Why You Can’t Pay Attention—And How to Get It Back with Dr. Amishi Jha

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Hello, Dr.

Ja.

How are you?

Hi.

Good.

Thank you.

It's great to be here.

Same.

So excited.

Well, here's how I thought we could start.

I sent Dr.

Ja an email last night about our talk today and i just want to read it to the pod squad so they can know where we're going with this attention situation okay so here was the email i said i've been looking so forward to spending this hour with you learning about how to attune our attention because when you said that we lose 50 of our lives due to distraction that felt true to me But I have to tell you off the bat, I am at this stage in my life where I do not want to attune my attention in order to optimize or crush it or be more productive or whatever.

I do.

Okay, Abby does.

So great.

I

feel, Amishi, that at almost 50, I'm pretty much as optimized as I'm going to be.

Okay.

That's not true.

I'm at my peak optimization.

I want to learn.

to hone my attention because as I head into my 50s, I want to learn how to be so present with my people that that they feel seen and heard and known by me.

Okay.

I want to have that kind of presence that you see in some people that feels like this kind of like calming invitation for people to reveal themselves.

And I want to be so present and regulated that I actually am always revealing my true self to them.

Because I think my highest goal as I head into this next phase of my life is just to love my people in a way that makes them feel known.

And I want to be deeply known.

And to me, attention,

this thing you've been studying forever, it's like the tool in our human toolbox designed to help us know and be known.

Attention is what we use to build or break love, right?

And as I listened and read your work, I kept thinking, I think what she calls attention, I call love.

Because what is love if not pure attention and whatever grows from it?

Right.

So that's what I'm hoping to talk to you about today.

How do I hone my quality of attention in such a way that everyone I encounter feels love and peace in my presence?

How do I use attention to just kind of spread peace and love like a contagion?

So I know you are a scientist.

I'm sorry.

This is just how I am.

Do you understand what the hell I'm talking about?

Okay.

Yeah.

Thank goodness for how you are.

Thank goodness for the world how you are.

Yes.

Oh, thank you.

So is this ringing true to you?

Absolutely.

I mean, I think what's great when I see the three of you is that we can talk about attention from the point of view that you just described, which I would fully agree with you.

Attention is the gateway and maybe even our highest form of love.

Attention is also what we use to crush it.

Attention is also what we use to understand the world around us.

So, you know, I think that from the familiarity I have of you and your dynamic trio, it's like we can cover all bases and they're all true.

So it is a tool, but the toolbox is our lives and we can apply that tool in whatever way we would like to.

Cool.

And I think what I love about what you just said is in some sense, I really resonate with the heart you have and that you bring to what you want to achieve as you move forward in your life but actually i would say that's probably been you all along it's not just in your late 40s moving to the 50s that you've had that desire so i think it's going to be a rich conversation but i fully get you and i also get the other perspectives we can discuss i love it okay so not to put too fine a point on this right off the bat but

When you talk about attention, what the hell are you talking about?

Okay,

so I think it is good to just sort of get the perspective that I'm coming from, right?

Because I'm a brain scientist and I'm also a mom and I'm also a professional and I also want to crush it and I also want to be heartful and I want to do good in the world.

You know, so I'm all those things.

But the perspective I take when I think about attention really comes from the research that I've done in my lab.

So I want to tell you a little bit about that because I think it'll help.

explain what I mean by it's a multi-tool in some sense that we can use.

So attention in the broadest sense is we want to first thank sort of our evolutionary ancestors that we have attention because it developed as a way, it was a survival mechanism.

Because at some point, the brain, though it's incredibly powerful, it's so capable, it reached its computational limits.

It could no longer process everything fully around it.

So even in the simplest organisms, it was like, done, can't fully get it.

So through the course of evolution, the solution to be able to still survive was to use the full computation of what the brain has to offer and apply it to sample the world around piece by piece so you can extract out as much information as possible.

And that's essentially what attention is.

It allows us to prioritize some information over other information so we can fully understand that.

And so from that point of view of attention is really a way to prioritize.

I mean, I think it relates to exactly what you're talking about when our priorities, the people in our lives, we devote that resource to prioritize them.

But from the technical side, it's actually three different ways of prioritizing.

So I'm going to just maybe talk us through that and then use some handy metaphors so we can kind of shorthand the conversation.

Perfect.

Okay, cool.

So the first way we can think about attention is that we're prioritizing based on the content, the thing.

So right now, when I'm talking to the three of you, my priority is the looks on your faces, the sound of your voice to comprehend each other, that whatever I'm thinking about is actually tied to what we're talking about.

It's stuff, right?

It's content.

When we prioritize information, we essentially highlight it within our mind.

It is more present.

And everything else that's not that priority is sort of dialed down.

And from the kind of brain response point of view, it really is like that.

When you lean in to focus on some content, you're dialing up the gain.

It's like you're amplifying the sound of the voice, the crispness of the visual image, et cetera.

And the metaphor I like to use for that system of attention, it's formally called selective attention, but the metaphor I like to use is that it's like a flashlight.

So if you're in a darkened room, you can hold this thing called our attention, you can direct it willfully, and wherever it is that you direct it toward gets this privileged access to your brain's full information processing.

So I hope that that makes sense.

What I love about this metaphor, in addition to the empowering aspect, because you can hold your attention, you can direct your attention,

is that you can do that externally.

So, you know, to what's happening in your visual environment and internally.

And so, when you think about, like, let's say you want to savor a particular memory, you can bring that up in your mind, and then you use that flashlight to hone in on it and pull out all those details.

Probably until you decide to really savor it, it's not fully present to you, but you can narrow and get access to that.

So, the flashlight's really handy.

One other thing I'll say about the flashlight, in addition to the external, the internal,

is that you can get your flashlight yanked.

It can get pulled.

So, you know, right now I may be fully intending to pay attention to you, but if my dog starts barking outside this door, it's going to grab my attention or the doorbell rings or like happened to me this morning, you know, you're fully intending to prepare for this wonderful conversation you're about to have and then the toilet clogs and the car stops working and the microwave doesn't, you know, it's like everything can go wrong and it like completely preoccupies you.

So even those distractions that pull your attention can be external or internal.

But that's sort of one way to think about attention.

Okay.

The second way we can think about our attention is almost the exact opposite of that flashlight, narrow, crisp, controlled.

It is more like a floodlight, broad, receptive.

And what this system is called the alerting system of the brain, what this system cares about is not stuff.

It's not content.

It's this moment right now.

If you think about it, you can't be alert for later.

or alert in the past.

You're really alert right now.

And why do we do that?

I mean, I really think about Abby in the context of, you know, this kind of competitive environment but really all of us we can have moments where we don't know what's going to happen next but we got to be fully present right now and if we reduce or narrow like a flashlight we will lose information that might actually be necessary to succeed or thrive or even understand the environment so broad receptive is a lot different than narrow and constrained both are really valuable most people don't think of that second type of attention as really attention but it is and then the third type of attention, the flashlight prioritizes stuff, the floodlight, content.

And the third type of attention is something we call executive functioning.

And I think of this as a metaphor I like to use is like a juggler.

So what's executive functioning?

Just like the executive of any organization, the executive's job is to be goal focused.

Make sure that whatever you're doing is tied to what you're internally holding as the goal, the thing you're trying to achieve in this moment.

And then the system, just like a good executive, is going to guide you to do the thing you're supposed to do or course correct when things are off track.

So my goal says, right now, pay attention to what I'm going to be talking about with you.

And if I go off and start thinking about my, you know, list of tasks I have to do, or if I get on my phone and start texting somebody, I better course correct because that's the wrong thing.

So we either change our behavior to make sure we're goal aligned, or we change the goal if we need to update it.

So I think this rounded out view of attention as three things, not one thing helps us think about how we can use it for the kinds of things we talked about at the outset for our lives, really.

So are we doing all of those at once?

No, actually, we're never doing all of those at once.

And they're in competition with each other.

Yeah, they are.

So if you think about the juggler, right, this executive functioning, it might, it leads the show.

So it decides sort of what mode you're going to be in.

But there's a constant interplay between being narrow, being present-focused, being goal focused, and kind of going back and forth.

So like a really good example of this is if you could think about how they're in competition, because from the brain point of view, they really are.

When this brain system that's about focus is really activated it's actively suppressing all the things that make you broad and receptive

okay this is a question i wrote down and i just want to explain why because it's just in my notes but it says are there people whose flashlights just naturally tend to turn inward is this why people like me fall down so much okay and what i mean by that is i'm i'm really serious about this like i have spent my life wondering why and abby too like i feel like I'm a smart, capable person.

Why is my coffee always gone?

Why can I not find my keys?

Why do I run into things?

I run into things a lot.

Like I have a lot of bruises I shouldn't have.

My flashlight, it's hard for me to be present and to have a floodlight because it feels like my flashlight naturally turns inward, that I'm thinking about feelings and thoughts.

And is that a thing?

Yeah, I love that.

I mean, I'm sorry that you're getting injured because we don't want that.

But But what you're describing, you know, you keyed in on something really important, which is that it is a limited resource and we only have one attention system.

So if you're using it in one way, it's going to disadvantage these other ways of using it.

And when I said from the brain point of view, like, so let's give a simpler example of not maybe injuring yourself, which would be, you know, tough.

But even if you're really engrossed in a thought or reading something, you got that flashlight honed in on it.

If somebody walks into the room, and I know this happens between spouses all the time, and starts talking to you, it takes a beat.

The person may have to break through by saying, hello,

I'm talking to you, right?

Because the flashlight system is highlighted and you're suppressing the awareness of the present moment around you.

The good news is that there are ways in which we can train the brain.

so that we can kind of get a little bit more balanced in terms of the utility of our systems and maybe amplify or strengthen those that we might not be naturally inclined to use often.

And part of that means kind of developing this other thing, which is tied to attention, that is something called meta-awareness.

I don't throw out a lot of jargon, but it's like almost like something overseeing all of this going on to know, oh, in this moment, maybe I need to pull back a little bit.

Maybe I do need to broaden out.

And to have that insight that says, I'm maybe not using my attention as I need to in this moment.

It takes training.

If we did this naturally, we would do this naturally, but it does take some training to do that.

You're talking about being being aware of your awareness.

So this is in spiritual terms, what we would say is

you can be watching the thinker.

So like you're talking about another entity, metacognition is above and beyond your own little personal flashlight that's watching how you're using your flashlight and can floodlight and floodlight and executive functioning.

And can say, hey, hey, hey, let's make a different decision.

And so scientists call that metacognition.

Well, metacognition is a little bit different.

I mean, totally agree with everything you just said.

It's not really a different entity.

It's actually paying attention to your attention.

The object for attention becomes attention itself.

It's still tied to attention.

So I don't want to do kind of some mental jiu-jitsu on you, but yeah, it is about attention still, but you're devoting it to the attention system and what it's doing in this moment.

So it still is that it's vulnerable to the same thing.

You can't be paying attention and overseeing all what the attention systems are doing and then fully focused in on one thing.

you're going to have to pull back even further i call it meta awareness not metacognition because metacognition really useful thing it's about the way we understand our own thinking like our tendencies just like you described at the outset i tend to have this type of way i use my attention right that would be a metacognition meta awareness is more about taking sampling of what's going on with our attention in this moment.

It is what's happening moment by moment in our conscious experience.

So it is much more fluid and online, not sort of our understanding of how we tend to be.

And that is the key thing we want to develop.

We really want to start being able to know what's going on with me right now, not just in terms of the content of what's in my thoughts or my tendencies of mind.

How am I using my brain?

How am I using my attentional resources right now?

And then do the next thing that might happen.

Is this the right thing to do?

Does this make sense to do?

Do I want to shift things?

And then do I have the capability to shift even if I want to?

Because sometimes we may not want to be overly focused but we are yanked and pulled and stuck that can be hard

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Similar to Glenn described her situation with attention, what I feel like is often happening with me and my crew of friends who have the youngerish kids and the jobs and whatever is that I can't decide, is it the floodlight or is it the executive functioning where it just feels like everything

is you're like a conductor of an orchestra and you're like, the kids need to get out the door and did they have their homework?

And what is the first meeting I have today?

And how do I need to get this done?

And it's just like exhausting.

An executive of the ecosystem.

But what is our attention

doing when we're in that, chronically in that mode?

What's happening?

Right.

Right.

It's a

really, really important point because you're not saying this, but oftentimes it doesn't feel so great to feel that sense of sort of exhaustion.

I try to say that as much as possible.

So I'm glad you brought it up.

Right.

Cause it, it, so I would describe this as what we might colloquially call multitasking.

We're trying to do 10 things at once, right?

And when we're trying to do 10 things at once, we have our set of priorities, but there are multiple competing simultaneous priorities we've got to do.

Like the kids got to get out of the house and you do have to get on this podcast because Amisha's going to be there and she wants to talk to you, right?

So it's not like you can just say, well, I'm only going to prioritize one.

These are all real and they're happening simultaneously.

So the solution we often try to apply is like, okay, look, I'm just going to do all the things at once.

I'm going to multitask.

Now,

probably are aware of this, but I'll just say it in case people aren't.

It's a myth.

We don't multitask because as I said, and as Glenn pointed out from the outset, we only have this precious resource.

It's limited and it only gets used in one way at one time.

So essentially, when we say we're multitasking, what we think we're doing is I got 10 flashlights.

I'm going to point them in 10 different directions and then I got it all covered.

No, what's actually happening is that whatever it is that out of all the things that you're trying to do, you're directing your flashlight to one task and then you're pulling it back and you're directing it to another and you're pulling it back and then you're directing it again.

And the thing that's doing the engaging, disengaging of the flashlight is the executive functioning and that is becoming exhausted by having to do that.

Why?

Because remember what I said at the outset.

Attention was a solution for the brain to prioritize certain information.

It's almost like you can think of your your brain as like a studio apartment.

When I prioritize doing a task, I've configured this apartment for a dinner party.

Beds put away, everything's in a certain way.

Now all of a sudden, I've got to cook the food before that.

So I'm going to actually make it a kitchen space.

So you're really having to rearrange everything every time you have a different task.

And it's exhausting.

So we should know.

that when we try to multitask, we are actually task switching.

We don't have multiple flashlights and we're exhausting ourselves.

And so the quality of attention when you switch back and forth, because there's a quality of attention, right?

Is there?

Is it like, does it matter?

Or can you switch back and forth?

And it's like, oh, I'm going from my writing to my Instagram to my kids thing to my whatever.

And the quality is the same no matter how fast I go back and forth.

Or is it like working out where you're like, actually, it takes me a while to get into the mode.

And then I hit this moment where I'm in it.

And does the constant switching mean we never settle into a high quality of attention that makes people feel known or that makes our best creativity come out, et cetera?

It's the second thing.

Okay.

It is a terrible idea to do this to yourself because there are two big costs.

I mean, in addition to the exhaustion, it takes time.

It takes time to put your mind and calibrate it for the one task, whether it's the Instagram post or whatever you're doing.

And then it takes time to recalibrate the brain for the other task.

So switching between them takes time.

And the quality of the engagement is reduced when you're trying to put these things in competition with each other.

You think of it as like driving a stick shift car.

It's like you're just grinding gears when you're trying to do this thing of switching back and forth and back and forth.

So the quality of nothing really ends up being great because you haven't allowed yourself the investment of time and mental resources to fully engage.

That's why doing it the least amount of time possible is a good idea.

And especially, I'll say for myself, like as a mom, I found my kids are older now, but when they were younger, like I felt like I could do it.

There'd be some days where the, you know, I'm in the groove, like I got the lunches thing, I got this and that.

What that means is that some of those things that you're doing that you feel like you're doing well aren't taking a lot of attention.

You can multitask, but not when the multiple things you're trying to do are very, very attentionally demanding.

So like we can talk and walk at the same time.

Why?

Well, because walking we're pretty much expert at if we've been walking all of our lives.

It doesn't take a lot of attention.

We can put that attention instead into the conversation.

But if I put you on the edge of a cliff or, you know, in the middle of busy traffic, you're not going to go talk and walk in the same way.

You're going to probably pull back, be more hesitant and switch back and forth between watching where you're going, then talking, watching when you're going.

So avoid it if you can.

And when you can't, be aware that there's going to be costs of time and exhaustion that will come with it.

So that's why it's not stressful to watch TV and fold my laundry.

Like, I can do that.

I crush that.

But you are saying that I cannot.

So I know I can't like be writing an email and talking to my kid at the same time.

Those are two things that require a flashlight.

And I'm trying to do them both.

Yes.

And neither are getting the light.

Well, and I think what she's also saying that's really ringing true to me is that the things that we are doing in our everyday life that actually don't require our full attention, that we can kind of join in together, whether it's talking and walking at the same time with a friend.

To me, this is really important because I do struggle with the paying of attention when I'm doing one task because kids and I have my floodlight is very engaged.

My flashlight is underdeveloped, I think.

And so it's harder for me to do that.

But because especially the tasks that I'm doing require more attention, that's something that is new to me.

I think that that's really, really important.

And I love that both of yours, one's got a really good flashlight, one's got a really good floodlight.

What a great team.

And I'm assuming Amanda's got executive control out of this world.

So the three of you got all three systems covered.

But what I'm hearing you say, which I think is really important to keep in mind because it's a real thing,

the mind has a tendency to be distracted.

You know, this 50% of the time our attention is not in the task at hand is just the default.

We do have a mind that tends to move around and that's our evolutionary history as well.

If we didn't, you know, if if we were at that watering hole and super fixated on getting water as our ancient ancestors, we would get eaten, right?

Or the storm would just have a tree fall on us.

So there is a bit of our mind that has to kind of move around.

But if we're overly attentive, hyper-vigilant to what's happening right now, again, those systems are in competition.

So if you're very broad and receptive, it is hard to amplify that flashlight so that you can direct it.

So again, it's a matter of balance between these things and trying to coordinate them better.

Yeah.

And I think if we could kind of shift the perspective of the conversation, because I feel like a lot of especially, you know, juggling women who are having to juggle a million things, when we talk about this, it can feel like, well, I need to fix this so that my person feels loved, so that my job gets the attention.

But actually, it's about our experience of life too.

Like, I want to learn how to do this so I can feel joy, so I can feel peace, so I can experience my one wild and precious life and notice it.

So I want to shift it in terms of our thinking right now for the pod squad.

And let's claim this for ourselves.

I want to walk through my life, like forget your work, forget your kids for a second.

Because Amishi, I can tell you that I was talking to Abby about this last night and I said, I feel like what matters for me less than where I am is how I am.

when I'm there.

So we can travel somewhere amazing and see a wonder of the world.

And I could be standing there and be

just gone, unhappy, distracted, not there.

Or I can be sitting on my couch and see my dog do something.

And because of my quality of attention, it can be ecstatic to me.

So how do we do this in a way that brings us more peace and joy?

How do we bring presence into our life for ourselves, not for other people?

You know, it's all part of honing in on how can we empower using, cultivating, developing our attention in a way that allows us to maximize the meaning, fulfillment, and joy in our lives, right?

Part of that means interacting with others.

Part of that means being successful at our mission, our job, whatever it is, our cause.

Orienting toward empowering yourself for the fulfillment of your life, I think is a wonderful entry point in.

First of all, it makes it not like another thing on your to-do list.

Yes.

Like, okay, how do I do this?

Right.

So that kind of gentleness, softness, and care toward ourselves is very, very important as we orient it and i'll just tell you from my personal experience this actually is the way i got into mindfulness in my own life and and mindfulness by the way is the solution that i would offer uh into the approach that we might take developing a mindfulness meditation practice as a route by which to refuel our attentional capacity to fully use it to add meaning and joy into the moments of our life And it came because there's always a pain point, right?

It is the case that sometimes it takes not having that sense sense that wakes you up to like, I don't want this anymore.

For me, it was pretty early in my career.

I just had my first child.

I was starting my own lab.

I pretty much on the outward face of it had achieved everything I was, you know, I was in the right course.

I had the right job.

I had a beautiful spouse.

I had a beautiful child.

And one of the commitments I'd made to myself is that I would.

No matter how busy I was doing whatever, I was going to have some time in the day when I would sit with my child and read him a book, usually at night when he was about to go to bed.

And what I found was that I had every intention to do that.

And then as I sat there, I was so checked out.

What do you do when you have the priority, you have the goal, you have the mission, the intention, the vision to do this?

And then your mind is just not cooperating, right?

And so I had this like kind of strange personal crisis where I'm like, I study attention.

Like I should be better at this.

I should know better.

Right.

And I couldn't master it myself.

I couldn't control my mind.

I couldn't discipline my mind to do this.

And I realized like the typical solutions of hunkering down to just force yourself were just not going to work.

I needed a different way.

And there were no ways I could find.

It wasn't, you know, I did the thing academics tend to do.

It's like, I'm going to just go look in the literature to see.

I'm going to find out what studies say I should do.

I'm just going to follow it.

Maybe I haven't come across it.

There was nothing in the literature that I could point to.

It wasn't like a manual that I could read on like, how do you regain your own attention when it's lost, which is essentially oftentimes a crisis moment for us that has ripples in everything we do, our work, our sense of emotional well-being, our family life, everything.

And that's sort of how I came upon the solution of mindfulness meditation.

And what I realized, because I was a little bit of a, I'd say more than a little bit of a skeptic.

I didn't want anything to do with meditation.

I mean, as a, you can see me, I'm an Indian woman.

I knew about meditation my whole life, but I was also a serious scientist.

And I was having like a thing about, no, not for me.

Identity crisis.

No thanks.

Yeah, identity crisis.

And also like, that's a bunch of BS.

Like, I'm not going to do that.

But thankfully, I opened up enough to give it a try.

And what it did is essentially exactly what you were talking about a few moments ago.

It gave me a sense of fulfillment and meaning back into my life.

And I was back in control of how I was going to use my attention.

Because the thing that was making it hard for me to sit with my child and read to him is that my mind was not there.

My body was there.

The book was in my hand.

He was in my lap, but my mind was a thousand other places.

First, to acknowledge that, oh, the mind is all over the place, sort of what Abby was alluding to, that it tends to kind of can go in places.

But also then, how do I get it back?

How do I train the mind to get the flashlight back, even after I realize it's not there?

And discipline didn't do it.

I had to develop the habit and create the mental muscle of practicing this separate from the moments I wanted to use it so that I had this mental strength to see it and then control it in a better way.

And after about maybe about a month or so of practicing these simple practices, which we can talk about, it was a totally different experience for me sitting with my child.

I mean, I felt like I was more embodied in my own life.

The external circumstances were no different.

I was still a busy, overworked, somewhat stressed person, but knowing that I could hone this resource to gain it back,

it changed everything about my life.

And actually, it changed the course of my career too, because I realized that I don't want to just study how attention works and what can make it go wrong.

I want to study how to strengthen it to empower people in all walks of life so that they can have access to these tools.

Because it is about meaning in our lives.

It is about fulfillment in our lives.

And if we don't have that, what do we have?

What's the point of any of it?

What's the point of having the most success and being in the most beautiful place if you're not really there to enjoy it?

Okay,

exactly.

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In one moment, I would love to just for a person listening who's saying, Yes, please, and then what, how the hell?

So, we're going to get to the how the hell in very practical ways.

And it feels to me like this is just an incredibly important thing to hear that we can learn to do it in our everyday lives because it feels to me like sometimes we know

in our hearts that

presence and embodiment is joyful, is the goal.

It's like the way to live that we were meant to live, but we don't know how to do it.

And sometimes I wonder if like all of our obsession with novelty, like we have to travel to this place, we have to travel to this place.

My partner's not good.

I need this new partner.

I need this new partner.

I sometimes wonder if all of the drama creation is because novelty forces us into forced presence.

So it's like the reason why we travel is not necessarily because we have to see every wonder of the world to be a full human being.

It's not the thing.

It's the presence that the thing brings out of us.

It's not the new partner.

It's the forced presence that novelty brings us to.

So we end up destroying our lives or leaving this destination life

just to get this quality of life, which we could nurture and create in the life we have if we had the tools.

That's interesting.

Beautifully said.

Is there something to that in terms of having like the common your day that you're going through, it like forces you into almost more floodlight attention rather than flashlight because it's not as interesting because you've seen the same thing every single day.

And so that's why you have to go on trips or find new partners.

Is that true?

It can be that.

And I think that's part of it.

But I think what both of you are honing in on is we're getting out of the default of the way that our attention and our lives work.

We're shaking ourselves out of the way we tend to be, right?

And so sometimes that means if the flashlight is like skipping around all way, what are the, we know through our evolutionary history, the thing that'll make a flashlight go toward it, novelty.

Salience, like something different, bright, shiny things, loud things.

You know, if you think about everything that we do, if think about everything that you might see on Instagram or any social media that keeps you glued, it has all of those qualities.

It's new, it's fast, it's exciting, it's personalized.

And so the chase

is to essentially step outside of the default to get pulled in in a way that feels compelling.

But what we're doing there is we're allowing the circumstances, the external distracting sources to be the thing that allows our attention to function that way.

But we can do that for ourselves.

So, you know, whether the thing you're looking at is a blade of grass, you can still bring that same sense of full presence to it.

A blade of grass, you know, you could say might not be that interesting.

And in terms of mindfulness practice, your own breath may not be the most fascinating thing, but it allows you to train this idea of I can be fully present no matter what.

And I can be fully there to experience my life in this way.

And when we do that, then all of a sudden all the options open up where we don't have to be on the chase anymore.

Because frankly, it up-levels how our moments feel so that our default is changing.

And frankly, frankly, from the brain science point of view, practicing these mindfulness exercises does literally change the way the brain functions by default.

So we are changing our brain in a way that's probably supporting us better.

I also think there's something here about there's like a shame.

spiral thing that happens where there's like a, you should be paying attention.

You should be present when you're reading to your son.

Shame on you.

You should not be looking at Instagram for three hours when you're going to bed.

There's all these like shoulds that don't feel very liberatory to break out of either, because it feels like, are you just trying to do it the right way?

But I think there's like an element of this to that is this beautiful choice.

Like when you are able to access what you're talking about right now, you choose.

where you want your attention to go as opposed to just being like swept in the wind like oh instagram took me i'm down the river or i have all these things on my mind.

So therefore I can't control my brain.

There's this beautiful thing of choice.

Like I am here enough inside of myself to choose to be here with my child or to choose to watch that trash TV because I really love it.

So I'm going to get my attention lost in it.

But it's less like autopilot, like when you get in the same fight with your partner over and over and you're like, I wish I didn't say those things, but I just do.

I just have to.

You know, there's an element of that that feels really liberating as a choice of where you want your attention to go.

Yeah.

I mean, I think the same concept would be agency.

It's like, you are the enacting agent in your life.

I mean, I would say, but you want to partner that agency with friendliness.

You're a friend to yourself.

We were talking about a little while ago about pulling back.

You know, what's the vision you've got on what you're seeing?

Is there a loving, curious, supportive quality to that?

If so, then the agency is going to have a different feel

than a drill sergeant that's saying, not doing it right, right?

So, in some sense, when we really can start practicing some of these tools, we can start even seeing the stories that we are telling ourselves and we can step out of those stories, which helps us break out of our default.

Because then it's like, that is a thing my mind created about my view of how I am or how this situation is or how this relationship is.

It may not be the truth.

It may be one of many possible ways that things work.

And the technical term for it would be called decentering.

So you're actually kind of allowing yourself with this sort of distanced kind perspective, see thoughts, feelings, emotions, memories, stories as creations in the mind that come and go.

Oh, yeah.

And when you can soften around that and kind of let go a little bit, that it's not the objective nature of reality, but a created and constructed thing from my mind.

And you do that from a place of self-supported, you know, friendliness, it definitely changes things.

So it feels more that the choices are supporting you in your life.

And it takes a little bit of work because it's not that stepping out of your default.

I don't mean work in a belligerent sense.

I mean cultivation and strengthening that we can do with not so much time.

And a lot of the work in my lab has been trying to figure out what's the most time efficient thing I can do.

What's the least amount of time I can spend on doing something and see these benefits?

Say more.

Yeah, let's do that.

Okay, so let's move to the whats because I often think of meditation as the time I practice building boundaries with myself.

So it's like boundaries with my brain.

It's like watching a friend and being like, oh, that's what she always does.

So, oh, bless her heart, but we're not going to like land there.

That's how I think of my own brain.

So can you talk to us?

If someone's listening right now and being like, yes, I would like this quality of life.

I don't want to live in this shaky hovering anymore that's all between places of attention.

Where do we start?

Right.

The good news is, you know, we already talked about these three systems of attention.

So essentially what I have been interested in doing is thinking about how we can describe mindfulness just from an understanding of why you do these kinds of practices from that attentional lens.

Just that's my doorway into mindfulness.

So what we want to achieve, I think, is a flashlight that we can have some agency over.

We know where it is.

We know where to direct it.

A floodlight that can actually not only keep us presence centered, but not hyper vigilant so that everything feels like we're on edge.

And a juggler that's generally able to kind of manage what's going on with some ease, not dropping all the balls all the time.

So we kind of have a sense of where we want to go with this.

And we also have a sense of what our challenges might be.

That flashlight can get locked in, you know, on a negative thought or a difficult emotion or a memory or a story about what things are or frankly social media and the external world, expectations and comparison mind, all that stuff.

And we can actually have a hard time with, you know, essentially all aspects of our attention to the point where it feels demoralizing and not self-supporting, and we feel stuck.

So what I wanted is something that I could do a few minutes every day that might have.

a helpful aspect.

And it ends up mindfulness was that solution.

We had tried many things in my lab, by the way.

We could never get people's attention to improve over time, especially if they were under high stress circumstances.

So a lot of the work in my lab looks at what you might call high demand professionals or high demand humans, as I would say.

That's really all of us, right?

People that feel like there's a lot to do and my standards for myself are high and the circumstances can be stressful.

We were looking at people that were those circumstances may even be life or death.

So medical and healthcare providers, military service members, first responders.

And if they make a mistake and their attention lapses, it's not just a bad day for them.

I mean, it's lives lost.

Theirs are other people's.

So it was very much from that perspective.

And what we realize is that when people experience high stress moments, no matter what those are, their attention is going to start to get worse.

So think about the situation you get put in.

You need your attention to function successfully.

You need it a lot when you're under high stress.

And those are the exact moments when it's going to be less and less available to you.

So my urgency was get this thing cultivated so that people can stay steady, even under high stress.

And if we're really lucky, maybe we can even go above and beyond where we started.

So let's talk a little bit about what mindfulness practice is and why it could be such a solution and sort of the quick ways to try to get it going in your own life if you don't practice already.

So the first thing to know is that mindfulness, this word mindfulness, we all are capable of being mindful.

People aren't going to practice something that is so outside of themselves.

I mean, if you think about the last time you felt fully present and alive, whether it was being on the couch and watching your puppy, I mean, That's just an intrinsic quality of your mind.

You don't have to do anything special.

So we all have this capacity to be mindful.

And it's lost often.

And we don't have this, I have access to being mindful on demand.

Mindfulness from the way that I describe it is paying attention.

It's this mental mode, a way of making the mind, paying attention to our present moment experience.

So being in the here and the now,

without

what we call conceptually elaborating, having a story about it.

or emotional reactivity.

I really think of this as a way to get the raw data of what's happening to me moment by moment without a story about it.

Damn, I never thought of that piece of it.

Because if we jump to story, we're already out of mindfulness, right?

Because if we jump to story, we're out of the moment and back into our head, right?

We've changed the flashlight.

Yeah, we can be in our head, but the key is present-centered attention.

that isn't bound by anything.

The thing a story does is it's putting constraints on what's going on because you've got a vision of what you think is happening, right?

So if I'm non-judgmental, non-elaborative non-reactive i am opened up to what might really be going on i'm following the thing instead of the thing following my story exactly yeah exactly i am aware of what's going on in this moment moment by moment so we all want to have this as a secret tool we can snap into, especially when moments are difficult.

And think about the last time you were in the middle of an argument or just having something very challenging happening.

You do feel a little trapped.

Like, I don't want to be here and I am stuck.

Right.

So how do I get out of that?

Sometimes people think that getting out of that is thinking your way through it.

Typically, that might twist you up even more.

Sometimes people think, I'm just going to suppress this and not think about it anymore.

Sorry, that doesn't work.

In fact, we know suppression is one of the worst ways you can actually try to manage your emotions.

So we need a different way.

And mindfulness as a concept kind of gets you into the space of, oh, present-centered, non-judgmental, non-reactive.

Got it.

I want to do that.

How do I get there?

So the kinds of practices that we do, it's not one practice.

It's typically a suite of practices.

And all of these practices build one on the other and they tap into all three of those systems of attention.

But let's maybe start with one of the most basic practices that people can do.

You know, I say the instructions are simple and not always easy to do, where we're going to use an anchor for our attention.

And a very handy anchor that I like to offer people and that the traditions offer people is our breath.

Why?

Well, we always have our breath with us.

If we don't, we got bigger problems, right?

It's a secret.

Like I can be focusing on my breath and you'd never know it.

So I can always kind of tune into my breath.

It is changing.

It's present-centered and it's this moment.

So it has a lot of the qualities that we'd want in an anchor that'll train us to do this.

And the instructions for a mindfulness of breathing practice are to essentially use your breath as an anchor and focus on the sensory experience of the breath.

I'm not having a story about the breath.

It's hard to have a story about the breath, which is also why it's kind of useful.

Focus my flashlight on that breath-related sensation.

That's my goal.

So let's say I do this for my research has suggested that 12 minutes a day would be sufficient for you to get the benefits.

For 12 minutes a day, you're going to take some quiet time,

dedicated time, quiet space is helpful.

That breath is my anchor.

I'm going to take my flashlight, direct it to breath-related sensations.

That's my goal.

That's what my executive functioning is saying is this is my goal.

Second part of the instruction, when the mind wanders, and it will, remember what I said, 50% of our waking moments is just what the brain does.

When my mind wanders, that's a win because I noticed my mind wandered.

I noticed my mind wandered.

Now I got to just find the flashlight and bring it back to the breath.

So essentially, it's focusing on what there is a goal.

There's noticing, because I have to kind of keep broad tabs on what is happening moment by moment, cultivate meta-awareness.

And refocusing, getting that executive control to say, say, you're not on your goal.

Let's get you back.

So by this, we are exercising all three systems of attention, the flashlight, the floodlight, and the juggler over and over again.

And with it comes a lot of benefit where, you know, it's not just while you're sitting there for 12 minutes a day focusing on your breath as a formal practice, but now you can be in the middle of a conversation.

It's almost like you woke up like, oh, wow.

I am stuck.

My flashlight is stuck on this point of view.

What if I loosen the grip a bit?

Or I'm too broad right now.

Maybe I need to narrow back and find that flashlight and direct it.

Or I totally forgot what my goal is.

So it allows us to have this sense of friendliness and agency around our own attention by doing this relatively simple practice for just a short time every day.

I just have a follow-up question because I think that a lot of folks who are listening to this, myself included, are like, oh, I've tried meditation.

Oh, it's so hard for me.

Obviously, this means we should still be trying and practicing this I'm more of like an active person in terms of

I guess my question is are there any other ways

don't do this boring thing well first of all I want to say this you can do very hard things isn't that the name of this podcast

So just because something is hard or boring or challenging doesn't mean we can't do it.

But I will still answer your question because yes, there are other options for you.

But frankly, I would say if it feels hard, maybe think of that as a personal challenge to see how it goes.

And you're not, you know, white knuckling your way through this.

This is a really take it as I am doing something for myself and kind of even bring that inquiry around what is so hard about this?

What is the feeling of boredom?

What is the...

physical sensations of resistance that I'm having to doing this.

Because I guarantee doing a mindfulness practice is not going to be the only time that you're going to have resistance to what's going on in your life, right?

Totally.

And if we can get even in the container of our mindfulness practice, comfortable with discomfort, we are empowering ourselves.

Totally.

It's like we are Teflon.

We can, and I do think of this a lot.

I mean, I will answer your question about other things to do.

I think about this a lot.

If I can sit there and be with myself for 12 minutes a day with the asshole I am, the mean person I am, the shaming person I am, I can probably handle anything else in my life.

But I have this sort of diligence and determination to just be with it, not resist it or push it away.

I'm right here.

Bring it.

And done out of love for myself.

Yes.

Compassion.

Isn't that a beautiful way to build self-compassion?

Because it's like you're not abandoning yourself.

You're staying with yourself for 12 minutes a day.

And

that is becoming a friend to yourself.

That's self-love is being together.

Exactly.

And, you know, and the voices start to change.

It's like, yeah sure i might say mean things to myself but i'm also the one that committed every day to just being here for me

and you start increasing the repertoire of what it means to be with yourself in ways that are multifaceted and and beneficial beautiful but there are multiple ways to practice and active ways are good but one thing i would say is that you should think about is do something that requires stillness

So, you know, I could tell you, do a walking meditation where you're going to go on a walk and you're going to feel the sensations of your feet moving and you're going to focus on those and when your mind wanders you're going to return them back to walking you could do a body scan we're going to take that flashlight and direct it toward the tip of the you know bottoms of the feet all the way to the tip of the head just systematically going through region by region and when the mind wanders bring it back so it has those same qualities of focus on an anchor notice when the mind wanders return it but you can have different things that are the anchor and and i encourage you to play around with what makes sense the reason i say to do a stillness practice is because when you do something active like walking, or sometimes people will say, I'm going to run and practice mindfulness, it may become so yoked to you feeling that sense of present-centered attention that now when you need present-centered attention and the circumstances won't allow for you to just go for a jog.

you won't have that extra tool.

Yeah, that's my problem.

So a stillness practice is like an extra level of challenge.

Like if I can just be here, and I just had this experience and I thought, you know, this is so useful that I've practiced mindfulness Back of the airplane, late for a flight, cannot get to the front of the plane.

Nothing can be done about it.

I could stew for the 15 minutes, just raise my entire

reactivity.

So I'm just like going to start screaming at people.

I'm just feeling like bad.

Or I can be in a different way with my experience in that moment.

And if I didn't have some way to relate to that of being with myself for 12 minutes a day, sitting and doing nothing else, I think it'd be harder to do it because I can't go for a run in that minute.

right?

I can't listen to my favorite song in that moment.

I can pretty much just do the thing that I'm stuck doing.

And that's an easy example.

There are much more complex moments in our life where we have to be present, aware.

Think about a very difficult conversation that you might have with somebody else.

You cannot run away in that moment.

You've got to, there's a distress that's real and you are there for it.

So that's the only thing I would say is think about adding some portion of your practice to be stillness.

And I mean, it is a love practice.

Abby didn't like that.

No, I know that it's something that I want to be

more consistent at.

Right.

And I think that just even the word meditation freaks people out because, I mean, really, it's a fear of self in a way.

Like it's a, I don't want to feel bad about being bad at something.

I like to be good at things, like the whole thing.

So I actually have to tell myself, like, just go sit still quietly.

for a few minutes.

Yeah.

And I appreciate that so much.

And it resonates with me a lot, given the kinds of groups that I work with, including elite athletes.

So, you know, after 15 years of doing this kind of research with the U.S.

military, including special operations and other folks, and now actually militaries around the world, they actually, after my book came out, asked me to turn the practices I offer in my book into an app.

And my approach was very much almost thinking of people like you, Abby.

I mean, hard-edged people where this may not be the natural inclination.

And the app is called push-ups for the mind.

And that is another framing you can use.

That's good.

Just doing push-ups for the mind.

That's good.

And the key is you're not going to dive into doing 12 minutes a day.

A big part of the app, there's so many meditation apps out there and they're wonderful, but I wanted to have something that people that might not naturally gravitate toward this might decide to go because it's the right entry point and doesn't feel as scary or foreign.

And frankly, that's because that's how I felt, even though.

I'm familiar with meditation from my own cultural background.

It didn't feel like something I wanted to do.

The other thing is what I focus on before we even get to doing 12 minutes a day is let's just get get the habit going.

Yeah.

You know, when you start any workout routine or learn a new, you know, anything, you're not going to start doing it hours and hours a day.

Can you do a minute a day?

Can you do three minutes a day?

And can you do that for a couple of weeks and stick it into your routine in a way that feels comfortable?

So you're kind of growing that habit of just doing it regularly.

And that will increase the duration.

So we want to treat this like we would any kind of mental or physical training.

We're going to introduce it in a way that's compelling and useful.

And then we're going to build the muscles to be able to do this well.

And then we see the utility of it in our lives.

So good.

And you found that this was the 12 minutes a day decreased these high stress humans by 10%.

Was that the thing?

It like really did yield these tangible effects in people's lives.

It did.

So not only in the broader field of what's called contemplative neuroscience, where neuroscientists like me are studying the changes in the brain that can happen, objective changes.

The things that we've done in my lab are look at things like cognitive functioning.

So how well do people perform on objective tasks of attention and working memory and long-term memory?

What does their mood look like?

Is your mood improved?

And yes, attention gets better.

Mood is improved or protected so you don't get more and more negative over high stress.

Social relationships, going back to where we started this conversation, your sense of interpersonal relationships, whether it's with your partner or your child or your team in the workplace context, cohesion is improved and performance, objective performance, whether it's athletic performance or in the context of the military, their operational performance at doing their tasks, as well as things like medical errors are reduced.

So the world of benefits is there when we start just sharpening this particular way of paying attention in our lives.

Well, circling back to the beginning, it does feel like besides all of those amazing benefits, it rings true to me that if we want to be able to be with our people, if we want to be able to be in hard moments with our people, if we want to be able to be in hard moments in our work, then it would begin with us being able to be with ourselves.

You cannot be with someone else unless you can be with yourself.

Thinking of it in terms of that kind of practice, like I am doing it so that I can be with,

is

a beautiful beginning of love, I think.

It's like self-love so that you can spread love.

Yeah.

See love.

Oh, I love that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Hey, you're great.

Thank you so much.

Great.

Really?

Really?

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you so much.

Thanks for having this conversation because, I mean, I think that if we can offer people these tools, improving self-love to improve love in the world, who doesn't want that?

That's right.

That's right.

Let's go.

All right, loves, We Can Do Hard Things

12 minutes a day.

Absolutely.

A lot of fun.

Thank you all.

Thank you.

Bye-bye.

See you next time, pod squad.

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First, can you please follow or subscribe to We Can Do Hard Things?

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To do this, just go to the We Can Do Hard Things show page on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Odyssey, or wherever you listen to podcasts, and then just tap the plus sign in the upper right hand corner or click on follow.

This is the most important thing for the pod.

While you're there, if you'd be willing to give us a five-star rating and review and share an episode you loved with a friend, we would be so grateful.

We appreciate you very much.

We Can Do Hard Things is created and hosted by Glennon Doyle, Abby Wombach, and Amanda Doyle in partnership with Odyssey.

Our executive producer is Jenna Wise-Berman, and this show is produced by Lauren Lograsso, Allison Schott, and Bill Schultz.