Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - BITESIZE | How to Train Your Attention and Improve Your Life | Dr Amishi Jha #341

Episode Date: March 3, 2023

By harnessing the power of our attention, we can better meet life’s demands. Our ability to focus and pay attention plays a crucial role in every aspect of our life - at work, at leisure and in our relationships.  Feel Better Live More Bitesize is my weekly podcast for your mind, body, and heart.  Each week I’ll be featuring inspirational stories and practical tips from some of my former guests. Today’s clip is from episode 218 of the podcast with Dr Amishi Jha - a neuroscientist and a professor of psychology at the University of Miami. Research shows that most of us are missing up to 50% of our lives through distraction and, in this clip, she explains how we can train our attention to improve our lives. Thanks to our sponsor http://www.athleticgreens.com/livemore Support the podcast and enjoy Ad-Free episodes. Try FREE for 7 days on Apple Podcasts https://apple.co/feelbetterlivemore. For other podcast platforms go to https://fblm.supercast.com. Show notes and the full podcast are available at drchatterjee.com/218 Follow me on instagram.com/drchatterjee Follow me on facebook.com/DrChatterjee Follow me on twitter.com/drchatterjeeuk   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.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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10. And these packs are perfect for keeping in your backpack, 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. Welcome to Feel Better Live More Bite Size, your weekly dose of positivity and optimism to get you ready for the weekend. Today's clip is from episode 218 of the podcast with Dr. Amishi Jha, a neuroscientist and a professor of psychology at the University of Miami. Research shows that most of us are missing up to 50% of our lives through distraction. And in this clip, she explains how we can train our attention to improve the quality of our lives. to improve the quality of our lives.

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. 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? 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

of the moments of our lives because we're here for them instead of being lost in thought. 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 this 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, it was that I felt like I was missing my life. I think pretty much everybody listening or watching this 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. But 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. 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? Absolutely. So right now, you know, Rangan, I'm looking at your face, that's going to 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, formerly 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, 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 plainly saying, if I said to you, can you tell me what the sensations are right now on the bottoms of your feet? It's like, well, probably you can 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. But these other two systems are advantaging other types of information. 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. It's broad, receptive, concentrated torch that we described. 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, it might say to you, pay attention. But the way in which you're paying attention that 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.

you can just notice it and then ensure that you're going to take action that's appropriate. So both these systems are important, I guess, and we can train both of them separately. 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. 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 this broad receptive stance, they are antagonistic. One does suppress the other. 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.

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, and better awareness that of where we are, you know, I am focused right now, or I am too broad right now, or not broad enough right now. That knowledge moment by moment helps. 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. So this system I often call the juggler. And why is that? Because the juggler's job is to ensure that essentially all the different tasks 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, 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. Like, I love the way you break down attention because I, as I said before, in this conversation, I really do feel that we kind of think attention is one thing, you know, can I, 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 know, you spent what, 20 years studying this and running experiments. 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 what are the ones that people can think about applying immediately? 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 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.

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. 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 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 focusing is the first instruction. The second instruction is now essentially notice. Notice when your mind has wandered away from those breath-related sensations. 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 you've been wandered away to something you're planning for the future, an itch on your forehead or whatever it is, 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 pushup. 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, floodlights, and the executive control system. 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. 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. 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 attention. Take it seriously because you may not have more moments of living, but you'll be there for more moments of your life. Hope you enjoyed that bite-sized clip.

I hope you have a wonderful weekend and I'll be back next week with my long-form conversational Wednesday and the latest episode of Bite Science next Friday.