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

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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It's the mic drop of chocolate. It's chocolate with game. It's chocolate with, hmm, what's the word in it, after? Oh, yeah. Crunch. 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, you're going to chase down our goals. We've come at diversity and set you up for a better tomorrow. I'm ready for my close to friends. Hi and welcome back. I'm so excited for you to meet Dr. Amishi Jha, Professor of Psychology at the University of Miami. You're in the 305. She serves as the Director of contemplative neuroscience for the mindfulness,

research, and practice initiative Holy Cup, which she co-founded in 2010. She received her PhD 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, Times, 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 tell the Komei 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. Oh, 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 school really close to us. Yes. And when I gave it, it was the 30th year they had asked me. gave my TED Talk at Ransom Everglades, which is school really close to us. Yes. And when it, when I gave it, it was the third year they had asked me. So I was like, yeah, definitely wanna do it. Just couldn't get the scheduling done. And finally, I agreed to do it.

That day, I actually had to go to LA to give a talk. And I found out as I was like on my way, getting ready to go to the TED Talk, that that talk in LA, which I had not prepared for, at all, was gonna have 700 people at it. So sort of like, okay, it was more like, okay, I really wanted 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. And 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 course got a lot more interest.

Okay, well people don't know that, so I do want to share that your TED talk has over 5 million views. Did that blow you away a little bit, especially because of 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, it's 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. Yeah, I think the reason that it has had so many views is because it really speaks to 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 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. Just 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 work, but I could

put it to the test and allow 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 would be where we are today. 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. I always thought of myself as this, oh, I wouldn't, I would say yeah, like a go-getter. 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 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. I mean, 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

in me that really was my wake-up call was evening bedtime book reading with my precious toddler. Now, 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 them 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 laps, knuckled up, we're reading a book, we've read Gush, hundreds of times. And in the middle of like turning the pages, he kind of puts a little hand on my, on the book, like to stop me. And they look at me and he says, what's a wump? And it was this Dr. Sous book, one fish, two fish, red fish, blue fish. And it was this Dr. Sus book, one fish, two fish, red fish, blue fish, literally red, like I said, a Gajillion 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. He only wants his mind attention and time, and 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 you might need me and the challenges are a lot bigger than that? So that was my personal wake up call. And then yeah, and then 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 and overwhelm. And then I was on a mission. I'm like, this is not right. I got to get my attention back. And then I thought, you know,

my entire professional career of 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 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 your lab has been with people in really tense, stressful situations. Can you share a little bit about your work that you don't have 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, you know, 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 some way 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 I've 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 police officer or any, you know, anybody that has to interface at that level of dealing with violence. For most of us, 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 one way and you are gonna satisfy that, like for example, girls aren't good at math or women can't be bosses, or 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. National security experts are warning our aging power grid is more vulnerable than ever.

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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 on our own, 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 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 two 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, what do we know about attention? Because usually when most of us hear that term, if you're not a brain scientist that happens to study this for a living, you think the word attention means focus, right? But it actually, in terms of the brain science and attention, it's a lot more than that. So I want to kind of break down all the different aspects of attention.

And then I got into, and I'd love to talk to you about it, how do we train these systems every day on our own, like a mental workout, mental push up, you know, for our minds, to again, deal with these kryptonite push up, you know, 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. It's very much like focus. So if you're not dark in path, or even in Miami, you know, power goes out, we got to get to one room to another, we get that 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 it, we get clear crisp information.

And wherever it is not, we are really not getting a lot of info from that. So think about that, how that translates into our moment to moment experience. Even when we're going back to the example I gave of reading a book to my, my, 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 extra 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 particular episode in our life, for example. And that 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, I mean, my flashlight gets yanked away all of the time. And for someone like me that truly, I mean, nine 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'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's 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 are 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 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 dark and

path example I was giving you, we're walking down a dark and 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 lowering 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 an 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 dress 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 know, you'd work out. If you want to have stronger legs or you want to have 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, I wouldn't say the trick, the challenge has been from a brain-sized 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, and the privacy of their own homes,

doesn't take any special equipment that could be beneficial. And that's what actually, by 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. 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 that you weren't good at it either. And that you found a breakthrough. So, Misha, I'd love it if you shared that a little bit. Well, I would say not only was it not about being good at it, it was that I just had like, it was, it was like almost offensive to me. The term, 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 for the culture except this. But I'm a 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 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 up 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 off track here, I need to come back, but I like that idea of giving grace that, okay, I've noticed it, and 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 mine to wander away, we were built to have distractable brains.

It was an evolutionary success to have distractability. And if you think about that, well, that's kind of weird. Why would you want to build a brain that was distractable? Imagine what would happen if we never allowed anything to penetrate our minds when we were focused. You know, you're seeing 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, there's always kind of surveying, that 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? And I really do often think of myself,

sort of like the way I might even treat my children. Like if you have your children, child at a particular task, and when they're younger, it's like, you know, I want you to organize the spoons, you know, in the dishwasher, whatever, put the dishes away, organize whatever the task is. And then they get side track. 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 minds 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 is 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 your 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 and knowing, 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 pressured. We're all time pressured. Time is our most precious and least available resource.

So that 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've 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 a target object in a very handy one. And that's by the way, the only reason we really offer it is the breath. This is not about manipulating the breath or changing the breath. It's just, it's here with us.

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 where the flashlight is supposed to be pointed. Notice when your mind is 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 on a growup on that, seems to really help not only in improving our ability to pay attention, reduce mind wandering, and also help our stress levels in our negative mood. If you're struggling with swelling in your legs, ankles are feet, you're going to want to listen up. Forget your compression socks and water pills. New research shows that swelling and inflammation can be resolved by upping your intake of omega-3 fatty acids from krill oil. Omega-3's improved circulation while lowering inflammation in the body, all while reducing

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and saving money is even easier with the Croger app. So get the most value out of every trip every time. Download the Croger app now to save big. Croger, fresh for everyone. Must have a digital account to redeem offers. Restrictions may apply, see site for details. 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 work around your awareness, your focus, your mindfulness. Then one was you were working with people and they weren't 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'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, 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 got to plan, you 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 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 at different paths, 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 full heartedly 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 it 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, 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 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 our attention. Our attention helps build that internal mental model. Bringing the good to mind is an active energy demanding mental process. It does, if it was there already, we wouldn't need to bring it to mind. Right? So remember, I just said we take that flashlight, we direct it 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 gonna use this approach, 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, 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 the 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 your permission, your self 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 it in the world for ourselves and other people. And holding that in our hearts, and that's a formal practice that I give over this four week suite of practices in the book, very powerful practice. We call it, you know, formally it's called the 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 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 said 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 we crave. You know, I'm madder to you. I'm gonna take the time that my flashlight is gonna be directed toward you. You know, that's that's the thing that makes us feel seen and heard and that gives meaning to our lives. So oftentimes we want to do that, but we almost don't know how. And I think 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 about 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. 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 what you do in 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. 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 impaying for that kind of transformation that you share in the book on so many occasions. I mean she, 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, Amishie, AMISHI.com. 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, until next week, keep creating your confidence. At a time when change is constant and we are pulled in far too many directions, we need a way to stay present to life and to increase our ability to remain calm, think clearly and maintain our well-being. Many studies indicate mindfulness improves our mental, emotional and physical health. On a mindful moment with Theresa McKee, you can learn how to practice mindfulness and enjoy its many benefits. Tune in for guided meditations and to hear tips and advice from some of the most respected experts in the fields of mental health and mindfulness. The world truly can be a better place.

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