Mind Control 101: How to Own Your Attention in a World Built to Steal It | Amishi Jha (Fan Fav)

This is a fan fav episode. When you are committed to hitting major goals, experiencing life on the next level, and showing up as a better version of yourself, being able to focus becomes a critical skill. Being able to give your full attention to what matters in the moment is necessary whether your focus is work or involves being present in a conversation. Amishi Jha is a professor of psychology at University of Miami and author of the new book, Peak Mind: Find Your Focus, Own Your Attention, Invest 12 Minutes a Day. She is unpacking why your wandering mind isn’t as big a problem as you think, how memories are formed and stories are ultimately created and stitched together to create our version of reality. If you’re struggling with being distracted, the different types of practices Amishi shares will give you a place to start immediately! ORIGINAL AIR DATE: 3-24-22 Check out Amishi Jha’s book, Peak Mind: https://www.amazon.com/Peak-Mind-Attention-Invest-Minutes-ebook/dp/B08THNJ978 SHOW NOTES: 0:00 | Introduction to Amishi Jha 0:52 | Why Mind Wandering Happens 4:13 | Memories and Neural Configuration 13:20 | Assigning Meaning to Dreams 16:20 | Accurate or Altered Memories 21:11 | Nostalgic Story Making 28:53 | Risky Story Making 34:31 | Break Story Mode 39:34 | Developing Meta Awareness 47:06 | Constructing Reality 53:07 | The Power of Mindfulness 1:02:07 | How to Practice Being Mindful 1:11:14 | Types of Mindfulness Practice 1:17:01 | Why Positivity Doesn’t Work 1:24:27 | Loving Kindness Follow Amishi Jha: Website: https://amishi.com/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/AmishiPJha Twitter: https://twitter.com/amishijha Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/amishipjha/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/amishi.jha What's up, everybody? It's Tom Bilyeu here: If you want my help... STARTING a business:https://tombilyeu.com/zero-to-founder?utm_campaign=Podcast%20Offer&utm_source=podca[%E2%80%A6]d%20end%20of%20show&utm_content=podcast%20ad%20end%20of%20showjoin me here at ZERO TO FOUNDER https://tombilyeu.com/zero-to-founder?utm_campaign=Podcast%20Offer&utm_source=podca[%E2%80%A6]d%20end%20of%20show&utm_content=podcast%20ad%20end%20of%20show SCALING a business:https://tombilyeu.com/callsee if you qualify here. https://tombilyeu.com/call Get my battle-tested strategies and insights delivered weekly to your inbox:https://tombilyeu.com/sign up here. https://tombilyeu.com/ ********************************************************************** If you're serious about leveling up your life, I urge you to check out my new podcast,Tom Bilyeu’s Mindset Playbook https://open.spotify.com/show/47VE90Cittmo6TGGFqg2xf —a goldmine of my most impactful episodes on mindset, business, and health. Trust me, your future self will thank you. ********************************************************************** Join me live on myTwitch stream https://impacttheory.co/4fitmnJ. I'm live daily from 6:30 to 8:30 am PT athttps://impacttheory.co/4fitmnJwww.twitch.tv/tombilyeu https://impacttheory.co/4fitmnJ ********************************************************************** LISTEN TO IMPACT THEORY AD FREE + BONUS EPISODES on APPLE PODCASTS:http://apple.co/impacttheoryapple.co/impacttheory http://apple.co/impacttheory ********************************************************************** FOLLOW TOM: Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/tombilyeu/https://www.instagram.com/tombilyeu/ Tik Tok:https://www.tiktok.com/@tombilyeu?lang=enhttps://www.tiktok.com/@tombilyeu?lang=en Twitter:https://twitter.com/tombilyeuhttps://twitter.com/tombilyeu YouTube:https://www.youtube.com/@TomBilyeuhttps://www.youtube.com/@TomBilyeu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices https://megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

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• 1:07Speaker 01

  We're talking about the firing of a particular neural configuration. And if you've heard that phrase, neurons that fire together, wire together. And it's this notion that out of all of our brain cells, there's some that are going to have sort of a synchronized activity. And through that, the connections between them will grow and be privileged over other connections. And that is essentially the foundation for human memory. So that once a particular, let's say, an episode has occurred, when we go to recall it, if we hit one of the nodes in this neural network that represents the episode we experienced, all of the neurons that kind of fired together will become activated. And that'll bring up the richness of the actual episode itself in our memories.

• 1:55Tom Bilyeu?

  Amishi Ja, welcome to the show.

• 1:57Speaker 01

  It's great to be here.

• 1:58Tom Bilyeu?

  I'm very excited to have you. The brain is a weird and wonderful place, and you really dive into some of the more enjoyable parts of its weirdness. One of the things that I find really fascinating about your work is somebody who has a mind that wanders obsessively. And I would say I have a bad memory. And for a long time, I considered that to be the bane of my existence. And then I started asking the question, but from an evolutionary standpoint, is there an advantage? Like, has some part of this been selected for? As you think about the context of attention and a wandering mind, has it been selected for? And if so, why?

• 2:40Speaker 01

  Oh, has mind wandering been selected for? Great question, absolutely. And this is sort of a puzzle that we're still figuring out. But if you just look at the prevalence of mind wandering, so 50% of our waking moments were doing this. From a metabolic point of view, that would be a really inefficient design. And every single thing the brain does, it really is trying to advantage it functioning well. So for some reason, we do this. And it is on purpose, meaning designed for through the course of human evolution. And the mystery has been, what is it? What is it that is actually supporting? What processes are being supported by the fact that we mind wander?

• 3:25Speaker 01

  And we have some clues.

• 3:27Tom Bilyeu?

  Let's hear it.

• 3:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. So the first thing I'd say is, let's just be clear on what I mean. So the broadest category of which mind wandering is a subset, is something called spontaneous thought. Essentially, something we get in touch with very, very quickly when we're meditating, practicing mindfulness meditation, for example, this sputtering out of mental content, just boom, boom, boom. You could be doing anything. You could be going for a walk, you know, taking a shower.

• 3:52Tom Bilyeu?

  Often referred to as the monkey mind.

• 3:53Speaker 01

  Exactly, the monkey mind, right? And most of the time, when there is no other pressing requirement, it's a no problem. I mean, the mind does that.

• 4:03Tom Bilyeu?

  Other than it tends to go to negative things a lot of the time.

• 4:06Speaker 01

  Okay, right. That's a different thing. We should, that is gonna be definitely a bad thing. But for example, right before we started our conversation, I took the opportunity to look out at the beautiful view you have here in your home. And just taking it in, right? There was nothing really on my mind, just this expansive scene. And, and little thought particles were popping up and like popcorn, and I was just allowing them to be. And there was no cost associated with that. But when we use the term mind wandering, what we're really talking about, and specifically the way I operationalize it, is off-task thoughts during an ongoing task or activity. So, there is something we're trying to do.

• 4:49Speaker 01

  And so, in this moment, as we're having this conversation, and there is a point to what I'm trying to say, if a random thought pulls me away, that could be problematic. I won't make sense anymore, or I'll pause, or I'll stumble somehow. So, some of the ideas regarding spontaneous thought, which is this broader category of the thought pump, or monkey mind, as you said, is that it supports our ability to remember. So, it's funny that you mentioned memory already. And, one of the reasons we think this is the case, is because memory requires this process called consolidation. So, I'm just going right into this now, I'm not.

• 5:27Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, yeah, please. Memory formation is really interesting and weird. I'm assuming you're gonna talk about this, but the, the way that they're not sort of solid-state things, that we change them constantly.

• 5:41Speaker 01

  That's right. I mean, in some sense, they're solid in the sense that we're talking about the firing of a particular neural configuration. And if you've heard that phrase, neurons that fire together, wire together. And it's this notion that out of all of our brain cells, there's some that are gonna have sort of a synchronized activity, and through that, the connections between them will grow, and be privileged over other connections. And that is essentially the foundation for human memory. So that once a particular, let's say, an episode has occurred, when we go to recall it, if we hit one of the nodes in this neural network that represents the episode we experienced, all of the neurons that kind of fired together will become activated, and that'll bring up

• 6:25Speaker 01

  the richness of the actual episode itself in our memories. But how does that process of firing together to wire together occur? It goes back to this notion of spontaneous thought. In some sense, every time we experience anything, so even as we're talking to each other right now, or those at a later point that are listening to us, every time we experience anything, there's a neural activity pattern that occurs. And there's bits and pieces of it that may need to replay themselves over and over again for there to be a privileged co-occurrence of their firing.

• 7:00Tom Bilyeu?

  Privileged because in the repetition, we've given a signal to the brain. This is important enough to myelinate, essentially, to make that more efficient?

• 7:10Speaker 01

  Um, yeah, but we would, even before we myelinate, even before we do anything to connect the two, just, I had this experience, and some replaying of it will begin almost immediately after you've had the experience. So, and we know this, right? If you watch a TV show right before going to bed, almost as you're going to bed at night, you might have like, episodes of it just pop up. You're not trying to make that happen, or even a conversation or a song, just random little bits and pieces. And what we think might be happening there is that it's essentially a replay function, so that when it replays over and over again, with every replaying, there's some things that occur again, and there's some things that may not because of chance.

• 7:50Tom Bilyeu?

  But what makes it privileged?

• 7:51Speaker 01

  Privileged is that the, the thing that gets replayed over and over again consistently is the thing that becomes privileged. So while I'm replaying this conversation, another thought might pop up, or another little thing may come up, but the thing that happens consistently after 10, 20, 50, 100, maybe 1,000 times, we, we have no idea how often this occurs, then those neurons are gonna say, these keep firing together, now I wanna actually have stronger connections between the neurons that represent them. So privilege is the result of a process. And it has to do with an averaging that occurs. I mean, like I told you, we're getting into the geeky part of this, but it's an averaging that occurs and that will allow us to have

• 8:36Speaker 01

  memories. This is a very common process during sleep, but now we think mind wandering and spontaneous thought may be something that is the beginnings of that, that then continues in sleep.

• 8:48Tom Bilyeu?

  It's really interesting, and I've heard multiple explanations for why we dream when we sleep. One of these, and I think this is a pretty early hypothesis, I don't think, I forget who posited this, but I even at the time they were saying it, I don't think they were trying to put forth that, no, this is like proven science, but it's a very interesting idea. And I've heard you talk about the fact that 50% of our brain is allocated to vision. And there's a mechanism in the brain where if you're not using something, it will get reallocated really quickly. And they were positing that even the eight hours that you're asleep may be a long enough period of time that if you're not using the vision, the centers for vision in your brain, that they would start to get encroached on by other

• 9:28Tom Bilyeu?

  areas. And that one of the possible reasons that we dream is to use the visual areas of our brain, even though our eyes are closed and not actually taking in any light, but you're using visual processing. And that keeps at bay the other areas of the brain from taking over, which I found a certainly very interesting hypothesis because it gets at this idea that the body isn't, the body achieves harmony through battle, if that makes sense, that they're all wrestling for resources.

• 9:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a great, that's interesting hypothesis. I'd not heard that before. A more kind of common view of why dreaming may occur, and we know this from studies in rodents, for example, is for memory consolidation, so that you're replaying over and over again.

• 10:12Tom Bilyeu?

  But why is it so weird?

• 10:13Speaker 01

  Why, because?

• 10:14Tom Bilyeu?

  It's not like you replay it realistically. It's like, all of a sudden, my mom and I are, literally, I had this dream one time, my mom and I are in a dinghy in the middle of the ocean, and something happened, I don't remember what, she ends up falling overboard. And like the Terminator and Terminator 2, as she sank, and if I remember right, there was like a piano tied to her ankle. And as she was sinking, she gave me thumbs up. And it was one of the most emotionally charged dream, like to the point, that dream must have been 30 years ago.

• 10:44Speaker 01

  Oh, wow.

• 10:44Tom Bilyeu?

  Sometime after Terminator 2, so somebody can check that, but it was emotionally resonant.

• 10:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:51Tom Bilyeu?

  But obviously, my mom and I have never been in a dinghy in the middle of the ocean. My mom did not fall overboard with the piano tied to her ankle.

• 10:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:56Tom Bilyeu?

  So the question becomes, what? Like, if that's memory consolidation, why is it so weird?

• 11:02Speaker 01

  Right. Well, first of all, it's the elements that could be consolidated have nothing to do with how they're put together. Because, for example, if you just think about the most simple thing, this amazing dream, by the way, and I'm glad that you had that such an ability to remember it, that it has an impact even today. It's rare that that can happen to us.

• 11:21Tom Bilyeu?

  I remember the world's smallest handful of dreams, much to my dismay, because I find them so interesting.

• 11:25Speaker 01

  Yeah. But let me just take a much more kind of simple view of dreaming, because you're right. And this is not my area, so I'm already speaking from a totally...

• 11:33Tom Bilyeu?

  Let's take you way out into the weird, just hypothesis, guess.

• 11:36Speaker 01

  But like, if you take a very simple model of having a rat, some kind of rodent, learn a maze, and you can actually go in, because it's a rodent model, know exactly what set of neurons, what population of cells are active as the rat pursues this maze, as it's actually moving around through it, and the sequence of how these neurons actually activate. Like, you know, let's say neurons 1, 2, 3, and then 4, 5, 6, for example, as it turns left and right, etc. So now the rat is in sleep, you're still, you still have, as the animal researcher, you still have those electrodes hooked up, and now you're not, you're just observing what happens. And what you notice is that there is this replay function.

• 12:18Speaker 01

  Not only are those same set of neurons firing, but they're firing in the same sequence, in that same coordinated fashion. And then the next day, when the animal performs, the animal's much more efficient. With those sets of activity profiles that were more reliable and clearer, and across animals, you notice this, those that have really strong firing patterns that are cohesive and replicate the actual experience of walking through the maze do better than those that don't have strong patterns.

• 12:48Tom Bilyeu?

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• 13:33Tom Bilyeu?

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• 14:59Tom Bilyeu?

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• 15:41Tom Bilyeu?

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• 16:22Tom Bilyeu?

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• 17:04Tom Bilyeu?

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• 17:21Tom Bilyeu?

  Okay, now I'm gonna just really go into absurd waters here. But so as you're saying that, A, my first question is, have they done that same study in humans? Because I'd be very curious to know if part of what we're consolidating, because as I replay that dream about my mom, which I haven't thought about in a long time, was there meaning that was being consolidated? Like, the understanding how to process a sense of loss, like, how would I deal with the loss of my mother, her trying to communicate that it would be okay, and that's my own subconscious trying to... And it's possible that that dream was long enough ago that I had anxiety over the loss of my parents still, and so it's interesting if, instead of consolidating the literal

• 18:04Tom Bilyeu?

  running of a maze, which there's no doubt, I mean, there's been enough studies that if you mess a people's sleep, they're not gonna learn algebra and things like that. So clearly, there is some link to that. But if there's also another thing going on where our brain is dealing in a more abstract layer of meaning and emotional resonance, where the literal firing of turn right, turn left, whatever, might not apply?

• 18:27Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, I mean, I think as we, I mean, as species became more complex and could do more things, this same fundamental aspect is gonna happen in various parts of the brain. And so whether it happens in aspects that have to do with our meaning, our sense of purpose, our sense of value, emotionally salient things, it's possible in any of those kinds of processing modes that we can experience this. And has it been done with humans? I mean, again, this is so outside my area, I'm sure aspects of this have been done with implanted electrodes, with EEG, for example.

• 19:06Speaker 01

  There's a lot known on dreams than, a lot more known than I know in this moment. But the way it connects to my work is that, first of all, the things that tend to become salient parts of this mind wandering, this mental popcorn, spontaneous thought...

• 19:24Speaker 01

  Really does at some level require some conscious input. We do have to pay attention, or we have had paid attention at some moment, to have it reappear over and over again, to eventually become a memory, to eventually become this neurons that fire together, wire together. So at some point, if you've had that insight through the course of waking up from the dream, you probably had some aspects of those, that experience, that emotional quality, that conceptual realization at some other point. Or right after you woke up, you put together the elements to make meaning. So the timing, I don't know. I don't know in this particular instance when it could have occurred, but typically the elements have occurred somehow.

• 20:08Tom Bilyeu?

  The applying meaning to it, the story that we tell ourselves, which is a big part of your work and how we get lost in those narratives and applying meaning to things is very interesting and I think profoundly impactful in people's lives. I want to go back to what we were talking about a minute ago, where, so you've got these memories that you're consolidating with the, oh god, what'd you call it, the spontaneous?

• 20:36Speaker 01

  Spontaneous thought.

• 20:37Tom Bilyeu?

  Thought, thank you. So the spontaneous thought, it's popping up. It's a way for us to consolidate those memories. But the part of that that makes this really complicated is that I'm not, I'm not making any attempt to faithfully rewrite it, if I understand this correctly, and hit me if I'm not. But my understanding of the way that memory works is that we pull it up into working memory and we will in some way manipulate it, massage it. Like as we retell it, we may be making it worse, darker, applying that story, applying meaning to it that wasn't there before, making it better, whatever. And then as it gets re-put into long-term memory, as I changed it, I'm now storing that slightly changed variation.

• 21:21Tom Bilyeu?

  And when I think about, and we're bringing a lot of elements together, that's why I find your work so fascinating. There's other, there is a hypothesis that when we sleep, one of the things that we're doing is stripping the emotional intensity from a situation. And people with PTSD basically have constantly elevated cortisol levels. So even as they sleep, and they should be stripping that memory of its like emotional intensity, which is why technically time heals all wounds, it doesn't. It never gets stripped of the emotional intensity. If anything, the emotional intensity gets like hardwired because it's constantly there. So I'm wondering if you've thought about like as we do this spontaneous thought and we're consolidating it in our

• 22:03Tom Bilyeu?

  waking hours and we're manipulating it, if that manipulation was selected for in that, what we're doing is essentially making that memory more usable and sort of damn the truth, just how do I make this memory more usable, which is why, I mean, they've done all kinds of studies about whether an eyewitness actually remembers things correctly. And it's just absolutely terrible. We don't remember things faithfully at all. Do you think that plays into it at all? That the, the brain as a product of evolution has found that actually changing this a bit is a good thing?

• 22:41Speaker 01

  So much richness in everything you just said. Um, I don't know about good thing or bad thing, but it's definitely a thing. It's a thing that happens, right? And, and you described it beautifully. So a memory already exists. We're now going to recall it. So even, even something as innocuous as what I had for breakfast this morning, right? I want to, you know, I love the hotel I'm staying at. I'm having such a great experience. I recall this, this breakfast I had and I like, I have this sort of overlay of it was an overall great experience. So even as I replay in my own mind, the experience of tasting the food, I may infuse it with this layer of overall was such a great experience, right? So there again now, is that the truth of what occurred? What is the truth of what

• 23:25Speaker 01

  occurred? Right? And, and now when I, uh, uh, store that memory again, It's gonna have that aspect overlaid onto it and baked into now what gets pulled up the next time. And these things are constantly mutable, and that's why we think of memory not as this solid thing, but this ever-changing thing, which, first of all, should give us a lot of humility. Like, what we remember, we should be, we should really have like a sense that, well, I think this is the case, but I don't really know, doing the best I can. We're not, we're not actually pressing record when we remember. It's constantly being updated, and this can be a very useful thing.

• 24:04Tom Bilyeu?

  Ah, don't blow past that. I've heard you talk about that, so I know where you're headed. But when you say that we don't press record when we remember something, what do you mean?

• 24:10Speaker 01

  Oh, it's not verbatim. It's not as it occurred. There is no objectivity in the way we remember. There's no point to that. The point of memory is to support our actions in the future. We're helping ourselves out. So if you and I have an interaction, and it's a pleasant one, the main thing I should take away, that I should remember, is that this is a person that I enjoy spending time around. This person is not a threat. This person's not gonna harm me. There's wellness associated with the experience itself. I'm not recording every single moment of what occurred, kind of with a neutrality about it. It's always shaped, and to remember through the course of human evolution, that that

• 24:51Speaker 01

  shaping is really to privilege our maximum learning for the next episodes of our life. It's to fuel the future, it's to benefit the future. We don't actually record, in quotes, we don't actually remember, to savor the past, but only so that we can use that information for the next action in our, in our life.

• 25:12Tom Bilyeu?

  At the risk of really taking us off course, I do have to ask, so you just said something, we're not programmed to savor the past. In my mid-40s, I have now found myself with a sudden wave of nostalgia is a really pleasurable thing, and I hunger for that feeling that nostalgia brings, and I have no idea why. I've never been a backwards-looking person, I've always looked forward in my life, and... Almost all of a sudden, over the last couple of years, it's become this just incredibly potent, wonderful feeling. But it's not true. Like, when I was a kid, I just wanted to be an adult.

• 25:53Tom Bilyeu?

  And so, but now, all of a sudden, I find myself thinking about, oh, my God, the way movies were when I was a kid. Like, it was so amazing. And what is that about? Like, why, if our, so, I love the definition of the human brain as being a prediction machine.

• 26:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:08Tom Bilyeu?

  So, everything it's optimized for is making really useful predictions about what the future is going to bring. So, why is nostalgia, like, why would that feel good?

• 26:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a, I don't, I don't have a great answer for you, but let me just say, let me just re-say something I said a moment ago, which is, it's not built for savoring the past, in the sense that it's some kind of objective recording. But it's capable of savoring. It's capable of nostalgia. And so, are you asking me, sort of, what's the benefit of nostalgia?

• 26:43Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, like, if you, if you had a guess, so, we're this prediction machine.

• 26:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:47Tom Bilyeu?

  We are trying to optimize in a way that allows us to not be eaten by a saber-toothed tiger hiding in the bush, to not get grabbed by a snake, to make sure that our kids make it to adulthood to find mates, all that stuff.

• 27:01Tom Bilyeu?

  But there is something incredibly potent about remembering something specifically from your childhood. And I don't understand why, what possible selection pressure is there for that? Is that around conservatism? I don't know. It's so weird.

• 27:18Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, I think that, kind of more plainly, it's just if you have aspects of your past that have been

• 27:28Speaker 01

  kind of shorthanded as fun, beautiful, fulfilling, et cetera, you can call upon those to model what you might do in the future. That would be a very simple way to put it. Like, when we gather together, and there is real connection and a tradition, for example, it feels fulfilling. That's going to prompt you to probably try to replicate those circumstances in the future. So, I mean, I could go on and on about all the possibilities, but I think that I would probably say what's fascinating is that we are much more than the simple, straightforward.

• 28:09Speaker 01

  Product of wanting to have evolutionary advantage. We've outgrown those sort of functions and anything we say to ourselves that is simply for the purposes of survival is probably wrong because that's in and of itself a story. And again, we have this problem as humans that we're only now retroactively looking at the evolutionary nodes that have led us to what we are now. And that's true for everything. That's true for our understanding of memory. That's true for our understanding of why attention developed. It's true for our predictions regarding why it is that we may have spontaneous thought. We don't really know. What we know is that we are this right now and these are our capabilities and we're

• 28:53Speaker 01

  doing the best we can as neuroscientists to even understand how it works. It's huge amounts of conjecture to say why it developed this way. I'm just gonna put it out there. And also that that limited view that it's for evolutionary survival, it doesn't hold anymore. It gets, it's way more complex.

• 29:08Tom Bilyeu?

  In what way?

• 29:09Speaker 01

  Well, there's just, everything we do is not that simply, the notion even what family is, the notion of what mate is, the notion of what survival is. They're all different now.

• 29:23Tom Bilyeu?

  Do you think that that's a recent phenomenon? Or do you think that we will even, that this was true 200 years ago, we just haven't yet had the tools to discover the truth of all this? Because I definitely, until 90 seconds ago when you said that, just took it sort of as the default assumption that the right way to think about the brain is it's a product of evolution. Everything that it's designed for is, in fact, I've said this a gazillion times, that your brain is designed to make sure that you have children that have children. And that's, you're optimized for that. And so as I think through all the weird things that our brain does, including going to negative things, well, negative things were the things that were more high risk. So of course you had to pay more attention to that because that's how you avoided to get eaten.

• 30:07Tom Bilyeu?

  And of course you wouldn't want to be ostracized by the group because that, you know, could lead to your death. And so you're just optimized to be hyper paranoid about what other people think so that you can fit in. If that isn't the right sort of framing, what is?

• 30:22Speaker 01

  Oh, I don't mean that that's not a useful framing, or that aspects of that probably aren't true. What I'm saying is moment by moment, in the way that we use our minds now, cannot simply be reduced to our evolutionary inheritance and the causes for that inheritance. Like, right now, we don't do things simply for those same reasons, is what I'm saying. Because we're not in the same circumstance. I mean, we're gonna use our mind.

• 30:50Tom Bilyeu?

  But are we dancing to that drum?

• 30:53Speaker 01

  I don't know if I care.

• 30:56Tom Bilyeu?

  Interesting. Do you not ever feel beholden to the way your mind works?

• 31:00Speaker 01

  Well, what I'm saying is, we have to really watch out for a very strong tendency of mind, even as we're thinking about the mind.

• 31:08Tom Bilyeu?

  When you say tendency of mind, you mean...

• 31:11Speaker 01

  Yes, story making. Reducing mental phenomena in a way that would be able to be nicely packaged, recalled, used, and guide our comprehension of what's happening in the moment. That is such a strong need we have. That is our default. And it's a very efficient default. But just again, like I said, have humility about it. This is our story. And science, in some sense, is building complex stories that are theories, where we can predict things to actually see if...

• 31:40Tom Bilyeu?

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• 32:23Tom Bilyeu?

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• 32:42Speaker 01

  We can reproduce certain kinds of phenomena. Um, so I don't know, I guess I'm just saying that the, the complexity of the modern circumstance, the complexity of the use of our brain in novel ways that never existed for our ancestors till maybe even 15 years ago. We never had smartphones before, we didn't have social media. The nature of how the mind gets used in complex and new ways is ever unfolding. And I wouldn't want to, I wouldn't say we have no idea, but I would say that, I don't, I would say we don't know yet how certain primitives, meaning certain kind of um, inheritances that the mind has,

• 33:25Speaker 01

  are now being utilized for the modern purpose. Right? I don't know, I think it's, I think it's, we don't know quite yet. Um, but I don't think there's anything wrong with the way that you're operating, that it makes sense to me that the way that we are driven has some evolutionary basis. I don't think there's any problem with that, but I would just say, eh, put a little asterisk next to that, that, yeah, but we still don't really understand because it's a work in progress and we as humans are trying to observe ourselves as this is all unfolding.

• 33:56Tom Bilyeu?

  I love that. So, I've heard you talk about this before, but I'd love it if you would explain now, what is the risk of having these stories? Does it blind us to something?

• 34:06Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, I mean, it's a very powerful thing. I mean, we've already been doing it even in our conversation, right? We have ideas, concepts. That's in some sense, stories about the way things happen, occur. Very useful packaging of complex information with the chronology, with the narrative, with an experiential or phenomenological perspective. I'm not knocking stories. Stories are great. But, stories are constructed. Stories can, as we already discussed with regard to human memory, stories can be reconstructed. Stories can be altered as we're retelling them.

• 34:43Tom Bilyeu?

  Without us realizing?

• 34:44Speaker 01

  Without us realizing. And, um, you know, I'm a scientist. Stories are hypotheses. And we should kind of keep that in mind. Uh, even as we retell a story that we think is factually just by the book what happened. Eh, maybe, maybe not. Our perspective is going to bias that. So, my caution regarding stories is in our drive, in our...

• 35:07Speaker 01

  Desire to make something have meaning and shorthand it in a way that I can efficiently carry it around. I may lose some aspect of what is useful and what is true. So in the book, I give this example from a dear colleague of mine, a military leader who had this occur to with his unit while they were on this side of a mountain in Afghanistan. And you know, these are real consequences of stories. So the intel that they'd been given, I'm just going to retell it.

• 35:38Tom Bilyeu?

  No, this story is so good, please. This terrifies me. P.S.

• 35:43Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, and think about what's unfolding right now in our world, right? With regard to conflicts that are unfolding. So anyway, the story is that, the story that, that, that I'm reflecting on is this colleague of mine, who was then a Colonel, Colonel Pyatt, he, and he told it to me because it was in his mind, a reason that mindfulness was such a, going to be such a valuable tool for soldiers, including those that he was leading. But what happened was that they were given intel and he was the leader of this, this particular brigade at that point, or battalion, I can't remember what his particular leadership role was. But they were told that on the top of this mountain is an encampment and the encampment is Taliban.

• 36:25Speaker 01

  And all the signs are there, there's small groups, they're, they're organized in this way, they've been roaming around, they just arrived. They are the enemy and they need to be terminated. So essentially he, they had, you know, planes flying above that were just on his command, going to drop a bomb and that group of the enemy was going to be obliterated, obliterated. Well, they all had that story in their mind. And again, as they're approaching this encampment going up the mountain, literally him and his soldiers, that story is, is, is fully present and was going to bias everything that they are seeing. Because if you are told that this is what you're seeing, there's going to be something

• 37:06Speaker 01

  called the confirmation bias, where all the cues that are aligned with that story become more salient to you. You're checking boxes that say, yep, looks like that, looks like that. Anyway, one of his soldiers, who was essentially a scout at the, at the front of this unit walking up. Went all the way up where he could make, he could see, could get a visual confirmation regarding this group and, and he's basically checking the list. Yes, I see young men. Um, I see, you know, that they're, they're roaming about, they're, they're surveying something. And then he saw something that made this, um, then Colonel pause. He said, there are no, I see no weapons.

• 37:46Speaker 01

  And that was, that was weird because if this is truly a Taliban group, that would be very odd for them to be roaming around without weapons on them. So essentially he saw, he noticed what he did not see, which was breaking out of that confirmation bias. And, um, and then he reports back, I see no weapons. So everybody's sort of flagged at this point, like, that doesn't make sense. That's weird. Um, but that alerted the Colonel to say, don't fire, don't, don't drop the bomb on these people. Let's check it out. And that scout went and actually just ran up and tackled these, these guys that were sitting outside. All of a sudden, a group of people walked out of one of the, um, uh, you know, dwellings. And it was this robust woman who is like screaming at them like, get off of my guys.

• 38:29Speaker 01

  This was not a Taliban encampment. This was a Bedouin tribe that had been going there for hundreds of years to let their animals roam, uh, and have food. And then eventually the Colonel made it up there. They actually sat with the leadership of this tribe. And, and you know, he recall, I recall him telling me, you know, it was one guy that was not biased by his own story. That is the reason these people are alive right now, consequential. And the thing that he thought was key was that the soldier's ability to remove himself from the story and actually get the raw data of what was occurring is the thing that made him say, no weapons.

• 39:12Speaker 01

  So if we could get that skill, the more people, it can be very powerful, especially more soldiers in the context of his line of work. That could be very powerful because they would have more opportunities to break free of the constraints that stories put on us in our thinking and even in our perception. Um, to hopefully not just save lives, but to actually improve the fullness of what we experience.

• 39:35Tom Bilyeu?

  Reminds me that famous quote, it doesn't matter what you look at, it matters what you see. And I've seen this at play in business a lot where people, they have an idea in their head and you don't realize how much that's like filling in the gaps, right? So, and I think most people don't understand, you talk about this in the book, if I remember correctly, that even your vision, like you're actually seeing clearly this really tiny amount of your visual field, like 2% or whatever, is clear. Everything else is the brain filling it in. Like there is where the optic nerve actually connects to the eye, as you well know, there's just a blank spot, but none of us perceive the blank spot. Your brain is drawing it in. It's crazy. It's crazy.

• 40:18Speaker 01

  It is.

• 40:18Tom Bilyeu?

  And so when I think about, and you tell another story in the book, that's only tangentially related, but I'll, I'll bring them together, which was the guy who called in the worst friendly fire strike in US history or something. And it was because he changed the battery on his coordinate device. And even though he knew that when you change the batteries, the, it will like re-put your base coordinates or whatever. And he knew that, forgot, does it, calls in the strike on his own people because he forgot that it changed. And I just thought, oh my God, that's so, your brain is like, oh, cool, I know where they are. I've got the data. It's right there. Cool. It's all connected. Oh, let me change the batteries.

• 41:03Tom Bilyeu?

  And then, yep, okay, it's connected. I already ran through that. So you have like it, the story locked in your mind that I've already done it. I've already checked. I know this is good. And so now your brain just like paints it. Yep, there's the coordinates. We're all good. Drop the bomb and whoa, like it is just really terrifying, even to what you were saying earlier, that part of why you're telling the story is to shrink the complexity into something that you can carry around.

• 41:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:28Tom Bilyeu?

  But if you can't get outside of that, it, it is really distressing how. I'm sure if you had like, okay, you guys are looking at the scene, close your eyes, don't look again. What kind of weapons are they carrying? Well, the one guy had an M60 or AK-47, whatever they would normally carry, the Russian era weapons. And then, nope, you actually didn't see anything because none of them have a weapon, but your brain is so convinced that you saw it. So I teach a class for business leaders and one of the things is about this sort of contextualized differently, but you have to have a story to move forward because you need something that's simplified enough to give you clarity that you can impart that clarity to other people so that you can create this forward momentum.

• 42:13Tom Bilyeu?

  And as the leader, you need to intoxicate everyone with your certainty. But oh secretly, you better go off into a corner and go, is this really right? Because if you don't have the story, you can't get people moving, even yourself. But if you get sucked in so deeply to the story that you forget it's a story, then you won't actually check to see if it's working. And it's this really weird part of the human psyche.

• 42:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And by the way, I think that I love that you do that because I think that that's such a useful thing to tell leaders because and it's atypical. Most people aren't thinking that it might be have a better story or guide them in a way that makes them buy into your story more. But the fact that you should question and reacquaint yourself with the fact that you've constructed this story really gold information, I think for leaders. But the thing to remember is that it's not like you can have a story or not have a story. You can go back and forth into the mode of being in the story mode. It's just that you have to be able to step outside of it to even remember that it exists. And that aspect of our functioning to step outside of a story is very hard to do.

• 43:25Speaker 01

  And most of us don't even think that it is worthy of doing. And even if we want to do it. It's hard to do it. So part of what I think the power of something like mindfulness meditation is, just from an attentional point of view, is that it trains us to be able to get into that mode, that observational mode, which we can do at a distance to watch, but we can also do it while we're actually in it. Like, we can do it from this sort of more embodied perspective. Oh, this is what this story feels like. So it can be both at a distance or within, but it's taking an observational stance. And when we take an observational stance, we can actually see the structure of the story. And that is very powerful.

• 44:09Speaker 01

  Because now we see the scaffolding that we've built. And we can make a choice. Like, does this scaffolding actually hold true or not? And we can do this moment by moment. And even as you're guiding people, if you realize, ah, this aspect of the story that I've constructed is actually not going to serve these people, or is entirely incorrect, you can rebuild it. But if you don't know that you're in it, and that it's driving everything you're doing, there's no chance you're going to even attempt to observe and then rebuild as needed.

• 44:37Tom Bilyeu?

  Facts. So how do people develop meta-attention?

• 44:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. You know, I think the shorthand would be, it's not just about reframing it, because sometimes people are like, I gotta hone my story. It's about this other term I like to use, deframing it. It's like you're just, and part of deframing is acknowledging the framework itself. Yeah, I mean, meta-attention, or what I would say, meta-awareness. So this is awareness of the ongoing contents and processes in your mind, moment by moment. Very, very powerful thing, just having that awareness. And I wish it was a quick fix to cultivate this, but it actually does train, it does require training. I mean, but there are in-the-moment things that you can do to, to become meta-aware.

• 45:22Tom Bilyeu?

  But it's important for people to know it is possible. Like, you actually can get better.

• 45:26Speaker 01

  Oh, you absolutely can better, can get better. And even if before you've really cultivated, you can do it in the moment. So, you know, I'm just thinking back to the view outside of your Beautiful home and also the title of my book Peak Mind, right? So in some sense, when you see the term Peak Mind, it's like the pinnacle of something. But what I actually, the view outside actually reminded me of why I wrote the, why I liked the title Peak Mind. Because in many ways, a Peak Mind is a mind that has the point of view of the vista from the peak. Not just arriving somewhere, but actually seeing the landscape. Which can be very powerful.

• 46:07Speaker 01

  So the in the moment way to have meta-awareness would be essentially kind of getting a sense of what the landscape is. Whether that's from a ridge above or, you know, I always think when I talk to my kids about this, it's like, imagine you're like a traffic helicopter hovering above and you're reporting down on what's occurring. In moments where you feel locked in or you want to just check yourself of like, is this, is this correct what I'm actually experiencing? You can take that, that kind of distanced perspective. And that's all we're talking about right now, something called psychological distancing. And what you can do in that moment is kind of say, what are the facts right now? What am I witnessing right now? What is the landscape before me right now?

• 46:50Speaker 01

  And reporting that can kind of, like you were saying before about memory, it can kind of reduce the emotional control or overlay that the circumstances can have, especially if there's a lot of reactivity. Because essentially now I'm not Amishi experiencing fear, confusion, rage, anger, whatever it is, I'm talking about this person, Amishi, who is experiencing those things. And that can be extremely powerful. So, you know, I would say start by moments where you feel stuck to take that bird's eye view or drone's view or traffic helicopter view.

• 47:26Tom Bilyeu?

  Can you give people an example? So in the book, you talk about somebody walking by you, they don't even look at you, and you relayed what that is? When you strip story and emotion? And I was like, whoa, that, it is, it is a startling level of difference that I think people, once you're not just overlaying a different story, you're just no story.

• 47:47Speaker 01

  No story.

• 47:48Tom Bilyeu?

  What, what does that sound like?

• 47:49Speaker 01

  It's like just the facts, just give me the facts, what occurred? Knowing with humility that like I'm gonna always be biased. I'm just gonna accept that I'm gonna be biased. But so the, the, the very trivial example, but you know, I'm sure at some point in our lives, some, most of us have experienced something like this. Where you're walking down the hall and for whatever reason, the person walking toward you, you know, you might even have a, like kind of a warmth toward the fact that somebody's passing you by and, or passing by you and you might even wanna like smile or just say hello or something kind of neutral, pro-social. Uh, and you notice that the person is kind of angrily averting their eyes. Angerly, I already did an overlay. The person is averting their eyes and walking past you.

• 48:31Speaker 01

  And the thought that probably would emerge is, why is this person being a jerk to me? Or did I do something to offend this person? Or, so all this, all these ideas start proliferating regarding why this occurred. And, and then you might even go on to make a story about it. Oh, it's because probably I took that bagel at the last time we had breakfast and he's still pissed at me that, whatever the story is that you make up. You created a full-on, uh, story regarding why you've had this particular interaction. But now let's take this kind of dis psychologically-distanced perspective. And the first thing is the truth.

• 49:10Speaker 01

  You really have no idea, you really truly have no idea why this particular set of circumstances has occurred in this moment. There's no certainty. Everything that you think you're certain about, you created in your own mind. And then relay what actually transpired. A human was walking in the direction opposite to the direction I was walking. Eye contact was not made. Uh, facial expressions that were expected were not occurring. Uh, expectations were not melt, met. And, uh, this human mind created a whole bunch of proliferating concepts to make sense of this episode. That's what occurred. So that just stating it that way, all of a sudden you realize, oh, there's a world of possibilities of why that could have occurred.

• 49:55Speaker 01

  And, and if we get better at this, we can actually become more observant as we're experiencing things like this. So for example, you know, the next time you now are walking down the hall and something like that happens, you might actually try to observe more with that curiosity and openness and not framing anything. You might notice, oh my gosh, that person looks like they're actually bleeding, they cut themselves, or whatever it is that could occur. You become more attuned to the novel features with the curiosity and you're not so locked in to the particular set of things. That's such a trivial example, but I think that, you know, from, from the kinds of groups that you speak to too, from a leadership perspective, this is very, very powerful to be able to take that distanced view.

• 50:38Tom Bilyeu?

  No doubt, so important. I had a guy on the show named Donald Hoffman. He's got a whole hypothesis that not only is the world not real, meaning that it, it isn't as you perceive it. It couldn't possibly be as you perceive it. And the, he gave an example that hit me so hard and I have remembered it like, like right at the forefront of my brain since he said it, which is reality is the number of photons falling on an object that you're looking at. And he was like, but you don't perceive it as there's this many are, you know, RGB, it's or CMYK, it's like this many in this color spectrum, this many in this. He was like, you perceive it as blue, as black, as white, whatever.

• 51:20Tom Bilyeu?

  And he was like, that is so abstracted from what is real. And once you realize you're layering meaning on top of meaning on top of meaning, like even just the, the, the experience of walking towards somebody, it's already layered with this abstractness of your brain, only having eyes, nose, ears, touch, you know, pressure sensation, heat sensation, things like that, which is a narrow, narrow, narrow, like the amount of what we call visible light is only point zero zero three five percent of the available electromagnetic spectrum. So we're already in this just obscenely narrow band of what's happening.

• 52:05Tom Bilyeu?

  And then on top of that, you're layering all of this meaning and. You use the word simulation in the book. And I'm obsessed with that. Longtime viewers of this show will know that I resonate. I was like, simulation? Indeed. Once people understand that you really are a brain in a vat. It's just that the vat happens to be your skull. Then you begin to realize that, whoa, like I am brick by brick constructing an artificial, I'll put that in quotes, but an artificial reality. And the ability to, as much as useful, like I don't often think about the world as photons falling on an object.

• 52:48Tom Bilyeu?

  But the more layers of abstraction that you can recognize you have added to this, the more likely you are to be open to what's actually happening and therefore can have a more useful response.

• 53:01Speaker 01

  Totally. And I love that. And yeah, Don Hoffman is a hero in, you know, are you talking about the professor at UC Irvine?

• 53:10Tom Bilyeu?

  I don't know if he's at UC Irvine. This is a very good quote, probably.

• 53:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, anyway, this notion of reality is constructed and frankly, a hallucination is sort of these kinds of ideas that he's talking about these days and coming up with the theorems that people have a hard time kind of arguing against. So I think it's very, it's very interesting. But what you described, I think, is such a beautiful way to, again, have humility regarding everything we perceive, think, ways we behave. That is a particular slice that is wholly constructed. And the thing that I'm interested in, because yes, if we can accept that, we orient with

• 53:54Speaker 01

  a lot more curiosity and awareness of our lack of knowing about a lot of things. But the reality is that sometimes we do get locked in. And sometimes we do ruminate. And sometimes the story feels so real or the memory so salient and damaging and harmful or problematic that it, it paralyzes us. So on the one hand, I'm all for kind of getting to the root of the constructed nature of reality, which it is, and sometimes we get little glimmers of that in very compelling ways like, ooh, this is totally made up. Or this doesn't have to be this way. It was constructed this way.

• 54:34Speaker 01

  Though I think that that's an important thing to be in touch with, the other thing is we need just practical tools. So though it may be that the mind is constructing these things, there are ways in which the mind does, has propensities towards certain kinds of mental processes that can really not serve us. And so if we can train our mind to not just become aware of what's going on, but to have more control of our, for example, attentional capacity, something that I study in my lab, it can really serve us, even if it is the case that this is ultimately a giant hallucination. Life is itself hallucination. Even so, if I notice that I'm fearful of walking outside my home, or of a crippling

• 55:17Speaker 01

  anxiety about something, or a memory that just flattens me, I have to live my life. And so it's almost like the absolute and the relative, and we're constantly kind of gonna have to go back and forth between them. And the surprising thing I've found is that the same things that help us deal with the challenges of our humanness actually lead us more and more to a fundamental understanding of the nature of things, which-

• 55:44Tom Bilyeu?

  Tell me more. How so?

• 55:46Speaker 01

  Well, because once we realize, you know, everything you've described with regard to the small sliver of reality that we actually have access to because of our perceptual systems, and so we're limited in that way. But there's another thing that we haven't talked about yet, which is that even the nature of brain processes, which you could say, okay, my brain processes are limited because, you know, my eyes can only see a certain amount of the visual spectra, or I only have two hands, I don't have ten hands, or, you know, memories are gonna be formed in this way, whatever. You know, in some sense, the-

• 56:25Speaker 01

  The reality is that we have to contend with time. Meaning whatever brain process is happening in a moment, there's a contingent nature of what is gonna happen in the next moment, just based on what occurred. So, we're limited and we're in some sense helpless. Even if our notion of what free will is can become challenged. Because if what I do in the next moment is bound by what I just did, am I truly free, ever? So I'm now adding another layer of limitations in our functioning and what we're gonna be tied to, just because of the physics in some sense.

• 57:06Speaker 01

  So we talk about this with regard to brain microstates. And we know that there's certain configurations in which the brain is for, let's say forty milliseconds, forty thousandth of a second, that can predict its likely configuration in the next microstate. So that, that is gonna be a problem as well. So I don't, I mean, I didn't know where our conversation was gonna go. I mean, I, I think this is fun. But to go back to what I was saying regarding the insights we can gain to help us in our, in destructive and, and difficult mind states through something like contemplative practice, not only can help us deal with those destructive and problematic mind states, but they can start connecting us to the kind of fundamental nature

• 57:50Speaker 01

  of what reality is, in its constraints, in its sort of impermanent nature, in its highly interconnected and dynamic nature, in its constructed nature, and they're related to each other. So, I don't know, is this making sense, what I'm, what I'm saying?

• 58:09Tom Bilyeu?

  Definitely. And I think that as we get into the specifics of mindfulness.

• 58:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:15Tom Bilyeu?

  One, why does it work? And as somebody who thankfully discovered this, I don't know how many years ago now, eight years, something like that, it changed my life. Like, that's an easy one to draw a line in the sand and say, okay, before this and after this.

• 58:31Speaker 01

  Oh, really?

• 58:31Tom Bilyeu?

  But, oh, yes. But, one, I think it's worth talking about the flashlight to define attention and mindfulness and then understand, going back to the idea of meta-awareness, how we practice, like at a mechanistic level, how do we practice the getting back up to the peak?

• 58:53Speaker 01

  Easy. Um, but no, I think that that's great. I'm glad that you wanna wanna talk about this. And I'm so happy to hear that this is something that's touched your life personally as a tool for your own leadership and, you know, sense of

• 59:05Tom Bilyeu?

  Profoundly.

• 59:07Tom Bilyeu?

  Emotional well-being, that would be the right thing. I don't know how people, if they're pursuing something big, I don't know how you manage it unless you have meditation. I really don't. Like, I would not have been able to pursue the goals that I pursue without it. No way. It would have stopped being fun. I would have stopped, for sure.

• 59:29Speaker 01

  So, I know this is your show, but I want to ask you a question. What do you think it is that it gave you in practicing that allowed you to not stop and to keep going?

• 59:39Tom Bilyeu?

  The easy analogy is the brain and body function similarly to a car. And if you're stepping on the accelerator,

• 59:52Tom Bilyeu?

  it can be fine if you're already in fifth gear. But if you're in first gear and you stamp on the accelerator, you rev into the red, it breaks the engine and and you're done. And that's burnout. That's people just like they're constantly running the engine in the red. And at the, not at the risk, I'm going to mix metaphors. I've always referred to this as background radiation. And what happens is you're just like, ah, I feel agitated. I don't, I don't feel comfortable. I feel a sense of something's wrong or something's about to go wrong, but I don't know what it is. And that's stress. That's anxiety. That's like that.

• 1:00:32Tom Bilyeu?

  I'm no longer even sure. I've just been running in the red so long that my body's just expecting a problem. And with meditation, what I found is it's shifting gears or it's letting off the accelerator may be the better way to think about it. So, in my life, I have been incredibly stressed. I've dealt with things where hundreds of millions of dollars are on the line. And I have never once been more than 45 minutes away from total equanimity. Because I learned how to breathe from my diaphragm, and it's purely mechanistic. Like, I'm not thinking anything. I'm literally, I mean, it's exactly what you tell people to do in your book, so none of it will be surprising to you. And it'll be good for you to walk people through it, but

• 1:01:14Tom Bilyeu?

  I am from by breathing from my diaphragm and just reminding myself every time I have a spontaneous thought, just come back to the breath, come back to the breath. And there's no magic. It is, to quote you, there is no blissful state. There's just coming back to the breath. And in doing that, my background radiation just drops. And so it's taking your foot off the accelerator, it's shifting into the right gear, whatever way you want to think about it. But if you don't do that, what ends up happening is each day you're just pressing on the gas a little bit harder, a little bit harder, a little bit harder. And so you're revving farther and farther and farther. And then all of a sudden, you're just like, I don't want to fucking do this. And you just like, you, you burn out, you quit your job, you're huddled in the corner

• 1:01:59Tom Bilyeu?

  crying, you're whatever, like all the things that humans go through. But in your pocket at all times is the ability to let it go. And then you just decompress. It's, it is so basic and yet so profound.

• 1:02:16Speaker 01

  Oh, I love that you described all that. I mean, I think that it's very helpful for people to hear. Uh, me saying as a scientist who studies in the lab is one thing, but you as somebody who not only has been practicing, but can show the actionable benefits.

• 1:02:30Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, but your teeth weren't numb. You've got some pretty like personal level.

• 1:02:34Speaker 01

  I do, I definitely do have a personal level insights, but I'm just saying you made it come alive in such a tangible way. And I love the way you put it, 45 minutes from equanimity. I love that. Um, and it kind of, I will definitely talk about all the things you said, but I want to just touch on something that you said that I think, uh, connects to all the more esoteric topics we've been talking about already. Um, so for example, you know, we talked about the constructed nature of reality. We talked about conceptual elaboration. We talked about story making and meaning making. All of those are what I would say is this revving up process. These are active, energetically costly things that we do by default. And that proliferate, not just construct and create, but proliferate our experience of stress.

• 1:03:19Speaker 01

  And so by what you consider the, you know, in some sense, I would say, simple but not always easy and very elegant act of focus back on the breath. What you allowed yourself to do in that moment is take a break from that constructing and proliferating and story making. And the nature of the mind with something called working memory is that unless we are actively keeping the contents of our conscious experience refreshed and rewritten moment by moment, they will fade away.

• 1:03:48Tom Bilyeu?

  Oh, my God. No one's, I've never heard anybody say that before. That's so true.

• 1:03:54Speaker 01

  And I think you just tapped into that, the power of that, that if I'm not feeding this and I'm focusing on the breath instead, now what the only thing on my mental whiteboard, as I like to call working memory, it's gonna be that. It's not gonna be the whole castle or doomsday scenario that I've built up in my mind. And the reason I love the 45 minutes idea, and I would say in 45 seconds probably for you at this point, when you feel an edge, you might be able to kinda-

• 1:04:21Tom Bilyeu?

  Really gnarly, it takes time.

• 1:04:23Speaker 01

  Right, but you could probably say, I have that tool. Even if you're not gonna be able to use that tool in that moment, because you're pretty spun up, you know you've got that tool. There is that place, and that place is right here, right now. That's the kind of irony of it. There's nowhere to go. You're actually not going anywhere. That's the place. You're meeting the moment right now. And when you actually get in touch with this moment, things do fall away. The constructed nature of reality and those doomsday ideas that are pumping cortisol through your body can take a little bit of a break. So then, you know, back to your question of like, well, how do you do that? You've obviously been doing it, so you know how to do it. But I'll just describe from sort of the

• 1:05:08Speaker 01

  attentional mechanistic point of view of how to do that. Because in some sense, showing up to the present moment is this weird journey. Because the reality is, that's all we have. All we have is right now. Our entire lives are just right now, and now, right now. And now, right now. But because we have this very powerful simulation machine that we carry around between our ears, um, we can hijack ourselves away in time, in place. So something called mental time travel. And we can hijack ourselves away from even my own mind. So it's not just time travel, it's mind travel.

• 1:05:52Speaker 01

  And both of those together are the best ways to simulate reality. Can you describe mind travel? Um, uh, mind travel would be me, for example, right now, being in your mind and saying, what is he's thinking about the way that I'm phrasing this sentence, is he, is he understanding it? So I'm, it's, it's a way to change perspectives so that you're actually seeing the world through somebody else's eyes. And oftentimes that can be very, very powerful and socially and emotionally intelligent, like perspective taking. But can also be very damaging when you layer into the notion of judgment or um, other bad things that other people can do to you. But now they haven't done it, but you've, you've kind of put yourself in their mind so that you're experiencing it from that perspective.

• 1:06:37Speaker 01

  Um, so anyway, I think that that's just something to really remember, that all we have is right now. And anytime we're not feeling right now, it's because the simulation that we've generated our own mind has taken us away. From my point of view, mindfulness is not really, has nothing to do, mindfulness of breathing has nothing to do with manipulation of the breath, having a different CO2 to O2 level, no, it's nothing about that. It's the way that you're going to make your attention, which is present centered and narrowed with this particular breath-related sensation as the anchor. And so you're taking that flashlight of attention, you've decided that I'm going to have the goal right now of focusing on breath-related sensations. And then you're just going to observe what is occurring within the sensory

• 1:07:22Speaker 01

  phenomena that arise tied to the breath. So, very, very simple instructions. Pay attention to breath-related sensations. But, because of everything we've talked about. Yeah, everything we've talked about. Fifty percent of our waking moments, our mind wanderers, spontaneous thought is the nature of the mind. We have a strong propensity for story-making, editorializing, emotionally reacting. So there's a second thing we have to do. You know, it's like, we can't just say, focus on the breath and then we're done. Because within nanoseconds of deciding to focus on the breath, thought pops up, you know, got an itch, got something that's not breath-related sensations, which should be, where I'm pointing that flashlight, will arise.

• 1:08:04Speaker 01

  And it is likely that that will pull my attention away. The flashlight will no longer be focused on breath-related sensations, but it's yanked away by something else. So the second instruction is, notice. Notice what is unfolding, and that's that meta-awareness piece that you were talking about. Become meta-aware of your moment-to-moment experience. So you have a goal, and you know what you're supposed to do in the service of that goal, but notice what is actually transpiring. And then, so it's focus, notice. And the third step is essentially redirect. If there's a mismatch between your goal of focusing your attention on the breath, and your attention's off somewhere else, redirect it back.

• 1:08:47Speaker 01

  And through that simple act of focus, notice, redirect, and I think you beautifully described it with your, what you do when, when you feel that, that teetering toward burnout, when the accelerator and is really just gonna go when you're in the wrong gear, is it, it provides a safe, stable, presence-centered way of making the mind, which, which gives it a break from all that elaborating and editorializing that we do. And that's pretty much all we need. And if we could do it for, from our research, twelve minutes a day, it's a great way to kind of reset our mind.

• 1:09:25Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, it is profoundly transformational. And you said in words, something that is just fundamentally true, but I've never heard anybody articulate it. I never thought about it before. But if you don't feed the process of worrying and catastrophizing and projecting all this negative stuff back at yourself from the other person's perspective, it goes away. Like by default. It's just, all you have to do is not feed it.

• 1:09:54Speaker 01

  Yes. But often what we do, instead of disengaging from that momentum, is we'll do some other kind of conceptual process. I'll push it away. I'll think about it differently. I'll not think about it. So don't think about that troubling thought. Don't think about that troubling thought. Guess what's most prominent on your mental whiteboard? The troubling thought. Because you have to keep in mind not to think about the thing, and that's the thing. So it seems like a straightforward thing. And I love that you appreciate that point, that essentially, just allowing the mind to be in its kind of natural state, that those conceptual processes, which are effortful and require cognitive fuel to produce, will fall away.

• 1:10:40Speaker 01

  They may arise again. But they can, they, well, they will arise again.

• 1:10:44Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, I was gonna say, oof.

• 1:10:45Speaker 01

  But they can, they can pass away without you having to push away or shove it in a corner or scold yourself for the fact that they've arisen. And we need to practice being able to let it pass away without messing with it, without going in there and tinkering with it. Just really, like, foot off the pedal, in some sense, and let it just fade. It gives us a lot more freedom in the next moment of what we do.

• 1:11:14Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, it is utterly fascinating to me how, one, how well it works just to breathe from your diaphragm. But two, the, people have been saying this for thousands of years and trying to get people to understand a thing that I call frame of reference.

• 1:11:37Tom Bilyeu?

  And Dave, have you heard David Foster Wallace's talk, This is Water?

• 1:11:41Speaker 01

  Oh, you're in for a treat.

• 1:11:43Tom Bilyeu?

  It is so good. Now, the very sad punchline is that he ends up committing suicide. But his, the talk is about how your mind is constructing a reality. It is so ever-present that there's, there's nothing to peel at. There's no way to get underneath it. There's no way to see that it's a construct. That all of the feelings and everything that you have, like it's, it's what water is to a fish. And water is so taken for granted by the fish that they don't, they don't have a perception of water, not water. They're just, it just is. And once people realize, wait a second, this milieu that I live in, that seems to be the truth.

• 1:12:27Tom Bilyeu?

  It's just, Tom, they're just facts. I'm just recognizing the truth of the world. That, no, no, it's all a construct, all of it, everything, every bit. It's all fake, I'll put that in quotes, because it, you know, we're all experiencing it. And that experience is in and of itself real, but it's all a construct. And that if you just stop feeding it, you will slide back to neutral. And because, and this is the same reason that people pursue money and fame. Money's amazing. It's more powerful than people think, but it's not what they've been told. And so they're going to get it and they're going to be very confused that it does not make them feel better about themselves. Because that's not what money does. But because money is useful, people keep pursuing it because it actually does have utility.

• 1:13:12Tom Bilyeu?

  Same with fame. Fame has utility. It's not going to change how you feel about yourself, which of course is the only thing that ultimately matters in life. But because it has utility and people will pursue it, but it will be very confusing when they get it. Because they were pursuing it for utility that it cannot provide. And Once you understand that all of the construct that your brain is coughing up, all of the spontaneous thought, all of the worry, all of the fear, all of the projection, all of it, it has utility. And so you, in some ways, you need to do it. But you have to recognize, oh, this is a tool. And right now, this tool, I'm hitting myself in the face with this hammer. And while the tool remains useful, smashing myself in the face is counterproductive.

• 1:13:57Tom Bilyeu?

  And so we get to the point where, you know, to a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. And so we just, we worry, we catastrophize, we do all of this stuff. And because it has utility, we keep doing it, but we don't understand that we're now using it in ways that are just wildly self-destructive. And to stick with the hammer metaphor, you, you can actually set the hammer down. And that the way you set the hammer down is so simple that it was already written about 3,000 years ago, whatever, and people still have to like re-encounter it from a thousand different angles because it is so hard. It's hard.

• 1:14:37Tom Bilyeu?

  Just, uh, if I know that my brain, to quote your long meditating friend, is going to monkey mind every seven seconds, no matter how long I do this,

• 1:14:49Tom Bilyeu?

  it's hard.

• 1:14:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. But I think that, um,

• 1:14:58Speaker 01

  a lot of things are hard and worth pursuing. And thankfully, we don't have to figure out strategies completely, uh, on our own to figure out how to do it. That's where the traditions can be helpful as well. Because things like focusing on the breath is one approach, but there's a whole bunch of tools we can lean on of how to-

• 1:15:21Tom Bilyeu?

  Are there some other ones?

• 1:15:22Speaker 01

  Well, for example, first of all, you could pick some other object. You could focus on the sensations of walking. You could focus on the way that you taste food. You can embody the moment in multiple ways. You can also train the mind to take this observational stance with practices like open monitoring practice, or in the book I call it the river of thought, where you're taking really a steady seat, you're steadying yourself, usually it requires having built these concentrative practices, concentrative capacities first, and then just allowing, observing, practicing observing the mind without engaging with it.

• 1:16:01Tom Bilyeu?

  How do you get that distance?

• 1:16:04Speaker 01

  Again, I think it is practice.

• 1:16:07Tom Bilyeu?

  But is that distance cultivated by returning to the feel of walking or the breath? Same thing?

• 1:16:14Speaker 01

  No, no, no, it's a very different function. So the two kind of broad categories of, so so far, remember in the way that I talked about the mindfulness of breathing, I talked about essentially this focus, notice, redirect. In that mode of practicing, something called concentrative mindfulness practice, there is a target object, and there are things that are non-targets, basically the thing you should not be focusing on. And what we do when we practice that kind of breath-focused or whatever, walking-focused practice is there's what we call signal and noise, right? So the signal is the target, the thing that you should be focusing on. Everything else is noise. And when I'm on the wrong target, I'm on the non-target, I'm in the noise, I want to get back to the signal.

• 1:16:59Speaker 01

  So that's why we focus on the thing that's the signal. We notice when we're off-target and we come back. That still requires sort of this conflict experience of like, ah, I'm not on the target right now, I'm doing something, like it's wrong what I'm feeling. And that's a very potent thing that we experience thousands of times in our day, when there's a goal, we're not on it, or something happens not in the way we expect or want. And then we course correct. We either change the goal, or we correct our behavior so that it aligns with the goal. But all of that requires a level of engagement with the mental processes that are occurring because we're going to muck with them. If we're on something else, we're going to do something about it to get back. This, so that's all what we'd call concentrated practices.

• 1:17:44Speaker 01

  What you're, what we're talking about now is tapping into a whole other mode of practicing called open monitoring practices. And this one essentially, we're dialing down the signal to noise ratio. There is nothing that is signal and there's nothing that is noise. You know, in the, in the concentrated practices, when we mind wander, that's noise. I'm making an error in focusing on the mind wandering content. I need to get back to signal. So here, even mind wandering is not a problem. Because what we're doing is, because there is no signal and no, no noise, what I'm doing is taking an observational stance to whatever arises without grabbing at it, without mucking

• 1:18:27Speaker 01

  with it, without doing anything about it, or even evaluating its nature, just acknowledging its presence. So sometimes people talk about this as, you know, if you think about the way we make the mind like a vast open sky, thoughts, feelings, sensations are like clouds passing. You know, that's one kind of metaphor, or, or I like to think of it as sort of like you're sitting, sitting at a strong giant boulder on the river, on a riverbank, and you're just sitting there. And all the occurrences in your mind, all the contents of your phenomenology are just passing away in the river. They're, they're, they're faint, and they become prominent, and then they can become faint again. We're not chasing a fish, we're not splashing in the water, we're not grabbing onto leaves, we're not trying to move around the boulders so the water flows differently.

• 1:19:12Speaker 01

  We are just sitting and observing. And this is a very, we can do this, but it's a very unnatural, meaning it doesn't feel like the, the typical thing we've trained throughout our course, the course of our life to do. Most of that time, when we notice a thought, we do something with it. We have another thought, and then another thought, or we act differently based on the thought. Instead, we're just noticing the arising of it.

• 1:19:39Speaker 01

  Not participating and letting it fade off that whiteboard. Um, so that's the way.

• 1:19:44Tom Bilyeu?

  Really hard. I'm not gonna lie.

• 1:19:46Speaker 01

  It is very hard.

• 1:19:47Tom Bilyeu?

  The uh, come back to the breath.

• 1:19:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:19:49Tom Bilyeu?

  But to just be like, oh, there's a panic, striking thought, but I'm not going to grab it. It's like, it hits me so viscerally.

• 1:19:58Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:19:59Tom Bilyeu?

  Oftentimes, I will feel it even before the thought.

• 1:20:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:20:03Tom Bilyeu?

  Forms into something useful. I'll just be like, oh, that's a massive burst of anxiety. What, oh, okay, that's why I just felt that.

• 1:20:10Speaker 01

  So, I, I completely appreciate what you're saying, that it's hard. It, it is hard. It is hard. It's, it's going against the grain of the way that most of our cognitive functions have been kind of honed throughout our lives. Um, and, and, and like you were saying before, the hammer is a useful tool. Um, but you can let go of it. That's essential. What we're doing is we're saying, let's let go of it. So, the next time, even the thought that this is hard, notice that that too is a thought. The evaluation of the experience is part of it. So, it's, it, it's just practicing it. And, um, it, we usually want to have this occur after we've steadied ourselves. When we, when we have practiced the breath-related focused or concentrative approaches,

• 1:20:55Speaker 01

  because it can get very unstable. You're like, where am I? What is going on? And if you feel like you can't, you either feel like a instability, or you're definitely grabbed onto something, you can always go back to the breath and kind of restabilize and then it'll open back up again. So, you know, if, if it feels like it's hard, but you've been practicing concentrative practices for a long time, um, do it just out of curiosity. And when you notice that something has gripped you, ah, there I am being gripped. Let go of the hammer, just sitting right here. And when you get like, it, it, it leans on everything we've cultivated through the concentrated practice, but it would be really useful to see how it impacts you.

• 1:21:39Speaker 01

  Um, because it gives you a whole other tool and you don't have to journey into this space for long. Even, you know, microseconds of just letting go can let those conceptual structures kind of fall away and you can rebuild again as you want to. But it's like you were saying before, uh, it gives you a chance to know you are a fish in water. Uh, and that there is something besides the water in which you are surrounded.

• 1:22:04Tom Bilyeu?

  Yes.

• 1:22:06Tom Bilyeu?

  Why doesn't positivity work? Why can't I just, and this is one thing, it's never worked for me. And your explanation may be the reason why. But people will be like, okay, you're about to do something that's really anxiety provoking. But there's really no difference between the physiological response to something that is provoking anxiety and something that you're excited about. And so it's heart racing, you're feeling flush, there's butterflies in your stomach. And I'm like, eh. So they're like, just tell yourself it's exciting. And I'm like, man, anxiety does not feel the same to me. But okay, I'm gonna try it. And I tried it, and I tried it, and I'm like, this doesn't work.

• 1:22:46Tom Bilyeu?

  Like, I can build the facade up for a minute, and then it just comes back at me again. No, this, actually, I'm really nervous about this.

• 1:22:56Tom Bilyeu?

  You talk about why that doesn't work. Why doesn't it work?

• 1:23:01Speaker 01

  Um, there are so many reasons that that can be challenging. But I'm curious, even the way that you just described it, right? That it's like, you wanna reframe the experience from a different point of view. No, this isn't actually anxiety in a bad way. This is like, you're about to go down the steep part of the roller coaster. It's fun. And you're like, eh, no, it's not fun, because I'm not going down the steep part of a roller coaster. I'm in this very massive, you know, this very difficult situation. And like, you can't kind of override that, right? Because you know what the reality is of the experiences you're perceiving it in the moment.

• 1:23:39Speaker 01

  But I will say that, you know, there is evidence that positive psychology and positive cultivation of positive emotion can be beneficial. There are ways in which we can focus on the good, focus on aspects of our experience.

• 1:23:53Tom Bilyeu?

  Focus on, I'm with you, a thousand percent. I'm talking about the trying to make believe that something that is scary and actually consequential is like, oh no, it's all good, this is just excitement.

• 1:24:08Speaker 01

  Right. So the whole, it's all good, it's like, you feel like you're lying to yourself, like, no, it's not all good. Anyway, so the perspective that I can talk about it from, I just wanna mention that, you know, I'm not saying that all cultivation of positive emotion is a fruitless thing. There are many ways in which it can be fruitful, especially if it's an underemphasized aspect of our experience. So if we tend to, like you already were talking about, gravitate toward the negative because we've been... I don't know, there's a strong evolutionary advantage to doing that, so we kind of tend to do that, to remind ourselves that we have that propensity and then focus on the thing we don't tend to focus on, which is the good, right? So, there are benefits to doing that. What we're talking about, I don't think, is that. It's not that there are aspects of the experience that we're disregarding.

• 1:24:53Speaker 01

  This is really that the framing we're using, we're saying, "Use a different frame and figure out a way to be okay with that new framing and reinterpret your physiologic sensations from that new frame." First of all, it is a very energetically costly thing to do that. It takes so much attentional, so many attentional resources and a massive amount of cognitive control to hold that view in your mind. Because there's another view, so you've got to override that and you've got to hold all the detail of this new view to try to interpret your current, present moment experience from that lens. So if you are depleted in any way, and we haven't talked about this, but just to say,

• 1:25:38Speaker 01

  when we are under high-stress circumstances, demanding circumstances, for some protracted period of time, this very limited precious brain resource of attention that fuels our ability to do all of these things, thinking, feeling, connecting, you know, conceptually elaborating, making stories, predictions, making decisions, the fuel that allows us to do all that stuff is reduced. And with less attentional control available, things are going to start getting messed up. So, that's just sort of the steady state. If you are under high demand for multiple weeks, you have less attentional capacity available to you. You're going to default to problematic approaches.

• 1:26:17Speaker 01

  Now, in the face of that, which is usually what corresponds with our experience of stress, it's like, something's going on, there is an experience of stress because of the nature of the demands and their protracted presence. Like, it's not that I'm just, it's not acute stress, it's really chronic stress. So, already, the attentional gas tank is... On empty. And then we're going to actually burn more fuel by trying to create this whole other structure. And we're going to find that it just keeps crumbling. Like, we can't hold it up because we don't have enough, uh, capacity to actually build it. And it's in those circumstances that we find that it's actually more problematic to try

• 1:26:57Speaker 01

  to do that thing of, of, uh, generate positive emotion than do something else, like take a mindful, a presence-centered, accepting stance toward what's occurring, when difficult situations are transpiring. So we know this from a study that we did with actually active-duty service members, where, um, over the course of a long pre-deployment training interval, um, where we knew, because we had tracked it before, their attention is depleted. If we do nothing at all, over about four to eight weeks, when we evaluate their attention by having them do simple attention tasks, their performance is worse after four to eight weeks, um, than at the beginning. Wow. And, um, think about that. That's like pre-deployment. Now they gotta go be deployed.

• 1:27:40Speaker 01

  So, anyway, we wanted to see what we could do to help with this. And one approach that the Army was using is positive psychology. So, um, to protect soldiers' well-being, have them cultivate positive emotion. Have them think about, um, positive memories. Have them, uh, actively create more positivity in their moment-to-moment experience. And a whole bunch of tools to be able to do that. Now, when you're not under a high-stress period of time, there are ways in which this can be very helpful to do, because you can actually do it. But under high stress, what we found was, um, that the group that got the positivity training looked no different than the control group. In fact, they looked a little bit worse. Not only did they decline... So surprising. They looked, uh, they, they declined a little bit more than the control group.

• 1:28:24Speaker 01

  We had another condition, which was a training in mindfulness. So we had essentially three groups: no training, positivity, and mindfulness. So the no training and my, uh, positivity looked very similar. Both degradation over time. The mindfulness group did not degrade. They stayed stable over time. So at the end of that four-to-eight-week interval, their attention was unchanged, which, to us, was a win, because if we do nothing at all or give them these alternate approaches, they're depleted. Um, so that would, that's where I, I come to this understanding that, you know, if you're going to cultivate positive emotion, just check in to make sure you've got the attentional resources to do it. And if you, and if you feel like you're working against yourself in trying

• 1:29:05Speaker 01

  to create these images or, or feelings, don't do it. You know, at least try something else. Take an accepting stance, meaning not like I'm all good with this, or I'm even okay with this, but it is what it is. It is the, these are the circumstances that I'm in right now. A neutrality in some sense, a non-judgmental, presence-centered orientation toward experience.

• 1:29:29Tom Bilyeu?

  All right. So all of this is incredibly powerful, transformational. There's a way to sort of supercharge this, which is something I haven't done too much, but every time it comes up, I find myself fascinated, which is loving kindness.

• 1:29:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:29:45Tom Bilyeu?

  Talk to me about that. It's really interesting.

• 1:29:48Speaker 01

  So you've not practiced loving kindness?

• 1:29:50Tom Bilyeu?

  I've done little smidgens of it, and I'm always surprised how much better it feels. But I don't spend a lot of time on it, if I'm completely honest.

• 1:30:03Speaker 01

  Just curious, like what, what makes you not want to spend time on it?

• 1:30:07Tom Bilyeu?

  Oh, it's not that I don't want to spend time on it. It's that I have programmed my life to be very goal-oriented. And so in, I don't find myself needing that to want to do things for other people, but I do find that when you get into that zone, it's close to sort of a blissful state. Like if I were really in need, if I were in an emotionally dark place, I would do it all day. And the irony that, and I know that you say to also do it to yourself, but the irony for me, that focusing on other people is the thing that's going to make me feel better, like wanting good things for them and like really thinking about amazing things, like lifts me up and makes me feel better. So if I were ever down,

• 1:30:51Tom Bilyeu?

  my thing is stress, more than like feeling low or depressed or anything like that. But if I were, boom, I would go hard on loving kindness.

• 1:31:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, I appreciate you saying that. I am curious to see, do an experiment, try it for a week, uh, two weeks, see what happens. Because, um, in some sense, it is meeting a pain point that we might not even know is part of our experience of stress. Um, but, but let me just back up to just say what it is, because we've kind of been talking about it without really getting into it. So, first of all, I don't usually use the term loving kindness. I think that it's, the traditions will talk about it, or, um, it's often, the, the term would be metta, M-E-T-T-A, uh, as a Buddhist term for this. Essentially, that practice is a different category. It's not concentrative, it's not open monitoring, or what we call receptive practice.

• 1:31:49Speaker 01

  Um, this is kind of a third category, but it leans on a lot of the receptive prac- uh, concentrative prac- practices. Because when we, um, do this practice, we are in that mode of there is something specific we're trying to do, and we're gonna ensure that that's the thing we're doing, not going off and some, some other thing is not gonna happen. So, um, the intention, uh, behind loving prac- loving kindness practice, or what we call connection practice in our work with special forces and first responders and people like that, is to have an orientation of well-wishing. So this is not manifesting, this is not prescribing, but it's that, that sense of

• 1:32:32Speaker 01

  connecting with we, what we most wish for ourselves, for other people, for our world. And to hold that very clearly as, uh, something we're gonna actively do. We're gonna wish well. And there are many ways we can do this. The, the, the formal practice actually, uh, encourages us to use phrases, uh, that kind of use a word that describes the nature of the well-wish. So, for example, um, I'll just give you some that, uh, I often use and that are part of some of the trainings that we do. So it would be something like, and we start with our, our, we can start with ourselves as the target for the well-wish, um, but we can move away from ourselves. So we start with ourselves, then we go to a close other.

• 1:33:16Speaker 01

  Somebody where it's very easy, somebody a benefactor, somebody that we have no trouble wishing them well. Um, then we go to a neutral person, somebody we might not even know. You know, maybe for me, it would be like the, the Uber driver that brought me home. I don't know him, but neutral. And then a slightly difficult person. There's somebody that you have friction with. You're gonna wish them these well wishes. And then kind of expand, not just in terms of distance, in terms of your affiliative aspects, but broadening out to, you know, everybody in this house right now, everybody that's in this neighborhood, everybody that's in this town, and then kind of eventually to all beings everywhere.

• 1:34:00Speaker 01

  So we're gonna, we're gonna expand outward in that way. And we're gonna do it by, like I said, a series of phrases that we're gonna repeat over and over again. So, but to know that we're not trying to make up whole stories here. It's just getting to the essence of that well wish. So some of the phrases would be, may I be safe? May I be happy? May I be healthy? May I live with ease? So we can just shorthand that as safe, happy, healthy, ease. And you can pick whatever words you want, but it should be kind of at the essence of something that captures something a lot broader.

• 1:34:45Speaker 01

  And that when you say them, you're actually, there's an aspect of feeling that thing, that feeling that well wishing. In the same way, you might say, you know, have a great day, or happy birthday. Like, there's a sincerity to it. You're not just saying this mindlessly. And to repeat it. Like, you know, when I, when we, when I do this practice, it would be, some days, I'll just do 12 minutes just for myself. I'm gonna repeat these phrases just for me. And you'll be surprised, you know, when you say that, when you feel the stress can be problematic. To me, what I've found kind of interesting about doing this practice for myself is that it reminds me that out of all the things that are happening in my life, all the things

• 1:35:27Speaker 01

  I'm striving for, that are important to me, that I'm working for, most fundamentally, this is what I want for myself. This is what I want for myself. And it doesn't have to look a particular way. It's that reminding of the well wishes that I have for myself. Or in the context of relationships, you know, doing it for that neutral person, for example, or even the slightly difficult person. When those friction moments happen in our lives, remember, even for this person who I'm finding difficult, my wish for this person is that they're happy, healthy, safe, and they'll live with ease. And there's a wisdom to that because we know if everybody that we found to be difficult

• 1:36:07Speaker 01

  had that, had those qualities in their life, the chances of them behaving in ways that are problematic that impinge on us may be less. It's also the case that it promotes sort of de-escalation. So if you're in a very confrontational mode and you kind of hold this as what you are wishing for the person even that you are having this challenge with, and I'm talking now, let's just talk about personal lives, like a spouse. Like for me, oftentimes the person that is the person easiest to generate these things for can sometimes also become the difficult person, whether it's your children or your spouse or people, you know, friends, family, whatever it is. But to hold that, to spend some time where I practice this and wish that for another

• 1:36:50Speaker 01

  person, when that challenge moment occurs and I could be a very confrontational or reactive, it's like a reminder, like I could really scream right now, but what do I really wish for this person? And how am I going to get to a point where both of us feel like we can maneuver through this difficulty with that, that, those wishes held, instead of me acting against what I truly want for another human being, or truly want for myself ultimately?

• 1:37:21Tom Bilyeu?

  I love that. Amishi, this has been wonderful. Where can people follow you, read the book, all that good stuff?

• 1:37:29Speaker 01

  Thanks for asking. They can find me if they remember my first name, Amishi, A-M-I-S-H-I dot com. And the book is Peak Mind and available everywhere books are sold.

• 1:37:39Tom Bilyeu?

  Love it. Are you on social media?

• 1:37:40Speaker 01

  I am, yeah. So on Instagram, Amishi P Jha, Twitter, Amishi Jha.

• 1:37:47Tom Bilyeu?

  Love it. It's amazing. So glad that you wrote the book and that we got a chance to talk. This really was fantastic. Boys and girls, man, let me tell you, this is something that has completely changed my life. I hope that you guys will give mindfulness. It's due. It is really a game changer. And speaking of things that are a game changer, if you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care. Peace.

• 1:38:18Tom Bilyeu?

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