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

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

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

• 0:00Lewis Howes?

  This is episode number 1,178 on Developing a Peak Mind with Dr. Amishi Jah.

• 0:09Lewis Howes?

  Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, a former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur. And each week, we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin.

• 0:29Lewis Howes?

  Welcome back, everyone. Today's guest is Dr. Amishi Jah. She is a professor of psychology at the University of Miami and serves as the Director of Contemplative Neuroscience for the Mindfulness Research and Practice Initiative, which she co-founded in 2010. And she received her PhD from the University of California, Davis, and postdoctoral training at the Brain Imaging and Analysis Center at Duke University. Now mindfulness has become a massive buzzword in the last decade, but Dr. Jah spent the last 25 years researching the science of attention through extensive work with elite sports teams, the US military, medical professionals, and more to answer this question.

• 1:11Lewis Howes?

  And she's written a new book called Peak Mind: Find Your Focus, Own Your Attention, and Invest 12 Minutes a Day. In this episode, we break down the science of how being distracted is causing you to miss out on 50% of your life. And so many of us are distracted all day long. How high performers focus their attention to achieve success. Practices to help you calm down and retrain your mind to be less distracted. How your life could change if you change your attention. That and so much more. And if you're enjoying this at any moment, make sure to share this with someone that you think wants more inspiration, wants more attention, focus, and wants to develop a peak mind in their life to create an optimal life.

• 1:53Lewis Howes?

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

• 2:40Lewis Howes?

  Welcome back everyone at School of Greatness. Very excited about our guest, Dr. Amishi Ja in the house. Good to see you.

• 2:46Speaker 01

  Good to see you.

• 2:47Lewis Howes?

  I'm pumped because I love psychology and I love neuroscience and those are two things that you focus on at the University of Miami. You've got a book out called Peak Mind, Find Your Focus, Own Your Attention and Invest 12 Minutes a Day. And I saw on your website that it said, research is showing that we are missing out on 50% of our lives because we are distracted. Is that, where's that stat come from? And is that, is that 100% true? I mean, we're 50% of our lives we're missing out on because we're distracted?

• 3:18Speaker 01

  We're not paying attention to 50% of our lives. And the way that it comes up, it's a pretty, it's been studied in so many ways and unfortunately we keep triangulating on that same number. But the initial studies were done where people just volunteered to get pinged on their phone. So, any time of day or night during normal wake hours, they'd get a text message that would say, what are you doing right now? You know, reading a book, having a conversation? Where is your attention? And essentially, is it on the thing you're doing or somewhere else? And half the time, people were not paying attention to the thing they were doing. So, this number 50% is really about off-task thoughts and...

• 3:58Lewis Howes?

  So, I'm reading, I want to read a book for an hour, but then I'm constantly checking my phone or I'm watching TV or I'm having a conversation. Is that what you mean? Or is it, I want to read a book, but I'm not even reading it?

• 4:09Speaker 01

  You've probably had that feeling like all of us have, right? Get to the bottom of the page, you have no idea.

• 4:12Lewis Howes?

  No idea. I mean, that was my whole childhood.

• 4:14Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, that's what I'm talking about. The new, the new aspects that are probably even more problematic are the external distraction. But that number 50% happens even without any external distraction.

• 4:26Lewis Howes?

  Just, okay, I'm reading a book in nature and there's nothing around me, but my thought is distracting me. Not my phone and people and the TV.

• 4:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, and we think of this, we think of distractibility as like a modern problem. But what's so interesting, and I write about it a little bit in the book. Monks, medieval monks complained about too much distraction in their lives. Like they had gone and become monastics. Their job was to pray all day and they're like, the thought of lunch is making me really distracted. Or, and then they would just, you know, stop talking to their family members and, but they could not escape this real issue of internal distractibility.

• 5:03Lewis Howes?

  Really? What is causing that distraction? Is it a survival mechanism? Is it something to help us in creation mode? Why do our brains do that?

• 5:13Speaker 01

  Both, very good insights. So yeah, we think right now, of course, we can't know, right? All we know is this is the nature of the brain today. And we are essentially the evolutionary success story. So we're intuiting and inferring what pressures might have led us to have this. But it's 100% for sure that this is not a design flaw. This is designed for.

• 5:34Lewis Howes?

  This is intentional.

• 5:35Speaker 01

  This is intentional. And so much of our metabolic energy is going toward this meandering of mind that it's on purpose. And, and we have some good clues about what we think it is. I mean, two you already mentioned, right? This notion of if you were excessively focused, like in our old, old ancestors at a watering hole. Like gotta get my.

• 5:54Lewis Howes?

  You get eaten alive.

• 5:55Speaker 01

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

• 6:36Speaker 01

  And then, the way it turns from just experience to a hardened neural representation is we have a replay mechanism, it just kind of goes over and over again. Anything that's the slop, the things that vary from replay over replay, those kind of go away. And whatever it is that keeps consistently getting replayed is the thing that becomes the structural change that is long-term memory.

• 6:58Lewis Howes?

  Why do we have thoughts that replay in our mind over and over?

• 7:02Speaker 01

  You mean, why specific thoughts might get like, you're ruminating?

• 7:05Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, why do memories keep popping up in our mind from a week ago, years ago, decades ago? Why does it keep replaying?

• 7:13Speaker 01

  Well, the replaying is different than the fact, what I'm talking about, what I was just talking about.

• 7:16Lewis Howes?

  Okay, what are you talking about there?

• 7:17Speaker 01

  What I was talking about a moment ago is just, it's a way for memory to even exist in our mind. So if I just, you know, for example, I had this conversation with you, and I'm on my, you know, Lyft ride home, and all of a sudden, I'll just, a random phrase that you said might pop up. Or remember when he was talking about this, like, no explanation necessarily? It's almost like the brain is, is creating, it's a thought pump, it's just pumping it out. So the explanation for that is that, in order to have memory created, because it's pretty fresh, we just experienced this interaction. In order for memory to actually be created, so that tomorrow, the next day, even by this evening, I have a more hardened representation in my memory that I can call upon. That's all structural, in some sense. The structures of the brain, the neural representations are hardening together

• 8:02Speaker 01

  in a specific way for me to have that memory representation. So I'm talking about the creation of memory, if that makes sense.

• 8:10Lewis Howes?

  Okay, that's the creation of memory.

• 8:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, what you're talking about, I think, is different.

• 8:12Lewis Howes?

  So, we're here, sitting here, you, before we got down here, you took a drink of the water, you had your lipstick on there.

• 8:20Speaker 01

  Can I get all my secrets?

• 8:21Lewis Howes?

  You wiped it off. It's a moment, so my thought is pumping the memory because I see a little bit of stain still on there.

• 8:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:27Lewis Howes?

  So my thought is pumping this, or my, my brain is pumping this memory, this image, right? And it may do it a few times to help me hold on to the memory, is that right?

• 8:38Speaker 01

  Right, and it will do it potentially many times, we don't even know exactly how. This is just a pretty new idea of why mind wandering happens. But yes, it'll, it may be part of a memory creation or consolidation process. But I think what you were talking about is almost like rumination, like a thought comes up and you kind of can't, it's, we sometimes call this attentional rubbernecking.

• 8:59Lewis Howes?

  Attentional rubbernecking, what does that mean?

• 9:01Speaker 01

  Like you're driving down the road and you're like, yeah, you know, you can't kind of help see the whatever traffic accident that's happened.

• 9:06Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 9:07Speaker 01

  So it's that idea that our attention just gets yanked by certain mental content.

• 9:11Lewis Howes?

  Why is that?

• 9:12Speaker 01

  Well, there's a lot of reasons that we think that happens.

• 9:14Lewis Howes?

  It seems like the more tragic the event, the more we, we reflect on it. We either shut down and block it and forget memories, like the brain seems to like protect yourself by not remembering, or you're constantly ruminating on it, is kind of what I hear.

• 9:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:28Lewis Howes?

  If therapists will say like, uh, you know, there's some patients that they have that don't remember a time period in their life because there were such tragic events that the brain kind of shut down. Where other people, they say, think about it often and then they live in fear from that event. So I'm not sure where that is.

• 9:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's a whole bunch in what you just said, right? So let's just talk about the kind of replaying.

• 9:47Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 9:48Speaker 01

  And I, and I think that this is, can be quite problematic for our experience of, you know, things like depression or even anxiety and PTSD. So the reliving of past events can have many different forms.

• 10:02Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 10:03Speaker 01

  So why it happens, you know, in some sense, I don't, I, I would say that there's a lot of debate regarding why it happens. One is that it's, it's something that you think you're going to actually try to resolve, right? You're actually thinking about it because it's going to help you see it in a different way, or you're going to problem solve in some way. But for sure, rumination itself, which really is this kind of looping process, isn't getting you anywhere, it's just a replaying. So my work actually starts from that reality. It's not, I'm not a, I'm not a clinician, I'm a neuroscientist.

• 10:32Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 10:33Speaker 01

  So it's like, there are certain states, certain ways that our attention functions, where we are rubbernecking. We're like, kind of can't go, can't pull ourselves away from it. And it doesn't have to be about the past. It could actually be worries about the future, too. So, and this is a very powerful brain function, mental time travel.

• 10:51Lewis Howes?

  Mental time travel. Tell me what that is.

• 10:53Speaker 01

  So, that is essentially, I mean, the way I like to think about it is it's like we can make our brains go and rewind or fast forward. There's actually something related, which is mind travel. Essentially, that would be like me taking your perspective. Oh, that must have seemed strange for him to see me wipe off lipstick. I mean, he probably never had to do that. I'm taking your perspective on an event. So, I've traveled into your mind and I'm looking back at myself through your mind. So, all of these are displacing us in space or time in some sense. And it's so useful to be able to do this. In fact, our ability to reflect is how we learn, right? And our ability to think of the future is how we plan. So, both of these functions are so, so beneficial.

• 11:35Speaker 01

  But the reality is, when that's happening, we are not in the present moment. Our attention is not...

• 11:40Lewis Howes?

  We're distracted.

• 11:41Speaker 01

  Well, not even if we're distracted. We may be doing it on purpose. So, our present moment is in the past. Our present moment is in the future. So, if there are any demands happening right now, like if somebody walked in the room and say, "We gotta, we gotta make our way downstairs for some..." We might, it might take us an extra minute to kind of reacquaint ourselves to what's happening right now. Now, in the context of being in a lovely studio space, no dire consequences. But oftentimes, if you are time traveling to the past or the future, and you're stuck there because you're ruminating or catastrophizing, that can be very problematic for in-the-moment action. And the consequences could be dire. Either as an athlete, for what's required next of you to get the right inputs, or for

• 12:24Speaker 01

  the kinds of groups I work with, military service members and first responders, it could mean somebody else's life or death based on your attentional lapse. So, so my interest is, has been not so much on why rumination occurs, but given the reality that it often occurs, and under high-stress circumstances, it can, it occurs more often. How do we solve this problem? Because it's definitely impacting our attention.

• 12:46Lewis Howes?

  Rumination. How do we solve rumination?

• 12:48Speaker 01

  How do we solve getting ourselves to be able to pick up what's happening right now if the mind's tendency is to be in the past, or the future, or in somebody else's head? Right? Like, "Oh, I wonder what she thought of me. I wonder what he thinks of me."

• 13:01Lewis Howes?

  So would you say a lot of our time is reflecting on the past memories, worrying about the future, or worrying about what someone else thinks about us?

• 13:08Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 13:09Lewis Howes?

  Why, why do we care so much what someone else thinks about us?

• 13:13Speaker 01

  I mean, because we're social creatures. We need to, right? We, it's part of our survival to know that. Now, things tip into the dysfunctional pretty quickly.

• 13:21Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 13:22Speaker 01

  And things that tip into that dysfunctional space quickly for certain professions can be very problematic. So, again, my, my starting point isn't, does it occur, why it occurs? It's, it occurs, it occurs often. And when we take it to the lab and look at people and look at their performance on attention tasks, they're terrible at them.

• 13:44Lewis Howes?

  Terrible. So what do you, what's an example of something in the lab? It's like focused for 20 minutes on a task? And then people just can't even do it?

• 13:51Speaker 01

  Well, they can do it, but they get worse and worse over time. So even over the course of-

• 13:54Lewis Howes?

  The longer it is.

• 13:55Speaker 01

  Well, yes. So if you did something, let's not even say 20 minutes. Let's say 10 minutes.

• 14:01Lewis Howes?

  So what would an example be?

• 14:02Speaker 01

  Okay, of an example of an experiment?

• 14:04Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 14:05Speaker 01

  Okay, so remember, the goal of this experiment would be to test out your internal distractibility.

• 14:10Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 14:11Speaker 01

  So now, if I'm trying to get you, and I'm trying to measure your internal distractibility, I can't tell you to be distracted, because then you're actually doing the task.

• 14:18Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 14:18Speaker 01

  You're not doing the other thing you should be doing when you should be doing the task. So we did puzzle over this, like, how do we design a task where people get distracted and they don't do what we tell them to do? It was easy, though. All we had to do was bore people.

• 14:31Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 14:31Speaker 01

  So if you bore them, they are so happy, they just go anywhere else. So we designed one of the world's most boring tasks, really.

• 14:37Lewis Howes?

  Read a thick textbook of-

• 14:38Speaker 01

  Well, we did that, too, but we did, this is, this is the way the experiment go. You'd come in, we'd tell you, this is going to be a task of your attention. What we want you to do is sit in front of the computer screen and look at the screen. I mean, we sometimes have a brain cap on them. So we're looking at the ongoing electrical activity. We'll put them in a brain scanner and look at what's going on there. And we'll say every time, you're gonna see a series of digits on the screen. Every time you see a digit, press a button. Right, so they're sitting there. One about every fourth of a second comes up. And then we say, the only thing unusual here is if that digit happens to be three, just don't press the button, withhold your response. Threes are only happening 5% of the time. So they're sitting there, press, press. And of course their mind is wandering. The three shows up, they press to the three.

• 15:22Lewis Howes?

  Right, they're not focused.

• 15:23Speaker 01

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

• 16:00Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 16:00Speaker 01

  And when they've made a mistake, it's usually because they report that they were on task, off task. When they get the three and they withhold to the three correctly, usually they're reporting soon after that, yeah, I was on task. So.

• 16:12Lewis Howes?

  It's interesting, I did a brain scan a few months ago. And I, and they had me do this test right before. It was like with an X. It was like letters and like, don't press the X.

• 16:22Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 16:23Lewis Howes?

  And it was for 15 minutes.

• 16:24Speaker 01

  Boring.

• 16:25Lewis Howes?

  It's the most boring thing ever. You stared a screen, it's a dark room, so you're like, eyes are tired already. Dark room, screen, and it's just a white background on the screen, and then like just a letter pops up. And it also had me use my, my left hand, I'm right-handed, so they said, I want you to use your left hand, push the spacebar every time. It was either push the spacebar every time you see a letter, but don't push it when you see an X.

• 16:47Speaker 01

  Okay, something like that.

• 16:48Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 16:49Speaker 01

  Very similar to what I'm saying, yeah.

• 16:50Lewis Howes?

  And for me, when there's a game, my brain goes, and I wanna win this game. So I was like, okay, I'm focused. Even though it's boring, I'm like, I want to be the best I can be at this game.

• 17:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:03Lewis Howes?

  And I did it the whole time. They leave the room, then they came back in or whatever, 15 minutes later, when it was about to finish. And I finish it and I go, he goes, how'd you do? And I go, I don't think I missed one. And he goes, that's not possible. He goes, not possible. I go, check the results. Show me the results. I don't think I missed one. And he goes, I've done thousand of these. Not one person has been on, like, get it a hundred percent. And I go, you put a game in front of me? I'm gonna focus.

• 17:28Speaker 01

  Right.

• 17:29Lewis Howes?

  You know, for me, it was like, turn me on.

• 17:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:31Lewis Howes?

  Uh, and I didn't miss one.

• 17:33Speaker 01

  Awesome.

• 17:33Lewis Howes?

  He was like, I've never seen this. He was like, I've never seen this. I don't know how you did it. I was like, I just paid attention. And I was really intentional about everybody. Is that an X? Okay. Is that, you know, it was like intentional.

• 17:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:44Lewis Howes?

  Then I had to go back and do another one. And I missed like when the first three, like, right away, I missed it. And then I missed like ten of them. Cause I was just like, okay, screw it. I was like, get me through this now.

• 17:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, so that's awesome that you did that. And it doesn't surprise me, given your background and, you know, the kind of mental training you've done yourself. But as you experience, this is a natural response to get fatigued.

• 18:07Lewis Howes?

  It was fatiguing, like, it's exhausting.

• 18:09Speaker 01

  It's exhausting.

• 18:10Lewis Howes?

  So keep your attention for fifteen minutes on anything and be intentional? It's in.

• 18:14Speaker 01

  Very exhausting, but it's not what you think. It's not like it's hard in a kind of immersive video game context. It's the mind that is doing its own thing. So now think about being like a baggage screener, right? And they're doing that all day long. Or an air traffic controller.

• 18:28Lewis Howes?

  Oh, man.

• 18:29Speaker 01

  Or somebody that's in a medical context that they're looking at, um, monitoring equipment. Like, they can't mess up, but they're having the same challenges.

• 18:39Lewis Howes?

  Dang it, yeah.

• 18:40Speaker 01

  That where the chances of something going wrong are low, meaning the X is not that often. But you can't mess up and your mind will wander. So over the course of an experiment, what we find, and this is something that's been known forever. It's something called the, like, the vigilance decrement. Essentially, if you have a ten-minute, fifteen-minute study, from the beginning to the end, people are just worse. And people used to think that it's attention just getting exhausted, just like you felt. But what we noticed is that as, as, as performance is going down, mind wandering, the self-reported sense of, "Yeah, I was not on task, I was somewhere else," is actually increasing.

• 19:17Lewis Howes?

  Ah.

• 19:17Speaker 01

  So we-

• 19:18Lewis Howes?

  So it's not attention, uh, what is it then? So mind wandering is going up, it's not like I'm getting tired, more tired.

• 19:25Speaker 01

  It may feel like it's tired, but I think tiredness, fatigue is a, it's like a feedback system that says, "Go do something else."

• 19:32Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 19:33Speaker 01

  So tired may be the result of a set of processes, not the cause. And we always think of it as the cause, like, "Oh, I'm tired, I gotta stop this," right? But it may be that your, your, the whole system is designed, and if you think about it, again, evolutionarily, opportunity costs. If you spend so much time doing something, you're missing out on other stuff. So like, you wanna get in the search mode, what's gonna make you wanna search? The uncomfortable feeling of what you're doing right now. So the story is quite complicated, but what it tells us is that attention isn't getting, the brain's not getting tired per se, but it's on the lookout. It's always on the lookout for other things that it might do. So it's experienced as, as fatigue, but also this propensity, the way that it gets itself out of doing what it's doing,

• 20:18Speaker 01

  is it's just internally going other places. It's like, "Oh, maybe I'll think about, you know, the vacation I wanna take," or "What about that email that I sent today?" So it is constantly journeying, it's what its nature is.

• 20:30Lewis Howes?

  So is there where they train the mind to have more attention and focus?

• 20:35Speaker 01

  I wouldn't be here if I didn't think there was. So, yeah, so, you know, most of my career, and I started studying attention when I was an undergrad at your favorite place, University of Michigan.

• 20:43Lewis Howes?

  That school up north?

• 20:44Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, um, I started very early on, and for most of my early career, I was just interested in how it works. How do you make it work, you know, how does it work in the brain? What are the various neural components of it? Then what I started noticing, like, early on when I was in my head, my own lab, is, "Ooh, we know a lot about what makes it fail." So we know it's quite powerful, but it's also vulnerable. And the kinds of things that it's vulnerable to, the, the top three that we kept seeing are stress, threat, and poor mood.

• 21:16Lewis Howes?

  Stress, threat, and poor mood.

• 21:18Speaker 01

  Yes, so, and if you think about where your mind goes often, it's that kind of terrain, you know, could be, when it's not intentional, like you're not trying to plan for some big event, it defaults to these states like you were saying before, rumination, catastrophizing. And knowing that, knowing that attention is powerful but vulnerable, I was, I became extremely interested in figuring out, how do we train it? Like, there must be a way we can train it. Neuroplasticity and the growth of new neurons, even in the adult brain, where something was coming out, you know, we've known about neuroplasticity for a very long time, but the notion that you could train the better for better, you could train the brain to be better, was new.

• 22:00Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 22:01Speaker 01

  And so that's kind of where I, like, kind of took it upon myself as a mission to, like, figure out, how can we do this? So we tried lots of things. We tried positive psychology. We tried these high-tech light and sound devices, like you were talking about before, this brain gym, like, some ways we could play computer games that might, none of it was reliably working. We're still getting this kind of consistent vulnerability to distraction that would occur. And then I did something that I never thought I would do. I was actually probably the world's biggest skeptic regarding this.

• 22:35Lewis Howes?

  Meditation?

• 22:35Speaker 01

  We tried mindfulness meditation.

• 22:37Lewis Howes?

  Why do all roads lead back to meditation?

• 22:39Speaker 01

  Isn't that funny? But at this time, remember, this is like the early 2000s. It was not a thing. I never would think in a million years at that moment, like, I'd be talking to somebody on a very popular platform that knows about this term. Like, it was this very odd thing. I remember the first time one of my senior colleagues mentioned it. It was like in the context of this big lecture, and he basically showed this brain image of like a brain that he had induced in his lab to be in a positive mood. And then one that was in-

• 23:06Lewis Howes?

  Positive psychology, you mean?

• 23:07Speaker 01

  No, like, yeah, but really-

• 23:08Lewis Howes?

  Think positive thoughts, or?

• 23:09Speaker 01

  He did that, but it was really basically get in a scanner and listen to, think about happy memories, listen to happy music, like, just in the state of positivity.

• 23:17Lewis Howes?

  An environment of positivity.

• 23:19Speaker 01

  For just the period of time that they were getting the brain image. Then he did the same thing for the negative brain. And at the end of his lecture, I said, "How do I get that negative brain to look like that positive brain?" Just sort of, because I was frankly having my own life circumstances around that.

• 23:33Lewis Howes?

  Sure.

• 23:33Speaker 01

  And he, like, I'm at the back of the room, and he just, and it's the end of the lecture, and he's like, "Meditation." And I was like, "What?" You know, to me, it was like-

• 23:41Lewis Howes?

  What year is this?

• 23:41Speaker 01

  This was- Two thousand and three?

• 23:44Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 23:45Speaker 01

  To me, it was like as offensive as somebody saying, talking to a group of like astrophysicists and talking about astrology as if it was a serious topic.

• 23:53Lewis Howes?

  Right, right.

• 23:54Speaker 01

  It's just like, I'm sorry, we're at the University of Pennsylvania here. We don't use those terms.

• 23:57Lewis Howes?

  Right, we're not some woo woo university.

• 23:59Speaker 01

  But of course, I respected him dearly and had a chance to talk to him afterwards. And he was telling me about the work they were doing with adept monks. This was Richie Davidson, who now, of course, leads a very enterprising center in Wisconsin to study meditation. But back then, it was not known at all, but it got me super curious, like, what?

• 24:19Lewis Howes?

  Hmm.

• 24:20Speaker 01

  What? And, you know, I'm an Indian woman, so like meditation is not something really new to me. I mean, I'd known about it, but I always thought it's a great thing for my parents to do.

• 24:29Lewis Howes?

  Right, right.

• 24:29Speaker 01

  I'm not interested. I'm a serious scientist. I'll wait, you know, I'll wait to see what the science has to say about any of that. I'll just... But he, he, his use of that term made me at least want to explore it personally to begin with. Cause I was, happened to be having my own... The reason I asked about how to get the negative thing to the positive brain, because at that moment in my life, I felt like I was probably more like that brain.

• 24:52Lewis Howes?

  The negative brain.

• 24:52Speaker 01

  The negative brain.

• 24:53Lewis Howes?

  You were stressed, you were overwhelmed.

• 24:54Speaker 01

  Stressed, overwhelmed, new baby.

• 24:56Lewis Howes?

  Personal stuff, yeah.

• 24:57Speaker 01

  Well, it was, it was, it was actually, I'd lost feeling in my teeth from grinding. I mean, it was not like minor anymore.

• 25:03Lewis Howes?

  You were a lot of stress. You were like grinding all night, all day. You were like, hmm.

• 25:07Speaker 01

  It was bad. And I'm like, you gotta shake this. And I was, the worst part wasn't so much the physical pain. I had no idea what was going on physically. But I was really like feeling that I wasn't paying attention to my life. And it bugged me. I mean, I was literally developing expertise. My lab was devoted to attention and I could not.

• 25:26Lewis Howes?

  You couldn't focus. That's all you did, though, and you couldn't focus.

• 25:29Speaker 01

  I couldn't keep my head in the game. And, and so when he said that, I was like, well, I'm gonna check it out. So I'd go literally to the pen book store and buy a book. I lucked out because I could have picked any random book. I picked a book called Mindfulness, it was called Meditation for Beginners by a now a very dear teacher of mine, Jack Kornfield. And it was, it was a tiny little book. It came with its own guided CD and I was like, I'll check it out. Fine. You know, this, my respected colleague says this is something. So I, I start doing this.

• 25:58Lewis Howes?

  Jack Kornfield or Jack Canfield?

• 25:59Speaker 01

  Jack Kornfield.

• 26:00Lewis Howes?

  Kornfield, okay. Cause there's a Jack Canfield as well.

• 26:03Speaker 01

  Oh yeah, no, this is Jack Kornfield, a long time meditation teacher. Really respond, one of the people responsible for bringing mindfulness to the West. So I lucked out that I picked that book.

• 26:12Lewis Howes?

  It had DVD or CD, so you're listening to it.

• 26:14Speaker 01

  So I listened to it and I'm like, oh my goodness. Every, all the instruction in this meditation thing, it's just all about attention. Pay attention to your breath.

• 26:22Lewis Howes?

  Your thought.

• 26:22Speaker 01

  Notice your mind wandering. Return it. And it was such a simple, yet elegant instruction. And what struck, struck me is he is providing instruction of something that's been around for 2,500 years, but it's tapping into the exact brain system I happen to study in my lab. And after a few weeks, probably about a month or month and a half or so of doing this, I was like, feeling completely transformed.

• 26:45Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 26:45Speaker 01

  Which was so bizarre to me. Like I didn't, I almost didn't believe that this was happening, but I could look at my spouse, I could be with my child, I could be more engaged in the lab. And the pressures and the strain hadn't changed at all externally, but I was a different person.

• 26:59Lewis Howes?

  Wow. Well, your response to the pressure had shifted.

• 27:02Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 27:02Lewis Howes?

  You were just showing up differently to the stress.

• 27:04Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 27:05Lewis Howes?

  To the emotional or psychological threats and the poor mood.

• 27:09Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 27:09Lewis Howes?

  The stress, the threats and the poor mood.

• 27:12Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 27:13Lewis Howes?

  Cause you had all three of them, it sounds like.

• 27:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:15Lewis Howes?

  And it was hard for you to shake it. You were trying to do what before? What were you trying to do to shift those three things?

• 27:20Speaker 01

  I mean, anything I could think of.

• 27:23Lewis Howes?

  Positive thinking or?

• 27:24Speaker 01

  Yeah. Look on the bright side. That failed epically. Um, we even brought that to the lab and for people that were in high stress, it doesn't seem to work.

• 27:31Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 27:32Speaker 01

  If you're experiencing high stress.

• 27:33Lewis Howes?

  Look on the bright side, meaning like have perspective?

• 27:36Speaker 01

  No.

• 27:36Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 27:37Speaker 01

  Induce a positive mood into your life by manufacturing that.

• 27:41Lewis Howes?

  How do you do that?

• 27:42Speaker 01

  Um, name three happy memories you've had. You know, and there are different levels of this. For example, gratitude or compassion. These are positive types of orientations where you affiliate toward the experience in that way. But this was more basic than that. This was like, listen to a happy song.

• 28:00Lewis Howes?

  Gotcha.

• 28:01Speaker 01

  And it works maybe temporarily, at least if you're under a lot of stress. But it doesn't transform your, essentially, your ability to be focused, your attention.

• 28:10Lewis Howes?

  What is having, uh, let's say you're just having a breakdown in your day. Something happens, you have a breakdown.

• 28:18Lewis Howes?

  What does the principle of perspective with that breakdown? I don't know, I got a cold today. But at least I don't have, you know, I still have a blessed life. I still live in Los Angeles and, you know, there's a lot worse sick people off than me. And I'm a healthy human being and this is just a week of a cold or something. What does perspective coupled with gratitude do for a peak peace mind?

• 28:44Speaker 01

  I mean, I think that for a cold in a healthy, stable environment, where you feel basically taken care of, it can be very helpful.

• 28:54Lewis Howes?

  Right, right, right.

• 28:55Speaker 01

  But now you're in the middle of a war zone and one of your best buds just lost his arm. It's very hard to see the silver lining there. And unfortunately, when people start trying to do that, they are depleting their attentional resources. We cannot reframe a situation. We cannot even garner that kind of perspective when attentional resources are limited. Because this, this thing called attention, I mean, I'm kind of shorthanding it and all I'm telling you is the term. But it ends up being the fuel for our success. And the fuel is particular for our ability to think, feel, and connect. So if you don't, yes, attention. So if you don't have this, if you, if you, you're basically depleted because of the demands in your life. And now you try to basically press the gas pedal because you're like, I gotta create a positive reality here. I gotta look on the bright side.

• 29:40Speaker 01

  I gotta have gratitude for everything good in my life. Nothing's gonna come up and you're gonna end up spending out more fuel than is useful to you.

• 29:47Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 29:48Speaker 01

  So what we'd need is a solution, especially in those kind of moments.

• 29:52Lewis Howes?

  So in a chaotic moment, a very...

• 29:53Speaker 01

  Not just chaotic, but demanding and long-term.

• 29:57Lewis Howes?

  Give me a few examples. You're going through a divorce.

• 30:00Speaker 01

  You're going through a divorce. You're a lawyer and you're preparing for a big case. You're an accountant in tax season. You're a mom that just had a baby.

• 30:07Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 30:07Speaker 01

  I mean, the, the list of things in our lives which are protracted and demanding and somewhat stressful, there's many.

• 30:13Lewis Howes?

  Your next six to 12 months is gonna be a journey.

• 30:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And you know, frankly, you know, I never expected this, but we'd been studying this for many, many years. And then COVID hit and the whole world is in this.

• 30:23Lewis Howes?

  Everyone's experiencing it, yes.

• 30:24Speaker 01

  Everyone is in this experience and, and the description and a lot of my war colleague colleagues use this, it was actually a term developed at the war college, US Army War College. VUCA, maybe it's a term you're familiar with.

• 30:35Lewis Howes?

  VUCA.

• 30:36Speaker 01

  V for volatile. U uncertain. C complex. And A ambiguous. So when the circumstances have that, those qualities, you're gonna be very, your attention is gonna be fully engaged and required. And it's gonna actually probably get depleted more quickly.

• 30:56Lewis Howes?

  Your attention will be depleted if it has those things. And if you're under stress and threat and poor mood. You're like, you can't focus on anything.

• 31:02Speaker 01

  That's right, but the worst part is that if now that system of attention, it, those are the factors that make it depleted.

• 31:08Lewis Howes?

  Those four factors make it depleted or the three?

• 31:11Speaker 01

  Well, the same thing, those are the circumstances. Those are the circumstances.

• 31:14Lewis Howes?

  Stress, threat, poor mood.

• 31:15Speaker 01

  Those circumstances, VUCA, creates a lot of stress, threat and poor mood. So those are the circumstances and the qualities of mind that appear are stress, threat, poor mood. You're such a good student.

• 31:26Lewis Howes?

  I learned this stuff.

• 31:28Speaker 01

  Well, the result ends up being that attention is depleted. And you know, you might say, well, that's not great. I mean, I probably won't be able to read a book or something. It's not great, but it's, it's, attention is way more than focusing for cognitive functioning. Like I said, we need our attention not only to think, we need it to actually feel and regulate our mood.

• 31:51Lewis Howes?

  Attention, because if we can't have attention, if we don't have the energy to have focused attention, then our mood will just continue to be stressful. And we'll continue to react in negative ways is what I'm hearing you say. In life situations.

• 32:06Speaker 01

  Well, let's maybe, maybe it would be helpful if you're up for it to like, break down what I even mean by the term attention.

• 32:11Lewis Howes?

  Give it to me, yes. What is attention?

• 32:14Speaker 01

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

• 32:58Speaker 01

  well, there's basically a couple of things. So it can be directed, that's awesome. We can, we can decide what to pay attention to. I'm now looking at you instead of, you know, over there, which would be annoying. And it's not just to the external environment. We can pay attention internally. So if I say right now, what are the sensations on the bottoms of your feet right now?

• 33:22Lewis Howes?

  I mean, I just feel sock and like a little bit of pressure of my shoe.

• 33:25Speaker 01

  But I bet you, before I said that, that was not on your mind at all, right? So you could internally take that flashlight, direct it toward bodily sensations and you can get access. So it goes back to that broader view of what attention does. It just, it solves a big problem that the brain has, which is it can't take in everything in every moment, all of it. So it's sub sampling. But it's not just bodily sensations, it's emotions, it's trains of thought, it's our connection to other people. All of that, we can direct the flashlight to. We can direct it toward other people, like I am right now and you are. We can direct it toward an idea we have and we want to pursue it. We can actually direct it toward a sensory, or sorry, an emotional experience to deepen our sense of it and kind of bathe in that. It could be something tender or anger.

• 34:08Speaker 01

  And we can regulate. We can say, you know what, right now is probably not a good idea for me to break down crying.

• 34:13Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 34:13Speaker 01

  So anyway, that's just one system.

• 34:15Lewis Howes?

  Focus.

• 34:16Speaker 01

  Focusing, right.

• 34:16Lewis Howes?

  And two is?

• 34:17Speaker 01

  The second system is the exact opposite. It's not about focusing, it's about being broad and receptive. And this I call the floodlight. It's called the alerting system. So its job is to essentially keep our resources, our mind's attentional resources, ready for whatever may occur next, so we can act. So whereas the first system was about selecting based on what, this is about, this floodlight is about time. We want to pay attention to now. What's going on right now? And you know, like if you're driving down the street and you see a flashing yellow light, like near a construction site or something, you're more vigilant. You're just alert. You don't know what it's gonna be. Is somebody gonna walk into the street? But it's available to you in a broad and receptive manner.

• 35:00Lewis Howes?

  You're not focused on one point, you're scanning.

• 35:03Speaker 01

  You're scanning, you're broad, and you're not gonna assume you know what's gonna happen.

• 35:08Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 35:08Speaker 01

  Right? That's why we're gonna be alert to whatever occurs. So does that make sense of how it's literally the polar opposite?

• 35:15Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 35:17Speaker 01

  And then the third system is called executive control. And this is a term that, the term executive is pretty much like the executive of a company. The executive's job is to ensure that our goals, you know, the organization's goals, for example, and behavior align. It's like goals and action need to align, moment by moment. And the metaphor I use for this is a juggler. So a juggler's job is to make sure all the balls are in the air. The executive of a company doesn't go in and do every individual task. That would be a bad executive, right? But it is to oversee, to make sure, we're supposed to be doing this, we're not, get back on track, that kind of an orientation.

• 35:57Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 35:58Speaker 01

  So very different, right? That's not really about focusing or even being broad, it's about the management. So now you see why, when we think about attention in this kind of three system point of view, it does feed into almost every single thing we do: thinking, feeling, connecting.

• 36:14Lewis Howes?

  Thinking, feeling, and connecting. Okay. So the narrow focus, this is kind of like when an athlete would call being in the zone. It's like having your attention focused in the moment. So you can be a peak performer and you're not distracted scanning everything, but you're mastering your craft to the moment of your sport, your skill. You know, maybe an archer is focused in that one line sight, not scanning everything. The second part of attention is the broad and receptive. Being ready for what may occur in life. And the third is the executive control. Ensuring that goals plus action are aligned.

• 36:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, I would actually, very good. You got it. But I would say all three probably you need in the context of successful athletic performance.

• 36:58Lewis Howes?

  Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 36:59Speaker 01

  Right? So like as a football player, you know, like-

• 37:00Lewis Howes?

  You need to scan the field as well and be focused.

• 37:02Speaker 01

  That's the exact same phrase. That's the phrase we use, right? It's like eye on the ball, but scan the field. It's like you need to have both.

• 37:08Lewis Howes?

  I heard that Floyd Mayweather, the boxer. He, I heard this, I don't know if this is true, but I heard that he actually looks to the side of someone's eye. He doesn't look at the face when he's punching, he actually looks to the side. Cause he's more receptive, he's quicker to react with like the peripheral. I don't know if that's true or not. And maybe it's focus and then off a little bit, back and forth, but-

• 37:30Speaker 01

  Well, it's true that peripheral vision has better motion detection.

• 37:33Lewis Howes?

  Really? So what does that mean? You can see it faster or something?

• 37:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, your motion detection will be better.

• 37:38Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 37:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:39Lewis Howes?

  So if I'm looking here and you're over here, if you move-

• 37:42Speaker 01

  And I'm like, yeah, it's gonna be better than if, even if I like do a slight movement while I'm in the center of your eyes. Just motion detection is, I mean, as you think about it, evolutionarily, that makes sense, right? You might, you wanna see if something's scurrying toward you.

• 37:52Lewis Howes?

  On the side. Cause you see it and you're like, well, what is that? Interesting.

• 37:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, so that might be a different thing.

• 37:58Lewis Howes?

  Okay, gotcha. What have you learned then from your study with those in the military and executives and high performing athletes? What have you learned by testing? Their attention on how they can improve. Is it through meditation alone? Is it through other factors?

• 38:17Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, you know, it's funny. There's so many reasons, so many ways in which we can try to advantage our performance. My interest is going to be narrow because I study a particular thing. I study, I study attention and my interest is in seeing how we can preserve it. And, you know, oftentimes people talk about resilience, this capacity to bounce back. I'm not even interested in resilience. I'm interested in pre resilience.

• 38:40Lewis Howes?

  Preserving it.

• 38:41Speaker 01

  No, yeah, preserving it.

• 38:42Lewis Howes?

  Preventing.

• 38:42Speaker 01

  Preventing the need for resilience in the first. It's like prior to being resilient, just keep everything steady.

• 38:47Lewis Howes?

  Yeah. Don't get to a place where you're exhausted and you're trying to push through something.

• 38:50Speaker 01

  Don't decline and bounce back. Just don't degrade. So that, what does that mean? Well, what I told you before was that essentially we know that attention is vulnerable to degradation over demanding circumstances. And this project we did with the, even the University of Miami football team, preseason training.

• 39:08Lewis Howes?

  Tell me about it.

• 39:09Speaker 01

  The preseason period, their attention was worse at the be, at the end of a four week preseason interval than after. And now they gotta go to camp to determine what their, what their playing season's gonna look like.

• 39:19Lewis Howes?

  So preseason before training camp?

• 39:21Speaker 01

  Before training camp, preseason training, right? So they're practicing every day. There's, there's probably, many of them were taking classes as well over the summer. Their attention was worse at the end of four weeks than before.

• 39:33Lewis Howes?

  Why?

• 39:34Speaker 01

  We just went over that. Stress, threat, poor mood, volatile, uncertain, complex, exhaustion, physical exhaustion, all of the factors that resulted in a protracted period of high demand. And by the way, it's not just elite athletes. We found this in undergrads as well.

• 39:49Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, of course.

• 39:51Speaker 01

  We know this, right? If you're, you remember being an undergrad, like you feel worse when you're right about to end the semester than at the beginning.

• 39:56Lewis Howes?

  Cause you haven't slept for a semester.

• 39:58Speaker 01

  Well, that's part of it.

• 39:59Lewis Howes?

  Pulling all nighters, you're, yeah.

• 40:00Speaker 01

  But then what do you have to do at the end of the semester?

• 40:02Lewis Howes?

  You got a big test.

• 40:03Speaker 01

  Finals, exactly. So you're not advantaging, advantaging yourself. Same thing with, by the way, pre-deployment soldiers.

• 40:10Lewis Howes?

  Oh, wow. Boot camp, boot camp, boogie, yeah, it's like.

• 40:13Speaker 01

  It's like, yeah, you're gonna be getting ready to train. You're trying, it's not even called.

• 40:16Lewis Howes?

  Trying to break people down.

• 40:17Speaker 01

  You're not trying to break people down. In fact, it's called readiness training, but it's not actually readying them in the attentional sense. They're depleted.

• 40:24Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 40:25Speaker 01

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

• 41:08Speaker 01

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

• 41:50Speaker 01

  It's an orientation where you're paying attention to your present moment experience, here in the here and the now, without editorializing or reacting to it.

• 41:59Lewis Howes?

  Sure.

• 42:00Speaker 01

  So you're getting that raw data without a story on top of it. And we all want that. I mean, who doesn't want that? Who doesn't want to go into an experience, a lot of stuff may go down, but you're like, this is the facts. This is what occurred. This is the data of the experience. And it doesn't have to be just objective, it could be subjective as well, but it's, it's what transpired. Instead of, you know, the reason he walked down the hall and didn't look at me is because I'm just a terrible person and he doesn't even think I'm worthy of looking at, right? I'm putting a story on instead of, oh, his eyes were just not toward me. That's the facts.

• 42:29Lewis Howes?

  Wasn't paying attention or whatever.

• 42:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, he was lost in thought. But anyway, what I'm saying is with mindfulness, you'd say, none of the stories matter, just the, just the data. The data was, he and I were walking in opposite directions, his eyes were not toward me as we passed each other. That's it. So if you could take experiences and actually hold them in that level without spinning on the story about it, that could be very useful.

• 42:54Lewis Howes?

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

• 43:21Speaker 01

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

• 44:04Speaker 01

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

• 44:49Speaker 01

  And now let's bring it into the military context. And so when I started this work, like I said, it was new to me. But the notion of mindfulness-based stress reduction had been around by a dear friend and teacher, John Kabat-Zinn. He had already established, using these Buddhist practices, an eight-week, 24-hour or so program, which had a suite of practices. So it wasn't any one thing. It was like four kind of main, four to six main exercises. And so we looked at that and said, how do we use that in a way that can be useful? And just to give you an example of one of the practices, right? So one of the very simple practices, which when people say the term meditation, they probably think of this. But I want to connect the dots between how it relates to attention

• 45:33Speaker 01

  and why I thought it was an interesting thing. Can I do that?

• 45:36Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, yeah, please.

• 45:38Speaker 01

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

• 46:23Speaker 01

  Then you're going to pick, kind of identify something in your kind of breath landscape that is prominent. It could be the coolness of air moving in and out of your nostrils or maybe some part of your back that you notice moving, something that really stands out, it's salient. And then you're going to take that flashlight of attention and just shine it there for the period of time that you do the practice. So the first instruction is focus. Focus on breath-related sensations. And then the next part of the practice, as you're doing this, if it hasn't happened already, it's going to happen. When you notice your mind has wandered away from breath-related sensations, redirect the flashlight back.

• 47:08Speaker 01

  So you're just breathing, noticing.

• 47:16Speaker 01

  Focusing.

• 47:22Speaker 01

  And when your mind wanders, nothing big to do, just bring it back and begin again.

• 47:33Speaker 01

  And that's it.

• 47:35Lewis Howes?

  So that's the first step, is that practice, just to notice how much it wanders?

• 47:39Speaker 01

  No, you're not even noticing how much it wanders. You did three things. You focused, you noticed, you redirected.

• 47:45Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 47:45Speaker 01

  Okay, that's what a lot of my military friends would call the push-up. That's the push-up. Now, it ended up that that simple practice tapped into all three of those brain systems. You had the flashlight that was directed, you exercised that. Floodlight that's noticing, what's going on, what's going on? And then that executive that says, get back.

• 48:02Lewis Howes?

  Interesting, get back on track.

• 48:04Speaker 01

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

• 48:49Lewis Howes?

  Gotcha. But you talk about a 12-minute mindfulness approach?

• 48:53Speaker 01

  So we do, yeah, so the whole program is essentially based on these early mindfulness-based stress reduction contexts. But mindfulness-based stress reduction, very powerful, 55 years of research now that have studied it. Too much time for pre-deployment soldiers, for example. Like, people aren't going to give me, in fact, I tried it for a year, I had $2 million of Department of Defense funding and nobody would take my project. They're like, nope, nope, too much time. So one of the things I had to do was write a grant that basically said, how can we... Figure out what the minimum effective doses. Do they need to do eight hours of training over, sorry, 24 hours of training over eight weeks and practice 45 minutes every day? Is that necessary? Because nobody's gonna do it.

• 49:34Lewis Howes?

  Mindfulness meditation training.

• 49:36Speaker 01

  Just like you did for 30 seconds there. Very well, well done.

• 49:39Lewis Howes?

  Thank you.

• 49:40Speaker 01

  For 45 minutes a day, that's the assigned homework, which is beneficial, but it's not realistic for these high-performance, high-stress groups.

• 49:47Lewis Howes?

  They can do 12 minutes a day or 5 minutes a day.

• 49:49Speaker 01

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

• 50:12Lewis Howes?

  12 minimum.

• 50:13Speaker 01

  It's a 12 minimum about 3 to 5 times a week.

• 50:15Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 50:16Speaker 01

  So that helped. Then people were like, in fact, that's what we did with the football team. We went in and we said, based on prior research, it's about 12 minutes a day. And, you know, we just, we gave them 12-minute recordings and they did it. They did it for about 5 days a week.

• 50:30Lewis Howes?

  Guided meditation.

• 50:31Speaker 01

  Guided meditation, just like I guided you right now and you followed. Same idea, but we do it for the entire 12 minutes. We're guiding them.

• 50:37Lewis Howes?

  What does that look like? Is it focusing on your breath, focusing on your thoughts?

• 50:42Speaker 01

  No, I mean, at this point with the practice was very, very fundamental. The entire 12 minutes for one of the practices is focusing on breath-related sensations.

• 50:51Lewis Howes?

  And that's it?

• 50:52Speaker 01

  That's it.

• 50:52Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 50:53Speaker 01

  Now, what people start realizing is, oh, my mind wanders. Oh, my mind wanders to the same stuff over and over again. So when you're not doing the formal practice, you might be able to think, like, what is it that's like sticky for me, that I'm just keep going back to? And look at that in a different kind of a way. So it's a different progression, but remember, the point for me was, what does it do to attention? So with the football team, we compared 12 minutes of mindfulness a day for 4 weeks to 12 minutes of relaxation a day for 12 weeks. And we found that both were great for improving and boosting and protecting mood.

• 51:29Lewis Howes?

  Mood, yeah.

• 51:30Speaker 01

  Only mindfulness helped attention.

• 51:32Lewis Howes?

  Really? Wow.

• 51:35Lewis Howes?

  Protecting mood is part of the equation to support you in having better attention. Is that right?

• 51:41Speaker 01

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

• 52:03Lewis Howes?

  But there were less, maybe less stress in those moments.

• 52:06Speaker 01

  In those moments, they seemed to be a little bit less stressed.

• 52:08Lewis Howes?

  Yes, gotcha.

• 52:09Speaker 01

  But mindfulness gave you both the stress reduction and mood boosting benefits and the attentional benefits. So if you were going to do one thing, my recommendation would be do the thing that you get more benefits.

• 52:18Lewis Howes?

  Right. Is there anything else that you've studied in the last 20 years that could help you become a higher performer with more attention and more focus in your life than these types of mindfulness practices? Or is this seem to be kind of the gold standard for the brain?

• 52:33Speaker 01

  It's interesting because when you start, when you start looking at the kinds of things that get people messed up in terms of performance. So we talked about where your attention is in that moment, right? So eye on the ball, scan the field, that kind of stuff. The other thing that seems to be very problematic is the story about what's happening.

• 52:52Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 52:52Speaker 01

  Like, I'm the best thing on the planet and so I'm going to dominate this is a problem in some sense because you have a false sense of dominance.

• 53:01Lewis Howes?

  Uh huh.

• 53:02Speaker 01

  Or I just screwed up and I'm never going to recover from this. And so both of those storytelling aspects also seem to be a big problem.

• 53:11Lewis Howes?

  To hurt you, really? If you think that like I'm the greatest in the world, or I suck and I'm never going to amount to anything, having those extremes. So is that an identity issue? It's like the way you shape your own identity about yourself?

• 53:23Speaker 01

  I mean, it may be, but what I'm talking about is how that shows up in the moment, in the play, in the, on the playing field.

• 53:29Lewis Howes?

  Gotcha, okay.

• 53:30Speaker 01

  Because if you go in with that kind of hubris, like, oh yeah, I got this, you are going to start limiting how much you are focusing and scanning because you've got a predisposition that there's no issue here. So you can't have that kind of already assumed success. And, you know, this, this is going to get complicated and I'm not a performance psychologist, I'm a neuroscientist, but my point was just that, my point is really just that the notion of storytelling in the mind and a

• 54:01Speaker 01

  Overreliance on the story can be very difficult. Now, the story is not just about yourself. The story is about what you think the intentions of the other team are as well. So we think that this play means this. So anytime you start telling a story, essentially, a narrative is constraining information processing in the brain because the brain is just going to default to constraining what it thinks about based on the story. So if I have the view, like we were talking about earlier, we're walking down the hall and you don't look at me and my view is, oh, well, you know, he doesn't like me or whatever I end up thinking about, I am so biased by that that I might not notice that actually, you know, you have a bloody nose or something like that. Like there could be something that I'm missing because I'm so like occupied with this thing.

• 54:44Speaker 01

  Now, in the context of elite performance, you don't want that. You do not want to be disadvantaging yourself because your story is narrowing. You want the full data and you want to understand that there's a multiplicity, that the other team is not, they're no chumps. They're not going to just do whatever and they're going to fall into a particular way of doing it, especially in this team context. It's very important in the military context with combat itself is that you don't know what the enemy is up to and if you start thinking you do, you might be very wrong, very wrong. So the drop the story aspect was also very important and it ends up that mindfulness also works on dropping the story because you are essentially aiming to orient to present moment experience without editorializing.

• 55:27Lewis Howes?

  Right. Let's say you have an all-star son playing college football and preparing for the season, right? He's about to go into training camp for football camp at one of the top universities, Ohio State University, and he has a goal to win the national championship and he's an all-star player. What would you guide him on paying attention to, working on, practicing on for the month leading up to training camp and then continually throughout the entire season? Would it be, what would you be your prescription to your son to have the best possible chance of being the best athlete he can be and accomplishing his goals?

• 56:11Speaker 01

  I mean, I think that's what I laid out in my book.

• 56:13Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 56:13Speaker 01

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

• 56:36Lewis Howes?

  Takes time and energy.

• 56:37Speaker 01

  It takes time and energy and if somebody, and athletes actually are great for this because they, as our, as our service members, you know you gotta train. You have no, you're not, you're not naive to think that if I just sit here, I'm gonna be great. No, you know you gotta work at it. But the thing about our culture at this moment, and this is sort of my bigger passion behind why I wanted to write the book now, we don't have a cultural understanding that the mind needs to be trained daily for performance, excellence and wellness. We don't have that understanding. We, we understand, thank goodness, that, that mental health can be problematic and we can, we can work on it. But the notion of a prevention and mental protective effect is not known, you know,

• 57:19Speaker 01

  and, and it's, think about, it's just a matter of time, I'm hoping, especially with more research like the kind of work I'm doing. Like a hundred years ago, if you saw somebody running down the street, you'd probably think they're being chased by somebody, right? It was not normalized to engage in daily practice. And there was a lot of resistance to it when people started, you're gonna do what? You're gonna just run around the block? That's insane. But we do it. And I want people to understand that everything in our, in our lab is suggesting you gotta do the same with the mind. Because you don't know when the next high-stress interval is coming around and we know what happens when that occurs. And for somebody in that kind of elite category, it's going to be demanding. It's, and, and that, in fact, that is the nature of what being elite means. It's the nature of what being a leader means, frankly, in any industry.

• 58:03Speaker 01

  You're not there because things are all chill, you're there because things are gonna be very demanding and that only a few people can actually successfully maneuver through.

• 58:11Lewis Howes?

  And that's where there's risk and there's reward at being in that position.

• 58:14Speaker 01

  But advantage yourself by training your own mind. You know, advantage yourself to get the most data, to be on your own team. You know, oftentimes, we're not on our own team, we're fighting ourselves.

• 58:23Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 58:23Speaker 01

  Like, we're in a battle internally and that will definitely deplete your attention.

• 58:29Lewis Howes?

  How important is positive self-talk, like coaching to yourself internally? As opposed to like the negative talk? I mean, we mentioned this briefly about not being this, you know, horrible naysayer to yourself and saying, "I suck." But how actually important is that?

• 58:42Speaker 01

  I mean, in my mind, again, remember, this is not my... I'm not a performance psychologist. But what I would say is be aware that the positive self-talk is occurring. So be aware that it's not reality, that it's done for a particular purpose. Because you want to have... It's like you were saying, a neutrality toward you. Like, you... If you... You want to notice the positive self-talk? Because you want to notice the negative self-talk. Neither are real.

• 59:06Lewis Howes?

  Mm-hmm.

• 59:07Speaker 01

  They're both an overlay on top of reality.

• 59:09Lewis Howes?

  They're a story.

• 59:10Speaker 01

  They're a story.

• 59:11Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 59:11Speaker 01

  And part of the training that we can offer is to remind people to drop the story. And, you know, to really distance themselves, to take a more bird's-eye view toward what's occurring with more of a self-supported approach. Like, Amish is feeling very negative right now. Or, you know, Amish is feeling really on top of it right now. Both are things that are overlaid upon the actual occurrence of events.

• 59:37Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 59:37Speaker 01

  I think that gives us much more flexibility and choice. Because then we don't... It's, you know, the phrase is really, "Thoughts are not facts." Thoughts are not facts. Like, but we forget that. We are so fused with our thoughts that they drive everything we do. It's like if you think about the mind playing out a movie. We're in the movie. We forget we're watching a movie.

• 1:00:00Lewis Howes?

  Absolutely. Thoughts are not facts. That's good. What's the... What's the practice that you do personally? And are you as consistent as you want to be with your own mindfulness approach on a daily basis?

• 1:00:12Speaker 01

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

• 1:00:49Lewis Howes?

  Like a mantra?

• 1:00:50Speaker 01

  No, I'll tell you what they are in a minute. A series of phrases that we repeat that are not prescribing anything. They're basically offering well wishes.

• 1:01:00Lewis Howes?

  Hmm.

• 1:01:01Speaker 01

  And so, and, and you start by offering them to yourself. And then you offer them to a benefactor, a close other that has really supported you. Then maybe to a neutral person. Then to maybe somebody that you're having a lot of difficulty with. And then you might expand out to everybody in your neighborhood or your community. It's a way to kind of expand this circle of well wishing.

• 1:01:19Lewis Howes?

  Hmm.

• 1:01:20Speaker 01

  And, and the, the, the benefits of that are also quite well known. Very different, very different kind of a practice. But it's part of the standard suite of practices that we offer, that we offer in the research that I've done is, as well as, as well as, that I describe in the book. But the phrases are like this. So you might say, you know, like if I'm just gonna dedicate it to myself. It's just kind of four different things. So, and you can pick whatever phrases you want. But it's, remember, it's a well wishing. It's not like you are this, or you're gonna be this. It's, may this happen for you. So you use the word, may, so, may you be safe.

• 1:01:55Lewis Howes?

  You say this to yourself.

• 1:01:56Speaker 01

  You say this to yourself.

• 1:01:57Lewis Howes?

  May I be safe?

• 1:01:58Speaker 01

  May I be safe? May I be healthy? May I be happy? May I live with ease?

• 1:02:07Speaker 01

  So, you know, you're, you're, you can kind of, you can play around with what the phrases are, but three to four things that you repeat yourself, repeat to yourself, that I might wish it for you, you know? May you be safe? And again, I'm doing this in the privacy of my own mind.

• 1:02:20Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 1:02:20Speaker 01

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

• 1:02:36Lewis Howes?

  To yourself internally, yep. And then to others, yep.

• 1:02:41Speaker 01

  That you, you end up being quite a bit more self supportive. Like, you know, if I want Amish you to be safe, happy, healthy, and live with ease, maybe I don't need to spend forty five minutes yelling at myself for something I just did.

• 1:02:53Lewis Howes?

  Right, yeah.

• 1:02:53Speaker 01

  Maybe it's a different way I could do it. Or frankly, you know, one of the people that can end up being your close supportive person can also be the difficult person sometimes. Your partner, like my husband sometimes. But if I, if I, he's in my practice. If we're having a disagreement and there's a little room for for understanding, I find myself giving extending that understanding like, look, ultimately, what I want for him is for him to be happy. And like, maybe he didn't mean to leave the dirty blender out all day, like, you know, whatever it is like, maybe it's okay, or I there's a there's just a little bit more kind of consideration for things and and you're not as quite as I don't know, quite as unforgiving. And so this, so you're asking me about my own practice, so I will, depending on on sort of the nature of

• 1:03:38Speaker 01

  what's going on with me, I'll either do a focus focused attention practice like the one we did, or something called an open monitoring practice, or one of the loving kindness practices. But I'll commit to doing whatever type of practice for the entire 12 minutes.

• 1:03:51Lewis Howes?

  So you do one of the practices for 12 minutes?

• 1:03:53Speaker 01

  Exactly, and the program that I laid out in the book, which is very similar to a program that we offer, you know, for example, special special forces also has those same types of practices. And you you kind of build on them, you you start out with the focus, then you go to the open monitoring, then you go to the loving kindness. And you interleave these as you go to kind of grow the capacities in this multiple way, it's it's like a type of mental cross training.

• 1:04:18Lewis Howes?

  Ooh, mental crossfit, I like it. Uh, open monitor practice, what does that look like?

• 1:04:24Speaker 01

  So open monitoring is remember we were talking about some are really good for the floodlight and the and the, sorry, the flashlight and um and the juggler, well, open monitoring is really a practice for the floodlight. Because it sounds easy to say, oh, just stay open and receptive to whatever happens. Usually, we're not doing that, we're like, like I said, latching on to things. This is a practice, open monitoring, where you are monitoring your ongoing thoughts, feelings, sensations, events internally and externally. So I call it the river of thought is the kind of phrase I that I use in the book, like, imagine yourself sitting on the bank of a river. And like, you know, near a nice rock is a comfortable spot and everything happening, the conscious, that the the flow of your conscious experience is the river.

• 1:05:08Speaker 01

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

• 1:05:45Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:45Speaker 01

  How do you cultivate that stability of mind? Or you can tell in the competition context that somebody's trying to get you. They are goading you. How do you stay stable? So yes, that is occurring and I'm still right here, sitting, watching.

• 1:05:59Lewis Howes?

  Steady, yeah.

• 1:06:00Speaker 01

  Steady.

• 1:06:00Lewis Howes?

  Wow. Okay, so one of those three practices you try to do every day.

• 1:06:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06:05Lewis Howes?

  With the may I be practice as well. Do you do that before or after?

• 1:06:09Speaker 01

  Oh, no, that's what I do for 12 minutes.

• 1:06:11Lewis Howes?

  The may I be safe, may I be healthy?

• 1:06:13Speaker 01

  You repeat them over and over. And then you say it to someone else. Yeah, you can go through the whole sequence. Some days I'll just do it only for me.

• 1:06:17Lewis Howes?

  Wow, for 12 minutes?

• 1:06:18Speaker 01

  12 minutes.

• 1:06:19Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 1:06:20Speaker 01

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

• 1:06:45Lewis Howes?

  That's cool.

• 1:06:46Speaker 01

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

• 1:07:21Lewis Howes?

  So they did these practices during it and then at the end choose one?

• 1:07:25Speaker 01

  They could choose one every night. They got to pick one for the next four weeks. And we just noted what they picked.

• 1:07:29Lewis Howes?

  A lot of them chose this. Why do you think that is?

• 1:07:32Speaker 01

  Try it.

• 1:07:33Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:07:34Speaker 01

  I think a lot of it is, we don't orient toward ourselves in this way. Especially people that are searching for excellence. We are very much interested in pushing the limits of our capacity. And we forget that that kind of care toward our own. We want to be excellent, but we don't. Sometimes it will turn into a punitive sort of a thing.

• 1:07:55Lewis Howes?

  Constantly beating yourself up to be better. And I messed this up and you weren't perfect. And what's wrong with you?

• 1:08:01Speaker 01

  Right. And that's, and I'm saying, all those may still happen. But for 12 minutes a day, if you could do something different.

• 1:08:06Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, that's nice. How many thoughts a day does the human brain have? Do we know?

• 1:08:12Speaker 01

  I mean, what's a thought?

• 1:08:18Lewis Howes?

  An idea, thinking something?

• 1:08:19Speaker 01

  Well, so this is, if you go down this road of thinking about it, you start getting very granular and very momentary, right? And so it's a great question. But I'll just tell you, like, I've thought about this because when I first started practicing, I was like, okay, where's this going to get me? You know, I'm like a results kind of person. Like, okay, I'm going to do this thing. The instruction was 45 minutes a day. After I finished with this book, I was taking this mindfulness course. So I asked one of my dear colleagues, who's been a practitioner for 30 years. I mean, we were just starting to collaborate. And I was like, okay, look, you've been at this for 30 years. Okay, how long do you go before you start mind wandering? You know? I thought he was going to say like, eh, 20 minutes, an hour. I thought it was going to be some long thing. He's like.

• 1:09:00Lewis Howes?

  10 seconds, 20 seconds.

• 1:09:01Speaker 01

  Seven seconds.

• 1:09:02Lewis Howes?

  Wow, right away, still after 30 years.

• 1:09:04Speaker 01

  And I was like, this sounds like a dumb thing to be doing that.

• 1:09:07Lewis Howes?

  If you can't, yeah, focus.

• 1:09:08Speaker 01

  But then we talked more and it goes back to a question of what is a thought? What he said that really struck me was the resolution of his mind was so well calibrated. He's like, think of it like this. You know, before, if I was lost in thought, it would be, I would have a full on fantasy or I'm having some doomsday scenario play out. Now I can see a little undulation, a little ripple in the water. So I don't even have a full thought, but I notice this instability arising that might lead to a thought. So, you know, the notion of what a thought is, is very, it's a tricky slippery thing. But I think what we want to cultivate is this capacity to know our mind to that level, that we know its contents, we know its arisings, we know its vulnerabilities, we know the

• 1:09:51Speaker 01

  stories it's making, and we can function in a more self supportive way.

• 1:09:56Lewis Howes?

  How important is? The things you think about the first, the first moment you wake up in the morning and right before you go to bed. How important are those, I guess, 10 to 15 minutes of wake up and pre-sleep?

• 1:10:07Speaker 01

  Yeah. I don't have an answer. I've not done that experiment, but I'll tell you that it's more about the moment to moment.

• 1:10:16Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 1:10:17Speaker 01

  And it's about the neighborhoods you travel often. Because, you know, I say this and it sounds like I'm trying to be grandiose, but what you pay attention to is your life.

• 1:10:25Lewis Howes?

  Hmm.

• 1:10:26Speaker 01

  If you are in the neighborhoods of self-hatred or anger or whatever it is, that's your life. There's no, there's no question. The whole brain is recalibrated toward those thoughts, those emotions, those bodily sensations, and that is your life. So this is unfortunately, one of the problems with stress is that stress is not the moment of demand. Stress is what you're carrying around with you. It's that mental time travel that happens even after the stressful event has occurred.

• 1:10:54Lewis Howes?

  Hmm. Because a stressful event can occur years ago, a month ago, a week ago, and you could still be holding on to it. And still be reliving, reliving that stressful event when you don't need to. Because it's not happening in this moment.

• 1:11:07Speaker 01

  And it's not that you're just reliving it and it's innocuous. You're reliving it and the biological cascade, both neuroly and physiologically, is going to be as if you're there.

• 1:11:17Lewis Howes?

  It's crazy, isn't it?

• 1:11:18Speaker 01

  That's how powerful our mind is. That's how powerful our attention is.

• 1:11:21Lewis Howes?

  So the body feels the memories of the past until we learn to, I guess, process it correctly or heal it.

• 1:11:30Speaker 01

  I would not say, and you need to, you can take those journeys. That's your choice, but be aware that it's happening and be aware that it's not happening right now.

• 1:11:42Lewis Howes?

  Be aware that what's happening?

• 1:11:44Speaker 01

  Whatever the memory is that's arising.

• 1:11:46Lewis Howes?

  That it happened.

• 1:11:46Speaker 01

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

• 1:12:08Lewis Howes?

  What is that called in psychological terms? When you're like...

• 1:12:11Speaker 01

  That process is called de-centering.

• 1:12:13Lewis Howes?

  De-centering.

• 1:12:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:12:14Lewis Howes?

  So you're not being in the moment, you're seeing yourself be in the moment.

• 1:12:17Speaker 01

  Correct. You are, you're not the center, you're de-centered. The, your attention is over here watching the unfolding here.

• 1:12:23Lewis Howes?

  And communicating to yourself from a different space.

• 1:12:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:12:27Lewis Howes?

  It's so fascinating what the mind can do. The brain can do, I guess.

• 1:12:33Lewis Howes?

  Where do thoughts um come from then? Is it, is it the brain or is it the mind?

• 1:12:42Speaker 01

  Now we're getting into the philosophical.

• 1:12:44Lewis Howes?

  And, and where does the, where is the mind? The, the brain is in here, right? But where's the mind? Is the mind only, is it in the body? Is it outside of the body? Is it in the sphere connected to the body? Is it consciousness in the world?

• 1:13:01Speaker 01

  I know, but I can't tell you, I'm sorry.

• 1:13:02Lewis Howes?

  You can't tell me?

• 1:13:03Speaker 01

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

• 1:13:46Speaker 01

  We may be bound by the fact that we as humans are looking at ourselves and there's gonna be limitations to that. And then, of course, his response was like, then why are you bothering, right? And

• 1:13:55Lewis Howes?

  Then why are you studying this?

• 1:13:56Speaker 01

  Then why bother, yeah, why are you studying this if you're not gonna have an answer? And, and, and I thought, you know, he's a, he's a

• 1:14:01Lewis Howes?

  Smart kid, he must go to Ohio State.

• 1:14:05Speaker 01

  He doesn't go to Ohio State. Um, he goes to Stanford, but anyway, um, he uh is a math and, and a computer science person, so very different. I mean, for him, it's a very different kind of thing. But the reason that I can say that I study it is because

• 1:14:21Speaker 01

  It's, it's, I'm a scientist, you know. Understanding the nature of things is my curiosity. It's what I want to do. But more than that, I would say, I'm a very practical and applied scientist. I want, it might be interesting, and I'm certainly happy to chat with you about that, to understand the nature of the mind and the brain and what is it. Are we, for example, as, as conscious beings, are we the factory for consciousness? Or are we just the radio antenna for consciousness? Right? These are all very interesting things. But when it comes down to it, we're, we're people. We got to function in a society. We have pain and suffering. We can harm each other. We're at a moment in time where our planet is in crisis. And I want to use my skills as a brain scientist to try to address those issues.

• 1:15:06Speaker 01

  That, I think, is possible. And maybe I won't have the ultimate answers, but I think I can help people get more answers for themselves, so that at least we're more functional in our world.

• 1:15:13Lewis Howes?

  What's your thoughts on manifesting thoughts? Abundance thoughts? There's a, you know, there's a saying called the law of attraction. And, you know, what you would think expands and, you know, starts to manifest. And that could be thoughts on stress and worry, and you start to expand that thought in the body and the mind. Or thoughts on, you know, opportunities in your life and healthy relationships and financial abundance and health.

• 1:15:40Speaker 01

  You're talking about the secret.

• 1:15:43Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, yeah. What's your, what's your thoughts on neuroscience, studying the brain and manifestation?

• 1:15:50Speaker 01

  In substance, I already told you my thoughts, right? I told you, what you pay attention to is your life.

• 1:15:55Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 1:15:56Speaker 01

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

• 1:16:33Lewis Howes?

  Mm-hmm, you'll start to see it in places in your life, yeah?

• 1:16:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, which, you know, maybe that's beneficial if it's done in the right way, and if you can cultivate it in that way, many of us under normal, real-life stressful circumstances.

• 1:16:46Lewis Howes?

  Don't have that, yeah, yeah. What are the questions you wish people asked you more about the brain, the mind?

• 1:16:52Speaker 01

  I mean, you asked a lot of great ones, really, you really did. I think that the main thing for me is that people start opening up to this idea that we can train the mind, that we should train the mind, and it's not fancy. It's not bells and whistles, you know, it's just like physical activity. It's pretty basic, but you gotta do it. And you gotta do it in a way that is regularity and a commitment. I'm not interested so much in the esoteric or the ethereal, because I'm just, I wanna, there's a lot to do now, here.

• 1:17:25Lewis Howes?

  Right, right.

• 1:17:26Speaker 01

  So, I would, I would say that my interest is more in supporting people and them inquiring on what they can do for themselves daily. It won't take a necessary lot of investment, 12 nights a day, to actually change themselves in a way that will be, they'll be better for it, and they'll help others.

• 1:17:44Lewis Howes?

  What's been the biggest benefits you've seen in the last, I guess, 17, 18 years of studying this and applying it consistently for your personal life?

• 1:17:53Speaker 01

  I mean, I wear a mouthguard now, and my teeth aren't numb, so there's something about that. I would say, really, it's about being more here. Like, I felt like I was barely here in my life. And I'm just here, and that means seeing a look of concern on my, you know, my child's face, or enjoying a sunset. I mean, it's gonna sound super cheesy, but like, I felt like I couldn't even enjoy stuff that should be joyful.

• 1:18:19Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 1:18:19Speaker 01

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

• 1:18:44Lewis Howes?

  What would you say for those who continue to stay distracted or aren't able to focus their attention? What are the biggest consequences for their life if they don't learn these practices for themselves?

• 1:18:56Speaker 01

  I mean, I don't think I need to tell them. I think most people that are experiencing that are suffering.

• 1:19:00Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:01Speaker 01

  I think most people, I don't know anybody, including myself, that would say, "Oh yeah, my attention. Oh, it's great. It's great. Got it." Most of us feel fractured, fragmented, barely able to hang on. And the reality is, we are in the most intense information-rich environment probably humanity's ever been in. But remember back to those monks. They also suffered with their mind wandering, right?

• 1:19:23Lewis Howes?

  Without cell phones and social media.

• 1:19:25Speaker 01

  That's right. So that's the baseline.

• 1:19:27Lewis Howes?

  And then we're doing all that on top of it.

• 1:19:28Speaker 01

  That's right. So I would say my question for the individuals that don't feel like, well, I think that most people feel like, "Yeah, I'm not paying attention as well as I need to." And they think there's something wrong with themselves, like, "My brain just isn't working right." And I want to just, the main, like, public service announcement I would want to say to all of those people is like, "Your brain is great. Your brain is fine. In fact, the reason computer algorithms can predict what you're gonna click on is because it's working so reliably." Right? So it's not, it's not the brain that's the problem. Our attention spans have not been shrinking, and evolution doesn't work at that timescale. But what's happening is that everything we know now about the way attention functions, what attracts it,

• 1:20:08Speaker 01

  what gets it distracted, what causes preoccupation, means we gotta work, we gotta work for our own benefit. And for me, it's, it's counterintuitive. It's not about being able to focus better. It's about noticing when you're not focused.

• 1:20:24Lewis Howes?

  It's noticing when you're not focused and then redirecting it to being present.

• 1:20:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:20:28Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 1:20:29Speaker 01

  Or choosing not to, whatever you choose. But noticing where you are. It's like I said before.

• 1:20:33Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 1:20:33Speaker 01

  Paying attention to your attention.

• 1:20:34Lewis Howes?

  Do you have guided, um, do you lead people through guided audios as well? Do they have this on your website, or is this?

• 1:20:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, there are some places you can get them all already. Mindful.org has a course. Yep, with me speaking.

• 1:20:47Lewis Howes?

  Mindful.org, yeah.

• 1:20:48Speaker 01

  Mindful.org. It's Mindful Magazine. It's got a whole course that I've offered on this, kind of to make the book come alive.

• 1:20:53Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 1:20:54Speaker 01

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

• 1:21:03Lewis Howes?

  Is that timer ten percent happier? Yeah, he's a good guy. He was very skeptic as well. He was like, this meditation thing, I'm never gonna do this. This is not practical.

• 1:21:12Speaker 01

  I know, now, literally.

• 1:21:13Lewis Howes?

  This is all he obsesses about, right?

• 1:21:16Speaker 01

  Now this is his life?

• 1:21:17Lewis Howes?

  It's his life. Cause he was like, nah, I'm just gonna work hard and, you know, be on the news and do this thing and live a practical life. This is some woo woo stuff. It's not based in science, but now the science is proving that mindful meditative practices are the most powerful ways to be present, it seems like, and to lower your stress and

• 1:21:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, and you know, and I, you know, there's now when you say the word meditation or mindfulness, it's like, it's such a, it feels like a, you know, like, not a very important word or like so commonplace. But I'm coming at it from the brain science and I'm coming at it for as an attention researcher. I was not out to figure out how to, um, you know, have mystical experiences. I was interested in like-

• 1:21:59Lewis Howes?

  Transcend your life, yeah, yeah.

• 1:22:00Speaker 01

  Which is fine. People can do whatever they like, but I was just like, how do you get people to pay attention in a way that helps them? How do I do that? It was very, it was very basic. So it's funny that the solution is very, uh, very similar, but it's very specific. It's not just do whatever you'd like and just close your eyes and everything's gonna be a blissful rainbow, you know?

• 1:22:18Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:22:18Speaker 01

  This is about brain training. It's about mental training, mental conditioning in the same way we condition the body.

• 1:22:23Lewis Howes?

  Consistently, not just a one-time thing.

• 1:22:26Speaker 01

  Consistently and reaching a threshold where it has an impact.

• 1:22:28Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 1:22:29Speaker 01

  Right? Just like for physical fitness, if I said, if I asked you like, do you think going for like a walk while I walk my dog is really great for my physical wellbeing? You're like, it probably isn't hurting you, but it's not gonna make you a great athlete.

• 1:22:38Lewis Howes?

  Making you stronger, yeah.

• 1:22:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, get to that point where you're doing something, even if it's like a couch to 5K, something consistently.

• 1:22:45Lewis Howes?

  What about burnout? We've got a few final questions, but I feel like the world is burnt out. From their work, from their, whether their lack of, um, passion and the career they've chosen, or their relationships are burnt out, their attention's burnt out. Is this a solution towards burnout as well? Or should it be asking other questions about not feeling burnt out in our lives?

• 1:23:07Speaker 01

  You know, the data is very clear that mindfulness-based practices help with burnout in many different fields, like whether it's critical care nurses, I gave a talk recently to a group of critical care nurses, and I mean, talk about a group that has just been...

• 1:23:21Lewis Howes?

  Depleted.

• 1:23:22Speaker 01

  And been called upon way beyond, right? Same thing with firefighters, in fact, you know, especially here in California.

• 1:23:30Lewis Howes?

  California, yeah.

• 1:23:31Speaker 01

  There are so many fields where this is happening, and mindfulness seems to consistently be beneficial. But here's the important thing I would say about burnout and offering mindfulness as a solution to that. At the individual level, I think it's very helpful to people, not I think, I mean, the data suggests, now we're not doing a study or two, it's like meta-analyses of meta-analyses, it's like a proliferation, there might be a hundred and something studies that are saying that there are beneficial effects. But when you have people benefit from mindfulness training, it's not, that's not, the job is not done there. And I really did talk about this with the critical care nurses, it's that the way in which structures and fields and industries have been set up are promoting this type of burnout to occur, and part of our responsibility...

• 1:24:16Lewis Howes?

  Promoting it, yeah.

• 1:24:17Speaker 01

  Because the individual is in some sense expendable, so this is maybe my radical part of my conversation with you, we have to make sure that as we recoup our own capacity to live a fulfilling life, we have a responsibility to look at the systems, you know, systemic change, whether it's racial and social injustice, sexism, or even the way that capitalist companies function at the expense of the individual, we've got to take a careful look at that. So recouping our energy is not the end, it's the beginning of transforming things in a way that will allow the world to be more sustainable, frankly.

• 1:24:53Lewis Howes?

  Yeah. I love all this stuff, I could talk to you for hours, but I want to ask you the final couple of questions, Amishi. This is, and before I ask these questions, I want people to be aware of your book, Peak Mind, Find Your Focus, Own Your Attention, Invest 12 Minutes a Day. You can go to amishi.com, Amishi Jha over on Twitter and social media, Amishi, what is it?

• 1:25:19Speaker 01

  Jha.

• 1:25:20Lewis Howes?

  P Jha over on Instagram, J H A, and on Facebook as well, amishi.jha.

• 1:25:27Lewis Howes?

  The book is out. Again, peak mind, if you want to improve your focus, your attention, and improve the quality of your life, go get the book and give it to a couple of friends as well.

• 1:25:38Lewis Howes?

  I want to hear one of your audios too, so you can get those audios on 10% happier.

• 1:25:42Speaker 01

  Mindful.org.

• 1:25:43Lewis Howes?

  Mindful.org, Inside Timer as well.

• 1:25:47Lewis Howes?

  This is a question I ask everyone at the end of our interviews called the three truths. So imagine it's your last day on earth, many years away from now. And you get to live the life of your dreams. You get to see everything come true. You solve the question of consciousness and your brain research, you know, all these things happen.

• 1:26:05Speaker 01

  I'm 500 years old.

• 1:26:06Lewis Howes?

  Yes, yes. You're healthy, happy, safe. All these things that you say to yourself continue to happen in your life, all that stuff. But for whatever reason, you got to take all of your work with you, or it goes to another place. And we don't have access to your information anymore. Your book, this interview, you know, all the things that you write in the future, we don't have access. But you get to leave behind three things you know to be true. Three lessons that you would share with the world. And this is all we would have to remember for our lives to help us improve the quality of our life. What would you say are those three truths?

• 1:26:40Speaker 01

  My goodness.

• 1:26:48Speaker 01

  That is really tied to my own life, my own work?

• 1:26:51Lewis Howes?

  Anything at all.

• 1:26:52Speaker 01

  Or just my understanding of things?

• 1:26:53Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, yeah. Just your life in general.

• 1:26:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's not going to be all that original, because I think that these really are truths.

• 1:27:00Speaker 01

  Everything is impermanent, and there's a preciousness to that impermanence. Be kind to each other. Be kind.

• 1:27:09Speaker 01

  And take care of your own mind.

• 1:27:13Lewis Howes?

  Simple is the best way, you know?

• 1:27:19Lewis Howes?

  It's about the, I think people need to go back to the basics all the time. It's hard to become more advanced unless you master the basics in your life. So that's why I think this is not basic, but 12 minutes a day of training the mind is the first step that you can do to start expanding upon accomplishing greater goals or living a more fulfilling, happier life as well. Being more present with the people you care about and stuff like that, so. I want to acknowledge you, Amishi, for dedicating your life to this. Because I think so many people in the world are suffering and struggling to figure out why they have these thoughts. How can I improve my mind? How can I improve my brain? How can I improve my quality of my life on a daily basis?

• 1:28:01Lewis Howes?

  So the fact that you're investing so much time, your entire life, to studying this, researching this, investing in the tests for people to see like what's working, what's not working as a scientist, and give us practical things we can do on a daily basis to help us improve the quality of our life is incredible. So I'm really grateful and appreciate and acknowledge you for your efforts and commitment to this. It's a complicated thing to study and you're making it so much easier for us to not beat ourselves up and have practices to improve our lives. So I acknowledge you for the gift you are, the gift you are in the world, even though you went to Michigan.

• 1:28:44Speaker 01

  Keeping it real.

• 1:28:46Lewis Howes?

  This is a, is there anything else that we can support you with besides getting the book, checking you on on social media, listening to one of these mindful meditations that you have? Anything else? Just go to amishi.com. Do you have a newsletter?

• 1:29:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, they can sign up for it at the website.

• 1:29:06Lewis Howes?

  Awesome, cool.

• 1:29:07Speaker 01

  No, I think that the best way is just keep doing what you're doing because, you know, you're providing people like me and many others that are interested in this work. You're giving us a platform to talk about it and you're asking really great questions and I'm not just trying to flatter you. I mean, I really mean it. It was a really fun conversation.

• 1:29:22Lewis Howes?

  I appreciate it, appreciate it. Final question for you. What's your definition of greatness?

• 1:29:27Speaker 01

  Can you tell me what yours is?

• 1:29:30Lewis Howes?

  Mine is discovering and cultivating the unique gifts within you to pursue your dreams. And in that pursuit, making the maximum impact on the people around you.

• 1:29:42Speaker 01

  Wow, I'll go with that.

• 1:29:44Lewis Howes?

  There you go.

• 1:29:46Speaker 01

  I think I would add in to remember your life is only lived moment by moment. And so it's all of the things you said, but to remember the granular, remember the moment to moment.

• 1:30:01Lewis Howes?

  Amishi, thank you so much. Appreciate it. Amazing. Thank you so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and it inspired you on your journey towards greatness. Make sure to check out the show notes in the description for a full rundown of today's show with all the important links. And also make sure to share this with a friend. Leave us a review over on Apple Podcasts and subscribe over on Apple Podcasts as well. I really love hearing feedback from you guys, so share a review over on Apple and let me know what part of this episode resonated with you the most. And if no one's told you lately, I want to remind you that you are loved, you are worthy, and you matter. And now it's time to go out there and do something great.