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[Music] hello hello thanks for doing this absolutely um peak mind huh that's right yeah how long you've been working on this um my whole life your whole life but the actual book couple years and the idea of improving all aspects of the way the brain works is this something that's always fascinated you absolutely yeah yeah the book isn't necessarily about all aspects but a very important one that drives a lot of other aspects which is the brain's attention system yeah that's a thing a lot of people have a problem with today right phones and distractions and screens and nonsense yeah but it's always been a problem so meaning you can look back to medieval monks and they report you know i abandoned my family i've devoted my life to god and i still keep thinking about lunch when i'm supposed to be praying so this is not only a modern problem it's actually a human problem where does it come from is it just a natural function of having a lot of things to think about in the world if you're trying to survive what does where does what come from the the like distracted distraction like if you think about it if you're a hunter-gatherer you kind of have to multitask mentally right you you can't just concentrate on picking these mushrooms you also have to think is that a sound of a branch snapping behind me is someone sneaking up on me like what's that smell like you have to always be aware of so many different things it's it seems almost like a natural part of being a person to be distracted absolutely our brain is built for distractibility exactly for the reasons that you said it advantages us to be able to not just focus when we want to but scan as we're as we're still engaged in a task and it's as we as i just mentioned it's not really only a modern problem because oftentimes even if we're abandoning every other kind of possible external distraction and we're just by ourselves alone in a quiet room we can still feel like it's hard to focus
so this capacity that drives kind of a shifting moving attention waxing and waning is something that is built baked into the way that our brain functions and i think that's often misunderstood as a problem people think oh no no my brain is really busy my brain gets really distracted instead of understanding that's just the nature of the brain if you are alive awake conscious about half of your waking moments your attention is not going to be in the task at hand yeah that's something that people need to learn when they start meditating that when you meditate people think god why do i keep getting distracted like that's just part of it exactly you're gonna you're never gonna be like completely zen for long periods of time and just completely full of bliss and enlightenment now you're going to be thinking about cheese and car tires exactly when is it raining yeah no absolutely i think understanding that it shifts it starts to shift your relationship to what you're trying to do in the practice of meditation it's not about clearing the mind and that term gets used a lot like just clear it out not possible not gonna happen not the way that your brain was designed but then you start understanding that there is a win to be had and it's a practice like especially the kind of stuff that i study in my lab mindfulness meditation because in the act of knowing where your mind is and training it to come back over and over you gain a lot you gain almost in some sense the super capacity to have more control in your not just the way your mind functions but in your life that's where it gets interesting for me because uh do you have sort of a standard protocol that you think people should apply to their thinking or is it based on where you are in your life how much you've already done of this is
every does everybody's brain vary in terms of how much distractions they have in their head deep question actually so yes it varies and let's just say the basics are there's a basic profile so to disabuse ourselves that if your mind wanders there's something wrong with you or there's something unique about you that's everybody but it is the case that for some people dur not some people in every group we've studied in my lab and this is many many kinds of groups so from active duty military to first responders to students to athletes leaders and organizations i mean teachers just goes on and on if you are experiencing a protracted period of high demand meaning you got to get something done like for students to be during the academic semester or for athletes even pre-season training if you're experiencing that kind of high demand for multiple weeks your attention is going to decline your attentional functioning is going to decline your distractibility or mind wandering would be the technical way to describe it is going to increase so that's one thing we need to know no matter what your sort of set point is and we do have different set points as individual differences now when it comes to your own mind um when when you're working with these different groups of people and you're putting together this book and you're putting together these sort of uh methods and strategies for uh taking care of the the just the weirdness of being a person and the weirdness of the mind are you gaining something out of this personally by going through all this like is this helping you as well while you're writing all this stuff down while you're you know exposing these various techniques that can improve your concentration and your ability to focus on things do you find that it's helping you as well or is it or is it something that you've always worked on oh no it's not i mean i've always been i've been a neuroscientist
for a long time i've been interested in the way the brain works for a long time i started studying attention as an undergrad and went on to do my you know graduate work and post doctoral training and then set up a lab to study attention and then kind of early in my time of being a professor i had like this kind of acute crisis of attention and it was around the time i just had my my first child and my husband was in grad school setting up the lab i lost feeling in my teeth from grinding whoa yeah it was pretty intense and then i i remember one night i was sitting there with my then almost three-year-old reading a book to him and like this is important to me i mean i this is like the only time i really have with him that's supposed to be quality time feeling like this is the time i'm supposed to really be here for him reading a book and he asked me a question put a little hand on the book asked me a question i had no idea what he was talking about and i'm like i am definitely not here i am not even here when i want to be this is what i want to do i'm not in the middle of doing anything else but my mind is not here and it was scary it was like oh this is not cool and then i'm like i study this stuff okay just let's go see the literature how can i find a solution i can't access my own attention it's slipping through my fingers so i literally did i'm like i'm gonna study everything i can nothing i came up empty and that was also troubling like what do you mean there's nothing i can go to in the literature that's just like here's the best way to train your attention so that you have better access to your moment-to-moment lived experience kind of empty and then just to kind of continue the journey i'm like this is there's got to be something to do and at that moment it was not just feeling distracted it was starting to feel kind of depressed and a little bit anxious too like sort of this bubbling up of
uh my life is slipping away from me and in that moment it was sort of how funny how serendipity happens but a dear colleague of mine an eminent neuroscientist uh who happens to be an emotional researcher an affective neuroscientist at that time was at the university of of pennsylvania he was giving a lecture so you know this is part of my colloquium i went to this lecture and i'm sitting at the back of the room he goes through this whole talk he ends his talk by showing kind of two brain images one is of a brain induced to be in a very negative mood i mean usually you do this by putting people on the scanner and saying think of your worst memories like feel bad you play sad music and they did the same thing on the other side where you showed a brain image of a person induced to be in a positive mood and he's just trying to make the point that these are distinct brain states we can track them they have different functions but of course given my own life circumstances at the end of the lecture i kind of shout out from the back of the room like how do you make that brain look like that brain i just wanted an answer yeah and i don't know if he was rushed because it was the end of the lecture or what but he he just kind of calls out like not even in the microphone i don't even remember meditation and i'm like what the heck is do you know where you are you don't say that this is in the early 2000s meditation was not a thing we don't talk about it timmy was almost as offensive as like talking about astrology to physicists or something like was it really it was absolutely not something i'd ever amongst academics academics neuroscience context really i did not know that when did it start becoming something that was taken seriously is it now yeah i think meditation's been no absolutely i would say a lot of the effort that i've been up to now we have a field contemplative neuroscience so anyway so yeah we we're definitely there i would say over the last 15 years there's been a serious uptick in the seriousness taken and a lot of it is because of these kind of brain imaging
studies where we could put people in scanners and we could track them a lot of the work that we've been doing as well but it really bugged me that he said that and i was still very much a skeptic like i don't know of meditation of just yeah and i i had a chance to talk to him afterwards he's now become a very sort of dear more closer colleague and he runs an entire center that's tied to um contemplative practice but at that point it was just it was almost like he was also kind of closeted he had not come out he was doing something initial studies closeted with meditation well yeah because he was just starting to do studies again it was a liability and when i i mean just to fast forward a little bit really meditation was a liability to discuss when i did in academic circles when i told my colleagues that i and it was a big deal because i'm like a traditional hard-nosed academic studying attention so i'm going to make this like tiny pivot to studying training attention and i'm gonna use this thing called mindfulness meditation it was like first it was like silence like you're committing career suicide but you know you're gonna do what you're gonna you're gonna do people actually said that to you oh yeah that's so strange i mean i love that you're saying it's so strange because in some sense it is the success of this enterprise and the rigor with which we've been able to do a lot of research that has caused a type of culture change which is a pretty rapid pace of causing that yeah culture change but for me when i heard the term you know i'm we can see i'm an indian woman i of course knew about meditation my earliest memories are seeing of my see my dad meditating and i always thought that's great you know that's great for them but i'm like a serious western trained scientist and until there's any reason to really think this is a helpful thing i'm not going to do it
but going back to your question which was about my personal journey with this practice as it relates to writing the book and the work that we're doing you know um i started practicing i went to the penn book store after he said that term with my own resistance in hand and found a little book called meditation for beginners i lucked out because i picked a really good book by a really influential person i didn't know anything about this jack cornfield it's called meditation for beginners it came with a little guided cd and i'm like you know what i'm going to give this a try and as i started doing it i had a lot of like light bulb moments like how does this guy know what's happening in my mind how how does he know that i'm now resisting or my mind is wandering or you know but the instruction was very clearly about attention so it's almost like i know this world i've never seen anybody talk about it from the direct phenomenology of of the attention system so i shifted into practicing and then like waking up to the benefits and then and then had that pivotal moment where i'm like i think i'm going to study this so is it fair to say that traditional academics study the brain states and study these various phenomena like lack of attention or hyperattention but they don't study how to achieve them they don't study the various things that can be done which is the jack cornfield is that his name kornfeld jack cornfield he's he's uh duncan trussell's a giant fan oh yeah yeah and his and his uh jack's wife trudy is on duncan strong oh so often oh interesting so so yeah no i would say uh it's shifting the landscape is shifting but for from my personal experience you remember there's if you just not remember but if you think back to the history of science we we as a field as a scientific enterprise started moving away from subjective to objective and when you're going to be objective about something it's not about your experience with it it's about what you can look at it through measures that have nothing to do with you but that's where it gets
weird because if you're talking about science and you're talking about the mind there's no way to separate you from the mind like what you do directly influences the way the mind works so if we're studying the way the mind works but we're not studying what you do we're just studying these random states with no understanding of how they got there until meditation's being really explored is that fair to say no i would say we do a lot that i mean now i i i mean i mean like the way you used to when you were saying that you were committing academic suicide by studying meditation is that the way they used to look at it even in my own in my own professional life we would design tasks that tapped into attention things that made people pay attention to things sort of like video games and then we look at the brain responses we'd understand the way attention is instantiated within our brain but it was not about my own phenomenological experience with my attention and how does it feel and what gets in the way and what distracts me some of that was covered in the kind of clinical realm like oh yeah you ruminate or you've got unfortunate psychological challenges you're depressed that's why you're not able to focus but these were not worlds that were merging and a serious look at people training their own minds in this way to result in objective metrics that we could change was certainly not being done which is why i couldn't find anything in the literature so yes the journey of uh the introduction of contemplative practice into science is very very new and it had a little bit of a resurgence or not resurgence but introduction in the 70s and then it really started again with the tools with tools like brain imaging where you know in some sense you could be objective you put somebody in the scanner and say okay joe i want you to do a quick meditation practice for 10 minutes and i'd look to see what your brain activity looked like and what kind of scans are you using is it fmri we use yeah we use a whole bunch of stuff in my
lab most of the work that i've been doing over the last 10 years or so because i'm going to military bases and various off-site locations we don't bring a scanner with us we just have them do attention tasks to see if things like mindfulness training have an impact so just to answer the question you asked it was the case that my personal journey woke me up to a whole new scientific endeavor which is what made me want to bring it to the lab and i happen to have all these tools from sort of traditional psychology and cognitive neuroscience to apply to this new space of mindfulness meditation so when you get to this book meditation for beginners what are you doing like what yeah a lot of the same stuff that actually we continue to do with all these groups including what the kinds of practices that i give these are not these are not brand new practices these are from the millennial wisdom traditions right in particular with jack the buddhist tradition so a foundational practice that he offered was mindfulness of the breath and he was very clear on what mindfulness in that sense meant it's about taking this sort of present centered present centered attention without editorializing or or reacting to it kind of getting the raw data of the experience and so he guided the participant and it was actually a recording of a retreat he was leading so it's just like he's talking to these people that are who knows how long maybe a month long retreat and he's like you're sitting quietly you're focusing on uh just notice your body breathing and notice what's prominent so might be coolness of air whatever it is for you that's where you should be holding guiding your attention to stay there and then the next aspect of the instruction was when you notice your mind wanders one you know wanders away from that
bring it back repeat and you know he would use these phrases like as minds do it'll wander away as minds do or you may find yourself resisting or you may find yourself in a fantasy but the instruction was always the same regardless of where you were gently bring your attention back and so i started realizing oh my goodness he's giving us like this workout for attention and given what i knew about the brain systems of attention my strong hunch was he's actually tapping into all the main brain systems of attention that exist and so now i want to check out let's bring it to the lab let's give it to people that aren't me and let's see does attention actually change with our objective measures of these systems and what did you get out of it that's the book [Laughter] so like when you're in the lab was there anything shocking that you learned from seeing how these practices and how mindfulness applied like what it did to the brain so yes i mean and and i want to go back to something you said that's tied to what shocked me which is is not something uh extraordinary it's just the fact that there was any effect at all so so you were asking me is the field of psychology not care about changing the brain or training the brain absolutely it cares but the approaches taken were like brain training games or stimulating the brain or lighten sound devices or maybe put somebody in a good mood and that will change their attention so we had tried all those when when you say stimulating the brain do you mean with transcranial magnetic stimulation that stuff's fascinating it's it's all fascinating i was listening to a radio lab podcast where they were discussing this sniper training course have you do you know the the course i'm talking about it's uh it's like a video game where you are uh in sort of a virtual reality scenario where you are if i'm remembering it correctly there's like
bad guys and hostages and you're supposed to shoot the bad guys not the hostages and this woman went through this and was fairly slow and the whole the thing is like 20 minutes and she did it and it was like she wasn't very good at it and she screwed it up and then they went through this uh transcranial what is it magnets that they're using and it's some some electrical i think it's called 9-volt nirvana i think that's the episode of the um okay there it is 9-volt nirvana so she they put these magnets on her and then she goes through it flawlessly she does the whole thing and she it ends and she's like i thought it was like five minutes and it turns out it was 20 minutes and she's like what the [ __ ] like what happened and then they look at her score like jesus chris you have a perfect score like she went from being terrible at it to being like an expert with this brain stimulation and the entire episode is about all these different people that have developed these like personal hacking devices to to do this trans dermal is transdermal stimulation that's what it's called uh yes transcription competitive direct transcranial magnetic stimulation brain zapping um yeah how does that work well that's not my expertise but i'll just tell you that it's fascinating to see that yes activating and inhibiting certain parts of the brain and basically you're limited because you got to get through the skull right and then you got to be able to it'll be just a few centimeters but if you can place it right or you have multiple coils you might be able to target different regions there's a lot of positive stuff happening with that now but just to take you back to where i was the kind of things that were happening back in the early 2000s there was not a lot of um benefit that we could see over and over again so maybe in the acute moment like you zap your brain and something looks different was great but what about
eight weeks later right what about even two days later so so the brain zapping the actual stimulation stuff very fruitful enterprise in the moment well in the moment for sure but also other people people are learning maybe there's a way you can stimulate um repeatedly and get a benefit but sort of separate from that the main thing that was happening at the time i was starting to think about pursuing mindfulness training was um brain training games so what are these games so these are kind of like simple video games attentionally demanding there's many companies out there that were offering them you you know now we could do them on our phone they're the kind they were like the experiments we were doing to evaluate attention except you you do them over and over again the levels would get higher and people would get better and better at doing them and then you'd give them sort of you'd have them do this for some period of time and then you'd have you'd change the way the game worked you'd change the superficial stimuli or maybe change the demand or you'd have them do something real world that you think is tied to attentional working memory and there was no benefit there was no transfer so that made the field really take a look at okay you know the brain is smart it will get better at that specific thing but it's not resulting in a generalizable benefit to attention so that you can use it no matter what you're doing so your question was such a good one which was what what surprised you so okay so i'm sitting by myself in my you know in my office struggling with not being able to feel my teeth decide to get this book start practicing all of a sudden my own embodied experience of my like life starts shifting i'm more present with my family i'm realizing i have more of my attention back and so i decided to pursue this line of research where we offer the program a mindfulness training program and there were several available already in the
medical context and i said the test is going to be those same kind of tests that we use to understand attention it might be remember faces and scenes or remember numbers and then try to do math problems or whatever it is complex stimuli does it transfer because nothing else was transferring so you sit quietly focusing on your breath then you come in lab and do these rigorous tests of attention and we saw benefits on those tests we saw transfer and that to me was very very exciting because it was like you're not doing any you're not practicing with numbers and and stimuli on the screen you're sitting there with your eyes closed by yourself you're doing this workout and all of a sudden it transfers so it really opened up this possibility um that we could add to suite of things like the radiolab episode you were talking to that people can do on their own every day as a mental workout to advantage their attention especially for people that are likely to have their attention degraded because high stress tends to degrade attention and when you're saying it transfers like how are you measuring this like yes what are the results the results are so let me give an example of one of the kinds of experiments it's a really basic um attention task and it's something called the sustained attention response task what we're trying to do in that task is we're trying to see how people can stay on task and resist their own internal distractibility right so their mind will wander and they have to keep themselves on this task really boring on purpose to do that so you sit in front of a computer screen you're going to see a number show up every half second or so about every quarter of a second press a button every time you see a digit on the screen except when that digit is three in those cases just withhold and people do this and we find that people have a terrible time doing this because the three only happens like five percent of the time so you can imagine you're sitting there like press press press the three appears and you're
like oh i and when we give this to marines they kind of freak out they're like just damn threes you know like they really freak out and they're like why can't i just do this because the mind just gets distracted and it's hard to pay attention so that task we knew had really good traction in the lab we could get people to do it we knew what the brain components were of the of the experiment itself and so now we give that experiment to people they come in we give it to them then they go through a multi-week mindfulness training program and we give it to them again and what we see is if there's any change in their performance it's a very stable task if you give it to people over and over again usually no change and this time we saw an improvement in that task performance they were not pressing just to the three more often meaning they weren't making mistakes and they were less variable so they were really just there more often to be able to do the task that's just a very simple example but there's many other we've done many kinds of experiments where we look at these core attentional functions and find improvements and you know it's so funny that you mentioned um this vr environment from the the radio uh lab episode because now we're doing that we're saying we're actually working with soldiers and uh you know mostly military active duty military and looking at combat scenarios with these kind of virtual reality environments immersive environments and we're seeing how their performance might change for those when they go through a mindfulness training program that's a project we're just in the middle of right now when you're saying that this uh i definitely want to talk about that but when you're saying that this the ability to not hit the number three and that you saw a measured improvement like how much of an improvement 10 really interesting yeah ten percent when we were looking at people that were practicing a lot so the first study we
did was um you know i didn't we had no i just kind of take you back in time now you'd say oh isn't meditation good for your brain we had no idea this was a total shot in the dark so i ended up i was like if there's ever going to be an effect i need to go where people are just gung-ho meditating a lot because if the signal is tiny and i don't pick it up i will conclude that it doesn't work so let's give it the best shot of working so i ended up partnering with a retreat center in colorado where people were doing mindfulness meditation practices 10 to 12 hours a day oh jesus and that was our first i was like i gotta advantage us like it was gonna when we saw it that's where we saw it and then we brought it back to the lab and looked at medical and nursing students and gave them a more kind of regular mindfulness training program that's about eight weeks long um and they're practicing about 45 minutes a day and we saw benefits there too so then we've kind of that's been the progression of my career has been to try to figure out time efficient solutions for people because most people can't get away for a month to meditate now when you're working with these soldiers did you have a control group yeah so because i would imagine that if they get frustrated they keep hitting the three they're gonna go okay get your [ __ ] together stop hitting the three to calm yourself down figure it out did anyone improve without the mindfulness meditation there's always variability you know how research goes right so how many people are you working with i mean now we've had hundreds of people at the time like when you're running these tests with soldiers i mean this this result we see over and over again but yeah of course some people will just get better at it because they've strategized did anybody get to the same level of 10 without mindfulness training no but here's there's another thing i gotta tell you which is it goes back to what i was saying uh happens under high
stress because you know my whole reason for so so just to kind of backtrack so why do i want to work with why am i working with soldiers all of a sudden it was like one of the things that we knew from my lab is attention is extremely powerful and we can talk about what it actually is because we're kind of using it as like a placeholder it's actually a pretty deep uh interesting topic to to think about what it actually is it's not just focus anyway we know how it works but we also we're learning that it's extremely vulnerable and so even the laboratory context even with a simple task like the one i was just describing to you if you what you do is you take kind of that simple uh digits task and i put in a negative image every now and then people start falling apart even more it's just what do you mean by putting in so you're sitting there you see number number you see a three you're going to screw up you're going to press it often and then i just added this element of i'm going to put in negative or neutral images every now and then pictures from the news so all of a sudden you're doing this task and you see like some some very disturbing image and then you got to go back to going you know doing the numbers thing or you see a neutral image complex scene just doing that small manipulation adding those things and performance got worse oh and so we knew we were starting to get this profile of attention is very powerful it can really impact things but things like negative images negative mood stressful circumstances threatening circumstances further deplete attention so and i was experiencing that right i was like i wasn't i wasn't in a life or death threat situation but i was now definitely looking back on it feeling a little overwhelmed with all that life required so i became very interested in like uh for me it wasn't consequential because i didn't read the book to my kid nothing
happened everybody was okay for many groups many professions it's not just that their attention matters it's that the circumstances that we ask them to perform at their best professionally are the ones that are going to disadvantage and degrade their attention and that like was a whole category of people you know military service members emergency services professionals first responders like we can't they can't attention is life or death you can't lapse you can't you can't shoot when you shouldn't be shooting so anyway that's why i started working with these groups so you're asking me if people actually stay anybody got better over time for the most part for the control group when we did nothing at all over a four to eight week interval usually we picked these intervals that were just preparatory high stress pre-deployment training they're getting ready to go to be deployed everybody as a group got worse so the baseline performance for the military folks and other high stress groups enduring high stress intervals was degradation if you give the same task to a civilian or even that same kind of person during normal life they were stable so the baseline was degradation when we gave them mindfulness training the training group they were stable over time they did not degrade even with the negative images and all the other things you were doing well now we didn't we didn't need to put negative images anymore because the circumstances were simulated i mean they were descriptive of high stress high threat negative mood that was their life so we didn't have to experimentally look at that anymore we gave very basic just numbers digits and everybody got worse as a group this is now we're not just talking about military service members we saw this with um football players during pre-season training undergrads you know if you're probably business people that are going through sales season i mean anything that is
i didn't think of your own life like anything that is high demand and long it's going to degrade your attention um yeah there's things that we know i was thinking about this the other day because i was counting some money and i was thinking and i was by myself but i was thinking how frustrated it is when you're counting money if someone starts throwing numbers at you i don't know why i was thinking that while i was counting money right that probably distracted you too kind of it did a little bit but i was thinking like god how weird is it that it's so difficult to just simple numbers like if you've got twenty dollar bills two four six eight ten two four six six you know you're piling these hundred dollar bills or twenty dollar bills in the hundred dollar stacks but if someone comes along goes fifty eighty ninety seven you know [ __ ] man stop doing that like that really works it works on everybody but it's so strange like that just that little external just something that interferes with your rhythm of counting numbers yeah i mean that's now you're tapping into like a classic working memory experiment because it's not stressful at all counting 20 bills is not stressful but if someone comes over and goes 90 110 120 45 60 like yeah what the [ __ ] man even if there's no stress on you if it's not a competition or anything it's just and you're trying to count 500 bucks and you can't do it because someone's yelling out numbers i'm like god how shitty are brains exactly but you're really you're what you're doing is like when you're counting you're putting it into something called our temporary scratch space working memory and like you're actually saying it to yourself and that same space is where new perceptual information goes in and it's messing you up temporary scratch space working memory that's what it is what is the terminology what is it what is it supposed to do so working memory i like to think of it as it's not really about the memory part it's about the working part so we've been talking about attention so far
take attention and think about it over time so like in our conversation right now you're using your working memory i'm saying stuff you're comprehending it you're probably having a thought but you're a nice person and you're not just blurted out you're going to probably hold it till you see a nice spot you just use your working memory it really is this temporary holding pad i sometimes talk about it as like a whiteboard in your mind but with disappearing ink it has this very short time frame maybe 30 to 60 seconds max so as you're experiencing information as you're paying attention to it the white you write on the whiteboard so you're doing this counting task you're counting your million dollar bills um or whatever whatever it was and um and the numbers are going up on the whiteboard and then somebody else says 90 50. those are also going up on the whiteboard so now you're like wait which what's the stuff happening there so your brain puts things into like a little area where i just need to know this for now and then eventually it's like done counting and then you're not gonna remember any of it you don't want to right it's like the cache in your computer like it's just a temporary scratch space and it's so important if you don't have that you're out of luck you use it for everything decision making thinking planning right now you're using it yeah it's it's very odd though that there's so many different kinds of memory and there's memories that are like cemented in your head like really important personal milestones or you know loving memories or or traumatic memories but then there's other memories that are just like you you ask someone their name and then you immediately forget it exactly it didn't get on the whiteboard right or vanish before you could rewrite it like that's a weird one the name one is weird yeah so what do you do if you're trying to if you meet somebody like i gotta remember this person's name what do you typically do i ask again exactly i say i forgot your name exactly you ask again i have too much on my brain to be dishonest so if i forget someone's name i'd say i'm sorry i forgot your name but i'm not trying to be rude i'm just being
and if you're a mature adult human being with a life like you like you know that you do that occasionally you're like fred no bob sorry bob [ __ ] sorry you know it's not rude it's just a mistake it's like a thing that people do so amishi just to refresh your memory yes you have a very rememberable name it's a beautiful name by the way thank you so you know here's the thing now that's inconsequential like you're right you could just make up you got great social intelligence you'll be fine but now let's say it's it is consequential there's like four servers and somebody you just dealt with is dealing with correcting the order you just made and you got to remember their name or something about them and you got to keep it in mind you cannot let it go because you will suffer because of it right so now let's say you're trying to remember but you know you're not going to remember this person forever what might you do to like try to keep that in mind usually you rehearse he's like say you kind of visualize the image or you kind of say it to yourself over and over again but then you're not listening to what they're saying because you're just trying to remember amish exactly it's the same scratch space it's the same scratch space so it ends up working memory is another thing that we test in my lab and working memory also significantly declines over high stress intervals yeah for sure right and working memory is something you know you mentioned there's all these kinds of memories but working memory it it takes from perception and attention as its inputs it's what writes it on the board but also you can call it up from long-term memory so if i say joe what was what did you have for for breakfast this morning you'd have to tell me but you could do it right okay yes i could so when what did you just do essentially you have a long-term representation or you don't let's say you do remember you call it up it gets written on the whiteboard and now you use your attention to kind of read what's on the
right whiteboard and say oh i had a shake or whatever it was so it's it's used for both the input of information and the extraction from our long-term memory very very powerful brain system tied to intelligence tied to decision making emotion regulation everything and it starts tanking under high stress did you run any experiments using nootropics or using uh various compounds that are thought to enhance memory i did not you did not interesting so and you know i know this is a topic near and dear to your heart and i would say it's not my expertise but i think that what's very interesting about going back to mindfulness training is that it really is establishing not just the kind of core strength but a specific set of processes so remember back let me just unpack that so like even what we were saying about that the simple set of uh practices like the breath awareness practice that jack's cd had on it what is that actually training me to do and i said you know when we were talking about that i said oh it's actually training all these systems of attention i'd love to tell you like a little bit about the systems of attention because my hunches and i think those studies with kind of different substances uh they can be beneficial but just like you know i think about you and your martial martial mma expertise and like there's going to be core strengths you're going to need but then there's certain moves you got to practice over and over again to be able to use them in that particular context and just being strong or agile in general is not going to be helpful there's like a certain kind of move that you need to make and that's what i think the suite of mindfulness practices is offering it's training attention in a particular way um so anyway so i think that that other substances can be great that's not my expertise but it's really regarding what what are the vulnerabilities why does attention start
tanking under stress threat and poor mood and why does it seem like mindfulness training is actually able to protect against that that takes a deep that makes us it requires us to get an understanding of of what the heck attention actually is i'm glad you used the analogy of martial arts because i think with that analogy you could also apply the idea of nootropics because in martial arts you do have techniques that need to be drilled and worked on over and over again but those techniques become more effective with a body that performs better yeah and when you supplement with vitamins and you know we make sure that you have a satisfying input in terms of like protein and carbohydrates and all the things that you need for your body to perform where your body's not at a deficit it performs better and then there's also supplements that you can take that will increase athletic performance and enhance recovery and those things will also allow you to put in more time and training which would then yield better results the way i look at nootropics is the same way there's certainly not a substitute for mindfulness training or for concentration or for breath work or any of those things but i think that things like acetylcholine and the various nootropics that have been shown to increase memory that i do think they play a part i i first found out about them back in the early 2000s there was a a radio show that i was on in san francisco um and uh one of the hosts had this thing called nero one and it was a product that was developed by bill romanowski he was a football player and um he was having memory issues you know football players should take a lot of hits to the head and so he developed this uh nootropic and i had never heard what a nootropic was i was like what is it and he's like just try it sarah no name shout out to them and uh this uh guy who was on the on the show who was taking it gave it to me and i was like whoa this gives you like a weird sort of
like alertness it wasn't like speedy like uh like too much caffeine but it was like uh i was cert i certainly felt like my brain flowed a little bit better and then i started getting really interested and there's a bunch of really good ones out there and we have some of this gum i don't know if you've ever seen it i'll give you something before you leave it's called neuro gum i like that stuff a lot and then there's a product that we developed my company on it developed called alpha brain and what we did is we it's a combination of all the various nootropics that we found to be beneficial and we try to tweak it over a period of time but those things help like nootropics can definitely we did two um placebo-controlled studies at the boston center for memory and we found increase in verbal memory increase in uh peak alpha flow state uh reaction time these things like can be enhanced through supplementation in a way that you can measure so i think that's awesome yeah that on top of meditation and mindfulness like we're trying to achieve peak states right exactly that's the idea yeah exactly so i mean it's definitely not um i mean everything you're saying sounds amazing and i think people should advantage themselves and do what they want to do to to do that so this is not a either or it's a potentially like and also no but i want you to try because you're a neuroscientist i'm like when i when i talk to someone like yourself i'm like i want you to try this and tell me what you think oh yeah i'll i'll definitely try it what we have here we have alpha brain here too right we have some of that there we go we have the gum i want you to try the gum because the gum is great we don't have by the way this is not my company i don't have anything to do with the gum it's just something we use yeah but it's um it's great stuff because it tastes like regular gum but it gives you like this little boost got a tiny amount of caffeine in it and um what's the other what's the other yeah theanine right yeah yeah
this is it i'm not gonna start doing it now but i'm i'm definitely interested yeah i i eat that stuff i chew it all day long cool yeah um yeah you know i think that that's the kind of neat thing about where we're at right now in this moment that there are just like you mentioned like the transcranial magnetic stimulation and and uh substances that we can take that will enhance us and it was so interesting when we were doing when i was when i was just starting out this stuff and i remember i was like really trying to figure out not only for people that are um have attentional challenges because they're under a lot of stress right you can take some now oh the quality of our conversation is just gonna like i think it's even deepen i feel i feel dumb today i had a rigorous workout sometimes i come off a hard workout i feel dumb oh man now i'm in for it we'll see that might stay dumb well it's pretty good for dumb but what i was saying is like i was also interested in people that have dispositional attentional challenges like right adhd what is that is that real adhd 100 attention functions on a continuum right so i mean i'd love to tell you about let me tell you about attention because that kind of makes me feel like at least we'll be on the same page then as it relates to uh what i'm talking about because even the mindfulness stuff is related to attention so attention usually in the way we've been talking about it we've been talking about it is focus right so what does that mean to you right now you're laser focused on me you've got awesome attention at least it looks that way focusing on me everything else is kind of fuzzed out and that we call um the brain's orienting system so i i think of it like a flashlight so wherever it is that you direct your attention in that way you're privileging that content so right now
you're seeing my face with more granularity hearing my voice with the crispness more than the air conditioner or whatever jamie might be saying you know like right now you're focused in on on on me thank you very much so that that actually does neurally look like it enhances the sensory input if you focus in on my voice your neurons as early as your auditory cortex within a few hundred milliseconds you're gonna have a clear understand comprehension but even just auditory input's gonna be amplified as a function of of paying attention and you know just like literally a flashlight if you're in a darkened space you know you value that thing you wherever it is that it points it actually gives you that privileged information the cool thing about the flashlight is you can direct it willfully you can point it you can also not just direct it to the external environment i can say like right now joe like what's the what's the sensations on the bottoms of your feet can you can you sense into that were you thinking about before i said it no it wasn't flashlight got directed to internal bodily sensations you can pick that up so it actually goes to one of the reasons attention even evolved in our brain we talked about the evolution of distractibility which was to advantage our survival but why do we have attention in the first place why do we even develop this capacity to focus and it comes down to the brain had a big problem which is that there's far more information in the environment than it could possibly process so it's got a subsample has got to like get bits and pieces of what's going on and attention just like the flashlight you know if you were in a darken room and you kind of figure out the landscape you kind of scan it and kind of put together the image same idea with attention focus very important we can talk about this but i actually want to tell you about the other two main systems but just keep in mind that not only can we direct the flashlight but it can get yanked
so if you're in a darkened room and you hear a weird sound you're going to point to wherever the sound came from so that's the double-edged sword of this system is that it's not just about where it goes again very good reasons that we evolved to have that have you ever done any personal experimentation with sensory deprivation tanks oh i wanna i definitely wanna talk to you about that and actually i think that i have not i want to oh you have to i want to um i just haven't had a chance to go so i will definitely i definitely want to but it actually perfect segue into the second system of attention which is the exact opposite of this narrowing and privileging and the second big system of attention i use the the metaphor of like a flood light it's called the alerting system the floodlight unlike the flashlight narrow privileging some information from each other floodlight broad receptive no privileging of any information allows whatever comes up to come up the only thing that's privileging is the now like what's important right now and i was when i'm driving i think about this often you see a flashing yellow light probably near a construction site or near school maybe what does that mean pay attention but it's not like that narrow focus attention like broad receptive something weird may happen be ready for it so this is like i said it's the this this system is so important and probably and not just probably i mean there's a lot of evidence that suggests in things like sensory deprivation you now are challenging that system because what is happening is not necessarily from the actual environment so whatever is the baseline existence within the internal milieu may actually be more salient to you because just like the flashlight where you can direct it internally externally or internally the floodlight you can also direct externally and internally so the ops absence of sensory input you're kind of in this receptive state where everything that's occurring internally there's an acute and rich
awareness of that does that match with your experience yeah the um the tank is fascinating because it's really the only environment where you can achieve almost no input from the body yeah because because of the warm water that's the same temperature as your skin and the amount of epsom salts in it that make you float uh you get to this place where you can't tell the difference between the water and the air and you're just gone and you can move a little bit so there is some input you know you can feel like if you move your head you'll feel the water in your ears and stuff like that and you can move your digits but the reality of that environment is that when you are completely still and just breathing it's as close to eliminating all external sensory input as possible and you don't achieve that state anywhere else on earth it doesn't exist so my experience is that any meditation or any mindfulness training inside the tank is significantly more impactful much more because you really can get to these very bizarre states like especially breath work concentrating on breathing you get to these like really weird almost psychedelic states yeah without any substances at all just just from the absence of sensory input and you're allowing your brain to be free of traditional restraints right and constraints yeah you know it's so interesting because i mean i definitely want to still tell you about the third system of attention keep it in my working memory but what is this the scratch what does it call again it's working memory um but before i do that i want to say something to you and i really hope we can i want to kind of set this up so we can talk about it and have it together to talk about but one really cool thing about that we know regarding another thing that i think we should talk about which is mind wandering so basically the thing we started talking about spontaneous initiation of thought so there's a study i was reading which basically said if you want to
in the context of creativity increase productive novel thought then you need to be basically in this kind of alerting the floodlight needs to be on for the generation and acceptance of the the thought that comes up and they specifically mentioned that sensory deprivation chambers may be a really great place to get that generative content coming up you basically have more spontaneous thought in those contexts yeah i had i never set it up but i bought one of those uh tape recorders that operates on voice activated and i bought like my my plan was like to velcro it to the wall but i never wound up doing it but it's probably a good idea because there are times where you come up with these ideas you're like oh my god i got to write this one down but i don't want to climb out of it exactly oh definitely do that i mean it's like this one of these self-experimentation things but i was struck by that especially anticipating coming to see you and i know that that's something that you've done but i think as a let's let's keep it in mind as we talk about mindfulness training because i think the way you're describing mindfulness i probably have a different view of what it is and it might actually connect with what we're talking about with creativity um anyway so you got flashlight floodlight and then the third system is b we call it executive control it's tied to this notion of the whiteboard in working memory it's essentially the manager it's like just like the flashlight is selecting based on content you know light right side or left side the floodlight is selecting based on time what's important right now this system is selecting information because the whole goal of attention is to subsample reality you just have different slices does that make sense the third system executive control is is sub sampling based on your goals so what is what most goal relevant right now that should guide the way that i perceive and act so this system's job and the term executive is like the way
we talk about executives of a company the executive's job is not to go in and do every single task but it's to ensure that the goals of the organization and the behavior of the organization align and then when it's a mess up the executive says no fix that so this is where things like maintaining the goal working memory that's where we put our goals when we maintain them inhibiting irrelevant information it's like you know no you don't need to go think about that right now right like even in the even in the context of a sensory deprivation tank it's like yeah that's great i probably should remember that but i can't not experience this right now it's like goal was experience sensory deprivation not go write something so inhibit urges we might have or behaviors we might have update new information update your goal and even shift like you are on that goal but get on that goal so very complex system i like to think of it as like a juggler as just like all the balls are in the air but it's a manager it really is doing this so the reason i wanted to tell you that is because you know attention is such a topical thing like people always say their problems are with attention and you were asking me about add and is it real yes it ends up that we have people differ along their set points of all three of these systems and oftentimes we see people that not only are are problematic on any one system like they're too focused it's a dysregulation so either hyper focus you can't get the flashlight off or you're hyper vigilant you can't stop seeing everything is requiring this broad receptive almost um anxiety provoking level of of um of present moment awareness or you just can't keep the balls in the air there's a problem with your with your juggler so for sure people vary along these lines and sometimes they vary in their coordination because these none of these systems work alone you know the the executive control is telling the flashlight where to go
the the um alerting system is telling you what's going on so you need to know if you need so there's this constant fluidity between these things so sometimes it's the coordination that gets messed up and when people's lives are negatively impacted by the way their attention functions to the point where it's actually causing serious problems that's when sometimes it gets diagnosed as add my perception on it from a personal experience is that it varies wildly and that where it varies is is where my actual interest lies if i'm actually interested in something i have no problem with my attention but like high school when i was in high school i remember there were subjects that i just was bored with or the teacher was boring and i just could not pay attention it was almost impossible and i was thinking as i got older and i realized that they were putting kids on prozac and all kinds of [ __ ] for this i was like i probably would have got put on drugs if i had the wrong parents like if if my parents didn't recognize that i just wasn't interested in these things that it wasn't that there was something wrong with my brain but i only am capable of concentrating on things i'm interested in and i don't know why i but i don't care because the things that i'm interested i'm really good at concentrating on but the things that i'm i don't give a [ __ ] about they're like i don't care like i i have a amazing capacity to ignore information that i find boring i just don't i don't care yeah i mean i think that um there's a whole world that we could talk about of the bioethics of putting children on medication when you fall in line with do you think there's like some sort of an evolutionary reason for that though i mean if we go back to like our hunter-gatherer roots when you're you'll say if you were trying to catch a fish like you're ready to spear a fish and you're hyper-focused trying to get right to the right spot the success or failure your life life really
depends upon it because if you get the nutrition from that fish you you get to live another day you thrive if you don't you're you're starving and your body gets diminished these are real real life scenarios that we evolved to deal with so that feeling like have you ever gone fishing no i was we were talking about it last night with some friends one of them who happens to be a scientist and we were saying there's a thing that's like in you when you catch a fish like your whole body gets excited oh my god when i got one i'm like that has to be connected to back when we were you know primitive people and that was the only way we gathered food we had to catch something and if we caught it it was a big deal so you you get so stimulated by this act of catching a fish so much so that like there's a whole world of people who catch fish and let them go yes the thrill the thrill of the catch it's a weird that catch-and-release [ __ ] is [ __ ] weird it's like you know fly fishing they make fish hooks that don't have a barb in them so you can just catch a trout and let it go i'm like are you just [ __ ] with these fish like what is this but meanwhile if you say that they'll get so offended with a gentle art of fly fishing like no you're you're just [ __ ] with fish oh man but it's the same thing let's go back let's use fishing just to go connect it back to you in the classroom you're at some place and you're going back to our ancestors just like you said you're fishing you've got to catch the food if your life depends on it you don't catch any fish there what's going to happen you're going to move on right you're going to be like you're gonna probably start having not the thrill of the catch but the boredom and irritation of nothing happening that's of interest so i see boredom as a really important feedback system boredom isn't the cause boredom is the result of basically the attention system saying opportunity costs i'm missing out go somewhere else and so boredom is such a good signal
because what it means is go do something else it's guiding action and so often it's not like you can't focus it's that for whatever complex set of reasons your brain biology is saying try something else because probably you'll get more reward out of that and now that's actually the reason why people miss the three back on that experiment you're sitting there it's like nothing's going on and i always think of this every time i walk through security at the airport the chances of finding a grenade or a bomb in that image very very low but if they screw up devastating consequences and that's the thing to remember the the um the reason oftentimes we can't stay on task is because the urge to mind wander away because the reward the intrinsic reward of the situation is low but sometimes we still have to stay on it like you don't want a police officer or soldier on patrol to be like this is so freaking boring i'd rather do something else they need to be there you know oftentimes i'll i'll ask my military colleagues you're standing at attention where's your attention i don't know well let's get our minds at attention because that's what we need we you cannot screw up right because even if the chances of something bad happening are low if they happen and you miss it it's on you so when people are bored it's essentially the mind telling you that you're wasting time here and that you need to find like if if you go back to like the evolutionary roots of the way we've hyper focus on like a fish that you're trying to catch if you're bored that discomfort is essentially your mind saying this is not productive and this is not helping us survive yeah it's basically let's make it even more basic than that it's saying the reward you're getting here is not com enough to keep you here but it starts with something even more basic the mind starts wandering you know like
and we did this like if you look over time in this simple task 10 minutes people are worse at the end of the task than at the beginning of the task and if you ask them if you stop the experiment every now and then and say where was your attention right now was it on the task or was it off task the rates of people saying they were off task go up so they're saying they're more and more off task their performance is getting worse they're more variable and then if you ask them subjectively how did it feel to do this task it was so boring it was it's like this is the moment that that kind of calculation is probably being done then you start finding other things if there's nowhere to go it'll go you'll go internal to your own mind it's a great place to to take a little journey somewhere else but that is the other thing i want to bring up that boredom itself seems to enhance creativity and there's been some critiques of modern life in terms of the way we use screens to constantly distract ourselves to the point where we don't really get bored anymore we might get bored but we're getting enough input that we maintain a certain level of awareness and what we're doing like but you'll find yourself you know two hours in on instagram like what the [ __ ] did i do i just killed two hours where you're at this like instead of at 10 like you're catching the fish you're at like one or two but you maintain it one or two and you never get down the baseline but when you do when people are legitimately bored often times that's when creative thoughts come out and this argument that i've heard multiple times is that we are not bored anymore so because we're not bored anymore there's a lot of creativity and there's a lot of ideas that we're missing out on because the mind doesn't have the chance to wander which is where many of these great ideas come from is the mind just sitting there thinking you're super in sync with everything i write about frankly in the book because yes then let's let's go back to that term mind wandering your your whatever you took is definitely kicking in
you're still dumb right now it's not ready yet talk to me in a half hour we'll be ready so okay so um the term mind wandering okay so technically when we ask people is your mind wonder what we mean is did you did your attention get hijacked away from the thing you're doing right technically that's what we talk about off-task thoughts during an ongoing activity it represents a broader category of something the mind does it's called spontaneous thought it doesn't necessarily have to be thought by the way it's just this pump the brain is constantly there's lots of reasons for that it's pumping out content and so when we become um task focused when there is something to do and the content is still going on and and you now move your attention away from the task to that content that's not right related to the task you are now mind wandering and your performance on the task is going to suffer you're going to make more mistakes you're going to have all kinds of problems and you know you were saying a moment ago that when you were little like you just couldn't focus on things that were boring and that kind of led us on this whole thing you know that's awesome that you're here and your life worked out where you didn't have to go back to focusing on those things that are are boring but i can guarantee just like going back and you counting the money you were talking about there are things we have to do in our life that is going to be boring but we still got to pay attention like even if it's watching your kid at the playground or you're on a you're on you know on some some you're having a conversation with somebody and it's boring like you got to be able to at least bring yourself back so the key to all of this a lot of what we're saying is it's not so much about not having spontaneous thought
and it's not about even feeling boredom it's about having an awareness of what your mind is doing in the moment where is my attention if you can do that all of a sudden a lot of things start changing so in this case where something boring is happening you're you're off knowing oh yeah look i'm not on the task anymore you know we might call it tuning out you're actually saying i don't care i don't do that that's probably what's happening in in school it's like i know i'm not paying attention to class and i don't want to it's really not interesting to me but you had an awareness of where your mind was the bigger problem we tend to have and remember the kind of groups i work with is that mind that the mind will wander and people are not aware of it so now they're not paying attention to the task at hand they're not aware of it and their performance starts suffering and you know it's not about the nature of the task it doesn't have to be a boring task brain surgeons say they their minds wander like that's consequential judges say their minds wander generals say their minds wander just part of being a person it's just part of being a person but it's consequential if you miss key information in any of those scenarios somebody's life is going to be impacted by that yeah and so that's one of my interests it's like how do you okay that's a really tricky thing it kind of goes back to your nootropics thing how do you train for that because i don't think it's gonna happen it doesn't happen on its own all that often how do you train the mind to pay attention to what's happening moment by moment are we doing this sort of after the fact like should this be something that's a core component of early childhood education where children can understand why they get bored and what is what can help them get on track to accomplish goals and give them a feeling of achievement when they they do focus and and recognize that they can bring their mind on track and that there's a reward for it in accomplishing these tasks instead of like
going back as adults and go why am i so [ __ ] up how come i can't pay attention anything and go oh i never learned how to think correctly i never learned how to harness my attention i mean right on yeah absolutely because we really don't teach kids how to think very much do we really just sort of show them what they need to learn you know even before we talk about thinking what we don't do for any of us it's very very rare is teach people the value and importance of checking out where their mind is moment by moment and going back to the people with add the patients that have add diagnosable add their pro their life is problematic because of this set of set points they have on all these three systems of attention those that have this thing we're talking about which the technical term is meta awareness it's essentially a version of that floodlight that i was talking about broad receptive but you're checking out technically meta awareness is having awareness of the current contents and processes of your mind moment by moment so first of all to say oh yeah i can do that i can see and we do this all the time we'd say oh yeah look i'm really you were you just did it a moment ago my brain's not working right now like you're checking in and you're saying right now it's not the crispness i want there to be but you're attuned to it and so it may make you do something differently because you're aware of it if we're not even aware of where our mind is there's not a lot of opportunity that we can do anything about it so it ends up if you look at people with add that have a lot of problems their minds wander a lot meaning they have off-task thoughts a lot but they also happen to have good meta awareness their lives don't their lives don't suffer all that much meaning they can they can have a job and do things that are kind of normal kinds of things so do you think we're doing a disservice by medicating people when they have that
instead of by training them how to focus you know this is exactly where i'm going so that was a question i thought was a legitimate thing to ask we didn't want to start out by saying stop your medication so i involved we one of the studies we did in my lab is that we um recruited a bunch of people adults with add and we said just keep on your regular meditation what is the what what's the what's the average medication like what are they on for the most part did you ask them i mean all kinds of things whether it's strotero welbutan bulbutrin or adorable those are ssris though right there's some there's combinations it's an ssri i'm not that's not my neuro neuro pharmacology is not my thing you can look it up yeah but the point is that we said whatever your particular medication cocktail is stay on it now take this eight week mindfulness training program and that program was like we started with a minute of practice very active practices so now it's not sit quietly and focus on your breath it's go for a walk feel the sensations of your feet on the ground when your mind wanders come back so we we worked up to about 12 minutes a day for these adults with add and then at the end of the training program we said you know we looked at the objective metrics looking better less mind wandering for the people that did the practices but but when i just inquired what's different about your medication use or your mind they'd say before i used to take my ritalin and then play video games for eight hours and i did really awesome on the video games but i didn't finish my homework or i forgot to go to work you know like they had this raw power to focus in some sense with some of the medications but they didn't have the meta awareness to know if they were using it correctly after the training that was the number
one most consistent thing people said i was aware of where my mind was i could use my time better because i was checking in where am i right now oh is that tied to where i want to be let me redirect that's also the thing that all of us benefit from with with mindfulness training is that not only does it connect to using the flashlight it allows us to cultivate that kind of broad receptive stance toward what is unfolding right now so that the executive control system can update shift or redirect when things are off track that makes the whole thing function better mindfulness is a very current term yeah people love to use it and you said before that we might have a different yeah definition so let's define what mindfulness means yeah so the way that i use that term is it's it's a mental mode meaning it's a way of making the mind mindfulness meditation is a set of practices you can do to cultivate this mode so what is the mode mindfulness as a mode is paying attention to our present moment experience without conceptual elaboration conceptual elaboration or emotional reactivity what's conceptual elaboration thinking so being in the moment without thinking and really a specific kind of thinking this thought hyperlinking thoughts oh okay so how can you get more data without the overlay of the story the editorial ver you know don't editorialize right now what's happening what's actually happening not your story about what's happening not you thinking about what's happening what is happening that's what i mean by it and when people now do these breath awareness practices for example you're focusing on your breath you're not controlling the breath that's where i thought was a little bit of a distinction between what you were saying what i'm saying you're doing nothing with the breath the only reason we use the breath handy tool always changing moment by moment you're doing it without having to control it in
fact if you had to actually pay attention to your breath you'd probably be dead because you don't have a specific breath technique that you're utilizing you're not manipulating the breath at all you're not concentrating on the fact that you are actually breathing no no no you're aware of the fact they're breathing you're focusing on the sensations of breathing what's the distinction concentrating is a tricky term it could be i'm thinking about the fact that i'm breathing isn't it so interesting that i have a diaphragm and my this part of my body that does these muscle movements that allow this breathing to thought that that thought it's coolness tingliness tension it's like you're literally staying at the like the most granular raw data of what's happening and with that awareness of this is happening right now you're in that meta aware mode and and i'm not by the way manipulating your breath and controlling it and having a particular box breathing or whatever fantastic thing to do have you done it pranayama right these are breath manipulation techniques that can induce all kinds of very interesting states um so for example breath work right we're actually getting these kind of very cool experiences very cool thing to do but that's not what we're going for with mindfulness with mindfulness we're using the breath simply as one of many different things we could focus on like you know the other night i can fall asleep i'm using in my hotel room mindfulness of the air conditioner like just noticing moment to moment the sensations of the sound shifting just to have a target because the the instruction is essentially pay attention to breath related sensations like i said be specific so you're using that flashlight and you're shining it somewhere you got to target now and then wait pretty soon you're not there notice that the mind has wandered away from breath-related sensations bring it back so you're holding the flashlight you got the flashlight going you got the
floodlight engaged and the juggler's always keeping you on track executive control that's what i meant by it's engaging all three of the systems of attention as a push-up do we know that there is any benefit to doing that versus doing breath work or vice versa the direct head head yes yeah i have not done that that would be interesting to see what i wanted to do is see not so much about acute manipulations like i know what it feels like to do breath work it feels really interesting you get so many amazing insights just like certain psychedelic substances can give you amazing insights but i couldn't keep hold of those in the same way like they they vanish in some sense i get some embodied sense of like this was a really cool insight it's just like you in the sense for a deprivation chamber sometimes sometimes you get insights and it sort of changes you in a way but you can't really capture what that is and i wanted something in the training we were providing to be enduring for people so that they didn't have to go you know it's almost like if you're in the middle of a war zone and you got to stay on it you got to keep your attention focused because you never know when somebody's going to come or go you probably can't do paleotropic breathing and you probably can't get the zapper out and zap your brain you just got to have it embodied within you and it needs to be on demand in that moment you need to be mindful on demand and you're up against a lot 50 of your waking moment your attention is going to be off somewhere that's what i wanted to help people cultivate and that meant sort of a raw workout a tip a strong workout they could do in the privacy of the preparatory interval so they had it on a more available to them so in your book do you lay out like a specific strategy for achieving these states i do and it's based on 15 years of work where you know at the time i started this work there were solutions there might mindfulness based stress reduction was
an awesome is an awesome program gold standard really of mindfulness training takes a long time eight eight weeks 24 hours 45 minutes of practice a day service members were not up for that in fact i had like two million dollars in grant funding from the department of defense nobody would take my project they're like yeah that's too much time i'll give you an hour you know i'm like i need like eight weeks so i ended up writing another grant that said let me systematically see if i can get a minimum effective dose let me go from eight weeks to four weeks and maybe two weeks let me cut the hours let me cut the daily practice time that led us to an answer which is that you can go too low so it's not effective but there is sort of a sweet spot that looks like it's about four weeks of training um eight hours and about 12 minutes a day and so that's it 12 minutes a day interesting now how did you get involved with the military how did they did they approach you or was this something that no you you felt like there would be a good vehicle for research because of the stress that they're under yeah i was like uh what we're seeing is like your attention is worse during pre-deployment then you're gonna be deployed right and just because my personal interest was in helping people that were experiencing high stress still perform well in fact i was not sure what would happen remember i told you about those people in the retreat we sound saw attentional benefits there the first time we ever did works work with the military we actually didn't even have dod funding i had private funding and we found a marine unit that was willing to do it and even the guys that welcomed us in were like yeah this is never gonna work you know but we'll give it a try because frankly at that point it was around 2006 and seven nothing was working deployment after deployment suicides going up the roof anxiety depression
rampant suicidality and they just were opened like let's try something else so we did our first study even without military dod funding and found these beneficial effects protective effects and so that's when i was able to write the grants and actually formally start studying it with with dod funding to come to this solution of four weeks eight hours 12 minutes a day and how did you develop that protocol so like say like when you're first working with them and they're like it's this is not going to work but we'll give it a try how do you know what what to start them with like is it experimental right so the fir that what we did is we we took really in science so we took a very incremental approach tiny little steps so we had eight weeks of this program called mindfulness-based stress reduction many many studies were done on it got a suite of practices like the one i was we talked about and others because you're not just training the flashlight you're training the floodlight too it's a it's a it's a really nice suite of practices started that started that are you are you getting bored now no just yawned i'm not bored okay good um just no problem so um we just said let's take this same program and contextualize it for service members let's use language that's related to their you know their life let's have the discussion regarding the benefits of this process related to their life like how so well like in the program that we use now for example you know we talk about why you need attention we use terms that have to do with what they know regarding the use of attention in their life as a soldier so you know that you have to zero your weapon to calibrate it to be able to do the job zero the mind so like we can use concepts that are tied to military life but now actually related to attention as essentially your biggest
i mean weapon is a tricky word but resource to be able to do what you need to do you do you have any experience at all in the military or did you ever deploy did you nothing look at me no i'm just asking because i wanted i don't know like how would you go about finding what the requirements are totally well the first project i did i collaborated with a former service member so she was able to she'd been deployed and was a mindfulness expert uh this was convenient very and and then we've been able to now do studies where we partner with people that train soldiers and teach them to be trainers so so what your goal is is to make them perform better under these periods of high stress the goal ultimately not just perform better but feel better and we do it by looking at attention and psychological health so we know if we do nothing under pre-deployment and even deployment attention is going to tank mood's going to get worse can we do anything to protect against that so are you giving them tools that will help them in combat are you giving them tools that will help them just in life in in this very bizarre and highly stressful world of being deployed of being an active duty soldier or both both both so when you're thinking about like them being deployed and them being in combat situations how are you calculating how are you deciding what to show them what not show them what are you working with imagery and visualizations how are you maintaining their focus very very um simple i mean in some sense remember back to what we were saying these are fundamental capacities we need attention to think to regulate our emotions to connect what i wanted to do is see if we could increase the raw availability of their attention and protect it from decline which we showed in the pre-deployment phase we didn't say anything in particular regarding how they might use
this during deployment and this is not like a this is just like any kind of good physical fitness routine like i don't have to tell you joe so now that you've worked out your upper body when you're at the airport in an airplane you need to put your suitcase up you can use your upper it's like no you if you've got this it's part of you know how to use it what was so interesting because we had no idea how it would translate frankly in the early days to the combat context because the amp you're completely amped up this is not training anymore you could die what i was really surprised by was what we saw in the soul in the marines themselves so you know we offer this program we find that it's protective if they do 12 minutes or more and then not everybody did 12 minutes or more we had like a group of them that were kind of resistors they thought i was full of it i don't care you know i'm not doing this and they didn't practice and that subgroup actually looked like the control group they got worse over time even though they went to the training they were not interested they come back we test them again and this subgroup looked better than before they were deployed i was like what this no sense how do they go from being worse over eight weeks now they're deployed to a war zone they come back and they're better than that i had all these grandiose ideas as scientists do like maybe they felt activated by their mission and that got their attention up so i asked my colleague the trainer like was there anything that stands out about this particular group of names because they just they're not showing the normal pattern of essentially more degradation and she said oh yeah these are the guys that contacted me from iraq and said you know that stuff you were trying to teach us that i thought was complete bs well the guys that are doing it are sleeping through the night they're coming back from mission patrol
and not getting the shakes teach me that so they actually started practicing while they were deployed and then when they came back we saw that the benefits in their attentional performance so i would say we're not being overly prescriptive we trust the expertise that the service members have to implement these skills in their lives but we are providing them the tools so that the training regime is like a cross cross training for their attention you get all three systems are going to get activated and you got this meta awareness so you kind of know where your mind is you can get back on track as you need to did you have to tweak the protocol did you have it like pretty firmly established before you started working with soldiers like how did you develop like what to how to get them going with this we used that same eight-week program that was established and then the only thing we really did was start tweaking the time like okay if you can't be with a group for 24 hours you got to cut something what should we cut and this is where it got really interesting too because i kind of just used my hunches with regard to physical training like if you're gonna go learn some new particular let's say you're just going to go get a personal trainer you want to know how to do the workout you want to maximize the benefits if you went to the gym and you met this person all i did is tell you how great their training is how it works techno technically why it's the best training program you'd probably be like yeah no can you just show me the workout can we just do it can we do the reps together so that's sort of what we did we took the program and we kind of split it up we had gotten it down to 16 hours or so and we split it up and i said i want one eight hour group that really just focuses on the workout and the other one that has a lot of talking about the mindfulness benefits and the problems with stress etc and then we put them head to head so we had one group that got nothing one that got the training focused and one that got the
talking about it and the talking about it was just like then pretty much just like the no training at all it was just get to the workout that also helped us shrink the time down to eight hours so this has been where we've been kind of honing it over and over again we did a project with special operators where at that point we were about four weeks and eight hours and i said can we crunch it more can we get to two weeks and we couldn't even with even with that level of an elite uh warrior two weeks was too short which i think is tied to how long it takes to train and physiologically change attention so you're doing basically 12 minutes a day for four weeks and does it vary or is it basically the same type of exercise over and over again for that four weeks the ver it's a suite of practices so the one aspect is this finding your flashlight as i call it practicing focusing the other one is really something that goes back to actually your comment regarding uh the the deprivation chamber what did you call it the sensory sensory sensory deprivation chamber exercising the floodlight and that we call open monitoring is a totally different kind of practice so and i can say more about that but then there's another practice that is actually what we call connection practice but it's about offering kind of well wishes toward yourself so it's a suite of practices that rounds out these multiple aspects of attention um but maybe we talk about open monitoring if you sure yeah so because i would be very curious to see what you think especially if you practice this and and even bring it to the in the context of the sensory deprivation um because it it seems to really help with um basically divergent thinking and thought genera i mean generation of mental content let's just say so the practice itself it's i mean let me just give you an example of something i describe in the book this is now because remember at the core
of it mindfulness training is about taking an observational stance it's like whatever's happening is happening and you're there watching it you're watching you have a goal you know and for the practices we've talked about so far the goal is focus on something in particular notice where that you're staying focused if you're not come back right that's what we talked about already beneficial effects when people do that this is the goal is don't focus on anything you're not going to actually engage in anything you are going to the goal is that you don't focus now not resisting focusing but allowing thoughts feelings sensations any mental content any external stimulation to come and pass away so the it was funny that you're talking about fishing because i the practice i named it just like river of thought so you kind of visualize yourself sitting at the bank of a river like maybe there's just like a little rock there's you're sitting you're solid you're stable and essentially you're just going to if you want to lower close your eyes think of your con your conscious mind as the passing of content through this river in front of you and you're not going to go for the fish or follow it or follow the leaf you're just gonna allow whatever arises to come up and then pass away and that's what's interesting about working memory like we were talking about before working memory is the scratch space of consciousness and for anything to stay in our conscious experience we need to keep rewriting it we need to follow it we need to hyperlink it or else it's going to dissolve away it just won't stay on the whiteboard so you're practicing allowing whatever occurs to occur without chasing it or pursuing it just watching it so just the the the idea of the river is just like a vehicle for allowing you to let these thoughts just flow yes some people say you know you can imagine this mind
is a vast open sky and thoughts feeling sensations are like clouds passing out there's always images you can use but the goal is you are aware you're meta aware of what's happening but you're not grabbing onto anything you don't have a thought pop up and be like oh i need to write that down or like what are five things that are related to that you're not making your mental grocery list you're like ah i had a thought that said i need to get milk move on so for people that are listening to this and they go okay but how does that help how does that help how does that help me when you are in a situation where you are stuck ruminating worrying catastrophizing first of all you're usually not aware that that's happening so this practice allows you to cultivate an awareness because that's all you're really doing you're just being aware of what's happening you're not doing anything with it so you want to cultivate that but also typically when we're in those kind of really sticky states we don't know what to do we keep looping on them or we dig ourselves further into a hole we don't have the capacity to distance and broaden and if we do that we can allow the content to pass away and that's where it becomes extremely powerful we can psychologically distance or de-center ourselves so that there's a steadiness and watchfulness and we're not so caught up in the negative and destructive mental content that we can't see our way out so is it kind of like cleaning the mind's closet or getting rid of unnecessary things that could be there that you would concentrate on like no you're not getting rid of anything no no is there any clue think about it there there's cleansing effect in that you're not you're staying observant yet disengaged now when could this be useful in a real situation you're in a really heated conversation you're angry you're super angry but you need to get along with this person
because there's some deliberation and military leaders will talk about this in fact one of the most powerful ways this practice shows up in real life is listening so what does it mean to actually listen especially when there's hostile complex content that's happening and this is one of the stories i described in the book where um one of the first military service member leaders that allowed us to do this project i met him as a colonel he ended up being a you know now he's a three-star general but he was deployed to iraq and his job was to manage the entire multinational land force and so he had to go to these various places right after isis had been sort of defeated and groups that were not talking to each other i mean sorry they were aligned because they all had to fight this common enemy isis now they they were having infighting like they weren't getting along with each other so he had to go and talk to three leaders they come together and they're so angry they're so angry with the united states they're so angry at each other and he basically was taking this he uses mindfulness practice because he started practicing when we first taught him i mean introduced this to his soldiers and he said it was so powerful to be able to just really listen and for them to experience somebody really listening and he was taking it in he was taking in what he was hearing he wasn't giving his responses and he fully heard it was able to kind of communicate it back and it shifted the entire dynamic where the one of the leaders was like we can actually work with you we can actually work with you because what he didn't do is get caught up in his own reactivity he didn't start formulating responses he didn't take that flashlight anyway he was really taking that observational steady emotionally non-reactive stance and he could fully get the information he needed to then respond
with a thoughtful answer and that's just one example of the kinds of things that can happen in our lives when we practice this capacity to distance ourselves and fully observe what's going on we can intervene of course but we're not so driven to intervene before we really are able to observe first this practice of using this in the military i think would be insanely beneficial but i would wonder how many people are involved in terms of like how many scientists and how many soldiers and whether or not you see this being deployed on a much broader scale yeah you know right now it's um it's starting to get a lot of traction it's still mostly been done in the context of research studies but i just actually co-hosted with the uk united kingdom's ministry of defense a ten nation summit where we brought together ten different countries that are all starting to implement mindfulness within their forces um to have sort of an international conversation regarding this so it's it's not quite there yet it's not like a program of record people can go on the website and sign up for it but it's starting to get noticed and right now we're doing a project we did a project in collaboration with army scientists with basic combat training where we offered this program which was mindfulness and yoga to new recruits and it's beneficial had a lot of beneficial effects we're also doing a project with all the newly minted one-star generals in the army so we're trying to get sort of through the career path also different points at which this could happen we're also doing a project with um schoolhouse settings so the special operations qualification school will now start um we'll be testing this but it's mostly through research right now and really my lab has been one of the only ones that's been consistently doing it you know i know a lot of professional athletes fighters that are using mindfulness training and some of them that have even gone to
sports psychologists and sports psychologists have implemented a lot of similar techniques in trying to focus them when when you do put this protocol together and you do work with these uh soldiers are you trying to have a specific time like do they wake up in the morning is that like one of the first things they do in order to start the day correctly like is there a good way to do it is it good to do it at the end of the day when you're reflecting like when is the best way to get this and to implement it the short answer is the best time to implement it is when you're going to implement it you got to get yourself to do it like if you have discipline like if you're a professional athlete they're very very disciplined absolutely so um we have not as far as i know there are no studies that have formally assigned people to do practice different times of day to see the benefits people do vary in terms of their time what we're trying to do right now at least in the military context is see if something like a mindful cooldown after the morning pt may be helpful then you kind of get a twofer where you've already had the physical exercises yoked to a routine in your day and then you're just going to have this 12 minute thing 12 to 15 minute thing you do after that for for the rest of us who aren't service members or professional athletes my guidance is always yoke it to something that you do as part of your routine you're gonna do it every day maybe it's right before after you brush your teeth or have your morning coffee so there's no question of debating whether you're gonna do it or not um and then start really really small don't start with 12 minutes a day start like say you're going to do three minutes and then cut that in half and that's going to be your goal because you got to get it to the point where it's achievable and you get that experience of like i'm doing it i'm committed it's habit formation and then slowly build up to 12 minutes
do you think this benefit in starting your day with it though it's like it seems like the for me there is i mean personally that's when i like to do it during the day because it sort of sets the it's a it's a it's not even you know i know this from our lab of what the objective results say for me it's i like doing it in the morning because usually if i do it at night i'll fall asleep frankly it's very you know part good doesn't make you fall asleep that's what a lot of the soldiers say they're like your mind is racing you can't fall asleep you start supplementing with things that probably aren't that useful oftentimes not the kind of stuff you probably would recommend for sleep and and and i and they do a body scan which is sort of like this practice where you're taking the flashlight guiding it through the whole body and they're out and i do it too to fall asleep but if i i'm not doing it the intention is not as a relaxation and sleep aid i like to do it in the morning because in some sense it's it's like i can i've found my flashlight again it's like it's gonna be all over the place but kind of reminding you like this is a fundamental capacity that you hold to know where your mind is moment by moment even if you're not going to do anything differently but you can if you want to because you're aware of it so for the regular person who's not a soldier or a professional fighter or anybody's in like ridiculously high stress situations how do they apply this to their life i mean that's why i wrote the book same way very similar ways of course it's not going to be as consequential but you know as simple as not freaking out when you get caught off in traffic um when you want to work on a report you're not on a group text you're actually aware i'm getting pulled in and sucked in my flashlight's getting yanked i got to get it back where am i right now uh interpersonal real you know relationships you can actually and this is what happened to me right so
i'm just giving that example i could see my my spouse again i could actually listen to i could see the look on his face i could look at my child it changes the nature of the and quality of the way we interact with other people so not just for for improved ability to think your attention is more available your working memory is more available to you it stress proofs those kind of abilities because you're not in mental time travel to the past or future you're here when you want to be but our emotions can be better regulated our connections are stronger so it ends up showing up over and over again in for everybody and that that is what motivated me to write the book i'm like if it can help these people how do we bring it so that everybody can do it and also just educate them about the nature of their attention so they understand what the vulnerabilities what they're up against isn't it kind of incredible that we got to 2021 without this being a normal regular part of most people's life right if you think about how important it is yeah your focus and your attention and the way you think and the way you approach various tasks and problems in your life the fact that this is not a normal part of everyone's day is really kind of strange because it's so important like everybody's like oh i'm distracted all right i can't get my [ __ ] together oh god i wish i was more disciplined and i really wish i was more focused and how few people actually apply techniques to enhance that it's kind of stunning right because it's not like it's it's not cost prohibitive it's not like it's something that takes like a deep education of you know like many many many years of training and you know in the [ __ ] esoteric arts no 12 minutes a day kind of crazy right well it's i love that you're saying that i love that you're having that kind of slight outrage about it because this has been like a huge passion of mine
a hundred years ago if you saw somebody running down the street you'd think they were nuts they're getting chased by a bear like something something serious is going wrong right now it's normalized we know that you need to physically move your body in a certain way for a certain number of minutes a week for you to stay physically fit you don't think they ran in 1920 okay maybe maybe 1900 right like maybe 1820 maybe 1820 but the point buffalo and [ __ ] yeah and you know but when the military instituted and it was the first real organization that instituted physical fitness there was a lot of pushback like what i'm going to sit here and and be like jump up and down not doing that military was the first to yeah yeah in fact it was a military um it was a navy scientist who used the term aerobics what's his name oh i can't remember cooper cooper yeah i think it was dr cooper so this is from when not that long ago i mean the aerobics thing was you know then it turned into the whole aerobics aerobic activity jane fonda yeah right good old days but but so think about how far we've come yeah over let's say not 100 years 200 years oh yeah it's fascinating the mind is no different than the rest of the body we need to exercise it regularly to stay psychologically fit and optimize our performance the question has been how do you do that and the funny thing when writing this book is like oh it's that thing people been doing for thousands of years we're just putting the modern lens of science on it to say this is why i've probably been helpful for people for thousands of years it's a really interesting comparison what you're saying with physical fitness because if you pay attention like particularly like with the what you get out of social media there's so many incredibly fit people now there's so many people that make a living like showing you workouts and a large percentage of people that i know regularly go to the gym or take a spin class or do something where they're stimulating their body and putting it under stress where
you look at like the way people look today you know just the the physical stature of the muscles that they have and how the fitness like that was really rare just 60 years ago and the fact that this has changed so radically within you know this generation it's pretty pretty amazing if we could get the same sort of application if we could to do the same sort of focus and put it on your mind yeah really have some pretty significant changes in the way we interface with each other the way we get through our lives what we can focus on what we can accomplish and probably happiness too right exactly so you know a lot of i love they're saying this i can't tell you remember back to the days when they said it was career suicide and i just was like i don't care i'm doing this i think it's some value so to me it is extremely gratifying to hear you say that you get it and also the fact that you think that the the the fact that it was considered as career suicide is like weird yeah not only in 60 years have we been able to transform the way we think about physical wellness in 15 years we've been able to start making a lot of traction on the benefits of this type of training on the mind and so i think that things are looking quite hopeful and frankly it couldn't come at a better it couldn't come soon enough because the nature of the world is going to continue to get more complex more interconnected more uncertain i mean the last couple years with this pandemic i mean same idea the challenges are going to amp up and we need to arm ourselves meaning we need to prepare our minds for a type of mental armor we're also experiencing distraction that's wholly unnatural like in terms of social media the ability to constantly like look at these things and just be inundated and for some people they get like really fixated in conflict and and getting in these little arguments with people that have they're nowhere near them oh and they're doing it online and arguing
about you know yeah political things or social things you know it goes back to something you said a while ago about the benefit of having what did you call it getting bored i would say i call it essentially task free time like create active white space in your day where you're task-free and if that doesn't mean you're going to take extra time out but you have plenty of these moments already where be aware that attention is going to get fatigued if you continue to use it and if you think that being on social media as your down time is giving your attention a break you're wrong you are in a task context and you are expending out your attention every time you scroll in fact that's why these social media companies are making gazillions of dollars your attention is the commodity you are giving it that is the product so to be aware that it's not innocuous it actually is problematic and to be aware that you know a solution like breakup with my phone is not a reasonable and realistic solution you're going to need your phone like even if i think about my kids you know i ask them like what are you what are you guys doing to to well i don't even have to ask them they tell me they got rid of all their social media apps it's not distracting but for some apps that they have to use they just use a another piece of software that limits the time so that they're very kind of this is your children yeah so they go in and they're like i got i got three more minutes to use youtube so they've done this voluntarily they did because they have to figure out a way to manage their own things how old are they 15 and 19. really interesting now do you think this because you're their mom maybe maybe i don't know they're more hyper aware of the the problems with not focusing and not paying attention to things i don't know if that's it or they're just got to be no 15 to 19 year old does that [ __ ] on their own you'd be surprised i think that that we think that children are unaware of the costs of social media on their attention and we're wrong they are suffering and they know it
they're going to fix it facebook changed their name they're fixing it now it's not gonna be a problem anymore do you hear that they've decided to change their name okay well what's that the metaverse the metaverse yeah they're trying to they're changing the whole company man what's it called they haven't announced it yet but it's they're focusing on that that new thing that's taking over the internet what is the new thing what are you talking about the metaverse i've been trying to tell you about it for a few weeks well explain yourself i don't i don't really know how to explain it honestly but like it's the like web 3 web 3.0 is i've heard it discussed that way uh it's a combination of vr ar nfts bitcoin cryptocurrency decentralized social media and this is what facebook's concentrating on now and yeah yeah responsible behavior from social media companies is awesome great please continue don't trust it but i believe that's what they're doing they're trying to stay they're also the corporate version of it so it's very hot to take over and that's why they're yeah yeah but here's what i do know if you train your attention this way and have more meta awareness use it in the context of your social media use like notice you're going for the phone notice you're picking it up notice that your face was recognized you're clicking on the app be aware as you're scrolling like we can advantage ourselves so that there's more decision points of what we're going to do instead of being like you said three hours into your doom scrolling and you feel like [ __ ] and you just can't do anything so confused yeah so anyway going back to that white space idea so the reason i think this is so important is because if we'd never allow for the spontaneous arising of thought we are exactly we're gonna have exact consequences you already described our chances for positive visioning creative problem solving insight and frankly positive mood are all we're all we're disadvantaging that we're cutting out the thing that we
will help us with that and you know i always think about it it's like actually even more than that like i think about what we do with our mind our attention most days most of our lives as like taking my dog for a walk every morning you know we take my husband takes him or i tape he's on a leash we got our thing to do you know sure he may like wander around but i'm pretty much keeping the leash that's that's attention we're in line we're trying to do what we do frankly we're leashing ourselves with a lot of our social media use because we're now constrained by the content they're providing some days and maybe you do this with your dog too you're taking the dog to the dog park take it off leash runs around is so joyful i feel joyful like there's a freedom in that and we need to do that with our own mind with our own attention we need to know that this is a valuable thing to do and we need to take the moments and they could be micro moments when you're standing at the checkout line don't check out don't pick up the phone just be there with yourself allow your mind to go where it will take those moments in nature take the walk from the work the office to the car is just to be with yourself maybe some days after you're done listening to this podcast you turn off the radio or silence your phone and just be in the car and drive you know we just we need to return to these moments because frankly we need it it's fascinating you're saying something that seems so simple let's just put your phone down and that like just live your life but like that that would be some sort of a therapy and that just literally the act of walking from your car to the store radical and not checking your phone while you're doing it is actually good for your brain what about other physical activities like what do you think the benefits are whether it's yoga or running or something like that how much of because there's a thing that when i was uh younger they discussed martial arts they talked about it as a moving meditation
and uh i remember thinking that like when you're doing it it's so difficult to do that all you can think about is it and there's some sort of an effect while you're engaging in that that it helps the mind it cleanses the mind it removes it removes the significance of a lot of these uh the internal dialogue and the the the [ __ ] that you have going on inside your head yeah and you know in some sense um these are also traditional practices right so so where we've got a very active mind that's either ruminating or catastrophizing something like yoga or other forms of of um sort of body-based practices keep that button on play instead of fast forward or rewind because they have to be like if you you cannot be distracted you will fall over right right or you could punch in the face like whatever it is you are not going to be able to go away from the now you are in the now but you're doing it and that actually moves us more toward why we do this in the first place we're not sitting there quietly focusing on our breath because we want to be like olympic level breath followers nobody cares about their breath they're following it it's just that we're we're training in the same way we might not want us it's not the most fun thing to sit there and do lift weights but we do it because it carries over into our lives so now it's not necessarily about when my mind wanders away from the breath return it but when my mind wanders away from what you're saying return it right so we want to keep translating that over and over again i think movement based practices active practices are getting us even more aligned with dealing with the fluidity and complexity of real life do you apply that also to your work with the military like is maybe that's something that like while they're doing physical training is there a way to think during that that helps you mean orient to the physical training yeah well a lot of this is why you already mentioned that you have friends that are athletes that are using this in many ways
what are the things that drive down performance excellence if you think about that right you're a competitive athlete and what is it that's going to mess you up it's probably not you've already perfected the physical you know the movements you've practiced them thousands of times it's the inner dialogue so it's either the i'm the best thing ever i got this or i really messed up how am i ever going to recover or that this other team is doing this and you have a story about it you're imposing it these are all ways that the mind is behaving that frankly disadvantages getting more information about what's actually occurring yeah it's often paralysis by analysis is a big one the fear of consequences that they concentrate on the negative possibilities the negative consequences and that becomes crippling and the anxiety of fear overcomes them it's like customato is a legendary he was a legendary boxing trainer trained mike tyson and uh he had this great saying that fear is like fire you could use it to cook your food or it could burn your house down like you need some fear because it's a motivating factor and it's it's it makes sure that you're aware of what you're about to do that it's very dangerous and then what you're doing is you have to be completely prepared and you must be disciplined in order to achieve that preparation but you also can't let it just run away because if it just burns you down then you'll be paralyzed with fear exactly that there's a balance there but how to achieve that balance exactly and that's the question so you can understand this conceptually but how do you not let fear turn into a raging fire i mean most of the ways we approach this is distract yourself or pretend the fear is not actually worthy of feeling fear or suppress it these are not effective approaches they're not and frankly one of the reasons they're not effective is because they're sucking up your attention you're actually putting so much energy into suppressing that you're going to have no capacity left to deal with what's in front of you
so these like going back to that open monitoring practice fear is present fear is my friend sitting here next to me fear is here it is so here or sadness you know whatever the strong emotion is to be with that emotion not deny it not suppress it and not feed it is the point of power and that's what we train for with something like an open monitoring practice we acknowledge the existence the river could be burning content over and over again yes it is here and i'm here for it that's a different way to address this and to achieve it and we we this is not just an idea it's training right now when you talked about this training particularly with the military where you're talking about four weeks and you're doing 12 minutes a day if you wanted to achieve a greater level of mastery over your consciousness would you recommend other things on top of that like this is is this seems like something that's it's it's practical you can get people to do it it's applicable but if is it optimal i love this question okay 12 minutes a day is the answer to what is the minimum effective dose for me to benefit every study we've done with mindfulness training where we offered people the opportunity to practice as long as they got to 12 they benefited 12 to 15. the more they did the more they benefited so that's the first thing to say that it is like physical activity you don't have to limit yourself to 12 minutes i always think of 12 minutes is like couch to 5k it's enough of a load that it's helping it's definitely helping now if you want to keep going go for it if you want to double that go for it in fact for me in circumstances where i know i'm going to be under a heavy load like even coming here today maybe i'll do 24 minutes maybe i'll do a half an hour what'd you do today just 30 minutes in the morning what'd you do i did my i did two things i did the focus attention practice and i did something else called loving kindness and loving kindness is that third category i talked about concentrated practices receptive practices and these
are really hard practices compassion practices um that one is actually really helpful when you've got a big performance coming up because frankly for all of us who are interested in excellence in how we perform um that can take on an edge of um orientation where we're so fixated on the things we want to do better we forget what we wish for ourselves so a loving-kindness practice is essentially a sequence of phrases you say privately to yourself to remind yourself of what your ultimate wishes for yourself for other people in your lives have you heard of these kinds of practices no not that one okay so loving ki i mean it's called loving kindness i never caught loving kindness because connection practice because that's where you're connected you're connecting with yourself and other people so does love and kindness practice sound too you tell me would you would you jump on would you sign up for something if i said yeah i don't i don't have a problem with that thank you because we need that kind of shift in orientation most people they would probably like and i'm not up for really isn't that funny that they would shy away from love and kindness it is it is it is a shocking thing but um you know i don't care i mean i'll at some point we'll we'll call it living kind of just saying those phrases have been co-opted by fruits like crazy people with like wooden beads who are like you know trying to be a guru that that's that's sort of the thing it's like it's affiliatively kind of problematic and it's very plain and actually with a lot of the groups that we work with shockingly maybe they love this practice like the cadets i was talking about it's one of the ones that they ask for often i think it's a good practice but i think it's one of those things like when people say i'm spiritual you go oh you're really you know it's like they've been those phrases have been co-opted by
so many people that are kind of fraudulent or at least like they want you to there's a thing that people do where they want you to think that they're enlightened right yeah and it's annoying like when you i think basically that sums it up it's annoying it's annoying because you know they're hustling yeah or there's another agenda that doesn't really have to do so i'm taking again just to kind of reclaim my turf it's really in line with what do people need to do to move toward optimizing was the question that you were asking so it's a great phrase though i love it really is love and kindness is really the right way to yeah maybe we should just ignore the cuckoos and just call that one of my favorite one of my you know jack cornfield and uh he talks about this but another teacher named sharon salzberg she is amazing she's she was actually one of our consultants for the military project so can i just tell you a little bit about loving kindness add your toolkit all right so the in the sequence of things first we teach people these concentrated practices then they we bring in the open monitoring because it's a little bit more complicated to stay steady enough to not wander this loving kindness category is the last thing we teach them it kind of rounds out the program so what you do is you similar to everything else sit comfortable quiet place do it seriously like take it seriously and you're going to um it's a practice of well-wishing like the way you might say happy birthday or have a good day you're not demanding anything it's not positive self-talk it's not manifesting it's a well-wishing all right and you do it because you're bringing to mind keeping on your whiteboard working memory what matters so for example in the way that i do it you start out with yourself and today i did it only for myself but what you typically do is you say these phrases and i'll say them in a second you start with yourself and then you move to
a close other a benefactor somebody's been good to you then you move to a neutral person somebody you never we don't know maybe a cashier at a restaurant you know a store you go too often and then a slightly more difficult person and then you kind of expand to your team to your community to all beings everywhere and it's like you're you're doing this to kind of broaden the circle of care and concern who matters what matters so the kind of phrases you say are i'm just giving you mine and you can choose whatever but short sweet simple may i be happy may i be healthy may i be safe may i live with ease and every time you say that just happy healthy safe ease it's just what do i wish for myself like in my life ultimately what do i want i want to be happy you know i want to advantage that i want to feel psychologically safe i want to feel physically safe i want to have ease in my life who wants a headache so you say this to yourself over and over and it's like reminding you of like fundamentally what do i want i wish this for my loved ones i wish that for you i wish it for jamie i wish it for everybody in this building i wish it for everybody and you know you can see how you expand the circle for our military service members in some sense they have no problem wishing it for their team of course you want everybody on your team to have these qualities oftentimes a little bit trickier to wish it for yourself but something really interesting starts happening when you do this um a lot of the sort of self-critical and self-punitive wars we have with ourself can start getting dialed down it's like you know i could kind of badger myself for something but ultimately is this in my best interest for what i really want in my life and it really helps by the way with the kind of maybe very loved one that can also sometimes be the difficult
one so this i'm gonna just give you an example for my personal life like even with my spouse of course i love my spouse but he can drive me nuts and even in the middle of an argument if i can kind of remember if i do a practice and he's the focus of the practice we're in the middle of an argument if there's any room where i can be a little bit lean into some understanding or a little more broadly receptive i extend that probably more than i would if i hadn't done the practice it just keeps that kind of orientation of what the purpose is of what we're doing in our lives in mind don't you think there's also room for if you want to achieve things in life one of the things that you do have to do is be you have to be self-critical you have to be oh yeah your worst critic because that's the only way you're the only one who really knows whether or not you put in all the effort that you need to put in in order to achieve things whether or not you really did everything that was necessary or whether or not your work was really good if you're you're you're being honest with yourself and objective yeah so in that regard you kind of got to be a personal critic nobody balance that out nobody has to be taught how to be a personal critic some people do maybe maybe maybe some people which i would say but what's interesting those people don't really get anywhere the people that think they're better than they are or they lie to themselves they deny themselves the discomfort of failure yeah because they're delusional and in doing so they deny themselves the opportunity for growth and learning absolutely so i think you kind of answered your your question which is this is a corrective the default is being self-critical and then we end up into not just productive self-criticism but ruminating and catastrophizing regarding something we already said or something we're going to do that we don't think is going to go well and that's why i did it this morning because i know that under consequences i encourage people that have performance as something you know like you perform
every time you do this podcast there's a performance element to it whenever we have to do that there's going to be those around the edges aspects of evaluation those are natural they should happen that's how we get to be as good as we can be this is just adding that other piece in like a loving person in your life might but toward you to say yeah of course you know yeah you better look at it and by the way all those other practices are to do that first part see what is how was that did i actually perform at my best what could i have brought in that was better how could i have actually been clearer whatever it is we're trying to see with that non-reactivity and this is the heart that we're putting around it we're acting in a loving and kind way toward ourselves so that as we move forward we're not pushing too far into the self-criticism where it becomes self-hatred which is also unproductive self-hatred so how does one balance out self-criticism and not let it turn into self-hatred yeah we want product just like for anybody else if i were gonna critique you you'd probably want me to do in a way that's gonna be helpful to you instead of saying yeah but you know i don't like you at all anyway you're a jerk you know nobody wants that but we do that to ourselves we turn the things that are problematic and are worthy of our are looking at into some kind of deep character flaw instead of being able to keep it at the level of i see what there is to do and i'm just going to do that right i don't have to hate you for it just do it differently the the problem with like a lot of super achievers a lot of people that uh go on to be like at the top of their field like especially athletes is that it requires a fanaticism it requires you being obsessed it's very difficult to balance obsession with these hyper-focused superachievers with self-love there's very little self-awareness
i think that that may be the default of how things turn out but i don't see them as contradictory at all i think you totally can love yourself and totally be striving for excellence hmm why can't you i don't know well look at that see the thing the thing is like there's not that many of them out there to study like when you get a like a michael jordan or a mike tyson or a person that's like at the very top of their field when they're especially in competition because it requires so much energy and intensity that oftentimes they develop this antagonistic relationship with both themselves and the competition and they're just ferocious and fierce all the time including with their own personal demons they're like constantly in combat and with those people i think their periods of happiness are brief and they come after success and then they constantly chase that dragon and i don't know if that's the right way to do it but i do know that that's the only way that the the greats really they all seem to be the same there seems to be something about truly great hyper performers where they're you know they're getting up earlier than everybody else they're more intense than everybody else and they're not nice about it they see they're ferocious i mean first of all the fact that contemplative practices is entering performance psychology it's a good sign because i think that people are starting to wake up to the consequences of that kind of an approach second thing is nothing i said about any of these practices is about being nice or happy but self-love is kind of about being happy right it's about wishing it's not about nice no and it's it's not even about it's not even about being happy it sounds terrible to say this but none the goal is not to contrive more positivity okay the goal is to
be clear on what the intention is behind what you're doing and my intention in my life is i wouldn't bust my ass unless i wanted some fulfillment some sense of joy some ease that's why we're doing it but we forget we're so in the chase that we forget wait why am i doing this why am i going to do yet another thing oh i want those things keep those in mind get balance it out bring those back in keep them on the whiteboard so that in the pursuit i don't get lost i don't get burnt out i don't harm myself or other people because you're right there is always this sort of um pendulum of extreme behavior toward ourselves or other people that we interact with and this becomes very important for leaders too by the way even if it's not in the professional athletic context we got to keep we got to be aware of that pendulum yeah that is a real problem with people that are hyperachievers right whether it's in business or whatever it's like they're so caught up in the goal that their life sucks even while they're killing it you know like how many people that are like business people that are working 16 hours a day or on the verge of a heart attack all the time and they live in hell but they're obsessed with numbers they're obsessed with stock market goals or whatever it is they're trying to achieve and they're on paper very successful like look at him look at his beautiful car and his beautiful house and all that but really they're [ __ ] they live in hell yeah yeah and they're constantly stressed out and they they don't like that life but they're trapped in a they're trapped in this quantifiable contest where they're trying to achieve numbers yeah and it kind of brings it back to where i was where i had was grinding so much i couldn't feel my teeth i'm sitting here with my i had all the uh it's a smaller scale i'm not a ceo jet setting everywhere but i had all the things i wanted in my life i had this awesome job married to the guy i love beautiful baby nice house i was not there for any of it and i could feel that and the fact that
maybe it's because i studied attention that i was kind of like becoming aware of it and then i was i knew about neuroplasticity so i'm like i gotta change the brain here i don't want to change any of this the external circumstances are great i need to be in it with the fullness so i can enjoy it and that's all that's all we're talking about right now we're talking about a way in which not to not kill it but not kill yourself in the process or anybody else it all sounds great i like what you're saying i like what you're saying but i think all i wanted to say is you know and that's the whole motivation you were asking me at the outset like how long just been writing this book and in some sense like everything about my life led me right to writing this book writing it really helped remind me of why i'm striving in the first place like what is it that i want and the going back to this morning partly the reason i wanted to do that is because my book just um launched yesterday and it's such a momentum i mean with any kind of success there's like yeah go crush it and i wanted to just take that time and give back to myself of like you know what enjoy it too be here remember what you wish for this is going to be fun like this this was fun but reminding myself of of what it's all about not on my death bed but every morning it's a pretty useful thing to do well in a lot of ways i mean especially what you just said that it really is most of your life because thinking is constant it's it is a part of your life and attention and focus it's everywhere it's the entire life so this book and you're concentrating on attention and and trying to give people the tools to help accelerate their attention or focus their attention or utilize their attention more efficiently that really is life it's so much of life because it's applicable to basically everything we do absolutely i mean really it sounds like
i'm being a little bit grandiose but what you pay attention to is your life yeah and people that are really super hyper negative like they're so exhausting and the the problem is like they'll drag you into their waters with them and drown you in their [ __ ] right that's that's a real problem because when people are always negative like oh my god man all you're concentrating on is the wrong [ __ ] like you have it's like someone with a poor diet and they get obese and start having heart attacks like look you're you're concentrating on eating the wrong things you're concentrating on living the wrong way well you're concentrating on concentrating on focusing on negative things or external factors that have nothing to do with you like the jealousy of others right which is a real poison that people consume on a daily basis the jealousy and hatred towards people they don't even know because they you know might see him on television or whatever yeah that's why actually and you know in the context of feeling that somebody else's dysfunction what are you gonna do in the context of that right so i mean i see this i was just even on my uh uber ride to the airport in miami um a gu the guy caught cut off and the guy that's in the car that cut him off like then pulls back to give the guy the finger and then speeds off again and i was just really curious terrified and also like how is this driver gonna respond and he's like you know what i'm just i deal with this all the time i don't know what his life is that's making him do this but that's not my life i'm it's unfortunate that it happened and i'm just gonna keep driving us to the airport i'm like thank you thank you thank you yeah you got a good one but i did but the thing is remember back to the loving kindness practice we don't just practice for ourselves and our and our and people we we love and care for we move it into the neutral we move it into the difficult person for that exact same reason
because now when you're interfacing with somebody and you see this and you feel it and you feel them pulling you in you say you know what my my true wish for you is not this stuff you obviously are saying this to yourself privately it changes your orientation toward the person and the way you're going to engage with them in some sense you start having more compassion like man you are so sad or fearful or angry it's taken you over that's not what i wish for you so at least in the way that i interact with this person now i'm stable and i'm aware of what i'm seeing and i've remind myself of what i want for any other person and it will change even if it's subtle it's going to change the way that i can interact with them so that it's not so defaulting to more bad stuff i mean i think all of it is information and you get good information from bad examples you get informations of you get information about the ways of life that you don't want to live you get information the way people interface with their surroundings and other human beings that you don't you don't want to mimic that and you can learn from other people's mistakes and that's one of the things that you get from living in cities when you see people hyper-stressed and you know you see that kind of like constant forced interaction that people have and how it can manifest itself in some undesirable results and you can say i don't want to be that guy and you can learn a little bit from that you can learn a little bit from that but you could also extend kindness in a way that you will probably shift the way things are happening now you're not going to fundamentally change somebody a little bit yeah i mean i remember once i was at a um i was at the airport and i saw this woman screaming at her kid like just she was losing her mind screaming at this child it was so obvious like you're losing it and i was like you know what i could avoid her or be like oh god this little and i just walked i just walked up to her like not even acting interfacing with her but just like kind of wanted to be in her space so that she could realize
just by my presence that she's got to kind of take a hold of what she's doing right now because she's being seen right by another person yeah and it helped like as soon as i kind of entered her space she's like you know kind of like collected herself and kind of started calming down and i was like small it's just a tiny little thing i was doing in a very compassionate way i wasn't to judge her i didn't go scream at her for screaming at her kid i just wanted her to nudge her in a way that might remind her of what her purpose is she probably the kid maybe ran away i have no idea what happened but i knew that her reaction was um stronger than it needed to be and i've been there it's no fun when you overreact to your children you beat yourself up a lot so if i could prevent her from having to beat herself up a lot that probably is going to have a positive cascade in her life in her children's life last question do you have an audiobook yes did you read it no damn it i know why didn't you read it so now you're saying thank you thank you i wanted to i just couldn't figure out how to have a week where i could do that oh well that makes sense maybe next time do you have a copy of it i do i do yeah grab it is it here over there over there go grab it grab it so we can hold it up and let everybody know and it's out today it was out yesterday yesterday okay so um hold please we're gonna grab it pull it up so you can have an actual copy of it oh jamie's got it right there peak mind find your focus own your attention invest 12 minutes a day how many pages is it it's a lot of work let's read all this and it guides you through this yeah there's a whole four week program at the end to help with what you should do for the 12 minutes every day all right it's available now ladies and gentlemen go get it even though she didn't read it you get the audio book as well available everywhere thank you very much i had a great conversation i really enjoyed me too it
was fun fun and i think it's such an important subject i think it's just the way you think about things is like it can make it just a gigantic impact and the quality and the just the way your life progresses absolutely all right thank you thank you bye everybody [Music]