Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - #218 How To Train Your Attention and Improve Your Life with Dr Amishi Jha

Episode Date: November 17, 2021

Where is your attention right now? Hopefully it’s on these words – but if you’re getting distracted and are contemplating what you’ll have for dinner or running through your to-do list, please know that you are not alone. Today’s guest shares research which shows that most of us are missing up to 50% of our lives. But if you’d like to change that for the better, you’re in the right place. Dr Amishi Jha is a neuroscientist, professor of psychology at the University of Miami and author of the brilliant new book Peak Mind: Find Your Focus, Own Your Attention, Invest 12 Minutes A Day, which looks at the science of attention. She wants to help us all harness the power of our attention to better meet life’s demands. And I know you’re going to find her advice useful whether it’s at work, at leisure or in your relationships. Amishi describes the three different types of attention: the Flashlight, the Floodlight and the Juggler. She explains how they all work together to keep us not just focused but also safe, productive and agile. What’s most important, she explains, is developing the awareness to know what type of attention, or distraction, you’re experiencing at any one time. We talk about factors which have a negative influence on our attention, namely stress, fear and lack of sleep. And how an inability to focus can not only be a consequence of poor mental health, but a cause as well. Often rumination, focusing too intently on our problems, can keep us in them. So how can we break free? This episode is packed with practical advice on optimising attention for all-round wellbeing and performance. Amishi’s research has shown that, just as we might train our bodies in the gym, so too can we train our brains to direct our focus where we’ll most benefit. And the good news is, we can experience incredible benefits in as little as 12 minutes a day. I really enjoyed this conversation and I hope you do too. Thanks to our sponsors:   https://www.vivobarefoot.com/uk/livemore https://www.blublox.com/livemore http://www.athleticgreens.com/livemore   Show notes available at https://drchatterjee.com/218   Support the podcast and enjoy Ad-Free episodes. Try FREE for 7 days on Apple Podcasts https://apple.co/3oAKmxi. For other podcast platforms go to https://fblm.supercast.com. Follow me on https://www.instagram.com/drchatterjee Follow me on https://www.facebook.com/DrChatterjee DISCLAIMER: The content in the podcast and on this webpage is not intended to constitute or be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your doctor or other qualified health care provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard on the podcast or on my website.

50% of our lives we're mind-wandering, it's going to cause problems and it does cause problems. We know that when people are mind-wandering and unaware, their performance is terrible. Their response times are variable. And frankly, there's another consequence which relates to things like depression and anxiety. People don't typically think about psychological disorders as attentional disorders, but in some sense they are. Hi, my name is Rangan Chatterjee. Welcome to Feel Better, Live More. Where is your attention right now? Hopefully it's on the words that I'm saying to you,

but if you're getting distracted and are contemplating what you're going to have for dinner tonight or running through your to-do list, please know that you are not alone. Today's guest shares research that most of us are missing up to 50% of our lives. But if you'd like to change that for the better, you have come to the right place. My guest on this week's podcast is Dr. Amishi Jha. Now, Amishi is a neuroscientist. She's a professor of psychology at the University of Miami, and she's also author of the brilliant new book, Peak Mind, which looks at the science of attention. Now, Amishi wants to help all of us harness the power of our attention to better meet life's demands and I'm quite certain that you are going to find her advice

useful whether it's for your work, your leisure time or perhaps for improving the quality of your relationships. On the show today Amishi describes the three different types of attention, the flashlight, the floodlight, and the juggler. And she explains how they all work together to keep us not just focused, but also safe, productive, and agile. What's most important, she explains, is developing the awareness to know what type of attention or distraction you're experiencing at any one time. Now, just a quick note, when Amisha uses the term flashlight, I often respond using the term spotlight due to the differences in how we

refer to those torches in the UK compared to America. Now in our conversation we cover so many different topics including how stress, fear and a lack of sleep can negatively influence our attention. We also talk about how an inability to focus can not only be a lack of sleep can negatively influence our attention. We also talk about how an inability to focus can not only be a consequence of poor mental health, it can also potentially be a cause as well. This episode is jam-packed with practical advice on how we can all optimize our attention. And Amishi's research has shown that just as we might train our bodies in the gym, so too can we train our bodies to direct our focus where it will most benefit. And the good news is that we can experience incredible benefits in as little as 12 minutes a day. I really enjoyed delving into the science of

attention and focus with Amishi. I really hope you enjoy listening. And now, my conversation with Dr. Amishi Jha. I have been very excited to talk to you, especially since I first read your brand new book, which is absolutely brilliant. I think it covers one of the most important topics that exists at the moment. And I think the best place to start this conversation for me is that statistic that you mentioned, that we're missing up to 50% of our lives. Not only that, we don't often realize we're missing 50% of our lives. So I wanted to put to you, why is it these days that so many of us are finding ourselves distracted and we're really struggling to pay attention? Well, that's a big question, but it ends up that that 50%

number is not actually a modern number. We've probably been this way for quite some time. So let's just maybe unpack what I even meant by that, because it's sort of a striking statistic. What do you mean I'm missing half my life? I don't feel like I am. But it's not even like big moments that you feel like are complete blank to you. It's the micro excursions that we take. So if we think back to how that number came to be, and we've done this in so many different ways, we keep triangulating around half the time. So the initial studies that were done to investigate essentially how attentive are people to what they are actually doing in the moment.

And so the request was recruit a bunch of participants and ask them if they can be contacted via just text any time of day or night during normal waking hours and asked a couple of questions. The first question being, what are you doing right now? And they basically could just go through and click on whatever broad category. I'm at work, I'm writing an email, I'm reading a book, I'm talking, whatever it is. So they categorized the nature of what they're doing. Some were pleasant tasks, some were unpleasant tasks. And then the second question was essentially, where is your attention right now? And it was that second question that revealed that only half of the time, only 50%

of the time, were they actually paying attention to the thing they said they were doing, their current task at hand. So we've gone on to take that experiment into the lab. So we bring people into the lab. We tell bring people into the lab, we tell them you're doing an attentionally demanding task, pay attention. But every now and then we stop the experiment and we ask, where's your attention right now? And again, we get that number about 50%. So it ends up that you can't really motivate people, you can't pressure people, you can't even pay people to kind of exceed that about 35 to 50% number of the moments when their attention is somewhere other than the present moment tasks

that they're engaged in. It's a pretty striking number, isn't it? If we reflect on our own lives, our relationships, our work performance, the school plays that we go and watch of our children. And this is why I think I'm so passionate about the topic you've written about in Peak Minds. It's this idea that when we can concentrate better, focus better, when we can basically strengthen our attention, for me, this we can basically strengthen our attention. For me, this goes beyond peak performance. This is not just about performing well. This actually has implications for the entirety of our lives, for our relationships with our partners, with our children, for our leisure activities, whatever it is, right? We need attention, don't we? Absolutely. And in fact, that's what motivated me to even pursue solutions to this. I have been a

neuroscientist for my whole career. And it ends up that the topic in my lab that we study is attention. And we know a lot about the power of attention to transform brain function, to actually modulate how the brain is calibrated, so to speak. And we also know a lot about the vulnerabilities, that when people are under stressful circumstances, they experience threat, even social threat, or negative mood in the context of sort of not even full-fledged psychological disorders, but dysphoria, just not feeling quite in the best mood or even in the neutral mood. All of those can start degrading and diminishing attention. And of course, as you already said, it does impact how we perform. If we're not paying

attention, we are not going to succeed at things that require it. And that's basically everything. Our attention in some sense is the fuel for our ability to think, just carry a line of thought with continuity, for our ability to, and just carry a line of thought with continuity, for our ability to, and this surprises, it surprised me when I first learned it, it's a fuel for our ability to even experience emotion, not just regulate it and control it so it's proportionate, but just to have the experience of an emotion. And it's also necessary for our ability to connect. So if we need this fuel to think, feel, and connect, and then it's degraded by life circumstances, all of a sudden we're not actually in our lives.

And for me, it was really about the second thing you mentioned, not so much performance. It was that I felt like I was missing my life. And it became this sort of ironic journey for me where I study attention, my lab is devoted to it, but I couldn't get a hold of my own attention. And, you know, at that point, this was probably around the early 2000s. And you mentioned you have children. I have children as well. At that point, they were quite young. And I felt like I was missing their childhood.

You know, moments that I knew were precious and fleeting. I just wasn't there for. So to me, I became sort of on a personal mission to figure out how am I going to get this thing back? And at that stage, the literature was not pointing me to anything. It wasn't like, oh yeah, do these five things and all of a sudden your attention will return to your life. So, you know, just to paint the picture that absolutely we miss a lot of things. And when we miss those things, we miss out on our lives. I think pretty much everybody listening or watching this right now will be able to deeply resonate with what you just said, that we struggle to be in our lives, to be present to all of our experiences. Now, your work is really empowering and inspiring because actually you're showing that there's lots

that we can do. And actually a lot of those steps don't actually cost us any money. They're actually very simple for us once we know what they are. And we're going to get to those in this conversation. But I think before we get there, we need to understand a few different concepts. And I think, you know, for me, it feels as though this is a modern problem, right? It feels as though phones and technology has made this problem worse. But you made the case in the book that actually, even if we got rid of our laptops and our phones and our notifications, then we would still struggle with this, don't you? I do. And really, because that's the question I get often is, aren't our attention spans shrinking? Our attention spans actually are not shrinking at all. Evolution doesn't work at that time scale. But when we even look back at

what the internal landscape looked like for people like monks in medieval times, we have reports from them, because they documented it, they wrote it down, that they did exactly what you just said. They gave away all their worldly possessions. They go away to this monastery where there's nothing else distracting them but their opportunity to pray and connect with God, which was their goal. And they couldn't do it. They would complain about being caught up in thinking about lunch or some interaction they might have had and felt a sense of frustration that their mind could not be devoted to the one thing they wanted it to be devoted to, which actually is this fundamental capacity. As you said, some of these concepts

we're talking about is this fundamental capacity of distractibility that is our evolutionary inheritance in some sense. So we think of distraction or distractibility as a liability, as a flaw of the way maybe our brains in particular work or maybe the nature of brains. But if we look back even way back before medieval monks, just in terms of why we would have developed a brain, why evolution would have selected for a brain that is distractible, it actually makes a lot of sense. Yeah, it absolutely does. And this idea that what makes us uniquely human is our ability to, I guess, be distracted, you know, see where that predator is, move our mind out of the present, but also that kind of benefit, it also becomes our Achilles heel at the same time,

which I find a really interesting sort of dilemma to try and sit with. Yeah, this notion of something that are, I mean, obviously the pressures that led through it through the course of evolution advantaged having it versus not having it, right? So in some sense, it definitely is a feature, not a flaw, or else we wouldn't probably have it now. But there are ways, and let's just unpack that a bit. What I mean by that is if we had unflinching focus, if we were so focused on the task at hand, ancient creature, we're at some watering hole, so focused on nourishment, getting the water, would miss the rustling in the bushes behind us, probably get eaten.

And so in some sense, always having both this focusing capacity, but a broad receptive orientation toward our environment, what a lot of military folks call situational awareness. That is very, very powerful because then we're able to clue in to see if we need to actually just, you know, move away from the task at hand to go do something else. So that's just in the physical realm. But when we think about our minds, forget about the external environment altogether. Distractibility within our own minds is also extremely powerful. And as you mentioned, that I talk about in the book, uniquely human. And what I mean by that is that we can actually, with our eyes closed in the privacy of our own heads, we're eyes open, escape to a different reality. Essentially, we can mentally time travel. And we can mentally time travel very easily to the past or to the future.

And doing that is so productive in terms of our ability to reflect on the past and learn from it. Again, a uniquely human thing to do or to plan productively for future events. So this is another aspect of our distractibility. Oftentimes, though, that 50% number we were talking about a moment ago is because of that distractibility. We aren't in the moment. In fact, all those people that were getting those text messages, when you probed them a little further, well, where were you? If your attention was not in the task at hand, where was it? And it was usually answers like this. I was thinking about an interaction I just had, or I was thinking about the next thing I had to do. They were hijacked in time. Even though we all have this capacity for mental time travel, which is a benefit of our evolutionary inheritance.

But I think maybe, again, going back to how attention developed in the first place and the multiple ways in which attention functions may be useful. Because when we started wanting to pursue solutions, and again, it came initially as the lead of the lab for me wanting to figure out myself, how do I pay attention better? I mean, I don't want to be slipping into mental time travel when I'm trying to read a book to my kid or have a conversation with my spouse or watch a soccer match of my little boy. I can't be somewhere else. I don't want to be. I think it's fascinating that we've always struggled with this. I want to talk about the modern world a bit later on and technology and how it potentially plays into that. But I wonder whether you understand what attention is, but also I think

it's really useful was this idea, or not this idea, this is what you talk about. You say that things which seem quite different, or which might seem different, such as anxiety, being worried about the future, lack of focus, feeling overwhelmed, potentially this sort of brain fog or cognitive fog. You are saying that all of them at their heart have a lack of attention and i found that really interesting so could you maybe tell us what is the point of attention for the brain and then maybe delve a bit deeper as to you know these different types of attention that you've studied in your lab yeah absolutely so yeah i mean essentially if we go rewind way, way, way, way back to when we were very early creatures could actually understand and maneuver ourselves

in the world. The brain of such a creature had a very big problem, which was all of a sudden, it was engaging with the world, but it didn't have access to process everything that was happening around it. So attention was a solution to basically sub-sample parts of the environment to get a picture of what was going on. If I can't know everything, maybe I can know bit by bit by bit to piece together what the world actually is around me and act on it. So that's essentially, in some sense, what we might even consider the definition of attention, to privilege some information over others. And when we privilege some information over others, the brain privileges it be where the bulk of my visual cortex is doing its work to understand the features, what you might be conveying through your eye

movements or your facial gestures. Everything else around me is sort of blanked out in some sense, fuzzed out. And so that privileging is very, very beneficial because I can get granular information. And oftentimes I'll talk about that capacity, that privileging of certain information over others as kind of, I mean, let's say in the UK, you might refer to it as a torch. Here we call it a flashlight, right? This, what we do if you were in a darkened room and we wanted to get information about the environment, just to make sure we don't fall or trip or, you know, if we're taking a nice stroll somewhere in the forest, making sure that we can maneuver our way through, we use a torch flashlight and we direct it willfully. And wherever it is that

we're directing it, we're going to be able to get more information about that part of the visual scene. And that focusing capacity, some formally known as the brain's kind of orienting system, we use it not just for the external environment, but we use it for the internal environment as well. So now all of a sudden, if I want to reflect back on something that I experienced last night, you know, in a conversation with my partner, for example, I can shine that flashlight on my memory and actually have more access to that information. So, you know, plainly saying, if I said to you, you know, can you tell me what the sensations are right now on the bottoms of

your feet? It's like, well, probably you can do that, but it's not something you were thinking about before I mentioned it. It tells us how quickly and how easily we have this capacity to access with more granularity, the information that is at some level there, but it's not at the front of our conscious experience. Yeah, yeah, I really like that. So when you said that, I thought, well, no, I don't know. But within a few seconds, maybe, I don't know, two seconds, three seconds, I could be, yeah, I could tell you now what it feels like that. But in that moment, I couldn't. So are you saying that actually

there are inputs going into our brain constantly and we are hopefully actively deciding, but essentially we are choosing or our brain or our mind is choosing what to filter out and what to focus on. Is that essentially what you're saying with the flashlight and the torch? Well, that is exactly what I'm saying. And what I'm saying is it's not just that we're filtering out, it's that whatever it is that we pay attention to at the level of literal brain activity within a few hundred milliseconds is not only advantaging, meaning I have more brain activity now to looking at a face, your face on the screen, but the cells that are firing that are more active to face your face on the screen are actively inhibiting everything else.

So it's this, neurally even speaking, we've got an advantage for some information over other information. So when I asked you to direct your attention to the sensations at the bottom of your feet, essentially what happened is now in the brain map of your somatosensory cortex, the feet became more prominent. And then the activity within that region of sensory cortex, somatosensory cortex, now all of a sudden more active. So you're getting more input the input is is there but now because you're attending to it it's suppressing everything else down it's

like that's the most important so so that that sort of is saying to me that this is great because we can purposely decide where to direct our attention depending on what we want to focus on yes if that is the case well well, if that's the case then, so what happens then, let's say someone wants to read a book and they've decided, okay, I've got my cup of tea and I'm going to sit down and relax. Maybe I've got the house to myself, maybe my partner or my kids aren't around, I'm now going to sit and read. So there is some intention, isn't there, that I'm now going to read a book. Yet when many of us find ourselves in that position, I don't know how long it takes, what the average time is, within seconds, within minutes,

the book may be open, we may be looking at the pages, but actually our mind is somewhere else. So what's going on in those types of situations? Very good question. Yes, all too common. So that same capacity, attentional focus, right? Like I said, we can direct it to the external environment, to the internal environment, in the sensory realm. We can direct it toward thoughts. We can direct it toward emotions. We can direct it toward a lot of different content. And that is the kind of power of voluntarily holding that torch and pointing it. But it ends up that capacity is not just directable. It's actually able to be pulled. able to be pulled. So let's imagine you're on that same darkened path. You're walking through the forest and you're like, I'm going to light the way so I can find my way back to where I'm going or enjoy this walk. You hear rustling behind you. Boom, the flashlight's going to be behind you

to figure out what was that. And you're going to do that so fast, you probably didn't even realize that you were doing that. So attention can be directed, but attention can be pulled. And it's the same system that does both. And now if you think about what kind of information pulls our attention in that way, again, back to our evolutionary history, things that are related to stress, like physical fear-inducing stimuli, threatening stimuli, self-related information, anything that's sort of bright, shiny objects, anything that would advantage our survival, it's going to get yanked around. So just to know that, that part of it, if it's not, let's say you were on a quiet day in your home and you decided to read and you're like,

my decision is to read. Let's just start by talking about the simple thing where your phone dings. Even though it's in another room, you might even just sense the vibration that something's going on with your phone in the other room. I mean, I know we've been there with phantom text syndrome, right? Yeah. What's going to happen? Without your knowledge, without your willful decision making, the flashlight's on that phone.

And now all of a sudden, a whole chain of thoughts begin of, oh, I wonder who's calling. Am I supposed to expect a call right now? So just the movement of the flashlight, getting pulled by that sensory stimulus, initiates a whole bunch of mental chatter, which can be distracting to you. So if we, you know, I love the example you used about the torch in the dark forest. And then suddenly we push it behind us to something else where we might sense danger it's another way that we can look at it because you're showing that this is a trainable skill we can get better at this so it's another way that we might want to look at this that let's say you are in that dark forest and you're holding a torch as you go, after a period of time,

it's going to be quite tiring on your bicep and your arm to hold it up. Your arm's going to get tired and then that floodlight is going to fall a little bit. It's not going to be where you want it. Could we think of it a bit like that when we're reading such that if we haven't trained the skill to focus, then within a few minutes of reading or whatever we're trying to do, whether it's a work presentation or an Excel spreadsheet, whatever it is we're trying to focus on, can we look at it like that, that if we can train... That's a great question. Yeah. Such a great question. And one that really psychologists have been curious about for a very long time. The phenomenon that you're describing is something we call kind of formally vigilance decrement. So essentially, if you have

somebody do a task for long enough, intentionally demanding, their performance is going to start getting worse over time. That's just known. So the thinking has been exactly the model that you described, that essentially this capacity fatigues, it just does. And after some period of time, you're just going to fall apart. Now think back to yourself in the forest. If you really want to kind of take that analogy to the next step, even if your arm hurt, even if you were tired, you would figure out a way to keep that flashlight focused because you need to make it back. Right. In the same way, if I said, you know, Dr. Chatterjee, you must read this report because the patient's life depends on it. And even if you felt tired, you would devote yourself. You could get yourself to do it. It wouldn't fatigue in the same way. So the question

becomes what is going on that leads to this thing called a vigilance decrement? We did a study in my lab, and it's sort of related, but I want to just, it's related to what you're saying, and it's bringing in the insight of that number 50% that we just talked about. So what we did is we gave people very simple memory tasks. Now, this is working memory. So all they have to do is remember essentially a face or some other kind of simple stimulus over some period of time. And then tell us a few seconds later, was this the face you were asked to remember? Very straightforward. People do quite well on this, especially if it's only one face. But every now and then, we would stop the experiment and ask them, just like the people that were getting those text messages, where's your attention right now? And then how aware are you of where your attention is? So oftentimes, initially in

the experiment, people would say, my attention's on the task. And yeah, I'm aware of it. So then we wanted to see what would happen over time. And just like all of those other experiments, people started getting worse over time. So their performance was definitely degrading over time. And then we said, what's going on with those two other questions that we asked? And what we found was kind of corresponding with a decrease in their performance, they were mind wandering more often, meaning they were saying they were off task more often. That was going up over time. And their awareness of where their attention was, was decreasing over time. So the picture becomes a lot more complicated. This notion of fatiguing of an intentional muscle doesn't seem to be the case because frankly, it looks like

the flashlight is still engaged. It's just pointing somewhere else the longer you have to engage in this task. And part of it may be, you know, often people say, well, they're just bored. I mean, it sounds pretty boring looking at face after face after face. And I think that that's probably true. I don't think boredom is the cause of why people start mind wandering. I think boredom is the feedback system that says, what you're doing is not giving you enough advantage right now, enough reward right now. Take your attention and do something else with it. It sort of motivates alternative or what we call opportunity costs to be explored. So we don't think at this point that we are incapable of maintaining focus. It's that we have a constant propensity to look for other things that might be more engaging of more interest. Hence the lure of the cell phone

buzzing in the other room. This is interesting, but I want to see who's calling me right now. I thought that was really interesting, this idea that actually it's not fatiguing, it's just going elsewhere. And I guess, does this speak to why on certain tasks, we can concentrate for longer if we're really invested in it, we're passionate about it, I guess we know it's important. Whereas something that we might find more mundane and tedious, our mind is wondering all the time. I don't know, I kind of feel that if, and this then goes to our employment and our work. If your job is something that you find tedious and mundane,

is it going to be harder for you to keep the spotlight, keep that torch where it needs to be compared to someone who kind of loves their job and is really engaged in the content? Possibly. But I think there's another culprit, another big culprit, because we've found that even brain surgeons, surgeons mind wander in the middle of brain surgery. So it's not just that you don't know it's consequential, that you're not passionate about it, that you don't think it's important.

Lives are on the line and still we wander. And so it goes back to that second question we asked, right? We were looking at performance. It got worse over time. We asked, where's your attention? It was somewhere else. It wasn't in the task. It wasn't that they blanked out.

They just said, no, I'm thinking about something else. But it was that second question we asked was how aware are you of where your mind is? People were starting to get worse at that. That capacity is something formally called meta-awareness. So meta meaning reflecting on itself. You can think of it as attention to your attention. But really formally, we would say it is the capacity to know moment by moment the kind of contents and processes at play in your mind right now.

So to know, oh, yeah, where am I right now? What is the content in my mind right now. So to know, oh yeah, where am I right now? What is the content in my mind right now? Oh, I'm thinking about the vacation instead of this task. That would be having meta-awareness. Or the process would be something like, oh, I'm looping, I'm ruminating on something. That would be, again, a good sign of meta-awareness. If we don't know where our attention is, if we don't know the flashlight isn't where we intend it to be, there's no hope of getting it back on track. So this is really, I guess, speaks to this idea that mind wandering is normal, right? So actually, the mind wandering is okay, but you've got to be aware that your mind is wandering. The problem is when your mind wanders and you don't

know it's wandered. Am I sort of, I'm getting closer? Absolutely, you're getting closer. And it goes back to what you were saying about the getting to the bottom of the page and like looking at yourself being like, where am I? You know, a lot of times people will say that regarding reading, but also just even on being on Instagram or TikTok or whatever your social media indulgences are, we lose ourselves because our attention is somewhere and we don't know. We're not holding that meta awareness. And that's really the only point that will provide us opportunities to do something differently. Usually when we get to the, when we're reading and we get to the bottom of the page, the bottom of the screen, that cues us like,

oh, there's nowhere else to go. The eyes are kind of defaulting to nothing else left. Where am I? You check in. So the external information prompts you to say, get meta aware right now. Something's not right. Or if you're in a conversation and you're kind of, somebody asked you a question a couple of times and you're not responding in an appropriate manner, your conversation partner will tell you, excuse me, are you listening to me? Right? So we have ways in which external prompts can get us to become meta aware. But if we don't have the capacity to do this internally, and we're up

against 50% of our lives, we're mind wandering, it's going to cause problems. And it does cause problems. We know that when people are mind wandering and unaware, their performance is terrible. Their response times are variable. And frankly, there's another consequence, which goes back to the initial question you asked me about. This relates to things like depression and anxiety. happens is often that flashlight is now getting used in the context of depressogenic thought, anxiety-provoking thought. And we're just stuck there, even though we're supposed to be doing something else. Yeah, I'm going to get to depression and anxiety shortly, because I think it's really interesting. And I had a few thoughts after reading your book on that. But let's get back to attention for a second, because I think many of us think that attention is one thing. And you beautifully show how actually there are at least three different systems of attention. I think the flashlight, the floodlight, and the juggler. So I wonder if you

could, I think you've gone through the flashlight flashlight but maybe you could just talk us all through what are those sort of three systems and how do they sort of weave together and interact with each other just taking a quick break to give a shout out to AG1, one of the sponsors of today's show. Now, if you're looking for something at this time of year to kickstart your health, I'd highly recommend that you consider AG1. AG1 has been in my own life for over five years now. It's a science-driven daily health drink with over 70 essential nutrients to support your overall health. It contains vitamin C and zinc, which helps support a healthy immune system, something that is really important, especially at this time of year. It also contains prebiotics

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office, or car. If you want to take advantage of this limited time offer, all you have to do is go to drinkag1.com forward slash live more. That's drinkag1.com forward slash live more. Absolutely. So we already talked about, you know, if evolution solution to our problem of information overload was to privilege some information over others, the flashlight or torch allows us to privilege certain kind of content. But these other two systems are advantaging other types of information. And we already started picking up on this a little bit. So in addition to what you might advantage, the other thing you might want to do is advantage time. So what's happening right now may be the most important thing. What is most prominent and

important right now? And that's where this notion of, as you described my metaphor of a floodlight. And formally, it's called the brain's alerting system. And the job of the alerting system is to privilege what is occurring in this moment relative to other information, because we want to be alert and receptive. So in some sense, this system is like the exact opposite of that narrow, concentrated torch that we described. That restricts information so that some things are much more important. In fact, the brain response would show some parts of our information processing are much more important than others. The alerting system, because it's about just paying attention

to what's happening right now, doesn't advantage the type of information. It's broad, receptive, and kind of able to bring in and process anything that's occurring in this moment, because it could be a potential relevance. We want to be alert to its occurrence. So I always think about this if you're driving anywhere, and I think probably in England it's the same way. You're near a construction site or a school zone or something like that, you might see like a flashing yellow light, right? And when you see that, usually not a traffic light, just a flashing light somewhere, it might say to you, pay attention.

But the way in which you're paying attention there is quite different than the flashlight. It's not about focus. It's about broad receptivity so that in any moment, you know, a weird traffic pattern or maybe children running out to play, you can just notice it and then ensure that you're going to take

action that's appropriate. So this, and I call it the floodlight basically because above my garage, I have a motion detecting floodlight. And what it tells me is what's going on right now, right outside my window. And it's in some sense, that's what this system is doing. If you think back to that term meta-awareness that I used, in some sense, it's that same sort of process of broad, receptive, aware. But now we're turning that awareness, we're turning the floodlight on attention itself. We're looking at the mind's phenomenology and saying, ah, what's going on in my own phenomenological experience right now? And that is where we can start benefiting from the knowledge of where we actually are relative to where we might want to be. So both these systems are important, I guess, and we can train both of them separately.

where you have worked with the military in the US. And I think there was a situation where a general was potentially going to, or was assessing an attack and whether they should attack in Afghanistan. Can you maybe talk us through that example and then help me understand, is that the flashlight or is that the floodlight or is it a bit of both? Yeah, it very much relates to probably more the notion of the floodlight. Because there are vulnerabilities to being broad and receptive. In some sense, if you want to get kind of technical, a flashlight has what we'd call a very high signal to noise ratio. Signal, meaning what's relevant, very important. Noise is everything else. The floodlight, we turn down the difference between signal and noise because we don't know what's most important. We take a broad, unbiased orientation toward

what we're seeing because we've got to get all the data in of what's happening in this moment before we even know what action to take. So having that sort of more neutral orientation is very important. Oftentimes what happens is that we do bias information processing, not so much about where we direct our flashlight in the external environment, but what story we have regarding what is occurring right now. Okay. So, so we know that there is this thing we might can call and probably people have heard of this confirmation bias, this notion that an idea we have in our mind, just like any other thing that we privilege in our, in our experience, it biases information processing. The idea that is driving, it biases information processing. The idea that is driving, will drive where we focus all of our attention from this torch perspective. So what happened in that example that you were describing

is essentially everybody's torch, everybody's orienting system was aligned with this story that they had, that at the top of this mountain is a Taliban encampment. All the data was there. There were tents. There were people there. And so this unit with the then lieutenant colonel, now three-star general, he describes this scenario where his soldiers were asked to basically deal with this Taliban group. They were fighters. They were the enemy. So they make their way up, and they're getting all the information. Yes, looks good. It's exactly what we've said. We've got tents. We've got men sitting there outside. It's definitely a Taliban encampment. In fact, he was radioed a few times to say, you sure you just don't want us to drop a bomb on

these guys? They're bad guys. So all the data was feeding into this story. In some sense, the flashlight or torch was on this notion of, is our target. We got to get them. But the reality was they did not know. That was the whole reason they were making their way up the mountain to actually see. So as they get closer and closer, some of the scouts that were up near the front, kind of near the top of the mountain, they look and they say, initially they radio back to this lieutenant colonel and they say, yeah, sir, we see the tents. We see the men sitting there. You know, everything's checking out. It's like they got their story and everything's lining up. Again, being confirmed from this sort of confirmation bias notion. But then something

really, really important happened. One of the scouts, one of the soldiers said, sir, I see no weapons. Like he was looking at the scene and he was able to have his floodlight for a moment without this bias of the story that this was Taliban, because he knew what would be expected to be seen if they were enemy fighters. And what he saw instead was the absence of the very clear signal that they were actually combatants, no weapons. So then he saw instead was the absence of the very clear signal that they were actually combatants, no weapons. So then he said, you know, sir, I don't see any weapons and I'm close enough. I'm just going to tackle him. So he goes and runs in and tackles this guy. Of course, this person is just sitting there completely shocked. All of a sudden, these people pour

out of these tents, a very large woman who's the leader of this group. It ended up they were not Taliban fighters. This was a Bedouin tribe that had been going there to graze their animals for hundreds of years. And so how it relates to the floodlight is if that person could not have dialed down the story, if he wasn't able to do exactly what he did is keep that floodlight broad and receptive so he got the data, that entire group of people would have died. And it didn't happen because he was able to bring it up in the way that was appropriate. I think it's a great example. Firstly, I just want to also mention that around the topic of

fighting in war is incredibly controversial. And I'm certainly not talking about the pros and cons of that. I'm just using this as an example. And let me just say, same here. Yeah. I mean, I work with the military because I live in a country that happens to have one. And my intention is to increase people's capacity to make the right kind of decision. So I think, yeah, I appreciate it. I think it's important for us to say that here but but let's use that example because i think it's a brilliant example of why we need that situational awareness why we need our floodlights to be working as well as our spotlight so if that's um and forgive me for not knowing the terms of everyone, that's the commander, the general.

So in that situation, if he was super focused with the spotlight, with the torch, with the flashlight, right? That super narrow focus, that could have been tragedy, right? Had he not been able to sort of put in that attention system number two, certainly in the context of this conversation, this more broad, less specific, but more sort of wide ranging view, things could have gone wrong there. So that then leads me to think, are these two systems, and I know there's a third one we've not mentioned yet, but are these two systems in competition with each other? Like, are they both vying to be top dog? Because there are times, aren't there, where you want to be super focused. Let's take the example of the brain

surgeon. If they are in an intricate part of the operation, they don't want to be hearing the door slamming or anything that might be going on. They want to be focused just on that micro part through the microscope where they're operating. So I guess what I'm trying to understand is you want to train both of these parts and how, if you train both of those parts, can we just then switch between them when we need to in a situation appropriate manner? Yes, that is, you nailed it perfectly because from the kind of brain dynamics point of view, it is the case that the brain network that supports that focusing capacity and the brain network that supports that focusing capacity and the brain

network that supports this broad receptive stance, they are antagonistic. One does suppress the other. And we don't need to be a brain surgeon or on a top of a mountain trying to fight enemy combatants to know this. If you're going back to that example of reading a book, if you are fully focused in what you're reading, you are engrossed. And somebody walks in the room and starts talking to you. I know this happens all the time with my husband. I'll be reading something. He comes in, he starts talking. I was like, I have no idea what you just said. Say it again. And that even might take me a few minutes to even, like something kind of fuzzy was picked up, but articulating and comprehending did not happen. And why is that? That's a very natural, normal thing that happened. The brain system of focus actively inhibited the broad

receptive stance, right? And same idea with the other way around. If you're broad and receptive, let's say you're walking in a parking lot in the middle of the night by yourself and you don't know what's around, you're kind of nervous that potentially you're vulnerable to potentially, I don't know, getting attacked by a werewolf or whatever it is. You're going to not probably be able to do your best planning for the next day. You cannot be broad, receptive, and kind of alert to what's happening, vigilant, and have detailed, fine-grained thoughts about something. So we know that there's this sort of complementary nature of things. And yes, getting better and going back to this notion of what a peak mind is, is first of all, understanding these basic concepts, advantaging ourselves with the

knowledge that I can't be both focused and receptive, so I shouldn't expect it of myself. But the other thing is that we can train for better fluidity, better handoff, is that we can train for better fluidity, better handoff, and better awareness of where we are. I am focused right now, or I am too broad right now, or not broad enough right now. That knowledge, moment by moment, helps. And I guess that's where this idea of meta-awareness comes in. Awareness of when your mind is wandering, or awareness of this kind of broad view of the situation. Because you want to be good with the torch, you want to be good with the floodlight, right? So it's meta-awareness also, when you're able to stand back and go, no, I need a spotlight now. No, no, no, I don't need, now I need the spotlight to be turned down. I now need broad

situational awareness. I guess that to me sounds like a peak mind. awareness. I guess that to me sounds like a peak mind. You got it. I mean, it's this capacity to notice what is happening so that then we can take action to say, if I've got these, and I was kind of thinking about it like a mixing board, like an audio mixing board, right? We've got this capacity to focus. We've got this broadening capacity. And then we've got this third system, which we'll talk about, which is basically like a manager between our goals and our actions. But we can set the levers as we need to, unless we can take enough of a view of what's going on to know what is needed. We're never going to be able to change the settings in some sense. So while it is the case that meta-awareness is kind of comes out of this notion of being broad

and receptive, it's even further distanced back so that you can watch how broad or receptive you actually are. Yeah, no, I love that. Something that pops into my head was my daughter is currently eight years old. So at the moment, she can get engrossed in books. And I mean, engrossed. Like if she is reading a book that she's engaged in, I can literally be in the room talking to her and she doesn't, she has no awareness that I'm there. She's not ignoring me. I think sometimes parents would think that their kids are ignoring them. I don't feel in any sense that she's ignoring me. I feel that her torch is so bright and so laser pinpoint focus that in that moment, all she's seeing is the words on the page.

What do you think is going on in that particular moment? First of all, that's such an important insight that when children or anybody in our lives shows an attentional profile that doesn't fit with what we think it should be, we don't personalize it and then we don't assume that we know what the intention is behind the action. So I think the fact that as a parent, you've been able to say, she's actually not willfully ignoring me and she's not trying to be rude to me. It's just that right now, given that the frontal lobes, which are a very important system that, frankly, is responsible for all types of attention, they're an important developmental milestone right now. She may just be at this particular moment as an eight-year-old where that capacity to focus is really kicking in. And if it's possible, I have no idea. Some people just have this tendency throughout their life. It's possible that the other systems and the ability to coordinate back and forth will mature. Probably it will. And most people it does. So right now you're capturing her at a moment where she's just kind of, her brain is just kind of getting into that ability to focus because young children, we know probably until

she was probably most children between, you know, five, six, seven, they're starting to even be able to focus before that they're kind of all over the place anyway. So now they're developing this capacity to narrow and stay steady. And, and then they kind of have to go beyond that to be able to coordinate between staying steady and being able to adjust to return back to the moment. Yeah. I love what you said that. I mean, I think hopefully that will help some kids not to get told off for things that they're doing at the moment when they're not willfully trying to ignore their parents. But also something you said there really made me think about relationships. I know I started off saying, I think your work will not only help us focus better in our jobs, but will help us improve the quality of our relationships. Even that thing,

even this idea that, you know, our partner may be focusing on something else. So they may not be ignoring us when we say something to them. Like we don't know the intention. I'm talking for a friend, not for myself, of course. But do you know what I mean? It's kind of like, you know, I think understanding this and going, ah, actually their spotlight is ramped up at the moment. Yeah. They're not, they're not trying to ignore me, they're just super focused on something else. I think that's really, really helpful for people. And the other thing I want to sort of talk about with that example, with the potential enemy fighters, which ended up being a Bedouin tribe,

was this idea of the stories in our mind that we create. So it would have been very easy to go, no, no, it must be enemy fighters. Everything looks right, the right location, you know, up a mountain, all the things fit right. And so you just play, you know, as you say, that sort of the bias, the confirmation bias that we have. And I just thought then about my role as a doctor. And it's very common, especially if you have lots of patients, one after the other, that you then will look at the notes. In the UK in primary care, we still have 10 minutes, sometimes 50 minutes, but really 10 to 15 minute appointments, which really is insufficient to really get a grasp of what's going on. So often what you will do, and I used to do this early on in my career, you will look at the notes, quickly scan the blood results,

look at the past medical history, the previous few consultations, and you build up a picture in your mind because you're trying to save time. You're trying to make sure that actually I can utilize the 10 minutes most efficiently. But I soon realized that that can be problematic because then you start to expect things. You start to make assumptions. And actually, I found that I'm a much better doctor and I get much better results when I sort of rewind and don't make those assumptions, sometimes I won't even look at the notes in detail, not because I want to be negligent or make the patient feel as though I'm not caring about them, but more because I don't want to bias the consultation with that patient based on their previous history. Does that make sense at all? Oh, it's a beautiful example of how the generalizability of these skills.

And what I think you're doing with your own self-awareness is saying, I know the tendency of my mind. It's as much faster, efficient to shorthand what I think is going on. And then I just look for, yep, this meets all those requirements. Yep, there's a tent. Yep, there's men outside. You know, similar with the story we're talking about in Afghanistan. And instead, what you're doing is saying, what is the data of this moment? What am I hearing? And you might even even go one step further to say, what doesn't satisfy the thing I already

think is happening? Almost like I have a story. What is counter to this story? So that way you're not even denying the very logical thing you did. And probably 90% of the time you are right. When you're with your expertise, when you look at the charts and you look at the profile, it probably is the case that if you thought it was X, Y, or Z, it was X, Y, or Z. But to be an excellent doctor, as you're describing, you are dialing that down and saying, let's see what data appears. And you could also say, this is the story that exists. It's also part of the landscape of my mind right now. The fact that it might be this particular issue is present, but now let's see what the data actually are. Then I'll make a final assessment. So you

keep it as part of your information available to you. You don't deny it, but you are open to what you're hearing. I mean, this to me speaks to this concept of meta-awareness. It's like zooming out more and more, being aware of the mind-wandering, being aware of the story, being aware of the biases and going, okay, that's cool. I've got those biases. Now let's just look out for information that sort of is, you know, that may be different information that doesn't speak to that bias. And I guess this is something we see, don't we, online a lot these days. A lot of people getting very triggered, very angry, you know, seeing a small thing and then just jumping to conclusions over what might be going on rather

than, you know, trying to take that holistic 360 degree view. But again, I want to come back to this thing that you are showing through your work that this is trainable, right? So even if we don't feel we have it, it's trainable. So we're definitely going to get to those things. Three systems of attention. We have done one, the spotlight. We have done two, the floodlights. What is number three? The third system we would call formally executive control. And just to say what that is. So it's just like the term executive that you'd use for somebody in a business setting. What is the executive's job? The job of this individual is to ensure that the goals of the organization in that point of view and the behavior align. So what you want

to do and what you're doing should be congruent, consistent with each other. And executive control is essentially the brain's capacity to do that, to look at behavior moment by moment, compare it with the goals held moment by moment. And going back to this notion of privileging, because that's what we talked about attention is. In one case, you're privileging content. Another case, you're privileging time, what's happening right now. And in this third case, you're privileging your goals, the internally held orientation you have to ensure. So even going back to our ancient ancestors, and if the goal is to get food, what I should be privileging right now is sights, sounds, smells, things in my environment that are tied to food.

That should guide what I do. So this system I often call the juggler. are going in a way that's consistent with my goals and that I don't drop any of the balls, that I don't sort of let things fade in a way that isn't going to allow my behavior to be goal consistent. And that requires a few things. And this is what executive control really means. I'm maintaining my goals in my mind, something called working memory, just as we were talking about a moment ago. you know, just what is important right now, what am I supposed to be doing, but then other things like inhibit stuff that isn't related to those goals, so, you know, if I'm in the middle of trying to read a book, maybe turn off the notifications on my phone, because that's not going to be the thing that's going to be

driving what I'm doing. Updating information, so allow things to come in from the flashlight and the floodlight to inform whether my goals are actually still appropriate. So updating information would be another one. And then shifting between things. So these are all the different tools that executive control has in it. As you can already tell, it really directs what these other two brain systems doing. In some sense, it's sort of the boss of what's going on, because where I direct my flashlight, where I pull it away from when it's gone the wrong way, whether I'm broad and receptive or narrow, all could be tied to my goals in the moment. Yeah. It's so interesting. I love the way you break down attention, because as I said before

in this conversation, I really do feel that we kind of think attention is one thing. Am I paying attention to the thing I'm trying to pay attention to? I think that's as far as it goes for most people, but you spent, what, 20 years studying this and running experiments. This term working memory has come up a few times in this conversation. And I was thinking about the conversation with you earlier today and thinking about how to make this really relevant for people. So I have a few examples from my own life, which I might bring in here for you to sort of showcase what's going on with attention. Would you be up for trying that a little bit? So I've just come back from a few days in London with my

family. It's half term holidays at the moment. We went down to see the Lion King. I was sleeping in a hotel room and I didn't sleep very well. And then on Thursday morning of this week, I was basically walking to the local coffee shop with my son, who's 11. I was pretty knackered from the night before. We're all in one hotel room. I didn't have time to myself in the morning, which I really normally love and thrive on. So I wasn't really feeling my best self and my wife asked me to buy her a coffee. And it was quite complex order. For some reason, there was three or four things to remember with it. So I'm walking there with my son. And I think working memory may come in here, but I'm walking there with my son. And then he starts singing tunes to me. He said, Daddy, can you guess what

song I'm singing? Now, I'd like to think now that I've got much greater awareness than I had 10 years ago. But I said, hey, darling, listen, I'm trying to remember mummy's coffee order at the moment. So can you just wait until I've ordered it? And then I'll engage with what song you're singing. In my head at that time, I knew if I took my mind off my wife's coffee order and got caught up in the game, I really felt I was going to forget what I was told. There's a lot going on there. You're an expert in this. Could you maybe break down some of that for me? Oh, I love this. This is awesome. Before we get back to this week's episode, I just wanted to let you know that I am doing my

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drchatterjee.com forward slash tour, and I can't wait to see you there. This episode is also brought to you by the Three Question Journal, the journal that I designed and created in partnership with Intelligent Change. Now journaling is something that I've been recommending to my patients for years. It can help improve sleep, lead to better decision making and reduce symptoms of anxiety and depression. It's also been shown to decrease emotional stress, make it easier to turn new behaviours into long-term habits, and improve our relationships. There are, of course, many different ways to journal, and as with most things, it's important that you find the method that works best for you. One method that you may want to consider is the one that I outline in the three-question journal.

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I have received hundreds of messages from people telling me how much it has helped them and how much more in control of their lives they now feel. Now, if you already have a journal or you don't actually want to buy a journal, that is completely fine. I go through in detail all of the questions within the three-question journal completely free on episode 413 of this podcast. But if you are keen to check it out, all you have to do is go to drchatterjee.com forward slash journal or click on the link in your podcast app. so first of all he probably was fine waiting a little bit and i bet your wife was happy when she got the right coffee order so that's success because that story could have gone a lot of different ways right i mean ask somebody ask my own husband to do that and the wrong order comes

back it's no fun for anyone. So I think you did absolutely a very cool thing, which is you understood your mind. You understood that working memory, I mean, you didn't use those words probably, but what is working memory? It's the ability to maintain and manipulate information over very short periods of time. And I always use this analogy or metaphor of working memory, like your mind's internal whiteboard. So just like a whiteboard that you working memory like your mind's internal whiteboard. So just like a whiteboard that you write things on, that's what it is. It's a scratch space for our mind, but it's a peculiar kind of whiteboard because it's a whiteboard with disappearing ink.

So you write stuff on there, but it will fade away after a few seconds, few to several seconds. So what do you do to keep it in your mind? And I know that this is what you did as you were walking with your son. You keep writing it over and over again, and it fades. You got to write it over again. And you knew that it was going to be like a half-life over which you had to keep writing it, or else by the time you actually made it to the coffee shop, it probably would have been gone. And you'd be like, I have no idea. You probably have to call her. And then she's like, I told you five times what to get me. I'm not putting words. Your life is probably extremely lovely. I'm just putting myself in that situation. So what happened, which was very, very smart of you,

is you said, okay, look, I got to devote this energy to continue to write on this whiteboard or else it's going to disappear. Your son was singing lyrics, I'm assuming. He was not just humming a tune. He was singing lyrics. Those lyrics are going to end up on your whiteboard. And here's the thing about the whiteboard. Not only is a scratch space for us to put in our goals. In this case, she told you an order and your goal was maintain that order. You're writing it on your whiteboard internally. But that same whiteboard gets thrown on it anything that comes in from the environment. So even though it was not your intention to potentially process every word your son said, it's going to end up on the whiteboard. And then as you can imagine, as an actual whiteboard, it's going to have all this muck all over it, like writing of various

lyrics and then barely you're going to, the coffee order is going to fade away. And so what you said is essentially, don't give me that input right now. Let me keep doing this. Once I tell the barista the order, I want to hear everything you have to say about the Lion King, say all the lyrics. So it's such a beautiful example. Now, if you had gone to a symphony and your son wanted to hum a tune instead of sing lyrics, probably that would not have been a problem because it ends up that this whiteboard, we kind of have sort of different scratch spaces for different kinds of information. whiteboard, we kind of have sort of different scratch spaces for different kinds of information.

Just auditory sounds that aren't words, what might not have interfered quite as much. Yeah. I love the way you broke that down. And you said that that situation could have gone down several different ways. One way in which it could have gone down, which for me personally has been a real drive to, like, I feel, I feel maybe that was an example of meta-awareness there. I'm not entirely sure. I feel that without that meta-awareness, it could have been, I'm trying to keep the coffee order in my head. My son keeps singing. I'm trying not to pay attention or whatever. And then you could just snap and, you know, shout or snap at your son, which no parent really wants to do. I know many parents end up in that situation, but no one wants to be that person who does that. And I would like to think I do that very rarely these days, because I felt in that moment, hey, I literally can't pay

attention. He was great. I said, hey, can you just wait two minutes? Let me make the order and then I'm all yours and we could play this for as long as she wants. It was totally cool with that because I think I explained it without any sort of triggering emotion, without any stress. It's like, listen, I've got to do this. And he totally got it. He's like, yeah, cool. Ordered it. Then we played it. And it was a really fun game. So actually that worked really well. That was a beautiful outcome, right? But it could have gone many different ways. And that whiteboard... Sorry, if he were younger, he might not have been able to withhold.

Yeah. Starting to say it. Yeah. And that's also important to know as well, is that there's nothing wrong with him if he can't withhold it, because the inhibitory capacity to follow goal-directed behavior is just coming online at younger ages. Yeah. I mean, that's a great point. I'm really glad you made it. Does the whiteboard have limited space? So let's say I did engage and I played the game

and I then end up in front of the barista and I can't remember. Is there a way to find that information or does it literally just get faded out and erased? So that was question one. The second one is, how much does a lack of sleep the night before affect our attention, but also that sort of whiteboard space?

Yeah, 100%. Lack of sleep is going to affect everything, where your flashlight is, how your floodlight functions, executive control, working memory, everything is compromised as a function of poor sleep for multiple reasons that, you know, we can get into the kind of neural processing compromise that can occur. But yes, short answer, sleep will make this worse. No, you probably can't retrieve it. Now, if she tends to have the same order every time, so you kind of get a general idea, like it's not going to be, you know, a black coffee, it's going to have some more complexity to it. You probably would get in the ballpark because you can kind of rely on long-term memory. But if it's something that you're really not familiar with and you

really had to rehearse it in mind, no, there's not, no, the only thing you could have done is probably called or texted or just tell it to me again. So it's not like other forms of memory because it truly is a temporary scratch space. We don't want to remember what's on the whiteboard forever, right? So think about that in the context of having a conversation. Like even right now as we're talking, we're both using our whiteboards. In fact, we've got a shared whiteboard too because we're throwing stuff up there and saying, is what I'm seeing and what you're seeing the same? That's how we have a kind of shared comprehension in the context of communication. So as I'm talking, I can see it on your face. Sometimes you're thinking about what I'm saying and you have an idea and you're polite

and you're not just blurting it out. You have it held on your whiteboard. You're seeing if, as the words I'm saying are aligned with this thing you're holding. So you're kind of keeping your attention on both of them. And then when the appropriate moment arises, you can give the appropriate content. Yeah, I love that. And that then leads nicely onto another example, which I had in my head, which was podcasting, as we are doing together now. So I feel almost four years into having this podcast. I feel that the art of conversation, the art of podcasting has actually made me a better person. And I'll explain what I mean by that. Not only, you know, of course, I get to speak to incredible minds like yours. I get to ask whatever question I want to, you know, some leading thinkers, which of course is

going to expand my own knowledge and repertoire, my ability to help people and help my patients. But that's not really what I'm talking about. What I'm talking about here is I do long form conversations. So, you know, I started off, they were 30, 40 minute conversations, but I realized that I really enjoy the in-depth 90 minutes, one hour 40, sometimes two hours if it's going really well, or there's a lot to say about a particular topic. And I found that as the conversations get longer and more in-depth, A, they're more popular, more people listen, which kind of we could get to because that kind of speaks to the opposite of what people tell us these days, which is people's attention is fragmented. So let's just park that on the

whiteboard. I'll try and put it in a heavy marker pen so it's still there in about five minutes. But I feel like we're doing this over Zoom. So, you know, but sometimes I'll have a guest, you know, literally one, one and a half meters away from me in the same room. And for 90 minutes, for two hours, I'm having a conversation with them with very little distraction. There's no phone, there's no email, there's no notifications coming up. You know, when I'm really in flow, I'm not distracted at all, though I don't think I'm distracted. I'm sure I do get distracted at times. So I guess one question from that is, does this practice of having long form conversation where I can't get distracted because it would be rude to get distracted. You finish saying something and I'm thinking about picking up my kids after school or, you know, that would be

rude. But also the conversation isn't going to get deep. It's not going to get, it's not going to be as rewarding and as nourishing as it could be if I was getting distracted. So I guess one of my thoughts is, does practicing regular 90 minute, twohour, undistracted conversations, does that help me with my attention when I'm not podcasting? So is it a transferable skill? And I guess the other thing I've learned in four years, nearly four years of doing this, is that the more present I can be to you, my guest, the less I can think about where do I want to go next with this conversation? What have we not covered yet? The better the conversation goes, because actually, if I'm now starting to think, like when you asked me before, what's the sensation

on my feet? That takes me away from actually what you're saying. And then it can take me a few moments to get back. And sometimes I have done that before in a conversation where you think, oh man, I missed the last 10 seconds. What did he or she say? Right? But I feel I've got much better at that now. I've learned to trust myself and go, no, wrong, and stay present. Stay focused. You've never been short of something to say in your entire life. It ain't going to start now. So a few little themes there. I wonder if any of that sort of spot your interest at all and whether we could talk about some of those things. Totally. I think it's great. I mean, I think that again, they're showing such great meta-awareness and even meta-cognition. So that's sort of this close cousin of meta-awareness where we kind of understand our styles and our kind of cognitive orientation toward things. So, um, you know, you, what you just said, like, I,

I should trust myself. I tend to be able to have verbal fluency. I never have problems doing that. That would be more like metacognition. These are my tendencies of mind. And awareness is where am I right now in this moment, which you also had an awareness of because, or else you would have been like, I missed the last 10 seconds to even know that, right. Is, is part of your understanding of the moment. So what I would say is so great about what you're describing. And I do think there, this is a transferable, um, capacity though. I, my hunch is that you had this capacity all along, study all along, really what we'd call attentive listening. You are both focused on me, but you're broad and receptive with regard to what's coming in. And this notion of the shared whiteboard, really what I'd call a shared mental model, like you're more available to it, right? So as I'm

saying words, we're painting pictures in our minds of what's being said. And then we're kind of checking with each other if the image I have or the landscape I'm drawing and what you're drawing align. And that's what a conversation actually is. It's understanding. And when we say things like, are we on the same page here? Essentially, that's what we mean is my view of what's going on in yours the same. Journeying that together is the most fruitful kind of conversation to have. Because as I'm scratching away certain parts, you're also doing that and that goes back and forth. Now, it requires these key aspects. It requires the ability to devote focus, but it requires a constant ability to check in with where you actually are. If you were so

preoccupied about making your next point, or that it's going to have to go in this direction, regardless of what I'm hearing, it's going to get awkward and jolty. What you are doing with your podcast style and your interviewing style, I think, is really making a point that we described earlier, which is that our attention spans are not shrinking. We may feel that way because we're dealing constantly with the pull of notifications on our phone, but we have this capacity. Anybody that listens to your podcast has shown this capacity to stay with content over a long period of time. And why doesn't it go like this, like the degradation, that boring experiment I described to you with the memory item after memory item where people are wandering away,

it's because you bring us back, you engage again and again. So the flashlight may have some tendency to wander off, but then you're like, come back here. This is another interesting point. So I think that weaving that throughout a conversation with receptivity and clarity and humility and understanding it's a shared experience is what makes it not only fun, but something transferable that can benefit aspects, other aspects of your life. Yeah. I really appreciate what you said there. And again, I'm drawn to this key concept that you described early on in your book, Peak Minds, and I sort of, I think I circled it. There is nothing wrong with your retention, right? And I paused and I thought about that because

I reckon if you go down the street and you just talk to random people, they'll say, yeah, man, I can't concentrate anymore. I'm distracted all the time. So this idea that there's nothing wrong, our brain is doing what it is designed to do, I think is really powerful. Because as you say, you know, people are listening. You went on Joe Rogan, what, for three plus hours you were on Rogan, right? That's a long time. You know, again, Joe Rogan's got the most popular, most listened to show on the planet, and he routinely goes over three hours, right? So clearly there is a lot of people, even in this world of emails, notifications, screens, distractions, social media,

despite that, I guess many people are able to concentrate despite what we're told. Yeah. Not only are we, we're not, I don't even think it's that we're told, we experience it. Yeah. I don't even think it's that we're told. We experience it. We experience that our attention gets fragmented and fractured. I want to just make the point that it's not only that there's nothing wrong with us, it's that there's so much right with the way that our attention functions that social media companies can actually have a team of programmers of, uh, programmers really astutely program algorithms that will keep our attention engaged. So it's very predictable. It's happening exactly in the way that it should, but it's being gamed for the benefit of somebody that doesn't feel like it's us. Right. So, so, and I don't think that that's a trivial point because the even if i say there's nothing wrong with your attention it doesn't mean like everything feels okay it feels it feels difficult it feels very difficult to try to have um you know uninterrupted time working without feeling like you're getting pulled into things and so then what's the solution so this is you

know and i do make this argument in the book that oftentimes the solutions we're given are essentially go become a monk, you know, drop all your worldly possessions, throw your phone in the river and, and then just live your life. And that is so unrealistic. It's just, it's, it's unrealistic because we think back to those monks from medieval times, they had the same issue. But it's also unrealistic because I don't think it's really providing the kind of guidance that will help us in this modern era, which is we right now don't pay enough attention to where our attention is. We assume that we put it where we want and it stays there. And then we somehow think there's something wrong with us when it gets pulled by other things like the ding of your phone or notifications, or even the kind of media that you might consume, you know, online. But that's not the case. It's not the case that

we are not, it's not the case there's anything wrong with, it's the case that we aren't monitoring ourselves. We aren't watching where we're going. We're defaulting to certain tendencies. So in some sense, what I'm going to say is the same answer we've been talking about all along. If we cultivate the capacity to become meta-aware, to watch ourselves, and almost, I talk about it as sort of like this bird's eye view of ourselves as we go into any situation, whether it's doing our work, you know, being a physician, looking over reports before you see a patient, or even interacting with our phone. Let's grow this capacity for meta-awareness so that we have more choice points. Because if we don't know what's going on, we can't choose, right? So like even as granular as, should I actually even scroll one more time?

We default to kind of becoming zombies where the autopilot system, the exogenous attention system takes over. And then the juggler's completely offline. All the balls are dropped. The floodlights checked out. And you're just kind of pointing this flashlight in the way that the content is pulling you toward it. out and you're just kind of pointing this flashlight in the way that the content is pulling you toward it. I guess the meta-awareness there is, or could be, and please correct me if

this isn't quite right, I'm now going to look on social media for 20 minutes. I just feel like numbing my brain for 20 minutes and switching off. And I guess the problem is when that 20 minutes becomes two hours and you didn't really know what was happening before you know it, actually, it's late in the evening, you've not done what you needed to do. Whereas if you were at least aware to say to yourself, okay, you know, this is 20 minutes. Yes, it's going to be a bit of fun. I'm not really doing anything productive, but I'm actively choosing to do this for 20 minutes. Then you sort of have an awareness like throughout it that actually, this is not necessarily productive. This is me unwinding, it's me switching off. And after 20 minutes, you're able to go,

okay, I've done what I said I was going to do. Now I'm going to move on. Is that also a kind of different branch potentially where we can think about meta-awareness in terms of still engaging with things that we know are hijacking our attention, but not allowing them to completely hijack our lives? That's such a beautiful way to put it. I mean, in some sense, it's a combination of having that executive control, set the goal and the parameters, and then holding our meta-awareness to monitor our ongoing activity. And if it's hard for you to do that, set a timer. But there's one other thing to say about that, which is be aware of this idea of this concept of what you might think of as downtime. Because oftentimes we say, I'm just going to go on social

media. Even if you are, your executive control is strong enough and your meta awareness is strong enough to say, I'm only going to do it for 20 minutes. Very rarely do we do that. But let's say you even did that. Think about what is actually happening in the context of engaging with scrolling. Oftentimes the kinds of things that lure us, that keep us, are things like threatening, fear-inducing, self-related stuff, alarming stuff. So just be aware that what you might think of as downtime for your attention is actually strongly engaging. You might not even think of it as downtime for your attention, just may think of it as downtime, but it is strongly engaging your attention. And it's very likely that if it's keeping you there, there's probably something about it that's going to lead to a little bit

of dysphoria after. And it could be just because it's very alarming news. It's surprising news. It's self-related and evaluative, like, oh, this person has more than me in this realm or that realm. All of those things that are the reason we can get pulled in are also these basic survival pressures that really hijack attention in a way that sets off a whole cascade of stress hormones often. So that's one thing is to say that attention is not actually giving, it's not even just giving, you're not getting a break when it comes to your attention, but the content is not innocuous. Yeah. I think that is such a brilliant point. It's not neutral. Like if you then, as you say, if you stick to those 20 minutes, but then for the rest of that

evening, later on, you are ruminating, you are worried about the state of the world, you put yourself into a stress response, fight or flight state, and then your sleep gets affected. And then your next day, your relationship shall work, everything gets, you know, those 20 minutes actually of downtime were pretty costly, potentially, weren't they? Yeah. And it's not that you don't want to be an unaware person that lives in your own bubble. You want to know what's going on. But you want to be aware that if you're seeking these sources of downtime to benefit you, it's probably not benefiting you. And my recommendation, just based on what we know with regard to attention,

is to actually let your mind not wander in the way that we're talking about, where it's in the context of a task, but let spontaneous thought arise unhinged or disconnected from content being fed to you. Because what that does is it really does seem to be just objectively speaking, mood boosting. And so, you know, what I mean by that is essentially, I guess I'm going back to very, very old wisdom. Go for a walk. Let your mind go wherever it will. Daydream. Let spontaneous thought arise. Because that is truly giving your attention system a break. It really is allowing the executive control to have a little bit of downtime. It doesn't have to hold all these goals in mind

or it's not, the flashlight isn't constantly getting captured. You're just letting mental content arise. And it ends up that we now know that spontaneous thought is actually not only better for mood and creative visioning and sort of productive problem solving, but maybe the route by which we are able to have better memory as well. Because the spontaneous thought that the brain pumps out is actually fragments and bits and pieces of a replay system

that allows for the encoding of memories to solidify. the encoding of memories to solidify. Wow. I mean, there's so much to think about in terms of what you just said, this idea that allow them to come up, allow those spontaneous thoughts to come up, daydream, mind wander. But I guess when we're constantly consuming content, no matter how good that content is, we're not allowing our mind just to wander naturally. So then to take the next step then for our attention, if going for a walk, let's say, has these benefits that it allows these thoughts to come up. We've spoken on the show before about the default mode network and how that then fires up and we can be more creative, we can solve problems. What about walking whilst listening to music or whilst listening to podcasts? Does that get in the way at all of our ability to let our mind wander?

Do we want some walks each week? But this is what I try to do. I do enjoy going for walks and listening to podcasts or music. I really do. But always try at least once or twice a week, go for a walk without anything, just to remind myself that I can do it without the need for an external device. But also I find it very relaxing and rejuvenating in a very different way um so how do you look at those things through the lenses your work yeah you know what i was saying a moment ago regarding uh scrolling and sort of the kinds of things that will grab the attentional torch if you will i think that the realm of of sort of what you were

talking about earlier with regard to podcasts and your podcast in particular and the kind of nourishment people would receive from it because it is a long, it is an exercise of your attention, but it's feeding your knowledge in a positive way. So just to put that to the side right now is that it's not that all content that engages us is problematic. I wanted to have a moment to say that. But here's what I would say. Go for a walk, listen to music, go for a walk and listen to a podcast. But here's another way you can actually bring more what I would call white space to your day. All those moments where you default to pulling out your phone and starting to read your email or go on your newsfeeds, see if you can just

try out not doing that. So use the micro moments, the space in between where you default to a quick fix of something. Now, obviously, sometimes you do need to check if the kids have texted so you can go pick them up. That's fine. But you're stopped at a stoplight. Just stop. Don't pick up the phone. Walking from your car to your office or whatever, walk. walking from your car to your, you know, office or whatever, walk, actually experience yourself walking. You know, it's funny, my colleagues, you know, some of these, these very senior military officers that I've gotten to know, they don't have their lives are extremely scheduled. Same thing with with judges and lawyers and physicians. I mean, I know this is not only for them, but they would say, like, I can't, I don't have time for this. I have no time to do any of this white space stuff. And I would just be like, you know,

mostly it's, it's men. I'd be like, sir, do you walk from one meeting to the next or are people coming to you? No, I walk from one meeting to the next. What's happening in that walk? Usually I'm getting fed something about the next meeting. And I said, are there any times when you might be able to walk without getting something fed to you? Like an aid is talking to you as you're going. Yes, there are definitely times to do that. Do that. Feel your feet on the ground as you walk from one meeting to the next.

And I would say the same thing to the physicians that we work with. Just from going to one patient room to the other patient's room, you know, as soon as you put that clipboard on that door and close it, just be in the moment before you arrive at the next room. That way you will be fresh, the kind of pivoting that's necessary so that all the lingering things that just occurred aren't yanking your attention back in time. And you're more there. So that's a place to start. You don't need to force yourself to put your phone away and go for a walk without anything. But there's so many moments we miss letting ourselves have that free space. So start there is what i would say in terms of training our attention in the conversation so far we've spoken about the three different areas within the attention system right we've spoken at length about them used examples I hope to really bring it to life for people.

How much do people need to do each day if they want to have better attention? You know, the cover of my book says 12 minutes a day, so I will stand by that. But let me just break that down of even why we came to an answer like that. In some sense, I was driven to want to have the most time efficient solution I possibly could give people because the kinds of groups that we work with in my lab, you know, we talked about the baseline being 50% of our time that is spent mind wandering. We talked about this general fatiguing ability of things like stress and threat and mood to degrade our attention. But a lot of the professions and professionals that we deal with, they're susceptible to a lot more mind-wandering and a lot more degradation. And in fact, when we bring people into the lab and we have them do attention tasks, and then a few weeks later, we have them do attention tasks again. And in that interval is

something demanding and stressful. For example, for students, it could be just going through the academic semester or for firefighters, emergency services people. It could be training for hurricane season. I live here in Miami. For soldiers, it could be preparing for deployment or deployment itself. What we know is when the demands are high and protracted, attention is going to get worse. And so I wanted to see if we could protect it. And by the way, it gets worse because all of these systems are being utilized a lot and because probably the stress is resulting in a lot of mental hijacking where their mind is ruminating or catastrophizing. So everything is kind of amped up with regard to the usage of the system. And I wanted to find out if there's

some way we could train them, something they could do daily for a short period of time to protect against it. And the same way that we know physical activity helps us stay physically fit. So that's, you know, we were able to, to, to live our lives in a way that's physically healthy. And so what we did, I just want to say something about the actual training itself, because that was also a little bit of a surprise, if you don't mind. So we tried a lot of different things to come up with a solution of how we're going to protect against this decline we see over high stress intervals, like literally light and sound devices to stimulate attention or

positive mood inductions, or even brain training games where people are playing simple video games to exercise attention. Nothing worked. We could not find a generalizable benefit to people's lives. And the one thing that did work is something called, you know, as you know, and I know you've talked about at some point on your show, mindfulness meditation. And mindfulness meditation was such an odd solution, but when you actually look at the details of what it is, paying attention to present moment experience without a story about it, without reactivity to it, it meets the exact same pain point we've been talking about this entire time. Our attention gets hijacked away

from the here and the now without us knowing about it. So if we can train our mind to be more here more often to get the data of what is occurring right now, probably we'll be able to stave off a lot of that distractibility and stress-related decline. And that's what we saw. We saw that giving people as little as four weeks of formal training and asking them to do 12 to 15 minutes a day was able to keep attention stable over time instead of declining. I mean, that's just so inspiring and empowering because who doesn't want more attention? Who doesn't want a better ability to focus, to not get distracted as often, or at least to know when they are getting distracted. And, you know, at the end

of the book, which is really a brilliant read, you know, you walk people through these kind of practical daily exercises that really don't take much time at all, as you say, 12 minutes a day can make a huge difference. So can we go through some of those exercises? You know, what are the ones that people can think about applying immediately? Right. I mean, I think the first one to probably talk about, because we've been touching on those three systems of attention, is something that is actually foundational to almost every mindfulness program. And I just want to say that mindfulness has been around for millennia. This is not something I came up with. This is part of the world's wisdom traditions, and in particular, inspired by a lot of Buddhist practice. We teach it in a way that

does not require any overarching worldview. You don't need to be of any particular religious tradition to practice in the way that we're guiding people to practice. Because really the intention from a cognitive training, a brain training perspective, is that we're engaging attention and we're exercising attention. So one foundational practice that is always part of what we teach and certainly what I describe in the book, I call it the find your flashlight practice because I think that's actually what you're doing. But formally, it might be called breath awareness practice or mindfulness of breathing. So what you do is essentially you sit in a comfortable, quiet place. And it's always good to start by advantaging your environment. If you want to do it in a noisy

coffee shop, you can. But the point is you take it as seriously as any other thing that you do for personal betterment and personal training. So when you're exercising, you take it as seriously as any other thing that you do for personal betterment and personal training. So when you're exercising, you take that seriously. Same way when you're exercising your mind, you take that seriously. So you're going to sit in this kind of alert, upright, dignified posture where you're taking the task seriously. And what you do next is essentially check in with the body breathing. Breathing is happening. We don't need to try to breathe. It's thankfully something that parts of the brain are controlling for us quite naturally. But then we start engaging attention. We notice we're sitting there with our body breathing.

We're kind of stable, upright. And what we start noticing, and again, this would be sort of engaging the floodlight, what's most prominent in my breath-related sensations? What's something that kind of stands out in the now, right now? And oftentimes people report maybe just the coolness of air moving in and out of your nostrils or maybe your chest moving up and down. It doesn't matter what it is. The point is select it, select something that seems prominent, and then essentially take your flashlight and have that sensation be the target for your attention for this short period of time.

And I would recommend if people have never done this before, two minutes, do this for two minutes. So you're sitting, you're noticing breathing, you pick something prominent, and now you focus. So you focus the flashlight on an intended target of sensations that are going to change. But the part of the body that you focus on is going to stay stable. So just above my nostrils would be a place, for example. That's where my attention is. I'm checking in. I'm noticing that I'm breathing, that the sensory experience is changing.

So focusing is the first instruction. The second instruction is now essentially notice. Notice when your mind has wandered away from those breath-related sensations. So you're engaging the floodlight to be on the lookout. What's happening right now? Monitoring, meta-awareness. What is happening right now? So as the flashlight is directed toward the target, maybe it's been wandered away to something you're planning for the future or an itch on your forehead or whatever it is, you know, a ding of the phone in the next room. Ah, my attention wandered away. Think of that as a win. That is not a failure of your mind. You actually noticed

where your attention and your flashlight are and then redirected back to those breath-related sensations. So, you know, this is where a lot of our military colleagues will call this mental push-up. So it's focus, notice, and redirect. And in some sense, we're engaging all three of those brain systems. The torch is pointing toward the sensations. The floodlight is monitoring what's going on. And that executive control is saying, get back on track.

That's not your goal right now. Yeah, it's a beautiful exercise that, yeah, as you were saying, I was thinking, this is doing all three. This is not just the spotlight. This is doing spotlight, floodlight, and the executive control system. And I also was thinking that fundamentally what you're asking us to do is to take this seriously and say, look, we kind of get the idea, don't we, that if we want bigger biceps and we go into the gym and

we progressively start increasing the weight at which you do a bicep curl, we know you keep doing that, it is going to get stronger, it is going to get bigger. No one would really argue with that. It's kind of ingrained in our belief system and the narrative around life that that is going to happen. But we don't really think about strengthening our attention in the same way as a bicep muscle. And we really should, because effectively what you're saying is take it seriously, right? If it's two minutes, it's two minutes, but it's two minutes where you are in the game of strengthening attention right that's the game at that time and I think it's really empowering for people because you're not saying your mind can't wonder if you notice your your mind's gone away

from the breath you failed and you're saying the opposite you're saying actually your mind is going to wonder I want you to notice when it's going to wander, which I think is a really, I think it's very gentle. I think it's, I think it's contrary to what a lot of people actually think mindfulness or meditation is. I think there is this belief that it's about, you know, having a serene, calm mind that never goes anywhere. But, but I think you're, you're beautifully showing that that's not necessarily the goal. Yeah. And that's why I even talk about it as the find your flashlight practice, because then you feel the win. When I know where it is,

it's like, oh, there it is. Got to get it back. It's a self-supported orientation toward this very normal thing that the mind does, which is mind wandering. And of course, we're never doing this to be excellent breath followers. We're just doing that as the workout so that now, when you are in the middle of a conversation with your loved one, you know, or when you do need to take a coffee order and walk down the street, it's like, you've got the access to your flashlight, you know, you got it on the whiteboard. You know, you know exactly what's going on right now and what the competing influences are. You can get back on track when you need to. I mean, these are, this is how it shows up in our lives. And in fact, this is why it was so surprising to me that it had never been brought to the lab before because it's such a powerful tool. scientists are trying to do to train brains, it's one of the ones that we've found is the most generalizable in terms of the benefit. So you can go by, and this is probably the thing that

surprised me the most in our data, really sitting and paying attention to my breath by myself. I can now bring people into the lab or put them in the brain scanner, have them do an intentionally demanding task, and I can see structural and functional and performance differences on something totally unrelated to the breath, that's kind of amazing. It is really core strength. But now from the mental and attentional point of view, instead of something like the physical point of view. It really is. It's brilliant. We get the concept. Do your strength training in the gym, do your squats, then you're going to find it easier to take the shopping to your car or take your shopping or your grocery shopping up the stairs to wherever your car is parked, right? We get that. And you're saying the same thing,

do this simple exercise for minutes a day that costs zero money at all to do, which I, again, I'm really passionate about trying to make health as accessible to as many people. This is a practice that anyone can do if they just decide for a few minutes a day, I'm going to actually do this. And then what you're demonstrating is the benefits are going to be seen outside the practice. So in the rest of your life, when you interact with your partner, with your children, with your boss, you know, whoever it is, you're going to be able to have that meta-awareness. It's going to improve the quality of all those interactions. And as you say, you're right, it's at its core, quite a simple exercise.

It is quite a simple exercise. It is quite a simple exercise. It does not mean easy. But the other thing I was going to say is that, you know, the whole reason that we spent about eight years of my lab's research trying to pursue this question of a minimum effective dose was because once you figure out that mindfulness training and mindfulness practices are beneficial, then you want to know for how long, right? Because some of the initial studies done that found beneficial effects, even from my own lab, we went to retreat centers where people were practicing 10 to 12 hours a day. They were doing a lot of practice and then we were seeing benefits. So the question became, is that really what it takes? It's almost like, well, you're not going to get any health benefits unless you train for several marathons. We'd probably be like, forget it.

I'm not even going to try. But learning that a couch to 5K can actually have positive health effects. This is sort of the equivalent. I wanted to find out what's the kind of enough of a push and challenge that will start being able to have tractable benefits. And that's where this 12 minute comes from. Essentially, it was saying when people build up or choose to do 12 minutes or more, we're seeing tractable benefits in the lab. If they do less than that, we tend not to see a lot of benefit. But if they do more than 12 minutes, the more they do, the more they benefit. in the same way, once you get to that 5k capacity, you can go on to be an Olympic level runner if you choose to, but you've really achieved some kind of important health shift by doing just that.

And that, you know, going for leisurely walk with your with your dog or whatever down the street, it's not going to be a problem if you do that, but that's not going to be enough of a push to really cause health transformation. So knowing what that boundary condition was, it was very important to me so that I could guide people in a way that was beneficial. Yeah. I think that's, that's a really good analogy. And would that be 12 minutes on this one exercise? Would that give us the benefits? That's correct. Yeah. There are other exercises that you can do. So this one really, the find your flashlight is about kind of the concentrative aspects where we have a target for our attention. We're broadly noticing mind wandering away from that. We're getting it

back on track. But the other exercises that I describe in the book are part of a suite of practices that kind of tap into various attention systems. So there's another exercise, which we don't probably have time to get into, something called open monitoring, where we're really exercising the floodlight, that meta-awareness, that receptivity, more so than the flashlight. So this is what I would call sort of cross-training for your attention. You're getting, not only are you exercising all three systems in every, every kind of exercise, but you can kind of, um, advantage some over others with specific practices. Yeah. That cross training idea again is, is brilliant. If we keep using that analogy of

the physical gym, you know, we know that actually if all you do is work on your biceps, okay, you're going to have bigger biceps, but actually, how practical is that going to be to the rest of your life? You're going to be missing out on core strength. You're going to be missing out on all kinds of other things which you need to be a physically able, functional human. And as you say, all these exercises that you outline in the book are going to also teach us cross-training. They're going to help us focus on different parts of the attention system so we can become attention maestros, right? That's what we want. At least we want to feel a little bit better so that we're not in a crisis mode all the time with our attention. Yeah. Man, so interesting. I know we've probably

not got time to go to things that hijack our attention. I know there's three core things that you write about stress, low mood and threat. Before we end, I just wanted to touch on low mood because we mentioned it earlier on in the podcast that I know low mood itself can make our attention worse. But then as I was reading that section this morning, I then thought, rumination, catastrophizing about the future, these things all take us out of the present. These things are things that we see commonly in people who are depressed or anxious. So I thought surely this goes both ways. I thought low mood itself can make your attention worse but then I thought well if we get

better with our attention, if we're able to stay in the present moment more often and for longer, then presumably that's also going to help us with depression and anxiety. That's right. Absolutely. And in some sense, people don't typically think about psychological disorders as attentional disorders, but in some sense they are. So oftentimes we can think about, well, when we see this in certain kinds of patients, it's not just that depressogenic mood or content arises in the context of depression. It's that the flashlight, the torch is overly fixated on that content. So you can't yank it away. You know, I talk about it as, and this is a term in cognitive psychology, attentional

rubbernecking. So just like if you're driving down the road and there's an accident, you kind of like you have this phenomenon of rubbernecking. It's like that. The content is stickier. We can't pull the flashlight away. That's one problem. The second problem is we're typically in this kind of ruminative context without our awareness that we are.

So we don't even know we've landed in the land of rumination, if you will. It might take a very long time, right? It's almost like getting to that bottom of that page while we're reading and being like, oh my gosh, I'm just stuck. And the worst, I think, is when you realize finally that I'm stuck, I'm ruminating, I can't get out of this particular very bad interaction I had or some feeling I have about myself, whatever it is, I'm lost. I'm lost of how to remove myself from this mental state. And again, attention can be a way to rescue us out because we can pay attention differently. So just to say, I've not said we have multiple flashlights. I've talked about having one.

So if you are now in a position where you are ruminating on very negative content and you're feeling it and you're feeling stuck, you even have an awareness that that's happening. What can you do about it? Well, what you can do about it is essentially getting yourself in a more meta aware state by something called de-centering. And de-centering is, we've talked about it already, kind of this bird's eye view. So now in the moment that you realize, ah, this is happening, I'm trapped in a ruminative loop. The first thing you can do is just state what's happening, but state it in a distanced way by just talking about your mind in the third person, like a reporter on the sidelines of some kind of news event. Amishi is feeling this. Amishi is experiencing that. So already in order to see what's going on, I've had to extract myself

to this kind of bird's eye view where I'm pointing the flashlight now on this person who is experiencing something. And just that, now having the flashlight that's pointing toward the content means I'm not stuck in it. I can't have my flashlight in it and looking at it. So distancing is a way to kind of allow us to unstick ourselves from this very depressing, sorry, very difficult mental content. And I think it's like I said, it's both, it's attention can get hijacked by negative mood, but it can also be a way out of a very difficult set of mental circumstances. Yeah. I mean, the more I think about your work, the more I think about attention,

the more I think it's hard to make the case that all of us shouldn't be practicing, developing, training this skill regularly, hopefully on a daily basis, but certainly regularly, because it's going to help relationships, focus, productivity. It could potentially help with things like anxiety, depression, when you're stuck in various loops. I'm convinced enough from reading your book and talking to you that I think, well, why would I not introduce this exercise to my children? Like, seriously, I'm thinking enough from reading your book and talking to you that I think, well, why would I not introduce this exercise to my children? Like seriously, I'm thinking, well, why would I want them to wait till their sort of early forties to start? What if I could help them understand this now at 11 and eight? You know, I think that would be incredible.

Amit, there's so much more I could have spoke to you about. I think you've written a brilliant book. I think your work is helping so many people around the globe now, which is just great to see. This podcast is called Feel Better, Live More. When we feel better, we get more out of our lives. I would sort of expand that with you to say when we can focus better, when we can strengthen our attention more, we're going to get more out of our lives. So for my listeners, for my viewers, do you have any final words, any sort of inspirational words to them? If they want to get started, if they feel inspired by what you've said, what would you say to them? what would you say to them? You know, I think I love the, I love the title of your podcast, because in some sense, we started out talking about 50% of our waking moments. We're in this

distracted haze of not being in the moment. And in some sense, paying attention to what is happening right now, it brings back more, more of the moments of our lives because we're here for them instead of being lost in thought. And so the sort of inspirational message would essentially be something very simple that we've been talking about all along. Pay attention to your attention. Take it seriously because you may not have more moments of living, but you'll be there for more moments of your life. And the good news is it doesn't take a lot of investment to kind of change this default of mind wandering as little as 12 minutes a day. And it can really help. Amishi, thank you so much for making time to come on

the show. I really wish we'd done this in person, but if you are back in the UK at any time, feel free to send me an email or a text. I'd love to meet up in person. And maybe if you have time, we'll do round two. But good luck with everything you're doing. It's a great book. Peak Minds, find your focus, earn your attention, invest 12 minutes a day. Take care and hopefully I'll see you soon. Thank you so much. It's been a lot of fun. Really hope you enjoyed that conversation. As always, do have a think about one thing that you can take away and start applying into your own life. Now, before you go, I really want to let you know about Friday Five. It's my weekly newsletter that contains

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listen on if you are new to my podcast you may be interested to know that i have written four books so far that are available to buy all over the world covering all kinds of different topics like mental health nutrition sleep stress behavior change stress, behavior change, and weight loss. So do take a moment to check them out. They're all available in paperbacks, eBooks, and as audiobooks, which I'm narrating. Thank you so much for listening. Have a wonderful week and please do press follow on whichever podcast platform you listen on so you can get notified when my latest conversation comes out. Remember, you are the architects of your own health, making lifestyle changes always worth it. Because when you feel

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