In this episode of the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, I sit down with neuroscientist and best-selling author, Dr. Aaron Horschig, to talk about his new book, Peak Mind , and why it s so important to know where your mind is. We talk about the role of the brain in our day-to-day lives and how it affects our ability to focus on a task. We also discuss the benefits of mindfulness and meditation, and how they can improve the way we think and focus. This episode is a must-listen for anyone interested in learning how to improve their own mind and improve their life. If you like what you hear here, please HIT SUBSCRIBE on Apple Podcasts and leave us a rating and review! You can also join the conversation by using the hashtag and on social media and tag to be featured on the next episode of . Thanks for listening and Good Luck Out There if you like the show, and Don t Tell a Friend about it! Timestamps: 5:00 - What's your favorite part of the show? 6:30 - How do you feel about the episode? 7:15 - What is your favorite thing about it? 8:40 - What are you looking for? 9:20 - How can you improve your life? 10:00 What do you think of the podcast? 11:00 | What s your biggest takeaway from this episode so far? 12:30 | How do I m looking forward to listening to the most important thing? 15:30 16:00: What are your biggest challenge? 17:15 | What is the biggest thing you re working on right now? 18:00 // 15:40 | What would you like to see me do next? 19:40 21:00 What s the best thing I m working on? 22:00 Is there something you re looking for in the most challenging part of your day? ? 23: What s a problem you re you want me to do more of? 26: Is there anything you re trying to improve? 27:00 Do you have a better way to improve your day-day? 29:00 How can I improve my life more? 30:00 Are you working on your life day to be more mindful?
00:00:35.000The book isn't necessarily about all aspects, but a very important one that drives a lot of other aspects, which is the brain's attention system.
00:00:43.000Yeah, that's a thing a lot of people have a problem with today, right?
00:00:46.000Phones and distractions and screens and nonsense.
00:00:52.000So, meaning, you can look back to medieval monks and they report, you know, I abandoned my family, I've devoted my life to God, and I still keep thinking about lunch when I'm supposed to be praying.
00:01:03.000So, this is not only a modern problem, it's actually a human problem.
00:01:48.000Our brain is built for distractibility, exactly for the reasons that you said.
00:01:52.000It advantages us to be able to not just focus when we want to, but scan as we're still engaged in a task.
00:02:02.000And as I just mentioned, it's not really only a modern problem, because oftentimes, even if we're abandoning every other kind of possible external distraction, And we're just by ourselves alone in a quiet room.
00:02:15.000We can still feel like it's hard to focus.
00:02:19.000So this capacity that drives kind of a shifting, moving, attention waxing and waning is something that is baked into the way that our brain functions.
00:02:30.000And I think that's Often misunderstood as a problem.
00:02:35.000People think, oh, no, no, my brain is really busy.
00:02:39.000Instead of understanding, that's just the nature of the brain.
00:02:41.000If you are alive, awake, conscious, about half of your waking moments, your attention is not going to be in the task at hand.
00:02:50.000Yeah, that's something that people need to learn when they start meditating, that when you meditate, people think, God, why do I keep getting distracted?
00:03:30.000Not the way that your brain was designed.
00:03:33.000But then you start understanding that there is a win to be had in a practice, especially the kind of stuff that I study in my lab, mindfulness meditation.
00:03:41.000Because in the act of knowing where your mind is and training it to come back over and over, you gain a lot.
00:03:50.000You gain almost, in some sense, the super capacity to have more control in not just the way your mind functions, but in your life.
00:04:01.000That's where it gets interesting for me because do you have sort of a standard protocol that you think people should apply to their thinking?
00:04:10.000Or is it based on where you are in your life?
00:04:44.000In every group we've studied in my lab, and this is many, many kinds of groups, so from active duty military to first responders to students to athletes, leaders in organizations, I mean, teachers, just goes on and on.
00:04:57.000If you are experiencing a protracted period of high demand, meaning you got to get something done, like for students, it'd be during the academic semester, or for Athletes, even pre-season training.
00:05:09.000If you're experiencing that kind of high demand for multiple weeks, your attention is going to decline.
00:05:14.000Your attentional functioning is going to decline.
00:05:16.000Your distractibility or mind-wandering, would be the technical way to describe it, is going to increase.
00:05:21.000So that's one thing we need to know, no matter what your sort of set point is.
00:05:24.000And we do have different set points as individual differences.
00:05:28.000Now, when it comes to your own mind, when you're working with these different groups of people and you're putting together this book and you're putting together these sort of methods and strategies for taking care of just the weirdness of being a person and the weirdness of the mind,
00:05:49.000Are you gaining something out of this personally by going through all this?
00:05:54.000Is this helping you as well while you're writing all this stuff down, while you're exposing these various techniques that can improve your concentration and your ability to focus on things?
00:06:05.000Do you find that it's helping you as well?
00:06:07.000Or is this something that you've always worked on?
00:06:10.000I mean, I've always been – I've been a neuroscientist for a long time.
00:06:14.000I've been interested in the way the brain works for a long time.
00:06:16.000I started studying attention as an undergrad and went on to do my graduate work and postdoctoral training and then set up a lab to study attention.
00:06:26.000And then kind of early in my time of being a professor, I had like this kind of acute crisis of attention.
00:06:35.000And it was around the time I just had my first child and my husband was in grad school setting up the lab.
00:06:41.000I lost feeling in my teeth from grinding.
00:07:44.000There's nothing I can go to in the literature that's just like, here's the best way to train your attention so that you have better access to your moment-to-moment lived experience.
00:07:54.000And then, just to kind of continue the journey, I'm like, there's got to be something to do.
00:08:00.000And at that moment, it was not just feeling distracted.
00:08:03.000It was starting to feel kind of depressed and a little bit anxious, too, like sort of this bubbling up of my life is slipping away from me.
00:08:12.000And at that moment, it was sort of how funny how serendipity happens.
00:08:16.000But a dear colleague of mine, an eminent neuroscientist who happens to be an emotion researcher, an affective neuroscientist, I think?
00:08:39.000One is of a brain induced to be in a very negative mood.
00:08:44.000I mean, usually you do this by putting people in a scanner and saying, think of your worst memories.
00:09:02.000But, of course, given my own life circumstances, at the end of the lecture, I kind of shout out from the back of the I'm like, how do you make that brain look like that brain?
00:09:14.000And I don't know if he was rushed because it was the end of the lecture or what, but he just kind of calls out, like not even on the microphone, I don't even remember, meditation.
00:09:54.000And I would say a lot of the effort that I've been up to, now we have a field, contemplative neuroscience.
00:09:59.000So anyway, so yeah, we're definitely there.
00:10:01.000I would say over the last 15 years, there's been a serious uptick in the seriousness taken.
00:10:06.000And a lot of it is because of these kind of brain imaging studies where we can put people in scanners and we can track them and A lot of the work that we've been doing as well.
00:10:13.000But it really bugged me that he said that.
00:11:19.000I mean, I love that you're saying it's so strange because in some sense, it is the success of this enterprise and the rigor with which we've been able to do a lot of research that has caused a type of culture change, which is a pretty rapid pace of causing that culture change.
00:11:50.000But I'm like a serious Western-trained scientist.
00:11:55.000And until there's any reason to really think this is a helpful thing, I'm not going to do it.
00:11:59.000But going back to your question, which was about my personal journey with this practice as it relates to writing the book and the work that we're doing.
00:12:11.000I went to the Penn bookstore after he said that term with my own resistance in hand and found a little book called Meditation for Beginners.
00:12:18.000I lucked out because I picked a really good book by a really influential person.
00:12:35.000How does this guy know what's happening in my mind?
00:12:38.000How does he know that I'm now resisting or my mind is wandering?
00:12:44.000But the instruction was very clearly about attention.
00:12:47.000So it's almost like I know this world.
00:12:49.000I've never seen anybody talk about it from the direct phenomenology of the attention system.
00:12:55.000So I shifted into practicing and then waking up to the benefits and then had that pivotal moment where I'm like, I think I'm going to study this.
00:13:05.000So is it fair to say that traditional academics study the brain states and study these various phenomena like lack of attention or hypertension, but they don't study how to achieve them?
00:13:20.000They don't study the various things that can be done Jack Kornfield, is that his name?
00:13:42.000But from my personal experience, if you just not remember, but if you think back to the history of science, we as a field, as a scientific enterprise, started moving away from subjective to objective.
00:13:55.000And when you're going to be objective about something, it's not about your experience with it.
00:13:59.000It's about what you can look at it through measures that have nothing to do with you.
00:14:02.000But that's where it gets weird because if you're talking about science and you're talking about the mind, there's no way to separate you from the mind.
00:14:10.000Like, what you do directly influences the way the mind works.
00:14:15.000So if we're studying the way the mind works but we're not studying what you do...
00:14:19.000We're just studying these random states with no understanding of how they got there until meditation's being really explored?
00:14:32.000I mean like the way you used to when you were saying that you were committing academic suicide by studying meditation, is that the way they used to look at it?
00:14:39.000Even in my own professional life, we would design tasks that tapped into attention, things that made people pay attention to things that are like, Video games, and then we'd look at the brain responses.
00:14:50.000We'd understand the way attention is instantiated within our brain.
00:14:54.000But it was not about my own phenomenological experience with my attention and how does it feel and what gets in the way and what distracts me.
00:15:03.000Some of that was covered in the kind of clinical realm, like, oh, yeah, you ruminate or you've got...
00:15:23.000Which is why I couldn't find anything in the literature.
00:15:26.000So yes, the journey of the introduction of contemplative practice into science is very, very new.
00:15:33.000I mean, it had a little bit of a resurgence, or not resurgence, but introduction in the 70s.
00:15:38.000And then it really started again with tools like brain imaging, where, you know, in some sense, you could be objective.
00:15:44.000You put somebody in the scanner and say, okay, Joe, I want you to do a quick meditation practice for 10 minutes, and I'd look to see what your brain activity looked like.
00:16:11.000So just to answer the question you asked, it was the case that my personal journey woke me up to a whole new scientific endeavor, which is what made me want to bring it to the lab.
00:16:22.000And I happen to have all these tools from sort of traditional psychology and cognitive neuroscience to apply to this new space of mindfulness meditation.
00:16:33.000So when you get to this book, Meditation for Beginners, what are you doing?
00:16:47.000These are from the millennia-old wisdom traditions, in particular with Jack, the Buddhist tradition.
00:16:52.000So a foundational practice that he offered was mindfulness of the breath.
00:16:57.000And he was very clear on what mindfulness in that sense meant.
00:17:01.000It's about taking this sort of present-centered attention without editorializing or reacting to it, kind of getting the raw data of the experience.
00:17:58.000Or you may find yourself in a fantasy.
00:18:01.000But the instruction was always the same.
00:18:03.000Regardless of where you were, gently bring your attention back.
00:18:07.000And so I started realizing, oh my goodness, he's giving us like this workout for attention.
00:18:13.000And given what I knew about the brain systems of attention, my strong hunch was, He's actually tapping into all the main brain systems of attention that exist.
00:18:24.000And so now I want to check out, let's bring it to the lab, let's give it to people that aren't me, and let's see, does attention actually change with our objective measures of these systems?
00:18:37.000So like when you're in the lab, was there anything shocking that you learned from seeing how these practices and how mindfulness applied like what it did to the brain?
00:19:37.000It's like a video game where you are in sort of a virtual reality scenario where you are, if I'm remembering it correctly, there's like bad guys and hostages and you're supposed to shoot the bad guys,
00:20:40.000And then they look at her score like, Jesus Christ, you have a perfect score.
00:20:43.000Like, she went from being terrible at it to being like an expert with this brain stimulation.
00:20:50.000And the entire episode is about all these different people that have developed these personal hacking devices to do this transdermal stimulation.
00:21:12.000Well, that's not my expertise, but I'll just tell you that it's fascinating to see that, yes, activating and inhibiting certain parts of the brain, and basically you're limited because you've got to get through the skull, and then you've got to be able to, it'll be just a few centimeters, but if you can place it right or you have multiple coils,
00:21:29.000you might be able to target different regions.
00:21:31.000There's a lot of positive stuff happening with that now, but just to take you back to where I was, the kind of things that were happening back in In the moment.
00:22:01.000Well, in the moment for sure, but also other people are learning.
00:22:04.000Maybe there's a way you can stimulate repeatedly and get a benefit.
00:22:08.000But sort of separate from that, the main thing that was happening at the time I was starting to think about pursuing mindfulness training was brain training games.
00:22:56.000So that made the field really take a look at, okay, you know, the brain is smart.
00:23:02.000It will get better at that specific thing, but it's not resulting in a generalizable benefit to attention so that you can use it no matter what you're doing.
00:23:11.000So your question was such a good one, which was, What surprised you?
00:23:17.000Okay, so I'm sitting by myself in my office, struggling with not being able to feel my teeth, decide to get this book, start practicing.
00:23:25.000All of a sudden, my own embodied experience of my life starts shifting.
00:23:31.000I'm realizing I have more of my attention back.
00:23:34.000And so I decided to pursue this line of research where we offer the program, a mindfulness training program, and there were several available already in the medical context.
00:23:43.000And I said the test is going to be those same kind of tests that we use to understand attention.
00:23:50.000It might be remember faces and scenes or remember numbers and then try to do math problems or whatever it is.
00:23:59.000Because nothing else was transferring.
00:24:00.000So you sit quietly focusing on your breath and you come in lab and do these rigorous tests of attention and we saw benefits on those tests.
00:24:10.000And that to me was very, very exciting because it was like you're not practicing with numbers and stimuli on the screen.
00:24:18.000You're just sitting there with your eyes closed by yourself.
00:24:20.000You're doing this workout and all of a sudden it transfers.
00:24:22.000So it really opened up this possibility of That we could add to a suite of things like the Radiolab episode you were talking to that people can do on their own every day as a mental workout to advantage their attention, especially for people that are likely to have their attention degraded because high stress tends to degrade attention.
00:24:42.000And when you're saying it transfers, how are you measuring this?
00:26:19.000In that task performance, they were not pressing to the three more often, meaning they weren't making mistakes, and they were less variable.
00:26:27.000So they were really just there more often to be able to do the task.
00:26:32.000But we've done many kinds of experiments where we look at these core attentional functions and find improvements.
00:26:38.000And it's so funny that you mentioned This VR environment from the radio lab episode, because now we're doing that.
00:26:47.000We're saying we're actually working with soldiers and, you know, mostly active duty military and looking at combat scenarios with these kind of virtual reality environments, immersive environments, and we're seeing how their performance might change for those when they go through a mindfulness training program.
00:27:05.000That's a project we're just in the middle of right now.
00:27:08.000When you're saying that this, I definitely want to talk about that, but when you're saying that this, the ability to not hit the number three and that you saw a measured improvement, like how much of an improvement?
00:28:00.000And that was our first, I was like, I got to advantage us.
00:28:03.000Like, when we saw it, that's where we saw it.
00:28:06.000And then we brought it back to the lab and looked at medical and nursing students and gave them a more kind of regular mindfulness training program that's about eight weeks long.
00:28:16.000And they're practicing about 45 minutes a day.
00:28:21.000So then we've kind of, that's been the progression of my career has been to try to figure out time efficient solutions for people because most people can't get away for a month to meditate.
00:28:29.000Now, when you're working with these soldiers, did you have a control group?
00:29:43.000But we also were learning that it's extremely...
00:29:47.000And so even in the laboratory context, even with a simple task like the one I was just describing to you, what you do is you take kind of that simple digits task, and I put in a negative image every now and then, people start falling apart even more.
00:30:02.000What do you mean by putting a negative?
00:30:04.000So you're sitting there, you see number, number.
00:30:08.000You see a three, you're going to screw up.
00:30:52.000I wasn't in a life or death threat situation, but I was definitely looking back on it, feeling a little overwhelmed with all that life required.
00:31:01.000So I became very interested in like, for me, it wasn't consequential.
00:31:05.000Okay, so I didn't read the book to my kid.
00:31:15.000It's that the circumstances that we ask them to perform at their best professionally are the ones that are going to disadvantage and degrade their attention.
00:31:24.000And that, like, was a whole category of people, you know, military service members, emergency services professionals, first responders.
00:31:33.000Like we can't, they can't, attention is life or death.
00:31:37.000You can't shoot when you shouldn't be shooting.
00:31:40.000So anyway, that's why I started working with these groups.
00:31:43.000So you're asking me if people actually stay, anybody got better over time.
00:31:48.000For the most part, for the control group, when we did nothing at all over a four to eight week interval, usually we picked these intervals that were just preparatory, high stress, pre-deployment training.
00:31:58.000They're getting ready to go to be deployed.
00:32:49.000This is now, we're not just talking about military service members.
00:32:52.000We saw this with football players during preseason training, undergrads, you know, if you're probably business people that are going through sales season.
00:33:02.000I mean, anything that is, you can think of your own life, like anything that is high demand and long, it's going to degrade your attention.
00:33:14.000I was thinking about this the other day because I was counting some money and I was thinking, and I was by myself, but I was thinking how frustrated it is when you're counting money if someone starts throwing numbers at you.
00:33:25.000I don't know why I was thinking that while I was counting money, right?
00:34:14.000But if someone comes over and goes, 90, 110, 120, 45, 60, like, yeah, what the fuck, man?
00:34:21.000Even if there's no stress on you, if it's not a competition or anything, it's just, you're trying to count 500 bucks, and you can't do it because someone's yelling out numbers.
00:34:34.000But what you're doing is when you're counting, you're putting it into something called our temporary scratch space working memory, and you're actually saying it to yourself, and that same space is where new perceptual information goes in, and it's messing you up.
00:34:48.000Temporary scratch space working memory.
00:35:00.000So we've been talking about attention so far.
00:35:02.000Take attention and think about it over time.
00:35:06.000So, like, in our conversation right now, you're using your working memory.
00:35:09.000I'm saying stuff, you're comprehending it, you're probably having a thought, but you're a nice person and you're not going to just blurt it out.
00:35:15.000You're going to probably hold it until you see a nice spot.
00:36:19.000It's very odd though that there's so many different kinds of memory and that there's memories that are like cemented in your head, like really important personal milestones or loving memories or traumatic memories.
00:36:31.000But then there's other memories that are just like you ask someone their name and then you immediately forget it.
00:39:17.000So, you know, I know this is a topic near and dear to your heart, and I would say It's not my expertise, but I think that what's very interesting about going back to mindfulness training is that it really is establishing not just the kind of core strength,
00:39:40.000So remember back, let me just unpack that.
00:39:43.000So like even what we were saying about that, the simple set of practices like the breath awareness practice that Jack's CD had on it.
00:39:52.000What is that actually training me to do?
00:39:54.000And I said, you know, when we were talking about that, I said, oh, it's actually training all these systems of attention.
00:39:58.000I'd love to tell you, like, a little bit about the systems of attention because my hunches, and I think those studies with kind of different substances, they can be beneficial.
00:40:08.000But just like, you know, I think about you and your martial MMA expertise, and like...
00:40:14.000There's going to be core strength you're going to need, but then there's certain moves you've got to practice over and over again to be able to use them in that particular context.
00:40:22.000And just being strong or agile in general is not going to be helpful.
00:40:26.000There's like a certain kind of move that you need to make.
00:40:28.000And that's what I think the suite of mindfulness practices is offering.
00:40:31.000It's training attention in a particular way.
00:40:35.000So anyway, so I think that other substances can be great.
00:40:39.000That's not my expertise, but it's really regarding mindfulness.
00:40:44.000Why does attention start tanking under stress, threat, and poor mood?
00:40:47.000And why does it seem like mindfulness training is actually able to protect against that?
00:40:52.000That requires us to get an understanding of what the heck attention actually is.
00:40:59.000I'm glad you used the analogy of martial arts because I think with that analogy you could also apply the idea of nootropics because in martial arts you do have techniques that need to be drilled and worked on over and over again but Those techniques become more effective with a body that performs better.
00:41:22.000And when you supplement with vitamins and you make sure that you have a satisfying input in terms of protein and carbohydrates and all the things that you need for your body to perform, where your body's not at a deficit,
00:41:40.000And then there's also supplements that you can take that will increase athletic performance and enhance recovery.
00:41:47.000And those things will also allow you to put in more time in training, which would then yield better results.
00:41:54.000The way I look at nootropics is the same way.
00:41:57.000They're certainly not a substitute for mindfulness training or for concentration or for breath work or any of those things.
00:42:04.000But I think that things like acetylcholine and the various nootropics that have been shown to increase memory, that I do think they play a part.
00:42:15.000I first found out about them back in the early 2000s.
00:42:20.000There was a radio show that I was on in San Francisco, and one of the hosts had this thing called Neuro One, and it was a product that was developed by Bill Romanowski.
00:43:37.000We did placebo-controlled studies at the Boston Center for Memory, and we found increase in verbal memory, increase in peak alpha flow state, reaction time.
00:43:47.000These things can be enhanced through supplementation in a way that you can measure.
00:44:39.000It's great stuff because it tastes like regular gum, but it gives you like this little boost got a tiny amount of caffeine in it and What's the other?
00:45:03.000You know, I think that that's the kind of neat thing about where we're at right now in this moment, that there are, just like you mentioned, like the transcranial magnetic stimulation and substances that we can take that will enhance us.
00:46:09.000I mean, I'd love to tell you about it.
00:46:10.000Let me tell you about attention because that kind of makes me feel like at least we'll be on the same page then as it relates to what I'm talking about.
00:46:16.000Because even the mindfulness stuff is related to attention.
00:46:18.000So attention usually in the way we've been talking about it, we've been talking about it as focus, right?
00:46:40.000So wherever it is that you direct your attention in that way, you're privileging that content.
00:46:46.000So right now you're seeing my face with more granularity, hearing my voice with the crispness more than the air conditioner or Whatever Jamie might be saying.
00:46:54.000Right now you're focused in on me, thank you very much.
00:46:57.000So that actually does neurally look like it enhances the sensory input.
00:47:06.000If you focus in on my voice, your neurons as early as your auditory cortex, within a few hundred milliseconds, you're going to have a Clear comprehension, but even just auditory input is going to be amplified as a function of paying attention.
00:47:23.000And, you know, just like literally a flashlight, if you're in a darkened space, you know, you value that thing.
00:47:28.000Wherever it is that it points, it actually gives you that privileged information.
00:47:32.000The cool thing about the flashlight is you can direct it willfully.
00:47:54.000So it actually goes to one of the reasons attention even evolved in our brain.
00:47:59.000We talked about the evolution of distractibility, which was to advantage our survival.
00:48:03.000But why do we have attention in the first place?
00:48:05.000Why do we even develop this capacity to focus?
00:48:08.000And it comes down to the brain had a big problem, which is that there's far more information in the environment than it could possibly process.
00:49:57.000So, this is, like I said, this system is so important.
00:50:05.000And probably, and not just probably, I mean, there's a lot of evidence that suggests in things like sensory deprivation, you now are challenging that system because what is happening is not necessarily from the external environment.
00:50:21.000Baseline existence within the internal milieu may actually be more salient to you because just like the flashlight where you can direct it internally, externally or internally, the floodlight you can also direct externally and internally.
00:50:35.000So in the absence of sensory input, you're kind of in this receptive state where everything that's occurring internally, there's an acute and rich awareness of that.
00:51:23.000But the reality of that environment is that when you are completely still and just breathing, it's as close to eliminating all external sensory input as possible.
00:51:37.000And you don't achieve that state anywhere else on Earth.
00:52:30.000But before I do that, I want to say something to you.
00:52:33.000And I really hope we can – I want to kind of set this up so we can talk about it and have it together to talk about.
00:52:39.000But one really cool thing about – that we know regarding – Another thing that I think we should talk about, which is mind-wandering.
00:52:48.000So basically, the thing we started out talking about, spontaneous initiation of thought.
00:52:54.000So there's a study I was reading which basically said, if you want to, in the context of creativity, increase productive novel thought...
00:53:05.000Then you need to be basically in this kind of alerting.
00:53:09.000The floodlight needs to be on for the generation and acceptance of the thought that comes up.
00:53:15.000And they specifically mentioned that sensory deprivation chambers may be a really great place to get that generative content coming up.
00:53:22.000You basically have more spontaneous thought in those contexts.
00:53:26.000Yeah, I had, I never set it up, but I bought one of those tape recorders that operates on voice activated, and I bought like, my plan was like to Velcro it to the wall, but I never wound up doing it.
00:53:39.000But it's probably a good idea because there are times where you come up with these ideas, you're like, oh my god, I gotta write this one down, but I don't want to climb out of the tank.
00:53:48.000I mean, it's like one of these self-experimentation things, but I was struck by that, especially anticipating coming to see you, and I know that that's something that you've done.
00:53:56.000But I think let's keep it in mind as we talk about mindfulness training, because I think the way you were describing mindfulness, I probably have a different view of what it is, and it might actually connect with what we're talking about with creativity.
00:54:21.000It's like, just like the flashlight is selecting based on content, you know, right side or left side, the floodlight is selecting based on time, what's important right now.
00:54:32.000This system is selecting information because the whole goal of attention is to subsample reality.
00:54:40.000The third system, executive control, is subsampling based on your goals.
00:54:46.000So what is most goal-relevant right now?
00:54:49.000That should guide the way that I perceive and act.
00:54:51.000So this system's job, and the term executive is like the way we talk about executives of a company.
00:54:57.000The executive's job is not to go in and do every single task.
00:55:01.000But it's to ensure that the goals of the organization and the behavior of the organization align.
00:55:06.000And then when it's a mess up, the executive says, no, fix that.
00:55:10.000So this is where things like maintaining the goal, working memory, that's where we put our goals when we maintain them, inhibiting irrelevant information.
00:56:17.000So either hyper-focused, you can't get the flashlight off, or you're hyper-vigilant, you can't stop seeing everything as requiring this broad, receptive, almost...
00:56:28.000Anxiety-provoking level of present moment awareness.
00:56:33.000Or you just can't keep the balls in the air.
00:56:51.000Alerting system is telling you what's going on, so you need to know if you need...
00:56:54.000So there's this constant fluidity between these things.
00:56:58.000So sometimes it's the coordination that gets messed up.
00:57:01.000And when people's lives are negatively impacted by the way their attention functions...
00:57:08.000To the point where it's actually causing serious problems, that's when sometimes it gets diagnosed as ADD. My perception on it, from a personal experience, is that it varies wildly.
00:57:19.000And that where it varies is, is where my actual interest lies.
00:57:24.000If I'm actually interested in something, I have no problem with my attention.
00:57:28.000But like high school, when I was in high school, I remember there were subjects that I just was bored with, or the teacher was boring, and I just could not pay attention.
00:57:40.000And I was thinking, as I got older and I realized that they were putting kids on Prozac and all kinds of shit for this, I was like, I probably would have got put on drugs if I had the wrong parents.
00:57:49.000Like, if my parents didn't recognize that I just wasn't interested in these things, that it wasn't that there was something wrong with my brain, but I only am capable of concentrating on things I'm interested in.
00:58:18.000I mean, I think that there's a whole world that we could talk about of the bioethics of putting children on medication when they don't fall in line with...
00:58:27.000Do you think there's some sort of an evolutionary reason for that, though?
00:58:32.000I mean, if we go back to our hunter-gatherer roots, when you're, say if you were trying to catch a fish, like you're ready to spear a fish, and you're hyper-focused, trying to get right to the right spot, the Success or failure, your life really depends upon it.
00:58:49.000Because if you get the nutrition from that fish, you get to live another day, you thrive.
00:58:54.000If you don't, you're starving and your body gets diminished.
00:58:58.000These are real life scenarios that we evolved to deal with.
00:59:03.000So that feeling like, have you ever gone fishing?
00:59:07.000We were talking about it last night with some friends, one of them who happens to be a scientist, and we were saying there's a thing that's like in you When you catch a fish, your whole body gets excited, like, oh, I got one, I got one.
00:59:21.000And I'm like, that has to be connected to back when we were primitive people, and that was the only way we gathered food.
01:02:14.000Because even if the chances of something bad happening are low, if they happen and you miss it, it's on you.
01:02:20.000So when people are bored, it's essentially the mind telling you that you're wasting time here and that you need to find...
01:02:29.000If you go back to the evolutionary roots of the way we hyper-focus on a fish that you're trying to catch, If you're bored, that discomfort is essentially your mind saying, this is not productive and this is not helping us survive.
01:02:44.000Yeah, it's basically, let's make it even more basic than that.
01:02:48.000It's saying the reward you're getting here is not enough to keep you here.
01:02:54.000But it starts with something even more basic.
01:03:49.000Some critiques of modern life in terms of the way we use screens to constantly distract ourselves to the point where we don't really get bored anymore.
01:03:58.000We might get bored, but we're getting enough input that we maintain a certain level of awareness in what we're doing.
01:04:08.000You know, two hours in on Instagram, like, what the fuck did I do?
01:04:11.000I just killed two hours where you're at this, like, instead of at ten, like, you're catching the fish, you're at, like, one or two, but you maintain at one or two and you never get down to baseline.
01:04:22.000But when you do, when people are legitimately bored, Oftentimes, that's when creative thoughts come out.
01:04:30.000And this argument that I've heard multiple times is that we are not bored anymore.
01:04:36.000So because we're not bored anymore, there's a lot of creativity and there's a lot of ideas that we're missing out on.
01:04:41.000Because the mind doesn't have the chance to wander, which is where many of these great ideas come from.
01:04:47.000Is the mind just sitting there thinking?
01:04:49.000You're super in sync with everything I write about, frankly, in the book.
01:04:54.000Because, yes, let's go back to that term mind-wandering.
01:04:59.000Whatever you took is definitely kicking in.
01:05:35.000The brain is constantly, and there's lots of reasons for that, is pumping out content.
01:05:40.000And so when we become task-focused, when there is something to do and the content is still going on and you now move your attention away from the task to that content that's not related to the task, you are now mind-wandering and your performance on the task is going to suffer.
01:06:09.000You know, that's awesome that you're here and your life worked out where you didn't have to go back to focusing on those things that are boring.
01:06:18.000But I can guarantee, just like going back and you counting the money you were talking about, there are things we have to do in our life that is going to be boring, but we still got to pay attention.
01:06:26.000Like, even if it's watching your kid at the playground, or you're having a conversation with somebody and it's boring.
01:06:33.000Like, you got to be able to at least bring yourself back.
01:07:16.000But you had an awareness of where your mind was.
01:07:19.000The bigger problem we tend to have, and remember the kind of groups I work with, is that the mind will wander and people are not aware of it.
01:07:27.000So now they're not paying attention to the task at hand.
01:07:31.000They're not aware of it and their performance starts suffering.
01:07:34.000And, you know, it's not about the nature of the task.
01:08:14.000Are we doing this sort of after the fact?
01:08:18.000Like, should this be something that's a core component of early childhood education where children can understand why they get bored and what is...
01:08:30.000What can help them get on track to accomplish goals and give them a feeling of Achievement when they they do focus and and recognize that they can bring their mind on track and that there's a reward for it in accomplishing these tasks instead of like Going back as adults and go.
01:09:01.000Because we really don't teach kids how to think very much, do we?
01:09:04.000We really just sort of show them what they need to learn.
01:09:07.000Even before we talk about thinking, what we don't do for any of us, it's very, very rare, is teach people the value and importance of checking out where their mind is moment by moment.
01:09:20.000And going back to the people with ADD, the patients that have ADD, diagnosable ADD, their life is problematic because of this set of set points they have on all these three systems of attention.
01:09:32.000Those that have this thing we're talking about, which the technical term is meta-awareness, It's essentially a version of that floodlight that I was talking about.
01:09:42.000Broad, receptive, but you're checking out, technically meta-awareness is having awareness of the current contents and processes of your mind, moment by moment.
01:09:54.000So, first of all, to say, oh yeah, I can do that.
01:10:09.000And so it may make you do something differently because you're aware of it.
01:10:12.000If we're not even aware of where our mind is...
01:10:16.000There's not a lot of opportunity that we can do anything about it.
01:10:19.000So it ends up, if you look at people with ADD that have a lot of problems, their minds wander a lot, meaning they have off-task thoughts a lot, but they also happen to have good meta-awareness.
01:10:30.000Their lives don't suffer all that much, meaning they can have a job and do things that are kind of normal kinds of things.
01:10:39.000Do you think we're doing a disservice by medicating people when they have that instead of by training them how to focus?
01:10:47.000You know, this is exactly where I'm going.
01:10:49.000So that was a question I thought was a legitimate thing to ask.
01:10:53.000We didn't want to start out by saying, stop your medication.
01:10:57.000One of the studies we did in my lab is that we recruited a bunch of people, adults with ADD, and we said, just keep on your regular meditation.
01:11:50.000So we worked up to about 12 minutes a day for these adults with ADD. And then at the end of the training program, we looked at the objective metrics, looking better, less mind-wandering for the people that did the practices.
01:12:05.000But when I just inquired what's different about your medication use or your mind, they'd say, Before, I used to take my Ritalin and then play video games for eight hours.
01:12:16.000And I did really awesome on the video games, but I didn't finish my homework or I forgot to go to work.
01:12:23.000They had this raw power to focus in some sense with some of the medications, but they didn't have the meta-awareness to know if they were using it correctly.
01:12:32.000After the training, that was the number one most consistent thing people said.
01:12:46.000That's also the thing that all of us benefit from with mindfulness training is that not only does it connect to using the flashlight, it allows us to cultivate that kind of broad, receptive stance toward what is unfolding right now so that And the executive control system can update,
01:13:08.000shift, or redirect when things are off track.
01:13:10.000That makes the whole thing function better.
01:15:04.000It could be, I'm thinking about the fact that I'm breathing.
01:15:06.000Isn't it so interesting that I have a diaphragm in this part of my body that does these muscle movements that allow this breathing to, thought, thought, thought, thought, thought.
01:16:31.000So you're holding the flashlight, you got the flashlight going, you got the floodlight engaged, and the juggler's always keeping you on track, executive control.
01:16:38.000That's what I meant by it's engaging all three of the systems of attention as a push-up.
01:16:44.000Do we know that there is any benefit to doing that versus doing breath work or vice versa?
01:17:38.000If you're in the middle of a war zone and you got to stay on it, you got to keep your attention focused because you never know when somebody's going to come or go.
01:17:45.000You probably can't do heliotropic breathing and you probably can't get the zapper out and zap your brain.
01:17:50.000You just got to have it embodied within you.
01:17:52.000And it needs to be on demand in that moment.
01:17:54.000You need to be mindful on demand and you're up against a lot.
01:17:58.00050% of your waking moment, your attention's going to be off somewhere.
01:18:01.000That's what I wanted to help people cultivate.
01:18:03.000And that meant sort of a raw workout, a strong workout they could do in the privacy of the preparatory interval so they had it more available to them.
01:18:12.000So in your book, do you lay out like a specific strategy for achieving these states?
01:20:23.000So we did our first study, even without military DOD funding, and found these beneficial effects, protective effects.
01:20:31.000And so that's when I was able to write the grants and actually formally start studying it with DOD funding to come to this solution of four weeks, eight hours, 12 minutes a day.
01:20:42.000And how did you develop that protocol?
01:20:44.000Say when you're first working with them and they're like, this is not going to work, but we'll give it a try.
01:20:49.000How do you know what to start them with?
01:21:06.000Got a suite of practices like the one we talked about and others because you're not just training the flashlight, you're training the floodlight.
01:21:14.000It's a really nice suite of practices.
01:22:01.000So like, we can use concepts that are tied to military life, but now actually related to attention as essentially your biggest, I mean, weapon is a tricky word, but resource to be able to do what you need to do.
01:22:15.000Do you have any experience at all in the military?
01:22:39.000And then we've been able to now do studies where we partner with people that train soldiers and teach them to be trainers.
01:22:48.000So what your goal is, is to make them perform better under these periods of high stress.
01:22:55.000The goal, ultimately, not just perform better, but feel better.
01:23:00.000And we do it by looking at attention and psychological health.
01:23:04.000So we know if we do nothing under pre-deployment and even deployment, attention is going to tank, mood's going to get worse.
01:23:11.000Can we do anything to protect against that?
01:23:14.000So are you giving them tools that will help them in combat, or are you giving them tools that will help them just in life, in this very bizarre and highly stressful world of being deployed, of being an active duty soldier,
01:23:59.000Remember, back to what we were saying, these are fundamental capacities.
01:24:03.000We need attention to think, to regulate our emotions, to connect.
01:24:08.000What I wanted to do is see if we could increase the raw availability of their attention and protect it from decline, which we showed in the pre-deployment phase.
01:24:17.000We didn't say anything in particular regarding how they might use this during deployment.
01:24:24.000This is just like any kind of good physical fitness routine.
01:24:27.000Like, I don't have to tell you, Joe, so now that you've worked out your upper body, when you're at the airport, in an airplane, you need to put your suitcase up, you can use your upper...
01:24:36.000If you've got this, you know how to use it.
01:24:39.000What was so interesting, because we had no idea how it would translate, frankly, in the early days to the combat context, because you're completely amped up.
01:25:59.000These are the guys that contacted me from Iraq and said, you know that stuff you were trying to teach us that I thought was complete BS? Well, the guys that are doing it are sleeping through the night.
01:26:09.000They're coming back from mission and patrol and not getting the shakes.
01:27:26.000If you went to the gym and you met this person, all they did is tell you how great their training is, how it works technically, why it's the best training program, you'd probably be like, yeah, no, can you just show me the workout?
01:27:41.000We took the program and we kind of Split it up.
01:27:44.000We had gotten it down to 16 hours or so.
01:27:47.000And we split it up and I said, I want one eight-hour group that really just focuses on the workout and the other one that has a lot of talking about the mindfulness benefits and the problems with stress, etc.
01:28:28.000Even with that level of an elite warrior, two weeks was too short, which I think is tied to how long it takes to train and physiologically change attention.
01:28:37.000So you're doing basically 12 minutes a day for four weeks?
01:28:42.000And does it vary, or is it basically the same type of exercise over and over again for that four weeks?
01:29:14.000But then there's another practice that is actually what we call connection practice, but it's about offering kind of well wishes toward yourself.
01:29:21.000So it's a suite of practices that rounds out these multiple aspects of attention.
01:29:27.000But maybe we talk about open monitoring if you...
01:29:30.000So, because I would be very curious to see what you think, especially if you practice this and even bring it in the context of the sensory deprivation, because it seems to really help with...
01:29:43.000Basically, divergent thinking and generation of mental content, let's just say.
01:29:54.000Let me just give you an example of something I describe in the book.
01:29:58.000This is now, because remember, at the core of it, mindfulness training is about taking an observational stance.
01:30:04.000It's like, whatever's happening is happening, and you're there watching it.
01:30:34.000Now, not resisting focusing, but allowing thoughts, feelings, sensations, any mental content, any external stimulation to come and pass away.
01:30:44.000So it was funny that you're talking about fishing because the practice, I named it just like river of thought.
01:30:50.000So you kind of visualize yourself sitting at the bank of a river, like maybe there's a little rock there.
01:30:59.000And essentially, you're just going to, if you want to lower or close your eyes, think of your conscious mind as the passing of content through this river in front of you.
01:31:13.000And you're not going to go for the fish or follow it or follow the leaf.
01:31:16.000You're just going to allow whatever arises to come up and then pass away.
01:31:22.000And that's what's interesting about working memory, like we were talking about before.
01:31:27.000Working memory is the scratch space of consciousness.
01:31:30.000And for anything to stay in our conscious experience, we need to keep rewriting it.
01:31:40.000So you're practicing allowing whatever occurs to occur without chasing it or pursuing it, just watching it.
01:31:47.000So just the idea of the river is just like a vehicle for allowing you to let these thoughts just flow through your mind?
01:31:55.000Yeah, some people say, you know, you could imagine this mind is a vast open sky and thoughts, feelings, sensations are like clouds passing it.
01:32:01.000There's a lot of images you can use, but the goal is...
01:32:04.000You are aware, you're meta-aware of what's happening, but you're not grabbing onto anything.
01:32:10.000You don't have a thought pop up and be like, oh, I need to write that down.
01:32:13.000Or like, what are five things that are related to that?
01:32:15.000You're not making your mental grocery list.
01:32:17.000You're like, ah, I had a thought that said, I need to get milk.
01:33:58.000But you need to get along with this person because there's some deliberation.
01:34:00.000And military leaders will talk about this.
01:34:02.000In fact, one of the most powerful ways this practice shows up in real life is listening.
01:34:08.000So what does it mean to actually listen, especially when there's hostile, complex content that's happening?
01:34:14.000And this is one of the stories I describe in the book where one of the first military service member leaders that allowed us to do this project, I met him as a colonel.
01:34:25.000He ended up being, you know, now he's a three-star general, but he was deployed to Iraq and his job was to manage the entire multinational land force.
01:34:35.000And so he had to go to these various places right after ISIS had been sort of defeated.
01:34:42.000And groups that were not talking to each other, I mean, sorry, that were aligned because they all had to fight this common enemy, ISIS. Now they were having infighting, like they weren't getting along with each other.
01:34:51.000So he had to go and talk to three leaders.
01:34:54.000They come together and they're so angry.
01:34:57.000They're so angry with the United States.
01:35:01.000And he basically was taking this—he used his mindfulness practice because he started practicing when we first introduced this to his soldiers.
01:35:10.000And he said it was so powerful to be able to just really listen and for them to experience somebody really listening.
01:35:23.000And he fully heard it, was able to kind of communicate it back, and it shifted the entire dynamic where one of the leaders was like, we can actually work with you.
01:35:35.000We can actually work with you because what he didn't do is get caught up in his own reactivity.
01:35:41.000He didn't take that flashlight anywhere.
01:35:42.000He was really taking that observational, steady, emotionally non-reactive stance and he could fully get the information he needed to then respond with a thoughtful answer.
01:35:55.000And that's just one example of the kinds of things that can happen in our lives when we practice this capacity to distance ourselves and fully observe what's going on.
01:36:05.000We can intervene, of course, but we're not so driven to intervene before we really are able to observe first.
01:36:12.000This practice of using this in the military I think would be insanely beneficial.
01:36:17.000But I would wonder how many people are involved in terms of like how many scientists and how many soldiers and whether or not you see this being deployed on a much broader scale.
01:36:32.000Yeah, you know, right now it's starting to get a lot of traction.
01:36:36.000It's still mostly been done in the context of research studies, but I just actually co-hosted with the United Kingdom's Ministry of Defense a 10-nation summit where we brought together 10 different countries that are all starting to implement mindfulness within their forces.
01:36:52.000To have sort of an international conversation regarding this.
01:37:04.000We did a project in collaboration with Army scientists with basic combat training where we offered this program, which was mindfulness and yoga, to people.
01:37:16.000New recruits, and it's beneficial, had a lot of beneficial effects.
01:37:21.000We're also doing a project with all the newly minted one-star generals in the Army.
01:37:25.000So we're trying to get sort of through the career path also different points at which this could happen.
01:37:31.000We're also doing a project with schoolhouse settings.
01:37:34.000So the Special Operations Qualification School will now start, will be testing this.
01:37:39.000But it's mostly through research right now, and really my lab has been one of the only ones that's been consistently doing it.
01:37:45.000You know, I know a lot of professional athletes, fighters, that are using mindfulness training and some of them that have even gone to sports psychologists and sports psychologists have implemented a lot of similar techniques in trying to focus them.
01:38:00.000When you do put this protocol together and you do work with these soldiers, Are you trying to have a specific time?
01:39:04.000For the rest of us who aren't service members or professional athletes, my guidance is always yoke it to something that you do as part of your routine.
01:40:07.000You start supplementing with things that probably aren't that useful.
01:40:09.000Oftentimes, not the kind of stuff you probably would recommend for sleep.
01:40:12.000And they do a body scan, which is sort of like this practice where you're taking the flashlight, guiding it through the whole body, and they're out.
01:40:20.000And I do it too to fall asleep, but if I'm not doing it, the intention is not as a relaxation and sleep aid.
01:40:26.000I like to do it in the morning because in some sense it's like I found my flashlight again.
01:40:34.000It's going to be all over the place, but kind of reminding you like this is a fundamental capacity that you hold to know where your mind is moment by moment, even if you're not going to do anything differently.
01:40:45.000But you can if you want to because you're aware of it.
01:40:48.000So, for the regular person who's not a soldier or a professional fighter or anybody who's in ridiculously high stress situations, how do they apply this to their life?
01:41:02.000I mean, that's why I wrote the book, frankly.
01:41:05.000Of course, it's not going to be as consequential, but, you know, as simple as not freaking out when you get caught off in traffic, when you want to work on a report, you're not on a group text, you're actually aware, oh, I'm getting pulled in and sucked in, my flashlight's getting yanked,
01:41:21.000I've got to get it back, where am I right now?
01:42:29.000If you think about how important it is, your focus and your attention and the way you think and the way you approach various tasks and problems in your life, the fact that this is not A normal part of everyone's day is really kind of strange.
01:42:50.000Everybody's like, oh, I'm distracted, or I can't get my shit together, or God, I wish I was more disciplined, and I really wish I was more focused.
01:42:57.000How few people actually apply techniques to enhance that, it's kind of stunning, right?
01:43:51.000Maybe 1820. Maybe 1820. We're running from Buffalo and shit.
01:43:54.000Yeah, but when the military instituted, and it was the first real organization that instituted physical fitness, there was a lot of pushback.
01:44:34.000The mind is no different than the rest of the body.
01:44:38.000We need to exercise it regularly to stay psychologically fit and optimize our performance.
01:44:44.000The question has been, how do you do that?
01:44:46.000And the funny thing when writing this book is like, oh, it's that thing people have been doing for thousands of years.
01:44:51.000We're just putting the modern lens of science on it to say, this is why I've probably been helpful for people for thousands of years.
01:44:56.000It's a really interesting comparison, what you're saying, with physical fitness because If you pay attention, particularly what you get out of social media, there's so many incredibly fit people now.
01:45:09.000There's so many people that make a living showing you workouts.
01:45:13.000A large percentage of the people that I know regularly go to the gym or take a spin class or do something where they're stimulating their body and putting it under stress.
01:45:25.000Where you look at, like, the way people look today, you know, just the physical stature, the muscles that they have, and the fitness.
01:45:34.000Like, that was really rare just 60 years ago.
01:45:45.000If we could get the same sort of application, the same sort of focus, and put it on your mind, We really have some pretty significant changes in the way we interface with each other,
01:46:00.000the way we get through our lives, what we can focus on, what we can accomplish, and probably happiness too, right?
01:46:30.000Not only in 60 years have we been able to transform the way we think about physical wellness, in 15 years we've been able to start making a lot of traction on the benefits of this type of training on the mind.
01:46:43.000And so I think that things are looking quite hopeful and frankly it couldn't come at a better, it couldn't come soon enough because the nature of the world is going to continue to get more complex, more interconnected, more uncertain.
01:46:55.000I mean, the last couple years with this pandemic, I mean, same idea.
01:46:58.000The challenges are going to amp up and we need to arm ourselves, meaning we need to prepare our minds for a type of...
01:47:08.000We're also experiencing distraction that's wholly unnatural, like in terms of social media, the ability to constantly look at these things and just be inundated.
01:47:18.000And for some people, they get really fixated in conflict and getting in these little arguments with people that are nowhere near them.
01:47:27.000When they're doing it online and arguing about, you know, political things or social things.
01:47:33.000Well, you know, it goes back to something you said a while ago about the benefit of having, what did you call it, getting bored.
01:47:39.000I would say I call it essentially task-free work.
01:47:45.000Like, create active white space in your day where you're task-free.
01:47:49.000And that doesn't mean you're going to take extra time out, but you have plenty of these moments already where be aware that attention is going to get fatigued if you continue to use it.
01:47:58.000And if you think that being on social media as your downtime is giving your attention a break, you're wrong.
01:50:42.000We can advantage ourselves so that there's more decision points of what we're going to do instead of being, like you said, three hours into your doom scrolling and you feel like shit and you just can't do anything.
01:50:54.000Anyway, going back to that white space idea.
01:50:59.000The reason I think this is so important is because if we'd never allow for the spontaneous arising of thought, we're going to have the exact consequences you already described.
01:51:12.000Our chances for positive visioning, creative problem solving, insight...
01:51:18.000And frankly, positive mood, we're all, we're disadvantaging that.
01:51:22.000We're cutting out the thing that will help us with that.
01:51:25.000And, you know, I always think about it.
01:51:27.000It's like actually even more than that.
01:51:29.000Like, I think about what we do with our mind, our attention, most days, most of our lives, as like taking my dog for a walk.
01:51:36.000Every morning, my husband takes him or I take him.
01:51:48.000Frankly, we're leashing ourselves with a lot of our social media use because we're now constrained by the content they're providing some days.
01:51:55.000And maybe you do this with your dog, too.
01:52:24.000Take the walk from the office to the car as just to be with yourself.
01:52:30.000Maybe some days after you're done listening to this podcast, you turn off the radio or silence your phone and just be in the car and drive.
01:52:37.000You know, we need to return to these moments because, frankly, We need it.
01:52:44.000It's fascinating that you're saying something that seems so simple.
01:52:46.000Just put your phone down and just live your life, but that would be some sort of a therapy and that just literally the act of walking from your car to the store and not checking your phone while you're doing it is actually good for your brain.
01:53:47.000And in some sense, these are also traditional practices, right?
01:53:53.000So where we've got a very active mind that's either ruminating or catastrophizing, something like yoga or other forms of sort of body-based practices Keep that button on play instead of fast-forward or rewind,
01:54:32.000In the same way, we might not want to, it's not the most fun thing to sit there and We lift weights, but we do it because it carries over into our lives.
01:54:40.000So now it's not necessarily about when my mind wanders away from the breath, return it, but when my mind wanders away from what you're saying, return it, right?
01:54:48.000So we want to keep translating that over and over again.
01:54:51.000I think movement-based practices, active practices, are getting us even more aligned with dealing with the fluidity and complexity of real life.
01:54:59.000Do you apply that also to your work with the military?
01:55:03.000Like is maybe that something that like while they're doing physical training is there a way to think during that that helps?
01:55:11.000You mean orient to the physical training?
01:56:02.000That they concentrate on the negative possibilities, the negative consequences, and that becomes crippling.
01:56:08.000And the anxiety of fear overcomes them.
01:56:12.000It's like Cus D'Amato is a legendary, he was a legendary boxing trainer who trained Mike Tyson, and he had this great saying that fear is like fire.
01:56:24.000You could use it to cook your food or it could burn your house down.
01:56:27.000Like you need some fear because it's a motivating factor and it makes sure that you're aware of what you're about to do that it's very dangerous and that what you're doing is you have to be completely prepared and you must be disciplined in order to achieve that preparation.
01:56:44.000But you also can't let it just run away because if it just burns you down then you'll be paralyzed with fear.
01:57:36.000Whatever the strong emotion is, to be with that emotion, not deny it, not suppress it, and not feed it, is the point of power, and that's what we train for with something like an open monitoring practice.
01:58:05.000Now, when you talked about this training, particularly with the military, where you're talking about four weeks and you're doing 12 minutes a day, if you wanted to achieve a greater level of mastery over your consciousness, would you recommend other things on top of that?
01:58:23.000This seems like something that's practical.
01:58:37.00012 minutes a day is the answer to what is the minimum effective dose for me to benefit?
01:58:43.000Every study we've done with mindfulness training where we offered people the opportunity to practice, as long as they got to 12, they benefited.
01:58:50.00012 to 15. The more they did, the more they benefited.
01:58:55.000So that's the first thing to say, that it is like physical activity.
01:59:00.000You don't have to limit yourself to 12 minutes.
01:59:02.000I almost think of 12 minutes as like couch to 5k.
01:59:05.000It's enough of a load that it's helping.
01:59:25.000I did the focus attention practice and I did something else called loving kindness.
01:59:31.000And loving kindness is that third category.
01:59:33.000I talked about concentrative practices, receptive practices, and these are really heart practices, compassion practices.
01:59:40.000That one is actually really helpful when you've got a big performance coming up.
01:59:46.000Because frankly, for all of us who are interested in excellence in how we perform, that can take on an edge of self-punitive action.
01:59:59.000Orientation, where we're so fixated on the things we want to do better, we forget what we wish for ourselves.
02:00:05.000So a loving-kindness practice is essentially a sequence of phrases you say privately to yourself to remind yourself of what your ultimate wish is for yourself or other people in your lives.
02:00:17.000Have you heard of these kinds of practices?
02:01:43.000It's annoying because you know they're hustling.
02:01:45.000Yeah, or there's another agenda that doesn't really have to do it.
02:01:48.000So I'm taking, again, just to kind of reclaim my turf, it's really in line with what do people need to do to move toward optimizing was the question that you were asking.
02:02:36.000So what you do is you, similar to everything else, sit comfortable, quiet place, do it seriously, like take it seriously, and you're going to...
02:04:40.000You can see how you expand the circle.
02:04:42.000For our military service members, in some sense, they have no problem wishing it for their team.
02:04:48.000Of course you want everybody on your team to have these qualities.
02:04:52.000Oftentimes a little bit trickier to wish it for yourself, but something really interesting starts happening when you do this.
02:04:59.000A lot of the sort of self-critical and self-punitive wars we have with ourself can start getting dialed down.
02:05:06.000It's like, you know, I could kind of badger myself for something, but ultimately, is this in my best interest for what I really want in my life?
02:05:15.000And it really helps, by the way, with the kind of maybe very loved one that can also sometimes be the difficult one.
02:05:22.000So this, I'm going to just give you an example from my personal life, like even with my spouse, of course I love my spouse, but he can drive me nuts.
02:05:29.000And even in the middle of an argument, if I can kind of remember, if I do a practice and he's the focus of the practice, we're in the middle of an argument, there's any room where I can be a little bit lean into some understanding or a little more broadly receptive, I extend that probably more than I would if I hadn't done the practice.
02:05:48.000It just keeps that kind of orientation of what the purpose is of what we're doing in our lives in mind.
02:05:56.000Don't you think there's also room for...
02:06:01.000If you want to achieve things in life, one of the things that you do have to do is you have to be self-critical.
02:06:06.000You have to be your worst critic because you're the only one who really knows whether or not you put in all the effort that you need to put in in order to achieve things, whether or not you really did everything that was necessary, or whether or not your work was really good.
02:06:24.000You're being honest with yourself and objective.
02:06:26.000So in that regard, you kind of got to be a personal critic.
02:06:39.000But what's interesting, those people don't really get anywhere.
02:06:41.000The people that think they're better than they are or they lie to themselves, they deny themselves the discomfort of failure because they're delusional.
02:06:50.000And in doing so, they deny themselves the opportunity for growth and learning.
02:07:04.000And then we end up into not just productive self-criticism, but ruminating and catastrophizing regarding something we already said or something we're going to do that we don't think is going to go well.
02:07:13.000And that's why I did it this morning, because I know that under consequences, and I encourage people that have performance as something, you know, like you perform every time you do this podcast, there's a performance element to it.
02:07:25.000Whenever we have to do that, there's going to be those around the edges aspects of evaluation.
02:07:54.000What could I have brought in that was better?
02:07:56.000How could I have actually been clearer?
02:07:58.000Whatever it is, we're trying to see with that non-reactivity.
02:08:01.000And this is the heart that we're putting around it.
02:08:04.000We're acting in a loving and kind way toward ourselves so that as we move forward, we're not Pushing too far into the self-criticism where it becomes self-hatred, which is also unproductive.
02:08:52.000The problem with a lot of super achievers, a lot of people that go on to be at the top of their field, especially athletes, is that it requires a fanaticism.
02:09:36.000See, the thing is, there's not that many of them out there to study.
02:09:40.000When you get a Michael Jordan or a Mike Tyson or a person that's at the very top of their field, especially in competition, because it requires so much energy and intensity, That oftentimes they develop this antagonistic relationship with both themselves and the competition and they're just ferocious and fierce all the time,
02:10:01.000including with their own personal demons.
02:10:05.000And with those people, I think their periods of happiness are brief and they come after success.
02:10:13.000And then they constantly chase that dragon.
02:10:16.000And I don't know if that's the right way to do it, but I do know that that's the only way that the greats, they all seem to be the same.
02:10:24.000There seems to be something about truly great hyper-performers where they're getting up earlier than everybody else, they're more intense than everybody else, and they're not nice about it.
02:10:40.000I mean, first of all, the fact that contemplative practice is entering performance psychology, it's a good sign because I think that people are starting to wake up to the consequences of that kind of an approach.
02:10:52.000Second thing is nothing I said about any of these practices is about being nice or happy.
02:11:02.000But self-love is kind of about being happy, right?
02:11:58.000There is always this sort of pendulum of extreme behavior toward ourselves or other people that we interact with.
02:12:07.000And this becomes very important for leaders, too, by the way, even if it's not in the professional athletic context.
02:12:12.000We've got to be aware of that pendulum.
02:12:17.000Yeah, that is a real problem with people that are hyper achievers, right?
02:12:23.000Whether it's in business or whatever, it's like they're so caught up in the goal that their life sucks even while they're killing it.
02:12:31.000You know, like how many people that are like business people that are working 16 hours a day or on the verge of a heart attack all the time and they live in hell?
02:13:37.000And the fact that maybe it's because I studied attention that I was kind of like becoming aware of it and then I knew about neuroplasticity, so I'm like, I gotta change the brain here.
02:15:51.000And the problem is, like, they'll drag you into their waters with them and drown you in their bullshit, right?
02:15:58.000That's a real problem because when people are always negative, like, oh my god, man, all you're concentrating on is the wrong shit.
02:16:05.000It's like someone with a poor diet and they get obese and start having heart attacks.
02:16:10.000You're concentrating on eating the wrong things.
02:16:12.000You're concentrating on living the wrong way.
02:16:14.000Well, you're concentrating on focusing on negative things or external factors that have nothing to do with you, like the jealousy of others, which is a real poison that people consume on a daily basis.
02:16:26.000The jealousy and hatred towards people they don't even know because they might see them on television or whatever.
02:16:32.000That's why actually, and in the context of feeling that, somebody else's Dysfunction.
02:16:39.000What are you going to do in the context of that, right?
02:16:43.000So, I mean, I see this, I was just, even on my Uber ride to the airport in Miami, the guy got cut off, and the guy that's in the car that cut him off, like, then pulls back to give the guy the finger.
02:17:32.000We move it into the difficult person for that exact same reason.
02:17:36.000Because now when you're interfacing with somebody and you see this and you feel it and you feel them pulling you in, you say, you know what?
02:17:45.000My true wish for you is not this stuff.
02:17:48.000You obviously are saying this to yourself privately.
02:17:50.000It changes your orientation toward the person and the way you're going to engage with them.
02:17:54.000In some sense, you start having more compassion.
02:18:03.000So at least in the way that I interact with this person now, I'm stable and I'm aware of what I'm seeing.
02:18:10.000And I remind myself of what I want for any other person.
02:18:14.000And it will change, even if it's subtle, it's going to change the way that I can interact with them so that it's not so defaulting to more bad stuff.
02:18:24.000I mean, I think all of it is information, and you get good information from bad examples.
02:18:30.000You get information about the ways of life that you don't want to live.
02:18:35.000You get information about the way people interface with their surroundings and other human beings that you don't want to mimic that.
02:18:42.000And you can learn from other people's mistakes and that's one of the things that you get from living in cities when you see people hyper stressed and you know you see that kind of like constant forced interaction that people have and how it can manifest itself in some undesirable results and you can say I don't want to be that guy and you can learn a little bit from that.
02:19:03.000You can learn a little bit from that but you can also extend Kindness in a way that you will probably shift the way things are happening.
02:19:12.000Now, you're not going to fundamentally change somebody.
02:19:28.000I could avoid her or be like, oh God, this...
02:19:30.000And I just walked up to her, like not even acting, interfacing with her, but just like kind of wanted to be in her space so that she could realize just by my presence that she's got to kind of take a hold of what she's doing right now because she's being seen by another person.