March 28, 2025 • 49 mins
In this episode, Dr. Amishi Jha explores how to stop losing your mind (literally) and the surprising science of attention. She shares how mastering your mind isn’t about more effort, it’s about understanding how attention really works. You’ll learn how to train the three systems of attention (the flashlight, the floodlight, and the juggler), why mindfulness isn’t just a trend but a mental upgrade, and how to reclaim your focus—12 minutes at a time.
Key Takeaways:
- How your attention isn’t broken; it’s just overwhelmed.
- Understand the three key attention modes
- Embrace how mindfulness strengthens attention
- Learn the concept of reframing and deframing and why this is so important
- Discover the relationship between stress, mood, and attention
- Uncover the micro-moments in your life and why they matter
If you enjoyed this conversation with Amishi Jha, check out these other episodes:
Stolen Focus and Attention with Johann Hari
How to Focus and Accomplish Goals with Emily Balcetis
For full show notes, click here!
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Experiencing conflict is not a problem, but to realize that
the conflict does not mean to translate into the elaborated
notion that I'm a complete failure and it is never
going to work out. That's the mind doing something else.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
Welcome to the one you feed Throughout time, great thinkers
have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have, quotes
like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you
think ring true. And yet for many of us, our
thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity,
self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't
(00:42):
have instead of what we do. We think things that
hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not
just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent,
and creative effort to make a life worth living. This
podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in
the right direction, how they feed their good wolf.
Speaker 3 (01:05):
Most of us live in doing mode, solving, planning, fixing,
But what if the real key to clarity isn't doing more,
but knowing when to be. This is a lesson I
can certainly learn. Doctor Amishi Jaw calls this peak mind
one that doesn't just chase focus, but knows when to
step back, observe, and reset. It's not about forcing your attention,
(01:28):
it's about understanding how to work with it. In this episode,
we explore why true mental mastery isn't about more effort,
but about balancing focus with awareness and how getting this
right can change everything. I'm Eric Zimmer and this is
the one you feed. Hi, Amishi, Welcome to the show.
Speaker 4 (01:48):
So great to be here.
Speaker 3 (01:49):
I'm really excited to have you on. We're going to
be discussing your new book, Peak Mind, Find your Focus,
own your attention, invest twelve minutes a day. So we'll
get into that in a minute. But we'll start like
we always do with the Parable. In the Parable, there's
a grandparent who's talking with their grandchild and they say,
in life, there are two wolves inside of us that
are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which
(02:10):
represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the
other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed
and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops and thinks
about it for a second, looks up at their grandparents, says, well,
which one wins, and the grandparent says the one you feed.
So I'd like to start off by asking you what
that parable means to you in your life and in
(02:31):
the work that you do.
Speaker 1 (02:32):
Oh, it's such a great parable, and I'd love that
it's really so central to what you talk about on
this podcast because it so much relates to what I
think about and the work that I do in my lab,
because it frankly is about attention, and what you feed
in my mind, reflects what you pay attention to what
you value. So to me, it's entirely describing the power
(02:55):
of attention and the vulnerability of mind when we do
not attend to things that serve us best.
Speaker 3 (03:02):
Yep, I agree totally, and attention is a big subject
in the work that I do. I've got a program
called Spiritual Habits, and attention is one of the core
principles there. Because you quote William James in your book,
there's another statement that I don't think you quoted in
the book, although it's possible I missed it, which is
my experience is what I agree to attend to. Fundamental
(03:24):
attention really does describe I wouldn't say it's the only thing,
but it is a big factor in the type of
life we experience.
Speaker 4 (03:33):
Absolutely.
Speaker 1 (03:34):
I mean it's funny William James, the father of the
field that I'm a member of psychology, but sometimes I
think he's like an alien from the future because he
had so much right about his wisdom and insight into things,
and couldn't agree more with your kind of take on
that whole thing, which is the centrality of our conscious experience,
(03:55):
is tied to the conduit for what becomes prominent in
our minds attention itself.
Speaker 3 (04:02):
So where I'd like to start is with the title
of the book, Peak Mind. You say, a peak mind
is a mind that doesn't privilege thinking and doing over being.
It masters both modes of attention. So say a little
bit more about that, because a lot of the book
is sort of talking about people who are, in, for
lack of a better word, mission critical type situations, you know,
(04:24):
people who are trying to perform better in given circumstances.
So there's a fair amount of the book that's devoted
in that direction. But this statement really is speaking to
something more broadly than how I perform. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (04:36):
Absolutely, And part of the reason I wanted to make
sure I made that distinction between thinking and doing is
exactly because of the populations that make gravitate toward this
book and toward the kind of projects that we do
in the research we conduct, which are as you call
a mission critical kind of folks, but also sometimes there
referred to as tactical professionals. There is a task at hand,
and we need to accomplish it, and there is a
(04:57):
more successful and less successful way to accomplish it, and
action is what it's all about. And frankly, in my
entire field, in the field of attention research, from the
sort of traditional point of view, that is essentially what
we see attention's role as serving action, and if we
can't pay attention, the chances of acting appropriately are going.
Speaker 4 (05:16):
To not be there.
Speaker 1 (05:18):
But what I'm trying to highlight, which is part of
the broader mission of a lot of contemplative practices and
wisdom traditions, is that there is another way we can
use our attention, use our mind, and their aspects of
even what sort of traditional attentional models within modern cognitive
neuroscience described that can be amplified but aren't currently amplified.
(05:39):
So the being mode from my point of view, is
taking an observational stance, being receptive to what's occurring, so
that in between the action there is reflection, and without
that reflection, the chances to ensure that the action is
appropriate are lessened because sometimes you can know sort of
(06:01):
a ballistic orientation like this is what we're doing, or
the training that you have may may guide you to
say this is what you do, but is it the
right thing to do? How are you going to know
unless you actually look at the circumstances and you know
a lot of times these tactical professionals or mission oriented
folks talk about situational awareness as you've got to know
what's going on around you. But what I'm highlighting with
(06:22):
that statement of being mode, not just doing mode, is
that part of the situation is what is occurring in
your own mind, the set points you have, the expectations
and stories and assumptions that you have, and the being
mode allows you to take stock of what is present
without taking any action in that moment, just allowing that
(06:44):
to exist and percolating in it. And I think it's
highly undervalued, especially for a lot of the kinds of
professionals that we end up working with. So it's a
new or novel aspect of what they might consider doing,
which is being. Yeah, and I put that in quotes
because you people can't see me. You know, in some sense,
the being new type of doing, if you want to
approach it in that way.
Speaker 3 (07:05):
You also say a peak mind and this to quote
William James again which I had not seen this quote before,
and I love a peak mind balances the flights and
the perchings. He says, like a bird's life. The stream
of consciousness seems to be made up of an alternation
of flights and perchings. Say a little bit more about that.
That's very poetic language, I think to speak to some
concepts that you've certainly backed up with neuroscience.
Speaker 1 (07:28):
Yeah, and I think it touches on what you were
asking me about a moment ago, right. The flights in
some sense is the doing and the perching is the being.
And that this can be broken down in sort of
the micro level. So even if we're in the middle
of executing a complex task, to not forget that the
(07:50):
flights are going to be much more successful if the
perchings are actually taking place, and it's that dance. It's
you know, sort of the important aspects of what wisdom is.
This is both reflection and action.
Speaker 3 (08:02):
Yeah, that quote made me think of we interviewed a gentleman.
I don't know, and I'm going to get your opinion
on this in a second. We interviewed a gentleman a
while back by the name of Ian McGilchrist. He wrote
a book called The Master and his Emissary and it's
talking about right brain and left brain. And I'd like
to get your opinion on that in a second. But
one of the things he said was, and when he
(08:23):
was talking about how the right brain and the left
brain work, is that the right brain is more the perching,
it's watching everything that's happening, it's seeing the context, it's
you know, and the left brain is more the flight
or he talked about like a bird pecking food out
of a series of stones. I'm curious in the work
(08:43):
that you've done, has right brain left brain shown up
at all. I'm just kind of curious your thought on
that theory. I don't want to spend a lot of
time there, but I can't help but ask.
Speaker 4 (08:52):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (08:53):
I mean, I don't know that book, and I don't
know Ian at all, and I don't know how literally
was being or what researcher was looking to. But frankly
from sort of a modern neuroscience perspective, the notion of
right brain left brain allowing for complex function to happen
in a hemispherically specified manner has been debunked. All complex functions,
whether it's a broad observational stance or an action oriented focusing,
(09:17):
will involve ordination between the entirety of the brain and
particular both hemispheres. But I appreciate the concept of these
are distinct from each other, and I would not describe
them as based on hemispheres. I describe them based on
mental modes. And when we think about a mode in
the mind, it's essentially a configuration of whatever brain networks
(09:38):
are involved in a particular process being more prominent versus
a different set of brain networks. So definitely it's the
case that I describe it in some sense as two
aspects of attention. And you know this notion of a
flashlight meaning focusing, narrowing, selecting versus a floodlight broad receptive
(09:58):
not biasing some information over other information. And those are
two different modes, and typically you cannot be in both
modes simultaneously. And we know this right if you're sitting
there and reading a deeply entrenched in a good novel
or a good book, any kindit with good book could
be big mind. So if you're entrenched in reading a
good book, somebody walks in the room and says something
(10:21):
to you, you're like, huh what. You have no idea
what was said. Not because you lost the capacity to
comprehend language, but because your focus was so narrowed that
the input coming in in your broad receptive stance was
not quite up to snuff to be able to break
down the sounds into language. From the brand science point
of view, we know that a lot of these aspects
of attention are mutually inhibitory. When one network is active,
(10:44):
the other one will be suppressed. So I again would
say that do not get too literal with regard to
the hemisphere that it's involved in. But the modal aspects
the mind being in different modes is certainly very very important.
Speaker 3 (10:56):
You mentioned the two different modes in your book, you
actually have three modes. You're a little bit like the
Buddha in that you're a list maker. There's lots of
lists of three in this book. I'm sure someone has
pointed that out before, but I actually like it as
a way of organizing. It helps. But so you talked
about two of the sort of quote unquote subsystems that
(11:17):
work together, right, the flashlight, which is we're narrowed in
we're focused to talk about the floodlight, which is a
more broad and open and then the third mode that
you talk about is the juggler. Say a little bit
more about what the juggler is.
Speaker 1 (11:31):
Sure, sure, all three of these are really, as you said,
subsystems of attention. And in the broadest sense we can
say this mental capacity of paying attention is really just
about prioritizing some information over other information. It's thankfully an
evolutionary inheritance we get to enjoy, even though it has
its own consequences.
Speaker 4 (11:51):
But it is the result.
Speaker 1 (11:53):
Of, we think, at least kind of going back in time,
a big problem that the brain had, which is that
everything could not be processed. The brain just lacked the
computational power to do that. So if you didn't prioritize
some stuff over other stuff, there was no way you
were going to be able to make sense of the
world around you or even what's occurring within your mind.
So just to keep that in mind, is the anchor
prioritize some information over other information. Now, the flashlight, you'd say,
(12:17):
is prioritizing some content over other content. So wherever you
direct that flashlight is going to be the privileged content.
But it's it's directed towards something, some object, and that
object can be something in the external environment or an
object in the mind like a thought or a memory.
Speaker 4 (12:33):
When we go to the.
Speaker 1 (12:34):
Floodlight, we're talking about prioritizing and not so much based
on the content, because you're not supposed to really advantage
one thing over another. It's about being this broad receptive stance,
but it is privileging something and that is the moment now,
so you know, formally, this flood light system is called
the alerting system, and you're not being alert to something
in the past or the future, but right in this moment,
(12:54):
so privileging the present moment. And then, as you mentioned,
the third system formally called executive functioning that I describe
it as a juggler for shorthand is really regarding prioritizing
based on our goals. So these are internally held goals, intentions, plans,
whatever it is you want to call it. That is
guiding the way we're going to interact with our own
(13:15):
mind and our environment. You know, just like a juggler,
you've got to do this with sort of a multiplicity
in mind. You usually don't have one goal. So in
this moment, my goal is to have a fruitful conversation
with you. But my goal is also to publish the
papers that I'm publishing, and to be in a responsible citizen,
and to enjoy my life and my family. Those goals
(13:37):
don't go away. But obviously I'm not actively doing all
of those simultaneously. So I'm kind of keeping all the
balls in the air and ensuring that every action that
I undertake aligns with my goals. And when the juggler
is not functioning so well, balls drop, we forget the goal,
we don't inhibit irrelevant information. And this could be a
micro goal, right, So I want to have a conversation
(13:59):
with you, that's my goal. My phone buzzes, and then
I go and start reading my text messages in the
middle of this conversation. Why did I do that? Well,
I fail to hold the goal and then control my behavior.
Speaker 4 (14:09):
Aligned with it.
Speaker 1 (14:11):
So I think that maybe helps frame it more broadly,
that all of it falls underneath attension, because it all
has to do with prioritizing some information or other information.
Speaker 4 (14:19):
It's just the nature of what that information is differs.
Speaker 3 (14:22):
Is the executive function, or the juggler as we would
call it, the part that is choosing where to point
the flashlight. Yes, I think attention is very interesting because
it's similar to the breath. It's something that happens automatically
and is also controllable.
Speaker 4 (14:38):
Correct.
Speaker 3 (14:39):
Yeah, you know, so if someone lit a firecracker off
behind my head right now, like my attention is going there,
there's nothing I'm going to going to do about that, right.
But beyond that is that the juggler that's sort of
trying to say, let me align my attention with my
to use a different word for what you were talking about,
my intentions, the things that matter to me. Is that
(15:01):
kind of falling into the juggler's role, correct.
Speaker 1 (15:03):
Yeah, Executive control is the thing that guides goals. Now,
the goal could be pay attention to what's happening right now,
don't privilege any content over other content. So you're driving
down the road and you see, you know, big flashing
yellow light like maybe by a construction site, and the
juggler would say, probably best to check out what's going
(15:24):
on right now, and it essentially calls upon that particular
floodlight orientation or mental mode to be in, or it
could be get narrow and focused right now so you
can actually understand this conversation or read this sentence or
whatever it is. Get focused and directed. But there's always
the kind of push and pull of what the juggler
(15:44):
intends to do, and then other stuff that may derail
what's going on. And you know, in some sense, the
flashlight is a great example of that, where you've already
said it. You can direct it willfully, but it can
get yanked. And what it gets yanked by is also
very interesting because in some sense it's like the baked
into us.
Speaker 4 (16:05):
Yes juggler.
Speaker 1 (16:06):
Right, It's like, why would it be that a firecracker
would pull your.
Speaker 4 (16:09):
Attention because your survival may depend on it.
Speaker 3 (16:12):
Right.
Speaker 1 (16:12):
So essentially, these, you know, are things that are salient,
that are novel, that are fear inducing or threatening, that
are self related, are all sort of privileged into the
way that our brain functions. We don't have to try
to make it that way, it just is sort of
by default built in.
Speaker 3 (16:28):
Right, you say, the three main factors that determine how
this attention gets deployed. Is familiarity something that's new. I'm
going to give more attention to salience, right, how important
it is to me. And then finally, our own goal,
our own attention. And so attention is sort of being,
as you said, pulled by those things. And one of
the things that you say early on that I really
(16:48):
liked was that there's nothing wrong with our attention. We
talk a lot about having attention problems these days, you know,
a crisis of attention, but you say, our attention is
working just fine. To say a little bit more about that, Yeah.
Speaker 1 (17:02):
That's the kind of ironic part of this moment. People
feel a sense of struggle and overwhelm or crisis, and
they want to blame their brain instead of the circumstances
in some sense. So let's just talk about social media
or technology kind of more broadly. The fact that there
are algorithms that can be built around our willingness to
(17:23):
continue engaging with particular pieces of software or websites, et
cetera tells us that our attention is working completely in
a regular, typical, predictable fashion. And you already mentioned the
three biggies that might get us familiarity in salience for
sure at goals also, but when you can finally tune
(17:45):
the familiar because you're being exposed to it over and
over again, or you can finally tune the salience because
it's so self related, or you can ensure that the
goals are kind of kept to the front of your mind,
you know, like at some point you look, you know
I talk about in the book like I was looking
for this frying pan, like a pot or pan, and
(18:05):
then I kept seeing pans all over the place because
it was being forced onto me, like you look for
a pan, you must be interested in this. So all
of a sudden, now the goal that I had once
is now kept at the front of my mind. It's like, ohyah,
I did want to get that pan. It's like reminding
you of goals. So attention is doing what it does,
but the circumstances are now aligning to tune up and
really maximize engagement for the benefit of usually selling us
(18:29):
a product, mining our attention to be exposed to potentially
buying a product. Right, So it's totally driven by this
whole structure. I just wanted to caution people that, first
of all, don't take it in like it's not like
there's something wrong with you if you see your name
and you want to click on it. That is. That's
the reason that your name and face are on every
social media app is because that's the first step into
(18:53):
hooking you in. And frankly, the other piece is that
you can't really fight against it because you're going to
lose because you're not just dealing with your own kind
of orientation towards social media content, but you're dealing with
very very smart algorithms that are tuning up to you
and a team of engineers that are programming it. So
if we're going to take on this challenge, it cannot
(19:14):
just be like, oh, my mind will not click on
that bright, yellow, shiny thing that's saying click here.
Speaker 3 (19:19):
Unlikely, you say you can't win that fight. Instead, cultivate
(19:46):
the capacity and skill to position in your mind so
you don't have to fight. Say a little bit more
about that, because I think that's a really important point,
is that if our goal is to bring our attention
back to our own control the things that matter to us,
it does feel like it's a fight. And like you,
I tend to believe it's a fight. We're set up
to sort of lose.
Speaker 1 (20:07):
Yeah, the way not to fight is to, at the
most fundamental level, pay attention to our attention, to know
where our mind is. Then there's more sense of agency,
just like anything else. Like I could have the most
elaborate plans, but if I don't know what the plans are,
and I'm not checking in with where I am relative
to those plans, I'll never be able to execute them.
(20:28):
But what we lack typically is that checking in component,
or what we'd call monitoring. Right, we're not monitoring ourselves
and we're not another kind of technical term meta aware.
We're not aware of the contents and processes in our
mind at play in any given moment, and we can
cultivate the ability to be better at that. And that's
where mindfulness meditation can really be helpful, because it is
(20:52):
a way in which we are better able to know
our mind, not just in general, like I tend to
be this way or that, but in this moment what
is occurring within me and around me, so more fully
situationally aware.
Speaker 3 (21:04):
I want to push on that a little bit and
explore it a little further because I think it's really important.
I love the way you said in the book we
lack internal cues about where our attention is moment to moment.
In the Spiritual Habits program, what I say is, you know,
if we're trying to live a life, and basically I
would say we'd be living a life more based on
principles that matter to us, right, living more by that
(21:25):
goal orientation, and the goal may just be to be kinder, right,
So I think forgetting is the biggest problem. Your book
advocates training, you know, twelve minutes in the morning with
a couple different approaches, and we can talk about what
some of those are. I'm curious, though, do you have
suggestions on how else, maybe during the day to get
(21:48):
a little bit more of this because I do agree
that a focused training period like you're describing does help,
and I know myself and a lot of people who
do have mourning mindfulness pe that we can still get
pretty lost all day long and lose track of any
of those internal cues. So do you have some ideas
about how to weave those into more of the moments
(22:09):
we have?
Speaker 1 (22:10):
Absolutely, And first of all, i'd say that just to
be clear about the prescription, you know, it comes out
of over a decade and a half of research and
the goal of that research is not how to maximize
your spiritual fulfillment or life, but what is the minimum
effective dose to protect attention in high stress circumstances. So
it's a very different goal, yes, than other things. And
(22:33):
that also that twelve minutes is not in my view,
the culmination or the be all end all.
Speaker 3 (22:37):
It's the starter minimum effective dose.
Speaker 1 (22:39):
It's the minimum effective dose, thank you, yes, And so
I just want to mention that because people could say
twelve minutes, why am I going to accomplish in twelve
minutes a day? But it actually we found is beneficial.
The other thing is that I don't say when to
do it, so do it whenever you're going to do it.
Speaker 4 (22:53):
But your point still holds.
Speaker 1 (22:55):
The reason we do the formal minutes of day of
mindfulness practice is so that the mental mode of mindfulness,
which I describe as paying attention to our present moment
experience without conceptually elaborating or emotionally reacting. We want to
bring about more of that mode throughout the day because
that is going to be the mode that allows us
(23:16):
to connect with what's happening in the moment and monitor
the contents of our mind as well. As obviously taking
stock of what's happening around us practicing so that we
can just say we got it off. There are to
do list we're practicing to elicit the more prevalence of
that mode. But you're right, there are ways in which
we can advantage curing ourselves to do that. So some
(23:38):
of the things that we do, I'll just give you
an example from some of the research studies that we do,
because we tell people what I just described to you,
that we're doing this so that we're more mindful throughout
the day, not just that we're Olympic level breath followers.
Speaker 4 (23:48):
I mean, who cares, right, But how do you do that?
Speaker 1 (23:52):
So, for example, one of the practices that we give
is it's you know, these are all part of sort
of the canon of what's currently offered in the world
of mindful training, and thankfully that that world is growing
and more available to people. But something called the stop
practice is a good one, and I recommend that people
do this, and they use the queue of being stopped,
meaning you're stopped at a elevator, you're stopped at a
(24:14):
stop sign, you're stopped at a crosswalk.
Speaker 4 (24:16):
An you're waiting in line.
Speaker 1 (24:17):
Anytime you stop and you notice the body is stationary.
Typically what happens in that moment pull out your phone,
start doing stuff. No use that as a moment to
do this practice. And the practice is a mini mindfulness practice.
So stop as an acronym for stop. You're already stopped.
Take a breath, and that's just aware of one conscious breath,
(24:37):
like you're just you're not manipulating the breath or trying
to take it more deeply, just like we've been breathing
this whole time, but taking stock of it observe. So
after that breath, you're still kind of in that kind
of mode of observing what's occurring right now.
Speaker 4 (24:50):
And then proceed.
Speaker 1 (24:51):
And you know, I'll tell you that one of the
papers that we're working on right now is a project
we did in basic combat training with close to two
thousand soldiers where they they did this stop practice. They
did a formal mindfulness practice like we assigned and that
I describe in the book, but then we asked them
to stop practice and we found benefited all kinds of things,
their sense of team cohesion, their ability to check out
(25:15):
if the body was experiencing pain, to determine if they
needed to take action. You know, like for example, people
talk about just fracturing their feet and legs and bones
because they're so negligent of taking stock of the body.
But if you're stopped in all these times and you're
just checking out what's going on, and we actually guide them.
Week one is the breath, then it may be the environment,
(25:35):
then its aspects the body, then it's people in your team.
So it kind of follows different components of what the
target of what you take stock of in that observe
moment is can really make a difference and cues people
into that mindful mode repeatedly and multiple times a day.
So that's one one thing that you could try.
Speaker 3 (25:52):
I think that's great. You know, I'm often thinking about triggers,
like what you use the word q Q or trigger,
like how can we remember? And that's a I mean
I've talked about and heard about sort of like if
you're stopped at a traffic light, but I love the
idea of like stopped in any circumstance. That's a great one.
Speaker 1 (26:08):
Yeah, And you know, now I'm telling people more like
if you feel the urge to pull out your phone,
that's a moment to practice stop. Yeah, because that's giving
you a sense of like something's going on that makes
you feel capable of doing that, and maybe think, is
that what I want to be doing? Now?
Speaker 4 (26:22):
Am I defaulting?
Speaker 3 (26:23):
Yep? Before we dive back into the conversation, let me
ask you something. What's one thing that has been holding
you back lately? You know that it's there, You've tried
to push past it, but somehow it keeps getting in
the way. You're not alone in this, and I've identified
six major saboteurs of self control, things like autopilot behavior,
(26:45):
self doubt, emotional escapism that quietly derail our best intentions.
But here's the good news. You can outsmart them. And
I've put together a free guide to help you spot
these hidden obstacles and give you simple, actionable strategies that
you can use to regain control. Download the free guide
now at oneufeed dot net slash ebook and take the
(27:09):
first step towards getting back on track. There are so
many places I could take this, but we're a little
bit time limited, so I'm gonna pivot to this place
because it's something I definitely want to talk with you about,
and I think it's important to reiterate sort of what
you said that the research you're focused on is about
improving attention. But you talk about attention, you say there
(27:31):
are three major forces that degrade our attention, stress, poor mood,
and threat. But it also sounds like early on you
say that if we're feeling cognitive fog might be depleted attention.
If we're feeling anxious or worried, it could be hijacked attention.
If we can't focus, it might be fragmented attention. So
not only are some of those things causes of degraded attention,
(27:54):
but it sounds like degraded attention is also the cause
of some of those things. Right, it seems like it's
a bidirectional relationship.
Speaker 4 (28:00):
Would that be absolutely? Yeah? Absolutely okay.
Speaker 3 (28:03):
So given that whether most people who are not tactical
professionals are going to say, you know what, I want
better quality of life, right, I want to be a
little bit happier. I want to spend less time ruminating
and regretting. I want to be more present of the
people I love, et cetera, et cetera. So given that
this is what boys a long setup for a question,
isn't it. But I'm going somewhere here.
Speaker 4 (28:24):
I trust you.
Speaker 3 (28:25):
You talk about some strategies that people use for some
of these things, like think positive, focus on the good,
do something relaxing, suppress upsetting thoughts. We've got these series
of strategies that I'm going to just put them under
a bucket. I've heard you use this bucket before, and
tell me if you agree. Reframing. They are sort of
reframing our experience. And then you used a term. Maybe
(28:49):
it was in the book and I missed it, but
I heard it on another podcast. You said, well, there's
reframing and then there's deframing, and I loved that idea.
I was wondering if you could say a little bit
more about those two, and then I want to talk
a little bit about when might it be appropriate to
do one versus the other, depending on what we're trying
to accomplish.
Speaker 1 (29:07):
Yeah, well, reframing, I think you've laid out very very
clearly already that essentially it's a replacing of one kind
of mental content with other mental content, and that can
happen through even paying attention differently. So we're still using
our attention, but now I'm going to highlight different aspects
of my experience to put different content at the center
of my mind. It's still using attention in that focused way,
(29:30):
that narrowed way, that action oriented way. In some sense,
deframing is saying get back into that perchings or being mode.
Speaker 4 (29:40):
Sure.
Speaker 1 (29:40):
It's like we're taking a look at the structure that
we're within. You know, a framework is an interesting thing.
Reframing is almost like you're ignoring the framework and you're
just filling it with new stuff. Like you know, it's
an apartment building and you're just going to bring a
new furniture. The apartment building still stands with the way
it is, or even let's say a particular room still
has a sofa and a chair, a table, but they're different.
(30:01):
They're a different kind of sofa, you know, a more
fluffy one or a genuine leave whatever it is that
you want that you think is an improvement over the
prior set of things, but the framework is the same.
What I'm saying with deframing is first step is essentially
be aware that you are within a framework, you are
within a story, You're within a set of contingencies and conditions,
(30:24):
and you're acting within that. So if we can just
even look around and say, oh wow, look at that,
I have take by default that there.
Speaker 4 (30:31):
Should be a couch and a chair and a table
in this room. Do I have to? Like?
Speaker 1 (30:35):
That's the first step of deframing. And you can build
back the same sort of components if you'd like, but
at least you're doing it with a will and with
knowledge that I'm going to put everything back in a
way that I'd like, or maybe I'm going to tear
the whole thing down and build it up differently. So
I just think most of us don't understand that this
is within our capacity to do. It seems too hard.
(30:58):
But when you understand with mindfulness practice, for example, that
every time even we do something as simple as a
breath awareness practice or what I call the find your
Flashlight practice, noticing that the mind has wandered away from
the goal is in little tiny moment of oh, I
wasn't in that framework anymore, and you know, moving towards
something like an open monitoring practice, we're really just kind
(31:20):
of disregarding all of that, all the stories and concepts,
and just trying to kind of be in the raw,
moment to moment flow of our conscious experience. It's also
a way to practice deframing. So I think that once
we understand why we're intending to do it, and I
think that there's a very important reason to intend to
do it, is that sometimes frameworks are wrong, stories are wrong.
(31:44):
More fundamentally, to get at what you're saying regarding you know,
spiritual practice and a spiritual life, replacing the couch is
not going to make you happier. It's going to mean
you have a different couch, you know. That's sort of
the deeper issue is that maybe you want to take
a look at the assumptions or of what it means
to be able to achieve the happiness you're seeking.
Speaker 3 (32:03):
So deframing in this sense, would we say it's similar
to the acceptance and commitment therapy term of diffusing, and
it's a way of sort of stepping back out of
thought right and trying to observe that all these thoughts
are happening. Is that the essence of.
Speaker 1 (32:21):
It's at the essence diffusion, decentering, becoming meta aware all
of that, and it does require stepping outside of what's occurring,
at least from the conceptual terrain or getting more embodied
in our sensory experience so we're not stuck in the
concepts that are driving whatever is going on in our
(32:41):
mind in that moment.
Speaker 3 (33:05):
One of the things you say with things like thinking positive,
focusing on the good, suppressing upsetting thoughts, that the problem
with a lot of those is that they do require
attentional resources to implement. They use up attention instead of
strengthening it. You call them failed strategies because while we
try to use them to solve our attention problems, they
degrade attention even further. Say a little bit more about that.
Speaker 1 (33:27):
Yeah, and this is where it comes down to the
context that I'm talking about now, positive psychology, gratitude, journaling,
a lot of things that fall within the umbrella of
positive psychology powerful things to do. There is a really
strong evidence base that this is a helpful thing to do.
But I'm specifically talking about people under high stress circumstances,
(33:48):
protracted periods of demand. Like, for example, if you think
about a critical care nurse over the course of this pandemic,
the notion of saying think positive, you know, like think
positive thought that doesn't even make sense. It's like, I've
gone through what I'm seeing and the level of demand
that I'm facing and utilizing my attention. I can't even
(34:08):
take a breath to do that, and I think trying
to do that is where it becomes a failed strategy.
You're pushing against and utilizing fuel that you don't have
to expend. You don't have it in your gas tank,
you can't use it. Yes, yes, it can really make
things more problematic for people because they somehow think they're
supposed to be able to do that. And what I
wanted more fundamentally for people to understand is that that
(34:31):
is not a cost free thing to do. It's not
like the default of your mind is to have positive
thoughts and you are going in the wrong direction to
have negative thoughts. It's that when things are occurring and
the mind is filled with negative thoughts, it will take
attentional resources to cognitively reframe, and that will be requiring
you to have those resources available.
Speaker 3 (34:52):
How do we get to the point where are deframing diffusion?
Mindfulness practices don't feel effortful in the same way because
it feels like for me to sit down and follow
the breath and keep bringing my attention back to it
and back to it is also an intentional drain. But
your studies seem to indicate that's not really the case.
Speaker 1 (35:14):
Yeah, the studies certainly indicate that what we're doing is
bolstering core intentional resources and working memory resources. It can
feel like it's difficult, it can feel like it's difficult,
but that doesn't mean that it's actually draining attention in
the same way that a very intense her body workout
can feel tiring, but you are actually working toward growing
(35:40):
your muscles.
Speaker 4 (35:40):
It's sort of like that idea.
Speaker 1 (35:42):
And I think that there are many ways in which
you can practice so that it feels less draining in
some sense, easing up, you know, not having that oh,
that kind of conflict that a lot of people can
experience in practice, and a lot of that I think
is optional. I don't think you need to feel like
a failure because you're mind wandered. But people think somehow
(36:02):
that if my goal is to pay attention to my breath,
my mind should not wander. And what I'm saying is
the goal is to pay attention to your breath, the
mind will wander, right, and actually remember that the moment
you realize that your mind is wandered is a win, yes,
And then so instead of feeling that conflict and that
effort and that drudge of like, oh god, my brain
(36:22):
is even staying stable. What's wrong with me? It's like,
h got it. I know where I'm off. I've got
to get back. So even the way we orient to
the practice at this more micro level can reduce that
sense of dread and effort. Yeah, but to kind of
more broadly understand that something that feels effortful can still
be building resources instead of depleting them.
Speaker 3 (36:43):
Yeah, I love that. I think what you said there
is so important. I'm kind of curious. Does everybody naturally
default to that sort of natural like, oh, my mind's wandering,
so I'm failing. It just seems inherent with everybody I've
ever talked to who's taken up a practice like this.
Do you come across people that don't orient that way?
Or is it just sort of natural to us to
(37:05):
be told if your job is to do this task
and you just see that you're not doing that task,
you just go, oh, I'm not good at this.
Speaker 4 (37:11):
Okay.
Speaker 1 (37:11):
I think it's even more fundamental than that. I think
that this experience. This is what's kind of interesting. Why
are conflict states and negative emotion? Why do they co occur?
Speaker 4 (37:22):
Right?
Speaker 1 (37:22):
So, anytime you have a mismatch between what you would
like to have happened and what happens. There can be
a slight dysphoria associated with it. That's kind of interesting,
So why is that? And people have looked at this
in cognitive neuroscience studies where sometimes you just look to
see if you impose a negative emotion on somebody, what
(37:42):
happens to their cognitive control, And what you find is
that sometimes the next thing that occurs, they're.
Speaker 4 (37:47):
Better at it.
Speaker 1 (37:48):
It's like that negativity can actually require us to bring
more of our cognitive resources to solve the problem. So
I think the yoking of conflict and what we call
upregulation of cognitive control go hand in hand. It's the
signal that says do something differently, expend more mental effort
to do this, bring more resources to bear. Even experiencing
(38:10):
conflict is not a problem. But to realize that the
conflict does not mean to translate into the elaborated notion
that I'm a complete failure and it is never going
to work out. That's the mind doing something else. I
think that it's really interesting when you, especially when you
talk to sort of long term practitioners, that conflict is
seen with a neutrality that most of us don't. Yeah, right,
(38:33):
when there's a mismatch, it's like that's data, that's not
I've suck. And I think that getting to that point,
and especially you know, within all of these kind of
elite settings, I think people are trying to understand that
that if I add the layer of a conceptual story
on top of the experience of conflict, it will slow
me down in course correcting what the conflict signal is conveying.
Speaker 3 (38:56):
Right right, Yeah, And I just think it's so important
to work on not developing that aversive relationship with practice
because a lot of people, I think, do it's that
I'm failing at this, I can't do this, I'm not
any good at this. And I love that.
Speaker 1 (39:10):
I would even encourage people to just really break down
the experience, like usually in our mindfulness practice and you know,
and I have to talk about this too, it's like
you're going to focus, you're going to notice your mind wandering,
and then you're going to redirect back. But sometimes I
will guide people to just hang out in the moment
that they notice the mind has wandered away and really
kind of get granular with that. What occurred first? What
(39:34):
is the first thing that happened. Usually we're having conflict,
negative emotion, I suck the fast track. So what if
it's that whatever that visceral or you know, feeling tone
is of the mismatch. See if you can get more
precise on that, get cued into that mismatch feeling, and
see if you can kind of paint the elaboration that follows.
(39:56):
And you know, a lot of expert practitioners will talk
about it's like I remember talking to two recard ones,
you know, an adept practitioner, a buist monk, and he
said it, and I thought it was so beautiful. It's like,
it's not it's not a storm. It's like I see
slight undulations on the ripples of the pond, you know,
whatever it is. It's like, that would be awesome if
the if the slight movement of the water, you know,
(40:17):
the tranquility of the mind is disturbed and you can say, oh, back.
Speaker 3 (40:20):
On track, totally, totally yeah. And I just wonder how
much new practitioners have that ability to be that granular.
Speaker 1 (40:27):
I think that it's at least what we can do
is say, observe it, see if you can track it,
and it's almost like what I would say to people
even when I think I do talk about this in
the book, Like if you've ever had experienced or seen
somebody experience a road rage, somebody gets cut off and
the next thing you know, somebody's flipping somebody else the bird,
or and you know, terrible circumstances, there's violence. What if
(40:50):
you could actually grab a hold of the earliest moment
that you whatever, that the initial inclination that I'm going
to have that.
Speaker 4 (40:58):
Feeling and we know what that is.
Speaker 1 (40:59):
And I was called well, as I noticed in my
own practice when I was very early stages, it's like
if there was a ballistic reactivity, I wasn't going to
catch it. You know, if my kid did something and
I was going to shout, I was probably still going
to shout, but I would apologize more quickly, yes, like, oh,
I didn't want to have that strong of a reaction
and I'm sorry. Yeah, because even though I feel what
(41:20):
happened was not okay, you didn't need that extra stuff
that just happened. So you know, I don't know if
that gets it what you're talking about, but that feels
like part of the journey of what this is.
Speaker 3 (41:30):
Yeah, Well, you quote Lou Read at one point in
the book and said, between thought and expression lies a lifetime.
I love anytime the velvet underground shows up in a book.
Between thought and expression lies lifetime reminds me of the
Victor Frankel quote of between stimulus and response, right, And
I've said that I think sometimes the most practical thing
(41:50):
a long history of different types of meditation practices given me.
I think the most practical thing is that space between
stimulus and response seems a little bit bigger. There's a
little bit more moment to be like, ah, hang on,
you know, listeners couldn't see that, but I sort of
started to rise up in like a outrage. And but
you know, don't get all the way there, you know.
(42:12):
And to your point, then, yes, also learning to walk
it back faster. And I love the idea that you
just said about noticing that moment when your mind is
wandered and really noticing what happens there. Because in Buddhism
they talk about the five skandas. I don't know if
you're familiar with the five skandas, but it's describing a
(42:33):
little bit of the way that we put together the
sense of a self there's some initial like Verdanna, like
the very first thing, but they make a distinction between
perception like the raw sense data, and then all the
layers that start getting added on top of that, right
from positive negative to the stories we might tell. You know,
(42:56):
advanced practitioners say, you can actually start to notice the
those extraordinarily fine increments. Right for most of us, it's
just like that. That whole process happens like that, But
there is a way of breaking that down. I guess
my question to you would be, what have you seen
looking at the way our brains process data that might
(43:17):
shed light on that or confirm that that's kind of
what happens. And do you see people being able to
interrupt that pattern kind of the snap I just did
you see people being able to interrupt it or break
it down?
Speaker 2 (43:29):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (43:29):
I mean I think the way that we look at
it in my lab, there's so many different people that
are looking at this kind of thing. We can start
to see even things like mind wandering. Let's not even
talk about sort of emotionally laden stuff. Obviously mind wandering
has that propensity, But what we know is that when
people mind wander, for example, if we just had them
do a simple task where they're just pressing a button
(43:51):
every time they see a digit on the screen. We
know that the response times are going to become more
and more variable when they are mind wandering. In fact,
that's the clue that their mind wandering, because usually a
few seconds later they'll miss something or they'll make an error.
The report back, yeah, my mind was wandering so close
in time to When we see a lot of variability,
(44:12):
you see the costs of that variability on the consequential
actions that need to be performed. And so what we
know with mindfulness training is that there's a reduction in
that variability and the performance is less prone to making
errors like that, and people report mind wandering less. So
I think that that's a movement or that's an insight
(44:34):
that says, Yes, the more you're able to monitor moment
by moment what's going on and you train your mind
to do that through something like a breath awareness practice
and the whole suite of practices now that I go
into in the book, the more chances that you're going
to be able to course correct more quickly. And so
even the windows that's the kind of thing we're looking
at now. It's like the windows of variability, can those
(44:56):
shrink or what we know from for example, the work
that one of the the post docs in my lab,
Tony Zenesco's doing, is we're looking at what we call
micro states. So these are essentially sort of the units
of our configuration of the brain, if you will, in
a moment, and typically it can break these down into
like thirty milliseconds, there's small micro microd of stability of
(45:19):
the mind in these tiny windows. And what we know,
for example, is that micro states tend to be temporarily contingent,
so the micro state you are in in one moment
is likely to produce the next micro state. And we
know what the micro states at least the signature of
what it looks like when people are completely off task
or their mind is not on the thing they're trying
(45:40):
to do, or they're highly variable. So if you're in
a highly variable kind of state, the next moment is
likely to be highly variable. The question now is with practitioners,
can you see that the return back to a state
of focus is more likely? So the contemporal contingencies are
actually being it's broken, and you know, in some sense
(46:02):
it sounds I mean, I'm going to leap down a lot.
But if the mind is built for this kind of
temporal contingency, which I think is definitely aligned with a
lot of Buddhist thought on you know, sort of the
contingent nature of reality. If you can train the mind
to be less contingent so that there is kind of
infinite potentiality from one moment to the next in the
way that you can configure the brain, right, what are
(46:26):
the benefits of that? And maybe that's what we mean
when we say even the term enlightenment is a non
contingent mind.
Speaker 3 (46:33):
Before we wrap up, I want you to think about this.
Have you ever ended the day feeling like your choices
didn't quite match the person you wanted to be? Maybe
it was autopilot mode or self doubt that made it
harder to stick to your goals. And that's exactly why
I created The Six Saboteurs of Self Control. It's a
(46:53):
free guide to help you recognize the hidden patterns that
hold you back and give you simple effect of strategies
to break through them. If you're ready to take back
control and start making lasting changes, download your copy now
at oneufeed dot net. Slash ebook. Let's make those shifts
happen starting today one you feed dot net slash ebook.
(47:17):
It's funny. I had up at the top of my
note one of my favorite quotes by an old zenmaster Dogan,
who said enlightenment is intimacy with all things. And I
had that there because I think that speaks to attention.
Intimacy is achieved by paying close attention to things. And
what Dogan is saying is if we are truly that present,
(47:40):
like you said, and that our micro states are not
as conditioned to remain on the same thing. To your point,
you're starting to get towards something that looks more like enlightenment,
which I think is fascinating.
Speaker 1 (47:52):
Which is so interesting, right because in some sense there's
enlightenment in there's psychosis when things aren't a contingent matter.
So got to figure out the qualities that make it
productive and warranted and worthy, and that's where all of
the other positive qualities and having an ethical orientation toward
our existence can come into play.
Speaker 3 (48:11):
Totally. Well, I mean, she thank you so much for
coming on. I really enjoyed the book. It's a great
look into the neuroscience of attention. I read a lot
of books about mindfulness this is my job, and yours
stood out. I just found some of the ways you
really dove into what's happening to be truly fascinating, and
we touched on a fraction of them. It's a wonderful read.
(48:33):
And thank you so much for coming on.
Speaker 4 (48:35):
Oh this is so much fun. Thank you for the
great conversation.
Speaker 3 (48:38):
Thank you so much for listening to the show. If
you found this conversation helpful, inspiring, or thought provoking, I'd
love for you to share it with a friend. Sharing
from one person to another is the lifeblood of what
we do. We don't have a big budget and I'm
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and that's you. Just hit the share button on your
(48:59):
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at a time. Thank you for being part of the
one you Feed community.
Experiencing conflict is not a problem, but to realize that
the conflict does not mean to translate into the elaborated
notion that I'm a complete failure and it is never
going to work out. That's the mind doing something else.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
Welcome to the one you feed Throughout time, great thinkers
have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have, quotes
like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you
think ring true. And yet for many of us, our
thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity,
self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't
(00:42):
have instead of what we do. We think things that
hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not
just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent,
and creative effort to make a life worth living. This
podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in
the right direction, how they feed their good wolf.
Speaker 3 (01:05):
Most of us live in doing mode, solving, planning, fixing,
But what if the real key to clarity isn't doing more,
but knowing when to be. This is a lesson I
can certainly learn. Doctor Amishi Jaw calls this peak mind
one that doesn't just chase focus, but knows when to
step back, observe, and reset. It's not about forcing your attention,
(01:28):
it's about understanding how to work with it. In this episode,
we explore why true mental mastery isn't about more effort,
but about balancing focus with awareness and how getting this
right can change everything. I'm Eric Zimmer and this is
the one you feed. Hi, Amishi, Welcome to the show.
Speaker 4 (01:48):
So great to be here.
Speaker 3 (01:49):
I'm really excited to have you on. We're going to
be discussing your new book, Peak Mind, Find your Focus,
own your attention, invest twelve minutes a day. So we'll
get into that in a minute. But we'll start like
we always do with the Parable. In the Parable, there's
a grandparent who's talking with their grandchild and they say,
in life, there are two wolves inside of us that
are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which
(02:10):
represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the
other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed
and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops and thinks
about it for a second, looks up at their grandparents, says, well,
which one wins, and the grandparent says the one you feed.
So I'd like to start off by asking you what
that parable means to you in your life and in
(02:31):
the work that you do.
Speaker 1 (02:32):
Oh, it's such a great parable, and I'd love that
it's really so central to what you talk about on
this podcast because it so much relates to what I
think about and the work that I do in my lab,
because it frankly is about attention, and what you feed
in my mind, reflects what you pay attention to what
you value. So to me, it's entirely describing the power
(02:55):
of attention and the vulnerability of mind when we do
not attend to things that serve us best.
Speaker 3 (03:02):
Yep, I agree totally, and attention is a big subject
in the work that I do. I've got a program
called Spiritual Habits, and attention is one of the core
principles there. Because you quote William James in your book,
there's another statement that I don't think you quoted in
the book, although it's possible I missed it, which is
my experience is what I agree to attend to. Fundamental
(03:24):
attention really does describe I wouldn't say it's the only thing,
but it is a big factor in the type of
life we experience.
Speaker 4 (03:33):
Absolutely.
Speaker 1 (03:34):
I mean it's funny William James, the father of the
field that I'm a member of psychology, but sometimes I
think he's like an alien from the future because he
had so much right about his wisdom and insight into things,
and couldn't agree more with your kind of take on
that whole thing, which is the centrality of our conscious experience,
(03:55):
is tied to the conduit for what becomes prominent in
our minds attention itself.
Speaker 3 (04:02):
So where I'd like to start is with the title
of the book, Peak Mind. You say, a peak mind
is a mind that doesn't privilege thinking and doing over being.
It masters both modes of attention. So say a little
bit more about that, because a lot of the book
is sort of talking about people who are, in, for
lack of a better word, mission critical type situations, you know,
(04:24):
people who are trying to perform better in given circumstances.
So there's a fair amount of the book that's devoted
in that direction. But this statement really is speaking to
something more broadly than how I perform. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (04:36):
Absolutely, And part of the reason I wanted to make
sure I made that distinction between thinking and doing is
exactly because of the populations that make gravitate toward this
book and toward the kind of projects that we do
in the research we conduct, which are as you call
a mission critical kind of folks, but also sometimes there
referred to as tactical professionals. There is a task at hand,
and we need to accomplish it, and there is a
(04:57):
more successful and less successful way to accomplish it, and
action is what it's all about. And frankly, in my
entire field, in the field of attention research, from the
sort of traditional point of view, that is essentially what
we see attention's role as serving action, and if we
can't pay attention, the chances of acting appropriately are going.
Speaker 4 (05:16):
To not be there.
Speaker 1 (05:18):
But what I'm trying to highlight, which is part of
the broader mission of a lot of contemplative practices and
wisdom traditions, is that there is another way we can
use our attention, use our mind, and their aspects of
even what sort of traditional attentional models within modern cognitive
neuroscience described that can be amplified but aren't currently amplified.
(05:39):
So the being mode from my point of view, is
taking an observational stance, being receptive to what's occurring, so
that in between the action there is reflection, and without
that reflection, the chances to ensure that the action is
appropriate are lessened because sometimes you can know sort of
(06:01):
a ballistic orientation like this is what we're doing, or
the training that you have may may guide you to
say this is what you do, but is it the
right thing to do? How are you going to know
unless you actually look at the circumstances and you know
a lot of times these tactical professionals or mission oriented
folks talk about situational awareness as you've got to know
what's going on around you. But what I'm highlighting with
(06:22):
that statement of being mode, not just doing mode, is
that part of the situation is what is occurring in
your own mind, the set points you have, the expectations
and stories and assumptions that you have, and the being
mode allows you to take stock of what is present
without taking any action in that moment, just allowing that
(06:44):
to exist and percolating in it. And I think it's
highly undervalued, especially for a lot of the kinds of
professionals that we end up working with. So it's a
new or novel aspect of what they might consider doing,
which is being. Yeah, and I put that in quotes
because you people can't see me. You know, in some sense,
the being new type of doing, if you want to
approach it in that way.
Speaker 3 (07:05):
You also say a peak mind and this to quote
William James again which I had not seen this quote before,
and I love a peak mind balances the flights and
the perchings. He says, like a bird's life. The stream
of consciousness seems to be made up of an alternation
of flights and perchings. Say a little bit more about that.
That's very poetic language, I think to speak to some
concepts that you've certainly backed up with neuroscience.
Speaker 1 (07:28):
Yeah, and I think it touches on what you were
asking me about a moment ago, right. The flights in
some sense is the doing and the perching is the being.
And that this can be broken down in sort of
the micro level. So even if we're in the middle
of executing a complex task, to not forget that the
(07:50):
flights are going to be much more successful if the
perchings are actually taking place, and it's that dance. It's
you know, sort of the important aspects of what wisdom is.
This is both reflection and action.
Speaker 3 (08:02):
Yeah, that quote made me think of we interviewed a gentleman.
I don't know, and I'm going to get your opinion
on this in a second. We interviewed a gentleman a
while back by the name of Ian McGilchrist. He wrote
a book called The Master and his Emissary and it's
talking about right brain and left brain. And I'd like
to get your opinion on that in a second. But
one of the things he said was, and when he
(08:23):
was talking about how the right brain and the left
brain work, is that the right brain is more the perching,
it's watching everything that's happening, it's seeing the context, it's
you know, and the left brain is more the flight
or he talked about like a bird pecking food out
of a series of stones. I'm curious in the work
(08:43):
that you've done, has right brain left brain shown up
at all. I'm just kind of curious your thought on
that theory. I don't want to spend a lot of
time there, but I can't help but ask.
Speaker 4 (08:52):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (08:53):
I mean, I don't know that book, and I don't
know Ian at all, and I don't know how literally
was being or what researcher was looking to. But frankly
from sort of a modern neuroscience perspective, the notion of
right brain left brain allowing for complex function to happen
in a hemispherically specified manner has been debunked. All complex functions,
whether it's a broad observational stance or an action oriented focusing,
(09:17):
will involve ordination between the entirety of the brain and
particular both hemispheres. But I appreciate the concept of these
are distinct from each other, and I would not describe
them as based on hemispheres. I describe them based on
mental modes. And when we think about a mode in
the mind, it's essentially a configuration of whatever brain networks
(09:38):
are involved in a particular process being more prominent versus
a different set of brain networks. So definitely it's the
case that I describe it in some sense as two
aspects of attention. And you know this notion of a
flashlight meaning focusing, narrowing, selecting versus a floodlight broad receptive
(09:58):
not biasing some information over other information. And those are
two different modes, and typically you cannot be in both
modes simultaneously. And we know this right if you're sitting
there and reading a deeply entrenched in a good novel
or a good book, any kindit with good book could
be big mind. So if you're entrenched in reading a
good book, somebody walks in the room and says something
(10:21):
to you, you're like, huh what. You have no idea
what was said. Not because you lost the capacity to
comprehend language, but because your focus was so narrowed that
the input coming in in your broad receptive stance was
not quite up to snuff to be able to break
down the sounds into language. From the brand science point
of view, we know that a lot of these aspects
of attention are mutually inhibitory. When one network is active,
(10:44):
the other one will be suppressed. So I again would
say that do not get too literal with regard to
the hemisphere that it's involved in. But the modal aspects
the mind being in different modes is certainly very very important.
Speaker 3 (10:56):
You mentioned the two different modes in your book, you
actually have three modes. You're a little bit like the
Buddha in that you're a list maker. There's lots of
lists of three in this book. I'm sure someone has
pointed that out before, but I actually like it as
a way of organizing. It helps. But so you talked
about two of the sort of quote unquote subsystems that
(11:17):
work together, right, the flashlight, which is we're narrowed in
we're focused to talk about the floodlight, which is a
more broad and open and then the third mode that
you talk about is the juggler. Say a little bit
more about what the juggler is.
Speaker 1 (11:31):
Sure, sure, all three of these are really, as you said,
subsystems of attention. And in the broadest sense we can
say this mental capacity of paying attention is really just
about prioritizing some information over other information. It's thankfully an
evolutionary inheritance we get to enjoy, even though it has
its own consequences.
Speaker 4 (11:51):
But it is the result.
Speaker 1 (11:53):
Of, we think, at least kind of going back in time,
a big problem that the brain had, which is that
everything could not be processed. The brain just lacked the
computational power to do that. So if you didn't prioritize
some stuff over other stuff, there was no way you
were going to be able to make sense of the
world around you or even what's occurring within your mind.
So just to keep that in mind, is the anchor
prioritize some information over other information. Now, the flashlight, you'd say,
(12:17):
is prioritizing some content over other content. So wherever you
direct that flashlight is going to be the privileged content.
But it's it's directed towards something, some object, and that
object can be something in the external environment or an
object in the mind like a thought or a memory.
Speaker 4 (12:33):
When we go to the.
Speaker 1 (12:34):
Floodlight, we're talking about prioritizing and not so much based
on the content, because you're not supposed to really advantage
one thing over another. It's about being this broad receptive stance,
but it is privileging something and that is the moment now,
so you know, formally, this flood light system is called
the alerting system, and you're not being alert to something
in the past or the future, but right in this moment,
(12:54):
so privileging the present moment. And then, as you mentioned,
the third system formally called executive functioning that I describe
it as a juggler for shorthand is really regarding prioritizing
based on our goals. So these are internally held goals, intentions, plans,
whatever it is you want to call it. That is
guiding the way we're going to interact with our own
(13:15):
mind and our environment. You know, just like a juggler,
you've got to do this with sort of a multiplicity
in mind. You usually don't have one goal. So in
this moment, my goal is to have a fruitful conversation
with you. But my goal is also to publish the
papers that I'm publishing, and to be in a responsible citizen,
and to enjoy my life and my family. Those goals
(13:37):
don't go away. But obviously I'm not actively doing all
of those simultaneously. So I'm kind of keeping all the
balls in the air and ensuring that every action that
I undertake aligns with my goals. And when the juggler
is not functioning so well, balls drop, we forget the goal,
we don't inhibit irrelevant information. And this could be a
micro goal, right, So I want to have a conversation
(13:59):
with you, that's my goal. My phone buzzes, and then
I go and start reading my text messages in the
middle of this conversation. Why did I do that? Well,
I fail to hold the goal and then control my behavior.
Speaker 4 (14:09):
Aligned with it.
Speaker 1 (14:11):
So I think that maybe helps frame it more broadly,
that all of it falls underneath attension, because it all
has to do with prioritizing some information or other information.
Speaker 4 (14:19):
It's just the nature of what that information is differs.
Speaker 3 (14:22):
Is the executive function, or the juggler as we would
call it, the part that is choosing where to point
the flashlight. Yes, I think attention is very interesting because
it's similar to the breath. It's something that happens automatically
and is also controllable.
Speaker 4 (14:38):
Correct.
Speaker 3 (14:39):
Yeah, you know, so if someone lit a firecracker off
behind my head right now, like my attention is going there,
there's nothing I'm going to going to do about that, right.
But beyond that is that the juggler that's sort of
trying to say, let me align my attention with my
to use a different word for what you were talking about,
my intentions, the things that matter to me. Is that
(15:01):
kind of falling into the juggler's role, correct.
Speaker 1 (15:03):
Yeah, Executive control is the thing that guides goals. Now,
the goal could be pay attention to what's happening right now,
don't privilege any content over other content. So you're driving
down the road and you see, you know, big flashing
yellow light like maybe by a construction site, and the
juggler would say, probably best to check out what's going
(15:24):
on right now, and it essentially calls upon that particular
floodlight orientation or mental mode to be in, or it
could be get narrow and focused right now so you
can actually understand this conversation or read this sentence or
whatever it is. Get focused and directed. But there's always
the kind of push and pull of what the juggler
(15:44):
intends to do, and then other stuff that may derail
what's going on. And you know, in some sense, the
flashlight is a great example of that, where you've already
said it. You can direct it willfully, but it can
get yanked. And what it gets yanked by is also
very interesting because in some sense it's like the baked
into us.
Speaker 4 (16:05):
Yes juggler.
Speaker 1 (16:06):
Right, It's like, why would it be that a firecracker
would pull your.
Speaker 4 (16:09):
Attention because your survival may depend on it.
Speaker 3 (16:12):
Right.
Speaker 1 (16:12):
So essentially, these, you know, are things that are salient,
that are novel, that are fear inducing or threatening, that
are self related, are all sort of privileged into the
way that our brain functions. We don't have to try
to make it that way, it just is sort of
by default built in.
Speaker 3 (16:28):
Right, you say, the three main factors that determine how
this attention gets deployed. Is familiarity something that's new. I'm
going to give more attention to salience, right, how important
it is to me. And then finally, our own goal,
our own attention. And so attention is sort of being,
as you said, pulled by those things. And one of
the things that you say early on that I really
(16:48):
liked was that there's nothing wrong with our attention. We
talk a lot about having attention problems these days, you know,
a crisis of attention, but you say, our attention is
working just fine. To say a little bit more about that, Yeah.
Speaker 1 (17:02):
That's the kind of ironic part of this moment. People
feel a sense of struggle and overwhelm or crisis, and
they want to blame their brain instead of the circumstances
in some sense. So let's just talk about social media
or technology kind of more broadly. The fact that there
are algorithms that can be built around our willingness to
(17:23):
continue engaging with particular pieces of software or websites, et
cetera tells us that our attention is working completely in
a regular, typical, predictable fashion. And you already mentioned the
three biggies that might get us familiarity in salience for
sure at goals also, but when you can finally tune
(17:45):
the familiar because you're being exposed to it over and
over again, or you can finally tune the salience because
it's so self related, or you can ensure that the
goals are kind of kept to the front of your mind,
you know, like at some point you look, you know
I talk about in the book like I was looking
for this frying pan, like a pot or pan, and
(18:05):
then I kept seeing pans all over the place because
it was being forced onto me, like you look for
a pan, you must be interested in this. So all
of a sudden, now the goal that I had once
is now kept at the front of my mind. It's like, ohyah,
I did want to get that pan. It's like reminding
you of goals. So attention is doing what it does,
but the circumstances are now aligning to tune up and
really maximize engagement for the benefit of usually selling us
(18:29):
a product, mining our attention to be exposed to potentially
buying a product. Right, So it's totally driven by this
whole structure. I just wanted to caution people that, first
of all, don't take it in like it's not like
there's something wrong with you if you see your name
and you want to click on it. That is. That's
the reason that your name and face are on every
social media app is because that's the first step into
(18:53):
hooking you in. And frankly, the other piece is that
you can't really fight against it because you're going to
lose because you're not just dealing with your own kind
of orientation towards social media content, but you're dealing with
very very smart algorithms that are tuning up to you
and a team of engineers that are programming it. So
if we're going to take on this challenge, it cannot
(19:14):
just be like, oh, my mind will not click on
that bright, yellow, shiny thing that's saying click here.
Speaker 3 (19:19):
Unlikely, you say you can't win that fight. Instead, cultivate
(19:46):
the capacity and skill to position in your mind so
you don't have to fight. Say a little bit more
about that, because I think that's a really important point,
is that if our goal is to bring our attention
back to our own control the things that matter to us,
it does feel like it's a fight. And like you,
I tend to believe it's a fight. We're set up
to sort of lose.
Speaker 1 (20:07):
Yeah, the way not to fight is to, at the
most fundamental level, pay attention to our attention, to know
where our mind is. Then there's more sense of agency,
just like anything else. Like I could have the most
elaborate plans, but if I don't know what the plans are,
and I'm not checking in with where I am relative
to those plans, I'll never be able to execute them.
(20:28):
But what we lack typically is that checking in component,
or what we'd call monitoring. Right, we're not monitoring ourselves
and we're not another kind of technical term meta aware.
We're not aware of the contents and processes in our
mind at play in any given moment, and we can
cultivate the ability to be better at that. And that's
where mindfulness meditation can really be helpful, because it is
(20:52):
a way in which we are better able to know
our mind, not just in general, like I tend to
be this way or that, but in this moment what
is occurring within me and around me, so more fully
situationally aware.
Speaker 3 (21:04):
I want to push on that a little bit and
explore it a little further because I think it's really important.
I love the way you said in the book we
lack internal cues about where our attention is moment to moment.
In the Spiritual Habits program, what I say is, you know,
if we're trying to live a life, and basically I
would say we'd be living a life more based on
principles that matter to us, right, living more by that
(21:25):
goal orientation, and the goal may just be to be kinder, right,
So I think forgetting is the biggest problem. Your book
advocates training, you know, twelve minutes in the morning with
a couple different approaches, and we can talk about what
some of those are. I'm curious, though, do you have
suggestions on how else, maybe during the day to get
(21:48):
a little bit more of this because I do agree
that a focused training period like you're describing does help,
and I know myself and a lot of people who
do have mourning mindfulness pe that we can still get
pretty lost all day long and lose track of any
of those internal cues. So do you have some ideas
about how to weave those into more of the moments
(22:09):
we have?
Speaker 1 (22:10):
Absolutely, And first of all, i'd say that just to
be clear about the prescription, you know, it comes out
of over a decade and a half of research and
the goal of that research is not how to maximize
your spiritual fulfillment or life, but what is the minimum
effective dose to protect attention in high stress circumstances. So
it's a very different goal, yes, than other things. And
(22:33):
that also that twelve minutes is not in my view,
the culmination or the be all end all.
Speaker 3 (22:37):
It's the starter minimum effective dose.
Speaker 1 (22:39):
It's the minimum effective dose, thank you, yes, And so
I just want to mention that because people could say
twelve minutes, why am I going to accomplish in twelve
minutes a day? But it actually we found is beneficial.
The other thing is that I don't say when to
do it, so do it whenever you're going to do it.
Speaker 4 (22:53):
But your point still holds.
Speaker 1 (22:55):
The reason we do the formal minutes of day of
mindfulness practice is so that the mental mode of mindfulness,
which I describe as paying attention to our present moment
experience without conceptually elaborating or emotionally reacting. We want to
bring about more of that mode throughout the day because
that is going to be the mode that allows us
(23:16):
to connect with what's happening in the moment and monitor
the contents of our mind as well. As obviously taking
stock of what's happening around us practicing so that we
can just say we got it off. There are to
do list we're practicing to elicit the more prevalence of
that mode. But you're right, there are ways in which
we can advantage curing ourselves to do that. So some
(23:38):
of the things that we do, I'll just give you
an example from some of the research studies that we do,
because we tell people what I just described to you,
that we're doing this so that we're more mindful throughout
the day, not just that we're Olympic level breath followers.
Speaker 4 (23:48):
I mean, who cares, right, But how do you do that?
Speaker 1 (23:52):
So, for example, one of the practices that we give
is it's you know, these are all part of sort
of the canon of what's currently offered in the world
of mindful training, and thankfully that that world is growing
and more available to people. But something called the stop
practice is a good one, and I recommend that people
do this, and they use the queue of being stopped,
meaning you're stopped at a elevator, you're stopped at a
(24:14):
stop sign, you're stopped at a crosswalk.
Speaker 4 (24:16):
An you're waiting in line.
Speaker 1 (24:17):
Anytime you stop and you notice the body is stationary.
Typically what happens in that moment pull out your phone,
start doing stuff. No use that as a moment to
do this practice. And the practice is a mini mindfulness practice.
So stop as an acronym for stop. You're already stopped.
Take a breath, and that's just aware of one conscious breath,
(24:37):
like you're just you're not manipulating the breath or trying
to take it more deeply, just like we've been breathing
this whole time, but taking stock of it observe. So
after that breath, you're still kind of in that kind
of mode of observing what's occurring right now.
Speaker 4 (24:50):
And then proceed.
Speaker 1 (24:51):
And you know, I'll tell you that one of the
papers that we're working on right now is a project
we did in basic combat training with close to two
thousand soldiers where they they did this stop practice. They
did a formal mindfulness practice like we assigned and that
I describe in the book, but then we asked them
to stop practice and we found benefited all kinds of things,
their sense of team cohesion, their ability to check out
(25:15):
if the body was experiencing pain, to determine if they
needed to take action. You know, like for example, people
talk about just fracturing their feet and legs and bones
because they're so negligent of taking stock of the body.
But if you're stopped in all these times and you're
just checking out what's going on, and we actually guide them.
Week one is the breath, then it may be the environment,
(25:35):
then its aspects the body, then it's people in your team.
So it kind of follows different components of what the
target of what you take stock of in that observe
moment is can really make a difference and cues people
into that mindful mode repeatedly and multiple times a day.
So that's one one thing that you could try.
Speaker 3 (25:52):
I think that's great. You know, I'm often thinking about triggers,
like what you use the word q Q or trigger,
like how can we remember? And that's a I mean
I've talked about and heard about sort of like if
you're stopped at a traffic light, but I love the
idea of like stopped in any circumstance. That's a great one.
Speaker 1 (26:08):
Yeah, And you know, now I'm telling people more like
if you feel the urge to pull out your phone,
that's a moment to practice stop. Yeah, because that's giving
you a sense of like something's going on that makes
you feel capable of doing that, and maybe think, is
that what I want to be doing? Now?
Speaker 4 (26:22):
Am I defaulting?
Speaker 3 (26:23):
Yep? Before we dive back into the conversation, let me
ask you something. What's one thing that has been holding
you back lately? You know that it's there, You've tried
to push past it, but somehow it keeps getting in
the way. You're not alone in this, and I've identified
six major saboteurs of self control, things like autopilot behavior,
(26:45):
self doubt, emotional escapism that quietly derail our best intentions.
But here's the good news. You can outsmart them. And
I've put together a free guide to help you spot
these hidden obstacles and give you simple, actionable strategies that
you can use to regain control. Download the free guide
now at oneufeed dot net slash ebook and take the
(27:09):
first step towards getting back on track. There are so
many places I could take this, but we're a little
bit time limited, so I'm gonna pivot to this place
because it's something I definitely want to talk with you about,
and I think it's important to reiterate sort of what
you said that the research you're focused on is about
improving attention. But you talk about attention, you say there
(27:31):
are three major forces that degrade our attention, stress, poor mood,
and threat. But it also sounds like early on you
say that if we're feeling cognitive fog might be depleted attention.
If we're feeling anxious or worried, it could be hijacked attention.
If we can't focus, it might be fragmented attention. So
not only are some of those things causes of degraded attention,
(27:54):
but it sounds like degraded attention is also the cause
of some of those things. Right, it seems like it's
a bidirectional relationship.
Speaker 4 (28:00):
Would that be absolutely? Yeah? Absolutely okay.
Speaker 3 (28:03):
So given that whether most people who are not tactical
professionals are going to say, you know what, I want
better quality of life, right, I want to be a
little bit happier. I want to spend less time ruminating
and regretting. I want to be more present of the
people I love, et cetera, et cetera. So given that
this is what boys a long setup for a question,
isn't it. But I'm going somewhere here.
Speaker 4 (28:24):
I trust you.
Speaker 3 (28:25):
You talk about some strategies that people use for some
of these things, like think positive, focus on the good,
do something relaxing, suppress upsetting thoughts. We've got these series
of strategies that I'm going to just put them under
a bucket. I've heard you use this bucket before, and
tell me if you agree. Reframing. They are sort of
reframing our experience. And then you used a term. Maybe
(28:49):
it was in the book and I missed it, but
I heard it on another podcast. You said, well, there's
reframing and then there's deframing, and I loved that idea.
I was wondering if you could say a little bit
more about those two, and then I want to talk
a little bit about when might it be appropriate to
do one versus the other, depending on what we're trying
to accomplish.
Speaker 1 (29:07):
Yeah, well, reframing, I think you've laid out very very
clearly already that essentially it's a replacing of one kind
of mental content with other mental content, and that can
happen through even paying attention differently. So we're still using
our attention, but now I'm going to highlight different aspects
of my experience to put different content at the center
of my mind. It's still using attention in that focused way,
(29:30):
that narrowed way, that action oriented way. In some sense,
deframing is saying get back into that perchings or being mode.
Speaker 4 (29:40):
Sure.
Speaker 1 (29:40):
It's like we're taking a look at the structure that
we're within. You know, a framework is an interesting thing.
Reframing is almost like you're ignoring the framework and you're
just filling it with new stuff. Like you know, it's
an apartment building and you're just going to bring a
new furniture. The apartment building still stands with the way
it is, or even let's say a particular room still
has a sofa and a chair, a table, but they're different.
(30:01):
They're a different kind of sofa, you know, a more
fluffy one or a genuine leave whatever it is that
you want that you think is an improvement over the
prior set of things, but the framework is the same.
What I'm saying with deframing is first step is essentially
be aware that you are within a framework, you are
within a story, You're within a set of contingencies and conditions,
(30:24):
and you're acting within that. So if we can just
even look around and say, oh wow, look at that,
I have take by default that there.
Speaker 4 (30:31):
Should be a couch and a chair and a table
in this room. Do I have to? Like?
Speaker 1 (30:35):
That's the first step of deframing. And you can build
back the same sort of components if you'd like, but
at least you're doing it with a will and with
knowledge that I'm going to put everything back in a
way that I'd like, or maybe I'm going to tear
the whole thing down and build it up differently. So
I just think most of us don't understand that this
is within our capacity to do. It seems too hard.
(30:58):
But when you understand with mindfulness practice, for example, that
every time even we do something as simple as a
breath awareness practice or what I call the find your
Flashlight practice, noticing that the mind has wandered away from
the goal is in little tiny moment of oh, I
wasn't in that framework anymore, and you know, moving towards
something like an open monitoring practice, we're really just kind
(31:20):
of disregarding all of that, all the stories and concepts,
and just trying to kind of be in the raw,
moment to moment flow of our conscious experience. It's also
a way to practice deframing. So I think that once
we understand why we're intending to do it, and I
think that there's a very important reason to intend to
do it, is that sometimes frameworks are wrong, stories are wrong.
(31:44):
More fundamentally, to get at what you're saying regarding you know,
spiritual practice and a spiritual life, replacing the couch is
not going to make you happier. It's going to mean
you have a different couch, you know. That's sort of
the deeper issue is that maybe you want to take
a look at the assumptions or of what it means
to be able to achieve the happiness you're seeking.
Speaker 3 (32:03):
So deframing in this sense, would we say it's similar
to the acceptance and commitment therapy term of diffusing, and
it's a way of sort of stepping back out of
thought right and trying to observe that all these thoughts
are happening. Is that the essence of.
Speaker 1 (32:21):
It's at the essence diffusion, decentering, becoming meta aware all
of that, and it does require stepping outside of what's occurring,
at least from the conceptual terrain or getting more embodied
in our sensory experience so we're not stuck in the
concepts that are driving whatever is going on in our
(32:41):
mind in that moment.
Speaker 3 (33:05):
One of the things you say with things like thinking positive,
focusing on the good, suppressing upsetting thoughts, that the problem
with a lot of those is that they do require
attentional resources to implement. They use up attention instead of
strengthening it. You call them failed strategies because while we
try to use them to solve our attention problems, they
degrade attention even further. Say a little bit more about that.
Speaker 1 (33:27):
Yeah, and this is where it comes down to the
context that I'm talking about now, positive psychology, gratitude, journaling,
a lot of things that fall within the umbrella of
positive psychology powerful things to do. There is a really
strong evidence base that this is a helpful thing to do.
But I'm specifically talking about people under high stress circumstances,
(33:48):
protracted periods of demand. Like, for example, if you think
about a critical care nurse over the course of this pandemic,
the notion of saying think positive, you know, like think
positive thought that doesn't even make sense. It's like, I've
gone through what I'm seeing and the level of demand
that I'm facing and utilizing my attention. I can't even
(34:08):
take a breath to do that, and I think trying
to do that is where it becomes a failed strategy.
You're pushing against and utilizing fuel that you don't have
to expend. You don't have it in your gas tank,
you can't use it. Yes, yes, it can really make
things more problematic for people because they somehow think they're
supposed to be able to do that. And what I
wanted more fundamentally for people to understand is that that
(34:31):
is not a cost free thing to do. It's not
like the default of your mind is to have positive
thoughts and you are going in the wrong direction to
have negative thoughts. It's that when things are occurring and
the mind is filled with negative thoughts, it will take
attentional resources to cognitively reframe, and that will be requiring
you to have those resources available.
Speaker 3 (34:52):
How do we get to the point where are deframing diffusion?
Mindfulness practices don't feel effortful in the same way because
it feels like for me to sit down and follow
the breath and keep bringing my attention back to it
and back to it is also an intentional drain. But
your studies seem to indicate that's not really the case.
Speaker 1 (35:14):
Yeah, the studies certainly indicate that what we're doing is
bolstering core intentional resources and working memory resources. It can
feel like it's difficult, it can feel like it's difficult,
but that doesn't mean that it's actually draining attention in
the same way that a very intense her body workout
can feel tiring, but you are actually working toward growing
(35:40):
your muscles.
Speaker 4 (35:40):
It's sort of like that idea.
Speaker 1 (35:42):
And I think that there are many ways in which
you can practice so that it feels less draining in
some sense, easing up, you know, not having that oh,
that kind of conflict that a lot of people can
experience in practice, and a lot of that I think
is optional. I don't think you need to feel like
a failure because you're mind wandered. But people think somehow
(36:02):
that if my goal is to pay attention to my breath,
my mind should not wander. And what I'm saying is
the goal is to pay attention to your breath, the
mind will wander, right, and actually remember that the moment
you realize that your mind is wandered is a win, yes,
And then so instead of feeling that conflict and that
effort and that drudge of like, oh god, my brain
(36:22):
is even staying stable. What's wrong with me? It's like,
h got it. I know where I'm off. I've got
to get back. So even the way we orient to
the practice at this more micro level can reduce that
sense of dread and effort. Yeah, but to kind of
more broadly understand that something that feels effortful can still
be building resources instead of depleting them.
Speaker 3 (36:43):
Yeah, I love that. I think what you said there
is so important. I'm kind of curious. Does everybody naturally
default to that sort of natural like, oh, my mind's wandering,
so I'm failing. It just seems inherent with everybody I've
ever talked to who's taken up a practice like this.
Do you come across people that don't orient that way?
Or is it just sort of natural to us to
(37:05):
be told if your job is to do this task
and you just see that you're not doing that task,
you just go, oh, I'm not good at this.
Speaker 4 (37:11):
Okay.
Speaker 1 (37:11):
I think it's even more fundamental than that. I think
that this experience. This is what's kind of interesting. Why
are conflict states and negative emotion? Why do they co occur?
Speaker 4 (37:22):
Right?
Speaker 1 (37:22):
So, anytime you have a mismatch between what you would
like to have happened and what happens. There can be
a slight dysphoria associated with it. That's kind of interesting,
So why is that? And people have looked at this
in cognitive neuroscience studies where sometimes you just look to
see if you impose a negative emotion on somebody, what
(37:42):
happens to their cognitive control, And what you find is
that sometimes the next thing that occurs, they're.
Speaker 4 (37:47):
Better at it.
Speaker 1 (37:48):
It's like that negativity can actually require us to bring
more of our cognitive resources to solve the problem. So
I think the yoking of conflict and what we call
upregulation of cognitive control go hand in hand. It's the
signal that says do something differently, expend more mental effort
to do this, bring more resources to bear. Even experiencing
(38:10):
conflict is not a problem. But to realize that the
conflict does not mean to translate into the elaborated notion
that I'm a complete failure and it is never going
to work out. That's the mind doing something else. I
think that it's really interesting when you, especially when you
talk to sort of long term practitioners, that conflict is
seen with a neutrality that most of us don't. Yeah, right,
(38:33):
when there's a mismatch, it's like that's data, that's not
I've suck. And I think that getting to that point,
and especially you know, within all of these kind of
elite settings, I think people are trying to understand that
that if I add the layer of a conceptual story
on top of the experience of conflict, it will slow
me down in course correcting what the conflict signal is conveying.
Speaker 3 (38:56):
Right right, Yeah, And I just think it's so important
to work on not developing that aversive relationship with practice
because a lot of people, I think, do it's that
I'm failing at this, I can't do this, I'm not
any good at this. And I love that.
Speaker 1 (39:10):
I would even encourage people to just really break down
the experience, like usually in our mindfulness practice and you know,
and I have to talk about this too, it's like
you're going to focus, you're going to notice your mind wandering,
and then you're going to redirect back. But sometimes I
will guide people to just hang out in the moment
that they notice the mind has wandered away and really
kind of get granular with that. What occurred first? What
(39:34):
is the first thing that happened. Usually we're having conflict,
negative emotion, I suck the fast track. So what if
it's that whatever that visceral or you know, feeling tone
is of the mismatch. See if you can get more
precise on that, get cued into that mismatch feeling, and
see if you can kind of paint the elaboration that follows.
(39:56):
And you know, a lot of expert practitioners will talk
about it's like I remember talking to two recard ones,
you know, an adept practitioner, a buist monk, and he
said it, and I thought it was so beautiful. It's like,
it's not it's not a storm. It's like I see
slight undulations on the ripples of the pond, you know,
whatever it is. It's like, that would be awesome if
the if the slight movement of the water, you know,
(40:17):
the tranquility of the mind is disturbed and you can say, oh, back.
Speaker 3 (40:20):
On track, totally, totally yeah. And I just wonder how
much new practitioners have that ability to be that granular.
Speaker 1 (40:27):
I think that it's at least what we can do
is say, observe it, see if you can track it,
and it's almost like what I would say to people
even when I think I do talk about this in
the book, Like if you've ever had experienced or seen
somebody experience a road rage, somebody gets cut off and
the next thing you know, somebody's flipping somebody else the bird,
or and you know, terrible circumstances, there's violence. What if
(40:50):
you could actually grab a hold of the earliest moment
that you whatever, that the initial inclination that I'm going
to have that.
Speaker 4 (40:58):
Feeling and we know what that is.
Speaker 1 (40:59):
And I was called well, as I noticed in my
own practice when I was very early stages, it's like
if there was a ballistic reactivity, I wasn't going to
catch it. You know, if my kid did something and
I was going to shout, I was probably still going
to shout, but I would apologize more quickly, yes, like, oh,
I didn't want to have that strong of a reaction
and I'm sorry. Yeah, because even though I feel what
(41:20):
happened was not okay, you didn't need that extra stuff
that just happened. So you know, I don't know if
that gets it what you're talking about, but that feels
like part of the journey of what this is.
Speaker 3 (41:30):
Yeah, Well, you quote Lou Read at one point in
the book and said, between thought and expression lies a lifetime.
I love anytime the velvet underground shows up in a book.
Between thought and expression lies lifetime reminds me of the
Victor Frankel quote of between stimulus and response, right, And
I've said that I think sometimes the most practical thing
(41:50):
a long history of different types of meditation practices given me.
I think the most practical thing is that space between
stimulus and response seems a little bit bigger. There's a
little bit more moment to be like, ah, hang on,
you know, listeners couldn't see that, but I sort of
started to rise up in like a outrage. And but
you know, don't get all the way there, you know.
(42:12):
And to your point, then, yes, also learning to walk
it back faster. And I love the idea that you
just said about noticing that moment when your mind is
wandered and really noticing what happens there. Because in Buddhism
they talk about the five skandas. I don't know if
you're familiar with the five skandas, but it's describing a
(42:33):
little bit of the way that we put together the
sense of a self there's some initial like Verdanna, like
the very first thing, but they make a distinction between
perception like the raw sense data, and then all the
layers that start getting added on top of that, right
from positive negative to the stories we might tell. You know,
(42:56):
advanced practitioners say, you can actually start to notice the
those extraordinarily fine increments. Right for most of us, it's
just like that. That whole process happens like that, But
there is a way of breaking that down. I guess
my question to you would be, what have you seen
looking at the way our brains process data that might
(43:17):
shed light on that or confirm that that's kind of
what happens. And do you see people being able to
interrupt that pattern kind of the snap I just did
you see people being able to interrupt it or break
it down?
Speaker 2 (43:29):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (43:29):
I mean I think the way that we look at
it in my lab, there's so many different people that
are looking at this kind of thing. We can start
to see even things like mind wandering. Let's not even
talk about sort of emotionally laden stuff. Obviously mind wandering
has that propensity, But what we know is that when
people mind wander, for example, if we just had them
do a simple task where they're just pressing a button
(43:51):
every time they see a digit on the screen. We
know that the response times are going to become more
and more variable when they are mind wandering. In fact,
that's the clue that their mind wandering, because usually a
few seconds later they'll miss something or they'll make an error.
The report back, yeah, my mind was wandering so close
in time to When we see a lot of variability,
(44:12):
you see the costs of that variability on the consequential
actions that need to be performed. And so what we
know with mindfulness training is that there's a reduction in
that variability and the performance is less prone to making
errors like that, and people report mind wandering less. So
I think that that's a movement or that's an insight
(44:34):
that says, Yes, the more you're able to monitor moment
by moment what's going on and you train your mind
to do that through something like a breath awareness practice
and the whole suite of practices now that I go
into in the book, the more chances that you're going
to be able to course correct more quickly. And so
even the windows that's the kind of thing we're looking
at now. It's like the windows of variability, can those
(44:56):
shrink or what we know from for example, the work
that one of the the post docs in my lab,
Tony Zenesco's doing, is we're looking at what we call
micro states. So these are essentially sort of the units
of our configuration of the brain, if you will, in
a moment, and typically it can break these down into
like thirty milliseconds, there's small micro microd of stability of
(45:19):
the mind in these tiny windows. And what we know,
for example, is that micro states tend to be temporarily contingent,
so the micro state you are in in one moment
is likely to produce the next micro state. And we
know what the micro states at least the signature of
what it looks like when people are completely off task
or their mind is not on the thing they're trying
(45:40):
to do, or they're highly variable. So if you're in
a highly variable kind of state, the next moment is
likely to be highly variable. The question now is with practitioners,
can you see that the return back to a state
of focus is more likely? So the contemporal contingencies are
actually being it's broken, and you know, in some sense
(46:02):
it sounds I mean, I'm going to leap down a lot.
But if the mind is built for this kind of
temporal contingency, which I think is definitely aligned with a
lot of Buddhist thought on you know, sort of the
contingent nature of reality. If you can train the mind
to be less contingent so that there is kind of
infinite potentiality from one moment to the next in the
way that you can configure the brain, right, what are
(46:26):
the benefits of that? And maybe that's what we mean
when we say even the term enlightenment is a non
contingent mind.
Speaker 3 (46:33):
Before we wrap up, I want you to think about this.
Have you ever ended the day feeling like your choices
didn't quite match the person you wanted to be? Maybe
it was autopilot mode or self doubt that made it
harder to stick to your goals. And that's exactly why
I created The Six Saboteurs of Self Control. It's a
(46:53):
free guide to help you recognize the hidden patterns that
hold you back and give you simple effect of strategies
to break through them. If you're ready to take back
control and start making lasting changes, download your copy now
at oneufeed dot net. Slash ebook. Let's make those shifts
happen starting today one you feed dot net slash ebook.
(47:17):
It's funny. I had up at the top of my
note one of my favorite quotes by an old zenmaster Dogan,
who said enlightenment is intimacy with all things. And I
had that there because I think that speaks to attention.
Intimacy is achieved by paying close attention to things. And
what Dogan is saying is if we are truly that present,
(47:40):
like you said, and that our micro states are not
as conditioned to remain on the same thing. To your point,
you're starting to get towards something that looks more like enlightenment,
which I think is fascinating.
Speaker 1 (47:52):
Which is so interesting, right because in some sense there's
enlightenment in there's psychosis when things aren't a contingent matter.
So got to figure out the qualities that make it
productive and warranted and worthy, and that's where all of
the other positive qualities and having an ethical orientation toward
our existence can come into play.
Speaker 3 (48:11):
Totally. Well, I mean, she thank you so much for
coming on. I really enjoyed the book. It's a great
look into the neuroscience of attention. I read a lot
of books about mindfulness this is my job, and yours
stood out. I just found some of the ways you
really dove into what's happening to be truly fascinating, and
we touched on a fraction of them. It's a wonderful read.
(48:33):
And thank you so much for coming on.
Speaker 4 (48:35):
Oh this is so much fun. Thank you for the
great conversation.
Speaker 3 (48:38):
Thank you so much for listening to the show. If
you found this conversation helpful, inspiring, or thought provoking, I'd
love for you to share it with a friend. Sharing
from one person to another is the lifeblood of what
we do. We don't have a big budget and I'm
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(48:59):
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one you Feed community.
Host
Eric Zimmer
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