Good Life Project - Make Better Decisions Faster | Dismantling Mindfulness

Episode Date: December 14, 2017

Good Life Riff: One of the most critical keys to success, in any endeavor, is knowing what to say yes or no to.The faster you can choose, the more time you can spend actually doing the things that matter, and walking away from the things that don't. In today's GLP Riff, we share a simple question that serves as a powerful decision-making tool designed to simplify your decisions, reduce "decision fatigue" and lead you more quickly to the things that matter most.Good Life Science: In our Good Life Science segment, we're diving into some fascinating new research on mindfulness.Yes, mindfulness. We know, there's been a lotta research on this topic. But this is different. The big challenge with mindfulness, when it comes to science, is that people are lumping a bunch of different practices under the umbrella of mindfulness, then making claims about what it can do. But, a new study finally dismantled the core elements of the practice (focused awareness and open monitoring) and showed how each does something very different, and has it's own special-sauce benefit. And, as always, for those who want to go to the source, here's a link to the full study.+--------------------------+Our Podcast Partners: ShipStation: Manage and ship your orders. FREE for 30 days, plus a bonus. Visit ShipStation.com, click on the microphone at the top of the homepage and type in GOODLIFE.MVMT Watches: Get 15% off today, go to MVMT.com/goodTunein: Catch all-new episodes of some of your favorite podcasts early with TuneIn First Play? Download the free TuneIn app now.Videoblocks:  Go to videoblocks.com/goodlife to get all the stock video, audio, and images you can imagine for just $149.Thrive Market: Get $60 of FREE organic groceries + free shipping and a 30-day trial atthrivemarket.com/goodlife. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

So one of the things I have learned about this crazy thing called success over the years is a lot of it comes down to figuring out ways to be able to understand what to say yes or no to quickly and easily. And there's one question that I've been using as a metric that has helped me in a really dramatic way lately. In today's riff, I'm going to share that question with you. I'm going to walk you through some examples of how I put it to use in my own life and maybe offer an invitation for you to explore that same thing because anything that makes us understand what to say yes and no to a lot more quickly and easily is something that we all want to do more of and we want in our lives. And in today's Good Life Science Update,

if you've been listening at all for anywhere from a few weeks to a few years now, you know that I am a student of meditation and mindfulness. There's a ton of research that's come out on it, but it's kind of all over the place. And we've got a pretty fascinating new study that breaks down the elements of what we're talking about when we're talking about mindfulness and then researches them independently to try and understand how they affect us differently. That's where we're going. I'm Jonathan Fields. This is Good Life Project. Mayday, mayday We've been compromised The pilot's a hitman I knew you were gonna be fun

On January 24th Tell me how to fly this thing Mark Wahlberg You know what the difference between me and you is? You're gonna die Don't shoot him, we need him Y'all need a pilot Flight Risk

The Apple Watch Series 10 is here It has the biggest display ever It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X.

Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary. So I don't know about you, but heading into the holidays every year, that can be, some people love this season. Some people want to run screaming away from it. It really all depends. I think it's really important to be conscious of how we each experience it. No matter what, though, whether you celebrate or don't celebrate holidays, the time of year, moving into December and moving towards the end of the year,

it's kind of a nice milestone to reflect on. And I love to sort of think about asking big questions, trying to understand what has gone well, what hasn't gone well, and also trying to come up with simple ways for me to make better decisions on a daily basis, ways that I can just kind of scan the world, scan the universe of opportunities to say yes or no to something from the smallest little thing to the biggest giant project or endeavor and find ways to be able to take less time, less struggle, less toil in the old noggin to figure out what makes sense to say yes to and what isn't an absolute no. The less energy I can spend on that, the quicker I can make those decisions, the happier I'm going to end up being and the more time I get to spend doing the things that truly fill my good life buckets and less time of the questions that you ask determines how often you

get to say yes and no, and how many of those opportunities actually fall into that gray area where you don't know. And what I've learned is that the better the questions, the fewer the answers fall into the I'm not sure category, and the more obvious the answers become yes or no. So I've been playing with asking different questions. One of the things that I sort of continually ask is, will this fill or empty any one of my good life buckets? Is it in alignment with the values and beliefs that I hold dear? All sorts of stuff like that. Will it allow me to work from a place of manifesting strength. So there's stuff like that, but that tends to, you know, require a little bit more thought. And sometimes I just don't want to think that much. So I keep trying to shorthand and shorthand

and shorthand. And there's this question that I've been asking myself as of late, that at least for me has been doing a really good job of taking about two seconds and getting a pretty immediate answer with very few I don't knows. I don't know if this will help you or not, but I know it's helped me, so I wanted to share it. And that question is really simple. I ask myself, what would success do? What would success do? Right, we all define success differently, but we all have a sense of what it is. You know, whether it's professional, whether it's life,

what would a successful life do? What would a successful, you know, like career do? What would successful relationships? But I find that I don't even need to break that down, that I can literally just pop that question into my head and I get an answer pretty quickly. So let me give you a few examples of how that would work as I kind of navigate a single day, because maybe that will help you see where these questions or this one question, really simple question, might inform how you say yes or no to something, right? So starting when I first opened my eyes in the morning, right, I wake up and next to me is a table. And on that table sits a device that has been charging at night.

A device that can be evil or a device that can add to my life. Now, I roll over generally. And if my wife is still in bed, I'll give her a hug and a kiss and say good morning. And then as I get out of bed, I pick up that device, right? Now I could do a lot of things with that device right then. My first thing is I'm going to look and see what time it is, because I kind of want to know where I am in my morning, right? But once I have it in my hand, and the screen is open, right? And there are any number of different things that I could do, right? How I make that simple decision actually sets up my day.

And if I want a successful life, it starts with the very first decision, right? So I look at the phone and I'm thinking to myself, hmm, I see that email icon. If I could just tap it, pop it open, and then ask myself, what would success do? The answer is really obvious for me. In this case, success would not click on the email button

because clicking on the email button means immediately surrendering my day to being reactive, starting with the multiple agendas of everybody who has dropped an email in my box over the seven or eight hours that I've been sleeping. And I start my day being reactive rather than intentional. Success is not reactive. Success is intentional. So that would be a reactive choice. Success would not pop open my email and read it because that sets the tone, not just for the next five minutes, but for the rest of the day. So if I look at that icon and ask myself, what would success do?

The answer is easy. Success would not hit it. Success would get up from the bed. Success would go out into my apartment. It would be to find my meditation cushion before everybody else is up, sit down, and then look at my device again, tap open the app that I use to sit in meditation, Insight Timer, by the way, which is an awesome app for anyone who's thinking about it. And then I would sit and I would do my five minutes of pranayama or breathing exercises.

And then I would do my mindfulness practice. That is what success would do waking up first thing in the morning, right? Now from there, I could say to myself, okay, so now I'm moving out into my day and I'm sitting down, right? I've showered, I'm up, I'm kind of ready to go. I'm sitting in front of my computer, right? And I open my computer and there are any number of things I could do now. I could check email,

I could check social media, I could check the stash for the podcast, which of course I occasionally obsessively do. Success does not always win there. But with each one of those things, I can say to myself, what would success do? So what I do generally is I have on my browser, on the top of it, a couple of sites that are sort of things where I will scan them very quickly for no more than a minute at a time. I will open my email and scan to see if there's something that is urgent that I need to respond to. And if there isn't, I will move on. I will check my stats.

I'll check my podcast stats. I'll check different things. I'll see what's happening in the app. And I'll very quickly scan the news of the morning because I want to feel informed. And also because it may give me something to think about as I move through the day or comment on. Right? What I won't do is dive into social media, I will limit the time that I have sort of scanning for urgency to just, you know, about five minutes. And then I'll move on because when I asked what would success do, success would not dive into all of those individual things and get caught up and then emerge at noon realizing that I've spent the

first four hours of my day massively reactive and not done the things that would be successful in my life, right? I look at my phone. I look at social media. I look at the different platforms. But anytime I get tempted, you know, to take a break and go scan stuff, I look at my phone and I'm like, ooh, I see the Instagram out there, right? And I ask myself, what would success do?

Now, I may just need a little bit of a break. But my question is, what would I do with that? Would a successful life sit there and spend 20 minutes lost just scanning a stream on social media? Or would success, the way I define it, have me sitting on a couch with my wife having a conversation? Would it have me trying to eat something that was nourishing and whole food based? Would it have me getting up from my chair going out for a walk around a couple of blocks to get my body moving? What would success do? So it becomes sort of like a guiding question as you move through the day, right? If you're hanging out at night after a long day of stuff and you're thinking to yourself, oh, you know, I'm watching a show,

which is fine. And you notice that you're halfway through the season, right? And you notice that your Netflix or Hulu or whatever it is, is set to automatically feed the next episode to you in the next four seconds, right? And you ask yourself, what would success do? It's 11 o'clock at night. You know that you do better when you go to sleep between 11 and 11.30. Success would hit off. Get ready for bed and go to sleep, knowing that that episode is still going to be there for you tomorrow or the next day or the next day. So these questions can kind of like very quickly short circuit the urges to do things that

would be, quote, anti-success. And again, I don't define success for you. I'm not telling you it's money or power. I'm not telling you it's relationships. I can tell you what it is for me, but we all have to define it in the way that is meaningful to us. So think about that as you move through your day, as you weigh the projects that are on your plate currently, as you weigh the tasks that you have to do. If a phone is ringing and you look at the number, right, and you're not sure whether to answer it or not, ask yourself, what would success do? If an email drops into your inbox and you're not sure what to do with it, ask, what would success do?

If a text comes in to your phone and you're not sure what to say or whether to respond right away or at all, ask yourself, what would success do? Because a successful life is an intentional life. And when we ask the question before we act and let that guide our yes and no and then our behavior, we spend way more time filling our days with the actions that lead to an intentional better life rather than the actions that are autopilot default

and not leading to a successful, happy, meaningful, joyful, connected, fulfilled life. That's my invitation. Play with it. Try it on. Take just a day and ask that question as you move through your day and see if it makes a difference. And then if you feel that it does, share those experiences with me.

You can find me pretty much all over at Jonathan Fields on social. And of course, I may or may not be checking because at any given moment, I'm going to be asking myself, what would success do? So really excited because this kind of ties in an interesting way to our Good Life Science update,

which deconstructs mindfulness and the research around it. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest charging Apple Watch, getting you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum.

Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were gonna be fun. January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. will vary. And we're back as always with today's Good Life Science update. For those who are new to this particular segment, I am a geek. I am not a trained scientist, but I love science and I'm constantly devouring research and studies and trying to figure out what's going on underneath this human hood. Why do we do the things we do? How does the world affect us, our mindsets, our health, our well-being, and our ability

to live good lives. And I love to share some of the research that I stumble upon in my adventures. As always, we will include in the show notes, if you're interested, for fellow geeks, a direct link to the fuller study report so that anyone who wants to dive into the details can go and check it out themselves and see how the study was done. Today, we are talking about some pretty cool new research on mindfulness, and it comes out of Brown University, some researchers there. And the name of this particular study is entitled Dismantling Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy, Creation and Validation of Eight-Week Focused Attention

and Open Monitoring Interventions with a Three-Arm Randomized Controlled Trial. I think science people probably need to get better copywriters for the titles of their pieces. Nonetheless, this is a really interesting study. So if you followed any of the research on mindfulness over the last decade or so, what you'll know is that there has been a mountain of research being done on mindfulness. From that research, we have seen all sorts of claims being made, everything from improved state of mind,

reduced depression, anxiety, increased mood, positivity, optimism, decreased risk for disease, inflammation, all sorts of different things that in some way are connected with different studies that have been done on this thing called mindfulness. A lot of it came out of one of the earliest sort of more clinicized interventions by Jon Kabat-Zinn, who developed something called mindfulness-based relaxation therapy. And that was kind of stripping a lot of mindfulness-based practices from Buddhism, kind of taking anything that wasn't sort of clinical and accessible by anybody out of it, making it very mainstream, and developing it into a

step-by-step progressive eight-week clinical experience. And the research around that has been pretty in-depth, and the outcomes have been pretty tremendous. But there is a but here. There's a challenge with all of this research around mindfulness. And by the way, I am a devout mindfulness practitioner. I have a daily practice and I have for many years now. The interesting thing is I've actually been thinking about the practice and realizing that in my own practice, I don't have a single mindfulness practice. There are a variety of techniques that I explore within my practice on a daily basis. And I've noticed over the years that those things train different capabilities and different states of being within me.

And the collective effect of those is really powerful. But I'd never seen research really break out those different elements until now. And I think that's really awesome because when we talk about the research on mindfulness, and then we talk about how it's all over the place very often, part of the reason for that is because when we talk about mindfulness,

nobody's really talking about the same thing, right? Very few people have broken out the sort of sub-practices of mindfulness and looked at each one independently. And that is exactly what these researchers have done. What they've done is they've taken an eight-week mindfulness-based cognitive therapy intervention. And they've said, okay, so within the context of this intervention, it's not just one practice that you do every day. As a general rule, there are two sort of major categories of practice that tend to dominate these interventions. And they call them open monitoring or sort of noticing and acknowledging feelings or thoughts as they come up, not judging them. And then the second one is called focused attention.

Now, I've used similar terms, and you may have heard it in prior conversations on the podcast. I've very often used the phrase open presence, which would be the same thing as open monitoring, and focused awareness, which is the same thing that they're calling focused attention, which is basically maintaining a focus on a particular thing and disengaging from the negative emotions. Now, these are really different things, right? So open monitoring is the practice of essentially sitting. And rather than focusing on one particular thing, like the breath breath and the sensation of the breath, you're just sort of opening yourself to notice everything, to monitor everything, to see, to hear, to feel. And the practice is allowing yourself to let everything in and then

practicing letting it go, practicing dropping it, right? Whereas a focused attention or focused awareness practice is much more about training your awareness or your attention on a particular kind of neutral anchor. Breathing is the one that's most often used. And using that as a way to sort of train your ability to hold your mind where you want it to be. And knowing that there are other thoughts or emotions that may come up or distractions, things like that, but you keep training it back on your breath. So you gain the ability to direct your attention. So one is, you know, fundamentally about opening to all sensation, not focusing, letting it all in, and then practicing letting it all go. And the other is about training your attention on a very specific sensation or anchor

and allowing that to kind of be the center of your thought. And when other things intervene, training your mind to come back to that one thing. As a general rule, most mindfulness research has focused just on the general category of mindfulness and not split these two out into different things. This particular study actually split them out. So they split a group of people into three different groups. One spent eight weeks training only in an open monitoring style. One spent that time training only in an open monitoring style. One spent that time training

only in focused attention. And one did more of a classic mindfulness-based cognitive therapy, which blends them all, kind of smushes them all together. And the question was, do these two techniques train you differently? Do they create different outcomes? Or do they fundamentally just kind of like work in the brain the same way and teach you to do the same thing? And the cool thing is, not surprisingly, but very cool to see validated in the research, these two techniques actually do train two different skill sets or capabilities. And I felt this in a really powerful way in my own practice and in those who I've worked with. But it's nice to see this actually appear in the research. So kind of setting up the big experimental question, lead researcher Willoughby Britton,

who's an assistant professor of psychiatry and human behavior at Brown, quote, said, it's been long hypothesized that focused attention practice improves attentional control while open monitoring promotes emotional non-reactivity, two aspects of mindfulness thought to contribute to its therapeutic effects. And he continues, End quote. points, end quote, which is sort of a fancier way of saying we split it into two practices and tracked whether this actually gives you two different skill sets. At the end, it turns out it does. So here's what they actually found. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever.

It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required.

Charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were gonna be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is?

You're gonna die. Don't shoot him, we need him! Y'all need a pilot? Flight risk. Turns out the focused attention only group reported that they had a much greater increase in the ability to, quote, willfully shift or focus attention. And the open monitoring group actually had an increase in the skill of being non-reactive to negative thoughts. Two similar but different skill sets. And the cool thing about that is combine them and it allows you to focus your mind where you want it to be and let go of negative thoughts and ideas and stimuli and emotion and be more intentional and less reactive to the life around you, which is pretty super cool because I have come to strongly believe that life is attention. And if you harness the ability

to be able to direct your attention to where you want it to be, to positive, intentional, constructive things, and gain the ability to let go of reactive responses and negative thoughts and emotions, that you have the ability to then direct your attention at things that are positive, uplifting, and nourishing. And when your attention lies there, there lies your life. So really interesting research. And I'll tell you that in kind of an odd quirk of coincidence, I have been experimenting with stripping these things out in my own personal practice. So I actually alternate. On one day, I will do a sitting practice that is primarily focused attention-based on my breath.

And on the next day, I'll do a practice that is primarily open monitoring-based, which is more expansive, allowing, and letting go. And I found that it's actually started to affect me in different ways. So something to think about as you explore this idea of mindfulness and something that helps us deconstruct what we mean when we talk about mindfulness, split it into two major types of practice approaches and see how each affects us in a different yet complementary way. Play with that. I hope that is interesting to you. As always, we will include a direct link to the study report for those who want to go deeper and excited to be back with you next week to share more fun riff type of things and,

as always, science updates. I'm Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project. Hey, thanks so much for listening. And thanks also to our fantastic sponsors who help make this show possible. You can check them out in the links we've included in today's show notes. And while you're at it, be sure to click on the subscribe button in your listening app so you never miss an episode. And then share the Good Life Project love with friends because when ideas become conversations that lead to action, that's when real change takes hold.

See you next time. The Apple Watch Series X is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations,

iPhone Xs are later required. Charge time and glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were gonna be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing.

Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're gonna die. Don't shoot him, we need him! Y'all need a pilot? Flight Risk.