The School of Greatness - How To Master A Peak Mindset, Find Your Focus & Own Your Attention w/Dr. Amishi Jha EP 1178

Episode Date: October 20, 2021

Today’s guest is Dr. Amishi Jha. She’s a professor of psychology at the University of Miami and serves as the Director of Contemplative Neuroscience for the Mindfulness Research and Practice Initiative, which she co-founded in 2010. She received her Ph.D. from the University of California–Davis and postdoctoral training at the Brain Imaging and Analysis Center at Duke University. Mindfulness has become a buzzword in the last decade, but Dr. Jha spent the last 25 years researching the science of attention through extensive work with elite sports teams, the US Military, medical professionals, and more to answer this question. She’s written a new book called PEAK MIND - Find Your Focus, Own Your Attention, Invest 12 Minutes a Day.In this episode we discuss how being distracted is causing you to miss out on 50% of your life, how high performers focus their attention to achieve success, practices to help you calm down and retrain your mind to be less distracted, how your life could change if you change your attention, and so much more!For more go to: www.lewishowes.com/1178Check out her website: www.amishi.comThe Wim Hof Experience: Mindset Training, Power Breathing, and Brotherhood: https://link.chtbl.com/910-podA Scientific Guide to Living Longer, Feeling Happier & Eating Healthier with Dr. Rhonda Patrick: https://link.chtbl.com/967-podThe Science of Sleep for Ultimate Success with Shawn Stevenson: https://link.chtbl.com/896-pod 

This is episode number 1178 on developing a peak mind with Dr. Amishi Jha. Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, a former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur. And each week we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin. Welcome back, everyone. Today's guest is Dr. Amishi John.

She is a professor of psychology at the University of Miami and serves as the director of contemplative neuroscience for the Mindfulness Research and Practice Initiative, which she co-founded in 2010. And she received her PhD from the University of California, Davis, and postdoctoral training at the Brain Imaging and Analysis Center at Duke University. Now, mindfulness has become a massive buzzword in the last decade, but Dr. Jha spent the last 25 years researching the science of attention through extensive work with elite

sports teams, the US military, medical professionals, and more to answer this question. And she's written a new book called Peak Mind. Find your focus, own your attention, and invest 12 minutes a day. In this episode, we break down the science of how being distracted is causing you to miss out on 50% of your life. And so many of us are distracted all day long. How high performers focus their attention to achieve success, practices to help you calm down and retrain your mind to be less distracted, how your life could change if you change your attention, that and so much more. And if you're enjoying this at any moment, make sure to share this with someone that you think wants more inspiration, wants more attention,

focus, and wants to develop a peak mind in their life to create an optimal life. And if this is your first time here, then welcome and click the subscribe button right now over on Apple Podcast. And at any moment during this interview, please leave us a review of the moment that you enjoyed the most or the part that really stood out to you as the most insightful. And today's fan of the week is from Shan who left a review over on Apple podcast who said, I've listened to the podcast for years now and it is one that keeps me constantly coming back full of valuable information and insight. Thank you for taking the time to do the show each week. It is always top shelf. So big thank you, Shan, for leaving the review, sharing your thoughts, and being the fan of the week. Again, welcome to this episode. And in just a moment,

the one and only Dr. Amishi Jha. Welcome back, everyone at the School of Greatness. Very excited about our guest, Dr. Amishi Jha. In the house. Good to see you. Good to see you. I'm pumped because I love psychology and I love neuroscience. And those are two things that you focus on at the University of Miami.

You've got a book out called Peak Mind. Find your focus, own your attention, and invest 12 minutes a day. And I saw on your website that it said research is showing that we are missing out on 50% of our lives because we are distracted. Where does that stat come from? And is that 100% true? I mean, we're 50% of our lives we're missing out on because we're distracted? We're not paying attention to 50% of our lives. And the way that it comes up, it's a pretty, it's been studied in so many ways. And unfortunately, we keep trying it triangulating on that same number. But the initial studies were

done where people just volunteered to get pinged on their phone. So any time of day or night, during normal wake hours, they'd get a text message that would say, what are you doing right now? You know, reading a book, having a conversation. Where is your attention? And essentially, is it on the thing you're doing or somewhere else? And half the time, people were not paying attention to the thing they were doing. So this number 50% is really about off-task thoughts. So I'm reading, I want to read a book for an hour, but then I'm constantly checking my phone or I'm watching TV or I'm having a conversation.

Is that what you mean? Or is it, I want to read a book, but I'm not even reading it. You probably have that feeling like all of us have, right? Get to the bottom of the page, you have no idea. No idea. I mean, that was my whole childhood. Yeah. Well, that's what I'm talking about. The new aspects that are probably even more problematic are the external distraction. But that number, 50%, happens even without any external distraction. Just, okay, I'm reading a book in nature and there's nothing around me, but my thought is distracting me. Not my phone and people and the TV. Yeah. And we think of this, we think of distractibility as like a modern problem. But what's so interesting, and I write

about it a little bit in the book, monks, medieval monks complained about too much distraction in their lives. Like they had gone and become monastics. Their job was to pray all day. And they're like, the thought of lunch is making me really distracted. And then they would just stop talking to their family members. But they could not escape this real issue of internal distractibility. Really? What is causing that distraction? Is it a survival mechanism? Is it something to help us in creation mode? Why do our brains do that? Both. Very good insights. So yeah, we think right now, of course we can't know, right? All we know is this is the nature of the brain today. And we are essentially the evolutionary success story. So

we're intuiting and inferring what pressures might have led us to have this. But it's 100% for sure that this is not a design flaw. This is designed for. This is intentional. This is intentional. And so much of our metabolic energy is going toward this meandering of mind that it's on purpose. And we have some good clues about what we think it is. I mean, two, you already mentioned, right? This notion of if you were excessively focused, like in our old, old ancestors at a watering hole, like got to get by.

You get eaten alive. Yeah. You get eaten alive. You're going to get eaten alive. And then if we are needing to plan, if we are needing to reflect, we need to be able to move our attention around. There's more cutting edge views of what this might be that actually are beyond that, that it's actually potentially a way that we are able to code what's called episodic memories, memories for events in our lives. Because oftentimes, now that we've talked about this number, if you're just sitting there and a random thought pops into your head, you might notice it's a replaying of something that's occurred. And that's at the neural level,

that's what we think might be happening is that essentially as we are experiencing things, we're encoding it, we're getting it into our memory. And then the way it turns from just experience to a hardened neural representation is we have a replay mechanism. It just kind of goes over and over again. Anything that's the slop, the things that vary from replay over replay, those kind of go away. And whatever it is that keeps consistently getting replayed is the thing that becomes the structural change that is long-term memory. Why do we have thoughts that replay in our mind over and over?

You mean why specific thoughts might get like, you're ruminating? Yeah. Why do memories keep popping up in our mind over and over? You mean why specific thoughts might get, like, you're ruminating? Yeah, why do memories keep popping up in our mind from a week ago, years ago, decades ago? Why does it keep replaying? Well, the replaying is different than the fact, what I'm talking about, what I was just talking about a moment ago. Okay, what are you talking about there?

What I was talking about a moment ago is just it's a way for memory to even exist in our mind. So if I just, you know, for example, I had this conversation with you, and I'm on my, you know, Lyft ride home. And all of a sudden I'll just random phrase that you said might pop up. Or remember when he was talking about this, like no explanation necessarily. It's almost like the brain is creating, it's a thought pump. It's just pumping it out. So the explanation for that is that in order to have memory created, because it's pretty fresh, we just experienced this interaction, in order for memory to actually be created so that tomorrow,

the next day, even by this evening, I have a more hardened representation in my memory that I can call upon. That's all structural in some sense. The structures of the brain, the neural representations are hardening together in a specific way for me to have that memory representation. So I'm talking about the creation of memory. That makes sense. That's the creation of memory. Yeah. What you're talking about, I think, is different. So we're here sitting here. Before we got down here, you took a drink of the water. You had your lipstick on there. You wiped it off. It's a moment. So my thought is pumping the memory because I see a little bit of stain still on there.

Yeah. So my thought is pumping this, or my brain is pumping this memory, this image, right? And it may do it a few times to help me hold on to the memory. Is that right? Right. It will do it potentially many times. We don't even know exactly how. This is just a pretty new idea of why mind-wandering happens.

But yes, it may be part of a memory creation or consolidation process. But I think what you were talking about is almost like rumination. Like a thought comes up and you kind of can't. We sometimes call this attentional rubbernecking. Attentional rubbernecking. What does that mean? Like you're driving down the road and you're like, yeah. You can't kind of help see the whatever traffic accident that's happened.

So it's that idea that our attention just gets yanked by certain mental content. Why is that? Well, there's a lot of reasons that we think that happens. It seems like the more tragic the event, the more we reflect on it. We either shut down and block it and forget memories, like the brain seems to like protect yourself by not remembering or you're constantly ruminating on it, is kind of what I hear. If therapists will say like,

there's some patients that they have that don't remember a time period in their life because there was such tragic events that the brain kind of shut down, where other people, they say, think about it often and then they live in fear from that event. So I'm not sure where that lies. Yeah, there's a whole bunch of what you just said, right? So let's just talk about the kind

of replaying. And I think that this can be quite problematic for our experience of things like depression or even anxiety and PTSD. So the reliving of past events can have many different forms. So why it happens, in some sense, I would say that there's a lot of debate regarding why it happens. One is that it's something that you think you're going to actually try to resolve, right? You're actually thinking about it because it's going to help you see it in a different way or you're going to problem solve in some way. But for sure, rumination itself, which really is this kind of looping process, isn't getting you anywhere.

It's just a replaying. So my work actually starts from that reality. I'm not a clinician. I'm a neuroscientist. Yes. So it's like there are certain states, certain ways that our attention functions where we are rubbernecking. We're like kind of can't go, can't pull ourselves away from it. And it doesn't have to be about the past.

It could actually be worries about the past. It could actually be worries about the future too. So, and this is a very powerful brain function, mental time travel. Mental time travel. Tell me what that is. So that is essentially, I mean, the way I like to think about it is it's like we can make our brain, our brains go and rewind or fast forward. There's actually something related, which is mind travel. Essentially, that would be like me taking your perspective. Oh, that must have seemed strange for him to see me wipe off lipstick. And we probably never had to do that. I'm taking your perspective on an event. So I've traveled into your mind and I'm looking back at myself through your mind.

So all of these are displacing us in space or time in some sense. And it's so useful to be able to do this. In fact, our ability to reflect is how we learn, right? And our ability to think of the future is how we plan. So both of these functions are so, so beneficial. But the reality is when that's happening, we are not in the present moment. Our attention is not- Well, not even if we're distracted, we may be doing it on purpose. So our present moment is in the past. Our present moment is in the past. Our present moment is in the future.

So if there are any demands happening right now, like if somebody walked in the room and say, we got to make our way downstairs for some, it might take us an extra minute to kind of reacquaint ourselves to what's happening right now. Now, in the context of being in a lovely studio space, no dire consequences. Now, in the context of being in a lovely studio space, no dire consequences. But oftentimes, if you are time traveling to the past or the future, and you're stuck there because you're ruminating or catastrophizing, that can be very problematic for in-the-moment action. And the consequences could be dire, either as an athlete for what's required next of

you to get the right inputs, or for the kinds of groups I work with, military service members and first responders, it could mean somebody else's life or death based on your attentional lapse. So my interest has been not so much on why rumination occurs, but given the reality that it often occurs, and under high stress circumstances, it occurs more often. How do we solve this problem? Because it's definitely impacting our attention. Rumination. How do we solve this problem? Because it's definitely impacting our attention. Rumination. How do we solve rumination? How do we solve getting ourselves to be able to pick up what's happening right now if the mind's tendency is to be in the past or the future or in somebody else's head? Like, oh, I wonder what you thought of me or I wonder what

he thinks of me. Interesting. So would you say a lot of our time is reflecting on the past memories, worrying about the future, or worrying about what someone else thinks about us? Yes. Why do we care so much what someone else thinks about us? I mean, because we're social creatures. We need to, right? It's part of our survival to know that. Now, things tip into the dysfunctional pretty quickly. And things that tip into that dysfunctional space quickly for certain professions can be very problematic. So again, my starting point isn't does it occur,

why it occurs. It occurs. It occurs often. And when we take it to the lab and look at people and look at their performance on attention tasks, they're terrible at them. Terrible. So what's an example of something in the lab? It's like focus for 20 minutes on a task and then people just can't even do it?

Well, they can do it, but they get worse and worse over time. So even over the course of- The longer it is. Well, yes. So if you did something, let's not even say 20 minutes, let's say 10 minutes. So what would an example be? I want you to- An example of an experiment? Yes. Okay. So remember, the goal of this experiment would be to test out your internal distractibility. So now if I'm trying to get you, and I'm trying to measure your internal distractibility, I can't tell you to be

distracted because then you're actually doing the task. You're not doing the other thing you should be doing when you should be doing the task. So we did puzzle over this. How do we design a task where people get distracted and they don't do what we tell them to do? It was easy, though. All we had to do was bore people. So if you bore them, they are so happy to just go anywhere else. So we designed one of the world's most boring tasks, really. Read a thick textbook. Well, we did that, too. But this is the way the experiment would go. You'd come in. We'd tell you, this is going to be a task of your attention. what we want you to do is sit in front of the computer screen and Look at the screen when we sometimes love a brain cap on them

so we're looking the ongoing electrical activity or put them in a brain scanner and look at what's going on there and We'll say every time you're gonna see a series of digits on the screen every time you see a digit press a button Mm-hmm right So they're sitting there, one about every fourth of a second comes up. And then we say, the only thing unusual here is if that digit happens to be three, just don't press the button. Withhold your response. Threes are only happening 5% of the time. So they're sitting there, press, press. And of course, their mind

is wandering. The three shows up. They press to the three. And it's usually followed by some kind of expletive, like, oh, crap. When we were doing this with Marines, I remember one of the guys almost threw the keyboard. I was like, it's okay. It's all right. But the way we know that they're mind wandering, in addition and having this kind of mental meandering we were talking about, is that not only do they make mistakes, I mean, it's obvious there's a three on the screen. It wasn't even too fast for them to see it. We stop the experiment every now and then, and we just ask them, right before this question appeared, where was your attention? Was it on task or off task? Just like that cell phone study I was telling you about. And they tell us. And they're not on task all that often. And when they've made a mistake, it's usually because they report that they were

off task. When they get the three and they it's usually because they report that they were on task, off task. When they get the three and they withhold to the three correctly, usually they're reporting soon after that, yeah, I was on task. It's interesting. I did a brain scan a few months ago and they had me do this test right before. It was like with an X. It was like letters and like, don't press the X. Okay. And it was for 15 minutes.

Boring. It's the most boring thing ever. You stare at a screen. It's a dark room. So you're like, eyes are tired already. Dark room, screen. And it's just a white background on the screen. And then like just a letter pops up.

And it also had me use my left hand. I'm right-handed. So they said, I want you to use your left hand. Push the space bar every time. It was either push the space bar every time you see a letter, but don't push it when you see an X or something like that. It's very similar to what I'm saying. And for me, when there's a game, my brain goes, I want to win this game.

So I was like, okay, I'm focused. Even though it's boring, I'm like, I want to be the best I can be at this game. And I did it the whole time. They leave the room, then they came back in or whatever 15 minutes later when it was about to finish. And I finish it and I go, he goes, how'd you do? And I go, I don't think I missed one. And he goes, that's not possible. It was not possible.

I go, check the results. Show me the results. I don't think I missed one. And he goes, I've done a thousand of these. Not one person has been on, like, get it 100%. And I go, you put a game in front of me, I'm going to I missed one. And he goes, I've done 1,000 of these. Not one person has been able to get it 100%. And I go, you put a game in front of me? I'm going to focus. For me, it was like, turn me on.

And I didn't miss one. Awesome. So you were right. He was like, I've never seen this. He was like, I've never seen this. I don't know how you did it. I was like, I just paid attention. And I was really intentional about every button.

Is that an X? OK. It was intentional. Then I had to go back and do another one. And I missed like when the first three, like right away, I missed it. And then I missed like 10 of them. Cause I was just like, okay, screw it. I was like, get me through this now. Yeah. So that's awesome that you did that. And it doesn't surprise me given your background and you know, the kind of mental training you've done yourself. But as you experience, this is a natural response to get fatigued along the way.

It was fatiguing. Like, it's exhausting. It's exhausting. To keep your attention for 15 minutes on anything and be intentional, it's an... Very exhausting. But it's not what you think. It's not like it's hard in a kind of immersive video game context. It's the mind that is doing its own thing.

So now think about being like a baggage screener, right? And they're doing that all day long. Or an air traffic controller. Oh, man. Or somebody that's in a medical context that they're looking at monitoring equipment. Like, they can't mess up. But they're having the same challenges in their mind. Dentists, yeah.

Where the chances of something going wrong are low, meaning the X is not that often. But you can't mess up up and your mind will wander. So over the course of an experiment, what we find, and this is something that's been known forever, it's something called like the vigilance decrement. Essentially, if you have a 10-minute, 15-minute study, from the beginning to the end, people are just worse. And people used to think that it's attention just getting exhausted, just like you felt. But what we noticed is that as performance is going down, mind-wandering, the self-reported

sense of, yeah, I was not on task, I was somewhere else, is actually increasing. So it's not attention. What is it then? So if mind-wandering is going up, it's not like I'm getting more tired. It may feel like it's tired. But I think tiredness, fatigue, it's like a feedback system that says, go do something else. Right. So tired may be the result of a set of processes, not the cause. And we always think of it as the cause.

Like, oh, I'm tired. I've got to stop this, right? But it may be that the whole system is designed. And if you think about it, again, evolutionarily, opportunity costs. If you spend so much time doing something, you're missing out on other stuff. So you want to get in the search mode. What's going to make you want to search? The uncomfortable feeling of what you're doing right now. So the story is quite complicated. But what it tells us is that attention isn't getting, the brain is not getting tired per se, but it's on the lookout. It's always on the lookout for other things that it might do. So it's experienced as fatigue, but also this propensity, the way that it gets itself out of doing what it's doing is it's just internally going other places.

It's like, oh, maybe I'll think about, you know, the vacation I want to take Or what about that email that I sent today? So it is constantly journeying. It's what its nature is. So is there where to train the mind to have more attention and focus? I wouldn't be here if I didn't think there was. So yeah. So most of my career, and I started studying attention when I was an undergrad at your favorite place, your first admission. That school up north? Yeah. So I started very early on. And for most of my early career, I was just interested in how it works. How do you make it work? How does it work in the brain? What are the various neural components of it? Then what I started noticing early on when I had my own lab is, ooh, we know a lot about what makes it fail. So we know it's quite powerful,

but it's also vulnerable. And the kinds of things that it's vulnerable to, the top three that we kept seeing are stress, threat, and poor mood. Stress, threat, and poor mood. Yes. And if you think about where your mind goes often, it's that kind of terrain. When it's not intentional, like you're not trying to plan for some big event, it defaults to these states, like you were saying before, rumination, catastrophizing. And knowing that, knowing that attention is powerful but vulnerable, I became extremely interested in figuring out how do we train it? Like there must be a way we can train it. interested in figuring out how do we train it? Like there must be a way we can train it.

Neuroplasticity and the growth of new neurons, even in the adult brain when something was coming out, you know, we'd known about neuroplasticity for a very long time, but the notion that you could train the brain to be better was new. Right. And so that's kind of where I kind of took it upon myself as a mission to figure out, how can we do this? So we tried lots of things. We tried positive psychology. We tried these high-tech light and sound devices, like you were talking about before, this brain jam, some ways we could play computer games that might... None of it was reliably working.

Really? We're still getting this kind of consistent games that my, none of it was reliably working. We're still getting this kind of consistent vulnerability to distraction that would occur. And then I did something that I never thought I would do. I was actually probably the world's biggest skeptic regarding this. Meditation. We tried mindfulness meditation. Why do all roads lead back to meditation? Isn't that funny? But at this time, remember, this is like the early 2000s. It was not a thing. I never would think in a million years at that moment,

like I'd be talking to somebody on a very popular platform that knows about this term. Like it was this very odd thing. I remember the first time one of my senior colleagues mentioned it. It was like in the context of this big lecture. And he basically showed this brain image of like a brain that he had induced in his lab to be in a positive mood. And then one that was in- Like positive psychology? You mean- No, like, yeah, but really- Think positive thoughts or- showed this brain image of like a brain that he had induced in his lab to be in a positive mood.

And then one that was- Like positive psychology? You mean- No, like, yeah, but really- Think positive thoughts or- He did that, but it was really basically get in a scanner and listen to, think about happy memories, listen to happy music, like just in the state of positivity. An environment of positivity. For just the period of time that they were getting the brain image.

Then he did the same thing for the negative brain. And at the end of his lecture, I said, how do I get that negative brain to look like that positive brain? Just sort of because I was, frankly, having my own life circumstances around that. Sure. And he, like, I'm at the back of the room and he just, and it's the end of the lecture and he's like, meditation. And I was like, what?

You know, to me, it was like. What year is this? This was 2003. Wow. It was like... What year is this? This was 2003. Wow. To me, it was like as offensive as somebody saying, talking to a group of astrophysicists

and talking about astrology as if it was a serious topic. Right, right. Just like, I'm sorry, we're at the University of Pennsylvania here. We don't use those terms. Right. We're not some woo-woo university. But of course, I respected him dearly and had a chance to talk to him afterwards. And he was telling me about the work that we're doing with adept monks.

This was Richie Davidson, who now, of course, leads a very enterprising center in Wisconsin to study meditation. But back then it was not known at all. But it got me super curious, like, what? What? And, you know, I'm an Indian woman. So, like, meditation is not something really new to me. I mean, I'd known about it, but I always thought it's a great thing for my parents to do. I'm not interested. I'm a serious scientist. I'll wait, you know, I'll wait to see what the science has

to say about any of that. I'll just, but he, he, his use of that term made me at least want to explore it personally to begin with. Cause I was, happened to be having my own the reason I asked about how to get the negative thing to the positive brain because at that moment in my life I felt like I was probably more like that brain the negative brain and they were stressed overwhelmed stressed overwhelmed new baby yeah well it was it was it was actually I'd lost feeling in my teeth from grinding and it was not like minor a lot of stress you were like grinding all night all. I mean, it was not like minor anymore. You were a lot of stress. You were like grinding all night, all day. You were like, it was bad. And I'm like, you got to shake this. And I was, the worst part wasn't so much the

physical pain. I had no idea what was going on physically, but I was really like feeling that I wasn't paying attention to my life. And it bugged me. I mean, I was literally developing expertise. My lab was devoted to attention, and I could not. You couldn't focus. That's all you did, though, and you couldn't focus. I couldn't keep my head in the game. And so when he said that, I was like, well, I'm going to check it out. So I go literally to the pen book store and buy a book.

I lucked out because I could have picked any random book. I picked a book called Mindfulness. It was called Meditation for Beginners by now a very dear teacher of mine, Jack Kornfield. And it was a tiny little book. It came with its own guided CD. And I was like, I'll check it out. Fine. My respected colleague says this is something. So I start doing this. Jack Kornfield or Jack Canfield? Jack Kornfield. Kornfield. Okay. Because there's a Jack Canfield as well. Oh, yeah. No, this is Jack Kornfield, Kornfield, okay. Because there's a Jack Canfield as well. Oh, yeah, no, this is Jack Kornfield, a longtime meditation teacher. Really one of the people responsible for bringing mindfulness to the West.

So I lucked out that I picked that book. It had DVD or CDs. You were listening to it. So I listened to it. I'm like, oh, my goodness. All the instruction in this meditation thing, it's just all about attention. Pay attention to your breath. Your thought.

Notice your mind wandering. Return it. And it was such a simple yet elegant instruction. And what struck me is he is providing instruction of something that's been around for 2,500 years, but it's tapping into the exact brain system I happen to study in my lab. And after a few weeks, probably about a month or month and a half or so of doing this, I was like feeling completely transformed. Really? Which was so bizarre to me. Like I didn't, I almost didn't believe that this was happening, but I could look at my spouse. I could be with my child. I could be more engaged in the lab and the pressures and the strain hadn't changed at all externally, but I was a different person. Wow. Well, your response to the pressure had shifted. Exactly. You were just showing up

differently to the stress. Correct. To the emotional or psychological threats and the poor mood. That's right. The stress, the threats, and the poor mood. Yes. Because you had all three of them, it sounds like. Yeah. And it was hard for you to shake it.

You were trying to do what before? What were you trying to do to shift those three things? I mean, anything I could think of. Positive thinking or... Yeah, look on the bright side. That failed epically. Uh-huh. We even brought that to the lab

and for people that were in high stress, it doesn't seem to work if you're experiencing high stress. Look on the bright side, meaning like have perspective? No.

Or, okay. Induce a positive mood into your life by manufacturing that. How do you do that? Name three happy memories you've had. And there are different levels of this, for example, gratitude or compassion. These are

positive types of orientations where you affiliate toward the experience in that way. But this was more basic than that. This was like, listen to a happy song. And it works maybe temporarily, at least if you're under a lot of stress but it doesn't transform your essentially your ability to be focused your just your attention what is having uh let's say you're just having a breakdown in your day something happens you have a breakdown um what does the the principle of perspective with that breakdown i I don't know. I got a cold today, but at least I don't have, you know, I still have a blessed life. I still live in Los Angeles and, you know, there's a lot worse sick people off than me and I'm a healthy human being and this is just a week of a cold or something. What does perspective coupled with gratitude do for a peak peace mind? I mean, I think that for a cold in a healthy, stable environment

where you feel basically taken care of, it can be very helpful. Right, right, right. But now you're in the middle of a war zone, and one of your best buds just lost his arm. It's very hard to see the silver lining there. And unfortunately, when people start trying to do that, they are depleting their attentional resources. We cannot reframe a situation. We cannot even garner that kind of perspective when attentional resources are limited.

Because this thing called attention, I mean, I'm kind of shorthanding it and all I'm telling you is the term, but it ends up being the fuel for our success. And the fuel is particular for our ability to think, feel, and connect. So if you don't, yes, attention. So if you don't have this, if you're basically depleted because of the demands in your life, and now you try to basically press the gas pedal because you're like, I got to create a positive reality here. I got to look on the bright side. I got to have gratitude for everything good in my life.

Nothing's going to come up and you're going to end up spending out more fuel than is useful to you. Interesting. So what we need is a solution, especially in those kind of moments. So in a chaotic moment, a very... Not just chaotic, but demanding and long-term. Give me a few examples. You're going through a divorce. You're going through a divorce. You're a lawyer and you're preparing for a big case. You're an accountant in tax season. You're a mom that just had preparing for a big case. You're an accountant in tax season. You're a mom that just had a baby. I mean, the list of things in our lives which are protracted and demanding and somewhat stressful, there's many. Your next six to 12 months is going to be a journey.

Yeah. And, you know, frankly, I never expected this, but we've been studying this for many, many years and then COVID hit. And the whole world is in this. Now everyone's experiencing it, yes. Everyone is in this experience. And the description, and a lot of my war colleagues use this. It was actually a term developed at the U.S. Army War College, VUCA. Maybe it's a term you're familiar with. VUCA. V for volatile, U, uncertain, C, complex, and A, ambiguous.

C, complex, and A, ambiguous. So when the circumstances have those qualities, your attention is going to be fully engaged and required, and it's going to actually probably get depleted more quickly. Your attention will be depleted if it has those things. And if you're under stress and threat and poor mood, you're like, you can't focus on anything. That's right. But the worst part is that if now that system of attention, those are the factors that make it depleted. Those four

factors make it depleted or the three? Well, the same thing. Those are the circumstances. Those are the circumstances. Stress, threat, poor mood. Those circumstances, VUCA, creates a lot of stress, threat, and poor mood. So those are the circumstances and the qualities of mind that appear are stress, threat, poor mood. You're such a good student. I'm trying to learn this stuff. Well, the result ends up being that attention is depleted. And you might say, well, that's not great. I mean, I probably won't be able to read a book or something. It's not great. But attention is way more than focusing for cognitive functioning. Like I said, we need our attention not only to think, we need it to actually feel and regulate our mood.

Attention. Because if we can't have attention, if we don't have the energy to have focused attention, then our mood will just continue to be stressful and we'll continue to react in negative ways, is what I'm hearing you say, in life situations. Well, maybe it would be helpful if you're up for it to break down what I even mean by the term attention. Give it to me. Yes. What is attention? So attention, like I said, it's complex, multifaceted. It literally is fuel for everything

else we do. And from the brain science point of view, we've basically parsed it into three main subsystems. So one, we've already been talking about it. It's focus. It's this ability. Formally, it's called the orienting system of attention. But the metaphor I like to use, which is essentially focus, is a flashlight. So if you're in a darkened room, wherever you direct that flashlight, you're going to get privileged access to that information, crisp and clear wherever it's pointing. Everything else is dark. Attention in terms of this focusing aspect is just the same. So right now, even as I'm like looking at you and paying attention to what you're saying to me, everything else is a little bit fudged out. So the cool thing about

that is that it can be, well, there's basically a couple of things. So it can be directed. That's awesome. We can decide what to pay attention to. I'm now looking at you instead of over there, which would be annoying. And it's not just to the external environment. We can pay attention internally. So if I say right now, what are the sensations on the bottoms of your feet right now? I mean, I just feel a sock and a little bit of pressure from my shoe. But I bet you, before I said that, that was not on your mind at all, right? So you could internally take that flashlight, direct it toward bodily sensations, and you can get access. So it goes back to that broader view of what attention does.

It just solves a big problem that the brain has, which is it can't take in everything in every moment, all of it. So it's subsampling. But it's not just bodily sensations. It's emotions. It's trains of thought, it's our connection to other people. All of that, we can direct the flashlight to. We can direct it toward other people, like I am right now, and you are. We can direct it toward an idea we have and we want to pursue it. We can actually direct it toward a sensory, or sorry, an emotional experience to deepen our sense of it and kind of bathe in that.

It could be something tender or anger. And we can regulate. We can say, you know what? Right now, it's probably not a good idea for me to break down crying. So anyway, that's just one system. Focus. Focusing, right. Or two is. The second system is the exact opposite. It's not about focusing. It's about being broad and receptive. And this I call the floodlight. It's called the alerting system. So its job is to essentially keep our resources, our mind's attentional resources ready for whatever may occur next so we can act. this floodlight is about time.

We want to pay attention to now. What's going on right now? And you know, like if you're driving down the street and you see a flashing yellow light, like near a construction site or something, you're more vigilant. You're just alert. You don't know what it's going to be. Is somebody going to walk into the street?

But it's available to you in a broad and receptive manner. You're not focused on one point. You're scanning. You're scanning. You're broad. And you're not going to assume you know what's going to happen. Right. Right?

That's why we're going to be alert to whatever occurs. So does that make sense of how it's literally the polar opposite? Yes. And then the third system is called executive control. And this is a term that, the term executive is pretty much like the executive of a company. The executive's job is to ensure that our goals, you know, the organization's goals, for example,

and behavior align. It's like goals and action need to align moment by moment. And the metaphor I use for this is a juggler. So a juggler's job is to make sure all the balls are in the air. The executive of a company doesn't go in and do every individual task. That would be a bad executive, right? But it is to oversee, to make sure we're supposed to be doing this. We're not. Get back on track. That kind of an orientation. So very different, right? That's not really about focusing or even being broad. It's about the management. So now you see why when we

think about attention in this kind of three system point of view, it does feed into almost every single thing we do, thinking, feeling, connecting. Thinking, feeling, and connecting. Okay. So the narrow focus, this is kind of like what an athlete would call being in the zone. It's like having your attention focused in the moment. so you can be a peak performer and you're not distracted scanning everything, but you're mastering your craft to the moment of your sport, your skill. Maybe an archer is focused in that one line site,

not scanning everything. The second part of attention is the broad and receptive, being ready for what may occur in life. And the third is the executive control, ensuring that goals plus action are aligned. Yeah. I would actually, very good. You got it. But I would say all three probably you need in the context of successful athletic performance. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Right. So like as a football player, you know, you need to scan the field as well and be focused. That's the exact same phrase. That's the phrase

we use, right? It's like eye on the ball, but scan the field. It's like you need to have both. I heard that Floyd Mayweather, the boxer, I heard this. I don't know if this is true, but I heard that he actually looks to the side of someone's eye. He doesn't look at the face when he's punching. He actually looks to the side because he's more receptive. He's quicker to react with the peripheral. I don't know if that's true or not. And maybe it's focus and then off a little bit and back and forth. Well, it's true that peripheral vision has better motion detection. Really?

So what does that mean? You can see it faster or something? Yeah, your motion detection will be better. Really? Yeah. So if I'm looking here and you're over here, if you move. It's going to be better even if I do a slight movement while I'm in the center of your eyes, just motion detection is,

I mean, as you think about it, evolutionarily, that makes sense, right? You might, you want to see if something's scurrying toward you on the side. Cause you see it and you're like,

well, what is that? Interesting. Yeah. So that might be a different thing. Okay. Gotcha. What did you learn then from your study with those in the military and executives and high-performing athletes?

What have you learned by testing their attention on how they can improve? Is it through meditation alone? Is it through other factors? Well, I mean, you know, it's funny. There's so many ways in which we can try to advantage our performance. My interest is going to be narrow because I study a particular thing. I study attention and my interest is in seeing how we can preserve it. And oftentimes people talk about resilience, this capacity to bounce back. I'm not even interested in resilience. I'm interested in pre-zillions.

Preserving it. No. Yeah. Preserving it. Preventing. Preventing the need for resilience. It's like prior to being resilient just keep everything steady yeah don't get to a place where you're exhausted you're trying to push through something don't decline and bounce back just don't degrade so that what does that mean well what i told you before was that essentially we know that attention is vulnerable to degradation over demanding circumstances and this project we did with the even the University of Miami football team,

preseason training. Tell me about it. The preseason period, their attention was worse at the end of a four-week preseason interval than after. And now they've got to go to camp to determine what their playing season is going to look like. So preseason before training camp. Before training camp, preseason training, right?

So they're practicing every day. Many of them were taking classes as well this summer. Their attention was worse at the end of four weeks than before. Why? We just went over that. Stress, threat, poor mood, volatile, uncertain, complex, exhaustion, physical exhaustion. All of the factors that resulted in a protracted period of high demand. And by the way, it's not just elite athletes.

We found this in undergrads as well. Yeah, of course. We know this, right? If you remember being an undergrad, like you feel worse when you're about to end the semester than at the beginning. Because you haven't slept for a semester. Well, that's part of it. You're pulling all-nighters.

But then what do you have to do at the end of the semester? You've got a big test. Finals. Exactly. So you're not advantaging yourself. Same thing with, by the way, pre-deployment soldiers. Oh, wow. Boot camp, boot camp, boot camp.

It's like, yeah, you're going to be getting ready to train. It's not even called. Trying to break people down. You're not trying to break people down. In fact, it's called readiness training. But it's not actually readying them in the attentional sense. They're depleted. Interesting. So that's the state of what things look like. training, but it's not actually readying them in the attentional sense. They're depleted.

So that's the state of what things look like. So for us, our interest was in how can we provide training, just like a mental workout, mental conditioning, reps they can do every day on their own to keep their own attention in this buoyant, stable state instead of declining. So when you say, oh, is it just meditation? Well, meditation itself, especially mindfulness meditation, is kind of a world of its own. So I'd love to say a little bit more about that because how you might define the term meditation may be quite different than the way I'm thinking about it. So just to kind of orient us. So first of all, even the term meditation, I mean, I'm still like, I don't know if I even want to say that word. All it means to me as a cognitive neuroscientist, as somebody who's interested in brain training,

is engaging in certain kinds of practices with regularity to cultivate certain mental qualities. So it's from the world's wisdom traditions. People have been doing this for eons because there's an interest in having a certain way of making yourself, right? So whether that's being more compassionate or more loving or being more transcendent, or in the case of mindfulness training, more present-centered. So in my mind, and this is sort of the broad way that we think about mindfulness, it's mindfulness meditation. Well, mindfulness itself is a mental mode. It's a way of making the mind. Even before we talk about the meditation piece, just the state of being mindful.

It's an orientation where you're paying attention to your present moment experience, here in the here and the now, without editorializing or reacting to it. So you're getting that raw data without a story on top of it. And we all want that. I mean, who doesn't want that? Who doesn't want to go into an experience? A lot of stuff may go down, but you're like, this is the facts. This is what occurred. This is the data of the experience. And it doesn't have to be just objective. It could be subjective as well, but it's what transpired instead of, you know, the reason he walked down the hall and didn't look at me is because I'm just a terrible person and he doesn't even think I'm worthy of looking at.

I'm putting a story on instead of, oh, his eyes were just not toward me. That's the facts. He wasn't paying attention or whatever. He was thinking about something else. Yeah, he was lost in thought. But anyway, what I'm saying is with mindfulness, you'd say none of the stories matter, just the data. The data was he and I were walking in opposite directions. His eyes were not toward me as we passed each other. That's it. So if you could take experiences and actually hold them in that level without

spinning on the story about it, that could be very useful. My training has been all about making every event neutral. And we give the events meaning, you know, whether it could be a positive or negative meaning, I guess, or, you know, it's like an event occurred. How do you want to respond to the event? Do you want to be stressed and overwhelmed and moody from it? Or do you want to see the data as it is, like you said, and then make a decision on how is this going to best serve the rest of my day or the rest of my life? You know, by the story I tie to this event. Yeah. At least you're seeing the story as something that's constructed actively.

So we're totally in agreement. Like what you just described, I would say, is you're taking a mindful orientation toward your experience. The problem is just having that mindset won't be enough because there's such a strong tendency. This 50% we started talking about. The default is simulate reality, make assumptions, conceptually elaborate, emotionally react, and mentally time travel. So we're up against a lot. Right. Right. We want to be in the here and the now. We want to get the raw data. But everything about our, almost like our evolutionary pre-programming makes that really hard to do, which is why just like every good athlete, you train for it. So what's the workout

we could do to actually get ourselves to be more presence centered in this non-reactive, non-elaborative way? That's where mindfulness meditation comes in. That's where it was really like a, it's like kind of a, I don't know, a chocolate peanut butter moment. Like, oh, I need this. And this is, this has it. It's like, what is the opposite of a wandering and reactive mind? Oh, a mindful one. Well, how do you train for that? There's 2,500 years of practice that you can look at. So what we've essentially done is taken the ancient, a lot of these wisdom tradition practices, primarily from the Buddhist traditions, and people have brought them into hospital settings, business settings, et cetera. My interest, which was the first time it had ever been done, is let's learn from all of that, and now let's bring it into the military context.

And so when I started this work, like I said, it was new to me, but the notion of mindfulness-based stress reduction had been around by a dear friend and teacher, John Kabat-Zinn. He had already established using these Buddhist practices an eight-week, 24-hour or so program, which had a suite of practices. So it wasn't any one thing. It was like four to six main exercises. And so we looked at that and said, how do we use that in a way that can be useful? And just to give you an example of one of the practices, right?

So one of the very simple practices, which when people say the term meditation, they probably think of this, but I want to connect the dots between how it relates to attention and why I thought it was an interesting thing. Can I do that? Yeah. Yeah, please. So the practice is essentially what's called a focused attention practice, right? Okay.

So what do you do in this practice? And it probably is going to resonate with some of the things that you already do. But you pick a period of time. Let's say right now, like 30 seconds we're going to do this. With my book, I'd say work up to 12 minutes, and that'll be the sort of sweet spot for real brain changes. For the period of time you're going to do this practice, you're going to sit in a comfortable, upright, alert posture, kind of upright, not uptight, kind of seriousness, but not stiff. And notice yourself breathing. Just floodlight is on breath-related sensations

happening in the body. Then you're going to pick, kind of identify something in your kind of breath landscape that is prominent. It could be the coolness of air moving in and out of your nostrils, or maybe some part of your back that you notice moving, something that really stands out, it's salient. And then you're going to take that flashlight of attention and just shine it there for the period of time that you do the practice. So the first instruction is focus. Focus on breath-related sensations. And then the next part of the practice as you're doing this,

if it hasn't happened already, it's going to happen. When you notice your mind has wandered away from breath-related sensations, redirect the flashlight back. breath-related sensations, redirect the flashlight back. So you're just breathing, noticing, focusing, and when your mind wanders, nothing big to do. Just bring it back and begin again. And that's it. So that's the first step.

Is that practice? Just to notice how much it wanders. No, you're not even noticing how much it wanders. You did three things. You focused, you notice, you redirected. Okay? That's what a lot of my military friends would call the push-up. That's the push-up. Now, it ended up that that simple practice tapped into all three of those brain systems. You had the flashlight that was directed. You exercise that. Floodlight that's noticing, what's going on? What's going on? And then that executive that says, get back.

Interesting. Get back on track. Get back on track. So that practice is really foundational to everything that people do. And then the other practices that I do go into detail on in the book are doing other things. Like this one really exercises both the focusing and noticing. Then we can do another one that really exercises the broadening. Like how do you actually allow? It gets into what you were talking about, the story-making mind, right? How do you actually just watch the nature of the mind? So essentially there is nothing privileged. It's just thoughts, emotions, memories, sensations passing through. We don't orient our experience that way.

Usually something happens. It's like we're latching onto content and we're making something out of it. So how do you take that observational stance? And then we go on to other practices that kind of build on those. Gotcha. But you talk about a 12-minute mindfulness approach? So we do. Yeah.

So the whole program is essentially based on these early mindfulness-based stress reduction contexts. But, you know, mindfulness-based stress reduction, very powerful, 55 years of research now that I've studied it. Too much time for pre-deployment soldiers, for example. People aren't going to give me, in fact, I tried it for a year. I had $2 million of Department of Defense funding and nobody would take my project. They're like, nope, nope, too much time.

So one of the things I had to do was write a grant that basically said, how can we figure out what the minimum effective dose is? write a grant that basically said, how can we figure out what the minimum effect of dose is? Do they need to do eight hours of training over, sorry, 24 hours of training over eight weeks and practice 45 minutes every day? Is that necessary? Because nobody was going to do it. Mindfulness meditation training. The mindful, just like you did for 30 seconds there. Very well, well done. Thank you. For 45 minutes a day, that's the assigned homework, which is beneficial, but it's not realistic for these high performance, high stress groups. Because they do 12 minutes a day or five minutes a day, that's the assigned homework, which is beneficial, but it's not

realistic for these high performance, high stress groups. Because they do 12 minutes a day or five minutes a day. So what we did is we looked to see what's the sweet spot. At what time, if people do daily, do we start seeing that, yes, it's beneficial and continues to be maintaining the benefits if they continue doing it. So the sweet spot was 12 minutes. They do 12 minutes or more than we see beneficial effects. The more they spot was 12 minutes. They do 12 minutes or more. Then we see beneficial effects. The more they do over 12 minutes, the better. But less than 12 was not consistently showing a benefit.

12 minimum. It's a 12 minimum about three to five times a week. Right. So that helped. Then people were like, in fact, that's what we did with the football team. We went in and we said, based on prior research, it's about 12 minutes a day. And we gave them 12-minute recordings, and they did it. They did it for about five days a week.

So guided meditation. Guided meditation. Just like I guided you right now and you followed. Same idea, but we do it for the entire 12 minutes. We're guiding them. What does that look like? Is it focusing on your breath, focusing on your thoughts? No.

I mean, at this point, the practice was very, very fundamental. The entire 12 minutes for one of the practices is focusing on breath-related sensations. And that's it? That's it. Okay. Now, what people start realizing is, oh, my mind wanders. Oh, my mind wanders to the same stuff over and over again. So when you're not doing the formal practice, you might be able to think, like, what is

it that's like sticky for me that I just keep going back to and look at that in a different kind of a way. So it's a different progression. But remember, the point for me was, what does it do to attention? So with the football team, we compared 12 minutes of mindfulness a day for four weeks to 12 minutes of relaxation a day for 12 weeks. And we found that both were great for improving and boosting and protecting mood. Mood, yeah. Only mindfulness helped attention. Really? Wow.

But protecting mood is part of the equation to support you in having better attention. Is that right? It didn't seem so. It seems like the mechanisms may be different. So guided relaxation and imagery was much more about feeling tension in the body, visualizing not being in so much pain, like thinking of yourself in a beautiful... Right. So guiding people to do that helped them feel a little bit more positive, but it was not helping their mood, just like we were talking about. I mean, sorry,

not helping their attention. But they were maybe less stressed in those moments. In those moments they seem to be a little bit less stressed. Yes, gotcha. But mindfulness gave you both the stress reduction and mood boosting benefits and the attentional benefits. So if you were gonna do one thing, my recommendation would be do the thing that you get more benefits. Right.

Is there anything else that you've studied in the last 20 years that could help you become a higher performer with more attention and more focus in your life than these types of mindfulness practices? Or does this seem to be kind of the gold standard for the brain? It's interesting because when you start looking at the kinds of things that get people messed up in terms of performance.

So we talked about where your attention is in that moment, right? So eye on the ball, scan the field, that kind of stuff. The other thing that seems to be very problematic is the story about what's happening. Like I'm the best thing on the planet and so I'm going to dominate this is a problem in some sense because you have a false sense of dominance. Or I just screwed up and I'm never going to recover from this. And so both of those storytelling aspects also seem to be a big problem for me. To hurt you, really? If you think that I'm the greatest in the world,

or I suck and I'm never going to amount to anything. Having those extremes. So is that an identity issue? It's like the way you shape your own identity about yourself? It may be, but what I'm talking about is how that shows up in the moment on the playing field. Gotcha. Okay. Because if you go in with that kind of hubris, like, oh yeah, I got this, you are going to start limiting how much you are focusing and scanning because you've got a predisposition

that there's no issue here. So you can't have that kind of already assumed success. And this is going to get complicated. And I'm not a performance psychologist. I'm a neuroscientist. But my point is really just that the notion of storytelling in the mind and a over-reliance on the story can be very difficult. Now, the story is not just about yourself. The story is about what you think the intentions of the other team are as well. So we think that this play means this. So anytime you start telling a story, essentially a narrative is constraining information processing in the brain because the brain is just going to default to constraining

what it thinks about based on the story. So if I have the view, like we were talking about earlier, we're walking down the hall and you don't look at me and my view is, oh, well, um, you know, he, he doesn't like me or whatever I end up thinking about. I am so biased by that, that I might not notice that actually, um, you know, you have a bloody nose or something like that. Like there could be something that I'm missing because I'm so like occupied with this thing now on the, on the, in the context of, of elite performance, you don't want that. You do not want to be disadvantaging yourself because your story is narrowing. You want the full data and you want to understand that there's a multiplicity that the other team is not, is there no chumps. They're not going to just do whatever and they're going to

fall into a particular way of doing it, especially in this team context. It's very important in the military context with combat itself is that you don't know what the enemy is up to. And if you start thinking you do, you might be very wrong, very wrong. So the drop the story aspect was also very important. And it ends up that mindfulness also works on dropping the story because you are essentially aiming to orient to present moment experience without editorializing. Right.

Let's say you have an all-star son playing college football and preparing for the season, right? He's about to go into training camp for football camp at one of the top universities, Ohio State University. for football camp at one of the top universities, Ohio State University. And he has a goal to win the national championship and he's an all-star player. What would you guide him on paying attention to,

working on, practicing on for the month leading up to training camp and then continually throughout the entire season? What would be your prescription to your son to have the best possible chance of being the best athlete he can be and accomplishing his goals? I mean, I think that's what I laid out in my book.

Yeah. I mean, I really wanted to give the best advice I could possibly give to people in high-performance contexts. And it doesn't come out of a study or two. It comes out of working with special operators and other kind of elite people where it matters that they perform well. But the thing that's key is that you have to do it. It is like a workout. And that's sort of my bigger interest. It takes time and energy. It takes time and energy. And athletes actually

are great for this because as our service members, you know you got to train. You have no, you're not naive to think that if I just sit here, I'm going to be great. No, you know you got to work at it. But the thing about our culture at this moment, and this is sort of my bigger passion behind why I wanted to write the book now, we don't have a cultural understanding that the mind needs to be trained daily for performance excellence and wellness. We don't have that understanding. We understand, thank goodness, that mental health can be problematic and we can work on it. But the notion of a prevention and mental protective effect is not known. And think about it's just a matter of time, I'm hoping, especially with more research like the kind of work I'm doing.

Like 100 years ago, if you saw somebody running down the street, you'd probably think they're being chased by somebody, right? Right, right. It was not normalized to engage in daily practice. And there was a lot of resistance to it when people started saying, you're going to do what? You're going to just run around the block? That sounds insane. But we do it. And I want people to understand that everything in our lab is suggesting you've got to do the same with the mind.

Because you don't know when the next high stress interval is coming around. And we know what happens when that occurs. And for somebody in that kind of elite category, it's going to be demanding. And, in fact, that is the nature of what being elite means. It's the nature of what being a leader means, frankly, in any industry. You're not there because things are all chill. You're there because things are going to be very demanding and that only a few people can actually successfully maneuver through. And that's where there's risk and there's reward at being in that position.

But advantage yourself by training your own mind. Advantage yourself to get the most data, to be on your own team. Oftentimes, we're not on our own team. We're fighting ourselves. We're in a battle internally, and that will definitely deplete your attention. How important is positive self-talk, like coaching to yourself internally, as opposed to the negative talk? I mean, we mentioned this briefly about not being this horrible naysayer to yourself and saying, I suck. But how actually important is that? I mean, in my mind, again, remember, I'm not a performance psychologist, but what I would say is be aware that the positive self-talk is occurring. So be aware that it's not reality, that it's done for a particular purpose. Because you want to have, it's like you were saying, a neutrality toward you. You want to notice the

positive self-talk because you want to notice the negative self-talk. Neither are real. They're both an overlay on top of reality. They're a story. They're a story. And part of the training that we can offer is to remind people to drop the story and to really distance themselves to take a more bird's eye view toward what's occurring with more of a self-supported approach. Like Amish is feeling very negative right now, or Amish is feeling really on top of it right now. Both are things that are overlaid upon the actual occurrence of events. I think that gives us much more flexibility and choice because then we don't, the phrase is really thoughts are not facts. Thoughts are not facts.

But we forget that we are so fused with our thoughts that they drive everything we do. It's like if you think about the mind playing out a movie, we're in the movie. We forget we're watching a movie. Absolutely. Thoughts are not facts. That's good. What's the practice that you do personally? And are you as consistent as you want to be with your own mindfulness approach on a daily basis? Yeah.

You know, it's funny because I write about 12 minutes. I like to do more than that, but I feel good if I can at least get the 12 minutes in. And in the book, I lay out this sort of suite of practices. One category we haven't talked about yet, which is its own conversation. Maybe some other time we could have that conversation. It's called, essentially, we call them connection practices, but formally, from kind of the traditions, they're called loving-kindness practices. And so this is when it's very, it sounds like it's, you're going to say it sounds like I'm doing positive self-talk, but it's actually kind of different. So this is when we have a series of phrases that we repeat.

Like a mantra? No, I'll tell you what they are in a minute. A series of phrases that we repeat that are not prescribing anything. They're basically offering well wishes. And so, and you start by offering them to, and then you offer them to a benefactor, a close other that has really supported you, then maybe to a neutral person, then to maybe somebody that you're having a lot of difficulty with. And then you might expand out to everybody in your neighborhood or your community. It's a way to kind of expand this circle of well-wishing.

And the benefits of that are also quite well known. Very different kind of a practice, but it's part of the standard suite of practices that we offer in the research that I've done as well as that I describe in the book. But the phrases are like this. So you might say, if I'm just going to dedicate it to myself, it's just kind of four different things.

And you can pick whatever phrases you want, but remember, it's a well-wishing. It's not like you are this or you're going to dedicate it to myself. It's just kind of four different things. And you can pick whatever phrases you want. But remember, it's a well-wishing. It's not like you are this or you're going to be this. It's may this happen for you. So you use the word may. So may you be safe. You say this to yourself. You say this to yourself quietly.

May I be safe? May I be safe. May I be healthy. May I be happy. May I live healthy? May I be happy? May I live with ease? So, you know, you can kind of, you can play around with what the phrases are, but three to four things that you repeat to yourself that I might wish it for you. You know, may you be safe.

And again, I'm doing this in the privacy of my own mind. And I'll tell you some very unusual things start happening when you do this. Remember, they're well wishes. It's not a demand. It's like wishing somebody happy birthday or a good day. It's just I'm putting it out there for you. I'm not demanding anything. But when you start doing this daily, and I'll tell you for myself.

To yourself internally, yep. And then to others, yep. You end up being quite a bit more self-supportive. Like, you know, if I want Amisha to be safe, happy, healthy, and live with ease, maybe I don't need to spend 45 minutes yelling at myself for something I just did. Maybe it's a different way I could do it. Or frankly, you know, one of the people that can end up being your close supportive person can also be the difficult person sometimes.

Your partner, like my husband sometimes. But if he's in my practice, if we're having a disagreement and there's a little room for understanding, I find myself giving, extending that understanding. Like, look, ultimately what I want for him is for him to be happy. And like, maybe he didn't mean to leave the dirty blender out all day. Like, you know, whatever it is, like maybe it's okay. Or there's a, there's just a little bit more kind of consideration for things. And you're not as quite as, I don't know, quite as unforgiving. And so this, so you were asking me about my own practice.

So I will, depending on sort of the nature of what's going on with me, I'll either do a focused, focused attention practice like the one we did or something called an open monitoring practice or one of the loving kindness practices. But I'll commit to doing whatever type of practice for the entire 12 minutes. So you do one of the practices for 12 minutes. Exactly. And the program that I laid out in the book, which is very similar to a program that we offer, for example, special forces, also has those same types of practices. And you kind of build on them. You start out with the focus, then you go to the open monitoring,

then you go to the loving kindness. And you interleave these as you go to kind of grow the capacities in this multiple way. It's like a type of mental cross-training. Ooh, mental cross-training. I like it. Open monitor practice, what does that look like? So open monitoring is, remember we were talking about some are really good for the floodlight

and the, sorry, the flashlight and the juggler. Well, open monitoring is really a practice for the floodlight because it sounds easy to say, oh, just stay open and receptive to whatever happens. Usually we're not doing that. We're like, like I said, latching onto things. This is a practice, open monitoring, where you are monitoring your ongoing thoughts, feelings, sensations, events internally and externally. Wow. So I call it the river of thought is the kind of phrase that I use in the book. Like imagine yourself sitting on the bank of a river and like, you know, near a nice rock. It's a comfortable spot and everything happening and everything happening, the flow of your conscious

experience is the river. You're just going to allow what happens. You're not going to go, you don't see a leaf and you're not going to go grab it. You're just going to let it, you see it, and let it float by. So you're taking that stance of stability, non-reactivity, you're self-supported, but this is all transpiring. How can you stay steady in the midst of whatever happens? Rapids happening or blue crystal waters or whatever it is. So it provides that kind of strength of observation that we don't usually cultivate. And we might say, oh, it's really good to be a listener, but what do you do when you're trying to be a listener and you're really pissed at what the person's saying to you? How do you cultivate that stability of

mind? Or you can tell in the competition context that somebody's trying to get you. They are goading you. How do you stay stable? So yes, that is occurring. And I'm still right here, sitting, watching. Steady. Yeah. Steady. Wow. Okay. So one of those three practices you try to do every day with the may I be practice as well. Do you do that before or after? Oh no, that's what I do for 12 minutes. The may I be safe, may I be healthy. You repeat that over and over. And then you say it to someone else. Yeah. You can go through the whole sequence. Some days I'll just do it only for me. Wow. For 12 minutes. 12 minutes.

Wow. I mean, it really, try it. I mean, it can really shift the way you are with yourself. Because again, you're almost acting like another person wishing it to you. Right? You're just like, you know, a loving partner or a parent might have that kind of well wishes toward their child, you know, or a tender, cared for person in your life. It feels good to have that wished upon you. And you can do it for yourself. That was the kind of cool part.

That's cool. And it's not like hokey or it sounds like it could be. But what's so funny about it is we did a big project with Boot Camp, essentially basic combat training. And for four weeks, we gave them a prescription of what they were supposed to do every day following this program that my colleague Scott Rogers and I developed called Mindfulness Based Attention Training, MBAT. Sounds tough. But one of those practices is the loving-kindness practice. And after the four weeks of the program, they were allowed to pick

whatever practice they wanted to do. And it ended up that most of them wanted to do this loving-kindness practice. So they did these practices during it, and then at the end, choose one? They could choose one every night. They got to pick one for the next four weeks. And we just noted what they picked. A lot of them chose this. Why do you think that is? Try it. I think a lot of it is we don't orient toward ourselves in this way, especially people that are searching for excellence. We are very much interested in pushing the limits of our capacity and we forget that that kind of care toward our own, we want to be excellent, but sometimes it'll turn into a punitive sort of a thing. Constantly beating yourself up to be better and I messed this

up and you weren't perfect and what's wrong with you. Right. And I'm saying all those may still happen, but for 12 minutes a day, if you could do something different, it would be helpful. Yeah, that's nice. How many thoughts a day does the human brain have? Do we know? I mean, what's a thought? An idea of thinking something? Well, so this is, if you go down this road of thinking about it, you start getting very granular and very momentary, right?

And so it's a great question, but I'll just tell you, like, I've thought about this because when I first started practicing, I was like, okay, where is this going to get me? You know, I'm like a results kind of person. Right, right. Like, okay, I'm going to do this thing. The instruction was 45 minutes a day. After I finished with this book, I was taking this mindfulness course. So I asked one of my dear colleagues, who's been a practitioner for 30 years I mean we were just starting to collaborate and I was like okay look you've been at this for 30 years okay how long do

you go before you start mind-wandering you know I thought he was gonna say like 20 minutes an hour I thought it was gonna be some long thing he's like 10 seconds 27 seconds wow right away still after 30 years and And I was like, this sounds like a dumb thing to be doing that. If you can't focus. But then we talked more and it goes back to your question of what is a thought. What he said that really struck me was the resolution of his mind was so well calibrated. He's like, think of it like this. Before, if I was lost in thought, it would be, I would have a-on fantasy or I'm having some doomsday scenario play out. Now I can see a little undulation, a little ripple in the water.

So I don't even have a full thought, but I notice this instability arising that might lead to a thought. So, you know, the notion of what a thought is, it's a tricky, slippery thing. But I think what we want to cultivate is this capacity to know our mind to that level, that we know its contents, we know its arisings, we know its vulnerabilities, we know the stories it's making, and we can function in a more self-supportive way. How important is the things you think about the first moment you wake up in the morning and right before you go to bed? How important are those, I guess, 10 to 15 minutes of wake up and pre-sleep? Now, I don't have an answer. I've not done that experiment. But I'll tell you that

it's more about the moment to moment. And it's about the neighborhoods you travel often. Because I say this and it sounds like I'm trying to be grandiose, but what you pay attention to is your life. If you are in the neighborhoods of self-hatred or anger or whatever it is, that's your life. There's no question. The whole brain is recalibrated toward those thoughts, those emotions, those bodily sensations, and that is your life. So this is unfortunately one of the problems with stress is that stress is not the moment of demand. Stress is what you're carrying around with you. It's that mental time travel that happens even after the stressful event has occurred. Because a stressful event can occur years ago, a month ago, a week ago, and you could still be holding on to it.

And still be reliving that stressful event when you don't need to because it's not happening in this moment. It's not that you're just reliving on to it and still be reliving that stressful event when you don't need to because it's not happening in this moment. And it's not that you're just reliving it and it's innocuous. You're reliving it and the biological cascade, both neurally and physiologically, is going to be as if you're there in that moment.

That's how powerful our mind is. That's how powerful our attention is. So the body feels the memories of the past until we learn to, I guess, process it correctly or heal it. I would not say, and you need to, you can take those journeys. That's your choice, but be aware that it's happening and be aware that it's not happening right now. Be aware that what's happening. Whatever the memory is that's arising. That it happened.

Well no, that it's happening to you right now. You are reliving the memory. Right now, Amishi is re-experiencing a very sad moment in her life. But when you say it to yourself in that way, you've pulled yourself out of being in the movie. You are now an audience member to what's occurring. As soon as you can get that distance,

this is going to eventually fade away. What is that called in psychological terms? That process? It's called de-centering. De-centering. So you're not being in the moment. You're seeing yourself be in the moment. Correct. You're not the center. You're de-centered. Your attention is over here watching the unfolding here. And communicating to yourself from a different space. Yeah. It's so fascinating what the mind can do. It is. The brain can do, I guess.

Where do thoughts come from then? Is it the brain or is it the mind? Now we're getting into the philosophical. And where is the mind? Now we're getting into the philosophical. And where is the mind? Yeah. The brain is in here, right? But where is the mind? Is the mind only, is it in the body?

Is it outside of the body? Is it in the sphere connected to the body? Is it consciousness in the world? I know, but I can't tell you. I'm sorry. You can't tell me. I'm joking. You're asking the big questions, right? You're asking regarding the nature of the mind,

the nature of consciousness. And what I'll tell you, like, just in terms of my personal view is, who knows? We're still debating this. We're still actively discovering this. And it's really funny because my son, my son's 19. He's a college student. And he said, he asked me this, you know, as he entering college, like, you know, you study this stuff, like, you think you're ever going to understand the nature of the brain or the mind in your, okay, let's, he said, mom, in your lifetime, are you going to understand? And I was like, well, I don't think so. You know, and he said, then do you think you're ever people, humanity will ever understand this? And I said, I don't know. We ever, people, humanity, will ever understand this?

And I said, I don't know. We may be bound by the fact that we as humans are looking at ourselves, and there's going to be limitations to that. And then, of course, his response was like, then why are you bothering, right? Then why are you studying this? Then why are you bothering? Yeah, why are you studying this if you're not going to have an answer? And I thought, you know, he's a math kid. Smart kid. He must go to Ohio State.

He doesn't go to Ohio State. It's easy. He goes to Stanford, but anyway. He is a math and a computer science person, so very different. I mean, for him, it's a very different kind of thing. But the reason that I can say that I study it is because I'm a scientist. You know, understanding the nature of things is my curiosity. It's what I want to do.

But more than that, I would say, I'm a very practical and applied scientist. It might be interesting, and I'm certainly happy to chat with you about that, to understand the nature of the mind and the brain and what is it. Are we, for example, as conscious beings, are we the factory for consciousness? Are we just the radio antenna for consciousness? These are all very interesting things. But when it comes down to it, we're people. We've got to function in a society. We have pain and suffering.

We can harm each other. We're at a moment in time where our planet is in crisis. And I want to use my skills as a brain scientist to try to address those issues. That, I think, is possible. And maybe I won't have the ultimate answers, but I think I can help people get more answers for themselves so that at least we're more functional in our world. What's your thoughts on manifesting thoughts, abundance thoughts? There's a saying called the law of attraction. And what you would think expands and starts to manifest. And that could be thoughts on stress and worry,

and you start to expand that thought in the body and the mind. Or thoughts on opportunities in your life and healthy relationships and financial abundance and health. You're talking about the secret. Yeah, yeah. What's your thoughts on neuroscience, studying the brain and manifestation and abundance? In some sense, I already told you my thoughts, right? I told you what you pay attention to is your life. Yes. What you pay attention to is your

life. Now, whether that translates into material possession showing up, who knows? I mean, that's not my experience, but whatever you want to do, go for it, but just be aware. And my biggest takeaway from all my work is pay attention to your attention. Like actually pay attention to where you are paying attention. That is going to really help because then you've got a lot more options. You're not at the mercy of wherever the mind decides to go. So in terms of manifesting and all that, I mean, who knows? All I know is that at a more granular level, if your mind is occupied with certain content, that's your reality. You'll start to see it in places in your life, yeah. Yeah.

Which, you know, maybe that's beneficial if it's done in the right way. And if you can cultivate it in that way, many of us under normal, real-life stressful circumstances. Don't have that. Yeah, yeah. What are the questions you wish people asked you more about the brain, the mind? I mean, you asked a lot of great ones. Really. You really did.

I think that the main thing for me is that people start opening up to this idea that we can train the mind, that we should train the mind, and it's not fancy. It's not bells and whistles. It's just like physical activity. It's pretty basic, but you got to do it. You got to do it in a way that is regularity and a commitment. I'm not interested so much in the esoteric or the ethereal because I'm just, I want to, there's a lot to do now here. So I would say that my interest is more in supporting people and them inquiring on what they can do for themselves daily. It won't take necessarily a lot of investment, 12 hours a day to actually change themselves in a way that will be, they'll be better for it and they'll help

others. What's been the biggest benefits you've seen in the last, I guess, 17, 18 years of studying this and applying it consistently for your personal life? I mean, I wear a mouth guard now and my teeth aren't numb. So there's something about that. I would say, really, it's about being more here. Like I felt like I was barely here in my life. And I'm just here. And that means seeing a look of concern on my, you know, my child's face or enjoying a sunset. I mean, it's going to sound super cheesy, but like I felt like I couldn't even enjoy stuff that should be joyful. Really?

Like even a great, you know, piece of chocolate cake. Like you're just, you're lost somewhere. Like even a great piece of chocolate cake, like you're lost somewhere. And so if our life is precious, which it is, and our moments are limited, which they are, how do you actually experience it? And that takes some training. And I'm really fortunate that I found this and I was able to actually study it with some seriousness to continue to offer it to other people. study it with some seriousness to continue to offer it to other people.

What would you say for those who continue to stay distracted or aren't able to focus their attention? What are the biggest consequences for their life if they don't learn these practices for themselves? I mean, I don't think I need to tell them. I think most people that are experiencing that are suffering. I think most people, I don't know anybody, including myself, that would say, oh yeah, my attention, oh, it's great. It's great. I got it. Most of us feel fractured, fragmented, barely able to hang on. And the reality is we are in the most intense information-rich environment probably humanity has ever been in. But remember back to those monks, they also suffered with their mind wandering, right? Without cell phones and social media. That. So we, that's the baseline. And then we're doing all that on top of it. That's right. So I would say my question for the individuals that don't feel like, well,

I think that most people feel like, yeah, I'm not paying attention as well as I need to. And I, and they think there's something wrong with themselves. Like my brain just isn't working right. And I want to just, the main, like, public service announcement I would want to say to all of those people is, like, your brain is great. Your brain is fine. In fact, the reason computer algorithms can predict what you're going to click on is because it's working so reliably. Right? So it's not the brain that's the problem. Our attention spans have not been shrinking.

And evolution doesn't work at that timescale. thinking, and evolution doesn't work at that time scale. But what's happening is that everything we know now about the way attention functions, what attracts it, what gets it distracted, what causes preoccupation, means we got to work for our own benefit. And for me, it's counterintuitive. It's not about being able to focus better. It's about noticing when you're not focused. It's noticing when you're not focused and then redirecting it to being present. Interesting. Or choosing not to. Whatever you choose. But noticing where you are. It's like I said before. Paying attention to your attention. Do you have a guided do you lead people through guided audios as well?

Do they have this on your website? Yeah, there are some places you can get them already. Mindful.org has a course. Yeah, with me speaking. Mindful.org, yeah. Mindful.org. It's a Mindful magazine. It's got a whole course that I've offered on this kind of to make the book come alive.

Okay. And then there's Insight Timer. I have a few recordings on that. 10% Happier. These are all great apps to try out, but I've got some guided audio on each of those. Is that a timer? 10% Happier.

Yeah, that's a good guy. He was very skeptic as well. He was like, this meditation thing, I'm never going to do this. This is not practical. This is like, this is all he obsesses about, right? Now this is his life. It's his life. Because he was like, nah, I'm just going to work hard and, you know, be on the news and

do this thing and live a practical life. This is some woo-woo stuff. It's not based in science. But now the science is proving that mindful meditative practices are the most powerful ways to be present, it seems like, and to lower your stress and live a more joyful life. Now when you say the word meditation or mindfulness you know, like not a very important word or like so commonplace, but I'm coming at it from the brain science and I'm coming at it as an attention researcher. I was not out to figure out how to, you know, have mystical experiences.

I was interested in like, which is fine. People can do whatever they would like, but I was just like, how do you get people to pay attention in a way that helps them? How do I do that? It was very basic. So it's funny that the solution is very similar. But it's very specific. It's not just do whatever you'd like and just close your eyes and everything's going to be a blissful rainbow. This is about brain training. It's about mental training, mental conditioning in the same way we condition the body. Consistently, not just a one-time thing. Consistently and reaching a threshold where it has an impact. Yes. Right? Just like for physical fitness. If I said, if I asked you, like, do you think going for like a walk while I walk my dog

is really great for my physical well-being? You're like, it probably isn't hurting you, but it's not going to make you a great athlete. It's not making you stronger, yeah. Yeah, get to that point where you're doing something, even if it's like a couch to 5K. Yes. Something consistently. What about burnout? We've got a few final questions, but I feel like the world is burnt out from their work, from their, whether their lack of passion in the career they've chosen,

or their relationships are burnt out, their attention's burnt out. Is this a solution towards burnout as well? Or should it be asking other questions about not feeling burnt out in our lives? You know, the data is very clear that mindfulness-based practices help with burnout in many different fields, like whether it's critical care nurses. I gave a talk recently to a group of critical care nurses and I mean, talk about a group that has just been-

Depleted. And been called upon way beyond, right? Same thing with firefighters, in fact, especially here in California. There are so many fields where this is happening, and mindfulness seems to consistently be beneficial. But here's the important thing I would say about burnout and offering mindfulness as a solution to that. At the individual level, I think it's very helpful to people. Not I think. I mean, the data suggests now we're not doing a study or two. It's like meta-analyses of meta-analyses. It's like a proliferation. There might be a hundred and something studies that are saying that there are beneficial effects. But when you have people

benefit from mindfulness training, the job is not done there. And I really did talk about this with the critical care nurses. It's that the way in which structures and fields and industries have been set up are promoting this type of burnout to occur. And part of our responsibility, because the individual is in some sense expendable. So this is maybe my radical part of my conversation with you. We have to make sure that as we recoup our own capacity to live a fulfilling life, we have a responsibility to look at the systems, you know, systemic change, whether it's racial and social injustice, sexism, or even the way that capitalist companies function at the expense of the individual. We've got to take a careful look at that. So recouping our energy is not the end. It's the beginning of transforming things in a way that

will allow the world to be more sustainable, frankly. Yeah. I love all this stuff. I could talk to you for hours, but I want to ask you the final couple of questions, Amishi. And before I ask these questions, I want people to be aware of your book, Peak Mind. Find your focus, own your attention, and invest I ask these questions, I want people to be aware of your book, Peak Mind. Find your focus, own your attention, and invest 12 minutes a day. You can go to amishi.com, amishijah over on Twitter and social media. Amishi, what is it? P-Jah. P-Jah over on Instagram, J-H-A.

And on Facebook as well, amishi.jah. The book is out. Again, Peak Mind, if you want to improve your focus, your attention, and improve the quality of your life, go get the book. And give it to a couple friends as well. I want to hear one of your audios too, so you can get those audios on 10% Happier. Mindful.org. Mindful.org Insight Timer as well. There's a question I ask everyone at the end of our interview.

It's called the three truths. So imagine it's your last day on earth, many years away from now, and you get to live the life of your dreams. You get to see everything come true. You solve the question of consciousness and your brain research. You know, all these things happen. I'm 500 years old at years old. Yes, yes. You're healthy, happy, safe. All these things that you say to yourself continue to happen in your life, all that stuff. But for whatever reason, you got to take all of

your work with you or it goes to another place. And we don't have access to your information anymore. Your book, this interview, you know, all the things that you write in the future, we don't have access. But you get to leave behind three things you know to be true, three lessons that you would share with the world. And this is all we would have to remember for our lives to help us improve the quality of our life. What would you say to those three truths? Goodness. Oh, my goodness. Whew.

That is really tied to my own life, my own work. Anything at all. My understanding of this. Yeah, yeah. Just your life in general. It's not going to be all that original because I think that these really are truths. Everything is impermanent, and there's a preciousness to that impermanence. Be kind to each other. Be kind.

And take care of your own mind. Simple is the best way, you know? I think people need to go back to the basics all the time. It's hard to become more advanced unless you master the basics in your life. So that's why I think this is not basic, but 12 minutes a day of training the mind is the first step that you can do to start expanding upon accomplishing greater goals or living a more fulfilling, happier life as well. Being more present with the people you care about and stuff like that. So I want to acknowledge you, Amishi, for dedicating your life to this because I think so many people in the world are suffering

and struggling to figure out why they have these thoughts. How can I improve my mind? How can I improve my brain? How can I improve the quality of my life on a daily basis? So the fact that you're investing so much time, your entire life, to studying this, researching this, investing in the tests for people to see what's working, what's not working as a scientist, and give us practical things we can do on a daily basis to help us improve the quality of our life is incredible. So I'm really grateful and appreciate

and acknowledge you for your efforts and commitment to this. It's a complicated thing to study and you're making it so much easier for us to not beat ourselves up and have practices to improve our lives. So I acknowledge you for the gift you are, the gift you are in the world, even though you went to Michigan. Keeping it real. This is, is there anything else that we can support you with besides getting the book, checking you out on social media,

listening to one of these mindful meditations that you have, anything else? Just go to amishi.com. You have a newsletter. Yeah, they can sign up for it at the website. Awesome. Cool. No, I think that the best way is just keep doing what you're doing because you're providing

people like me and many others that are interested in this work. You're giving us a platform to talk about it and you're asking really great questions. And I'm not just trying to flatter you. I mean, I really mean it. It was a really fun conversation. I appreciate it. I appreciate it. Final question for you. What's your definition of greatness? Can you tell me what yours is?

Mine is discovering and cultivating the unique gifts within you to pursue your dreams. And in that pursuit, making the maximum impact on the people around you. Wow. I'll go with that. There you go. I think I would add in to remember your life is only lived moment by moment. And so it's all of the things you said, but to remember the granular, remember the moment to moment. Amishi, thank you so much.

Appreciate it. Amazing. Thank you so much. Appreciate it. Amazing. Thank you so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and it inspired you on your journey towards greatness. Make sure to check out the show notes in the description for a full rundown of today's show with all the important links. And also make sure to share this with a friend. Leave us a review over on Apple Podcasts and subscribe over on Apple Podcasts as well. I really love hearing feedback from you guys. So share a review over on Apple and let me know what part of this episode resonated with you

the most. And if no one's told you lately, I want to remind you that you are loved, you are worthy, and you matter. And now it's time to go out there and do something great.