The Joe Rogan Experience - #1723 - Amishi Jha

Episode Date: October 21, 2021

Dr. Amishi Jha is a professor of psychology at the University of Miami, and Director of Contemplative Neuroscience for the Mindfulness Research and Practice Initiative. She is the author of "Peak Mind: Find Your Focus, Own Your Attention, Invest 12 Minutes a Day."

The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day. Hello. Hello. Thanks for doing this. Absolutely. Peak mind, huh? That's right.

Yeah. How long have you been working on this? My whole life. Your whole life? But the actual book, a couple years. And the idea of improving all aspects of the way the brain works, is this something that's always fascinated you? Absolutely. Yeah? Yeah.

The book isn't necessarily about all aspects, but a very important one that drives a lot of other aspects, which is the brain's attention system. Yeah, that's a thing a lot of people have a problem with today, right? With phones and distractions and screens and nonsense. Yeah, but it's always been a problem. So meaning you can look back to medieval monks and they report, you know, I abandoned my family, I've devoted my life to God,

and I still keep thinking about lunch when I'm supposed to be praying. So this is not only a modern problem, it's actually a human problem. Where does it come from? Is it just a natural function of having a lot of things to think about in the world if you're trying to survive? Where does what come from? Distractibility. Distraction. If you think about it, if you're a hunter-gatherer, you kind of have to multitask mentally, right? You can't just concentrate on picking these mushrooms. You also have to think, is that a sound of a branch snapping behind me?

Is someone sneaking up on me? Like what's that smell? Like you have to always be aware of so many different things. It seems almost like a natural part of being a person to be distracted. Absolutely. Our brain is built for distractibility, exactly for the reasons that you said. It advantages us to be able to not just focus when we want to, but scan as we're still engaged in a task. And as I just mentioned, it's not really only a modern problem because oftentimes, even if we're abandoning every other kind of possible external distraction, and we're just by ourselves alone in a quiet room, we can still feel like it's hard to focus.

So this capacity that drives kind of a shifting, moving attention, waxing and waning is something that is baked into the way that our brain functions. And I think that's often misunderstood as a problem. People think, oh, no, no, my brain is really busy. My brain gets really distracted. Instead of understanding that's just the nature of the brain. If you are alive, awake, conscious, about half of your waking moments, your attention is not going to be in the task at hand. That's something that people need to learn when they start meditating, that when you meditate, people think, God, why do I keep getting distracted? That's just part of it. Exactly. You're never going to be like completely Zen for long periods of time and just completely full of bliss and enlightenment.

No, you're going to be thinking about cheese and car tires. Exactly. When is it raining? Yeah. No, absolutely. I think understanding that, it starts to shift your relationship to what you're trying to do in the practice of meditation. It's not about clearing the mind. and that term gets used a lot. Like, just clear it out.

Not possible. Not going to happen. Not the way that your brain was designed. But then you start understanding that there is a win to be had in a practice, like especially the kind of stuff that I study in my lab, mindfulness meditation, because in the act of knowing where your mind is and training it to come back over and over, you gain a lot. You gain almost, in some sense, the super capacity to have more control in your, not just the way your mind functions, but in your life.

That's where it gets interesting for me, because do you have sort of a standard protocol that you think people should apply to their thinking? Or is it based on where you are in your life? How much you've already done of this? Does everybody's brain vary in terms of how much distractions they have in their head? Deep question, actually. So yes, it varies. And let's just say the basics are there's a basic profile. So to disabuse ourselves that if your mind wanders, there's something wrong with you or there's something unique about you, that's everybody. But it is the case that for some people, not some people, in every group we've studied in my lab, and this is many, many kinds of groups. So from active duty military to first responders to students to athletes, leaders in organizations, I mean, teachers, just goes on and on.

If you are experiencing a protracted period of high demand, meaning you got to get something done, like for students, it'd be during the academic semester or for athletes, even pre-season training. If you're experiencing that kind of high demand for multiple weeks, your attention is going to decline. Your attentional functioning is going to decline. Your distractibility or mind wandering would be the technical way to describe it is going to increase. So that's one thing we need to know, no matter what your sort of set point is. And we do have different set points as individual differences. Now, when it comes to your own mind, when you're working with these different groups of people, and you're putting together this book, and you're putting together these sort of methods and strategies for taking care of just the weirdness of being a person

and the weirdness of the mind. Yeah. Are you gaining something out of this personally by going through all this? Like, is this helping you as well while you're writing all this stuff down, while you're exposing these various techniques that can improve your concentration and your ability to focus on things. Do you find that it's helping you as well? Or is it something that you've always worked on? Oh, no, it's not. I mean, I've always been, I've been a neuroscientist for a long time. I've been

interested in the way the brain works for a long time. I started studying attention as an undergrad and went on to do my graduate work and postdoctoral training and then set up a lab to study attention. And then kind of early in my time of being a professor, I had like this kind of acute crisis of attention. And it was around the time I just had my first child and my husband was in grad school setting up the lab. I lost feeling in my teeth from grinding. Yeah, it was pretty intense. And then I remember one night I was sitting there with my then almost three-year-old reading a book to him. And like this is important to me.

I mean this is like the only time I really have with him that's supposed to be quality time. Feeling like this is a time I'm supposed to really be here for him. Reading a book and he asked me a question. Put a, reading a book, and he asked me a question. He put a little hand on the book, asked me a question. I had no idea what he was talking about. And I'm like, I am definitely not here. I am not even here when I want to be. This is what I want to do.

I'm not in the middle of doing anything else, but my mind is not here. And it was scary. It was like, oh, this is not cool. it was scary it was like oh this is not cool and then I'm like I study this stuff okay just let's go see the literature how can I find a solution I can't access my own attention it's slipping through my fingers so I literally did I'm like I'm gonna study everything I can nothing I came up empty and that was also troubling like what do you mean there's nothing I can go to in the literature that's just like, here's the best way to train your attention

so that you have better access to your moment to moment lived experience. Kind of empty. And then just to kind of continue the journey, I'm like, this is, there's got to be something to do. And at that moment, it was not just feeling distracted. It was starting to feel kind of And at that moment, it was not just feeling distracted. It was starting to feel kind of depressed and a little bit anxious, too, like sort of this bubbling up of my life is slipping away from me. And in that moment, it was sort of how funny how serendipity happens. But a dear colleague of mine, an eminent neuroscientist who happens to be an emotion researcher, an affective neuroscientist. At that time, I was at the University of Pennsylvania. He was giving a lecture. So, you know, just as part of my colloquium, I went to this lecture.

And I'm sitting at the back of the room. He goes through this whole talk. He ends his talk by showing kind of two brain images. One is of a brain induced to be in a very negative mood. I mean, usually you do this by putting people in a scanner and saying, think of your worst memories, like feel bad, you play sad music. And then he did the same thing on the other side, where he showed a brain image of a person induced to be in a positive mood.

And he's just trying to make the point that these are distinct brain states. We can track them. They have different functions. But, of course, given my own life circumstances, at the end of the lecture, I kind of shout out from the back of the room, like, how do you make that brain look like that brain? I just wanted an answer. And I don't know if he was rushed because it was the end of the lecture or what, but he just kind of calls out, like not even in the microphone, I don't even remember, and I'm like what the heck is not do you know where you are you don't say that this is in the early 2000s meditation was not a thing we don't talk about it to me it was almost as offensive as like talking about astrology to

physicists or something like was it really it was absolutely not something I had ever amongst academics in an academic neuroscience context. Really? I did not know that. So when did it start becoming something that was taken seriously? Is it now? Yeah, I think meditation's being taken seriously. No, absolutely.

And I would say a lot of the effort that I've been up to, now we have a field, contemplative neuroscience. So anyway, so yeah, we're definitely there. I would say over the last 15 years, there's been a serious uptick in the seriousness taken. And a lot of it is because of these kind of brain imaging studies where we can put people in scanners and we can track them. A lot of the work that we've been doing as well. But it really bugged me that he said that. And I was still very much a skeptic.

Like, I don't know. Of meditation? Of just, yeah. And I had a chance to talk to him afterwards. I've just, yeah. And I had a chance to talk to him afterwards. He's now become a very dear, more closer colleague, and he runs an entire center that's tied to contemplative practice. But at that point, it was almost like he was also kind of closeted.

He had not come out. He was doing some of the initial studies. He was closeted with meditation? Well, yeah, because he was just starting to do studies. Again, it was a liability. And when I, I mean, just to fast forward a little bit. Really? Meditation was a liability to discuss in academic circles.

When I told my colleagues that I, and it was a big deal because I'm like a traditional hard-nosed academic studying attention. So I'm going to make this like tiny pivot to studying training attention. And I'm going to use this thing called mindfulness meditation. It was like, first it was like silence, like you're committing career suicide, but you know, you're going to do what you're going to do. People actually said that to you? Oh yeah. That's so strange. I mean, I love that you're saying it's so strange because in some sense it is the success of this enterprise and the rigor with which we've been able to do a lot of research that has caused a type of culture change, which is a pretty rapid pace of causing that culture change.

But for me, when I heard the term, you know, we can see I'm an Indian woman. I, of course, knew about meditation. My earliest memories are seeing my dad meditating. And I always thought that's great. You know, that's great for them. But I'm like a serious Western trained scientist. And until there's any reason to really think this is a helpful thing, I'm not going to do it. But going back to your question, which was about my personal journey with this practice as it relates to writing the

book and the work that we're doing. You know, I started practicing. I went to the Penn bookstore after he said that term with my own resistance in hand and found a little book called Meditation for Beginners. I lucked out because I picked a really good book by a really influential person. I didn't know anything about this. Jack Kornfield. It's called Meditation for Beginners. It came with a little guided CD. And I'm like, you know what? I'm going to give this a try. And as I started doing it, I had a lot of like light bulb moments, like how does this guy know what's happening in my mind? How does he know that I'm now resisting or my mind is wandering? But the instruction was very clearly about attention.

So it's almost like I know this world. I've never seen anybody talk about it from the direct phenomenology of the attention system. So I shifted into practicing and then waking up to the benefits and then had that pivotal moment where I'm like, I think I'm going to study this. So is it fair to say that traditional academics study the brain states and study these various phenomenon like lack of attention or hyper attention, but they don't study how to achieve them? They don't study the various things that can be done, which is Jack Kornfield. Is that his name? Kornfeld?

Jack Kornfield. Duncan Trussell's a giant fan. Oh, yeah, yeah. And Jack's wife, Trudy, is on Duncan's show often. Oh, interesting. So, yeah. No, I would say it's shifting. The landscape is shifting.

But from my personal experience, remember, if you just not remember, but if you think back to the history of science, we as a field, as a scientific enterprise started moving away from subjective to objective. And when you're going to be objective about something, it's not about your experience with it. It's about what you can look at it through measures that have nothing to do with you. about what you can look at it through measures that have nothing to do with you. But that's where it gets weird because if you're talking about science and you're talking about the mind, there's no way to separate you from the mind. Like what you do directly influences the way the mind works. So if we're studying the way the mind works but we're not studying what you do, we're just studying these random states with no understanding of how they got there until meditation's being really explored.

Is that fair to say? No, I would say we do a lot that- I mean now. Now, now. I mean like the way you used to when you were saying that you were committing academic suicide by studying meditation. Is that the way they used to look at it? Even in my own professional life, we would design tasks that tapped into attention, things that made people pay attention to things sort of like video games. And then we'd look at the brain responses. We'd understand the way attention is instantiated within our brain. But it was not about my own phenomenological experience with my attention and how does it feel and what gets in the way and what distracts me.

Some of that was covered in the kind of clinical realm like, oh, yeah, you ruminate or you've got unfortunate psychological challenges. You're depressed. That's why you're not able to focus. But these were not worlds that were merging and a serious look at people training their own minds in this way to result in objective metrics that we could change was certainly not being done, which is why I couldn't find anything in the literature. So yes, the journey of the introduction of contemplative practice into science is very, very new. I mean, it had a little bit of a resurgence, or not resurgence, but introduction in the 70s. And then it really started again with tools like brain imaging, where, you know, in some sense, you could be objective. You put somebody in the scanner and say, okay, Joe, I want you to do a quick meditation practice

for 10 minutes and I'd look to see what your brain activity looked like. And what kind of scans are you using? Is it fMRI? Yeah, we use a whole bunch of stuff in my lab. Most of the work that I've been doing over the last 10 years or so, because I'm going to military bases and various off-site locations, we don't bring a scanner with us. We just have them do attention tasks to see if things like mindfulness training have an impact. So just to answer the question you asked, it was the case that my personal journey woke me up to a

whole new scientific endeavor, which is what made me want to bring it to the lab. And I happen to have all these tools from sort of traditional psychology and cognitive neuroscience to apply to this new space of mindfulness meditation. So when you get to this book, Meditation for Beginners, what are you doing? Yeah. A lot of the same stuff that actually we continue to do with all these groups, including the kinds of practices that I give. These are not brand new practices. These are from the millennia old wisdom traditions, right? In

particular with Jack, the Buddhist tradition. So a foundational practice that he offered was mindfulness of the breath. And he was very clear on what mindfulness in that sense meant. It's about taking this sort of present-centered attention without editorializing or reacting to it, kind of getting the raw data of the experience. And so he guided the participant. And it was actually a recording of a retreat he was leading. So it's just like he's talking to these people that are, who knows how long, maybe a month-long retreat. And he's like, you're sitting quietly, You're focusing on, just notice your body breathing. And notice what's prominent. So it might be coolness of air, whatever it is for you. That's where you should be holding, guiding your attention to stay there.

And then the next aspect of the instruction was, when you notice your mind wanders, you know, wanders away from that, bring it back. Repeat. And, you know, he would use these phrases like, as minds do, it'll wander away as minds do, or you may find yourself resisting, or you may find yourself in a fantasy. But the instruction was always the same, regardless of where you were, yourself in a fantasy. But the instruction was always the same. Regardless of where you were, gently bring your attention back. And so I started realizing, oh my goodness, he's giving us like this workout for attention. And given what I knew about the brain systems of attention, my strong hunch was he's actually tapping into all the main brain systems of attention that exist. And so now I want to check out, let's bring it to the lab, let's give it to people that aren't me,

and let's see, does attention actually change with our objective measures of these systems? And what did you get out of it? That's the book. So, like, when you're in the lab, was there anything shocking that you learned from seeing how these practices and how mindfulness applied like what it did to the brain? So, yes. I mean, and I want to go back to something you said that's tied to what shocked me, which is is not something extraordinary. It's just the fact that there was any effect at all. So so you were asking me, is the field of psychology not care about changing the brain or training the brain? Absolutely it cares.

But the approaches taken were like brain training games or stimulating the brain or light and sound devices or maybe put somebody in a good mood and that'll change their attention. So we had tried all those in the lab. When you say stimulating the brain, do you mean with- Transcranial magnetic stimulation. That stuff's fascinating. It's all fascinating. I was listening to a Radiolab podcast where they were discussing this sniper training course. Do you know the course I'm talking about?

No. It's like a video game where you are in sort of a virtual reality scenario where you are in sort of a virtual reality scenario where you are, if I'm remembering it correctly, there's like bad guys and hostages and you're supposed to shoot the bad guys, not the hostages. And this woman went through this and was fairly slow.

And the whole, the thing is like 20 minutes. And she did it and it was like she wasn't very good at it and she screwed it up and then they went through this uh transcranial what is it magnets that they're using and it's some some electrical i think it's called nine volt nirvana i think that's the episode of the um okay there There it is, Nine Volt Nirvana. So they put these magnets on her, and then she goes through it flawlessly. She does the whole thing, and it ends, and she's like, I thought it was like five minutes,

and it turns out it was 20 minutes. She's like, what the fuck? Like, what happened? And then they look at her score, like, Jesus Christ, you have a perfect score. Like, she went from being terrible at it to being like an expert with this brain stimulation and the entire episode is about all these different people that have developed these like personal hacking devices to to do this trans dermal it'sermal stimulation. That's what it's called. Yeah.

It's like repetitive, direct transcranial magnetic stimulation, brain zapping. Yeah. How does that work? Well, I, that's not my expertise,

but I'll just tell you that it's fascinating to see that yes, activating and inhibiting certain parts of the brain. And basically you're limited because you got to get through the skull. Right. And then you got to be able to, it'll be just a few centimeters, but if you can place it right, or you have multiple coils, you might be able to target different regions. There's a lot of positive stuff happening with that now. But just to take you back to where I was, the kind of things that

were happening back in the early 2000s, there was not a lot of benefit that we could see over and over again. So maybe in the acute moment, like you zap your brain and something looks different, it was great. But what about eight weeks later? What about even two days later? So the brain zapping, the actual stimulation stuff, very fruitful enterprise. In the moment. Well, in the moment for sure, but also other other people are learning maybe there's a way you can stimulate um repeatedly and get a benefit but sort of separate from that the main thing that was happening at the time i was starting to think about pursuing mindfulness training was um brain training games so what are these games so these are kind of like simple video games intentionally demanding there's many companies out there that were offering them.

You know, now we could do them on our phone. They were like the experiments we were doing to evaluate attention, except you do them over and over again and the levels would get higher and people would get better and better at doing them. And then you'd give them sort of,

you'd have them do this for some period of time and then you'd have, you'd change the way the game worked. You'd change the superficial stimuli or maybe change the demand or you'd have them do this for some period of time, and then you'd change the way the game worked. You'd change the superficial stimuli, or maybe you'd change the demand, or you'd have them do something real world that you think is tied to attention and working memory, and there was no benefit. There was no transfer. So that made the field really take a look at, okay, the brain is smart. It will get better at that specific thing, but it's not resulting in a generalizable benefit to attention so that you can use it no matter what you're doing.

So your question was such a good one, which was what surprised you? So, okay, so I'm sitting by myself in my, you know, in my office, struggling with not being able to feel my teeth, decide to get this book, start practicing. All of a sudden, my own embodied experience of my life starts shifting. I'm more present with my family. I'm realizing I have more of my attention back. And so I decided to pursue this line of research where we offer the program, a mindfulness training program, and there were several available already in the medical context. And I said, the test is going to be those same kind of tests that we use to understand attention. It might be remember faces and scenes or remember numbers and then try to do math problems or whatever it is, complex stimuli. Does it transfer?

Because nothing else was transferring. So you sit quietly focusing on your breath and you come into the lab and do these rigorous tests of attention. And we saw benefits on those tests. We saw transfer. And that to me was very, very exciting. Because it was like, you're not doing any, you're not practicing with numbers and stimuli on the screen. You're just sitting there with your eyes closed by yourself. You're doing this workout, and all of a sudden it transfers. So it really opened up this possibility that we could add to a suite of things like the Radiolab episode you were talking to, that people can do on their own every day as a mental workout to advantage their attention, especially for people that are likely to have their attention degraded because high stress tends to degrade attention. And when you're saying it transfers, like how are you measuring this?

What are the results? The results are, so let me give you an example of one of the kinds of experiments. It's a really basic attention task. And it's something called a sustained attention response task. What we're trying to do in that task is we're trying to see how people can stay on task and resist their own internal distractibility. Right? people can stay on task and resist their own internal distractibility, right? So their mind will wander and they have to keep themselves on this task, really boring on purpose to do that.

So you're sitting in front of a computer screen, you're going to see a number show up every half second or so, about every quarter of a second, press a button every time you see a digit on the screen, except when that digit is three. In those cases, just withhold. And people do this, and we find that people have a terrible time doing this because the three only happens like 5% of the time. So you can imagine, you're sitting there like, press, press, press, the three appears,

and you're like, oh, shoot, I pressed. And when we give this to Marines, they kind of freak out. They're like, just damn threes. You know, like they really freak out. And they're like, why can't I just do this? Because the mind gets distracted and it's hard to pay attention. So that task we knew had really good traction in the lab. We could get people to do it. We knew what the brain components were of the experiment itself. And so now we give that experiment to people. They come in, we give it to them. Then they go through a multi-week mindfulness training program now we give that experiment to people. They come in, we give it to them, then they go through a multi-week mindfulness training program and we give it to them again.

And what we see is if there's any change in their performance, it's a very stable task. If you give it to people over and over again, usually no change. And this time we saw an improvement in that task performance. They were not pressing to the three more often, meaning they weren't making mistakes, and they were less variable. So they were really just there more often to be able to do the task. That's just a very simple example. But there's many other, we've done many kinds of experiments where we look at these core attentional functions and find improvements. And, you know, it's so funny that you mentioned this VR environment from the Radiolab episode,

because now we're doing that. We're saying we're actually working with soldiers and, you know, mostly active-duty military and looking at combat scenarios with these kind of virtual reality environments, immersive environments, and we're seeing how their performance might change for those when they go through a mindfulness training program. That's a project we're just in the middle of right now. When you're saying that this, I definitely want to talk about that, but when you're saying that this, the ability to not hit the number three and that you saw a measured improvement, like how much of an improvement? 10%.

Really? Interesting. interesting yeah 10 when we were looking at people that were practicing a lot so the first study we did was um you know i didn't we had no i mean just kind of take you back in time now you'd say oh isn't meditation good for your brain we had no idea this was a total shot in the dark so i ended up i was like if there's ever going to be an effect i need to go where people are just gung-ho meditating a lot because if the signal is tiny and I don't pick it up, I will conclude that it doesn't work. So let's give it the best shot of working. So I ended up partnering with a retreat center in Colorado where people were doing mindfulness meditation practices 10 to 12 hours a day. Oh, Jesus.

And that was our first, I was like, I got to advantage us. Like, when we saw it, that's where we saw it. And then we brought it back to the lab and looked at medical and nursing students and gave them a more kind of regular mindfulness training program. That's about eight weeks long. And they're practicing about 45 minutes a day. And we saw benefits there, too. So then we've kind of, that's been the progression of my career has been to try to figure out time efficient solutions for people because most people can't get away for a month to meditate.

Now, when you're working with these soldiers, did you have a control group? Yeah. So, because I would imagine that if they get frustrated, they keep hitting the three, they're going to go, okay, get your shit together.

Stop hitting the three. Calm yourself down. Figure it out. Did anyone improve without the mindfulness meditation? There's always variability. You know how research goes, right? How many people are you working with? I mean, now we've had hundreds, hundreds of people.

At the time, like when you're running these tests with soldiers? I mean, this result we see over and over again. But, yeah, of course, some people will just get better at it because they've strategized. Did anybody get to the same level of 10% without mindfulness training? No. But there's another thing I got to tell you, which is, it goes back to what I was saying happens under high stress. Because my whole reason for, so just to kind of backtrack, so why do I want to work with, why am I working with soldiers all of a sudden? It was like, one of the things that we knew from my lab is attention is extremely

powerful. And we can talk about what it actually is, because we're kind of using it as like a placeholder. It's actually a pretty deep, interesting topic to think about what it actually is. It's not just focus. Anyway, we know how it works, but we also were learning that it's extremely vulnerable. And so even the laboratory context, even with a simple task like the one I was just describing to you, what you do is you take kind of that simple digits task, and I put in a negative image every now and then, people start falling apart even more. It's just- What do you mean by putting a negative? So you're sitting there. You see number, number.

You see a three. You're going to screw up. You're going to press it often. And then I just added this element of I'm going to put in negative or neutral images every now and then, pictures from the news. So all of a sudden you're doing this task and you see like some very disturbing image. And then you've got to go back to doing the numbers thing. Or you see a neutral image, complex scene. Just doing that small manipulation, adding those things and performance got worse. And so we knew we were starting to get this profile of attention is very powerful. It can really impact things. But

things like negative images, negative mood, stressful circumstances, threatening circumstances, further deplete attention. So, and I was experiencing that, right? I was like, I wasn't, I wasn't in a life or death threat situation, but I was now definitely looking back on it, feeling a little overwhelmed with all that life required. So I became very interested in like, for me, it wasn't consequential. Okay, so I didn't read the book to my kid, nothing happened, everybody was okay. For many groups, many professions, it's not just that their attention matters, it's that the circumstances that we ask them to perform at their best, professionally, are the ones that are going to disadvantage and

degrade their attention. And that like was a whole category of people, you know, military service members, emergency services, professionals, first responders, like we can't, they can't, attention is life or death, you can't lapse, you can't, you can't shoot when you shouldn't be shooting. So anyway, that's why I started working with these groups. So you're asking me if people actually stay, anybody got better over time. For the most part, for the control group, when we did nothing at all over a four to eight week interval, usually we picked these intervals that were just preparatory, high stress, pre-deployment training, they're getting ready to go to be

deployed. Everybody as a group got worse. So the baseline performance for the military folks and other high stress groups enduring high stress intervals was degradation. If you give the same task to a civilian or even that same kind of person during normal life, they were stable. So the baseline was degradation. When we gave them mindfulness training, the training group, they were stable over time. They did not degrade. Even with the negative images and all the other things you were doing? Well, now we didn't need to put negative images anymore because the circumstances were simulated. I mean, they were descriptive of high stress, high threat, negative mood. That was their life. So we didn't have to experimentally look at that anymore. We gave very basic just numbers, digits. And everybody got worse as a group. This is now we're not just talking about military service members. We saw this with football players during preseason training, undergrads, you know,

if you probably business people that are going through sales season. I mean, anything that is, I didn't think of your own life, like anything that is high demand and long, it's going to degrade your attention. Yeah. There's things that we know. I was thinking about this the other day, because I was counting some money and I was thinking, and I was by myself, but I was thinking how frustrated it is when you're counting money, if someone starts throwing numbers at you. I don't know why I was thinking that while I was counting money, right? That probably distracted you too.

Kind of, it did a little bit, but I was thinking like, God, how weird is it that it's so difficult to just simple numbers? Like if you've got $20 bills, 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 2, 4, 6, 8, you know, you're piling these hundred dollar bills or $20 bills in the hundred dollar stacks. But if someone comes along and goes 50, 80, 90, 70, fuck man, stop doing that. Like that really works. It works on everybody, but it's so strange. Like that, just that little external, just something that interferes with your rhythm of counting numbers. Yeah. I mean, that's now you're tapping into like a classic working memory experiment.

Because it's not stressful at all. Like counting $20 bills is not stressful. But if someone comes over and goes 90, 110, 120, 45, 60, like, yeah, what the fuck, man? Even if there's no stress on you. Totally. If it's not a competition or anything, it's just, you know, you're trying to count 500 bucks and you can't do it because someone's yelling out numbers. I'm like, God, how shitty are brains? Exactly. But you've really, what you're doing is like when you're counting, you're putting it into something called our temporary scratch space working memory.

And like you're actually saying it to yourself. And that same space is where new perceptual information goes in and it's messing you up. Temporary scratch space working memory. That's what it is. What is the terminology? What is it? What is it supposed to? So working memory, I like to think of it as it's not really about the memory part. It's about the working part. So we've been talking about attention so far. Take attention and think about it over time. So like in our conversation right now, you're using your working memory. I'm saying stuff. You're comprehending it.

You're probably having a thought, but you're a nice person and you're not going to just blurt it out. You're going to probably hold it till you see a nice spot. You just use your working memory. It really is this temporary holding pad. I sometimes talk about it as like a whiteboard in your mind, but with disappearing ink. It has this very short time frame, maybe 30 to 60 seconds max. So as you're experiencing information, as you're paying attention to it, you write it on the whiteboard.

So you're doing this counting task. You're counting your million-dollar bills or whatever it was. And the numbers are going up on the whiteboard. And then somebody else says 90, 50. Those are also going up on the whiteboard. So now you're like, wait, what's the stuff happening there? So your brain puts things into like a little area where I just need to know this for now. And then eventually it's like I'll be done counting and then you're not going to remember of it you don't want to right it's like the cash in your computer like it's just

a temporary scratch space and it's so important if you don't have that you're out of luck you use it for everything decision making thinking planning right now you're using it yeah it's it's very odd though that there's so many different kinds of memory and that there's memories that are like cemented in your head like really important personal milestones or, you know, loving memories or traumatic memories. But then there's other memories that are just like you ask someone their name and then you immediately forget it. Exactly. It didn't get on the whiteboard. Right.

Or it vanished before you could rewrite it. That's a weird one. The name one is weird. Yeah. So what do you do if you meet somebody and you're like a weird one. The name one is weird. Yeah. So what do you do if you meet somebody and you're like, I got to remember this person's name. What do you typically do? I ask again.

Exactly. I say, I forgot your name. Exactly. You ask again. I have too much on my brain to be dishonest. So if I forget someone's name, I'd say, I'm sorry, I forgot your name. I'm not trying to be rude. I'm just being honest. And if you're a mature adult human being with a life, like you know that you do that occasionally.

You're like, Fred? No, Bob. Sorry, Bob. Fuck. Sorry. You know, it's not rude. It's just a mistake. It's like a thing that people do.

So Amishi, just to refresh your memory. Yes. You have a very rememberable name. It's a beautiful name, by the way. Thank you. So, you know, here's the thing. Now, that's inconsequential. Like, you're right. You can just make up. You got great social intelligence. You'll be fine. But now let's say it is consequential. There's like four servers and somebody you just dealt with is dealing with

correcting the order you just made. And you got to remember their name or something about them. And you got to keep it in mind. You cannot let it go because you will suffer because of it. So now let's say you're trying to remember, but you know you're not going to remember this person forever. What might you do to like try to keep that in mind? Usually you rehearse.

You kind of visualize the image or you kind of say it to yourself over and over again. But then you're not listening to what they're saying because you're just trying to remember Amishi, Amishi, Amishi. Exactly.

It's the same scratch space. It's the same scratch space. It's the same scratch space. So it ends up working memory is another thing that we test in my lab. And working memory also significantly declines over high stress intervals. Yeah, for sure. And working memory is something, you know, you mentioned there's all these kinds of memories, but working memory, it takes from perception and attention as its inputs. It's what writes it on the board. But also you can call it up from long-term memory. So if I say, Joe, what did you have for breakfast this morning?

You don't have to tell me, but you could do it, right? Okay, yes, I could. So what did you just do? Essentially, you have a long-term representation, or you don't. Let's say you do, remember. You call it up. It gets written on the whiteboard. And now you use your attention to kind of read what's on the right whiteboard and say, oh, I had a shake or whatever it was. So it's used for both the input of information and the

extraction from our long-term memory. Very, very powerful brain system tied to intelligence, tied to decision-making, emotion regulation, everything. And it starts tanking under high stress. Did you run any experiments using nootropics or using various compounds that are thought to enhance memory? I did not. You did not. Interesting.

So, and you know, I know this is a topic near and dear to your heart. And I would say, it's not my expertise, but I think that what's very interesting about going back to mindfulness training is that it really is establishing not just the kind of core strength, but a specific set of processes. So remember back, let me just unpack that. So like even what we were saying about that, the simple set of practices like the breath awareness practice that Jack's CD had on it. What is that actually training me to do? And I said, you know, when we were talking about that, I said, oh, it's actually training all these systems of attention because my hunch is, and I think those studies with kind of different substances, they can be beneficial. But just like, you know, I think about you and your MMA expertise, and like, there's going to be core strength you're going to need, but then there's certain moves you got to practice over and over again to be able to use them in that particular context. And just being strong or agile in general is not going to be helpful.

There's like a certain kind of move that you need to make. And that's what I think the suite of mindfulness practices is offering. It's training attention in a particular way. So anyway, so I think that other substances can be great. That's not my expertise, but it's really regarding what are the vulnerabilities? Why does attention start tanking under stress, threat, and poor mood? And why does it seem like mindfulness training is actually able to protect against that? That requires us to get an understanding of what the heck attention actually is. I'm glad you used the analogy of martial arts, because I think I'm glad you used the analogy of martial arts because I think with that analogy, you could also apply the idea of nootropics.

Because in martial arts, you do have techniques that need to be drilled and worked on over and over again. But those techniques become more effective with a body that performs better. with a body that performs better. Yeah. And when you supplement with vitamins and you make sure that you have a satisfying input in terms of like protein and carbohydrates and all the things that you need for your body to perform where your body's not at a deficit, it performs better.

And then there's also supplements that you can take that will increase athletic performance and enhance recovery. And those things will also allow you to put in more time and training, which would then yield better results. training or for concentration or for breath work or any of those things. But I think that things like acetylcholine and the various nootropics that have been shown to increase memory, that I do think they play a part. I first found out about them back in the early 2000s. There was a radio show that I was on in San Francisco. And one of the hosts had this thing called Neuro One. And it was a product that was developed by Bill Romanowski. He was a football player, and he was having memory issues. You know, a football player should take a lot of hits to the head.

And so he developed this nootropic, and I had never heard what a nootropic was. I was like, what is it? And he's like like just try it Sarah no name shout out to them and this guy Who was on the on the show who was taking it gave it to me? I was like whoa this gives you like a weird sort of like alertness. It wasn't like speedy Like like too much caffeine, but it was like I was sir

I certainly felt like my brain flowed a little bit better. And then I started getting really interested in them. There's a bunch of really good ones out there. And we have some of this gum, I don't know if you've ever seen it before. I'll give you some before you leave. It's called NeuroGum, I like that stuff a lot. And then there's a product that we developed,

my company Onnit developed, called AlphaBrain. And what we did is we, it's a combination of all the various nootropics that we found to be beneficial and we tried to tweak it over a period of time. But those things help. Nootropics can definitely, we did two placebo controlled studies at the Boston Center for Memory and we found increase in verbal memory, increase in peak alpha flow state, reaction time. These things can be enhanced through supplementation in a way that you can measure. That's awesome. Yeah. That on top of meditation and mindfulness, we're trying to achieve peak states, right? Exactly. That's the idea. Yeah, exactly. I mean, it's definitely not, I mean, everything you're saying sounds amazing. And I think people should advantage themselves and do what they want to do to to do that. So this is not a either or to try this and tell me what you think. Oh yeah, I'll definitely try it. What we have here, we have AlphaBrain here too, right? We have some of that.

There we go. We have the gum. I want you to try the gum because the gum is great. By the way, this is not my company. I don't have anything to do with the gum. It's just something we use. Yeah. But it's great stuff because it tastes like regular gum, but it gives you like this little boost. Got a tiny amount of caffeine in it. And what's the other? What's the other? Yeah. Theanine, right?

Yeah. Yeah. This is it. I'm not going to start chewing it now, but I'm definitely interested. Yeah. I eat that stuff. I chewed it all day long. Cool.

Yeah. Yeah. You know, I think that that's the kind of neat thing about where we're at right now in this moment, that there are, just like you mentioned, like the transcranial magnetic stimulation and substances that we can take that will enhance us. And it was so interesting. When we were doing, when I was just starting out this stuff, and I remember I was like really trying to figure out not only for people that have attentional challenges because they're under a lot of stress, right? Are you going to take some now? This is our – Oh, the quality of our conversation is just going to like even deepen. I feel dumb today.

I had a rigorous workout. Sometimes I come off a hard workout. I feel dumb. Oh, man. Now I'm in for it. We'll see., I feel dumb. Oh, man. Now I'm in for it. We'll see. I might stay dumb. Well, it's pretty good for dumb.

But what I was saying is, like, I was also interested in people that have dispositional attentional challenges, like ADHD, for example. What is that? Is that real? ADHD. 100%? Attention functions on a continuum. Right.

So, I mean, I'd love to tell you about it. Let me tell you about attention because that kind of makes me feel like at least we'll be on the same page then as it relates to what I'm talking about. Because even the mindfulness stuff is related to attention. So, attention usually in the way we've been talking about it, we've been talking about it as focus, right? So, what does that mean to you? Right now, you're laser focused on me. You've got awesome attention. At least it looks that way. Focusing on me, everything else is kind of fuzzed out. And that we call the brain's orienting system. So I think of it like a flashlight. light. So wherever it is that you direct your attention in that way, you're privileging that content. So right now you're seeing my face with more granularity, hearing my voice with the

crispness more than the air conditioner or whatever Jamie might be saying. You know, like right now you're focused in on me. Thank you very much. So that actually does neurally look like it enhances the sensory input. If you focus in on my voice, your neurons as early as your auditory cortex, within a few hundred milliseconds, you're going to have a clear comprehension. But even just auditory input is going to be amplified as a function of paying attention. And, you know, just like literally a flashlight, if you're in a darkened space, you know, you value that thing. Wherever it is that it points, it actually gives you that privileged information.

The cool thing about the flashlight is you can direct it willfully. You can point it. You can also not just direct it to the external environment. I can say, like, right now, Joe, what's the sensations on the bottoms of your feet? Can you sense into that? Were you thinking about it before I said it? No, I wasn't.

Flashlight got directed to internal bodily sensations. You can pick that up. So it actually goes to one of the reasons attention even evolved in our brain. We talked about the evolution of distractibility, which was to advantage our survival. But why do we have attention in the first place? Why do we even develop this capacity to focus? And it comes down to the brain had a big problem, which is that there's far more information in the environment than it could possibly process. So it's got a subsample. It's got to like get bits and pieces of what's going on and attention, just like the flashlight. You know, if you were in a darkened room, you kind of figure out the landscape, you kind of scan it and kind of put together the image.

Same idea with attention, focus, very important. We can talk about this, but I actually want to tell you about the other two main systems. But just keep in mind that not only can we direct the flashlight, but it can get yanked. So if you're in a darkened room and you hear a weird sound, you're going to point to wherever the sound came from. So that's the double-edged sword of this system is that it's not just about where it goes. Again, very good reasons that we evolved to have that. Have you ever done any personal experimentation with sensory deprivation tanks? Oh, I definitely want to talk to you about that.

And actually, I think that I have not. I want to. Oh, you have to. I want to. I just haven't had a chance to go. So I will definitely, I definitely want to. But it actually, perfect segue into the second system of attention, which is the exact opposite of this narrowing and privileging. And the second big system of attention, I use the metaphor of like a floodlight.

It's called the alerting system. The floodlight, unlike the flashlight, narrow, privileging some information over the other. Floodlight, broad, receptive, no privileging of any information. Allows whatever comes up to come up. The only thing that's privileging is the now. Like what's important right now? When I'm driving, I think about this often. You see a flashing yellow light, probably near a construction site or near a school, maybe. What does that mean? Pay attention. But it's not like that narrow focus attention, like broad,

receptive, something weird may happen. Be ready for it. So this is, like I said, this system is so important. And probably, and not just probably, I mean, there's a lot of evidence that suggests in things like sensory deprivation, you now are challenging that system because what is happening is not necessarily from the external environment. So whatever is the baseline existence within the internal milieu may actually be more salient to you because just like the flashlight where you can direct it externally or internally, the floodlight you can also direct externally and internally. So in the absence of sensory input, you're kind of in this receptive state where everything

that's occurring internally, there's an acute and rich awareness of that. Does that match with your experience? Yeah. The tank is fascinating because it's really the only environment where you can achieve almost no input from the body. Yeah. That's so cool.

Because of the warm water that's the same temperature as your skin and the amount of Epsom salts in it that make you float you uh you get to this place where you can't tell the difference between the water and the air and you're just gone and you can move a little bit so there is some input you know you can feel like if you move your head you'll feel the water in your ears and stuff like that and you can move your digits but the reality of that environment is that when you are completely still and just breathing, it's as close to eliminating all external sensory input as possible. And you don't achieve that state anywhere else on earth.

It doesn't exist. So my experience is that any meditation or any mindfulness training inside the tank is significantly more impactful, much more because you really can get to these very bizarre states, like especially breath work, concentrating on breathing, you get to these really weird, almost psychedelic states without any substances at all, just from the absence of sensory input, and you're allowing your brain to be free of traditional restraints and constraints.

Yeah. It's so interesting because I definitely want to still tell you about the third system of attention. Keep it in my working memory. What is this? The scratch? What is it called again? It's working memory. But before I do that, I want to say something to you. And I really hope we can, I want to kind of set this up so we can talk another thing that I think we should talk about, which is mind wandering. So basically the thing we started out talking about, spontaneous initiation of thought. So there's a study I was reading which basically said if you want to, in the context of creativity, increase productive novel thought,

creativity increase productive novel thought then you need to be basically in this kind of alerting the floodlight needs to be on for the generation and acceptance of the the thought that comes up and they specifically mentioned that sensory deprivation chambers may be a really great place to get that generative content coming up. You basically have more spontaneous thought in those contexts. Yeah, I had, I never set it up, but I bought one of those tape recorders that operates on voice activated. And I bought like, my plan was like to Velcro it to the wall, but I never wound up doing it. But it's probably a good idea because there are times where you come up with these ideas. You're like, oh my God,'ve got to write this one down, but I don't want to climb out of the tank. Exactly. Oh, definitely do that.

I mean, it's like this one of these self-experimentation things, but I was struck by that, especially anticipating coming to see you. And I know that that's something that you've done. But I think let's keep it in mind as we talk about mindfulness training because I think the way you're describing mindfulness, probably have a different view of what it is and it might actually connect with what we're talking about with creativity anyway so you got flashlight floodlight and then the third system is bait we call it executive control it's tied to this notion of the whiteboard and working memory it's essentially the manager it's like just like the flashlight is selecting based on content, you know, right side or left side, the floodlight is selecting based on time, what's important right

now. This system is selecting information because the whole goal of attention is to subsample reality. You just have different slices. Is that making sense? The third system, executive control, is subsampling based on your goals. So what is most goal relevant right now? That should guide the way that I perceive and act. So this system's job, and the term executive is like the way we talk about executives of a company. The executive's job is not to go in and do every single task, but it's to ensure that the goals of the organization and the behavior of the organization align. And then when it's a mess up, the executive says, no, fix that. So this is where things like maintaining the goal, working memory, that's where we put our goals when we maintain

them, inhibiting irrelevant information. It's like, you know, no, you don't need to go think about that right now, right? Like even in the context of a sensory deprivation tank, it's like, yeah, that's great. I probably should remember that, but I can't not experience this right now. It's like goal was experience sensory deprivation, not go write something. So inhibit urges we might have or behaviors we might have. Update new information, update your goal. And even shift, like you are on that goal, but get on that goal. So very complex system. I like to think of it as like a juggler, as just like all the balls are in the air, but it's a manager. It really is doing this. So the reason I wanted to tell you that is because, you know, attention is such a topical thing. Like people always say their problems are

with attention and you were asking me about ADD and is it real? Yes, it ends up that we have people differ along their set points of all three of these systems. And oftentimes we see people that not only are problematic on any one system, like they're too focused. It's a dysregulation. So either hyper-focused, you can't get the flashlight off, or you're hyper-vigilant. off, or you're hyper-vigilant, you can't stop seeing everything as requiring this broad, receptive, almost anxiety-provoking level of present moment awareness, or you just can't keep the balls in the air. There's a problem with your juggler. So for sure, people vary along these lines, and sometimes they vary in their coordination,

because none of these systems work alone. And sometimes they vary in their coordination because none of these systems work alone. You know, the executive control is telling the flashlight where to go. The alerting system is telling you what's going on. So you need to know if you need it. So there's this constant fluidity between these things. So sometimes it's the coordination that gets messed up and when people's lives are negatively impacted by the way their attention functions to the point where it's actually causing serious problems, that's when sometimes it gets diagnosed as ADD. My perception on it from a personal experience is that it varies

wildly and that where it varies is where my actual interest lies. If I'm actually interested in something, I have no problem with my attention. But like high school, when I was in high school, I remember there were subjects that I just was bored with or the teacher was boring. And I just could not pay attention. It was almost impossible. And I was thinking as I got older and I realized that they were putting kids on Prozac and all kinds of shit for this I was like I probably would have got put on drugs if I had the wrong parents like if if my parents didn't recognize that I just wasn't interested in these things that it wasn't that there was something wrong with my brain but I only am capable of concentrating on things I'm interested in and I don't know why I but I don't care because the things that I'm interested

I'm really good at concentrating on but the things that I don't give a fuck about they're like I don't care like I Amazing capacity to ignore information that I find boring. I just don't I don't care. Yeah, I mean I think that There's a whole world that we could talk about of the bioethics of putting children on medication when they don't fall in line with. Do you think there's like some sort of an evolutionary reason for that though? I mean, if we go back to like our hunter-gatherer roots, when you're, say if you were trying to catch a fish,

like you're ready to spear a fish and you're hyper-focused trying to get right to the right spot, the success or failure, your life really depends upon it. Because if you get the nutrition from that fish, you get to live another day, you thrive. If you don't, you're starving and your body gets diminished. These are real life scenarios that we evolved to deal with. So that feeling like, have you ever gone fishing?

No. We were talking about it last night with some friends, one of them who happens to be a scientist. And we were saying, there's a thing that's like in you. When you catch a fish, like your whole body gets excited. Oh, I got one, I got one. And I'm like, that has to be connected to back when we were primitive people. And that was the only way we gathered food.

We had to catch something. And if we caught it, it was a big deal. So you get so stimulated by this act of catching a fish. So much so that there's a whole world of people who catch fish and let them go. Yes. The thrill. The thrill of the catch. It's a weird, that catch and release shit is fucking weird.

It's like, you know, fly fishing. They make fish hooks that don't have a barb in them. So you can just catch a trout and let it go. I'm like, are you just fucking with these fish? Like, what is this? But meanwhile, like if you say that, they'll get so offended with the gentle art of fly fishing. Like, no, you're just fucking with fish.

Oh, man. But it's the same thing. Let's go back. Let's use fishing just to connect it back to you in the classroom. You're at some place and you're going back to our ancestors, just like you said. You're fishing. You've got to catch the food. Your life depends on it.

You don't catch any fish there. What's going to happen? You're going to move on right you're gonna be like you're gonna probably start having not the thrill of the catch but the boredom and irritation of nothing happening that's of interest hmm so I see boredom as a really important feedback system boredom isn't the causeoredom is the result of basically the attention system saying, opportunity costs. I'm missing out. Go somewhere else.

And so boredom is such a good signal because what it means is go do something else. It's guiding action. And so often it's not like you can't focus. It's that for whatever complex set of reasons, your brain biology is saying, try something else because probably you'll get more reward out of that. And now that's actually the reason why people miss the three back on that experiment. You're sitting there. It's like nothing's going on. And I always think of this every time I walk through security at the airport.

The chances of finding a grenade or a bomb in that image, very, very low. But if they screw up, devastating consequences. And that's the urge to mind wander away because the reward, the intrinsic reward of the situation is low. But sometimes we still have to stay on it. Like you don't want a police officer or soldier on patrol to be like, this is so freaking boring. I'd rather do something else. They need to be there. You know, oftentimes I'll ask my military colleagues, you're standing at attention.

Where's your attention? I don't know. Well, let's get our minds at attention because that's what we need. You cannot screw up because even if the chances of something bad happening are low, if they happen and you miss it, it's on you. So when people are bored, it's essentially the mind telling you that you're wasting time here and that you need to find like if you go back to like the evolutionary roots of the way we've hyper focus on like a fish that you're trying to catch. If you're bored, that discomfort is essentially your mind saying this is not productive and this is not helping us survive. Yeah, it's basically let's make it even more basic than that. It's saying the reward you're getting here is not enough to keep you here.

But it starts with something even more basic. The mind starts wandering. And we did this. If you look over time in this simple task, 10 minutes, people are worse at the end of the task than at the beginning of the task. And if you ask them, if you stop the experiment every now and then and say, where was your attention right now? Was it on the task or was it off task? The rates of people saying they were off task go up. So they're saying they're more and more off task.

Their performance is getting worse. They're more variable. And then if you ask them subjectively, how did it feel to do this task? It was so boring. It's like this is the moment that kind of calculation is probably being done, then you start finding other things. If there's nowhere to go, you'll go internal to your own mind. It's a great place to take a little journey somewhere else. But that is the other thing I want to bring up, that boredom itself seems to enhance creativity. And there's been some critiques of modern life

in terms of the way we use screens to constantly distract ourselves to the point where we don't really get bored anymore. We might get bored, but we're getting enough input that we maintain a certain level of awareness and what we're doing like but you'll find yourself you know two hours in on instagram like what the fuck did i do i just killed two hours where you're at this like instead of at 10 like you're catching the fish you're at like one or two but you maintain at one or two and you never get down

the baseline but when you do when people are legitimately bored, oftentimes that's when creative thoughts come out. And this argument that I've heard multiple times is that we are not bored anymore. So because we're not bored anymore, there's a lot of creativity and there's a lot of ideas that we're missing out on. Because the mind doesn't have the chance to wander, which is where many of these great ideas come from, is the mind just sitting there thinking. You're super in sync with everything I write about, frankly, in the book. Because yes, let's go back to that term mind wandering. Whatever you took is definitely kicking in. I'm still dumb right now. It's not ready yet. Another half hour. Talk to me in a half hour. We'll be ready. So, okay. So the term mind-wandering. Okay. So

technically when we ask people, is your mind wandering? What we mean is, did your attention get hijacked away from the thing you're doing? All right. Technically, that's what we talk about. Off-task thoughts during an ongoing activity. It represents a broader category of something the mind does. It's called spontaneous thought. It doesn't necessarily have to be thought, by the way. It's just this pump. The brain is constantly, and there's lots of reasons for that, is pumping out content. And so when we become task-focused, when there is something to do and the content is still going on and you now move your attention away from the task to that content that's not related to the task, you are now mind-wandering and your performance on the task is going to suffer. You're going to make more mistakes. You're going to have all kinds of problems.

And, you know, you were saying a moment ago that when you were little, like, you just couldn't focus on things that were boring. And that kind of led us on this whole thing. You know, that's awesome that you're here and your life worked out where you didn't have to go back to focusing on those things that are boring. But I can guarantee, just like going back and you counting the money you were talking about, there are things we have to do in our life that is going to be boring, but we still got to pay attention. Like even if it's watching your kid at the playground or you're on a, you're on, you know, on some, some, you're having a conversation with somebody and it's boring. Like you gotta be able to at least bring yourself back. So the key to all

of this, a lot of what we're saying is it's not so much about not having spontaneous thought. of what we're saying is it's not so much about not having spontaneous thought, and it's not about even feeling boredom. It's about having an awareness of what your mind is doing in the moment. Where is my attention? If you can do that, all of a sudden, a lot of things start changing. So in this case where something boring is happening, you're off knowing, oh, yeah, look, I'm not on the task anymore. You know, we might call it tuning out. You're off. Knowing, oh, yeah, look, I'm not on the task anymore. You know, we might call it tuning out. You're actually saying, I don't care. I don't want to do that.

That's probably what was happening in school. It's like, I know I'm not paying attention to class, and I don't want to. It's really not interesting to me. But you had an awareness of where your mind was. The bigger problem we tend to have, and remember the kind of groups I work with, is that the mind will wander and people are not aware of it. So now they're not paying attention to the task at hand. They're not aware of it and their performance starts suffering. And it's not about the nature of the task. It doesn't have to be a boring task. Brain surgeons say their minds wander.

That's consequential. Judges say their minds wander. Generals say their minds wander. Just part of being a person. It's just part of being a person, but it's consequential. If you miss key information in any of those scenarios, somebody's life is going to be impacted by that. And so that's one of my interests is like, how do you, okay, that's a really tricky thing. It kind of goes back to your nootropics thing. How do you train for that? Because I don't think it's going to happen. It doesn't happen on its own all that often. How do you train the mind to pay attention to what's happening moment by moment? Are we doing this sort of after the fact? Like, should this be something that's a core component of early childhood education where children can understand why they get bored and what can help them get on track to accomplish goals and give them a feeling of achievement.

When they do focus and recognize that they can bring their mind on track and that there's a reward for it in accomplishing these tasks instead of like going back as adults and go, why am I so fucked up? How come I can't pay attention to anything? And go, oh, I never learned how to think correctly. I never learned how to harness my attention. I mean, right on. Yeah, absolutely. Because we really don't teach kids how to think very much, do we? We really just sort of show them what they need to learn. You know, even before we talk about thinking, what we don't do for any of us, it's very, very rare, is teach people the value and importance of checking out where their mind is moment by moment. moment. And going back to the people with ADD, the patients that have ADD, diagnosable ADD, their life is problematic because of this set of set points they have on all these three systems of attention. Those that have this thing we're talking about, which the technical term is meta-awareness. It's essentially a version of that floodlight that I was talking about,

broad, receptive, but you're checking out. Technically, meta-awareness is having awareness of the current contents and processes of your mind moment by moment. So first of all, to say, oh yeah, I can do that. I can see. And we do this all the time. We'd say, oh yeah, look, I'm really, you just did it a moment ago. My brain's not working right now. Like you're checking in and you're saying, right now, it's not the crispness I want there to be, but you're attuned to it. And so it may make you do something differently because you're aware of it. If we're not even aware of where our mind is, there's not a lot of opportunity that we can do anything about it. So it ends up, if you look at people with ADD that have a lot of problems, their minds wander a lot, meaning they have off-task thoughts a lot.

But they also happen to have good meta-awareness. Their lives don't suffer all that much, meaning they can have a job and do things that are kind of normal kinds of things. Do you think we're doing a disservice by medicating people when they have that instead of by training them how to focus? You know, this is exactly where I'm going. So that was a question I thought was a legitimate thing to ask. We didn't want to start out by saying stop your medication. So I involved – one of the studies we did in my lab is that we recruited a bunch of people, adults with ADD. And we said just keep on your regular meditation.

What is the, what's the, like, what's the average medication? Like, what are they on for the most part? Did you ask them? I mean, all kinds of things, whether it's Stratera, Welbutrin, or Adderall, Ritalin. Some of those are SSRIs, though, right? There's some, there's combinations of things. Is Welbutrin an SSRI? I'm not, that's not my, neuropharmacology is not my thing. You can look it up.

Yeah, Jamie, look it up. But the point is that we said, whatever your particular medication cocktail is, stay on it. Now take this eight-week mindfulness training program. And that program was like, we started with a minute of practice, very active practices. So now it's not sit quietly and focus on your breath. It's go for a walk, feel the sensations of your feet on the ground when your mind wanders, come back. So we worked up to about 12 minutes a day for these adults with ADD. And then at the end of the training program, we said, you know, we looked at the objective metrics, looking better, less mind wandering for the people that did the practices. But when I just inquired, what's different about your medication use or your mind?

They'd say, before I used to take my Ritalin and then play video games for eight hours. And I did really awesome on the video games, but I didn't finish my homework or I forgot to go to work. You know, like they had this raw power to focus in some sense with some of the medications, but they didn't have the meta-awareness to know if they were using it correctly. After the training, that was the number one most consistent thing people said. I was aware of where my mind was. I could use my time better because I was checking in. Where am I right now? Oh, is that tied to where I want to be? Let me redirect. That's also the thing that all of us benefit from with mindfulness training is that not only does it connect to using the flashlight, it allows us to cultivate that kind of broad receptive stance toward what is unfolding right now so that the executive control system can

update, shift, or redirect when things are off track. That makes the whole thing function better. Mindfulness is a very current term. People love to use it. And you said before that we might have a different definition. So let's define what mindfulness means. Yeah. So the way that I use that term is it's a mental mode, meaning it's a way of making the mind. Mindfulness meditation is a set of practices you can do to cultivate this mode. So what is the mode? Mindfulness as a mode is paying attention to our present moment experience without conceptual elaboration. Conceptual elaboration. Or emotional reactivity.

What's conceptual elaboration? Thinking. So being in the moment without thinking. And really a specific kind of thinking, this thought, hyperlinking thoughts. Oh, okay. So how can you get more data without the overlay of the story, the editorial, you know, don't editorialize right now. What's happening? What's actually happening? Not your story about what's happening, not you thinking about what's happening. What is happening? That's what I mean by it. And when people now do these breath

awareness practices, for example, you're focusing on your breath. You're not controlling the breath. That's where I thought there was a little bit of a distinction between what you were saying, what I'm saying. You're doing nothing with the breath. The only reason we use the breath, handy tool, always changing moment by moment. You're doing it without having to control it. In fact, if you had to actually pay attention to your breath, you'd probably be dead because you'd get distracted. So you don't have a specific breath technique that you're utilizing? You're not manipulating the breath at all. You're not. You're just concentrating on the fact that you are actually breathing.

No. No? Nope. You're aware of the fact that you're breathing? You're focusing on the sensations of breathing. What's the distinction? Concentrating is a tricky term. It could be I'm thinking about the fact that I'm breathing. Isn't it so interesting that I have a diaphragm in this part of my body that does these muscle movements that allow this breathing to thot, thot, thot, thot, thot?

It's coolness, tingliness, tension. It's like you're literally staying at the most granular raw data of what's happening. And with that awareness of this is happening right now, you're literally staying at the most granular raw data of what's happening. And with that awareness of this is happening right now, you're in that meta-aware mode. And I'm not, by the way, manipulating your breath and controlling it and having a particular box breathing or whatever, fantastic thing to do. Have you done it? Pranayama, right? These are breath manipulation techniques that can induce all kinds of very interesting states. So, for example, breath work. We're actually getting these kind of very cool experiences, very cool thing to do.

But that's not what we're going for with mindfulness. With mindfulness, we're using the breath simply as one of many different things we could focus on. Like the other night I couldn't fall asleep, I'm using in my hotel room mindfulness of the air conditioner, like just noticing moment to moment the sensations of the sound shifting just to have a target now. And then, wait, pretty soon you're not there. Notice that the mind has wandered away from breath-related sensations. Bring it back. So you're holding the flashlight. You've got the flashlight going. You've got the floodlight engaged.

And the juggler's always keeping you on track, executive control. That's what I meant by it's engaging all three of the systems of attention as a push-up. engaging all three of the systems of attention as a push-up. Do we know that there is any benefit to doing that versus doing breath work or vice versa? The direct head-to-head? Yes. Yeah, I have not done that. It would be interesting to see. What I wanted to do is see not so much about acute manipulations, like I know what it feels like to do breathwork. It feels really interesting. You get so many amazing insights, just like certain psychedelic

substances can give you amazing insights. But I couldn't keep hold of those in the same way. Like, they vanish. In some sense, I get some embodied sense of like, this was a really cool insight. It's just like you in the sensory deprivation chamber. Sometimes you get insights and it sort of changes you in a way, but you can't really capture what that is. And I wanted something in the training we were providing to be enduring for people so that they didn't have to go, you know, it's almost like if you're in the middle of a war zone and you got to stay on it, you got to keep your attention focused because you never know when somebody is going to come or go. You probably can't do paleotropic breathing and you got to stay on it. You got to keep your attention focused because you never know when somebody is going to come or go. You probably can't do paleotropic breathing and you probably can't get the zapper out and zap your brain. You just got to have it embodied within you.

And it needs to be on demand in that moment. You need to be mindful on demand and you're up against a lot. 50% of your waking moment, your attention is going to be off somewhere. That's what I wanted to help people cultivate. And that meant sort of a raw workout, a strong workout they could do in the privacy of the preparatory interval. So they had it on a more available to them. So in your book, do you lay out like a specific strategy for achieving these states? I do. And it's based on 15 years of work where, you know, at the time I started this work, there were solutions. The mindfulness-based stress reduction was an awesome, is an awesome program. Gold standard, really, of mindfulness training. It takes a long time. Eight weeks, 24 hours, 45 minutes of practice

a day. Service members were not up for that. In fact, I had like $2 million in grant funding from the Department of Defense. Nobody would take my project. They're like, yeah, that's too much time. I'll give you an hour. I'm like, I need like eight weeks. So I ended up writing another grant that said, let me systematically see if I can get a minimum effective dose. Let me go from eight weeks to four weeks and maybe two weeks. Let me cut the hours. Let me cut the daily practice time. That led us to an answer, which is that you can go too low, so it's not effective. But there is sort of a sweet spot that looks like it's about four weeks of training, eight hours, and about 12 minutes a day.

That's it, 12 minutes a day. Interesting. Now, how did you get involved with the military? Interesting. Now, how did you get involved with the military? How did they did they approach you? Or was this had private funding and we found a Marine unit that was willing to do it. And even the guys that welcomed us in were like, yeah, this is never going to work. But we'll give it a try because, frankly, at that point, it was around 2006 and 2007, nothing was working. Deployment after deployment, suicides going up the roof, anxiety, depression, rampant suicidality. And they just were open to, like, let's try something else. suicidality, and they just were open to like, let's try something else. So we did our first study even without military DOD funding and found these beneficial effects, protective effects. And so that's when I was able to write the grants and actually formally start studying it with DOD funding to come to this solution of four weeks, eight hours, 12 minutes a day. And how did you develop that protocol? So say when you're first working with them

and they're like, this is not going to work, but we'll give it a try. How do you know what to start them with? Is it experimental? Right. So what we did is we took really an science. So we took a very incremental approach. Tiny little steps.

So we had eight weeks of this program called Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction. Many, many studies were done on it. Got a suite of practices like the one I was, we talked about and others, because you're not just training the flashlight, you're training the floodlight too. It's a really nice suite of practices. Start of that. Are you getting bored now? No, I just yawned. I'm not bored. Okay, good. Just an inadvertent yawn. No problem. So we just said, let's take this same program and contextualize it for service members. Let's use language that's related to their, you know, their life. Let's have the discussion

regarding the benefits of this program. When you say language related to their life, like how so? Well, like in the program that we use now, for example, we talk about why you need attention. We use terms that have to do with what they know regarding the use of attention in their life as a soldier. So you know that you have to zero your weapon to calibrate it to be able to do the job. Zero the mind.

So like we can use concepts that are tied to military life, but now actually related to attention as essentially your biggest i mean weapon is a tricky word but resource to be able to do what you need to do you do you have any experience at all in the military or did you ever deploy did you nothing look at me no i'm just asking because i wanted i don't know like how would you go about finding what the requirements are totally well the first project i did i collaborated with a former service member so she was able to she'd been deployed and was a mindfulness expert uh this was oh that's convenient very and and then we've been able to now do

studies where we partner with people that train soldiers and teach them to be trainers. So what your goal is, is to make them perform better under these periods of high stress. The goal ultimately, not just perform better, but feel better. And we do it by looking at attention and psychological health. And we do it by looking at attention and psychological health. So we know if we do nothing under pre-deployment and even deployment, attention is going to tank, mood's going to get worse. Can we do anything to protect against that? So are you giving them tools that will help them just in life, in this very bizarre and highly stressful world of being deployed, of being an active duty soldier,

or both? Both. Both. So when you're thinking about them being deployed and them being in combat situations, how are you calculating, how are you deciding what to show them, what not to show them? Are you working with imagery and visualizations?

How are you maintaining their focus? Very, very simple, I mean, in some sense. Remember back to what we were saying. These are fundamental capacities. We need attention to think, to regulate our emotions, to connect. What I wanted to do is see if we could increase the raw availability of their attention and protect it from decline, which we showed in the pre-deployment phase. We didn't say anything in particular regarding how they might use this during deployment.

And this is not like a, this is just like any kind of good physical fitness routine. Like, I don't have to tell you, Joe, so now that you've worked out your upper body, when you're at the airport in an airplane and you need to put your suitcase up, you can use your upper, it's like, no, if you've got this, you know how to use it. What was so interesting,

because we had no idea how it would translate, frankly, in the early days to the combat context, because combat context because you're completely amped up. This is not training anymore. You could die. What I was really surprised by was what we saw in the Marines themselves. So, you know, we offer this program. We find that it's protective if they do 12 minutes or more. And then not everybody did 12 minutes or more we had like a group of them that were kind of resistors they thought I was full of it I don't care you know I'm not doing this and they didn't practice and that subgroup actually looked like the control group they got worse over time even though they went to the training they were not

interested they come back We test them again. And this subgroup looked better than before they were deployed. I was like, what? This makes no sense. How do they go from being worse over eight weeks? Now they're deployed to a war zone. They come back and they're better than that. And I had all these grandiose ideas as scientists do, like maybe they felt activated by their mission and that got their attention up. So I asked my colleague,

the trainer, like, was there anything that stands out about this particular group of names? Because they just, they're not showing the normal pattern of essentially more degradation. And she said, oh yeah, these are the guys that contacted me from Iraq and said, you know that stuff you were trying to teach us that I thought was complete BS? Well, the guys that are doing it are sleeping through the night. They're coming back from mission and patrol and not getting the shakes. Teach me that. So they actually started practicing while they were deployed. And then when they came back, we saw the benefits in their attentional performance. So I would say we're not being overly prescriptive.

We trust the expertise that the service members have to implement these skills in their lives. But we are providing them the tools so that the training regime is like a cross-training for their attention. You got all three systems are going to get activated, and you got this meta-awareness so you kind of know where your mind is. You can get back on track as you need to did you have to tweak the protocol did you have it like pretty firmly established before you started working with soldiers like how did you

develop like what to how to get them going with this we used that same eight-week program that was established and then the only thing we really did was start tweaking the time. Like, okay, if you can't be with a group for 24 hours, you got to cut something, what should we cut? And this is where it got really interesting too, because I kind of just used my hunches with regard to physical training. Like, if you're going to go learn some new particular, let's say you're just going to go get a personal trainer. You want to know how to do the workout. You want to maximize the benefits. If you went to the gym and you met this person, all they did is tell you how great their training is, how it works technically, why it's the best training program. You'd probably be like, yeah,

no, can you just show me the workout? Can we just do it? Can we do the reps together? So that's sort of what we did. We took the program and we kind of split it up. We had gotten it down to 16 hours or so. And we split it up and I said, I want one eight-hour group that really just focuses on the workout. And the other one that has a lot of talking about the mindfulness benefits and the problems with stress, et cetera. And then we put them head to head. So we had one group that got nothing, one that got the training focused, and one that got the talking about it. And the talking about it was just like the, pretty much just like the no training at all. It was just get to the workout. That also helped us shrink the time down to eight hours. So this has been where we've been kind of honing it over and over again. We did a project with special operators where at that point we were about four weeks and eight hours. And I said,

can we crunch it more? Can we get to two weeks? And we couldn't. Even with that level of an elite warrior, two weeks was too short, which I think is tied to how long it takes to train and physiologically change attention. So you're doing basically 12 minutes a day for four weeks. And does it vary or is it basically the same type of exercise over and over again for that four weeks? It's a suite of practices. So the one aspect is this finding your flashlight, as I call it, practicing, focusing. The other one is really something that goes back to actually your comment regarding the deprivation chamber. What did you call it? Sensory deprivation chamber. Sensory deprivation chamber. What did you call it? The sensory deprivation chamber.

Exercising the floodlight. And that we call open monitoring. It's a totally different kind of practice. So, and I can say more about that, but then there's another practice that is actually what we call connection practice, but it's about offering kind of well wishes toward yourself. So it's a suite of practices that rounds out these multiple aspects of attention. But maybe we talk about open monitoring if you're up for it. Sure, yeah, please. So, because I would be very curious to see what you think, especially if you practice this and even bring it in the context of the sensory deprivation. Because it seems to really help with basically divergent thinking and thought generation of mental content, let's just say. So the practice itself, it's, I mean, let me just give you an example of something I describe in the book.

This is now, because remember at the core of it, mindfulness training is about taking an observational stance. It's like whatever's happening is happening, and you're there watching it. You're watching, you have a goal, you know, and for the practices we've talked about so far, the goal is focus on something in particular. Notice that you're staying focused. If you're not, come back. Right? That's what we talked about already. Beneficial effects when people do that. This is, the goal is, don't focus on anything. You're not going to actually engage in anything. You are going to, the goal is that you don't focus. Now, not resisting focusing, but allowing thoughts, feelings, sensations, any mental content, any external stimulation to come and pass away. So it was funny that you were talking about fishing because the practice, I named it just like river of thought. So you kind of visualize yourself sitting at the bank of a river, like maybe there's a little rock there. You're sitting, you're solid, you're stable. And essentially, you're just going to, if you want to lower or close your eyes, think of your conscious mind as the passing of content through this river in front of you.

And you're not going to go for the fish or follow it or follow the leaf. You're just going to allow whatever arises to come up and then pass away. And that's what's interesting about working memory, like we were talking about before. Working memory is the scratch space of consciousness. And for anything to stay in our conscious experience, we need to keep rewriting it. We need to follow it. We need to hyperlink it, or else it's going to dissolve away. It just won't stay on the whiteboard. So you're practicing allowing whatever occurs to occur without chasing it or pursuing it, just watching it. So just the idea of the river is just like a vehicle for allowing you

to let these thoughts just flow through your mind? Yeah. Some people say, you know, you could imagine this mind is a vast open sky and thoughts, feelings, sensations are like clouds passing it. There's all these images you can use, but the goal is you are aware, you're meta aware of what's happening, but you're not grabbing onto anything. You don't have a thought pop up and be like, oh, I need to write that down. Or like, what are five things that are related to that? You're not making your mental grocery list. You're like, ah, I had a thought that said I need to get milk, move on. So for people that are listening to this and they go, okay, but how does that help? How does that help? How does that help me?

When you are in a situation where you are stuck, ruminating, worrying, catastrophizing, first of all, you're usually not aware that that's happening so this practice allows you to cultivate an awareness because that's all you're really doing you're just being aware of what's happening you're not doing anything with it so you want to cultivate that but also typically when we're in those kind of really sticky states we don't know what to do we keep looping on them or we dig ourselves further into a hole we don't have the capacity to distance we keep looping on them, or we dig ourselves further into a hole. We don't have the capacity to distance and broaden. And if we do that, we can allow the content to pass away. And that's where it becomes extremely powerful. We can psychologically distance or de-center

ourselves so that there's a steadiness and watchfulness. And we're not so caught up in the negative and destructive mental content that we can't see our way out. So is it kind of like cleaning the mind's closet? Like getting rid of unnecessary things that could be there that you would concentrate on? No, you're not getting rid of anything. No? No. Is there any cleansing effect? rid of anything. No. No. Is there any cleansing effect? There's cleansing effect in that you're not, you're staying observant yet disengaged. Now, when could this be useful in a real situation?

You're in a really heated conversation. You're angry. You're super angry, but you need to get along with this person because there's some deliberation and military leaders will talk about this. In fact, one of the most powerful ways this practice shows up in real life is listening. So what does it mean to actually listen, especially when there's hostile, complex content that's happening? And this is one of the stories I describe in the book where one of the first military service member leaders that allowed us to do this project, I met him as a colonel. He ended up being, you know, now he's a three-star general, but he was deployed to Iraq, and his job was to manage the entire multinational land force. And so he had to go to these various places right after ISIS had been sort of defeated, and groups that were not talking to each other, I mean, sorry, that were aligned,

because they all had to fight this common enemy, ISIS. Now they were having infighting, like they weren't getting along with each other. So he had to go and talk to three leaders. They come together, and they're so angry. They're so angry with the United States. They're so angry at each other. And he basically was taking this, he used his mindfulness practice because he started practicing when we first taught him, I mean, introduced this to his soldiers. And he said it was so powerful to be able to just really listen and for them to experience somebody really listening. And he was taking it in. He was taking in what he was hearing. He wasn't giving his responses. And he fully heard it, was able to kind of communicate it back. And it shifted the entire dynamic where one of the leaders was like, we can actually work with you. We can actually work with you. Because what he didn't do is get caught up in his own reactivity. He didn't start formulating responses. He didn't take that flashlight anywhere. He was really taking that observational, steady, emotionally non-reactive stance.

And he could fully get the information he needed to then respond with a thoughtful answer. And that's just one example of the kinds of things that can happen in our lives when we practice this capacity to distance ourselves and fully observe what's going on. We can intervene, of course, but we're not so driven to intervene before we really are able to observe first. This practice of using this in the military, I think, would be insanely beneficial. how many people are involved in terms of like how many scientists and how many soldiers and whether or not you see this being deployed on a much broader scale. Yeah. You know, right now it's starting to get a lot of traction. It's still mostly been done in the context of research studies, but I just actually co-hosted with the UK, United Kingdom's Ministry of Defense, 10-nation summit where we brought together 10 different countries that are all starting to implement mindfulness within their forces to have sort of an international conversation regarding this.

So it's not quite there yet. It's not like a program of record. People can go on the website and sign up for it. But it's starting to get noticed. And right now we're doing a project. We did a project in collaboration with Army scientists with basic combat training where we offered this program, which was mindfulness and yoga to new recruits. And it's beneficial, had a lot of beneficial effects. beneficial effects. We're also doing a project with all the newly minted one-star generals in the Army. So we're trying to get sort of through the career path also different points at which this could happen. We're also doing a project with schoolhouse settings. So the Special Operations Qualification School will now start, will be testing this. But it's mostly through research right now. And really, my lab has been one of the only ones that's been consistently doing it.

through research right now. And really, my lab has been one of the only ones that's been consistently doing it. You know, I know a lot of professional athletes, fighters that are using mindfulness training, and some of them that have even gone to sports psychologists and sports psychologists have implemented a lot of similar techniques and trying to focus them. when you do put this protocol together and you do work with these soldiers, are you trying to have a specific time? Like, do they wake up in the morning? Is that like one of the first things they do in order to start the day correctly? Like, is there a good way to do it? Is it good to do it at the end of the day when you're reflecting? Like, when is the best way to get this and to implement it

the short answer is the best time to implement it is when you're going to implement it you got to get yourself to do it like if you have discipline like if you're a professional athlete they're very very disciplined absolutely so um we have not as far as i know there are no studies that have formally assigned people to do practice different times of day to see the benefits. People do vary in terms of their time. What we're trying to do right now, at least in the military context, is see if something like a mindful cool down after the morning PT may be helpful. And you kind of get a twofer where you've already had the physical exercises yoked to a routine in your day, and then you're just going to have this 12-minute thing, 12 to 15-minute thing you do after that. and then you're just going to have this 12-minute thing, 12 to 15-minute thing you do after that.

For the rest of us who aren't service members or professional athletes, my guidance is always yoke it to something that you do as part of your routine. You're going to do it every day. Maybe it's right before or after you brush your teeth or have your morning coffee. So there's no question of debating whether you're going to do it or not. And then start really, really small. Don't start with 12 minutes a day. Say you're going to do three minutes and then cut in half, and that's going to be your goal.

Because you've got to get it to the point where it's achievable, and you get that experience of, like, I'm doing it. I'm committed. It's habit formation. And then slowly build up to 12 minutes. Do you think there's benefit in starting your day with it, though? It seems like the— For me, there is.

I mean, personally personally that's when i like to do it during the day because it sort of sets the it's a it's a it's not even you know i know this from our lab of what the objective results say for me it's i like doing it in the morning because usually if i do it at night i'll fall asleep frankly it's very you know part of good to help you fall asleep that's what a lot of the soldiers say they're like your racing. You can't fall asleep. You start supplementing with things that probably aren't that useful. Oftentimes, not the kind of stuff you probably would recommend for sleep. And I and I and they do a body scan, which is sort of like this practice. We're taking the flashlight, guiding it through the whole body and they're out. And I do it, too, to fall asleep. But if I'm not doing it, the intention is not as a relaxation and sleep aid. I like to do it in the morning because in some sense it's like I found my flashlight again. It's like it's going to be all over the place, but kind of reminding you like this is a fundamental capacity that you hold to know where your mind is moment by moment, even if you're not going to do anything differently. But you can if you want to, because you're aware of it.

So for the regular person who's not a soldier or professional fighter or anybody who's in ridiculously high stress situations, how do they apply this to their life? I mean, that's why I wrote the book, frankly. Same way? Very similar ways. Of course, it's not going to be as consequential, but, you know, as simple as not freaking out when you get cut off in traffic, when you want to work on a report, you're not on a group text. You're actually aware I'm getting pulled in and sucked in my flashlight's getting yanked. I got to get it

back. Where am I right now? Interpersonal relationships, you can actually, this is what happened to me, right? So I'm just giving that example. I could see my spouse again. I could actually listen to him. I could see the look on his face. I could look at my child. It changes the nature and quality of the way we interact with other people. the way we interact with other people. So not just for improved ability to think, your attention is more available, your working memory is more available to you. It stress proofs those kind of abilities because you're not in mental time travel to the past or future. You're here when you want to be. But our emotions can be better regulated. Our connections are stronger. So it ends up showing up over and over again for everybody. And that is what motivated me to write the book. I'm like, if it can help these people, how do we bring it so that everybody can do it? And also just educate them about the nature of their attention so they understand what the vulnerabilities, what they're up against. we got to 2021 without this being a normal, regular part of most people's life. Right, if you think about how important it is, your focus and your attention and the way you think

and the way you approach various tasks and problems in your life, the fact that this is not a normal part of everyone's day is really kind of strange. Because it's so important. Like everybody's like, oh I'm distracted, or I can't get my shit together, or God I wish I was more disciplined,

and I really wish I was more focused. And how few people actually apply techniques to enhance that, it's kind of stunning, right? Because it's not of stunning right because it's not like it's it's not cost prohibitive it's not like it's something that takes like a deep education of you know like many many many years of training and you know and the fucking esoteric arts no 12 minutes a day kind of crazy right well it's i love that you're Well, I love that you're saying that. I love that you're having that kind of slight outrage about it because this has been like a huge passion of mine. A hundred years ago, if you saw somebody running down the street, you'd think they were nuts. They're getting chased by a bear.

Like something serious is going wrong. Right. Now it's normalized. We know that you need to physically move your body in a certain way for a certain number of minutes a week for you to stay physically fit you don't think they've ran in 1920 okay maybe maybe 1900 right okay but 1820 maybe 1820 but the point buffalo and shit yeah and you know but when the military instituted and it was the first real organization that instituted physical fitness there was a lot of pushback like what i'm gonna sit here going to sit here and jump up and down?

No, I'm not doing that. The military was the first to? Yeah. Yeah. In fact, it was a military, it was a Navy scientist who used the term aerobics. What's his name? Oh, I can't remember. Cooper.

Cooper? Yeah. I think it was Dr. Cooper. And this is from when? Not that long ago. I mean, the aerobics thing was, you know, then it turned into the whole aerobics, aerobic activity, Jane Fonda. Right.

Good old days. But so think about how far we've come. Yeah. Over, let's say, not 100 years. Physical fitness. 200 years. Oh, yeah. It's fascinating.

The mind is no different than the rest of the body. We need to exercise it regularly to stay psychologically fit and optimize our performance. The question has been, how do you do that? And the funny thing when writing this book is like, oh, it's that thing people have been doing for thousands of years. We're just putting the modern lens of science on it to say, this is why I've probably been helpful for people for thousands of years.

It's a really interesting comparison, what you're saying, with physical fitness because if you pay attention, particularly what you get out of social media, there's so many incredibly fit people now. There's so many people that make a living showing you workouts. And a large percentage of the people that I know regularly go to the gym or take a spin class or do something where they're stimulating their body and putting it under stress. Where you look at the way people look today. in class or do something where they're stimulating their body and putting it under stress. Yeah.

Where you look at like the way people look today, you know, just the physical stature, the muscles that they have and the fitness. Like that was really rare just 60 years ago. Very rare. And the fact that this has changed so radically within, you know, this generation. It's pretty amazing. If we could get the same sort of application, the same sort of focus, and put it on your mind, really have some pretty significant changes

in the way we interface with each other, the way we get through our lives, what we can focus on, what we can accomplish, and probably happiness too, right? Exactly. So, you know, a lot of, I love that you're saying this, I can't tell you. Remember back to the days when they said it was career suicide and I just was like, I don't care, I'm doing this, I think it's of value.

So to me, it is extremely gratifying to hear you say that you get it. And also the fact that you think that the fact that it was considered as career suicide is like weird. Because not only in 60 years have we been able to transform the way we think about physical wellness. In 15 years, we've been able to start making a lot of traction on the benefits of this type of training on the mind. And so I think that things are looking quite hopeful. And frankly, it couldn't come at a better, it couldn't come soon enough

because the nature of the world is going to continue to get more complex, more interconnected, more uncertain. I mean, the last couple of years with this pandemic, I mean, same idea. The challenges are going to amp up and we need to arm ourselves, meaning we need to prepare our minds

for a type of mental armor. We're also experiencing distraction that's wholly unnatural, like in terms of social media, the ability to constantly like look at these things and just be inundated. And for some people, they get like really fixated in conflict and getting in these little arguments with people that have, they're nowhere near them. Oh, totally. And they're doing it online and arguing about, you know, political things or social things. It goes back to something you said a while ago about the benefit of having, what did

you call it? Getting bored. I would say, I call it essentially task-free time. Like create active white space in your day where you're task-free. And that doesn't mean you're going to take extra time out, but you have plenty of these moments already where be aware that attention is going to get fatigued if you continue to use it. And if you think that being on social media as your downtime is giving your attention a break. You're wrong. You are in a task context and you are expending out your attention every time you scroll. In fact, that's why these social media companies are making gazillions of dollars. Your attention is the commodity.

You are giving it. That is the product. So to be aware that it's not innocuous, it actually is problematic. And to be aware that, you know, a solution like breakup with my phone is not a reasonable and realistic solution. You're going to need your phone. Like, even if I think about my kids, you know, I asked them, like, what are you, what are you guys doing to, to, well, I don't even have to ask them. They tell me they got rid of all their social media apps. So it's not distracting, but for some apps that they have to use, they just use another piece of software that limits the time.

So that they're very kind of... This is your children? Yeah. Really? So they go in and they're like, I got three more minutes to use YouTube, so... They've done this voluntarily? They did, because they have to figure out a way to manage their own thing. How old are they?

15 and 19. Really? Interesting. Now, do you think that's because you're their mom? Maybe. I don't know. They're more hyper aware of the problems with not focusing and not paying attention to things? I don't know if that's it or they're just like-

It's got to be. No 15 and 19 year old does that shit on their own. I mean, you'd be surprised. I think that we think that children are unaware of the costs of social media on their attention and we're wrong. They are suffering and they know it. They're just- You know, they're going to fix it. Facebook changed their name. They're fixing it. Now it's not going to be a problem anymore. Do you hear that? They've decided to change their name. Okay. Well, what's

that? The metaverse. The metaverse? Yeah. They're trying to, they're changing the whole company, man. What's it called? They haven't announced it yet, but it's, they're focusing on that, that new thing that's taking over the internet. What is the new thing? What are you talking about? The metaverse. I've been trying to tell you about it for a few weeks. Well, explain yourself. I don't really know how to explain it, honestly. But it's like Web 3.0, I've heard it discussed that way.

It's a combination of VR, AR, NFTs, Bitcoin, cryptocurrency, decentralized social media. And this is what Facebook's concentrating on now? Yeah. Responsible behavior from social media companies is awesome. Great. Please continue. I don't trust it. I don't believe that's what they're doing.

They're trying to stay alive. They're also the corporate version of it, so it's very hot to take over, and that's why they're – yeah. But here's what i do know if you train your attention this way and have more meta awareness use it in the context of your social media use like notice you're going for the phone notice you're picking it up notice that your face was recognized you're clicking on the app be aware as you're scrolling like we can advantage ourselves so that there's more decision points of what we're going to do instead of being, like you said, three hours into your doom scrolling and you feel like shit and you just can't do anything. Confused. Yeah.

So, anyway, going back have the exact consequences you already described. Our chances for positive visioning, creative problem solving, insight, and frankly, positive mood, we're all, we're all, we're disadvantaging that. We're cutting out the thing that we, will help us with that. And, you know, I always think about it. It's like actually even more than that. Like I think about what we do with our mind, our attention, most days, most of our lives as like taking my dog for a walk. Every morning, you know, we would take, my husband takes him, or I take him. He's on a leash. We got our thing to do. You know, sure, he may like wander around, but I'm pretty much keeping the leash. That's attention.

We're in line. We're trying to do what we do. Frankly, we're leashing ourselves with a lot of our social media use because we're now constrained by the content they're providing. Some days, and maybe you do this with your dog too, you're taking the dog to the dog park, take it off leash, runs around. He's so joyful. I feel joyful. Like there's a freedom in that. And we need to do that with our own mind, with our own attention. We need to know that this is a valuable thing to do.

And we need to take the moments and they could be micro moments. When you're standing at the checkout line, don't check out. Don't put up the phone. Just be there with yourself. Allow your mind to go where it will. Take those moments in nature. Take the walk from the office to the car as just to be with yourself. Maybe some days after you're done listening to this podcast, you turn off the radio or silence your phone and just be in the car and drive. You know, we need to return to these moments because, frankly, we need it. It's fascinating that you're saying something that seems so simple let's just put your phone down and that like just live your life but like that that would be some sort of a therapy and that just literally the act of walking from your car to the store

radical and not checking your phone while you're doing it is actually good for your brain. What about other physical activities? Like what do you think the benefits are, whether it's yoga or running or something like that? How much of, because there's a thing that when I was younger, they discussed martial arts. They talked about it as a moving meditation. And I remember thinking that, that like when you're doing it, it's so difficult to do that all you can think about is it, and there's some sort of an effect while you're engaging in that that it helps the mind, it cleanses the mind, it removes the significance of a lot of the internal dialogue

and the bullshit that you have going on inside your head. Yeah. And, you know, in some sense, these are also traditional practices, right? So where we've got a very active mind that's either ruminating or catastrophizing, something like yoga or other forms of sort of body-based practices,

keep that button on play instead of fast forward or rewind because they have to be. Like if you cannot be distracted, you will fall over. Right. Or you get punched in the face. Like whatever it is, you are not going to be able to go away from the now. You are in the now, but you're doing it

and that actually moves us more toward why we do this in the first place. We're not sitting there quietly focusing on our breath because we want to be like Olympic-level breath followers. Nobody cares about their breath or following it. It's just that we're – in the same way we might not want to – it's not the most fun thing to sit there and lift weights. But we do it because it carries over into our lives. So now it's not necessarily about when my mind wanders away from the breath, return it. But when my mind wanders away from what you're saying, return it.

Right. So we want to keep translating that over and over again. I think movement based practices, active practices are getting us even more aligned with dealing with the fluidity and complexity of real life. Do you apply that also to your work with the military? Like is maybe that something that like while they're doing physical training, is there a way to think during that that helps? You mean orient to the physical training? Yeah. Well, a lot of this is why you already mentioned that you have friends that are athletes that are using this in many ways. What are the things that drive down performance excellence? the things that drive down performance excellence. If you think about that, right, you're a competitive athlete. And what is it that's going to mess you up? It's probably not. You've already perfected

the physical. You know the movements. You've practiced them thousands of times. It's the inner dialogue. So it's either the, I'm the best thing ever. I got this. Or I really messed up. I got this. Or I really messed up. How am I ever going to recover? Or this other team is doing this and you have a story about it and you're imposing it. These are all ways that the mind is behaving that frankly disadvantages getting more information about what's actually occurring. Yeah. It's often paralysis by analysis is a big one. The fear of consequences, that they concentrate on the negative possibilities, the negative consequences, and that becomes crippling, and the anxiety of fear overcomes them.

It's like, Customato is a legendary, he was a legendary boxing trainer, he trained Mike Tyson, and he had this great saying that fear is like fire. You could use it to cook your food or it could burn your house down like you need some fear because it's a motivating factor and it's it's it makes sure that you're aware of what you're about to do that it's very dangerous and that what you're doing is you have to be completely prepared and you must be disciplined in order to achieve that preparation but you also can't let

it just run away because if it just burns you down, then you'll be paralyzed with fear. Exactly. That there's a balance there, but how to achieve that balance. Exactly. And that's the question. So you can understand this conceptually, but how do you not let fear turn into a raging fire? I mean, most of the ways we approach this is distract yourself or pretend the fear is not actually worthy of feeling fear or suppress it. These are not effective approaches. They're not.

And frankly, one of the reasons they're not effective is because they're sucking up your attention. You are actually putting so much energy into suppressing that you're going to have no capacity left to deal with what's in front of you. So these, like going back to that open monitoring practice, fear is present. Fear is my friend sitting here next to me. Fear is here. It is so here or sadness, you know, whatever the strong emotion is to be with that emotion, not deny it, not suppress it and not feed it is the point of power. And that's what we train

for with something like an open monitoring practice. We acknowledge the existence. The river could be burning content over and over again. Yes, it is here, and I'm here for it. That's a different way to address this and to achieve it. And this is not just an idea, it's training. Right. Now, when you talked about this training, particularly with the military, where you're talking about four weeks and you're doing 12 minutes a day,

if you wanted to achieve a greater level of mastery over your consciousness, would you recommend other things on top of that? This seems like something that's practical. You can get people to do it. It's applicable. But is it optimal? I love this question.

Okay. 12 minutes a day is the answer to what is the minimum effective dose for me to benefit. Every study we've done with mindfulness training where we offered people the opportunity to practice, as long as they got to 12, they benefited, 12 to 15. The more they did, the more they benefited. So that's the first thing to say, that it is like physical activity.

You don't have to limit yourself to 12 minutes. I always think of 12 minutes as like couch to 5K. It's enough of a load that it's helping. It's definitely helping. you don't have to limit yourself to 12 minutes. I almost think of 12 minutes as like couch to 5K. It's enough of a load that it's helping. It's definitely helping. Now, if you want to keep going, go for it. If you want to double that, go for it. In fact, for me, in circumstances where I know I'm going to be under a heavy load, like even coming here today, maybe I'll do 24 minutes.

Maybe I'll do a half an hour. What did you do today? Just 30 minutes in the morning. What did you do? I did two things. I did the focus attention practice, and I did something else called loving kindness. And loving kindness is that third category. I talked about concentrative practices, receptive practices, and these are really heart practices, compassion practices.

That one is actually really helpful when you've got a big performance coming up. Because frankly, for all of us who are interested in excellence in how we perform, that can take on an edge of self-punitive orientation where we're so fixated on the things we want to do better, we forget what we wish for ourselves. where we're so fixated on the things we want to do better, we forget what we wish for ourselves. So a loving-kindness practice is essentially a sequence of phrases you say privately to yourself to remind yourself of what your ultimate wish is for yourself, for other people in your lives. Have you heard of these kinds of practices? No, not that one. Okay, so loving-kindness, I mean, it's called loving-kindness.

I never caught loving-kindness because... What do you call it? Connection practice. Okay. Because that's. I mean, it's called loving kindness. I never caught loving kindness because. What do you call it? Connection practice. Okay. Because that's where you're connecting with yourself and other people. Does loving kindness practice sound too airy-fairy? Would you jump on? Would you sign up for something if I said?

Yeah, I don't have a problem with it. Thank you. Because we need that kind of shift in orientation. Most people, they'd probably like, man, I'm not up for it. Really? Isn't that funny that they would shy away from love and kindness it is it is it is a shocking thing but um you know i don't care i mean i'll at some point we'll call it loving kind i just think those phrases have been co-opted by fruits like crazy people with like wooden beads who are

like you know trying to be a guru that's sort the thing. It's like it's affiliatively kind of problematic and it's very plain. And actually with a lot of the groups that we work with, shockingly maybe, they love this practice. Like the cadets I was talking about, it's one of the ones that they ask for often. I think it's a good practice, but I think it's one of those things like when people say, I'm spiritual, you go, oh, are you really? one of those things like when people say i'm spiritual you go oh are you really you know it's like they've been those phrases have been co-opted by so many people that are kind of fraudulent or at least like they want you to there's a thing that people do where they want you to think that they're enlightened right yeah and it's annoying like when you i think basically that sums it up it's annoying it's annoying because you know they're hustling

Yeah or there's another agenda that doesn't really have to do So I'm taking again just to kind of reclaim my turf It's really in line with What do people need to do to move toward optimizing Was the question that you were asking It's a great phrase though I love it It really is

Love and kindness is really the right way to look at it Maybe we should just ignore the cuckoos And just call it that One of my favorite One of my you know Jack Kornfield Love and kindness is really the right way to look at it. Maybe we should just ignore the cuckoos. And just caught that. One of my favorite, one of my, you know, Jack Kornfield, and he talks about this, but another teacher named Sharon Salzberg. She is amazing. She was actually one of our consultants for the military project. So can I just tell you a little bit about loving kindness? Add to your toolkit.

All right. So in the sequence of things, first we teach people these concentrated practices. Then we bring in the open monitoring because it's a little bit more complicated to stay steady enough to not wander. This loving kindness category is the last thing we teach them. It kind of rounds out the program. So what you do is you, similar to everything else, sit comfortable, quiet place, do it seriously, like take it seriously. And you're going to, it's a practice of well-wishing, like the way you might say happy birthday or have a good day. You're not demanding

anything. It's not positive self-talk. It's not manifesting. It's a well-wishing, all right? And you do it because you're bringing to mind, keeping on your whiteboard working memory, what matters. So for example, in the way that I do it, you start out with yourself. And today I did it only for myself. But what you typically do is you say these phrases, and I'll say them in a second. You start with yourself, and then you move to a close other, a benefactor, somebody who's been good to you. Then you move to a neutral person, somebody you never, we don't know, maybe a cashier at a restaurant, I mean, a store you go to often, and then a slightly more difficult person. And then you kind of expand to your team,

to your community, to all beings everywhere. And it's like you're doing this to kind of broaden the circle of care and concern, who matters, what matters. So the kind of phrases you say are, I'm just giving you mine, and you can choose whatever, but short, sweet, simple. May I be happy? May I be healthy? May I be safe? May I live with ease? And every time you say that, just happy, healthy, safe, ease, is just, what do I wish for myself? Like in my life, ultimately, what do I want? I want to be happy. I want to advantage that. I want to feel psychologically safe. I want to feel physically safe. I want to have ease in my life. Who wants a headache? So you say this to yourself over and over, and it's like reminding you of like, fundamentally, what do I want? I wish this for my loved ones. I wish it for you. I wish it

for Jamie. I wish it for everybody in this building. I wish it for everybody. And you can see how you expand the circle. For our military service members. In some sense, they have no problem wishing it for their team. Of course, you want everybody on your team to have these qualities. Oftentimes, a little bit trickier to wish it for yourself. But something really interesting starts happening when you do this. lot of the sort of self-critical and self-punitive wars we have with ourself can start getting dialed down. It's like, you know, I could kind of badger myself for something, but ultimately, is this in my best interest for what I really want in my life? And it really helps, by the way, with the kind of maybe very loved one that can also sometimes be the difficult one. So this, I'm going to just give you an example from my personal life, like even with my spouse, of course, I love my spouse, but he can drive me nuts. And even in the middle of an argument, if I can kind of remember, if I do a practice, and he's the focus of the practice, we're in the middle of an argument, there's any room

where I can be a little bit lean into some understanding or a little more broadly receptive. I extend that probably more than I would if I hadn't done the practice. It just keeps that kind of orientation of what the purpose is of what we're doing in our lives in mind. Don't you think there's also room for, if you want to achieve things in life, one of the things that you do have to do is you have to be self-critical. You have to be your worst critic because that's the only way you're the only one who really knows whether or not you put in all the effort that you need to

put in in order to achieve things, whether or not you really did everything that was necessary or whether or not your work was really good. If you're, you're, you're being honest with yourself and objective. Yeah. So in that regard, you kind of got to be a personal critic.

So how do you balance that out? Nobody has to be taught how to be a personal critic. Some people do. Maybe, maybe, maybe. Some people are delusional. Which I would say. But what's interesting, those people don't really get anywhere. The people that think they're better than they are or they lie to themselves,

they deny themselves the discomfort of failure because they're delusional. And in doing so, they deny themselves the opportunity for growth and learning. Absolutely. So I think you kind of answered your question, which is, this is a corrective. The default is being self-critical. And then we end up into not just a productive self-criticism, but ruminating and catastrophizing regarding something we already said or something we're going to do that we don't think is going to go well. And that's why I did it this morning, because I know that under consequences, and I encourage people that have performance as something, you know, like you perform every time you do this podcast, there's a performance element to it. Whenever we have to do that, there's going to be those around the edges aspects of evaluation. Those are natural. They should happen. That's how we get to be as good as we can be.

This is just adding that other piece in like a loving person in your life might, but toward you to say, yeah, of course, you know, yeah, you better look at it. And by the way, all those other practices are to do that first part. See what is, how was that? Did I actually perform at my best? What could I have brought in that was better? How could I have actually been clearer? Whatever it is, we're trying to see with that non-reactivity. And this is the heart that we're putting around it. We're acting in a loving and kind way toward ourselves so that as we move forward, we're not pushing too far into the self-criticism where it becomes self-hatred, which is also unproductive. Self-hatred. So how does one balance out self-criticism and not let it turn into self-hatred? Yeah, we want product.

Just like for anybody else, if I were going to critique you, you'd probably want me to do it in a way that's going to be helpful to you. Instead of saying, yeah, but, you know, I don't like you at all anyway. You're a jerk. You know, nobody wants that. But if we do that to ourselves, we turn the things that are problematic and are worthy of our looking at into some kind of deep character flaw. Instead of being able to keep it at the level of I see what there is to do and i'm just going to do that right i don't have to hate you for it just do it differently the the problem with like a lot of super achievers a lot of people that uh go on to be like at the top of their field like especially athletes is that it requires a fanaticism.

It requires you being obsessed. It's very difficult to balance obsession with these hyper-focused super achievers with self-love. There's very little self-love going on when you're obsessed. I think that that may be the default of how things turn out, but I don't see them as contradictory at all. I think you totally can love yourself and totally be striving for excellence. Why can't you? I don't know. Well, look at that.

See, the thing is like there's not that many of them out there to study. Like when you get like a Michael Jordan or a Mike Tyson or a person that's like at the very top of their field, when they're, especially in competition, because it requires so much energy and intensity, that oftentimes they develop this antagonistic relationship with both themselves and the competition. And they're just ferocious and fierce all the time, including with their own personal demons. They're like constantly in combat. And with those people, I think their periods of happiness are brief and they come after success. And then they constantly chase that dragon. And I don't know if that's the right way to do it,

but I do know that that's the only way that the greats really, they all seem to be the same. There seems to be something about truly great hyper-performers where they're getting up earlier than everybody else, they're more intense than everybody else, and they're not nice about it. They're ferocious. I mean, first of all, the fact that

contemplative practice is entering performance psychology, it's a good sign because I think that people are starting to wake up to the consequences of that kind of an approach. Second thing is nothing I said about any of these practices is about being nice or happy. But self-love is kind of about being happy, right? It's about wishing. It's not about nice. No? And it's not even about of about being happy, right? It's about wishing. It's not about nice. No? And it's not even about being happy. It sounds terrible to say this,

but the goal is not to contrive more positivity. Okay. The goal is to be clear on what the intention is behind what you're doing. And my intention in my life is I wouldn't bust my ass unless I wanted some fulfillment, some sense of joy, some ease. That's why we're doing it. But we forget. We're so in the chase that we forget, wait, why am I doing this? Why am I going to do yet another thing?

Oh, I want those things. Keep those in mind. Balance it out. Bring those back in. Keep them on the whiteboard so that in the pursuit, I don't get lost. I don't get burnt out. I don't harm myself or other people because you're right. There is always this sort of pendulum of extreme behavior toward ourselves or other people that we interact with, and this becomes very important for leaders too, by the way, even if it's not in the professional athletic context, we got to keep, we got to be aware of that pendulum. Yeah, that is a real problem with people that are hyper achievers, right? Whether it's in business or whatever, it's like they're so caught up in the goal that their life sucks even while they're killing it. You know, like

how many people that are like business people that are working 16 hours a day or on the verge of a heart attack all the time and they live in hell, but they're obsessed with numbers. They're obsessed with stock market goals or whatever it is they're trying to achieve. And they're obsessed with numbers they're obsessed with stock market goals or whatever it is they're trying to achieve and they're on paper very successful like look at him look at his beautiful car and his beautiful house and all that but really they're fucking they live in hell yeah yeah and they're constantly stressed out and they they don't like that life, but they're trapped in this quantifiable contest where they're trying to achieve numbers. Yeah, and it kind of brings it back to where I was, where I was grinding so much I couldn't feel my teeth. I'm sitting here with my—I had all the—it's a smaller scale.

I'm not a CEO jet-setting everywhere, but I had all the things I wanted in smaller scale. I'm not a CEO jet setting everywhere. But I had all the things I wanted in my life. I had this awesome job. I married to the guy I love. Beautiful baby. Nice house. I was not there for any of it. And I could feel that. And the fact that maybe it's because I studied attention that I was kind of like becoming aware of it.

And then I was, I knew about neuroplasticity. So I'm like, I got to change the brain here. I'm not, I don't want to change any of this. The external circumstances are great. I need to be in it with a fullness so I can enjoy it. And that's all, that's all we're talking about right now. We're talking about a way in which not to not kill it, but not kill yourself in the process or anybody else. It all sounds great. I like what you're saying. I like what you're saying.

But I think all I wanted to say is, you know, and that's the whole motivation you were asking me at the outset. Like, how long have you just been writing this book? And in some sense, like, everything about my life led me to writing this book. Writing it really helped remind me of why I'm striving in the first place. Like, what is it that I want? And going back to this morning, partly the reason I wanted to do that is because my book just launched yesterday. And it's such a momentum. I mean, with any kind of success, there's like, yeah, go crush it.

And I wanted to just take that time and give back to myself of like, you know what? Enjoy it, too. Be here. Remember what you wish for. This is going to be fun. Like this, this was fun, but reminding myself of, of what it's all about, not on my deathbed, but every morning, it's a pretty useful thing to do. Well, in a lot of ways, I mean, especially what you just said that it really is most of your life because thinking is constant. It's, it is a part of your life and attention and focus. It's everywhere. It's the entire life. So this book and you concentrating on attention and trying to give people the tools to help accelerate their

attention or focus their attention or utilize their attention more efficiently. That really is life. It's so much of life because it's applicable to basically everything we do. Absolutely. I mean, really, it sounds like I'm being a little bit grandiose, but what you pay attention to is your life. Yeah. And people that are really super hyper negative, like they're so exhausting. And the problem is like, they'll drag you into their waters with them and drown you in their bullshit. Right. That's, that's a real problem because when people are always negative, like, Oh my God, man, all you're concentrating on is the wrong shit. Like's like someone with a poor diet and they get obese and start having heart attacks.

You're concentrating on eating the wrong things. You're concentrating on living the wrong way. Well, you're concentrating on focusing on negative things or external factors that have nothing to do with you, like the jealousy of others, which is a real poison that people consume on a daily basis. The jealousy and hatred towards people they don't even know because they, you know, might see them on television or whatever. Yeah. That's why actually, and, you know, in the context of feeling that somebody else's dysfunction, what are you going to do in the context of that? Right. So, I mean, I see this. I was just even on my Uber ride to the airport in Miami. The guy got cut off and the guy that's in the car that cut him off, like, then pulls back to give the guy the finger and then speeds off again. And I was just really terrified.

And also, like, how is this driver going to respond? And he's like, you know what? I'm just, I deal with this all the time. I don't know what his life is that's making him do this, but that's not my life. I'm, it's unfortunate that it happened. And I'm just gonna keep driving us to the airport. And I'm like, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. You got a good one. But I did. But the thing is, remember back to the loving kindness practice. We don't just practice for ourselves and the people we love and care for. We move it into the neutral. We move it into the difficult person for that exact same reason. Because now when you're interfacing with somebody and you see this and you feel it and you feel them pulling you in, you say,

you know what? My true wish for you is not this stuff. You obviously are saying this to yourself privately. It changes your orientation toward the person and the way you're going to engage with them. In some sense, you start having more compassion, like, man, you are so sad or fearful or angry. It's taken you over. That's not what I wish for you. So at least in the way that I interact with this person now, I'm stable and I'm aware of what I'm seeing. And I've reminded myself of what I want for any other person. And it will change, even if it's subtle, it's going to change the way that I can interact with them so that it's not so defaulting to more bad stuff. I mean, I think all of it is information,

and you get good information from bad examples. You get information about the ways of life that you don't want to live. You get information in the way people interface with their surroundings and other human beings that you don't want to mimic that. And you can learn from other people's mistakes, and that's one of the things that you get from living in cities when you see people hyper-stressed. And you see that kind of like constant forced interaction that people have and how it can manifest itself in some undesirable results. And you can say, oh, I don't want to be that guy.

And you can learn a little bit from that. You can say, oh, I don't want to be that guy. You can learn a little bit from that. You can learn a little bit from that, but you can also extend kindness in a way that you will probably shift the way things are happening. Now, you're not going to fundamentally change somebody. A little bit, yeah. I remember once I was at the airport and I saw this woman screaming at her kid. She was losing her mind, screaming at this child. It was so obvious, like, you're losing it mind screaming at this child it was so obvious like

you're losing it and i was like you know what i could avoid her or be like oh god this and i just walked i just walked up to her like not even acting interfacing with her but just like kind of wanted to be in her space so that she could realize just by my presence that she's got to kind of take a hold of what she's doing right now because she's being seen right by another person yeah and it helped like as soon as i kind of entered her space she's like you know kind of like collected herself and kind of started calming down and i was like small just a tiny little thing i was doing in a very compassionate way i wasn't to judge her i didn't go scream at her for screaming at her kid i just wanted her to nudge her in a way that might remind her of what her purpose is she She probably, the kid maybe ran away. I have no idea

what happened, but I knew that her reaction was stronger than it needed to be. And I've been there. It's no fun when you overreact to your children, you beat yourself up a lot. So if I could prevent her from having to beat herself up a lot, that probably is going to have a positive cascade in her life, in her children's life. Last question. Do you have an audio book? Yes. Did you read it?

No. Damn it. I know. Why didn't you read it? You have a great voice. See, now you're saying, thank you, thank you. I wanted to. I just couldn't figure out how to have a week where I could do that.

Oh, well, that makes sense. Maybe next time around. Because you're very busy. Do you have a copy of it? I do. I do, yeah. Grab it. Is it here? It's over there. Over there. Go have a copy of it? You can hold it up? I do. I do. Yeah. Grab it.

Is it here? It's over there. Over there. Go grab it. Grab it so we can hold it up and let everybody know. And it's out today? It was out yesterday. Yesterday.

Yeah. Okay. So hold, please. We're going to grab it, pull it up so you can have an actual copy of it. Oh, Jamie's got it. Right there. Peak mind, find your focus, own your attention, invest 12 minutes a day. How many pages is it? It's a lot of work to read all this. And it guides you through this. Yeah, there's a whole four-week program at the end

to help with what you should do for the 12 minutes every day. All right. It's available now. Ladies and gentlemen, go get it. Even though she didn't read it, you can get the audio book as well. Available everywhere. Thank you very much. Thank you.

I had a great conversation. I really enjoyed it. Oh, me too. It was fun. It was fun. And I think it's such an important subject. I think it's just the way you think about things is like it can make it just a gigantic impact and the quality and the, just the way your life progresses. Absolutely.

All right. Thank you. Thank you. Bye everybody.