How To INSTANTLY Improve Focus & 10x Your PRODUCTIVITY! | Dr. Amishi Jha & Lewis Howes

I say this and it sounds like I'm trying to be grandiose, but what you pay attention to is your life. If you are in the neighborhoods of self-hatred or anger or whatever it is, that's your life. There's no question. Your whole brain is recalibrated toward those. I think you gotta have a dream.

The School of Greatness. Really? Yeah. Please welcome Lewis Howes. Saw on your website that it said research is showing that we are missing out on 50% of our lives because we are distracted. Where's that stat coming from? And is that 100% true? I mean, we're 50% of our lives we're missing out on because we're distracted.

We're not paying attention to 50% of our lives. And the way that it comes up, it's been studied in so many ways, and unfortunately we keep triangulating on that same number. But the initial studies were done where people just volunteered to get pinged on their phone. So any time of day or night, During normal awake hours, they'd get a text message that would say, what are you doing right now? Reading a book, having a conversation. Where is your attention? And essentially, is it on the thing you're doing or somewhere else? And half the time, people were not paying attention to the thing they were doing. So this number 50% is really about off-task thoughts.

So I'm reading, I want to read a book for an hour, but then I'm constantly checking my phone or I'm, watching TV or I'm having a conversation, is that what you mean? No. Or is it, I mean, I wanna.

Read a book, but I'm not even reading it. You probably had that feeling like all of us have, right?

Get to the bottom of the page.

You have no idea. No idea. I mean, that was my whole childhood. Yeah, well, that's what I'm talking about. The new aspects that are probably even more problematic are the external distraction.

But that number, 50%, happens even without any external distraction. Just, okay, I'm reading a book in nature and there's nothing around me, but my thought is distracting me. Not my phone and people and the TV.

Yeah. And we think of this, we think of distractibility as a modern problem. But what's so interesting, and I write about it a little bit in the book, monks, medieval monks complained about too much distraction in their lives. They had gone and become monastics. Their job was to pray all day and they're like, the thought of lunch is making me really distracted. And then they would just stop talking to their family members. but they could not escape this real issue of internal distractibility.

Really? What is causing that distraction? Is it a survival mechanism? Is it something to help us in creation mode? Why do our brains do that?

Both very good insights. So yeah, we think right now, of course, we can't know, right? All we know is this is the nature of the brain today and we are essentially the evolutionary success story. So we're intuiting and inferring what pressures might have led us To have this, but it's 100% for sure that this is not a design flaw. This is designed for.

This is intentional.

This is intentional and so much of our metabolic energy is going toward this meandering of mind that it's on purpose. And we have some good clues about what we think it is. I mean, two you already mentioned, right? This notion of if you were excessively focused, like in our old, old ancestors at a watering hole, like, gotta get back.

Yeah, you get eaten alive.

Yeah, you get eaten alive, you're gonna get eaten alive. If we are needing to plan, if we are needing to reflect, we need to be able to move our attention around. There's more cutting edge views of what this might be that actually are beyond that, that it's actually potentially a way that we are able to code what's called episodic memories, memories for events in our lives. Because oftentimes, now that we've talked about this number, if you're just sitting there and a random thought pops into your head, you might notice it's a replaying of something that's occurred. And at the neural level, that's what we think might be happening, is that essentially as we are experiencing things, we're encoding it, we're getting it into our memory. And then the way it turns from just experience to a hardened neural representation is we have a replay mechanism. It just kind of goes over and over again. Anything that's the slop, the things that vary from replay over replay, those kind of go away. And whatever it is that keeps consistently getting replayed is the thing that becomes the structural change that is long-term memory.

Why do we have thoughts that replay in our mind over and over?

You mean why specific thoughts might get like- Why memories?

Yeah, why do memories keep popping up in our mind from a week ago, years ago, decades ago? Why does it keep replaying?

Well, the replaying is different than the fact, what I'm talking about, what I was just talking about there. What I was talking about a moment ago is just it's a way for memory to even exist in our mind. So if I just, you know, for example, I have this conversation with you and I'm on my, you know, lift ride home and all of a sudden I'll just random phrase that you said might pop up or remember when he was talking about this, like no explanation necessarily. It's almost like the brain is creating the, it's a thought pump. It's just pumping it out. So the explanation for that is that in order to have memory created, because it's pretty fresh, we just experienced this interaction. in order for memory to actually be created so that tomorrow, the next day, even by this evening, I have a more hardened representation in my memory that I can call upon. That's all structural in some sense. The structures of the brain, the neural representations are hardening together in a specific way for me to have that memory representation. So I'm talking about the creation of memory, if that makes sense.

That's the creation of memory.

Yeah, what you're talking about, I think, is different.

So we're here sitting here, You, before we got down here, you took a drink of the water, you had your lipstick on there.

Can't give me all my secrets.

You wiped it off. It's a moment. So my thought is pumping the memory, 'cause I see a little bit of stain still on there. So my thought is pumping this, my brain is pumping this memory, this image, right? And it may do it a few times to help me hold on to the memory, is that right?

Right, it will do it potentially many times. We don't even know exactly how, this is just a pretty new idea of why mind wandering happens. But yes, it may be part of a memory creation or consolidation process. But I think what you were talking about is almost like rumination, like a thought comes up and you kind of can't, we sometimes call this attentional rubbernecking. Attentional rubbernecking.

What does that mean?

Like you're driving down the road and you're like, yeah, you know, you can't kind of help see the whatever traffic accident that's happened. So it's that idea that our attention just gets yanked by certain mental content.

Why is that?

Well, there's a lot of reasons that we think that happens.

It seems like the more tragic the event, the more we reflect on it. We either shut down and block it and forget memories. Like the brain seems to like protect yourself by not remembering or you're constantly ruminating on it. It's kind of what I hear.

Yeah.

A therapist will say like, you know, there's some patients that they have that don't remember a time period in their life because there were such tragic events that the brain kind of shut down. where other people, they say, think about it often and then they live in fear from that event. So I'm not sure where that is.

There's a whole bunch in what you just said, right? So let's just talk about the kind of replaying.

Yes.

And I think that this can be quite problematic for our experience of things like depression or even anxiety and PTSD. So the reliving of past events can have many different forms. So why it happens, you know, in some sense, I don't, I would say that there's a lot of debate regarding why it happens. One is that it's something that you think you're gonna actually try to resolve, right? You're actually thinking about it 'cause it's gonna help you see it in a different way or you're gonna problem solve in some way. But for sure, rumination itself, which really is this kind of looping process, isn't getting you anywhere. It's just a replaying. So my work actually starts from that reality. It's not, I'm not a clinician, I'm a neuroscientist. So it's like there are certain states, certain ways that our attention functions where we are rubbernecking, we can't pull ourselves away from it. And it doesn't have to be about the past, it could actually be worries about the future too. And this is a very powerful brain function, mental time travel.

Mental time travel, tell me what that is.

So that is essentially, the way I like to think about it is it's like we can make our brains go and rewind. Or fast forward. There's actually something related which is mind travel. Essentially that would be like me taking your perspective. Oh, that must have seemed strange for him to see me wipe off lipstick. And we probably never had to do that. I'm taking your perspective on an event. So I've traveled into your mind and I'm looking back at myself through your mind. So all of these are displacing us in space or time in some sense. And it's so useful to be able to do this. In fact, our ability to reflect is how we learn. And our ability to think of the future is how we plan. So both of these functions are so, so beneficial. But the reality is when that's happening, we are not in the present moment. Our attention is elsewhere. We're distracted. Well, not even if we're distracted, we may be doing it on purpose. So our present moment is in the past, our present moment is in the future. So if there are any demands happening right now, like if somebody walked in the room and say, we gotta make our way downstairs for some, it might take us an extra minute to kind of reacquaint ourselves to what's happening right now. Now, in the context of being in a lovely studio space, no dire consequences. But oftentimes, if you are time traveling to the past or the future, and you're stuck there because you're ruminating or catastrophizing, that can be very problematic for in the moment action. And the consequences could be dire, either as an athlete for what's required next of you to get the right inputs or for the kinds of groups I work with, military service members and first responders, it could mean somebody else's life or death based on your attentional lapse. So my interest has been not so much on why rumination occurs, but given the reality that it often occurs and under high stress circumstances, it occurs more often. How do we solve this problem? Because it's definitely impacting our attention. Rumination.

How do we solve rumination?

How do we solve getting ourselves to be able to pick up what's happening right now if the mind's tendency is to be in the past or the future or in somebody else's head. Like, oh, I wonder what you thought of me or I wonder what he thinks of me.

Interesting. So would you say a lot of our time is reflecting on the past memories, worrying about the future or worrying about what someone else thinks about us?

Yes.

Why do we care so much what someone else thinks about us?

I mean, because we're social creatures. We need to, right? It's part of our survival to know that. Things tip into the dysfunctional pretty quickly. And things that tip into that dysfunctional space quickly for certain professions can be very problematic. So again, my starting point isn't, does it occur, why it occurs? It occurs, it occurs often. And when we take it to the lab and look at people and look at their performance on attention tasks, they're terrible at them.

Terrible. So what's an example of something in the lab? It's like focus for 20 minutes on a task, and then people just can't even do it?

Well, they can do it, but they get worse and worse over time.

So even over the longer it is.

Well, yes. So if you did something, let's not even say 20 minutes, let's say 10 minutes.

So what would an example be?

An example of an experiment? Yes. Okay, so remember, the goal of this experiment would be to test out your internal distractibility. Okay. So now if I'm trying to get you, and I'm trying to measure your internal distractibility, I can't tell you to be distracted because then you're actually doing the task. You're not doing the other thing you should be doing when you should be doing the task. So we did puzzle over this, like how do we design a task where people get distracted and they don't do what we tell them to do? It was easy though. All we had to do was bore people. So if you bore them, they are so happy to just go anywhere else.

So we designed one of the world's most boring tasks.

Read a thick textbook. We did that too, but we did, This is the way the experiment go. You come in, we tell you, this is going to be a task of your attention. What we want you to do is sit in front of the computer screen and look at the screen. Sometimes we'll have a brain cap on them, so we're looking at the ongoing electrical activity, or put them in a brain scanner and look at what's going on there. And we'll say, every time you're going to see a series of digits on the screen, every time you see a digit, press a button. So they're sitting there, one about every fourth of a second comes up, And then we say, the only thing unusual here is if that digit happens to be three, just don't press the button, withhold your response. Threes are only happening 5% of the time. So they're sitting there, press, press, and of course their mind is wandering. The three shows up, they press to the three. And it's usually- They're not focused. It's usually followed by some kind of expletive, like, oh, crap. When we were doing this with Marines, I remember one of the guys almost threw the keyboard. I was like, it's okay, it's all right. But the way we know that they're mind wandering, in addition to having this kind of mental meandering we were talking about, is that not only do they make mistakes, I mean it's obvious there's a three on the screen. It wasn't even too fast for them to see it. We stopped the experiment every now and then and we just asked them. Right before this question appeared, where was your attention? Was it on task or off task? Just like that cell phone study I was telling you about. And they tell us and they're not on task all that often. And when they've made a mistake, it's usually because they report that they were on task, off task. When they get the three and they withhold to the three correctly, usually they're reporting soon after that, yeah, I was on task.

It's interesting, I did a brain scan a few months ago, and they had me do this test right before. It was like with an X, it was like letters and like, don't press the X. Okay. And it was for 15 minutes. Boring. It's the most boring thing ever. You stare at a screen, it's a dark room, so you're like, eyes are tired already. Dark room screen, and it's just a white background on the screen, and then just a letter pops up, And it also had me use my left hand, I'm right handed. So they said, I want you to use your left hand, push the space bar every time. It was either push the space bar every time you see a letter, but don't push it when you see an X or something like that.

Okay, something like that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's very similar to what I'm saying. And for me, when there's a game, my brain goes, I wanna win this game. So I was like, okay, I'm focused. Even though it's boring, I'm like, I want to be the best I can be at this game.

Yeah.

And I did it the whole time. They leave the room, then they came back in or whatever, 15 minutes later, when it was about to finish. And I finish it and I go, he goes, How'd you do? And I go, I don't think I missed one. And he goes, that's not possible. It was not possible. I go, Check the results. Show me the results. I don't think I missed one. And he goes, I've done 1,000 of these. Not one person has been on, like, get it 100%. And I go, you, put a game in front of me, I'm gonna focus. You know what I mean? For me, it was like, Turn me on.

Yeah.

And I didn't miss one.

I was like, I've never seen this.

I don't know how you did it. I was like, I just paid attention. And I was really intentional about everybody. Is that an X? Okay. It was intentional. Then I had to go back and do another one. And I missed like one of the first three. Right away I missed it. And then I missed like 10 of them. 'Cause I was just like, okay, screw it. I was like, get me through this now.

Yeah, so that's awesome that you did that. And it doesn't surprise me given your background and the kind of mental training you've done yourself. But as you experience, this is a natural response to get fatigued.

It was fatiguing. Like it's exhausting.

It's exhausting.

To keep your attention for 15 minutes on anything and be intentional, it's very exhausting.

But it's not what you think. It's not like it's hard in a kind of immersive video game context. It's the mind that is doing its own thing. So now think about being like a baggage screener, right? And they're doing that all day long or in air traffic. looking at monitoring equipment. They can't mess up, but they're having the same challenges.

Dentists and yeah.

Where the chances of something going wrong are low, meaning the X is not that often, but you can't mess up and your mind will wander. So over the course of an experiment, what we find, and this is something that's been known forever, is something called the vigilance decrement. Essentially, if you have a 10-minute, 15-minute study, From the beginning to the end, people are just worse. And people used to think that it's attention just getting exhausted, just like you felt. But what we noticed is that as performance is going down, mind wandering, the self-reported sense of, yeah, I was not on task, I was somewhere else, is actually increasing.

So it's not attention, what is it then? So mind wandering is going up. It's not like I'm getting tired, more tired.

It may feel like it's tired, but I think tiredness, fatigue, it's like a feedback system that says, go do something else.

Right.

So tired may be the result of a set of processes, not the cause. And we always think of it as the cause, like, oh, I'm tired, I gotta stop this, right? But it may be that the whole system is designed, and if you think about it, again, evolutionarily, opportunity costs. If you spend so much time doing something, you're missing out on other stuff. So you wanna get in the search mode, what's gonna make you wanna search the uncomfortable feeling of what you're doing right now? So the story is quite complicated, but what it tells us is that attention isn't getting, the brain is not getting tired per se, but it's on the lookout. It's always on the lookout for other things that it might do. So it's experienced as fatigue, but also this propensity, the way that it gets itself out of doing what it's doing is it's just internally going other places. It's like, oh, maybe I'll think about, you know, the vacation I want to take or what about that email that I sent today? So it is constantly journeying. It's what its nature is.

So is there a way to train the mind to have more attention and focus?

I wouldn't be here if I didn't think there was. So yeah, so, you know, most of my career, and I started studying attention when I was an undergrad at your favorite place, you know, that school up north. Yeah. So I started very early on, and for most of my early career, I was just interested in how it works. How do you make it work? How does it work in the brain? What are the various neural components of it? Then what I started noticing, like early on when I had my own lab, is, ooh, we know a lot about what makes it fail. So we know it's quite powerful, but it's also vulnerable. And the kinds of things that it's vulnerable to, the top three that we kept seeing are stress, threat, and poor mood.

Stress, threat, and poor mood. Yes.

And if you think about where your mind goes often, it's that kind of terrain. It could be when it's not intentional, like you're not trying to plan for some big event, it defaults to these states like you were saying before, rumination, catastrophizing. And knowing that, knowing that attention is powerful but vulnerable, I became extremely interested in figuring out How do we train it? There must be a way we can train it. Neuroplasticity and the growth of new neurons, even in the adult brain, when something was coming out, we've known about neuroplasticity for a very long time. The notion that you could train the better for better, you could train the brain to be better, was new. And so that's kind of where I kind of took it upon myself as a mission to figure out How can we do this? So we tried lots of things. We tried positive psychology. We tried these high-tech light and sound devices, like you were talking about before, this brain gym, like some ways we could play computer games that might, none of it was reliably working. We were still getting this kind of consistent vulnerability to distraction that would occur. And then I did something that I never thought I would do. I was actually probably the world's biggest skeptic regarding this.

Meditation.

We tried mindfulness meditation.

Why do all roads lead back to meditation?

Isn't that funny? But at this time, remember this is like the early 2000s, it was not a thing. I never would think in a million years at that moment, like I'd be talking to somebody on a very popular platform that knows about this term. Like it was this very odd thing. I remember the first time one of my senior colleagues mentioned it, it was like in the context of this big lecture. And he basically showed this brain image of like a brain that he had induced in his lab to be in a positive mood and then one that.

Was- Positive psychology, you mean- no, like.

Yeah, think positive thoughts or- He did that, but it was really basically get in a scanner and listen to think about happy memories, listen to happy music.

Like just in the state of positivity. An environment of positivity.

For just the period of time that they were getting the brain image. Then he did the same thing for the negative brain. And at the end of his lecture, I said, how do I get that negative brain to look like that positive brain? Just sort of, because I was frankly having my own life circumstances around that. And I'm at the back of the room and it's the end of the lecture and he's like, meditation. And I was like, what?

To me, it was like, what year is this?

This was 2003. To me, it was as offensive as somebody saying, talking to a group of astrophysicists and talking about astrology as if it was a serious topic. Right, right. It's just like, I'm sorry, we're at the University of Pennsylvania here.

We don't use those terms.

Right, we're not some woo-woo university. But of course I respected him dearly had a chance to talk to him afterwards. And he was telling me about the work they were doing with adept monks. This was Richie Davidson, who now of course leads a very enterprising center in Wisconsin to study meditation. But back then it was not known at all, but it got me super curious, like, what?

What?

And I'm an Indian woman, so like meditation is not something really new to me. I mean, I've known about it, but I always thought, It's a great thing for my parents to do. I'm not interested. I'm a serious scientist. I'll wait to see what the science has to say about any of that. But his use of that term made me at least want to explore it personally to begin with, because I happened to be having my own, the reason I asked about how to get the negative thing to the positive brain, because at that moment in my life, I felt like I was probably more like that brain.

The negative brain. You were stressed, you were overwhelmed.

Stressed, overwhelmed, new baby, personal stuff.

Yeah.

Well, it was actually, I'd lost teeling in my teeth from grinding. I mean, it was not like minor.

A lot of stress. You were like grinding all night, all day.

You were like, it was bad. And I'm like, you got to shake this. And I was. The worst part wasn't so much the physical pain. I had no idea what was going on physically, but I was really, like, feeling that I wasn't paying attention to my life, and it bugged me. I mean, I was literally developing expertise. My lab was devoted to attention. and I could not.

You couldn't focus. That's all you did though, and you couldn't focus.

I couldn't keep my head in the game. And so when he said that, I was like, well, I'm gonna check it out. So I go literally to the pen bookstore and buy a book. I lucked out because I could have picked any random book. I picked a book called Mindfulness, what was called Meditation for Beginners by now a very dear teacher of mine, Jack Kornfield. And it was a tiny little book. It came with its own guided CD. And I was like, I'll check it out. Fine. My respected colleague says this is something. So I start doing this.

Jack Kornfield or Jack Canfield? Jack Kornfield.

Jack Kornfield, okay. Because there's a Jack Canfield as well. Oh yeah, no, this is Jack Kornfield, a long time meditation teacher.

Really one of the people responsible for bringing mindfulness to the West.

So I lucked out that I picked that book. It had a DVD or a CD, so you're listening to it. So I listened to it, I'm like, oh my goodness, all the instruction in this meditation thing, it's just all about attention. Pay attention to your breath.

Your thought.

Notice your mind wandering. Return it. It was such a simple yet elegant instruction. And what struck me is he is providing instruction of something that's been around for 2,500 years, but it's tapping into the exact brain system I happen to study in my lab. And after a few weeks, probably about a month or a month and a half or so of doing this, I was feeling completely transformed. Really? Which was so bizarre to me. I didn't I almost didn't believe that this was happening, but I could look at my spouse, I could be with my child, I could be more engaged in the lab. And the pressures and the strain hadn't changed at all externally, but I was a different person.

Wow. Your response to the pressure had shifted. Exactly. You were just showing up differently to the stress. Correct. To the emotional or psychological threats and the poor mood. That's right. The stress, the threats, and the poor mood. Yes. Because you had all three of them, it sounds like. Yeah. and it was hard for you to shake it. You were trying to do what before? What were you trying to do to shift those three things?

I mean, anything I could think of. Positive thinking or... Look on the bright side, that failed epically. We even brought that to the lab, and for people that were in high stress, it doesn't seem to work if you're experiencing high stress.

Look on the bright side, meaning like have perspective?

No. Or, okay. Induce a positive mood into your life by manufacturing that.

How do you do that?

How do you do that? Name three happy memories you've had. And there are different levels of this, for example, gratitude or compassion. These are positive types of orientations where you affiliate toward the experience in that way. But this was more basic than that. This was like, listen to a happy song. And it works maybe temporarily, at least if you're under a lot of stress, but it doesn't transform your, essentially your ability to be focused your just your attention.

What is having, let's say you're just having a breakdown in your day, something happens, you have a breakdown. What does the principle of perspective with that breakdown? I don't know. I got a cold today, but at least I don't have, you know, I still have a blessed life. I still live in Los Angeles and, you know, there's a lot worse sick people off than me. And I'm a healthy human being, and this is just a week of a cold or something. What is perspective coupled with gratitude do for a peak peace mind?

I think that for a cold in a healthy, stable environment where you feel basically taken care of, it can be very helpful.

Right, right, right.

But now you're in the middle of a war zone and when your best bud's just lost his arm. It's very hard to see the silver lining there. And unfortunately, when people start trying to do that, they are depleting their attentional resources. We cannot reframe a situation. We cannot even garner that kind of perspective when attentional resources are limited. Because this thing called attention, I mean, I'm kind of short-handing it and all I'm telling you is the term, but it ends up being the fuel for our success and the fuel in particular for our ability to think, feel, and connect. So if you don't, yes, attention. So, if you don't have this, if you're basically depleted because the demands in your life, and now you try to basically press the gas pedal, because you're like, I gotta create a positive reality here. I gotta look on the bright side. I gotta have gratitude for everything good in my life. Nothing's gonna come up and you're gonna end up spending out more fuel than is useful to you. Interesting. So, what we need is a solution.

Especially in those kind of moments.

So, in a chaotic moment, a very- Not just chaotic, but demanding and long-term.

Give me a few examples. You're going through a divorce.

You're going through a divorce. You're a lawyer and you're preparing for a big case. You're an accountant in tax season. You're a mom that just had a baby. I mean, the list of things in our lives which are protracted and demanding.

And somewhat stressful, there's many. Your next six to 12 months is.

Gonna be a journey. It's gonna be a stress. Yeah, and you know, frankly, I never expected this, but we'd been studying this for many, many years and then COVID hit. And the whole world is experiencing it. Now everyone's experiencing it, yes. Everyone is in this experience. And the description, and a lot of my war colleagues use this. It was actually a term developed at the US Army War College. VUCA. Maybe it's a term you're familiar with.

VUCA.

V for volatile, U for uncertain, C complex, and A ambiguous. So when the circumstances have those qualities, you're gonna be very, your attention is gonna be fully engaged and required, and it's gonna actually probably get depleted more quickly.

Your attention will be depleted if it has those things. And if you're under stress and threat and poor mood, you're like, you can't focus on anything.

That's right, but the worst part is that if now that system of attention, those are the factors that make it depleted.

Now let's- those four factors make it.

Depleted or the three- well, the same.

Thing, those are the circumstances.

Those are the stress, stress, stress, poor mood. The circumstances, VUCA, creates a lot of stress, threat, and poor mood. So those are the circumstances and the qualities of mind that appear are stress, threat, poor mood. You're such a good student.

Trying to learn this stuff.

Well, the result ends up being that attention is depleted. And you might say, well, that's not great. I mean, I probably won't be able to read a book or something. It's not great, but attention is way more than focusing for cognitive functioning. Like I said, we need our attention not only to think, we need it to actually feel and regulate our mood.

Attention, because if we can't have attention, if we don't have the energy to have focused attention, then our mood will just continue to be stressful and we'll continue to react in negative ways is what I'm hearing you say. In life situations.

Well, maybe it would be helpful If you're up for it, to break down what I even mean by the term attention?

Give it to me. Yes. What is attention?

So attention, like I said, it's complex, multifaceted, literally is fuel for everything else we do. And from the brain science point of view, we've basically parsed it into three main subsystems. So one, we've already been talking about it, it's focus. It's this ability formally it's called the orienting system of attention, but the metaphor I like to use which is essentially focus, is a flashlight. So if you're in a darkened room, wherever you direct that flashlight, you're gonna get privileged access to that information, crisp and clear, wherever it's pointing. Everything else is dark. Attention in terms of this focusing aspect is just the same. So right now, even as I'm looking at you and paying attention to what you're saying to me, everything else is a little bit fuzzed out. So the cool thing about that is that it can be, well, there's basically a couple things. It can be directed, that's awesome. We can decide what to pay attention to. I'm now looking at you instead of over there, which would be annoying. And it's not just to the external environment. We can pay attention internally. So if I say right now, what are the sensations in the bottoms of your feet right now?

I mean, I just feel a sock and a little bit of pressure from my shoes.

But I bet you, before I said that, that was not on your mind at all. Right. So you could internally take that flashlight direct it toward bodily sensations and you can get access. So it goes back to that broader view of what attention does. It just, it solves a big problem that the brain has, which is it can't take in everything in every moment, all of it. So it's sub-sampling. But it's not just bodily sensations, it's emotions, it's trains of thought, it's our connection to other people. All of that we can direct the flashlight to. We can direct it toward other people like I am right now and you are. We can direct it toward an idea we have and we want to pursue it. We can actually direct it toward a sensory, or sorry, an emotional experience to deepen our sense of it and kind of bathe in that. It could be something tender or anger. And we can regulate. We can say, you know what, right now is probably not a good idea for me to break down crying. Right. So anyway, that's just one system.

Focus.

Focusing, right? The second system is the exact opposite. It's not about focusing, it's about being broad and receptive. And this I call the floodlight. it's called the alerting system. So its job is to essentially keep our resources, our mind's attentional resources ready for whatever may occur next so we can act. So whereas the first system was about selecting based on what, this floodlight is about time. We want to pay attention to now. What's going on right now? And you know, like if you're driving down the street and you see a flashing yellow light, like near a construction site or something, you're more vigilant. you're just alert, you don't know what it's gonna be, is somebody gonna walk into the street or... But it's available to you in a broad and receptive manner.

You're not focused on one point, you're scanning.

You're scanning, you're broad and you're not gonna assume you know what's gonna happen. That's why we're gonna be alert to whatever occurs. So does that make sense of how it's literally the polar opposite?

Yes.

And then the third system, is called executive control. And this is a term that the term executive is pretty much like the executive of a company. The executive's job is to ensure that our goals, you know, the organization's goals, for example, and behavior align. It's like goals and action need to align moment by moment. And the metaphor I use for this is a juggler. So a juggler's job is to make sure all the balls are in the air. the executive of a company doesn't go in and do every individual task. That would be a bad executive, right? But it is to oversee, to make sure we're supposed to be doing this, we're not, get back on track, that kind of an orientation. So very different, right? That's not really about focusing or even being broad. It's about the management. So now you see why when we think about attention in this kind of three system point of view, it does feed into almost every single thing we do, thinking, feeling, connecting.

Thinking, feeling, connecting. Okay, so the, the narrow Focus. This is kind of like what an athlete would call being in the zone. It's like having your attention focused in the moment so you can be a peak performer and you're not distracted scanning everything, but you're mastering your craft to the moment of your sport, your skill. You know, maybe an Archer is focused in that one line site, not scanning everything. This, the second part of attention is the broad and reset. receptive, being ready for what may occur in life. And the third is the executive control, ensuring that goals plus action are aligned.

Yeah, I would actually, very good. You got it. But I would say all three probably you need in the context of successful athletic performance.

Yeah, yeah.

Right. So like as a football player, you.

Know, you need to scan the field as well and be focused.

That's the exact same phrase. That's the phrase we use, right? It's like eye on the ball, but scan on the field. It's like you need to have both.

I heard that, Floyd Maidweather, the boxer, he, I heard this, I don't know if this is true, but I heard that he actually looks to the side of someone's eye. He doesn't look at the face when he's punching. He actually looks to the side because he's more receptive. He's quicker to react with like the peripheral. I don't know if that's true or not. And maybe it's focus and then off a little bit and back and forth, but.

Well, it's true that peripheral vision has better motion detection.

Really?

So what does that mean?

You can see it faster or something?

Yeah, your motion detection will be better.

Really?

Yeah.

So if I'm looking here and you're over here, if you move, and I'm.

Like, yeah, it's gonna be better than if, even if I like do a slight movement while I'm in the center of your eyes. Just motion detection is, I mean, as you think about it, evolutionarily, that makes sense, right?

You might, you wanna see if something's scurrying toward you.

On the side, 'cause you see it.

And you're like, well, what is that? Interesting. Yeah, so that might be a different thing. Okay, gotcha. What did you learn then, from your study with those in the military and executives and high performing athletes, what have you learned by testing their attention on how they can improve? Is it through meditation alone? Is it through other factors?

Well, you know, it's funny, there's so many ways in which we can try to advantage our performance. My interest is going to be narrow because I study a particular thing. I study attention and my interest is in seeing how we can preserve it. And oftentimes people talk about resilience, this capacity to bounce back. I'm not even interested in resilience, I'm interested in presilience.

Preserving it.

No, preserving it. Preventing. Preventing the need for resilience in the first, it's like prior to being resilient.

Just keep everything steady. Don't get to a place where you're.

Exhausted and you're trying to push through something. Yeah, don't decline and bounce back, just don't degrade. So what does that mean? Well, what I told you before was that essentially we know that attention is vulnerable to degradation over demanding circumstances. And this project we did with even the University of Miami football team, pre-season training.

Tell me about it.

The pre-season period, their attention was worse at the end of a four-week pre-season interval than after. And now they got to go to camp to determine what their playing season is going to look like.

So pre-season before training camp.

Before training camp, pre-season training, right? So they're practicing every day. There's probably many of them were taking classes as well over the summer. Their attention was worse at the end of four weeks than before.

Why?

We just went over that. Stress, threat, poor mood, volatile, uncertain, complex, exhaustion, physical exhaustion, all of the factors that resulted in a protracted period of high demand. And by the way, it's not just elite athletes. We found this in undergrads as well. We know this, right? If you remember being an undergrad, you feel worse when you're right about to End the semester than at the beginning.

Because you've been asleep for a semester.

Well, that's part of it. Pulling all-nighters.

Yeah.

But then what do you have to do at the end of the semester? You got a big test. Finals. So you're not even more pressure. Yeah.

Advantaging yourself.

Same thing with, by the way, pre-deployment soldiers. Oh, wow. Boot camp, boot camp, boot camp. Yeah. It's like, yeah, you're gonna be getting ready to train. You're trying to, it's not even called, trying to break people down. You're not trying to break people down. In fact, it's called readiness training. But it's not actually readying them in the in an intentional sense, they're depleted.

Interesting.

So that's the state of what things look like. So for us, our interest was in how can we provide training, just like a mental workout, mental conditioning, reps they can do every day on their own to keep their own attention in this buoyant, stable state instead of declining. So when you say, oh, was it just meditation? Well, meditation itself, especially mindfulness meditation, is a kind of a world of its own. So I'd love to say a little bit more.

Yes, yes.

About that because you know, what you might, how you might define the term meditation may be quite different than the way I'm thinking about it. Sure. Just to kind of orient us. Sure. First of all, like even the term meditation, I mean, I'm still like, I don't know if I even want to say that word. All it means to me as a cognitive neuroscientist, as somebody who's interested in brain training, is engaging in certain kinds of practices with regularity to cultivate certain mental qualities. So it's from the world's wisdom traditions. People have been doing this for hands. It's because there's an interest in having a certain way of making yourself, right? So whether that's being more compassionate or more loving or being more transcendent or in the case of mindfulness training, more present-centered. So in my mind, and this is sort of the broad way that we think about mindfulness, it's mindfulness meditation. Well, mindfulness itself is a mental mode. It's a way of making the mind. Even before we talk about the meditation piece, just the state of being mindful. It's an orientation where you're paying attention to your present moment experience, here and the here and the now, without editorializing or reacting to it. So you're getting that raw data without a story on top of it. And we all want that. I mean, who doesn't want that? Who doesn't want to go into an experience? A lot of stuff may go down, but you're like, this is the facts. This is what occurred. This is the data of the experience. And it doesn't have to be just objective. It could be subjective as well, but it's what transpired instead of, you know, the reason he walked down the hall and didn't look at me is because I'm just a terrible person and he doesn't even think I'm worthy of looking at, right?

I'm putting a story on instead of.

Oh, his eyes were just not toward me. That's the thing. He wasn't paying attention or whatever. He was lost in thought. But anyway, what I'm saying is with mindfulness, you'd say none of the stories matter, just the data. The data was, he and I were walking in opposite directions. His eyes were not toward me as we passed each other. That's it. So if you could take experiences and actually hold them in that level without spinning on the story about it, that could be very useful.

My training has been all about making every event neutral. And we give the events meaning, you know, whether it could be a positive or negative meaning, I guess, or, you know, it's like an event occurred. How do you want to respond to the event? Do you want to be stressed and overwhelmed and moody from it? Or do you want to see the data as it is, like you said, and then make a decision on how is this gonna best serve the rest of my day or the rest of my life? You know, by the story I tie to this event.

Yeah, at least you're seeing the story as something that's constructed actively. So we're totally in agreement. Like what you just described, I would say, is you're taking a mindful orientation toward your experience. The problem is just having that mindset won't be enough. Because there's such a strong tendency, this 50% we started talking about, the default is simulate reality, make assumptions, conceptually elaborate, emotionally react, and mentally time travel. So we're up against a lot. Right. We want to be in the here and the now. We want to get the raw data, but everything about our, almost like our evolutionary pre-programming makes that really hard to do. which is why just like every good athlete, you train for it. So what's the workout we could do to actually get ourselves to be more presence-centered in this non-reactive, non-elaborative way? That's where mindfulness meditation comes in. That's where it was really like a, it's like kind of a, I don't know, a chocolate peanut butter moment. Like, oh, I need this. And this has it. It's like, what is the opposite of a wandering and reactive mind? Oh, a mindful one. Well, how do you train for that? There's 2,500 years of practice that you can look at. So, what we've essentially done is taken the ancient, a lot of these wisdom tradition practices, primarily from the Buddhist traditions, and people have brought them into hospital settings, business settings, et cetera. My interest, which was the first time it had ever been done, is let's learn from all of that, and now let's bring it into the military context. And so when I started this work, like I said, it was new to me, but the notion of mindfulness-based stress reduction had been around by a dear friend and teacher, John Kabat-Zinn. He had already established using these Buddhist practices an eight-week, 24-hour or so program, which had a suite of practices. So it wasn't any one thing. It was like four kind of main, four to six main exercises. And so we looked at that and said, how do we use that in a way that can be useful? And just to give you an example of one of the practices, right? So one of the very simple practices, which when people say the term meditation, they probably think of this, but I want to connect the dots between how it relates to attention and why I thought it was an interesting thing. Can I do that? Yeah.

Yeah, please.

So the practice is essentially what's called a focused attention practice, right? So what do you do in this practice? And it probably is going to resonate with some of the things that you already do. But you pick a period of time, let's say right now, like 30 seconds, we're going to do this. In my book, I'd say work up to 12 minutes, and that'll be the sort of sweet spot for real brain changes. For the period of time you're going to do this practice, you're going to sit in a comfortable, upright, alert posture, kind of upright, not uptight, kind of seriousness but not stiff. And notice yourself breathing. Just floodlight is on, breath-related sensations happening in the body. Then you're going to pick, kind of identify something in your kind of breath landscape that is prominent. It could be the coolness of air moving in and out of your nostrils or maybe some part of your back that you notice moving, something that really is it stands out, it's salient. And then you're going to take that flashlight of attention and just shine it there for the period of time that you do the practice. So the first instruction is focus, focus on breath-related sensations. And then the next part of the practice as you're doing this, if it hasn't happened already, it's going to happen, when you notice your mind has wandered away from breath-related sensations, Redirect the flashlight back. So you're just breathing, noticing, focusing.

And.

When your mind wanders, nothing big to do, just bring it back and begin again. and that's it.

So that's the first step of that practice. Just to notice how much it wanders.

No, you're not even noticing how much it wanders. You did three things. You focused, you notice, you redirected. Yeah. Okay. That's what a lot of my military friends would call the push-up that's the push-up now, it ended up that that simple practice tapped into all three of those brain systems. you had the flashlight that was directed, you exercised that, floodlight that's noticing what's going on, what's going on. And then that executive that says, get back.

Interesting, get back on track.

Get back on track. So that practice is really foundational to everything that people do. And then the other practices that I do go into detail on in the book are doing other things. Like this one really exercises both the focusing and noticing. Then we can do another one that really exercises the broadening. How do you actually allow? It gets into what you were talking about, the story-making mind, right? How do you actually just watch the nature of the mind? So essentially there is nothing privileged. It's just thoughts, emotions, memories, sensations passing through. We don't orient our experience that way. Usually something happens, it's like we're latching onto content and we're making something out of it. So how do you take that observational stance? And then we go on to other practices. that kind of build on those.

Gotcha. But you talk about a 12-minute mindfulness approach.

So we do, yeah, so the whole program is essentially based on these early mindfulness-based stress reduction contexts. But, you know, mindfulness-based stress reduction, very powerful, 55 years of research now that have studied it. Too much time for pre-deployment soldiers, for example. Like, people aren't going to give me, in fact, I tried it for a year. I had $2 million of Department of Defense funding and nobody would take my project. They're like, no, Nope, too much time. So one of the things I had to do was write a grant that basically said, how can we figure out what the minimum effective dose is? Do they need to do eight hours of training over, sorry, 24 hours of training over eight weeks and practice 45 minutes every day? Is that necessary? Because nobody was going to do it. Mindfulness, meditation training. Just like you did for 30 seconds there. Very well, well done. Thank you. For 45 minutes a day, that's the assigned homework. It is beneficial, but it's not realistic for these high performance, high stress groups.

Because they do 12 minutes a day.

Or five minutes a day. So what we did is we look to see what's the sweet spot. At what time, if people do daily, do we start seeing that yes, it's beneficial and continues to be maintaining the benefits if they continue doing it. So the sweet spot was 12 minutes. They do 12 minutes or more, then we see beneficial effects. The more they do over 12 minutes, the better. But less than 12 was not consistently so. showing a benefit. So minimum. It's a 12 minimum, about three to five times a week. Right.

So that helped.

Then people were like, in fact, that's what we did with the football team. We went in and we said, based on prior research, it's about 12 minutes a day. And, you know, we just gave them 12 minute recordings and they did it. They did it for about five weeks.

So guided meditation.

Guided meditation, just like I guided you right now and you followed. Same idea, but we do it for.

The entire 12 minutes. We're guiding them. What does that look like? Is it focusing on your breath, focusing on your thoughts? No, I mean, at this point with.

The practice was very, very fundamental. The entire 12 minutes for one of the practices is focusing on breath-related sensations. And that's it. That's it. Okay. Now, what people start realizing is, oh, my mind wanders. Oh, my mind wanders to the same stuff over and over again. So when you're not doing the formal practice, you might be able to think, like, what is it that's that's sticky for me that I'm just keep going back to and look at that in a different kind of a way. So it's a different progression, but remember the point for me was.