Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan - #159: The KEY To Functioning At Your Peak With Dr. Amishi Jha

Episode Date: October 26, 2021

In This Episode You Will Learn About:  Focusing in high stress environments without all the struggle  Listening to your body Getting your attention back and being FULLY present   Resources: Website: amishi.com  The Jha Lab: lab.amishi.com  Read Peak Mind Watch “How To Tame The Wandering Mind”  LinkedIn: @Amishi Jha Youtube: @AmishiPJha Instagram: @amishipjha Twitter: @amishijha Facebook: @Amishi Jha Email: [e-mail]  Call: 305-284-1931  Review this podcast on Apple Podcast using this LINK and when you DM me the screen shot, I buy you my $299 video course as a thank you!  To pre-order Overcome Your Villains NOW and get the bonus bundle click here: https://overcomeyourvillains.com  If you haven't yet, get my first book Confidence Creator Show Notes:  Are you struggling to pay attention? Do you know how to eliminate stress in order to focus better? There are so many aspects of life that demand our attention, we must train our mind for high demand circumstances. Dr. Jha shares her research results and the KEY to functioning at your PEAK! About The Guest:  Dr. Amishi Jha is a professor of psychology at the University of Miami. She serves as the Director of Contemplative Neuroscience for the Mindfulness Research and Practice Initiative, which she co-founded in 2010. Dr. Jha’s work has been featured at NATO, the World Economic Forum, and The Pentagon! She has received coverage in The New York Times, NPR, TIME, Forbes and more. Today we are SO lucky to have her with us on the show. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

All those kind of negative biases that we hold in our own minds can actually become threatening for us and preoccupying for us as we try to maneuver in the world. And the thing that we learned is that in the same way, actual physical threat can take away our attentional resources because it basically means a part of our mind is just dealing with the fact that we are under threat. Well, that happens when our own mind creates the threat as well. I'm on this journey with me. Each week when you join me, we are going to chase down our goals. We'll overcome adversity and set you up for a better tomorrow. I'm ready for my close-up. Hi, and welcome back.

I'm so excited for you to meet Dr. Amishi Ja, Professor of Psychology at the University of Miami, here in the 305. She serves as the Director of Contemplative Neuroscience for the Mindfulness, Research and Practice Initiative, Holy Cow. Which she co-founded in 2010. She received her Ph.D. from the University of California Davis and post-doctoral training at the Brain Imaging and Analysis Center at Duke University.

Dr. Jaws' work has been featured at NATO, the World Economic Forum, and the Pentagon. She has received coverage in the New York Times, NPR, Time, Forbes, and more. And today we are so lucky to have you here with us, Dr. Jaws. Thank you so much for being here. Oh, it's great to be here. And please, Heather, call me Amishi. I'm excited to have this conversation with you. You're so normal. It's crazy. And I just have to put that out there for everyone listening who might not know someone with as much education as you have and living in this neuroscience world. How do you stay so regular?

Having two teenagers helps. That is an excellent point. You are not fooling around there. I've got a 14 year old and totally feel that one. Okay, so first of all, I have a personal question to ask you. Sure. Were you scared to death when you gave your TED Talk? You know, it's so funny that you asked me that. I gave my TED Talk at Ransom Everglades, which is a school really close to us. Yes. And when I gave it, it was the third year they had asked me. So I was like, yeah, I definitely wanted to do it. Just couldn't get the scheduling done. And finally I agreed to do it. That day, I actually had to go to L.A. to give a talk. And I found out as I was like on my way, you know, getting ready to go to the TED Talk, that that talk in L.A., which had not prepared for it, at all was going to have 700 people at it. So it was more like, okay, I was more like, okay, I really want to do a good job with this, but then I got to get to the airport and go across the country. So my mind was so much in the fully being present for what is and then moving on

that I wasn't really thinking about being nervous all that much. Then I had no idea that it would go from being a TEDx talk to being picked up by TED. And then it, of course, got a lot more interest. Okay, well, people don't know that. So I do want to share that your TED Talk has always. over five million views. Yeah. Did that blow you away a little bit?

Especially because the way that you're describing it, you weren't putting that much thought into it. Oh, no, I put a lot of thought into it. I put a lot of thought and effort into it. I just wasn't really preoccupied about it. Like, oh, my God, is going to go well. Which I actually found out, and I do talk about that in the book, probably is the reason it went well

is because I wasn't so overly preoccupied with the success. I just wanted to make sure in every moment I was doing what was supposed to happen. It was a really cool opportunity to see how these topics get traction. I think the reason that it has had so many views is because it really speaks to sort of a pain point that I think a lot of us are experiencing right now, this feeling of the crisis of our attention. Well, your book couldn't be coming out at a better time, you know, based off of the isolation that so many of us have been living with, the high level of stress that everyone has been living under the news. There's so much chatter and negativity, social media out there that, you know, diving into your book and being reminded about a number of things that I knew to do that I'm not doing, but enlightening into some of the things that I thought were working for me that are actually proven not to work in your book. I mean, I was just blown away. So number one, thank you for writing this amazing book and literally laying out a very basic plan that anyone can follow.

in a short window of time and realize change. And thank you for sharing your personal story. I love the story that is wrapped through your book around your teeth and your challenges and the struggle that you had and that you didn't make mindfulness and awareness this simple thing. I thought that was so relatable. Oh, thank you. That means a lot. And yeah, it was different as a scientist to describe my own journey.

But I figured, you know, what got me to wanting to study this topic? It started from my own crisis. And thankfully, I found a solution that I not only felt worked, but I could put it to the test in the lab and found that it may be a tool useful for a lot of other people who experience a lot of challenge and a lot of stress and still have to perform. And I had no idea at that time, this was back in the early 2000s, that we'd be where we are today, you know, where the whole world is a high stress, high demand place with lots of uncertainty, especially over these last 18, 19 months. Can you share a little bit about that personal story and struggle that you had? Yeah, absolutely. You know, I always thought of myself as this, oh, I wouldn't, I mean, I would say, yeah, like a go-getter, you know, wanting to get everything done. I felt like I was on the right path, grad school, postdoc. My very first faculty position was at the University of Pennsylvania. So I had landed at really my dream job. And at that point, my husband quit his job, actually, to move with me to Philadelphia. And we bought a hundred-year-old fixer upper. I was pregnant. So I'd start my job like in like literally. every possible demand that you can have. And then, and then everything went fine. We're just growing the lab and he's fixing up the house and my son was born. And when my son was about two or so, a little

bit older than two, it was like I had this very pivotal moment. And it really, that point, I mean, I can talk about the teeth grinding episode, which I'm not alone. I mean, a lot of people have problems grinding their teeth. But what happened to me that really was my wake-up call was evening bedtime book reading with my precious toddler. I look forward to this all day. It's like the thing I was like connecting with him, you know, I didn't have a lot of time with him because I was very, very busy. And he got a lot more time with my husband actually than me.

But this was something we always did. And he's in my lap, snuggled up. We're reading a book we've read, gosh, hundreds of times. And in the middle of like turning the pages, he kind of puts his little hand on the book to stop me. And they looks at me and he says, what's a wump? And it was this Dr. Seuss book, One Fish, Two Fish, Redfish, Blue Fish, literally read it, like I said, a gazillion times. I had no idea what he was talking about. I had no idea what he was talking about. And then I kind of like sneaked at the page and I was like, oh my gosh, he's talking about what's on this page right now, which was an entire passage about Wumps. And that was this like moment of like, oh my gosh, I am not here. I am here physically, but I am not here mentally. Here he is. All he wants is me. All he wants is my attention and time. And I'm, It's looking like I'm doing that, but my mind is a thousand other places.

And if this is what's happening to me now when he's this small and things are relatively, you know, challenges are relatively manageable, how am I going to show up in the moments where he might need me and the challenges are a lot bigger than that? So that was my personal, like, wake up call. And then, yeah, and then like around that time, I had lost feeling in my front teeth from grinding. And I'm like, okay, the body is giving a lot of signals that there's a lot of stress happening. overwhelm. And then I was on a mission. I'm like, this is not right. I've got to get my attention back. And then I thought, you know, my entire professional career, I've spent studying this brain system.

Literally, I'm an attention researcher. If there's a call for somebody in the media that wants to learn about attention, they call me. And then I just could not find anything that was helping. So that was the actual kind of low point of the journey was feeling completely lost and nowhere to look. That could give me answers. And I feel like everyone can relate to that, right? Whether be reading to your child and just trying to fast forward through it to get them to fall asleep and relax or, you know, whatever that situation may be, or even being in a conversation with people and losing your moment in time and saying, oh my gosh, what am I thinking about? How did I get so distracted? So, you know, we all have these struggles. We all understand them. But like you said, figuring out what are the things that we can do that actually work. And I know that a lot of your work in in your lab, has been with people in really tense, stressful situations. Can you share a little bit about your work that you've done with people in the military? Yeah, yeah. So that's what got me interested. I mean, initially, I was what we'd call basic scientists. So I was interested in how the brain systems of

attention work, bringing undergrads in, putting in a brain scanner, or doing brainwave recording, and understanding the specific sort of neural pathways and functional pathways. That was all great. I was excited to learn about that. But after this whole, my own crisis of attention and figuring out understanding sort of that there's more to this than the basic brain science, I got really interested in working with groups who basically suffer from what we were learning at that time are the three forms of kryptonite for our attention, which are stress, threat, and negative mood. And for most of us, this is part of, for all of us, it's part of being human. For most of us, it's like the annoyances that we have to encounter in our lives and the challenges we encounter.

But for some professions, it is the exact defining circumstances where they have to do their best work. So I'm talking about first responders, emergency services, people, medical and nursing personnel, and then military service members. So they don't have a choice. And we all lean on them to be able to do their job. So now if they, like all of us, human beings, are going to suffer in terms of their attention. and we need them to perform well, how are we going to do that? There has to be somewhere we might be able to help them train their own mind, especially through these high demand circumstances, to keep their attention steady and maybe even increase their capacity to do their job well. And then, of course, my interest after finding we did have a solution and we could help them, I wanted to bring it to

as many people as possible, which is what motivated me to write the book. So you mentioned threat. And in the book, you go into detail in what, you know, why that is and what a threat actually is. However, that really, that resonated very strongly with me because I realized how many times I have created a story in my mind that I am now perceiving as a thought or something, but it's not actual reality based. Is that what you see with a lot of people? Yes, you know, that was the thing that was so interesting. For a military service member, when they feel that their lives are in danger and that there's a threat, I mean, it's a real threat, right? Same thing with the, with a police officer or anybody that has to interface at that level of dealing with violence, for most of us,

you know, it's not the case. And if we think about what makes us feel threatened, it's things like stereotype threat, the expectation that you may be, you know, one way and you are going to satisfy that. Like, for example, girls aren't good at math or women can't be bosses or, you know, like, who are you to think you can step into this big thing and do it? Like all those kind of negative biases that we hold in our own minds can actually become threatening for us and preoccupying for us as we try to maneuver in the world. If your anxiety, depression, or ADHD are more than a rough patch, you don't need just another meditation app.

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our attentional resources because it basically means a part of our mind is just dealing with the fact that we are under threat. well, that happens when our own mind creates the threat as well. And it's very real. And so whatever we can do to dissolve, the added stress that we put in our own minds is really a good thing we should try to figure out how to do. And that doesn't mean we're ignoring reality. It just means that we're just not, we're going to be as self-supportive as possible and not make our attention even more disadvantaged because of the possibilities that we create, the doom scenarios we create. I'm definitely somebody who signs up for that program. I'm constantly, you know, creating these ridiculous moments. Now, some of the things that you have many tactics in the book that lay out how to handle different situations and just now to pop into my mind, the flashlight and where we're focusing the flashlight. Yeah, yeah. These are actually, so a lot of what I try to do in the book is kind of bring people into the lab and let them know, you know, what do we know about attention? Because usually when most of us hear that term, if you're

you're not a brain scientist that happens to study this for a living, you think the word attention means focus, right? And, but it actually, in terms of the brain science of attention, it's a lot more than that. So I wanted to kind of break down all the different aspects of attention. And then I got into, and I'd love to talk to about it, how do we train these systems every day on our own, like a mental workout, mental push up for our minds to, again, deal with these kryptonite conditions of stress, threat, and poor mood. So the flashlight, as you were just describing is a way of thinking about attention that's very much like focus. So if you're in a darkened path or even in Miami, you know, power goes out. We got to get

from one room to another. We get the flashlight out. And we're pointing to wherever we need to go. That really helps us. Wherever it is that the flashlight is pointing, we get clear, crisp information from that part of space. Everything else is less available to us, right? It's just literally blanked out. Well, attention is like a flashlight. Wherever we direct, We get clear, crisp information. And wherever it is not, we are really not getting a lot of info from that. So think about how that translates into our moment-to-moment experience. Even going back to the example I gave of reading a book to my then-toddler, now he's in college, but, you know, not having your attention on the most precious people in your life. That means you're not getting any information about what's going on with that. You're missing facial expressions. You're missing stories of you're missing their challenges or their joys. So it goes really fast from the basic brain science to like the meaning of our lives. And I think that's very, very powerful.

The most important thing to remember about the flashlight is that we can direct it willfully, just like an actual flashlight. We can point it to what we want to point it to. We can point it not only to the external environment, but to the internal environment, to our own thoughts, feelings, memories. And actually, that is how in many ways memory works, is that we're directing that internal flashlight to a particular episode in our life, for example. And then it kind of comes to mind because we did that.

And everything else is sort of quieted down when we do so. So part of the kind of adventure of training the mind is let's get a handle on our own flashlight. Where the heck is it? And let's practice having control over it and knowing when it gets yanked away unintentionally. Well, Amishi, my flashlight gets yanked away all of the time. And for someone like me that truly, I mean, 9 million ideas are always popping up. in my mind. I just always wondered, now I know it's the bad boss, right? And I need to retrain the boss to be a good boss, which we have the potential to do with the steps that you walk us through.

However, I just thought, I, you know, I'm a creative person or I'm a type A personality and I just have lots of ideas. I wasn't aware that I really can focus the flashlight. And I need to start practicing, focusing the flashlight. How do you get people started when they're like me and they feel that their attention is being taken all over. Well, the first thing is your brain isn't broken. There's nothing wrong with your brain. And in many ways, as you said, you were a creative person. You're a generative person.

And this capacity for our mind to pump out thoughts is our intrinsic brain capacity. It's what minds do. And if you remember back to the book, I start out with sort of a startling statistic, which is the number 50%. And what is 50%. It's the amount of time that we know from study after study that our attention. that our attention is not in the task at hand. So where our attention is and where we want it to be are often mismatched.

So we want to be focusing on, you know, the words that you're hearing from me, but, you know, something else pops up in your own mind or in your environment that pulls you away. Very, very normal. And that's, by the way, the job of the flashlight. And if you go back to that darkened path example I was giving you, we're walking down a darkened path or even in your own house and, like, you hear something rustle behind you. The first thing you're going to do is move that flashlight to figure out where the sound came from. So the flashlight both can be directed, but it can also be pulled.

And the kind of content that pulls the flashlight is novelty. Again, fear, personally relevant. You might call the category sex drugs and rock and roll enticing stuff that you want to kind of, these are all things that will pull us. And if you can imagine, well, you know this, that is exactly what our social media feeds and our technology are luring us with constantly. That's just from the external environment. And then we've got all the stuff in the internal environment that pulls us away as well.

So it's a real challenge, but yes, we can train ourselves to do this. And the first thing I'd say, you've already started because you already acknowledge that, yeah, I have a mind that does all these things. And you acknowledge, you know, sort of the first step is to actually realize that this is all happening and unfolding moment to moment. It's not happening in some other dimension. It's happening right now in my life moment to moment. So if I'm going to address this, I have to do it in that way.

I have to actually take it seriously in the same way if you want to build your upper body strength, you'd, you know, you'd work out if you want to have stronger legs or you want to better physical health. You go to, like you do, soul cycle. But we have to think of our minds the same way. And the trick has been, or I wouldn't say the trick, the challenge has been from a brain science perspective, we didn't know what to offer people. We did not know what is a full attentional workout for the mind that people can do every day, the privacy of their own homes, doesn't take any special equipment. That could be beneficial. And that's what actually, my own journey, as well as my lab's journey landed on something kind of unusual, which was mindfulness meditation.

And that's what we've been offering military service people and first responders and busy corporate leaders and business leaders, medical professionals. And we could definitely talk about what that is and how to implement it. Yes, absolutely. But I want everyone listening right now to do not get turned off by this idea of mindfulness and meditation because immediate, that's my visceral reaction when I hear that, oh, I'm not good at that. And I love it. And I love it. that you weren't good at it either and that you found a breakthrough. So, Misha, I'd love it if you'd share that a little bit about that. I would say not only was it not about being good at it.

It was that I just had like, it was like almost offensive to me. It's like, I'm a serious scientist. Like, I don't want to deal with what is, to me, the term meditation, and I mean, I'm just completely acknowledging my own biases. It was like talking, you know, as a brain scientist I'm saying in particular, talking, somebody talking to me about meditation as a neuroscientist was like going to an astrophysicist conference and talking about astrology. You know, it was just like, what are you doing? And again, as an Indian woman, you know, people that are just listening can't tell. But as an Indian woman,

this is part of my cultural sort of background and baggage. And I was like, not for me. It was great for my parents, great that the culture accepts this. But I'm not serious scientist and we don't do that kind of stuff. So there was a lot of, I had to overcome in terms of my own skepticism. The issue about not being good at it, I just want to disabuse everybody that's listening. There is no being good at it. Remember what I just said. 50% of the time are mind wanders. If you try to sit down and practice mindfulness meditation and your mind wanders, that's a good

thing that you noticed it. And the win is noticing how often it wanders. And the key is to bring it back after it does. That's the actual push-up part. The mind will wander on its own. And every time you know it's not where it's supposed to be. to be and you guide it back, it's a win. That makes me feel a lot of comfort because as you mentioned, many of us have minds that wander off. And when I have tried to practice mindfulness, for me,

I just used the Headspace app because it was someone guiding me and talking me through how to do it. And I would keep noticing, okay, I'm, okay, I'm off track here. I need to come back. But I like that idea of giving grace that, okay, I've noticed it. And that is, this is the work that I'm putting in. And by the way, that's the only thing we can do. If this is the tendency of mind to wander away, we were built to have distractible brains, it was an evolutionary success to have distractibility. And if you think about that, well, that's kind of weird. Why would you want to build a brain that was distractible?

Imagine what would happen if we never allowed anything to penetrate our minds when we were focused. You know, you're sitting there at least our ancestors out of watering hole, getting their hydration. They don't notice the rustling around them. Boom, they're dead. Right? So having a mind that wanders around that is always kind of surveying, that's scanning the environment, external and internal, this is a wonderful thing that the mind does. So to not feel annoyed or irritated by that, it's the nature of the mind. That's the first thing. And then the second thing is, how do we actually befriend our mind knowing that it has these tendencies? Right. And I really do often think of myself, sort of like the way I might even treat my children. Like if you have your child, like, on a particular task. And when they were younger, it's like, you know, I want you to organize the spoons, you know, in the dishwasher or whatever, put the dishes away, organize whatever the task is.

And then they get sidetracked. What do you do? Usually, if it's at least the first offense, you might say, come on, come back over here, go back to doing this. It's like you notice they're not on the task at hand and you gently bring them over to guide them, especially when they're very little and you know that their attention isn't going to be that great. So why don't we do that with ourselves. When we get off track, why do we have to scream at ourselves? Why do we have to get angry of our mind just doing what they do? It's wasting time. It's wasting cognitive energy. And we're not getting back on track. We're spending our time now yelling at ourselves for the thing we didn't do. So the practice of mindfulness in many ways is about focusing and practicing the focusing.

The second important piece is noticing that the mind has wandered away. And then in a gentle yet self-supportive way redirecting the flashlight back to the task at hand. And if you can cut the time between when you notice you're off task and you get yourself back, again, you're befriending yourself more and more. You're being more self-supportive. That's what you're trying to do. Well, just so everyone listening knows, I know mindfulness and meditation can sound overwhelming, but you're only talking about 12 minutes a day, which is very attainable. And that was another very important thing to me. I mean, I deal with a lot of all these groups that we described. They're all time pressure. We're all time pressured.

Time is our most precious and least available resource. So what I was on a hunt for in the lab was let's test out. Let's give people different prescriptions of how much time we spend doing this. And then let's see what works. And that means you might undershoot, so we give them too little and it doesn't work. And we found sort of the sweet spot that we repeatedly found was beneficial, which was 12 minutes a day. And what do you do for these 12 minutes a day? It's a very simple, this three-step process where you find it.

a target object and a very handy one. And that's, by the way, the only reason we really offer it is the breath. Is this not, this is not about manipulating the breath or changing the breath. It's just, it's here with us. It's always there. You don't have to have any special, you know, secret thing that you, is, you know, equipment to do it. Focus on the breath as it's naturally occurring. That's that, that's where the flashlight's supposed to be pointed. Notice when your mind has wandered away. Redirect the flashlight back. Repeat. That's the push up. And then we do that for 12 minutes a day. And then there's other practices where we can, grow upon that seems to really help not only in improving our ability to pay attention,

reduce mind wandering, and also help our stress levels and our negative mood. When you want more, start your business with Northwest Registered Agent and get access to thousands of free guides, tools, and legal forms to help you launch and protect your business. All in one place. Build your complete business identity with Northwest today. Northwest Registered Agents has been helping small business owners and entrepreneurs launch and grow businesses for nearly 30 years. They are the largest registered agent and LLC service in the U.S. with over 1,500 corporate guides, real people who know your local laws and can help you in your business every step of the way. Build your business identity fast with Northwest

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brand and get your complete business identity in just 10 clicks and 10 minutes. Visit northwest registered agent.com slash confidence free and start building something amazing. Get more with Northwest Registered Agent at www. northwest registered agent.com slash confidence free. That was the most impressive thing to me was the data that you shared. There were three different charts. One was showing if you didn't do any type of. of work around your awareness, your focus, your mindfulness, then one was you were working with people

and they were in high stress situations and they did not decline. And then you had another group where you worked with them and they entered high stress situations and they were still getting better. What was the big difference there? Yeah, you know, it was the amount of time that they spent. It's just like any kind of exercise, the more you do, the more you benefit. For some people, so that was that's an important pattern that you just described. So just to unpack that a bit, when we look at high stress groups. And by the way, any of us over a high stress interval, whether it's preparing for a big launch, whether it's preparing for a court case if you're a lawyer or, you know, hurricane season for firefighters, it doesn't matter. Students over the academic semester, if it's a high demand interval

that lasts four to eight weeks, your attention will get worse over time. Like, just to know that. What does that mean? That by the end of that interval, not only is your attention worse, but now you got to probably perform. Student takes final exams. You know, if you're athlete, you've got to deal with playing season. If you're a soldier, you're going to be deployed. That's very problematic. When you need your attention most, it's the least available. And part of the reason it keeps declining is because those kryptonite things I talked about of stress, threat, and poor mood. So our main question was, okay, if we do nothing, we know what the consequences are, attention's going to tank. What if we give people these practices, even if they're under a high

stress period. And yeah, if they do 12 minutes a day for about four weeks as the on-ramp and continuing beyond that if they choose to, they stay steady. They don't decline. And for those individuals that did even more than the 12 minutes, the more they did, the more they benefited. And some benefited to actually improving from where they started. That was very exciting to us because it meant that, you know, fit people can get even more fit through exercise. We know that. But that's true for the mind as well. And that is illustrated through the story of, and I don't remember the man's name, but the man that you helped who was thinking about killing himself when he got out of the military and then started doing down a different path, started doing this work, got divorced, got remarried,

had a child completely changed his life and then had a heart attack and he credits this work to what actually saved him. Absolutely. It's kind of tremendous to see the kind of beneficial effects it can have in our lives. It's unbelievable and life-changing work that you're doing. So help me to understand this. For my whole entire life, I had been told and believed fullheartedly that focus on positive things, tell yourself a positive story, get back to positivity. That is your answer and you're in control that. However, in the book, you show that that actually is not the case or you can, you can employ that tactic, but that is not proven to work. So yeah, yeah, I think that's a really important wake up call. And let me just say, this is really

regarding what happens under high demand intervals, you know, like the ones that I was describing. And frankly, the pandemic is a high demand interval. There's a lot on us. There's a lot of uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity. These are sort of the defining features of what demand and stress mean. So under those circumstances, I was just saying a moment ago that what we know is that attentional resources decline. They get less and less available. What do we need in order to actually reframe a situation as positive? Well, the first thing we need is like, our attention. Our attention helps build that internal mental model. Bringing the good to mind is an active energy demanding mental process. If it was there already, we wouldn't need to bring it to mind.

So remember I just said we take that flashlight, we directed internally. We have to call up all those memories. We have to call up the kind of positive self-talk. And it takes a lot of cognitive resources to do that. So what we found is when we compared head-to-head mindfulness to a positivity training program in high stress groups, the positivity was actually better than nothing at all. And I think it's because it was sort of like draining out this fuel that we need, which is our attention. And so if you're going to use this approach, you know, positive self-talk, positive visioning, just be aware of where your kind of set point is right now. Do you have the resources to do it? And we know quite well, if it feels too painful, you know, and a lot of the soldiers

would say this to us, you know, I just lost a buddy or he lost his leg. I don't, I can't see this. silver lining here. I can't. And I'd say, right, and the right approach may not be to try to see the silver lining. Why is that the only go-to? How about accept and allow? Feel that pain. You know, the next moment might change, but really let yourself be where you are, give yourself permission to do that. That actually frees up more resources to be able to then do the next thing that we need to do. There was one part of the book. I actually took a screenshot of it because I loved it so much. It made me feel comfort. And it was really in the routines that you're suggesting for people, may you be happy, may you be healthy, may you be safe, may you live with ease. Very, very important. And by the way, that's not the same as a

positive self-talk. That is a wish we put in the world for ourselves and other people. And holding that in our hearts, and that's a formal practice that I gave over this four-week suite of practices in the book. Very powerful practice. We call it, you know, formally it's called a loving, a loving kindness practice. We call it a connection practice because essentially it allows us to connect back with what we hold most dear for ourselves, right? We want that for ourselves. In fact, we kind of organize our whole lives. So we experience those things. Somehow we forget when we're running around or, you know, have too many demands, the emails are piling up. The traffic is terrible. You know, all these daily annoyances we have. We forget what we truly want for ourselves is good health,

physical and mental ease and a warm, loving, self-nurturing kind of stance toward our life. So just reminding ourselves of that can really change the micro decisions that we make to honor, honor that. And I'm glad that you found comforted. And I do too. And oftentimes, you know, I'll do practices like the mindfulness one we described, but I'll mix it up with having loving kindness. In fact, oftentimes I will do, you know, 12 minutes of the mindfulness and then 12 minutes

of the loving kindness the next day just to kind of even it out. So I think both are very, very important and beneficial. And I love that you bring up the element of being connected because so many of us are isolated. So many of us are now working from home. So many of us aren't feeling that connection. But one of the epiphany moments for me was in the book when you talk about the most loving thing we can do for someone is being present, being aware. That's the real connection. but so often when we're not being mindful, we're actually not present in that moment and what we're robbing from ourselves and from the people we love in our lives. Exactly. I mean, I always say, kindness and connection begin by paying attention. That's the very first step. That's what most of

our precious inner circle. That's what they crave. That's what they crave. You know, I matter to you. I'm going to take the time. That my flashlight is going to be directed toward you. You know, that's the thing that makes us feel seen and heard and that gives meeting to our lives. So oftentimes we want to do that, but we almost don't know how. And I think what I'm trying to do what I'm definitely trying to do in the book is give people that tool back so they can find that flashlight and direct it wherever they want, knowing that how valuable it truly is. It can be shocking what any of us can be missing. And again, not because we're not there, but because we're not fully aware and fully present.

That's right. Yeah, we can even learn things about ourselves. We never knew. You know, like it took my teeth going numb for me to say, oh, maybe I'm a little stressed. You know, it seems like, how could you miss it? But we do. We miss it. We go, go, go.

And we don't take the time to pay attention to our bodies or our psychological health. And I think that I think what you do and the kind of offerings you give through this podcast as well. I mean, you're reminding people, pay attention to this stuff. It really matters. you know, what you say to yourself matters. Your own inner chatter really matters. And what I'm saying is a compliment to that, which is, and here's how you can have better control over where your mind goes. You know, and I think that they both sort of go hand in hand. Well, I can tell you this. After reading your book, I am committed to doing the 12 minutes a day and praying for that kind of transformation

that you share in the book on so many occasions. Amishi, where can everyone find the book? Where can everyone find you. The book is called Peak Mind. It's out October 19th. So get it at any of your favorite retailers. And if they want to learn more about me, just remember my first name. Amishi, a-M-I-S-H-I-S-H-I. That's my website. Well, I so appreciate the work you're doing. Your book is amazing. I highly recommend everyone pick up a copy and implement this 12-minute process for a better, more present life. Thank you so much. Thank you. It's been a lot of fun. Okay. And Until next week, keep creating your confidence.