Passion Struck with John R. Miles - Dr. Zelana Montminy on the Science of Meaningful Happiness | EP 686

Episode Date: November 6, 2025

What if happiness isn’t something you chase—but something you build through resilience, purpose, and self-compassion?In this episode of Passion Struck, host John R. Miles sits down with Dr. Zelana Montminy, a behavioral scientist, positive psychologist, and author of Finding Focus: Own Your Attention in an Age of Distraction to unpack the deeper science of happiness—and why our culture has misunderstood it for so long.Dr. Montminy, one of the foremost voices in positive psychology, reveals that true well-being doesn’t come from constant positivity, but from learning how to transform discomfort into growth. Her evidence-based approach draws on neuroscience, behavioral research, and decades of clinical work to help people cultivate resilient joy—the kind that endures even through pain, loss, and uncertainty.Together, John and Dr. Montminy explore the difference between “feeling good” and “doing well,” the myth of toxic positivity, and the powerful connection between meaning, mattering, and mental health.This episode continues our new series, “The Irreplaceables”—a deep look at the people, mindsets, and moments that make life meaningful, and why what matters most can never be replicated.👉 Read the full show notes:Listen + Watch + Go DeeperAll episode resources—including guest links, Passion Struck books, The Ignited Life Substack, and the Start Mattering store—are gathered here:👉 linktr.ee/John_R_MilesTo learn more about Dr. Zelana Montminy, visit zelanamontminy.com.💡 About the EpisodeDiscover why chasing happiness keeps us stuck—and how to cultivate resilient joy instead.Learn the four pillars of emotional fitness that anchor Dr. Montminy’s research: perspective, purpose, connection, and self-awareness.Understand how discomfort and emotional friction can serve as catalysts for growth.Explore the neuroscience of resilience and why our brains are wired more for survival than satisfaction.Hear Dr. Montminy’s personal story of loss and reinvention—and how it reshaped her understanding of well-being.Gain practical tools to strengthen your psychological flexibility and reconnect with what truly matters.🌿 Fuel Your Body, Fuel Your PurposeGet 20% OFF BUBS Naturals Collagen — clean, NSF Certified, and veteran-founded.Use code PASSIONSTRUCK at bubsnaturals.comReclaim your energy from the inside out.Get 20% OFF Mitopure Gummies from Timeline, powered by clinically proven Urolithin A.Head to timeline.com/passionstruck.Join The Ignited Life CommunityIf this episode sparked reflection, The Ignited Life is where transformation continues.Each week, John shares behind-the-scenes insights, neuroscience-backed tools, and practical reflections to help you live more intentionally.🔗 Subscribe free at TheIgnitedLife.net❤️ Support the Mattering MovementEveryone deserves to feel valued and important. Show it. Wear it. Live it.Visit StartMattering.comSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Coming up next on Passion Struck. We're always going to have things that are thrown at us. So that's inevitable having the noise of life consume us. So the real work is in the micro habits, the day-to-day functions that we employ the boundaries that we cultivate around our days and our time in order to choose how to respond to things versus just be super, super reactive. So most of the time, people have content and information coming at them. it all feels very urgent. Our brain is in fight or flight. Someone else's emergency is also ours, and it becomes very sort of nebulous and contagious, right? Welcome to Passionstruck. I'm your host, John Miles. This is the show where we explore the

art of human flourishing and what it truly means to live like it matters. Each week, I sit down with change makers, creators, scientists, and everyday heroes to decode the human experience and uncover the tools that help us lead with meaning, heal what hurts, and pursue the fullest expression of who we're capable of becoming. Whether you're designing your future, developing as a leader, or seeking deeper alignment in your life, this show is your invitation to grow with purpose and act with intention. Because the secret to a life of deep purpose, connection, and impact is choosing to live like you matter. Welcome back, friends, to Passion Struck Episode 686.

I'm your host, John Miles, and I am so glad you're here. Whether you're a long-time listener or joining for the first time, welcome. You're part of a growing movement to live intentionally and to create a world where people feel seen, valued, and like they truly matter. If this show has ever helped you take a step toward that life, here's how you can help it grow. Share this episode with someone who needs it. Leave a five-star rating and review on Apple Podcast or Spotify. It's the best way to help others discover these conversations. And lastly, join our rapidly growing community hub at the ignitedlife.net.

My substack, where I share weekly frameworks, workbooks, reflections, and behind-the-scenes to help you live with greater purpose and connection. This week, we launched our brand new series, The Irreplaceables, rediscovering human work in an age of acceleration. In a world where machines are getting faster, smarter, and more capable, what truly sets us apart. This series explores qualities that no algorithm can replicate, empathy, imagination, integrity, and love, and why our humanity itself is our ultimate competitive edge. Earlier this week, Dr. Zach Seidler helped us explore what happens when disconnection erodes

our sense of belonging, especially among men and how reclaiming vulnerability and friendship can literally save lives. Today, we turn that conversation inward to the disconnection that happens inside us. In a culture that glorifies productivity, hacks, and optimization, many of us are quietly losing the ability to simply be present. We meditate, journal, track, and measure our every move, yet somehow feel more fractured than ever. As my guest today says, our pursuit of wellness has become performative, and in trying so hard to be well, we've forgotten how to actually feel alive. To impact why this is happening and what we can do about it, I'm joined by Dr. Zelina Mo Minning, behavioral scientist, psychologist, and author with a brand new book, Finding Focus,

Own Your Attention, and an Age of Distraction. A former television contributor and researcher turned thought leader on emotional well-being, Dr. Z blends science storytelling and soul to help us reclaim the most precious human resources we have, our attention. In today's conversation, we explore why the pursuit of wellness can sometimes make us sick. The three focused thieves that quietly drain our energy. How to replace multitasking with meaningful attention, and why learning to trust ourselves through what she calls tiny trust is the real key to freedom and fulfillment.

This isn't just about productivity. It's about presence and how to rediscover the wonder of being here now. Before we begin, a quick reminder, my new children's book, You Matter Luma, the first story in the mattering verse, is now available for presale at Barnes & Noble or wherever books are sold. Links will be in the show notes. It's a story for ages 4 to 8 about courage, kindness, and the ripple effect of knowing you matter. Now, let's step into episode 686, finding focus in an age of distraction with Dr. Zelina Momini. Thank you for choosing Passionstruck and choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey to creating an intentional life.

Now, let that journey begin. I am so excited today to have Zelana Momini. I'm Passionstrap. Welcome, Zilana. How are you today? I'm doing great. So happy to be here. Thank you for having me. I'm so excited to have you here as well. I thought I would start with this question. I was hoping you might be able to take us back to that UCLA classroom where a student whispers, I'm doing everything right and I feel frozen. What did you hear beneath those words and how did that moment change your approach? I love that question. I think you're referring to my Oprah essay, right? It was actually extremely powerful.

We have a collection of moments in our lives that we can point to that were internally gave pause or some sort of transformative element. And I had just finished lecturing about and talking to the graduate students about burnout and anxiety and the attention crisis that we're all living in. And she just looked so hopeless. And I think that's what stuck with me the most. And then the echoes that followed. And she just looked at me because everyone always asks me, like, okay, so what's the one

I need to be doing. What's the secret? As if wellness or mental health has this one thing. Goodness, if it did, we would all be in it. But they try, right? So she said, and she just looked at me. She said, I'm literally doing, I don't know where to start. I have every single thing on my to-do list and the red lights and the saunas and the green juice and the therapy. Like, I don't even, and it's expensive and I can't afford it all. And I don't know what I'm doing. And I just can't be well without it. And she was just like so broken about it. And then I started to hear, oh, yeah, me too. Me too.

Another guy. Me, oh my God, yeah, me too. I don't know where to start. I don't know. And it's just, it was like this group formed around me, like bees to honey. What do we do? How do we even start? And it dawned on me that and I knew this and I felt this in myself over the years.

And I certainly did write about this that our pursuit of wellness and being well. and the actual performative element of it has actually barricaded us from being truly well and that we need to spend much less time trying to hit the to-do lists and the products that are being pitched and much more time about actually being alive in the moments that we're living. As I was looking at your background, you live at this intersection of science and storytelling. You're a clinician, you're a researcher, your TV contributor, you're an author, you're a consultant, you're a mom.

Yeah. I was like, wow. How do you deal with your own personal tension between performing wellness yourself and feeling well? Listen, I think that's a really profound question. And I think you've hit sort of the heart of my work is that I'm a human being. So yes, I study these things and I work with clients. But I'm always trying to narrate the chaos of being human right now and make sense of it.

And so I hope that I speak to the narrative truths that we all feel, but maybe just don't know how to name or that we, and I think that's why some of my social content has really gone viral and been so well accepted is that it's, I'm talking about the things that every single one of us knows and lives, but maybe doesn't know exactly how to say it. And so throughout my days, I understand that life is cyclical and that we live through seasons of time and that nothing really is forever. And I don't mean that, like, in a saccharine way. People aren't forever. Actually, our experiences, our timelines, if we're going through struggles with one kid, that's going to pass. Like, it's really tough in the thick of it. But I also know people are like this.

And we go through things. And I think being a parent actually illuminates that very clearly because we think something's really problematic. And then it's like a week or two later, it just fizzles away. And so I think leaning into those cycles and the same. seasonality of it is something that I do in order to get through and use what I know and what I preach in my own life. And I also think, honestly, I don't subscribe to balance. And I know that's a bit counterintuitive. I don't think balance exists. I think it's a hard metric. And I think when

people talk about balance, they're probably not using the word accurately enough. But for me and for so many of my clients, it's much more about what are we prioritizing? How does that match our value system and our intentions for that day or that week? And some weeks, like my work will take precedent. Like right now my book came out and that's taking time away from my kids and my family, but they were, I'm aligned in that. I'm okay with that. I don't feel shame about that. And then some weeks my kids or my, some days my kids or my spouse or my dog. So I think it's so much less about trying to be balanced, the scale to be balanced and much more about, am I doing what lights me up? Do I find purpose in anything?

Am I actually remembering what I'm doing? And am I attuned and intentional about those moments? Well, that's one of the reasons I wanted to have you on this show so much is the podcast is really about the power of intentionality and the importance of being present in your life. So your brand new book, which came out in September, finding focus, own your attention in an age of distraction, really hits that head on the nail. Why did you think now was the right time for the book? Well, I think that there hasn't been a more urgent time to talk about the epidemic of distraction. I believe that we're really living through a global crisis where our nervous systems are entirely overloaded by constant input, technology, and our.

sort of productivity culture that glorifies like constant busyness has essentially rewired our brain for task switching and fragmentation, which leaves us emotionally exhausted. We have tons of unresolved grief and it's really eroding our capacity to sustain attention to be present for ourselves and each other. And so we live through this like this world of disconnection and depletion. And so that's why I wrote the book because our attention has been hijacked. as someone else's profit margin. But the cost isn't just productivity, which most people think about when they think about focus. It's actually the real cost, the more expensive cost is the presence, the empathy, and the meaning that we've lost touch with. When I started to examine this,

and I started to look at all the symptoms that are out there, whether it's the loneliness epidemic, so many high schoolers who feel sad and hopeless, etc. To me, what this is really causing is a crisis of mattering in my view. And I feel like so many people because of what's happening start feeling more and more invisible to who they are and how they're showing up to the people around them. And I think it's that emptiness that is causing so much of this grief and despair that so many people are feeling around the world. And I think you've hit the nail. I do think it is a crisis of mattering. And I love that lens. I do think that. I do think that focus and attention is actually even deeper than that, the crisis of attention that we're

in. It's almost like a prerequisite for mattering because you can't feel that you matter. You can't experience belonging or mattering if you're not aligned with other people, if you're not connecting deeply with others. Mattering is actually relational. So it requires connections and attunement. And when our collective attention is hijacked by all the noise, by all the metrics, the distractions, the things we say yes to, we can't even experience, we don't have the presence of mind to even know we matter, right? Because it's, mattering is such an emotional thing, but I feel like attention and focus is even, it's almost like more existential. It's like mattering is about not feeling significant and attention really is also about, I can't even,

I don't even know my version of reality. Like how many times a day do people come home and they don't even know what they've done for the day. Like they just are on autopilot because they're not attuned. They're not paying attention. They're not focused on any one activity. Like we drive home without knowing where we're going and we just arrive. So I think that's why so many people describe feeling really numb right now and unappreciated, too, because our sense of what's even real has just eroded.

And that requires attention. And it's something that we've lost touch with. Yeah. Thank you for sharing that. I'm sure you're familiar with Allison Woodbrooks. She came out with the book last year talk and she teaches a great course how to talk. Gooder in life and in work. I think that's her course. Anyway, she and I were having a discussion and what she said made this real to me. She said when you're having a conversation with another person, you're really holding up a mirror

to yourself because you see yourself in their stories, in their life. But if you're not paying attention, you miss that whole connection. And the more that starts happening, the more this breakdown happens. And I think you were talking about a few different words, and I think it's important to ground the audience in them. You mentioned attention, you mentioned focus. I think you also mentioned concentration, but I think there's a key difference between those three words. Why does it matter? It matters because we have to start becoming emotionally granular to our experience. And when I say that, and what I actually mean is our vocabulary and the narrative that we tell ourselves matters. And so when we go through our day without really paying much attention to any one thing and we're saying,

oh, I'm so mad at him, I'm so this. And we're just using words without understanding really like the depth of the experience, we lose being able to confront the things that we need to confront to move through it. So we might not actually be mad. We might be just really jealous or maybe feeling hurt or insignificant, like you said. So I think it's important to differentiate attention versus focus and concentration so that we understand that those are actually very different things, although people use them interchangeably all the time.

So I think that we have to understand that attention is the brain's like, so. spotlight on one thing. And I talk about this in the book. It's the capacity to notice something in your environment. And I think that's really, it's more passive and it's broad. It's almost like an umbrella. Attention is always happening, but it's what kind of orientes you to what you're doing, right? Focus is more of a directional, directed state. So it's a little more active. And focus is attention. It's a form of attention, but it's with intention. So you're consciously choosing what to attune to, where to place your attention. So focus is actually a choice, which is why so many people feel like they have no control

anymore because they've given away focus. They don't even, they're not intentional about what they respond to. And then concentration is the more, it's the stamina. It's like the ethos behind your focus. It's how much cognitive energy you're applying to that one thing. It's almost like a Zoom function, right, on a camera. Thank you for going through those, and I think it's important as well. I came out with a book myself last year called Passionstruck, and I go through these 12 different

principles in it, but the last one was all on this topic. Oh, good. The lens I put this through was I used one of the famous sayings from Stephen Covey. The main thing about the main thing is keeping the main thing. And so many of us aren't focusing on the main thing anymore. And you use the word autopilot. but I've updated it to, I think, so many people today are living what I call the pinball life. They're acting as if they're the pinball in the game of pinball.

And they just bounce off of all the things that they hit that they run into. And you write that many of us have outsourced our attention like that pinball to algorithms, alerts, even our routines. How do we recognize the line between being that pinball? and controlling the pinball. Great question. And we're always going to have things that are thrown at us. So that's inevitable, is having the noise of life consume us.

So the real work is in the micro habits, the day-to-day functions that we employ the boundaries that we cultivate around our days and our time in order to choose how to respond to things versus just be super, super reactive. So most of the time, people have content and information coming at them. and they just, it all feels very urgent. Our brain is in fight or flight. Someone else's emergency is also ours and it becomes very sort of nebulous and contagious, right? And so it's very critical that we take moments of time to outline priorities that are important and urgent and knock things out in chunks, understanding that our brain can't focus inevitably. We

don't have an unlimited amount of attention and focus, by the way. Most people think we do, but we don't. So to really block out those moments of time where we can attune to certain things and understand that things will come at us and things will want to distract us, will want to pull towards something else for relief because it's really hard for us to sit with the discomfort of focus because our brain just isn't trained for that. And I think it's just about intention and it's about micro habits. And something as simple as just maybe not reaching for your phone the minute you wake up is a really effective tool that sets your day up for less distraction. Our brain is like wet cement when we wake up. And so it takes about 30 minutes for

it to harden, 30 to 40 minutes. And so if we harden, if our brain hardens in someone else's world with social media and scrolling through emails that all feel intense that we have to respond to and all of that's a different day than you're going to have if you take that time for your brain to harden, as I say, being in your own world, attuning to what matters to you and setting yourself up for success for the rest of the day. Hang tight. We've got more from Zelanamo Mini coming up right after the break. Please support the brands who make Passion Struck possible. It's one of the best ways you can help this mission reach more people. You're listening to Passion Struck on the Passion Struck Network. Now, back to my conversation with Zelana Momini. I love that. Myself,

I start my day off early in the morning. Typically, I get up around 5, 515. And the first thing I do is I go for about an hour walk. And for the first 30 minutes, I just spend it in mindfulness. I don't listen to anything. I just try to tune in and sense the world around me. And I love that time of day because I feel like your senses are more alive and you smell, you sense things a lot more. So I try to just let myself move into that and set my intentions for the day. And then I'll do like I did today, listen to a podcast episode of a guest I've got coming on or listen to an audio book or something like that. But I agree with you. I think it's so important to really not go on your phone, not use devices, not do those types of things.

until you allow yourself at least a half an hour or 45 minutes into your day to just set the conditions for how you want to live it. At least it works for me. Yeah, it's fantastic. Now, not everybody has the luxury of time. So many people sometimes are waking up at the crack of dawn to get to work or they have little kids jumping all over them. And so again, when I talked about seasons earlier in the episode, I think we have to be really cognizant. That is a season of life. My kids no longer jump on me in bed at five in the morning. They're 13, 11, and 5, although my 5-year-old does actually sometimes, but not as much, right? And so, like, physically, they need less of me.

It's developmentally on point. We've moved through that season. So if you're in a season of life where you might not have the luxury of taking time for yourself or making a coffee in silence or whatever it is, just know that you still have power over your outcomes in that day. For example, if you have things that are taking away your focus right when you wake up, maybe try to set your night up so that once everyone is in bed, you have time for yourself and you can map out how you're going to start the next day and what you're going to employ. And maybe don't grab your phone first thing and model to your

kids like that you're present with them. Or maybe carve out a little extra chunk of time in the morning to take time for each other yourself, whatever that is, or go outside for a split second and take a breath. So there's lots of things that we can do in the seasons we're in. So earlier this week, we had a major heist that happened at the Louvre. And I know you come from a French background. And I want to use this as a segue because it was thieves that went in there and did that taste. But you talk about focus thieves. What are the three thieves that you see in high performers who are a lot of my audience,

parents and students, and how do they masquerade as productivity? I love that Louvre story, by the way. And what I love the most is that they did it at 9.30 in the morning, which very nice work life balance, even for thieves. They even brought a platform out and lifted it up in midday life. It was real funny. we have only in Paris we have our noise thieves right so that's like the constant inputs the overstimulation the notifications the news the chatter the text the comparisons like that's one of the

thieves that happens to us a lot and it keeps us in high alert for those things like we seek out those quick hits of dopamine and the novelty because of those like it triggers this network in our brain that expects that and it's overstimulating so we mistake that busyness often for meaning. And that's probably why I dug into this topic is everyone was feeling so burnt out. And it couldn't be just the job or the spouse or the kids, right? It's steeper than that. So I really feel like this is at the core. There's like the emotional thieves where we are in a culture that avoids discomfort at all costs and boredom. We sort of filled our lives so that we don't ever have to feel uncomfortable or just that we have to slow down. We keep going

because honestly, a lot of us don't really want to address the stuff that's hard to, like the unspoken grief, the disappointment of maybe your partner spoke to you in a way that you didn't like this morning, but it's so much easier to triple screen on Netflix and buy groceries at the same time and sit right next to him than to actually address it. So those are all the kinds of things that we're dealing with throughout the day. And then there's multiple things. I talk about a lot in the book. I think that's like the emotional thief.

We feel like we have to fill every pause so we don't have to feel anything. and that's our emotional avoidance that fractures our ability to really pay attention to anything and to focus. And so when you can actually sit through that discomfort and I actually talk a lot about prescribing boredom to ourselves because we don't feel it anymore, but it's almost like brain training. It's like emotional tolerance and focus training, right? So those are just some of them.

But there's lots of thieves. I highlighted a few in the book, but there's so many more. There's constant overstimulation that's the overwhelmed thief, right? we over the over stimulation is mistaken for productivity and we say oh we're being so productive right but we're actually not it keeps our stress responses activated there's also the myth of multitasking which i'm not sure if you want to talk about later but that's a whole other thief that takes us away from actually doing anything and doing anything well and that's just such a part of our culture we glorify it in such a profound way it's really dangerous well maybe we'll just hit on that right

I remember I, at the time, I was a senior executive at Lowe's. I was leading all, I was in their IT organization leading all application development. So that was, to put in a perspective, about a billion and a half dollar budget, thousands of resources around the world. And I had 12 direct reports. And at the time, our portfolio had somewhere over, it was like 300 programs and 800 projects. And I remember one of my direct reports said to me in a one-on-one that I'm the best multitasker that he had ever seen.

And at the time, I took it as a compliment, but the more mature I've gotten in my career and I look back, the more I see it as a weakness at that point in my career, because I was choosing to focus on so many things. And oftentimes, going back to Stephen Covey, I wasn't focusing on the main thing. thing that was truly the most important thing at the time. And I think science has shown us that multitasking is something that really is not a strength for anyone. Why is that the case?

Well, because the brain actually doesn't multitask. It just task switches. So the human brain cannot run tasks in parallel. It just goes back and forth between them. So every time you toggle between an email and a conversation. or between slack and doing your work, whatever it is, like there's a part of your brain that has to reorient and it reboots context. And every time you have to reorient, there was this incredible study that showed it takes

about 23 to 25 minutes on average to fully regain focus. Minutes, I didn't misspeak. That's not seconds. So it takes 23 to 25 minutes to fully regain focus and energy. So that constant task shifting and context shifting is flooding our brain and we just can't do it. We're just exhausted. We can't retain things. We have lower creativity.

And we're losing huge chunks of time pretending that we're multitasking. In my case, I don't think I was, I was pretending. I was having to do it because my life, I was living my work life by meetings. and I learned this lesson so much that now I try to eliminate almost all meetings. You can't eliminate them all, but if it is not focused on a quick result and an outcome, I don't do it anymore because all those meetings were keeping me so distracted instead of what I really need to focus on. And sometimes meetings are important.

There's connection, there's rapport between client and whatever it is. It's important to bake that into a system in which. which when you are doing your work, you're chunking that out so that you can actually sustain focus. You're not doing multiple things at one time. There's an illusion of productivity. Oh, I just have to because there's so much coming at me. It's just not how it works. When you actually single task, you're much more productive. You get a lot more done. You're much more efficient by about 40%. So you get a dopamine hit. Like it feels good to check off multiple boxes at one time. And it feels like progress. But what we're actually doing is fragmenting our presence. We're not actually

multiplying output. Well, the way that you organize your book is you start out with building the foundation and you go into initially a vision and commitment, starting with who we want to be, not what we want to do. And we've talked about this a little bit about setting some type of ritual. But what do you suggest for a listener on how to set a daily focus of intention? I think it has to start with whatever period you have that you have a moment to calibrate what it is that's worthy of your attention in that day. And everything feels like a lot.

Like so many of us are just utterly overwhelmed by tasks and by things that are coming at us. And parents have so much more to deal with in terms of just the forms that need to be filled out. The things that need to be purchased constantly, it's just nonstop and not even talking about. invisible and mental labor of caretaking or parenting or whatever it is that you're doing outside of your job. So there's a lot. And I think because of that, we have a responsibility to create rituals for ourselves within our days where we take time to be intentional about what it is that we're tackling for that day and to schedule in. If you're a person who needs to scroll through social media and thinks that's restorative. It's actually not at all. It's still

content that you're digesting. But then factor that into your day. Don't just do it like we talked about just on autopilot. Actually say, okay, this is my scroll time. I scheduled this into my calendar. I have 10 minutes to scroll through Instagram starts now and put that timer on. So you're actually giving yourself the time to do that versus just telling yourself I can't do that. But then the other chunks of time, don't do that. So being really intentional about how you create your day and factor in those kinds of rituals is important. And the other thing that you bring up that's important is sleep. Yes. And this is something I concentrate on a lot, all the way from my habits of when I go to bed, when I wake up and trying to see it consistent as possible to Sarcadium rhythm and

trying to make sure that I'm outside when light first comes up and then I take a walk during nightfall. So I have that balance. But what do you also recommend on about caffeine, winding down, timing, those sorts of things? Sleep is essentially our operating system reboot. Like we shut down our computer. We have to shut down our body. We need it for a nervous system and for everything to function well. You can do every hack in the world and nothing's going to really make a dent. if you don't have a sound sleep routine in place and sleep hygiene. So I would say that what you're talking about, the light is really important,

exposing yourself to daylight first thing when you wake is critical. I think creating also like that digital sunset, sun down, sunup, right? Like power down your screens if you can 30 to 60 minutes before bed because your brain needs a drop in stimulation to cue the melatonin to start. miltonin is the hormone that we need to have a balanced sleep. So that's important. You can implement sensory cues too. Like you can light a candle. You can turn the lights down. You can grab a book that tells your body like, okay, it's time to sleep soon. I can feel it coming. You can brain dump.

If you're someone who wakes up in the middle of the night with a million things on your mind and it's just like you have an active brain, I call it a brain dump. So you write on a pad of paper, anything that's in your brain. Just dump it on the paper. And then in the morning, when you have time, you'll figure out how to factor that into your day or your schedule if you need to. And so I think that those are important.

I think circadian alignment like you were talking about is really great. Waking up at the same time, going to bed at the same time is important. For your body, it strengthens your emotional stability. And I think what some people misunderstand about sleep is that it's not just the end of your day. It's like a full day start.

Like your focus, the next day, your emotional equilibrium, the next day actually depends on how you end your day before and the day prior to that. So it's really about being very intentional about that because a rested brain, it's going to work so much better for you in every facet of your life. And you're just going to live much more deeply. I also wanted to ask you, what are your thoughts? And I'll hold one up here. I guess I have it upside down.

This is a neutropic that I like to take from proscriptions. This one happens to be methylene blue. They have another one that's methylene blue and caffeine and some other things. I also like the timeline products for cellular regeneration. I do coffee. I only drink organic. Try to look for a thing. I have mold testing in them.

But what are some of the foods that you think are best, especially for people who get that energy low in the afternoon? Yeah. And so I do have a whole chapter on nutrition. And you did ask me about caffeine. And I forgot to reply about that. But I do think caffeine is fine as long as it's. And actually some elements of coffee can be really supportive with attention and focus. But definitely not past early afternoon, if at all. And I would say just a couple cups and just cap it would be ideal. In terms of like actual supplements, I think first of all, we really need to focus on foundational. foods and just like everybody says, like supporting your health, which means colors, which means antioxidant, which means all of the things that we always hear about, right? I think that if you're having for energy boosts, I actually think I've been digging into collagen and creatine a little bit. I think some amino acids and neurotransmitter precursors can be really interesting for sustained energy and for sleep as well. And I hesitate to recommend certain

supplements just because every body is so different. I think magnesium is phenomenal for sleep. I think most of us have very little of it. But I think overall we need to focus on food sources and go from there and really nail that first. I take bubs collagen. That's my go-to in coffee. And what you just said about magnesium, I remember interviewing Dom D'Agostino. A couple years ago, I asked them, what is the one supplement that if you would have people take that people don't have enough of, and he said magnesium, but you have to make sure that the magnesium that you need is the right one for what you're lacking. Some people need it for sleep. Other people need it to go to the bathroom. So it just depends on what brand. Yeah, it's great. It's great. Overall,

we're lacking and our brain requires it. So we can't always get it from food, which is important. And it really calms the nervous system. It supports all sorts of functions. So I would focus on the glycinate versus let citrate kind, but you guys have to talk to your doctors and figure that out. Just before you and I hit the air, I was outside with my dogs just trying to get in some midday sun and activity. And you say that nature gives a soft fascination. Where do you personally go when you need to refill your attention and why is nature so important? Nature is critical. I always try to just get outside, even if I can't physically go to a park or a space like that, just being outside is restorative. It recalibrates us. We're never

meant to process the world, mostly through screens, which is how many of us kind of function. So our brain was meant to attune to sound and wind and light and sun and rhythms and textures. And so that's how we need to bring that nature, those elements, those textures back into my life and into anyone's life. And I think even just short exposure, as the science has shown, to be very helpful. So even five to 10 minutes outdoors can lower our stress hormones and regulate our heart rate and all of those great things. And they even say I did a deep dive into this.

If you have to be in an office for most of the day, granted, definitely try to take your lunch outside or go for a walk during a phone call can be helpful. I try to do that sometimes. But even a house, like even a plant, like putting a plant in an office has been shown to also lower stress and nourish our brain. So I think there's little things we can do. We can always try to step outside, looking away from your screen toward a tree or whatever it is, ending your day with a few minutes of an attention walk outside, no headphones or ear pods, like nothing, no input. Just try for five minutes.

It's going to feel really challenging because our brain just isn't trained for that anymore. But we need to recalibrate because our nervous system is suffering. So one of the things that you do in the book is you give different examples. examples of concentration training from five-minute first-in-ables to Pomodoro to long-form reading, et cetera. What's your recommended on-ramp for each personality type? Ooh, that's a big question. I think it's not really dependent on personality types. I think it's just dependent on how well you can currently focus, how often you reach toward distractions or want to interrupt your focus time. And so I think definitely focus has to be trained.

and we have to be able to sustain our voluntary attention. So I think it has to do more less with sort of personality types and more to do with like how good are you at it already. And I think you just start small. Most of us are really not great at it. So set a timer for three to five minutes, honestly. It can be super, super simple. And you can just, it's not a meditation, but just to think that to focus on one thing, I call

it single tasking for five minutes. Try not to reach for anything else or think about anything else. And then you're going to start little by little building that muscle back. You might drift and then just go back and notice that drift, but go back. And it's really important. The best thing we can do is that monotasking, choosing that one thing, even if you're doing something monotonous, like washing dishes, reading, writing, whatever it is, have a defined start time and only do that one thing for that chunk of time.

No background music, no background TV, no toggling, no tabs. This builds our neural endurance, and it's really important for all of us. So I love that. And you talked about scrolling before and putting a time limit on it. And I think a lot of us default to taking a break by scrolling. But is there a memory tactic that we could use that actually sticks for busy brains? A memory tactic. Oh, to improve our working memory.

right yeah i think there's all sorts of fun things we can be doing and puzzles i think word searches are great crossword puzzles even just trying to memorize a phone number we don't do that anymore our brain is just not adjusted to that anymore instead of having everything in your contacts try to memorize a number or something learn something new our brain grows when there's novelty and repetition of connections so that's what we have to really focus on i absolutely love that. I was recently back at my college alma mater with all my rugby buddies. And that was actually a topic that came up back in the day, how if you wanted to get someone's number, how you had to be so good at memorizing. And now we're given a number and 90% of the time, we can't remember it. So you get in this

habit of tapping someone's phone or asking for the number because it's a lost skill. totally lost scale and it's and it's not that we're adjusting to it it's that our brain is just it's not evolved our brain isn't evolved to function like this and we have to get it back and that's why so many of us feel so depleted and exhausted and overwhelmed even with all the tools even with all the efficiency tools like we're just we're in it we're in a bad place we're the loneliest generation ever even though we're the most connected there's just so many things one of the things that I did want to explore was this idea of tiny trusts and you write in the book every time that I keep a tiny promise to myself I prove I can create space for my life without

needing a perfect system and I love that what's one tiny trust that's changed how you relate to your own focus oh I like that yeah these tiny trust teach our nervous system that we're capable of things and that we're dependable I think that what are my tiny I feel like there's tiny trust throughout the day, like throughout every moment. There's things that I often put aside that I say that I'll get to and then I do get to them tomorrow or the next day and it teaches my brain that my words matter and that I can keep my promise. They don't just like not do it at all, but I do get to that and that's like a bridge for

myself. Little things like not touching my phone for 10 minutes when I'm trying to focus and sticking to that, drinking a full glass of water because I'm really. really bad at remembering to do that sometimes. It's like I'm training myself that I'm capable that I can keep my promises and then it's not it's about consistency. It's not about perfection at all. So earlier on in the conversation, we talked about attention and I had you give the difference between attention, concentration and focus. And we talked a little bit about mattering. I want to come back to it through the lens of relationships as force multipliers. How does

attention given and received, repair our closeness with our partners, kids, or our work teams? And is there a favorite active listening micro habit that you use or recommend? So I actually just wrote about this yesterday on Instagram and it's resonating deeply with people. I really think that it's where I got it. Yeah. I do think that attention is the currency of connection these days. I think that it's minimal that we are just or depleted. we're wired to have to connect with each other, to be able to respond and to sense each other's like emotional states. And our shared attention is how we co-regulate. It's how our nervous system learns. It's really important to be able to look in someone's eyes and not have to

look away or track their tone or feel like that sort of human chemistry, whether it's like platonic or romantic. I think that, you know, people often think that disconnection comes from distance or not being together, but it actually comes from attention that's divided. And so I think that we're living in a world that really has glorified these surface connections. Like we have followers, we have texts, we have all these things that we exchange with people. And it's on the surface level makes us feel like we're content that we have a lot of people in our life. But really, we're not. There's no depth. So we're not with individuals. We're full of people, but we're not really seeing who we fully are and we need that. I think that's one of the biggest issues in

today's dating world. And I just think that attention is a really rare form of love. And you ask, like, how do we do that? I mean, it's, it's really simple, but we've walked away from it. Like, we have to stick with the discomfort. We have to move past those moments where it's, oh, she's been quiet for a long time, but I'm going to stay. I'm going to stay. I'm going to stick with this. And that's when intimacy starts to build when you can tolerate each other's discomfort and be there for those moments. Zelana, I was hoping that we might be able to do a live exercise if you're up for it. I was going to pick the live calendar audit. And maybe we can pick a scenario and think about your rock exercise. And so people can understand how to apply a little bit of

this. Yeah, sure. So maybe we'll just. pick something that's going on in my life. So my mother-in-law is getting ready to move closer to us. And so there are a whole bunch of activities that we need to do to prepare for it. And I keep finding myself, this happened to me earlier that I'm putting it on the back burner instead of giving it the precedence that it needs because the timing is key, because we need everything delivered to where she's going to live so that as soon as it gets here, we can have all the accommodations done. So how do I put the rocks before other things that I'm doing and prioritize this to give it to all the attention that deserves? And so for those of you who don't know this metaphor,

it's really about rocks, pebbles, and sand. And if you fill your jar with sand first, there's obviously no room for the rocks. But if you start with the rocks first and then the pebbles, so the rocks are like the things that matter the most, which is health, family, like work, rest, relationships, et cetera. And then you've got the pebbles. Like that's like the supportive of stuff, like the meetings, the errands, the logistics of life. And then the sand is the reactive noise. It's like the scrolling, the emails, the obligations that, like, don't really do much for your life. So if you put the rocks first and then the pebbles, the sand sort of settles in around that. So you can still do some of those things, but they don't take precedent. So I think that's

what you're referring to, right? And so when you look at your calendar and audit your life, I suggest maybe color coding. So maybe green can be the rock and the red is like, the pebble and the gray is like the sand or something like that. And then you have to start layering in what's critical to your rocks, like the things that matter. And so putting her into your home, getting the things ready, that takes precedent. And so tracking back from when the due date is for that and maybe give yourself a little cushion in case you lag a little bit. So I always say never schedule things exactly when you need them done. You should always give yourself a few days of a window because light.

happens, things come up and then track back from there and map out how many rocks am I targeting per day and is my time actually like when I look at my calendars, most of my time actually going toward the pebbles and the sand probably is. So how can I put back those rocks and start from there first? So always start with the big picture, the mattering, the purpose driven stuff, the stuff that was required for family, for health. And then you can schedule in the other stuff, like the work, the meetings, the other things. And I think that's the lens we always need to take. And I find color coding to be very effective in this.

Zelano, thank you so much for sharing that. My last question for you is this. What does it mean to you to live a passion-struck life? I think you have to live in every moment. You have to actually live and be alive in the moments that we choose. I think attunement and where we place our attention, is living a passion-struck life. Love it.

Where can the listeners go to learn more about you and your work? On Instagram as dr.z-e-L-A-N-A. I have tons of content and resources. And then my website, dr.zelana.com, tons of free resources that walk people through all sorts of things and we've in neuroscience and actionable tools and lots. It was such an honor to have you here today.

Thank you so much for joining us on Passionstruck. I'm happy to be here. Thanks for having me. That's a wrap on today's conversation with Dr. Zelina Moeaning. What I love about this episode is how it reminds us that focus isn't about control. It's about connection. It's not balance we need. It's alignment with what truly matters.

Here are three reflections to carry with you. Your attention is your most powerful currency. Spend it where it matters. Second, healing doesn't come from managing yourself perfectly. It comes from safety, tenderness, and trust. And third, every tiny trust you keep with yourself builds the foundation for the focus you crave. This conversation helped you rethink your relationship with attention or gave you tools to bring more presence in your life. Then consider paying the fee.

Subscribe to our YouTube channel for full episodes, highlights, and behind the scenes moments that bring these conversations to life. Share it with someone who needs to hear it and leave a five-star rating or review on Apple Podcast or Spotify. It helps new listeners discover passion Struck and join our growing movement for intentional living. You can also find key takeaways, companion workbooks, and extended insights at the ignited life.net, my substack for living with intention and purpose. Coming up next week on Passionstruck, we continue our series the irreplaceables with Elias Friedman, the visionary founder and photographer behind the doggist. We explore how empathy, attention, and storytelling connect us not only to each other, but to every living thing.

doesn't have to ask you a question of like, how are you doing? Just being in their presence and they have an ability to listen and sense the way you're feeling and whether it's eye contact, touch, warmth, letting you connect with them. There's just something that has a powerful way of making you feel better and de-escalating and relieving stress. They're the best listeners and even though they don't speak to you, they know exactly what to say. And there's also a stigma around mental health. Not everyone's going to raise their hand and say, I need help. So with a dog, you don't have to raise your hand. They just show up for you. Until next time, focus on what truly matters. Protect your attention like it's sacred. And as always, live life,

Passion Star.