Finding Mastery with Dr. Michael Gervais - Find Your Focus, Own Your Attention | Psychology Professor, Dr. Amishi Jha
Episode Date: October 20, 2021This week’s conversation is with Dr. Amishi Jha, a professor of psychology at the University of Miami. She serves as the Director of Contemplative Neuroscience for the Mindfulness Rese...arch and Practice Initiative, which she co-founded in 2010. Amishi received her Ph.D. from the University of California–Davis and postdoctoral training at the Brain Imaging and Analysis Center at Duke University. Her work has been featured at NATO, the World Economic Forum, and The Pentagon. Amishi has received coverage in The New York Times, NPR, TIME, Forbes, and more. Her TED Talk on “How to Tame Your Wandering Mind” has over 5 million views and she is the author of Peak Mind, which came out on October 19th. You can probably guess where this conversation is headed – it’s all about awareness, focus, and how you can train your brain to pay attention more effectively._________________Subscribe to our Youtube Channel for more powerful conversations at the intersection of high performance, leadership, and meaning: https://www.youtube.com/c/FindingMasteryGet exclusive discounts and support our amazing sponsors! Go to: https://findingmastery.com/sponsors/Subscribe to the Finding Mastery newsletter for weekly high performance insights: https://www.findingmastery.com/newsletter Download Dr. Mike's Morning Mindset Routine! https://www.findingmastery.com/morningmindsetFollow us on Instagram, LinkedIn, and X.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
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Okay.
This week's conversation is with Dr. Amishi Jha, a professor of psychology at the University
of Miami.
And she serves as the director of Contemplative Neuroscience for the Mindfulness Research
and Practice Initiative, which she co-founded in 2010.
Her work has been featured at NATO, the World Economic Forum, and the Pentagon.
These are serious organizations with serious people, and she's got her arms around one
of the serious elements of becoming your very best, and we're going to get into that in
a moment.
Amishi has received coverage in the New York Times, NPR, Time, Forbes, and more. And her TED
talk on how to tame your wandering mind has over 5 million views. And she is the author of Peak
Mind, which came out on October 19th, 2021. So go check that out for sure. You can probably guess
where this conversation is headed. It's all about awareness and focus and how you can
train your mind to pay attention more effectively and with that let's jump right into this week's
conversation with dr amishi ja amishi how are you i'm great it's great to be here um i'm so excited
to introduce your work to our community.
And some folks have definitely followed along and some have not been familiar with it.
So let's just kind of do a broad sweep really quickly.
What are you most fascinated by in your work?
I'm most fascinated by the brain's capacity to alter the way it functions in a beneficial manner. And my curiosity has been around how to do that, how to actually guide people to do that. All right. So is the first
part about neuroplasticity or is it about the functional aspect of attention and training and
introspection? Or is it more about the neuroplasticity, the actual changing of the
brain? I guess I don't see a distinction. It's like whatever we're doing functionally is going
to affect the way the brain changes. I'm not so interested in brain area A or circuit X, Y,
or Z change. Those are just the details of how it shakes out. But it's really regarding
how to drive change in a beneficial manner through some form of
cognitive training we can offer people.
Okay, perfect.
And then, so that's the general frame.
How did you get into this field?
And where did it start?
Maybe just peel back a couple of layers, a couple of decades, like talk a little bit about your childhood
and what led you into this experience.
Yeah, never thought.
You know, if you just, before we rewind,
let's just fast forward, like where I am today,
I never thought I would spend my career
studying something like mindfulness meditation.
Never occurred to me.
In fact, I would say I was, i would be shocked at myself if i were if
i were to rewind 30 years and there's multiple reasons why which we can we can chat about
so rewinding back growing up i was always interested in psychology and it's funny now
because i would always tell people that i was going to be a physician that was just you know
it's it's almost a joke to say as an indian person to say you're going to be a physician. That was just, you know, it's almost a joke to say as an Indian person to say you're going to be a physician. It's like, well, isn't that what
you're required to do? But especially in this country, there's so many Indian doctors. So it
was certainly something that was an expectation for my family that I would do something along
the lines of either medicine or maybe be an accountant or a software engineer or something like that. And so I really did frame my life in those terms, volunteered at hospitals,
knew I was going to study some kind of science in college, but for fun, I would read psychology
textbooks. My mom was actually a psychology major. And I remember even when I was in maybe
10th grade, I took a course, I grew up in Chicago. I took a course at the University of Chicago on like moral psychology. And I'm like a kid in this class, but I just thought it was fun.
So it was kind of a surprise that when I started undergrad, I said, you know, I think I'm going to,
I think I'm going to have this as my major. But again, thinking that I was going to be a
physician, I decided to do biological psychology, which was offered as a as a as a major until then but as it
turns out I just don't like being in hospitals and it's just not my thing and
I was not prepared to have that kind of a career of treating people that were
ill but I really lucked out because one of my rotations as a hospital
volunteer was actually in a brain injury unit. And that's where, when you asked me a moment ago
regarding kind of what my work most broadly is interested in, they're curious about, what I
learned there and what I saw actually week after week of going in and helping these patients is
neuroplasticity in action. There was this one
particular patient I remember who came in, or when I came in, he was, I thought, a quadriplegic.
And what we, what I realized is that actually he wasn't a quadriplegic. He was a, he did have some
movement in his arm. And over the weeks that went by, he was actually, he went from not being able
to move at all to
actually being able to guide his own wheelchair. And he would tell me that in the evenings,
you know, when he was trying to fall asleep, he'd actually rehearsed the movements of moving his
chair with part of his hand. And I was so like, that is amazing. He's literally changing the way
his brain functions by just training it. So that set those seeds in motion. And then through
a very, that's sort of really rewinding the story back, but then fast forwarding to, I knew I was
going to be in a neuroscience sort of professional trajectory, studied attention because attention
is very much related to neuroplasticity in that whatever it is that we pay attention to
in the moment reconfigures the way the brain is organized.
So it's still really tied to this idea that how we make our mind changes the way the brain operates.
But then it wasn't until about 2008, after I'd had my own research lab for several years, that I
happened upon the topic of mindfulness and really decided to take it on as a serious topic of study
within my own lab. Okay. So let's parse out some technical words just for a moment. Oh, sure.
Yeah. Let's do focus, concentration, and attention. And I know the bulk of your work
is around attention. So let's just level on those words for a moment.
Yeah, right.
I would say all three are obviously very much interrelated.
When I think of the kind of superordinate category, it would be the term attention.
And within that, focus is a particular type of attention, something we'd formally call
the brain's orienting system.
And the kind of metaphor I like to use for
that system, just based on what we know it does to brain function, is like a flashlight.
So wherever we direct that computational resource, ability to focus, we get more crisp, clear,
granular information. We select for it. Everything else that is not within the flashlight's focus is sort of dulled down.
Concentration is related to that.
It's in my mind, the ability to sustain
that level of focus over time.
But then there are other aspects of attention
that fall outside of those terms,
which happy to talk about if you'd like.
Yes, for sure.
Which ones are you interested in?
So really there's three main broad categories
of attention, which, you know, I just, what marvels me about this particular
topic, which happens to be my life's sort of focus is that our attention is the success story
of our evolution. And that's sort of true for everything
about the brain right now,
that whatever we are right now,
no matter how annoying some of the qualities
of our mind may be, they were selected for,
they were advantaged,
and they probably have a use in our lives.
So just to kind of keep that in mind,
but attention in particular,
we think evolved to
solve a very big problem that the brain had, which is that there is just so much information out
there that this limited thing called the human brain could not possibly analyze and understand
at all. So attention was the solution to subsample a bit of that external environment and frankly,
the internal environment to get more information about it and that really is what this focusing capacity is.
But there's another way, another kind of almost antithesis of that way of that attention works,
which is about sampling something that isn't about the nature of the content,
like the flashlight focusing here versus there, but it's almost about what's relevant in time.
So it's like, what's most important right now?
And that may not even allow you to know
what aspects of what's happening right now
is most important.
And this goes to another system of attention
that, again, as a metaphor,
I use this kind of model of a floodlight,
metaphor of a floodlight.
So very much the opposite of focused and narrow, it's broad and receptive, and it's about whatever
shows up right now.
And we want to take that kind of orientation so that we can take fast action regardless
of what shows up if that action is needed.
And I think about this often, even when I'm driving, if you see a flashing yellow light when you're driving, it puts you in that mindset, sort of this
formally called the alerting system, just alert, aware, receptive. You don't know what you need
to pay attention to. Something weird is happening. So just be ready when you're driving at least.
And it's about deselecting in that sense. The only thing you're really privileging is the now.
And then, oh, sorry.
Yeah, no, no, it's good.
So you're deselecting in that moment.
So broad external awareness,
broad external attention,
you're suggesting that that is part of a deselection.
Because when I think of broad external,
I think about
that I'm taking in as much information as I can. And then when something like a yellow or red or
green or something, let's say yellow light grabs my attention, then I have narrowed my external
focus, my external attention on that yellow light. And then what I need to do is go back out to broad to go scan and find
have a better orientation of the setting and then i might go back to a narrow external narrow
attention as well all within those three seconds or you know three nanoseconds whatever it might
be i've also processed some internal processing so my attention can go external broad and narrow and
internal broad and narrow right now you're talking about item model but no that's not the way i'm
parsing this by the way what i'm saying is the capacity to focus is is really about high signal
to noise something is relevant and advantaged and everything else is disadvantaged, actively
disadvantaged. And that's what I mean by this flashlight. It's illuminated relative to everything
else. And it doesn't matter if it's in the external environment or internal environment.
You can direct the flashlight and focus to the external environment as you're scanning,
selecting for specific things and internally. So right now, if I said, you know, Mike, tell me if, what are the
sensations of the feelings of your feet right now on the ground? It wasn't part of where your
flashlight was, but the minute I said that you could direct it willfully and get that internal
sensation. Or even if I said, think back to what you had for dinner last night, what was the most
delicious thing in that? It might not have been in your mind, but you directed that flashlight
of attention to a memory to then do a selection process. So for the purposes of what I'm talking
about, this orienting system is about narrowing and selecting, and it's internal or external.
And then the second system, this floodlight metaphor, is really around broadening and
being receptive. So you're turning down the gain on the signal to
noise distinction, and it can be within the external environment and the internal environment.
So it's a very different model. And from the kind of brain science point of view,
we know that these are different and distinct brain circuits that allow selection to happen,
and then sort of this vigilant receptive mode to happen.
Okay. When I heard you explain it the second time, I still heard the same thing. I still heard the broad external. It's about the narrow
versus broad, but the system don't care about internal or external. So that's one distinction,
but the broad and narrow, certainly that's the case. And then there is a, but this is still regarding selection based on some domain, whether it's
content or time, right?
The first one is really around content, like narrow to this content.
The second one is about right now, what is it?
I'm scanning in my external field or internal field and allowing whatever's happening to
happen. And then the third way we
select is based on our own goals, which is the central executive or this executive functioning
system so that the goals that are held, what is relevant for us, what guides our behavior can
guide the way we select information. And that central executive is something we'd call,
you know, the metaphor would be like a juggler,
so that your job is to ensure that all the balls in the air are in the air. You're not
necessarily engaging in each individual task, just like the executive of a company wouldn't
engage in each individual task, but you have to oversee to ensure that your goals and your
behavior are aligned. So is that juggler, to not mix the metaphor in any way,
but is the juggler in your mind, your value systems and your framework, your psychological
framework and your value systems? Not necessarily, but they can be brought into the juggler's
purview. So your framework, your mindset, your orientation would be kind of longer term,
longer term kind of memories that are held.
What the juggler is doing is really bringing them
into the in the moment selection process.
So it could be that I tend to be the kind of person
who really values helping another person.
That's just my orientation.
But it turns into something that the executive network
will handle if in this moment, I see somebody who's dropped all their groceries and I'm like, oh, I'm a person who helps people.
The goal right now should be to help this person.
And now I engage in that action to ensure that it's aligned with the current goals.
So the framework and the mindsets can come into the present moment to allow the juggler to do that.
Yeah. Okay. Yeah.
Okay.
Right.
So, but you're saying they're not the same thing.
You're saying that the virtues, the framework, the psychological framework and principles
is I'll substitute virtues right now for it.
But if there's something that I have developed a value set around, then that is operating in the backdrop or to inform the juggler,
or is that something that the juggler is attending to as well?
The juggler's attending to it. And when a particular goal aligns with the backdrop of
a mindset or an ethical code or a particular long-term vision,
it's brought to the front of the mind. But what I'm focusing on when I talk about attention is
actually the in-the-moment content. So it interfaces with the content.
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at double or triple the time of other information. And is that a useful framework to work through to
get to some of the deeper stuff that you're onto? What I have been interested in and what
we've been really focusing on is these three
different ways of orienting actually the three different systems of attention and
the vulnerabilities of each of those systems and then how to train and
strengthen them because as you already pointed out in that example you gave of
like I'm focusing in and I'm broadening and I'm focusing in these don't work
independently they're constantly holding hands and coordinating with each other.
But it ends up that they're all vulnerable to the same things.
They're all vulnerable to what we might even call kryptonite in the mind.
And they're all limited in capacity and they're all trainable.
So, you know, there's there's certain themes that that go across all of them. But that's really where my mind is right now is understanding
from a broad kind of brain basis perspective, how are these things instantiated in the brain?
How do they start falling apart? And what can I do to protect them and train them?
Great. Okay. So we can get into the mechanics of that. And then one more subtlety that I want to
understand is when you use the word brain and use the word mind,
how do you differentiate? How are you differentiating those two?
Yeah, those are at this point as, and in my field, I'm a cognitive neuroscientist.
So the exact intersection of those two is what I spend my time thinking about. How is it that
the functioning, the processing that allows us to engage and live and have
thoughts, feelings, emotions, plan action, how is that instantiated and maybe even constrained
by the hardware of our own brain?
Some of our own ideas regarding how functions might occur may not be supported by the way
brain networks actually operate.
So it's a constraining space.
The brain is sort of the constraint on any kind of model
we might have about how functioning happens.
That's a cool way to think about it, that the brain is the constraint.
I haven't heard that frame used.
It feels right because the mind is more expansive,
the software, and more malleable in that respect but
when you separate those two which I'm not suggesting that that is an accurate way to
do it but when we do try to think about the different systems are you thinking about it
in a hardware software framework or is there a different analogy that you use um I mean hardware
software works but what I'm really talking about when I say constrain is,
for example, like we just talked,
let's just go back to the things we were talking about,
this flashlight versus floodlight.
Those are essentially,
you could say that they're two different functions, right?
They're just two functions that the brain does.
It narrows and selects or broadens and receives.
But now when you look at the brain circuits
that implement those two
functions and their relationship to each other you learn something very important which is they have
what's called a antagonistic relationship toward each other which means that one one network is
active let's say the focusing network is active it actively suppresses this ability to broadly
expand your attention so that means means that, you know,
when you, like, for example, you're immersed in reading a book or deep in thought and somebody
walks into a room and says, you know, Mishi, it takes me a minute to kind of realize my mind,
somebody's called me. That makes sense from a brain science point of view, because yes,
the functioning of that network that perceives broad input from my environment in an unselected
fashion is dialed down a bit. So it takes me an extra amount of time to kind of catch that,
and then to basically allow that network's processing to come back online to then say,
what was that that was just said? Oh, my name. Yeah. Yes. I'm over here. So that's what I mean
by constrain. It's that we can have all kinds of ideas about functions in the abstract as
sort of you know boxes of of behavior and and thought or the nature of information processing
but when we start seeing the way the brain implements and instantiates these it starts
allowing us to see how things may go wrong or how things can go way better depending on how we train what's going on
and the realistic expectations of what's possible. Okay. So the constraint you're using a bit of a
bottleneck theory. It's not that just it's like an on-off that there's only one switch,
either broad or external or whatever. But there's a bottleneck of processing that takes place.
And that would map nicely onto some of the findings around the default mode network and
ways to dampen it and ways to quiet that down.
Yeah.
I mean, I'm just making a very broad statement that you asked me, you know, what's the difference
between mind and brain?
So I'm just saying, well, you know, mind is like all these things, but they're not sort of
all happening at the same time. And the way in which they relate to each other,
we may be able to learn about that by seeing how the brain actually implements them.
So for, and I just gave one example that you can't both be broad and narrow simultaneously,
just based on what we see in terms of the way the brain
operates.
In the same way you just described, we can't be both internal and external typically simultaneously.
It'll cause a conflict.
So we've got to figure out a way if we want to be able to do these things that typically
are antagonistic, we might want to really train for that specifically so there's better
or smoother coordination.
So one is a comment regarding sort of the standard way
the brain operates. The second is a comment on the possibilities that exist when you start
understanding the nature of those dynamics in the typical fashion, in the dysfunctional
fashion, and then maybe even in the optimizing fashion.
Okay, cool. When I think of signal tonoise ratio, the way that I describe noise is easy, right?
It's all the extraneous variables that are not necessarily relevant to the task at hand.
I think about the signal as being only available in the present moment and is connected to
the most relevant aspects or tasks that are required.
And so that signal can be internal or external to your point as well.
Do you see signal-to-noise ratio in a different way or does that feel familiar to you?
It completely aligns with what I'm saying. I'm saying in some sense that the signal-to-noise,
the determiner of what signal and noise happens by this brain system called executive control.
And then the flashlight is implementing that signal to noise privileging.
So, you know, my my executive function says, oh, right now,
the most important thing you should be paying attention to is the mic space
on the screen and then my orienting system, the flashlight says yes.
And to do that focus here.
So they work together in that manner.
But yes, I agree with you on the
distinct the way that you're describing signal to noise aligns with the way that i think about it
and then the executive functioning part is that the juggler are you talking about is that yeah
yeah that's just one metaphor we can use for it yep and then so so i'm interested in how to train, and you are as well, the juggler.
And so I think about it in at least two ways to be a bit of a reductionist here.
One is through frameworks.
And that's really about one's personal philosophy.
And so if somebody values, to your point, A over B, they're more likely to find A in an environment. And so if they value kindness, they're we're running out here, we're running out there, and then we feel in return some scarcity.
These are philosophies that people work from. Another word for philosophy in a broad sense is
the framework that you're operating from. And so I'm interested in how to develop both the framework or
the philosophy of the juggler, but also how to train the particular skills for people to attend
better, to hold their gaze and to attend better to the most relevant task or the most relevant
details of the task at hand. So where are you more interested in those two?
I mean, I would say the bulk of what I've been working on
is not the former, not the mindset framework orientation,
except to understand what is present,
like to even know what framework you're holding.
That's a whole other journey. But more like if you know what it is, or you know what framework you're holding um that's a whole other journey but but more like
if you know what it is or you know what stance to take meaning you don't know what it is but
you want to be able to receive information how do you train for that okay cool i want to dive
into that because that it's like that that is in exact high speed fast paced high pressured
environments it's a requirement that we can
attend to the most necessary elements internal and external to be able to pivot and adjust.
And the responding and adjusting is one of the most important capabilities
inside of high speed environments. That being said, are you more interested in going upstream to how to attend,
or are you more interested in the downstream, how you respond to whatever it is that you're
attending to? I mean, I'm interested in both. You are interested in both. Okay.
Yeah. I would say the kinds of things that we've been looking at in the research studies that we've done have really been regarding what are vulnerabilities that we see often in people that happen to be basically high stress, high demand, time pressured individuals across professions for whom the ability to pay attention can become a matter of life and death. So that it's consequential. So behavior absolutely matters. Action absolutely matters.
And there's a vulnerability that you have because of the nature of the context you're operating
within that your full capacity is not available to you. You're actually going to be compromised
as you're maneuvering through challenge. So that's sort of the working space of what I've been interested in.
And partly that's because in some sense, that's all of us at some point in our lives.
Sure, there's certain professions like military service members or elite athletes or emergency
room physicians for whom that's just, you know, everything's dialed up in some sense.
But we've all been there and we
all will be there at some point in our life where our actions are consequential and even if they
may not be literally life or death they can certainly feel like their life or death so
training for better attention for all of us has value because of that reality okay so can we dial
into the way that we can train attention we absolutely should dial into the way that we can train attention? We absolutely should dial into the way that we train attention. And the way in which
a decision is made to focus on something, that's its own landscape. Is it contingent? Is it
emergent? Is it based on your framework? Whatever it is, let's just take that as a given. Some
decision has been made of where to focus. That's what we'd call now instantiating the flashlight voluntarily
pointing towards something internal or external, right? So you've got voluntary focus going on.
It's absolutely the case, and we know this because we live in a modern world with tons
of external distractions, that we can have this willful decision made to focus,
and then we don't necessarily know in the next moment
where the flashlight is pointing.
Oftentimes it is getting pulled
because it can be pushed and pulled
to something that seems like it just drew us to it.
So the ping of your phone or a notification on your screen
or somebody calling your name, without even knowing it, your flashlight's gonna immediately point to it. So the ping of your phone or a notification on your screen or somebody calling
your name, without even knowing it, your flashlight's going to immediately point to that.
And even going back to that example I gave of you're on a darkened path and you've got a flashlight
pointing and it's really helping you see what's most important for you to be able to maneuver
through. If in that same moment you heard rustling behind you, the flashlight is going to go back to where you heard it from. So this capacity to decide where to focus, very powerful.
Knowing where your focus is in any moment, which is more the job of this alerting system or, you know, we might even call meta awareness, which we can get into.
Also just as important because no matter where you decided to
put it, there's no guarantee it's there. So this is the landscape of what you were saying a moment
ago, stress. Stress is a landscape often of ambiguity, uncertainty. The U.S. Army War College
has this great phrase that I think that they actually coined, VUCA, volatile, uncertain,
complex, and ambiguous, which now is coming up more and more in sort of business settings.
But what I love about that term is that it perfectly captures conditions in which there's going to be a battle that we work with is to understand what we're up against and to train for those circumstances. just use football for an example, is that if a wide receiver is running a route and the ball is
coming out before they've turned their head and because it needs to be on time, that is actually
by design. They flip their head around and the ball's coming out of the quarterback's hand
already. It's in flight somewhere. They have to locate it. Then they are, to do it well,
are required to follow the ball, the
tip of the ball all the way into their hands.
At the same time, they know that there is a near 200 pound, you know, fast, powerful
human trying to, you know, tackle them at high speed.
Yeah.
Okay.
So it would be from an evolutionary standpoint, it would make sense to stop focusing
on the tip of the ball and to protect yourself from danger.
Now, this is what makes most sport really interesting is because it is counter to our
natural impulses.
Extraordinary performance is counter to natural impulses, so it takes incredible training. Now we can understand that framework and let me go two ways with you. One is
how do we train better the deep focus and attention on the tip of the arrow when there's, or I'm sorry,
the tip of the ball, when there's danger around, that's one that will transport into probably most
performative environments. And
the second is, how is this relevant to us that are sitting in front of computers, answering calls,
sending emails, having meetings, sometimes hosting? Most of us are not hosting meetings.
We're listening. We're participating in some way. So how does this translate in the work life,
in the home life,
and in social settings as well? Right. Such a great question. So the first thing is to say we can train to, and I'm going to put the very poignant example of somebody
trying to catch the tip of the ball and the football example, let's put it to the side,
but I think it applies there too.
So the first thing is that we can train for better focus voluntarily.
We can practice over and over again to,
to actually view certain aspects of a scene or keep certain ideas in mind and
be very clear about what the focus should be on, right?
With precision.
We can train for doing that better and better.
The thing that we probably don't do by default all that often
is train to be broadly receptive and aware in an unconstrained fashion.
And that's when this flashlight that is going toward
the thing you've dedicated yourself in a voluntary manner to direct your your
mind toward when it gets pulled away you're unaware of it because you're not
looking for where the flashlight is you're just going where you're in the
immersive experience of wherever the flashlight went. So cultivating a
broad receptive stance, which is the term I used a little while ago, meta-awareness, an awareness of
the contents and processes in our moment-to-moment experience. Not the same as metacognition, not
kind of knowing yourself and your cognitive functions, but having an awareness of what's
going on right now is such a powerful tool because what that says is in addition,
it goes back to what you actually said a moment ago. In addition to be able to focus with precision,
which I can train for, I can know what my focus should be. I can direct that flashlight
willfully to that. If I'm keeping this broad receptive stance, I can be constantly checking
on it. Is it where I think it should be? And if not, let's get it back. Let's redirect. Let's redirect. Okay. So I want to do two things right now.
I want to start in reverse, which is the meta.
And the meta awareness is actually mapped to flow in some states. a helicopter perspective but you know kind of a you know hovering over right over you being able
to see kind of how the experience is unfolding is that how you're thinking about meta awareness yes
but I would say it's the opposite of flow because there's a self consciousness and an awareness of
okay the experience it's not the immersive experience it's actually the watching of it so that actually
is mapped to flow as well yeah and so i guess it depends on how how constrained or broad your view
of flow is but what i'm talking about and i want to go back to the thing that you said a moment ago
which is why does this matter for our actual life for most of us because the more we watch and the
more we're able to see oh look at
the flashlight it's over there we start getting a sense of how often we're yanking our own
flashlights away from our intended Target and we can know a lot about the nature of what our
evolutionary programming has really uh advantaged us getting pulled away by so things like threatening
information you know, like you
said, the 200 pound guy coming your way, threatening, I better pay attention to that. Of course,
my flashlight is going to be yanked to that, but it doesn't even have to be salient physical
threats in your external environment. Just the thought of something can yank the flashlight
away. So, you know, the three things we're seeing, at least in my work, are threatening
information, stress-inducing information, where there's a sense of overwhelm that I don't have the capacity to meet this challenge, and negative mood.
Those are three biggies that we see consistently degrade attentional capacity.
And in particular, it seems to be because the flashlight gets yanked away and you aren't able to hold the focus where you want it to be. Finding Mastery is brought to you by Cozy Earth. Over the years, I've learned
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checkout for 20% off your first order. That's calderalab, C-A-L-D-E-R-L-A-B.com slash findingmastery. degrade attention so stress threat and negative mood stress threat and negative mood so
threat is real and perceived and then how do how are you working with stress in this
stress is really what we mean by perceived distress where okay so not capacity yeah
threat is when there is actual threat and it could be psychological threat,
stereotype threat, et cetera. Everything I'm talking about is the contents of the external
reality and the inner workings of the mind, regardless of the actual reality. If you think
that there's a threat and you perceive it that way, it will degrade your attention.
Okay. But that's different than stress for you. Well, I'm just telling you the broad categories of things that tend to show
specific degradation and attention. The broad category of perceived and real threat,
the broad category of perceived stress. And frankly, it's all perceived because it's always
being translated through the mind and then negative mood. So those are the things that
tend to degrade attention and they're related to the kinds of things that tend to yank attention away in this exogenous or externally driven fashion
that are things like fear-inducing information, salient information, novel information,
self-related information. You can see how those broader categories of threat, stress,
negative mood tie to this more fundamental biological drive to pay attention
to certain kinds of content. So how does mood degrade attention?
Right. So all of these in some broad sense, we think are because of where attention gets hijacked
to and away from the task at hand. So we can first think that all these three
systems that we've been talking about, you know, attention really is a limited capacity system. We
only have so much of it. It's a type of fuel and that fuel can get depleted over the course of,
as it gets expended for the purposes of using it, you know, we're using it for various things.
When I say negative mood, what I'm talking about
is mental content that yanks that flashlight away. So really it's tied to all three of these
are tied to something we might call mental time travel. So you've got a task in the moment,
right? You've got a thing you're trying to do. There is a demand that you're trying to engage in, but now the mind is not necessarily in that moment. It's decoupled from it and it is in
past or the future. And when that past or future content is negative, it will tend to gravitate,
the flashlight will be drawn to it, magnetically drawn to it. So now there's less resource
available for me to direct right now. So like rumination worrying catastrophizing would all go into that sort of trans diagnostic
category of negative of mental content okay and then you you said that
attention is a limited resource is I get the constraint bit but I'm not sure I
understand how it's limited and so i i understand
the idea that um our our energy systems become depleted as we expend lots of processes and you
know whether it's uh attention or it is effort or whatever it might be from a physical standpoint or
a cognitive standpoint that i do understand the depletion of of energy systems and then help me
understand how you're seeing like attention being a limited resource as
well well it's limited in two ways in the moment it's limited because we only
have one flashlight we don't have right two three four so it's going to be
constrained by certain parameters.
That's why things like multitasking are actually not real. And it's limited in what you just said,
that there is a temporal aspect to it. So that over time, and that timeframe could be
over the course of a 20-minute mentally engaging task you've got to do, or it could be over the course of a 20 minute mentally engaging task you've
got to do, or it could be over weeks.
And the principles seem to be the same, is that the more there is a demand for you to
utilize your attention, the more rapidly and more reliably we see a decline in its availability.
And let me just say, it's very plain of how we're evaluating this.
We take people that are,
we know because we've partnered with them
under these particular circumstances,
we know they're gonna be experiencing a high demand interval.
So going back to football,
one of the last times you and I had a chance to chat
was when we were doing this project
with the University of Miami football team.
And I remember even asking you,
how do I make sure that they're going to be
in a high demand, high stress interval? You know, it was obvious to me the playing season would be
the case, but there would be ups and downs based on maybe what happened last week. And they've got
another game coming up. And is there, so you suggested, well, maybe look at even before they
start the season, maybe preseason training, which actually helped us hone in a lot. We were able to
partner with the team during the preseason summer training period of time, about four weeks. And so every day,
they've got practice, they've got physical conditioning, they've got school, they were
in summer school. And we already knew from sort of studies in typical undergrads that
over the course of the academic semester, undergrads tend to have a diminishment in
their attention over the course of the
semester, and then they got to take final exams.
So now the prediction was that the football team over the course of summer preseason training
might be doing something very similar, that they also have these academic demands they
may be depleting, but then they have all of these game-related preparatory training, physical
and mental demands, and that's exactly what we saw.
We sampled their attention and this other related function, working memory, at the beginning of the
month, at the end of the month. And sure enough, most people declined over time. So that's the
level at which I'm talking about it. It's a lot larger timeframe. But I think it really gives us
insight into how vulnerable we can become because now all
of a sudden those same players that degraded in their attentional functioning, their whole season
is going to be determined by how they do in this camp and they have less of their resources
available. So the motivation behind wanting to offer some kind of training in that interval comes
from that type of result that not only did their
attention diminish, by the way, but their mood and their stress levels, their mood tanked and
their stress levels increased. So it's all sort of this combined package. And then the question
we had is, well, what type of training is going to be most beneficial and most protective for
people in that kind of high demand interval? So let's just make up a scenario that people are chronically fatigued.
You know, there's a high stress.
Let's make that up.
Let's just make that up.
This work-life hybrid model
is actually quite challenging
and that we're suffering a bit
from social connections
and physical contact and, bit from social connections and,
you know, physical contact and, and, and, and, and, right. And let's just say that the economy
was like, you know, for some folks, uh, pretty volatile. So, so, so let's just say that people
are at home working their asses off and stress levels are high. Mood is compromised, which we
know to be the case what have you found well
let's throw in one more thing there's a threat to your actual physical well-being and safety
and health like maybe there's a global pandemic happening maybe yeah okay right so it's like we're
on the same page we've got a threefer we've got a a situation in which stress threat poor mood all
are at play um and what we And what we're seeing is that
it's protracted. It's not a week or two. It's not the daily ups and downs of life. You might have a
good week or badly week, but there's sort of this ongoing aspect to it. So that even our normal
ability to kind of bounce back if there was some challenge is not happening because the circumstances.
What we're seeing is what you expect to see.
There's gonna be a decline
in all of those psychological health variables,
but also attention.
And I never thought that when we see this pattern
of degradation and attention over high stress intervals,
like in elite athletes that we just talked about
or service members or even firefighters
during an intensive fire season. It's almost like all of us are in that same interval now.
And that flashlight that we talked about, when you want to direct it toward the email or report
you've got to write, is now all of a sudden getting yanked around by this other kind of content.
And if you're not checking in with regularity and training yourself to do so, the chances of you being able to even notice that you're off task to get it back, it's going to be less and less.
And soon enough, your performance is compromised.
You know what pulls our attention better than anything else right now is like numbing content. the dopamine hits from TV or social media or, you know, whatever, you know,
chit chat conversations that used to be four minutes over a water cooler are now
like 40 minutes, you know,
at the beginning of zoom calls or something or teams calls.
So we're looking for escape mechanisms because we are so tired.
And so that being said, how are you,
what interventions are you finding to be useful in the training mechanisms? You know, I would say, you know, just to go back to what
you just said, we're looking for escape. I don't know if that's true. I think that what we're
seeing is we're engaging in certain kinds of behavior much more often and much more by default,
but I can tell you myself and, and then people that are in my kind of closed circle, there's many times when you're scrolling and
you're like, why am I doing this? I don't want to be doing this. It's like you wake up in the
middle of some kind of dazed state where you realize, oh, the thing that I'm doing by default,
you know, in fact, I would say now I actually, of course, watch for it, but I have
no memory when I'm in that moment of realizing I've been on Instagram for way too long.
No, you're not. We're saying the same thing. We're attracted to that. And then at some point,
the conscientious part of us, you know, the ambitious part of us goes, what am I doing?
And it doesn't even feel good.
Right. But what I'm saying is, yeah, we're on the same page about that. What I'm saying is, I have no memory of picking up the phone, finding the app, clicking on it, and actually being here.
All of that happened in some kind of ballistic fashion. So now we get more granular with our
attention of like, I'm not monitoring at all. And I have no meta-awareness. So this is the
other thing that we know from our research is that over the course of time,
not only does our attention start declining, but our capacity for meta-awareness is also
degrading.
And we found this, by the way, over the course of a 20-minute task, as well as over the course
of multi-week intervals.
So the thing that we were thinking maybe the way to try to approach all of this is, well,
what if we could do a training where we targeted meta-awareness we targeted the capacity to watch our mind
and this is where the mindfulness work actually came in is because it was sort of this
not obvious solution you'd think if you want to train for better focus practice focusing but the
reality is if you want to train for better focus practice noticing and so then the the quest became not only
do we how do we offer mindfulness training how do we offer mindfulness training to time pressured
people under high stress intervals when they may have no interest in doing this uh you know it's
not an easy welcome welcome to my world i mean that's exactly that's exactly where you know like
10 years ago when i introduced mindfulness to the NFL, it was like, what?
You know, like you want us to what?
And so you're exactly on it.
And so, listen, thank you for the research, you know, to have something to point to.
And so it is meaningful work that you've done here. So drilling down more specifically, when you're doing some of this open monitoring awareness,
mindfulness training,
you found some protocols that have been useful as well.
Can you talk through some of those?
Sure, sure.
And I would say that the protocols actually do all three,
train all three systems, right?
So let's just take even a very, I'll do it fast,
a focused attention practice.
Focus on breath related
sensations when you notice your mind has wandered away redirect so the first part is take that
flashlight get very granular almost laser focused to something that's the target for your attention
let's say it's like the tip of your nose while you're breathing that gives you a lot of a
possibility to have strong signals noise distinction so you can get even granular on like,
no, I'm actually not even on the tip of the nose. I'm even on the whole face or I'm thinking about
my next vacation. So it allows you to train the, the, the directing of the flashlight,
the broadening on receptive stance of the floodlight and the jugglers always watching
to make sure behavior and goals are aligned. So the focused attention practice does this.
When we think about something like open monitoring, which I know you've talked about on your podcast, you're actually
just targeting the floodlight. Because what typically happens is that we're terrible at
taking a broad receptive stance. Things are enticing. We want to move the flashlight toward
them. We want to get pulled into them. We want to engage with them. So how do you actually practice taking sort of suite of practices like that is a totally different
category, which we may not probably have time to talk about, but loving kindness practice or what
we call connection practice, because that in the suite is really regarding kind of reminding
yourself of the broader intentions of why you're doing this. And then to use that flashlight and
floodlight in the interpersonal domain. So what we found is that offering a suite of practices like that over the course of four
weeks with about 12 minutes a day of practice can really help strengthen all three systems
of attention as well as improve mood and performance.
So we actually just published a paper where we found that not only was depression reduced
and mood improved, but things like marksmanship in soldiers was improved
so that they're not only shooting with more precision but they're not shooting when they
shouldn't be which is very important one would think yeah that's great that's really it's um
you've taken some the some of the principles from the ancient practice and brought it into the laboratory
and found some results that are applicable to VUCA-based environments and performers
that need to operate accurately and at speed.
So it's really fascinating what you've done.
And just to be uber concrete, 12 minutes, and I had read somewhere that you had found
some findings at eight minutes. And I had read somewhere that you had found some findings at eight minutes.
And maybe I attributed you to it when it wasn't actually you. So did you find anything at eight
minutes? No, but others have. And I would say, all of this is a work in progress. And when you're
talking about humans and asking them to practice mindfulness, it's an imprecise science. But the way that we came to
specifically 12 minutes was in the context of asking people to do a lot more, 30 minutes.
And what we found is that nobody's doing 30 minutes. So we said, okay, at what point,
how many minutes on average are producing beneficial effects? And it was 12 or more.
So it's almost just like a threshold, a minimum effective dose to see attentional
protection or improvements in high stress groups. So different practices, different
goals may result in different specific number of minutes, but this was in our hands for
this type of metric.
And so, you know, the ancient practice of mindfulness kind of would roll their eyes
right now. Those practitioners like,
what are we talking about slicing minutes for? We're not getting to wisdom slicing minutes here.
And then folks that really understand training know that there is some precision that we're looking for when we go to quote unquote a gym, whether it's a psychological gym or a physical
fitness gym. There's some precision we're looking for. And at the same time, volume is important.
You know, so intensity and volume are two metrics that we look at.
And 12 minutes of deep, intense work is going to be likely better
than 42 minutes of really sloppy work.
All that being said is each time that we are wildly distracted,
we have an opportunity to refocus. And so I'm wondering, which is training, which is work.
So I'm wondering if you could just comment on this axiom that focusing is the decision
and refocusing is a skill. Yeah. And I think that that's a great summary of what I've just described.
That's great. Okay, perfect. In some sense, that is exactly what we're saying. Focusing is the goal.
That's the set point. You're saying that I'm setting out to do that. And what I'm saying is
actually, yes, it's a skill to refocus. And what that skill requires is an awareness of what is happening
and you can train to have that better that awareness be stronger and more available to
you on demand okay amishi where can people go find your work and i know you've got a book coming out
and which is really exciting and so where can people find your work so yeah my new book uh is
gonna be is out october 19 It's Peak Mind. And if they
want to learn more about me, just remember my first name, Amishi. It's A-M-I-S-H-I.com.
And what are your social handles? Where can people find you on social?
I'm on everything, Twitter, Instagram.
Is it all Amishi?
It's all Amishi, Amishi Pija or Amishi Ja.
Okay, perfect. And then that'll be all in the show notes and everything. And then I want to
snap back to one thing really quickly is that on the threat portion that we're talking about is
I've found that one of the great threats for the modern human is the potential threat that comes from
how they might be thinking of me. And so I'm using the word me, but I'm using it pejoratively for
all of us. So that the fear of another person's opinion is actually quite a constrictor for
potential, but it's actually one of those mechanisms that pulls our attention to trying
to sort out safety by trying to figure out what might they be thinking of me.
So do you have any comments or insights around that mechanism that's at play?
Absolutely.
I mean, I think that first of all, yes, it's stereotype threat would be another way to
think about it. And it either can be pejorative, this imposing I put it, working memory bandwidth to address that
potential ongoing concern as you're trying to actually do the task at hand. And so partly,
it's to acknowledge when it's present and its relationship to competing with your attention
for something else, and then how to orient to its existence in a way that doesn't interfere as
much right so in some sense that broadening function that we talked about we can use toward
that landscape of our own mind so that now yes you know the the thoughts that um somebody has about
me whether they're negative or overly positive is there but it doesn't have to yank my attention and
pull my attention it's just part of the landscape that I can accept.
I'm super stoked that your book is here. And I hope people go check it out and check into your
work and social and otherwise. And can you maybe make a couple suggestions on a best practice,
maybe a reading best practice or doing best practice that has been meaningful for
you to help, you know, the rest of us in the quality of our lives? You know, it's so funny,
I could give some grandiose answer about a prescription, which you can read all about,
because it's essentially the culmination of 15 years of work in the book. But one that I go to
all the time, use all the time is a very simple one. And you probably even maybe had guests talk about it, but it's just called the stop practice. And it captures all of these aspects of our attention.
So stop, like literally what you're doing, stop. Sometimes we're forced to stop, so it's easy.
Stop sign, for example. Take a breath, just one conscious breath, allowing it to happen at its
natural pacing. Observe, at least allowing whatever's happening in the inner or outer landscape to just be there
and then proceed. And I think of it as just a simple brain break to kind of check in. And now
all of a sudden, no matter where that flashlight was pointed, you got it in your hand again,
and you can move forward with your life. So it's stop, S for stop. And what is the T?
Take a breath. Take a breath breath and then the o is observe and then the p is the uh proceed yeah very cool appreciate you mishi
start to see your work you know being um pulled together in the book that you're publishing and
and and hopefully it makes it to the widest audience that we can imagine. So I would encourage people to go check out your work.
Oh, appreciate it.
Thank you.
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