The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #1723 - Amishi Jha

00:00:01.000 Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out!

00:00:04.000 The Joe Rogan Experience.

00:00:06.000 Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day!

00:00:12.000 Hello.

00:00:13.000 Thanks for doing this.

00:00:14.000 Absolutely.

00:00:15.000 Peak mind, huh?

00:00:17.000 That's right.

00:00:18.000 Yeah.

00:00:18.000 How long have you been working on this?

00:00:20.000 My whole life.

00:00:21.000 Your whole life?

00:00:22.000 But the actual book, a couple years.

00:00:24.000 And the idea of improving all aspects of the way the brain works, is this something that's always fascinated you?

00:00:33.000 Absolutely.

00:00:34.000 Yeah?

00:00:34.000 Yeah.

00:00:35.000 The 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.

00:00:43.000 Yeah, that's a thing a lot of people have a problem with today, right?

00:00:46.000 Phones and distractions and screens and nonsense.

00:00:50.000 Yeah.

00:00:50.000 But it's always been a problem.

00:00:52.000 So, 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.

00:01:03.000 So, this is not only a modern problem, it's actually a human problem.

00:01:08.000 Where does it come from?

00:01:10.000 Is it just a natural function of having a lot of things to think about in the world if you're trying to survive?

00:01:16.000 Where does what come from?

00:01:19.000 Distraction.

00:01:20.000 If you think about it, if you're a hunter-gatherer, you kind of have to multitask mentally, right?

00:01:27.000 You can't just concentrate on picking these mushrooms.

00:01:31.000 You also have to think, is that a sound of a branch snapping behind me?

00:01:35.000 Is someone sneaking up on me?

00:01:37.000 What's that smell?

00:01:38.000 You have to always be aware of so many different things.

00:01:41.000 It seems almost like a natural part of being a person to be distracted.

00:01:47.000 Absolutely.

00:01:48.000 Our brain is built for distractibility, exactly for the reasons that you said.

00:01:52.000 It advantages us to be able to not just focus when we want to, but scan as we're still engaged in a task.

00:02:02.000 And 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.

00:02:15.000 We can still feel like it's hard to focus.

00:02:19.000 So 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.

00:02:30.000 And I think that's Often misunderstood as a problem.

00:02:35.000 People think, oh, no, no, my brain is really busy.

00:02:37.000 My brain gets really distracted.

00:02:39.000 Instead of understanding, that's just the nature of the brain.

00:02:41.000 If you are alive, awake, conscious, about half of your waking moments, your attention is not going to be in the task at hand.

00:02:50.000 Yeah, 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?

00:02:57.000 That's just part of it.

00:02:59.000 Exactly.

00:02:59.000 You're never going to be completely zen for long periods of time and just completely full of bliss and enlightenment.

00:03:08.000 No, you're going to be thinking about cheese and car tires and when is it raining.

00:03:14.000 Yeah.

00:03:14.000 No, absolutely.

00:03:15.000 I think understanding that, it starts to shift your relationship to what you're trying to do in the practice of meditation.

00:03:23.000 It's not about clearing the mind, and that term gets used a lot.

00:03:27.000 Like, just clear it out.

00:03:29.000 Not possible.

00:03:29.000 Not going to happen.

00:03:30.000 Not the way that your brain was designed.

00:03:33.000 But 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.

00:03:41.000 Because in the act of knowing where your mind is and training it to come back over and over, you gain a lot.

00:03:50.000 You gain almost, in some sense, the super capacity to have more control in not just the way your mind functions, but in your life.

00:04:01.000 That'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?

00:04:10.000 Or is it based on where you are in your life?

00:04:14.000 How much you've already done of this?

00:04:17.000 Does everybody's brain vary in terms of how much distractions they have in their head?

00:04:22.000 Deep question, actually.

00:04:26.000 Yes, it varies.

00:04:28.000 And let's just say the basics are there's a basic profile.

00:04:32.000 So to disabuse ourselves that if your mind wanders, there's something wrong with you or there's something unique about you.

00:04:37.000 That's everybody.

00:04:39.000 But it is the case that for some people...

00:04:42.000 Not some people.

00:04:44.000 In 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.

00:04:57.000 If 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.

00:05:09.000 If you're experiencing that kind of high demand for multiple weeks, your attention is going to decline.

00:05:14.000 Your attentional functioning is going to decline.

00:05:16.000 Your distractibility or mind-wandering, would be the technical way to describe it, is going to increase.

00:05:21.000 So that's one thing we need to know, no matter what your sort of set point is.

00:05:24.000 And we do have different set points as individual differences.

00:05:28.000 Now, 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,

00:05:49.000 Are you gaining something out of this personally by going through all this?

00:05:54.000 Is 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?

00:06:05.000 Do you find that it's helping you as well?

00:06:07.000 Or is this something that you've always worked on?

00:06:09.000 Oh, no, it's not.

00:06:10.000 I mean, I've always been – I've been a neuroscientist for a long time.

00:06:14.000 I've been interested in the way the brain works for a long time.

00:06:16.000 I 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.

00:06:26.000 And then kind of early in my time of being a professor, I had like this kind of acute crisis of attention.

00:06:35.000 And it was around the time I just had my first child and my husband was in grad school setting up the lab.

00:06:41.000 I lost feeling in my teeth from grinding.

00:06:45.000 Whoa.

00:06:46.000 Yeah, it was pretty intense.

00:06:47.000 And then I remember one night I was sitting there with my then almost three-year-old, reading a book to him.

00:06:54.000 And like, this is important to me.

00:06:55.000 I mean, this is like the only time I really have with him that's supposed to be quality time.

00:07:00.000 Feeling like this is a time I'm supposed to really be here for him.

00:07:03.000 Reading a book and he asked me a question, put a little hand on the book, asked me a question.

00:07:08.000 I had no idea what he was talking about.

00:07:10.000 And I'm like, I am definitely not here.

00:07:13.000 I am not even here when I want to be.

00:07:17.000 This is what I want to do.

00:07:19.000 I'm not in the middle of doing anything else, but my mind is not here.

00:07:22.000 And it was scary.

00:07:24.000 It was like, oh, this is not cool.

00:07:26.000 And then I'm like, I study this stuff.

00:07:28.000 Okay, just let's go see the literature.

00:07:29.000 How can I find a solution?

00:07:31.000 I can't access my own attention.

00:07:33.000 It's slipping through my fingers.

00:07:36.000 So I literally did.

00:07:38.000 I'm like, I'm going to study everything I can.

00:07:39.000 Nothing.

00:07:40.000 I came up empty.

00:07:42.000 And that was also troubling.

00:07:43.000 Like, what do you mean?

00:07:44.000 There'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.

00:07:52.000 Kind of empty.

00:07:54.000 And then, just to kind of continue the journey, I'm like, there's got to be something to do.

00:08:00.000 And at that moment, it was not just feeling distracted.

00:08:03.000 It 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.

00:08:12.000 And at that moment, it was sort of how funny how serendipity happens.

00:08:16.000 But a dear colleague of mine, an eminent neuroscientist who happens to be an emotion researcher, an affective neuroscientist, I think?

00:08:39.000 One is of a brain induced to be in a very negative mood.

00:08:44.000 I mean, usually you do this by putting people in a scanner and saying, think of your worst memories.

00:08:48.000 Like, feel bad.

00:08:49.000 You play sad music.

00:08:50.000 And then he did the same thing on the other side, where he showed a brain image of a person induced to be in a positive mood.

00:08:55.000 And he's just trying to make the point that these are distinct brain states.

00:08:59.000 We can track them.

00:09:00.000 They have different functions.

00:09:02.000 But, 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?

00:09:11.000 I just wanted an answer.

00:09:14.000 And 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.

00:09:23.000 And I'm like, what the heck is...

00:09:25.000 Do you know where you are?

00:09:27.000 You don't say that.

00:09:28.000 This is in the early 2000s.

00:09:30.000 Meditation was not a thing.

00:09:31.000 We don't talk about it.

00:09:33.000 To me, it was almost as offensive as talking about astrology to physicists or something.

00:09:38.000 Was it really?

00:09:38.000 It was absolutely not something I had ever heard of.

00:09:42.000 Amongst academics and neuroscience.

00:09:43.000 In an academic neuroscience context.

00:09:45.000 Really?

00:09:45.000 I did not know that.

00:09:46.000 When did it start becoming something that was taken seriously?

00:09:51.000 Is it?

00:09:51.000 Now?

00:09:52.000 Yeah, I think meditation's being taken.

00:09:53.000 No, absolutely.

00:09:54.000 And I would say a lot of the effort that I've been up to, now we have a field, contemplative neuroscience.

00:09:59.000 So anyway, so yeah, we're definitely there.

00:10:01.000 I would say over the last 15 years, there's been a serious uptick in the seriousness taken.

00:10:06.000 And 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.

00:10:13.000 But it really bugged me that he said that.

00:10:15.000 And I was still very much a skeptic.

00:10:17.000 Like, I don't know.

00:10:18.000 Of meditation?

00:10:19.000 Of just, yeah.

00:10:21.000 And I had a chance to talk to him afterwards.

00:10:23.000 He's now become a very sort of dear, More closer colleague, and he runs an entire center that's tied to contemplative practice.

00:10:32.000 But at that point, it was almost like he was also kind of closeted.

00:10:36.000 He had not come out.

00:10:36.000 He was doing some of the initial studies.

00:10:38.000 He was closeted with meditation?

00:10:39.000 Well, yeah, because he was just starting to do studies.

00:10:41.000 Again, it was a liability.

00:10:43.000 Just to fast forward a little bit.

00:10:45.000 Really?

00:10:45.000 Meditation was a liability to discuss in academic circles.

00:10:49.000 When I told my colleagues that I... And it was a big deal because I'm like a traditional hard-nosed academic studying attention.

00:10:57.000 I said, I'm going to make this like tiny pivot to studying training attention.

00:11:02.000 And I'm going to use this thing called mindfulness meditation.

00:11:07.000 It was like first it was like silence.

00:11:09.000 Like you're committing career suicide and But, you know, you're going to do what you're going to do.

00:11:14.000 People actually said that to you?

00:11:16.000 Oh, yeah.

00:11:17.000 That's so strange.

00:11:19.000 I 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.

00:11:37.000 Yeah.

00:11:38.000 But for me, when I heard the term, you know, we can see I'm an Indian woman.

00:11:41.000 I, of course, knew about meditation.

00:11:43.000 My earliest memories are seeing my dad meditating.

00:11:47.000 And I always thought, that's great.

00:11:49.000 You know, that's great for them.

00:11:50.000 But I'm like a serious Western-trained scientist.

00:11:55.000 And until there's any reason to really think this is a helpful thing, I'm not going to do it.

00:11:59.000 But 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.

00:12:08.000 You know, I started practicing.

00:12:11.000 I 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.

00:12:18.000 I lucked out because I picked a really good book by a really influential person.

00:12:23.000 I didn't know anything about this.

00:12:24.000 Jack Kornfield.

00:12:25.000 It's called Meditation for Beginners.

00:12:26.000 It came with a little guided CD. And I'm like, you know what?

00:12:28.000 I'm going to give this a try.

00:12:30.000 And as I started doing it, I had a lot of, like, light bulb moments.

00:12:34.000 Like...

00:12:35.000 How does this guy know what's happening in my mind?

00:12:38.000 How does he know that I'm now resisting or my mind is wandering?

00:12:44.000 But the instruction was very clearly about attention.

00:12:47.000 So it's almost like I know this world.

00:12:49.000 I've never seen anybody talk about it from the direct phenomenology of the attention system.

00:12:55.000 So 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.

00:13:05.000 So 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?

00:13:20.000 They don't study the various things that can be done Jack Kornfield, is that his name?

00:13:26.000 Kornfeld?

00:13:27.000 Jack Kornfield.

00:13:29.000 Duncan Trussell's a giant fan.

00:13:31.000 Oh, yeah, yeah.

00:13:31.000 And Jack's wife, Trudy, is on Duncan's show.

00:13:35.000 Oh, is she?

00:13:36.000 Oh, interesting.

00:13:37.000 So, yeah.

00:13:38.000 No, I would say...

00:13:40.000 It's shifting.

00:13:41.000 The landscape is shifting.

00:13:42.000 But 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.

00:13:55.000 And when you're going to be objective about something, it's not about your experience with it.

00:13:59.000 It's about what you can look at it through measures that have nothing to do with you.

00:14:02.000 But 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.

00:14:10.000 Like, what you do directly influences the way the mind works.

00:14:15.000 So if we're studying the way the mind works but we're not studying what you do...

00:14:19.000 We're just studying these random states with no understanding of how they got there until meditation's being really explored?

00:14:26.000 Is that fair to say?

00:14:28.000 No, I would say we do a lot that...

00:14:30.000 I mean now.

00:14:31.000 Now, yeah.

00:14:32.000 I 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?

00:14:39.000 Even 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.

00:14:50.000 We'd understand the way attention is instantiated within our brain.

00:14:54.000 But 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.

00:15:03.000 Some of that was covered in the kind of clinical realm, like, oh, yeah, you ruminate or you've got...

00:15:09.000 We're good to go.

00:15:23.000 Which is why I couldn't find anything in the literature.

00:15:26.000 So yes, the journey of the introduction of contemplative practice into science is very, very new.

00:15:33.000 I mean, it had a little bit of a resurgence, or not resurgence, but introduction in the 70s.

00:15:38.000 And then it really started again with tools like brain imaging, where, you know, in some sense, you could be objective.

00:15:44.000 You 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.

00:15:52.000 And what kind of scans are you using?

00:15:53.000 Is it fMRI?

00:16:11.000 So 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.

00:16:22.000 And I happen to have all these tools from sort of traditional psychology and cognitive neuroscience to apply to this new space of mindfulness meditation.

00:16:33.000 So when you get to this book, Meditation for Beginners, what are you doing?

00:16:37.000 Yeah.

00:16:38.000 A lot of the same stuff that actually we continue to do with all these groups, including the kinds of practices that I give.

00:16:44.000 These are not brand new practices.

00:16:47.000 These are from the millennia-old wisdom traditions, in particular with Jack, the Buddhist tradition.

00:16:52.000 So a foundational practice that he offered was mindfulness of the breath.

00:16:57.000 And he was very clear on what mindfulness in that sense meant.

00:17:01.000 It's about taking this sort of present-centered attention without editorializing or reacting to it, kind of getting the raw data of the experience.

00:17:13.000 And so he guided the participant.

00:17:16.000 And it was actually a recording of a retreat he was leading.

00:17:19.000 So it's just like he's talking to these people that are who knows how long, maybe a month-long retreat.

00:17:23.000 And he's like, you're sitting quietly, you're focusing on, just notice your body breathing, and notice what's prominent.

00:17:32.000 So it might be coolness of air, whatever it is for you, that's where you should be holding, guiding your attention to stay there.

00:17:41.000 And then the next aspect of the instruction was, when you notice your mind wanders, you know, wanders away from that, Bring it back.

00:17:50.000 Repeat.

00:17:51.000 And you know, he would use these phrases like, as minds do.

00:17:54.000 It'll wander away, as minds do.

00:17:56.000 Or you may find yourself resisting.

00:17:58.000 Or you may find yourself in a fantasy.

00:18:01.000 But the instruction was always the same.

00:18:03.000 Regardless of where you were, gently bring your attention back.

00:18:07.000 And so I started realizing, oh my goodness, he's giving us like this workout for attention.

00:18:13.000 And 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.

00:18:24.000 And 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?

00:18:33.000 And what did you get out of it?

00:18:34.000 That's the book.

00:18:37.000 So 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?

00:18:50.000 So yes, I mean and Yeah.

00:19:15.000 Or stimulating the brain.

00:19:17.000 Or light and sound devices.

00:19:18.000 Or maybe put somebody in a good mood and that'll change their attention.

00:19:21.000 So we had tried all those in the lab.

00:19:23.000 When you say stimulating the brain, do you mean with...

00:19:25.000 Transcranial magnetic stimulation?

00:19:27.000 Okay, that stuff's fascinating.

00:19:29.000 It's all fascinating.

00:19:30.000 I was listening to a Radiolab podcast where they were discussing this sniper training course.

00:19:35.000 Do you know the course I'm talking about?

00:19:37.000 No.

00:19:37.000 It'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,

00:19:54.000 not the hostages.

00:19:55.000 And this woman went through this and was fairly slow and the whole thing is like 20 minutes.

00:20:03.000 And she did it and it was like, she wasn't very good at it and she screwed it up.

00:20:07.000 And then they went through this transcranial, what is it, magnets that they're using?

00:20:15.000 And it's some electrical, I think it's called 9 Volt Nirvana.

00:20:20.000 I think that's the episode of the- There it is, 9-volt nirvana.

00:20:24.000 So they put these magnets on her, and then she goes through it flawlessly.

00:20:30.000 She does the whole thing, and it ends, and she's like, I thought it was like 5 minutes.

00:20:36.000 And it turns out it was 20 minutes. 0.99

00:20:38.000 And she's like, what the fuck? 0.99

00:20:39.000 Like, what happened? 1.00

00:20:40.000 And then they look at her score like, Jesus Christ, you have a perfect score.

00:20:43.000 Like, she went from being terrible at it to being like an expert with this brain stimulation.

00:20:50.000 And the entire episode is about all these different people that have developed these personal hacking devices to do this transdermal stimulation.

00:21:03.000 That's what it's called?

00:21:04.000 Yes.

00:21:05.000 Transcranial?

00:21:06.000 Repetitive direct transcranial magnetic stimulation.

00:21:08.000 Brain zapping.

00:21:10.000 Yeah.

00:21:11.000 How does that work?

00:21:12.000 Well, 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,

00:21:29.000 you might be able to target different regions.

00:21:31.000 There'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.

00:22:01.000 Well, in the moment for sure, but also other people are learning.

00:22:04.000 Maybe there's a way you can stimulate repeatedly and get a benefit.

00:22:08.000 But 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.

00:22:18.000 So what are these games?

00:22:19.000 So these are kind of like simple video games, attentionally demanding.

00:22:22.000 There's many companies out there that we're offering them.

00:22:25.000 You know, now we can do them on our phone.

00:22:29.000 They're like the experiments we were doing to evaluate attention except you do them over and over again.

00:22:34.000 The levels would get higher and people would get better and better at doing them.

00:22:37.000 And then you'd have them do this for some period of time and then you'd change the way the game worked.

00:22:44.000 You'd change the superficial stimuli or maybe change the demand.

00:22:48.000 Or you'd have them do something real-world that you think is tied to attention and working memory and there was no benefit.

00:22:54.000 There was no transfer.

00:22:56.000 So that made the field really take a look at, okay, you know, the brain is smart.

00:23:02.000 It 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.

00:23:11.000 So your question was such a good one, which was, What surprised you?

00:23:17.000 Okay, 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.

00:23:25.000 All of a sudden, my own embodied experience of my life starts shifting.

00:23:29.000 I'm more present with my family.

00:23:31.000 I'm realizing I have more of my attention back.

00:23:34.000 And 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.

00:23:43.000 And I said the test is going to be those same kind of tests that we use to understand attention.

00:23:50.000 It might be remember faces and scenes or remember numbers and then try to do math problems or whatever it is.

00:23:56.000 Complex stimuli.

00:23:58.000 Does it transfer?

00:23:59.000 Because nothing else was transferring.

00:24:00.000 So 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.

00:24:08.000 We saw transfer.

00:24:10.000 And that to me was very, very exciting because it was like you're not practicing with numbers and stimuli on the screen.

00:24:18.000 You're just sitting there with your eyes closed by yourself.

00:24:20.000 You're doing this workout and all of a sudden it transfers.

00:24:22.000 So 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.

00:24:42.000 And when you're saying it transfers, how are you measuring this?

00:24:46.000 What are the results?

00:24:47.000 Let me give you an example of one of the kinds of experiments.

00:24:50.000 It's a really basic attention task, and it's something called a sustained attention response task.

00:24:56.000 What we're trying to do in that task is we're trying to see how people can stay on task and resist their own internal distractibility.

00:25:04.000 So their mind will wander and they have to keep themselves on this task, really boring on purpose to do that.

00:25:11.000 So you sit in front of a computer screen.

00:25:13.000 You're going to see a number show up every half second or so, about every quarter of a second.

00:25:19.000 Press a button every time you see a digit on the screen, except when that digit is three.

00:25:24.000 In those cases, just withhold.

00:25:26.000 And people do this and we find that people have a terrible time doing this because the three only happens like 5% of the time.

00:25:34.000 So you can imagine, you're sitting there like, press, press, press, the three appears, and you're like, oh, shoot, I pressed.

00:25:41.000 And when we give this to Marines, they kind of freak out. 0.98

00:25:44.000 They're like, yes, damn threes, you know, like they really freak out. 0.98

00:25:46.000 And they're like, why can't I just do this? 0.99

00:25:48.000 Because the mind gets distracted, and it's hard to pay attention.

00:25:51.000 So that task we knew had really good traction in the lab.

00:25:56.000 We could get people to do it.

00:25:57.000 We knew what the brain components were of the experiment itself.

00:26:01.000 And so now we give that experiment to people.

00:26:04.000 They come in, we give it to them, then they go through a multi-week mindfulness training program and we give it to them again.

00:26:09.000 And what we see is if there's any change in their performance, it's a very stable task.

00:26:13.000 If you give it to people over and over again usually, no change.

00:26:17.000 And this time we saw an improvement.

00:26:19.000 In that task performance, they were not pressing to the three more often, meaning they weren't making mistakes, and they were less variable.

00:26:27.000 So they were really just there more often to be able to do the task.

00:26:31.000 That's just a very simple example.

00:26:32.000 But we've done many kinds of experiments where we look at these core attentional functions and find improvements.

00:26:38.000 And it's so funny that you mentioned This VR environment from the radio lab episode, because now we're doing that.

00:26:47.000 We'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.

00:27:05.000 That's a project we're just in the middle of right now.

00:27:08.000 When 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?

00:27:18.000 10%.

00:27:19.000 Really?

00:27:21.000 Interesting.

00:27:22.000 Yeah, 10% when we were looking at people that were practicing a lot.

00:27:26.000 So the first study we did was, you know, I didn't, we had no, I mean, just kind of take you back in time.

00:27:32.000 Now you say, oh, isn't meditation good for your brain?

00:27:34.000 We had no idea.

00:27:35.000 This was a total shot in the dark.

00:27:37.000 So I ended up, I was like, if there's ever going to be an effect, I need to go where people are just gung-ho meditating a lot.

00:27:56.000 Oh, Jesus.

00:28:00.000 And that was our first, I was like, I got to advantage us.

00:28:03.000 Like, when we saw it, that's where we saw it.

00:28:06.000 And 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.

00:28:16.000 And they're practicing about 45 minutes a day.

00:28:19.000 And we saw benefits there, too.

00:28:21.000 So 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.

00:28:29.000 Now, when you're working with these soldiers, did you have a control group?

00:28:33.000 Yeah. 0.99

00:28:34.000 So, because I would imagine that if they get frustrated, they keep hitting the three, they're going to go, okay, get your shit together. 0.98

00:28:41.000 Stop hitting the three, calm yourself down, figure it out. 0.98

00:28:45.000 Did anyone improve without the mindfulness meditation?

00:28:51.000 There's always variability.

00:28:53.000 You know how research goes, right?

00:28:54.000 How many people are you working with?

00:28:55.000 I mean, now we've had hundreds, hundreds of people.

00:28:58.000 At the time, like when you're running these tests with soldiers?

00:29:01.000 I mean, this result we see over and over again.

00:29:04.000 But yeah, of course, some people will just get better at it because they've strategized.

00:29:07.000 Did anybody get to the same level of 10% without mindfulness training?

00:29:11.000 No.

00:29:11.000 But there's another thing I've got to tell you, which is it goes back to...

00:29:16.000 What I was saying happens under high stress.

00:29:18.000 Because, you know, my whole reason for...

00:29:20.000 So just to kind of backtrack.

00:29:22.000 So why do I want to work with...

00:29:23.000 Why am I working with soldiers all of a sudden?

00:29:25.000 It was like...

00:29:26.000 One of the things that we knew from my lab is attention is extremely powerful.

00:29:31.000 And we can talk about what it actually is because we're kind of using it as a placeholder.

00:29:34.000 It's actually a pretty deep, interesting topic to think about what it actually is.

00:29:39.000 It's not just focus.

00:29:41.000 Anyway, we know how it works.

00:29:43.000 But we also were learning that it's extremely...

00:29:47.000 And 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.

00:30:02.000 What do you mean by putting a negative?

00:30:04.000 So you're sitting there, you see number, number.

00:30:08.000 You see a three, you're going to screw up.

00:30:09.000 You're going to press it often.

00:30:11.000 And then I just added this element of, I'm going to put in negative or neutral images every now and then.

00:30:16.000 Pictures from...

00:30:17.000 The news.

00:30:18.000 So all of a sudden you're doing this task and you see like some very disturbing image.

00:30:23.000 And then you got to go back to doing the numbers thing.

00:30:26.000 Or you see a neutral image, complex scene.

00:30:29.000 Just doing that small manipulation, adding those things in, performance got worse.

00:30:34.000 And so we knew we were starting to get this profile of attention is very powerful.

00:30:39.000 It can really impact things.

00:30:40.000 But things like negative images, negative mood, stressful circumstances, threatening circumstances further deplete attention.

00:30:50.000 And I was experiencing that, right?

00:30:52.000 I 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.

00:31:01.000 So I became very interested in like, for me, it wasn't consequential.

00:31:05.000 Okay, so I didn't read the book to my kid.

00:31:07.000 Nothing happened.

00:31:07.000 Everybody was okay.

00:31:09.000 For many groups, many professions, it's not just that.

00:31:14.000 Their attention matters.

00:31:15.000 It'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.

00:31:24.000 And that, like, was a whole category of people, you know, military service members, emergency services professionals, first responders.

00:31:33.000 Like we can't, they can't, attention is life or death.

00:31:36.000 You can't lapse.

00:31:37.000 You can't shoot when you shouldn't be shooting.

00:31:40.000 So anyway, that's why I started working with these groups.

00:31:43.000 So you're asking me if people actually stay, anybody got better over time.

00:31:48.000 For 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.

00:31:58.000 They're getting ready to go to be deployed.

00:31:59.000 Right.

00:32:00.000 Everybody as a group got worse.

00:32:02.000 So the baseline performance for the military folks and other high stress groups enduring high stress intervals was degradation.

00:32:11.000 If you give the same task to a civilian or even that same kind of person during normal life, they were stable.

00:32:17.000 So the baseline was degradation.

00:32:20.000 When we gave them mindfulness training, The training group, they were stable over time.

00:32:27.000 They did not degrade.

00:32:28.000 Even with the negative images and all the other things you were doing?

00:32:31.000 Well, now we didn't need to put negative images anymore because the circumstances were simulated.

00:32:36.000 I mean, they were descriptive of high stress, high threat, negative mood.

00:32:40.000 That was their life.

00:32:40.000 So we didn't have to experimentally look at that anymore.

00:32:43.000 We gave very basic, just numbers, digits.

00:32:47.000 And everybody got worse as a group.

00:32:49.000 This is now, we're not just talking about military service members.

00:32:52.000 We saw this with football players during preseason training, undergrads, you know, if you're probably business people that are going through sales season.

00:33:02.000 I 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.

00:33:12.000 Yeah, there's things that we know.

00:33:14.000 I 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.

00:33:25.000 I don't know why I was thinking that while I was counting money, right?

00:33:28.000 That probably distracted you too.

00:33:30.000 It kind of did a little bit, but I was thinking like, God, how weird is it that it's so difficult to just simple numbers?

00:33:37.000 Like if you've got $20 bills, 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 2, 4, 6, you know, you're piling these $100 bills or $20 bills in the $100 stacks. 0.99

00:33:47.000 But if someone comes along and goes, 50, 80, 90, 70, you know, fuck, man, stop doing that. 0.99

00:33:52.000 Like, that really works. 1.00

00:33:54.000 It does.

00:33:54.000 It works on everybody.

00:33:55.000 But it's so strange, like, that just that little external, just something that interferes with your rhythm of counting numbers.

00:34:05.000 Yeah.

00:34:06.000 Now you're tapping into a classic working memory experiment.

00:34:11.000 Because it's not stressful at all.

00:34:12.000 It's not.

00:34:13.000 Counting $20 bills is not stressful. 0.99

00:34:14.000 But if someone comes over and goes, 90, 110, 120, 45, 60, like, yeah, what the fuck, man? 0.95

00:34:21.000 Even 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. 1.00

00:34:31.000 I'm like, God, how shitty are brains? 0.99

00:34:33.000 It's terrible. 1.00

00:34:33.000 Exactly. 1.00

00:34:34.000 But 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.

00:34:48.000 Temporary scratch space working memory.

00:34:50.000 That's what it is?

00:34:51.000 Yeah.

00:34:51.000 What is the terminology?

00:34:52.000 What is it supposed to...

00:34:54.000 So working memory, I like to think of it as it's not really about the memory part.

00:34:58.000 It's about the working part.

00:35:00.000 So we've been talking about attention so far.

00:35:02.000 Take attention and think about it over time.

00:35:06.000 So, like, in our conversation right now, you're using your working memory.

00:35:09.000 I'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.

00:35:15.000 You're going to probably hold it until you see a nice spot.

00:35:18.000 You just use your working memory.

00:35:19.000 It really is this temporary holding pad.

00:35:22.000 I sometimes talk about it as, like, A whiteboard in your mind, but with disappearing ink.

00:35:28.000 It has this very short timeframe, maybe 30 to 60 seconds max.

00:35:33.000 So as you're experiencing information, as you're paying attention to it, you write it on the whiteboard.

00:35:38.000 So you're doing this counting task.

00:35:40.000 You're counting your million-dollar bills or whatever it was.

00:35:45.000 And the numbers are going up on the whiteboard.

00:35:47.000 And then somebody else says 90, 50. Those are also going up on the whiteboard.

00:35:51.000 So now you're like, wait, what's the stuff happening there?

00:35:55.000 So your brain puts things into like a little area where I just need to know this for now.

00:36:01.000 And then eventually it's like I'll be done counting and then you're not going to remember any of it.

00:36:05.000 You don't want to.

00:36:06.000 It's like the cash in your computer.

00:36:08.000 Like it's just a temporary scratch space.

00:36:10.000 And it's so important.

00:36:12.000 If you don't have that, you're out of luck.

00:36:14.000 You use it for everything.

00:36:15.000 Decision making, thinking, planning.

00:36:18.000 Right now you're using it.

00:36:19.000 Yeah.

00:36:19.000 It'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.

00:36:31.000 But then there's other memories that are just like you ask someone their name and then you immediately forget it.

00:36:37.000 Exactly.

00:36:38.000 It didn't get on the whiteboard.

00:36:39.000 Right.

00:36:40.000 Or vanish before you could rewrite it.

00:36:42.000 That's a weird one.

00:36:42.000 The name one is weird.

00:36:44.000 Yeah, so what do you do if you meet somebody and you're like, I gotta remember this person's name.

00:36:48.000 What do you typically do?

00:36:49.000 I ask again.

00:36:50.000 Exactly.

00:36:51.000 I say I forgot your name.

00:36:52.000 Exactly.

00:36:52.000 You ask again.

00:36:53.000 I have too much on my brain to be dishonest.

00:36:56.000 So if I forget someone's name, I'd say I'm sorry I forgot your name.

00:37:00.000 I'm not trying to be rude.

00:37:01.000 I'm just being honest.

00:37:02.000 If you're a mature adult human being with a life, you know that you do that occasionally.

00:37:08.000 You're like, Fred?

00:37:09.000 No, Bob.

00:37:10.000 Sorry, Bob. 1.00

00:37:11.000 Fuck. 1.00

00:37:11.000 Sorry. 1.00

00:37:12.000 You know, it's not rude.

00:37:13.000 It's just a mistake.

00:37:15.000 It's like a thing that people do.

00:37:17.000 So, Amishi, just to refresh your memory.

00:37:20.000 Yes.

00:37:20.000 You have a very rememberable name.

00:37:22.000 It's a beautiful name, by the way.

00:37:23.000 Thank you.

00:37:24.000 So, you know, here's the thing.

00:37:25.000 Now, that's inconsequential.

00:37:27.000 Like, you're right.

00:37:27.000 You can just make up.

00:37:28.000 You got great social intelligence.

00:37:29.000 You'll be fine.

00:37:30.000 But now let's say it is consequential.

00:37:32.000 There's like four servers and somebody you just dealt with is dealing with correcting the order you just made.

00:37:38.000 And you got to remember their name or something about them.

00:37:40.000 And you got to keep it in mind.

00:37:41.000 You cannot let it go because you will suffer because of it.

00:37:45.000 Right.

00:37:46.000 So now let's say you're trying to remember, but you know you're not going to remember this person forever.

00:37:48.000 What might you do to try to keep that in mind?

00:37:53.000 Usually you rehearse.

00:37:54.000 You kind of visualize the image or you kind of say it to yourself over and over again.

00:37:58.000 But then you're not listening to what they're saying because you're just trying to remember, Amishi, Amishi, Amishi.

00:38:02.000 Exactly.

00:38:03.000 And it's the same scratch space.

00:38:04.000 It's the same scratch space.

00:38:06.000 So it ends up working memory is another thing that we test in my lab.

00:38:10.000 And working memory also significantly declines over high stress intervals.

00:38:15.000 Yeah, for sure, right?

00:38:16.000 And working memory is something, you know, you mentioned there's all these kinds of memories.

00:38:19.000 But working memory, it takes from perception and attention as its inputs.

00:38:24.000 It's what writes it on the board.

00:38:25.000 But also you can call it up from long-term memory.

00:38:28.000 So if I say, Joe, what did you have for breakfast this morning?

00:38:33.000 You don't have to tell me, but you could do it, right?

00:38:35.000 Yes, I could.

00:38:36.000 So what did you just do?

00:38:38.000 Essentially, you have a long-term representation, or you don't.

00:38:41.000 Let's say you do, remember.

00:38:43.000 You call it up.

00:38:44.000 It gets written on the whiteboard.

00:38:45.000 And now you use your attention to kind of read what's on the whiteboard and say, oh, I had a shake or whatever it was.

00:38:51.000 So it's used for both the input of information and the extraction from our long-term memory.

00:38:56.000 Very, very powerful brain system tied to intelligence, tied to decision-making, emotion regulation, everything.

00:39:03.000 And it starts tanking under high stress.

00:39:05.000 Did you run any experiments using nootropics or using various compounds that are thought to enhance memory?

00:39:14.000 I did not.

00:39:15.000 You did not?

00:39:16.000 Interesting.

00:39:17.000 So, 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,

00:39:37.000 but a specific set of processes.

00:39:40.000 So remember back, let me just unpack that.

00:39:43.000 So 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.

00:39:52.000 What is that actually training me to do?

00:39:54.000 And I said, you know, when we were talking about that, I said, oh, it's actually training all these systems of attention.

00:39:58.000 I'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.

00:40:08.000 But just like, you know, I think about you and your martial MMA expertise, and like...

00:40:14.000 There'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.

00:40:22.000 And just being strong or agile in general is not going to be helpful.

00:40:26.000 There's like a certain kind of move that you need to make.

00:40:28.000 And that's what I think the suite of mindfulness practices is offering.

00:40:31.000 It's training attention in a particular way.

00:40:35.000 So anyway, so I think that other substances can be great.

00:40:39.000 That's not my expertise, but it's really regarding mindfulness.

00:40:42.000 What are the vulnerabilities?

00:40:44.000 Why does attention start tanking under stress, threat, and poor mood?

00:40:47.000 And why does it seem like mindfulness training is actually able to protect against that?

00:40:52.000 That requires us to get an understanding of what the heck attention actually is.

00:40:59.000 I'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.

00:41:22.000 And 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,

00:41:38.000 it performs better.

00:41:40.000 And then there's also supplements that you can take that will increase athletic performance and enhance recovery.

00:41:47.000 And those things will also allow you to put in more time in training, which would then yield better results.

00:41:54.000 The way I look at nootropics is the same way.

00:41:57.000 They're certainly not a substitute for mindfulness training or for concentration or for breath work or any of those things.

00:42:04.000 But 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.

00:42:15.000 I first found out about them back in the early 2000s.

00:42:20.000 There 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.

00:42:32.000 He was a football player.

00:42:34.000 And he was having memory issues. 1.00

00:42:36.000 Football players should take a lot of hits to the head.

00:42:39.000 And so he developed this nootropic. 0.93

00:42:41.000 And I had never heard what a nootropic was.

00:42:43.000 I was like, what is it?

00:42:44.000 And he's like, just try it.

00:42:45.000 Sarah, no name.

00:42:46.000 Shout out to them.

00:42:47.000 And this guy...

00:42:50.000 Who was on the show, who was taking it, gave it to me and I was like, whoa, this gives you like a weird sort of like alertness.

00:42:57.000 It wasn't like speedy, like too much caffeine, but it was like I certainly felt like my brain flowed a little bit better.

00:43:07.000 And then I started getting really interested and there's a bunch of really good ones out there and we have some of this gum.

00:43:12.000 I don't know if you've ever seen it before.

00:43:13.000 I'll give you some before you leave.

00:43:14.000 It's called NeuroGum.

00:43:16.000 I like that stuff a lot.

00:43:32.000 Nootropics can definitely...

00:43:37.000 We 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.

00:43:47.000 These things can be enhanced through supplementation in a way that you can measure.

00:43:52.000 That's awesome.

00:43:54.000 That on top of meditation and mindfulness.

00:43:58.000 Like, we're trying to achieve peak states, right?

00:44:00.000 Exactly.

00:44:00.000 That's the idea.

00:44:01.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:44:02.000 So, I mean, it's definitely not...

00:44:04.000 I mean, everything you're saying sounds amazing, and I think people should advantage themselves and do what they want to do to do that.

00:44:11.000 So, this is not an either-or.

00:44:13.000 It's potentially like an And also.

00:44:15.000 No, but I want you to try, because you're a neuroscientist.

00:44:18.000 I'm like, when I talk to someone like yourself, I'm like, I want you to try this and tell me what you think.

00:44:22.000 Oh, yeah.

00:44:23.000 I'll definitely try it.

00:44:24.000 What we have here, we have AlphaBrain here, too, right?

00:44:26.000 We have some of that?

00:44:27.000 There we go.

00:44:28.000 We have the gum.

00:44:29.000 I want you to try the gum, because the gum is great.

00:44:32.000 By the way, this is not my company.

00:44:34.000 I don't have anything to do with the gum.

00:44:36.000 It's just something we use.

00:44:37.000 Yeah.

00:44:39.000 It'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?

00:44:47.000 What's the other?

00:44:47.000 Yeah, theanine right?

00:44:50.000 Yeah This is it.

00:44:54.000 I'm not going to start chewing it now, but I'm definitely interested.

00:44:57.000 Yeah.

00:44:58.000 I eat that stuff.

00:45:00.000 I chew it all day long.

00:45:01.000 Cool.

00:45:02.000 Yeah.

00:45:03.000 Yeah.

00:45:03.000 You 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.

00:45:16.000 And it was so interesting.

00:45:17.000 When we were doing...

00:45:18.000 When I was just starting off this stuff, and I remember I was...

00:45:22.000 Like, really trying to figure out, not only for people that have attentional challenges because they're under a lot of stress, right?

00:45:30.000 Are you going to take some now?

00:45:31.000 Oh, the quality of our conversation is just going to, like, even deepen. 0.98

00:45:35.000 I feel dumb today. 0.89

00:45:37.000 I had a rigorous workout. 0.96

00:45:39.000 Sometimes I come off a hard workout. 0.97

00:45:41.000 I feel dumb. 0.96

00:45:43.000 Oh, man. 0.98

00:45:43.000 Now I'm in for it. 0.98

00:45:46.000 We'll see. 1.00

00:45:47.000 You might stay dumb. 1.00

00:45:50.000 Well, it's pretty good for dumb. 0.99

00:45:53.000 But what I was saying is, like, I was also interested in people that have dispositional attentional challenges, like ADHD, for example. 0.95

00:46:01.000 What is that?

00:46:01.000 Is that real?

00:46:02.000 ADHD? 100%?

00:46:05.000 Attention functions on a continuum.

00:46:07.000 Right.

00:46:09.000 I mean, I'd love to tell you about it.

00:46:10.000 Let 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.

00:46:16.000 Because even the mindfulness stuff is related to attention.

00:46:18.000 So attention usually in the way we've been talking about it, we've been talking about it as focus, right?

00:46:23.000 So what does that mean to you?

00:46:25.000 Right now you're laser focused on me.

00:46:27.000 You've got awesome attention.

00:46:29.000 At least it looks that way.

00:46:31.000 Focusing on me.

00:46:32.000 Everything else is kind of fuzzed out.

00:46:34.000 And that we call the brain's orienting system.

00:46:38.000 So I think of it like a flashlight.

00:46:40.000 So wherever it is that you direct your attention in that way, you're privileging that content.

00:46:46.000 So 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.

00:46:54.000 Right now you're focused in on me, thank you very much.

00:46:57.000 So that actually does neurally look like it enhances the sensory input.

00:47:06.000 If 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.

00:47:23.000 And, you know, just like literally a flashlight, if you're in a darkened space, you know, you value that thing.

00:47:28.000 Wherever it is that it points, it actually gives you that privileged information.

00:47:32.000 The cool thing about the flashlight is you can direct it willfully.

00:47:35.000 You can point it.

00:47:37.000 You can also not just direct it to the external environment.

00:47:40.000 I can say, like, right now, Joe, what's the sensations on the bottoms of your feet?

00:47:47.000 Can you sense into that?

00:47:49.000 Were you thinking about it before I said it?

00:47:51.000 No, I wasn't.

00:47:51.000 Flashlight got directed to internal bodily sensations.

00:47:54.000 You can pick that up.

00:47:54.000 So it actually goes to one of the reasons attention even evolved in our brain.

00:47:59.000 We talked about the evolution of distractibility, which was to advantage our survival.

00:48:03.000 But why do we have attention in the first place?

00:48:05.000 Why do we even develop this capacity to focus?

00:48:08.000 And 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.

00:48:17.000 So it's got a subsample.

00:48:18.000 It's got to, like, get bits and pieces of what's going on and attention, just like the flashlight.

00:48:22.000 You know, if you were in a darkened room and you kind of figure out the landscape, you kind of scan it and kind of put together the image.

00:48:28.000 Same idea with attention.

00:48:29.000 Focus.

00:48:30.000 Very important.

00:48:31.000 We can talk about this, but I actually want to tell you about the other two main systems.

00:48:35.000 But just keep in mind that not only can we direct the flashlight, but it can get yanked.

00:48:39.000 So if you're in a darkened room and you hear a weird sound, you're going to point to wherever the sound came from.

00:48:44.000 So that's the double-edged sword of this system is that it's not just about where it goes.

00:48:49.000 Again, very good reasons that we evolved to have that.

00:48:53.000 Have you ever done any personal experimentation with sensory deprivation tanks?

00:48:58.000 Oh, I definitely want to talk to you about that.

00:49:00.000 And actually, I think that I have not.

00:49:02.000 I want to.

00:49:03.000 Oh, you have to.

00:49:03.000 I want to.

00:49:04.000 I just haven't had a chance to go.

00:49:06.000 So I will definitely, I definitely want to.

00:49:09.000 But it actually, perfect segue into the second system of attention, which is the exact opposite of this narrowing and privileging.

00:49:19.000 And the second big system of attention, I use the metaphor of like a floodlight.

00:49:24.000 It's called the alerting system.

00:49:26.000 The floodlight, unlike the flashlight, narrow, privileging some information from the other.

00:49:30.000 Floodlight, broad, receptive, no privileging of any information allows whatever comes up to come up.

00:49:38.000 The only thing that's privileging is the now.

00:49:41.000 Like, what's important right now?

00:49:43.000 And when I'm driving, I think about this often.

00:49:45.000 You see a flashing yellow light, probably near a construction site or near a school maybe.

00:49:49.000 What does that mean?

00:49:50.000 Pay attention!

00:49:51.000 But it's not like that narrow focus attention, like broad, receptive, something weird may happen.

00:49:55.000 Be ready for it.

00:49:57.000 So, this is, like I said, this system is so important.

00:50:05.000 And 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.

00:50:19.000 So, whatever is the...

00:50:21.000 Baseline 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.

00:50:35.000 So 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.

00:50:46.000 Does that match with your experience?

00:50:48.000 Yeah, the tank is fascinating because it's really the only environment where you can achieve Almost no input from the body.

00:50:58.000 Yeah, that's so cool.

00:50:59.000 Because of the warm water that's the same temperature as your skin and the amount of Epsom salts in it that make you float.

00:51:06.000 You get to this place where you can't tell the difference between the water and the air.

00:51:12.000 And you're just gone.

00:51:13.000 And you can move a little bit, so there is some input.

00:51:17.000 You know, if you move your head, you'll feel the water in your ears and stuff like that.

00:51:21.000 And you can move your digits.

00:51:23.000 But 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.

00:51:37.000 And you don't achieve that state anywhere else on Earth.

00:51:40.000 It doesn't exist.

00:51:41.000 So my experience is that any meditation or any mindfulness training inside the tank is...

00:51:51.000 Significantly more impactful.

00:51:54.000 Much more.

00:51:55.000 Because you really can get to these very bizarre states.

00:51:59.000 Especially breath work.

00:52:01.000 Concentrating on breathing.

00:52:03.000 You get to these really weird, almost psychedelic states.

00:52:08.000 Without any substances at all.

00:52:10.000 Just from the absence of sensory input.

00:52:12.000 You're allowing your brain to be free of traditional restraints.

00:52:18.000 And constraints.

00:52:20.000 Yeah.

00:52:20.000 You know, it's so interesting because, I mean, I definitely want to still tell you about the third system of attention.

00:52:25.000 Keep it in my working memory.

00:52:26.000 What is this?

00:52:27.000 The scratch?

00:52:27.000 What is it called again?

00:52:29.000 It's working memory.

00:52:30.000 But before I do that, I want to say something to you.

00:52:33.000 And 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.

00:52:39.000 But one really cool thing about – that we know regarding – Another thing that I think we should talk about, which is mind-wandering.

00:52:48.000 So basically, the thing we started out talking about, spontaneous initiation of thought.

00:52:54.000 So there's a study I was reading which basically said, if you want to, in the context of creativity, increase productive novel thought...

00:53:05.000 Then you need to be basically in this kind of alerting.

00:53:09.000 The floodlight needs to be on for the generation and acceptance of the thought that comes up.

00:53:15.000 And they specifically mentioned that sensory deprivation chambers may be a really great place to get that generative content coming up.

00:53:22.000 You basically have more spontaneous thought in those contexts.

00:53:26.000 Yeah, 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.

00:53:39.000 But 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.

00:53:46.000 Exactly.

00:53:47.000 Oh, definitely do that.

00:53:48.000 I 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.

00:53:56.000 But 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.

00:54:09.000 Yeah.

00:54:09.000 Anyway, so you got flashlight, floodlight, and then the third system, we call it executive control.

00:54:15.000 It's tied to this notion of the whiteboard and working memory.

00:54:19.000 It's essentially the manager.

00:54:21.000 It'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.

00:54:32.000 This system is selecting information because the whole goal of attention is to subsample reality.

00:54:37.000 You just have different slices.

00:54:38.000 Is that making sense?

00:54:40.000 The third system, executive control, is subsampling based on your goals.

00:54:46.000 So what is most goal-relevant right now?

00:54:49.000 That should guide the way that I perceive and act.

00:54:51.000 So this system's job, and the term executive is like the way we talk about executives of a company.

00:54:57.000 The executive's job is not to go in and do every single task.

00:55:01.000 But it's to ensure that the goals of the organization and the behavior of the organization align.

00:55:06.000 And then when it's a mess up, the executive says, no, fix that.

00:55:10.000 So this is where things like maintaining the goal, working memory, that's where we put our goals when we maintain them, inhibiting irrelevant information.

00:55:18.000 It's like...

00:55:19.000 You know, no, you don't need to go think about that right now, right?

00:55:22.000 Like even in the context of a sensory deprivation tank, it's like, yeah, that's great.

00:55:26.000 I probably should remember that, but I can't not experience this right now.

00:55:29.000 It's like goal was experience sensory deprivation, not go write something.

00:55:33.000 So inhibit urges we might have or behaviors we might have.

00:55:38.000 Update new information.

00:55:40.000 Update your goal.

00:55:41.000 And even shift.

00:55:43.000 Like, you are on that goal, but get on that goal.

00:55:45.000 So very complex system.

00:55:47.000 I like to think of it as like a juggler, as just like all the balls are in the air, but it's a manager.

00:55:51.000 It really is doing this.

00:55:52.000 So the reason I wanted to tell you that is because, you know, attention is such a topical thing.

00:55:57.000 Like people always say their problems are with attention.

00:56:00.000 And you were asking me about ADD and is it real?

00:56:02.000 Yes, it ends up that we have people differ along their set points of all three of these systems.

00:56:08.000 And oftentimes we see people that not only are problematic on any one system, like they're too focused.

00:56:16.000 It's a dysregulation.

00:56:17.000 So 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...

00:56:28.000 Anxiety-provoking level of present moment awareness.

00:56:33.000 Or you just can't keep the balls in the air.

00:56:35.000 There's a problem with your juggler.

00:56:37.000 So for sure, people vary along these lines.

00:56:40.000 And sometimes they vary in their coordination.

00:56:42.000 Because none of these systems work alone.

00:56:44.000 You know, the executive control is telling the flashlight where to go.

00:56:49.000 The...

00:56:51.000 Alerting system is telling you what's going on, so you need to know if you need...

00:56:54.000 So there's this constant fluidity between these things.

00:56:58.000 So sometimes it's the coordination that gets messed up.

00:57:01.000 And when people's lives are negatively impacted by the way their attention functions...

00:57:08.000 To 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.

00:57:19.000 And that where it varies is, is where my actual interest lies.

00:57:24.000 If I'm actually interested in something, I have no problem with my attention.

00:57:28.000 But 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.

00:57:39.000 It was almost impossible.

00:57:40.000 And 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.

00:57:49.000 Like, 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. 0.51

00:58:01.000 And I don't know why.

00:58:03.000 But I don't care.

00:58:04.000 Because the things that I'm interested in, I'm really good at concentrating on. 0.96

00:58:07.000 But the things that I don't give a fuck about, they're like, I don't care. 0.64

00:58:11.000 I have an amazing capacity to ignore information that I find boring. 0.96

00:58:16.000 I just don't care.

00:58:18.000 Yeah.

00:58:18.000 I 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...

00:58:27.000 Do you think there's some sort of an evolutionary reason for that, though?

00:58:32.000 I 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.

00:58:49.000 Because if you get the nutrition from that fish, you get to live another day, you thrive.

00:58:54.000 If you don't, you're starving and your body gets diminished.

00:58:58.000 These are real life scenarios that we evolved to deal with.

00:59:03.000 So that feeling like, have you ever gone fishing?

00:59:06.000 No.

00:59:07.000 We 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.

00:59:21.000 And I'm like, that has to be connected to back when we were primitive people, and that was the only way we gathered food.

00:59:29.000 We had to catch something.

00:59:30.000 And if we caught it, it was a big deal.

00:59:32.000 So you get so stimulated by this act of catching a fish, so much so that there's a whole world of people who catch fish and let them go.

00:59:41.000 Yes!

00:59:42.000 The thrill!

00:59:43.000 The thrill of the catch!

00:59:44.000 It's a weird... 1.00

00:59:45.000 That catch and release shit is fucking weird. 0.99

00:59:47.000 It's like, you know, fly fishing. 1.00

00:59:49.000 They make fish hooks that don't have a barb in them.

00:59:53.000 So you can just catch a trout and let it go. 0.99

00:59:56.000 I'm like, are you just fucking with these fish? 0.99

00:59:58.000 Like, what is this? 0.99

00:59:59.000 But meanwhile, if you say that, they'll get so offended with the gentle art of fly fishing. 0.99

01:00:05.000 Like, no, you're just fucking with fish. 0.99

01:00:07.000 Oh, man. 1.00

01:00:08.000 But it's the same thing.

01:00:09.000 Let's go back.

01:00:10.000 Let's use fishing just to connect it back to you in the classroom.

01:00:13.000 Okay.

01:00:14.000 You're at some place, and you're going back to our ancestors, just like you said, you're fishing.

01:00:19.000 You've got to catch the food.

01:00:20.000 Your life depends on it.

01:00:22.000 You don't catch any fish there.

01:00:23.000 What's going to happen?

01:00:24.000 You're going to move on.

01:00:26.000 You're going to probably start having not the thrill of the catch, but the boredom and irritation of nothing happening that's of interest.

01:00:38.000 So I see boredom as a really important feedback system.

01:00:42.000 Boredom isn't the cause.

01:00:44.000 Boredom is the result of basically the attention system saying, opportunity costs.

01:00:50.000 I'm missing out.

01:00:50.000 Go somewhere else.

01:00:52.000 And so boredom is such a good signal because what it means is go do something else.

01:00:57.000 It's guiding action.

01:00:58.000 And so often it's not like you can't focus.

01:01:02.000 It's that for whatever complex set of reasons your brain...

01:01:07.000 Biology is saying, try something else, because probably you'll get more reward out of that.

01:01:13.000 And now, that's actually the reason why people missed the three back on that experiment.

01:01:20.000 You're sitting there, it's like nothing's going on.

01:01:22.000 And I always think of this every time I walk through security at the airport.

01:01:26.000 The chances of finding a grenade or a bomb in that image, very, very low.

01:01:32.000 But if they screw up, devastating consequences.

01:01:35.000 Yeah.

01:01:36.000 And that's the thing to remember.

01:01:37.000 The reason oftentimes we can't stay on task is because the urge to mind wander away because the intrinsic reward of the situation is low.

01:01:52.000 But sometimes we still have to stay on it.

01:01:54.000 Like you don't want a police officer or soldier on patrol to be like, this is so freaking boring.

01:01:58.000 I'd rather do something else.

01:01:59.000 They need to be there.

01:02:00.000 You know, oftentimes I'll ask my military colleagues, you're standing at attention.

01:02:04.000 Where's your attention?

01:02:05.000 Pfft.

01:02:06.000 I don't know.

01:02:08.000 Well, let's get our minds at attention because that's what we need.

01:02:12.000 You cannot screw up.

01:02:14.000 Because even if the chances of something bad happening are low, if they happen and you miss it, it's on you.

01:02:20.000 So when people are bored, it's essentially the mind telling you that you're wasting time here and that you need to find...

01:02:29.000 If 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.

01:02:44.000 Yeah, it's basically, let's make it even more basic than that.

01:02:48.000 It's saying the reward you're getting here is not enough to keep you here.

01:02:54.000 But it starts with something even more basic.

01:02:57.000 The mind starts wandering.

01:02:59.000 And we did this.

01:03:01.000 If you look over time in this simple task, 10 minutes, people are worse at the end of the task than at the beginning of the task.

01:03:07.000 Mm-hmm.

01:03:08.000 I think?

01:03:28.000 It's like this is the moment that that kind of calculation is probably being done, then you start finding other things.

01:03:35.000 If there's nowhere to go, you'll go internal to your own mind.

01:03:39.000 It's a great place to take a little journey somewhere else.

01:03:42.000 But that is the other thing I want to bring up, that boredom itself seems to enhance creativity.

01:03:48.000 And there's been...

01:03:49.000 Some 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.

01:03:58.000 We might get bored, but we're getting enough input that we maintain a certain level of awareness in what we're doing.

01:04:06.000 But you'll find yourself... 0.98

01:04:08.000 You know, two hours in on Instagram, like, what the fuck did I do? 0.96

01:04:11.000 I 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. 0.94

01:04:22.000 But when you do, when people are legitimately bored, Oftentimes, that's when creative thoughts come out.

01:04:30.000 And this argument that I've heard multiple times is that we are not bored anymore.

01:04:36.000 So 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.

01:04:41.000 Because the mind doesn't have the chance to wander, which is where many of these great ideas come from.

01:04:47.000 Is the mind just sitting there thinking?

01:04:49.000 You're super in sync with everything I write about, frankly, in the book.

01:04:54.000 Because, yes, let's go back to that term mind-wandering.

01:04:59.000 Whatever you took is definitely kicking in. 0.98

01:05:01.000 I'm still dumb right now. 0.97

01:05:03.000 It's not ready yet. 0.96

01:05:04.000 Another half hour.

01:05:05.000 Talk to me in a half hour.

01:05:06.000 We'll be ready.

01:05:07.000 So, okay, so the term mind-wandering.

01:05:12.000 Okay, so technically, when we ask people, is your mind-wandering?

01:05:16.000 What we mean is, did your attention get hijacked away from the thing you're doing?

01:05:22.000 Technically, that's what we talk about, off-task thoughts during an ongoing activity.

01:05:26.000 It represents a broader category of something the mind does.

01:05:30.000 It's called spontaneous thought.

01:05:32.000 It doesn't necessarily have to be thought, by the way.

01:05:34.000 It's just this pump.

01:05:35.000 The brain is constantly, and there's lots of reasons for that, is pumping out content.

01:05:40.000 And 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.

01:05:57.000 You're going to make more mistakes.

01:05:58.000 You're going to have all kinds of problems.

01:06:01.000 And, you know, you were saying a moment ago that when you were little, like, you just couldn't focus on things that were boring.

01:06:08.000 And that kind of led us on this whole thing.

01:06:09.000 Yeah.

01:06:09.000 You 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.

01:06:18.000 But 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.

01:06:26.000 Like, even if it's watching your kid at the playground, or you're having a conversation with somebody and it's boring.

01:06:33.000 Like, you got to be able to at least bring yourself back.

01:06:36.000 So the key to all of this...

01:06:39.000 A lot of what we're saying is it's not so much about not having spontaneous thought and it's not about even feeling boredom.

01:06:47.000 It's about having an awareness of what your mind is doing in the moment.

01:06:52.000 Where is my attention?

01:06:54.000 If you can do that, all of a sudden a lot of things start changing.

01:06:58.000 So in this case where something boring is happening, you're off.

01:07:03.000 Knowing, oh yeah, look, I'm not on the task anymore.

01:07:05.000 You know, we might call it tuning out.

01:07:07.000 You're actually saying, I don't care.

01:07:08.000 I don't want to do that.

01:07:09.000 That's probably what's happening in school.

01:07:11.000 It's like, I know I'm not paying attention to class and I don't want to.

01:07:13.000 It's really not interesting to me.

01:07:16.000 But you had an awareness of where your mind was.

01:07:19.000 The 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.

01:07:27.000 So now they're not paying attention to the task at hand.

01:07:31.000 They're not aware of it and their performance starts suffering.

01:07:34.000 And, you know, it's not about the nature of the task.

01:07:36.000 It doesn't have to be a boring task.

01:07:38.000 Brain surgeons say their minds wander.

01:07:40.000 Like, that's consequential.

01:07:41.000 Judges say their minds wander.

01:07:43.000 Generals say their minds wander.

01:07:45.000 Just part of being a person.

01:07:47.000 It's just part of being a person, but it's consequential.

01:07:49.000 If you miss key information in any of those scenarios, somebody's life is going to be impacted by that.

01:07:55.000 Yeah.

01:07:56.000 And so that's one of my interests.

01:07:58.000 It's like, okay, that's a really tricky thing.

01:08:00.000 It kind of goes back to your nootropics thing.

01:08:02.000 How do you train for that?

01:08:03.000 Because I don't think it's going to happen.

01:08:06.000 It doesn't happen on its own all that often.

01:08:08.000 How do you train the mind to pay attention to what's happening moment by moment?

01:08:14.000 Okay.

01:08:14.000 Are we doing this sort of after the fact?

01:08:18.000 Like, should this be something that's a core component of early childhood education where children can understand why they get bored and what is...

01:08:30.000 What 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. 0.98

01:08:49.000 Why am I so fucked up? 0.71

01:08:50.000 How come I can't pay attention anything and go? 0.99

01:08:53.000 Oh, I never learned how to think correctly I never learned how to harness my attention I mean, right on.

01:08:59.000 Yeah.

01:09:01.000 Absolutely.

01:09:01.000 Because we really don't teach kids how to think very much, do we?

01:09:04.000 We really just sort of show them what they need to learn.

01:09:07.000 Even 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.

01:09:20.000 And 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.

01:09:32.000 Those 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.

01:09:42.000 Broad, receptive, but you're checking out, technically meta-awareness is having awareness of the current contents and processes of your mind, moment by moment.

01:09:54.000 So, first of all, to say, oh yeah, I can do that.

01:09:56.000 I can see.

01:09:57.000 And we do this all the time.

01:09:58.000 We say, oh yeah, look, I'm really...

01:09:59.000 You just did it a moment ago.

01:10:01.000 My brain's not working right now.

01:10:02.000 Like, you're checking in, and you're saying, right now, it's not the crispness I want there to be.

01:10:07.000 But you're attuned to it.

01:10:09.000 And so it may make you do something differently because you're aware of it.

01:10:12.000 If we're not even aware of where our mind is...

01:10:16.000 There's not a lot of opportunity that we can do anything about it.

01:10:19.000 So 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.

01:10:30.000 Their lives don't suffer all that much, meaning they can have a job and do things that are kind of normal kinds of things.

01:10:39.000 Do you think we're doing a disservice by medicating people when they have that instead of by training them how to focus?

01:10:47.000 You know, this is exactly where I'm going.

01:10:49.000 So that was a question I thought was a legitimate thing to ask.

01:10:53.000 We didn't want to start out by saying, stop your medication.

01:10:57.000 One 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.

01:11:08.000 What's the average medication?

01:11:11.000 What are they on for the most part?

01:11:12.000 Did you ask them?

01:11:13.000 I mean, all kinds of things, whether it's Stratera, Wilbutrin, or Adderall, Vitalin.

01:11:19.000 Some of those are SSRIs though, right?

01:11:21.000 There's some, there's combinations of things.

01:11:22.000 Is Wilbutrin an SSRI? I'm not, that's not my, neuropharmacology is not my thing.

01:11:28.000 You can look it up.

01:11:28.000 Yeah, Jamie, look it up.

01:11:29.000 But the point is that we said, whatever your particular medication cocktail is, stay on it.

01:11:36.000 Now take this eight-week mindfulness training program.

01:11:37.000 And that program was like, we started with a minute of practice, very active practices.

01:11:42.000 So now it's not sit quietly and focus on your breath.

01:11:44.000 It's go for a walk, feel the sensations of your feet on the ground.

01:11:48.000 When your mind wanders, come back.

01:11:50.000 So 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.

01:12:05.000 But 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.

01:12:16.000 And I did really awesome on the video games, but I didn't finish my homework or I forgot to go to work.

01:12:23.000 They 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.

01:12:32.000 After the training, that was the number one most consistent thing people said.

01:12:35.000 I was aware of where my mind was.

01:12:38.000 I could use my time better because I was checking in.

01:12:41.000 Where am I right now?

01:12:42.000 Oh, is that tied to where I want to be?

01:12:44.000 Let me redirect.

01:12:46.000 That'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,

01:13:08.000 shift, or redirect when things are off track.

01:13:10.000 That makes the whole thing function better.

01:13:13.000 Mindfulness is a very current term.

01:13:15.000 People love to use it.

01:13:16.000 And you said before that we might have a different definition.

01:13:20.000 So let's define what mindfulness means.

01:13:23.000 Yeah.

01:13:23.000 So the way that I use that term is it's a mental mode, meaning it's a way of making the mind.

01:13:31.000 Mindfulness meditation is a set of practices you can do to cultivate this mode.

01:13:34.000 So what is the mode?

01:13:37.000 Mindfulness as a mode is paying attention to our present moment experience without conceptual elaboration.

01:13:46.000 Conceptual elaboration.

01:13:48.000 Or emotional reactivity.

01:13:50.000 What's conceptual elaboration?

01:13:52.000 Thinking.

01:13:54.000 So being in the moment without thinking.

01:13:58.000 And really a specific kind of thinking.

01:14:01.000 Hyperlinking thoughts.

01:14:03.000 Oh, okay.

01:14:04.000 So how can you get more data without the overlay of the story?

01:14:10.000 Don't editorialize right now.

01:14:12.000 What's happening?

01:14:13.000 What's actually happening?

01:14:14.000 Not your story about what's happening.

01:14:15.000 Not you thinking about what's happening.

01:14:17.000 What is happening?

01:14:19.000 That's what I mean by it.

01:14:20.000 And when people now do these breath awareness practices, for example, you're focusing on your breath.

01:14:25.000 You're not controlling the breath.

01:14:27.000 That's where I thought it was a little bit of a distinction between what you were saying and what I'm saying.

01:14:31.000 You're doing nothing with the breath.

01:14:32.000 The only reason we use the breath?

01:14:34.000 Handy tool.

01:14:35.000 Always changing moment by moment.

01:14:36.000 You're doing it without having to control it.

01:14:38.000 In fact, if you had to actually pay attention to your breath, you'd probably be dead.

01:14:42.000 Because you'd get distracted.

01:14:43.000 So you don't have a specific breath technique that you're utilizing?

01:14:46.000 You're not manipulating the breath.

01:14:48.000 At all.

01:14:50.000 You're not.

01:14:50.000 You're just concentrating on the fact that you are actually breathing.

01:14:53.000 No.

01:14:54.000 No?

01:14:55.000 Nope.

01:14:55.000 You're aware of the fact that you're breathing?

01:14:57.000 You're focusing on the sensations of breathing.

01:15:00.000 What's the distinction?

01:15:03.000 Concentrating is a tricky term.

01:15:04.000 It could be, I'm thinking about the fact that I'm breathing.

01:15:06.000 Isn'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.

01:15:14.000 It's coolness.

01:15:19.000 Tinglyness.

01:15:19.000 Tension.

01:15:20.000 It's like you're literally staying at the most granular raw data of what's happening.

01:15:24.000 And with that awareness of this is happening right now, you're in that meta-aware mode.

01:15:30.000 And by the way, manipulating your breath and controlling it and having a particular box breathing or whatever, fantastic thing to do.

01:15:37.000 Have you done it?

01:15:39.000 Pranayama, right?

01:15:40.000 These are breath manipulation techniques that can induce all kinds of very interesting states.

01:15:46.000 So, for example, breath work, right?

01:15:48.000 We're actually getting these kind of very cool experiences, very cool thing to do.

01:15:53.000 But that's not what we're going for with mindfulness.

01:15:55.000 With mindfulness, we're using the breath simply as one of many different things we could focus on.

01:16:00.000 Like, you know, the other night I couldn't fall asleep.

01:16:01.000 I'm using, in my hotel room, mindfulness of the air conditioner.

01:16:05.000 Like, just noticing moment to moment the sensations of the sound shifting just to have a target.

01:16:12.000 Because the instruction is essentially pay attention to breath-related sensations.

01:16:17.000 Like I said, be specific.

01:16:18.000 So you're using that flashlight and you're shining it somewhere.

01:16:20.000 You've got a target now.

01:16:22.000 And then, wait, pretty soon you're not there.

01:16:26.000 Notice that the mind has wandered away from breath-related sensations.

01:16:29.000 Bring it back.

01:16:31.000 So 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.

01:16:38.000 That's what I meant by it's engaging all three of the systems of attention as a push-up.

01:16:44.000 Do we know that there is any benefit to doing that versus doing breath work or vice versa?

01:16:50.000 The direct head to head?

01:16:52.000 Yes.

01:16:52.000 Yeah, I have not done that.

01:16:54.000 It would be interesting to see.

01:16:56.000 What I wanted to do is see not so much about acute manipulations, like I know what it feels like to do breath work.

01:17:04.000 It feels really interesting.

01:17:06.000 You get so many amazing insights, just like certain psychedelic substances can give you amazing insights.

01:17:13.000 But I couldn't keep hold of those in the same way.

01:17:17.000 Like, they vanish.

01:17:18.000 In some sense, I get some embodied sense of, like, this was a really cool insight.

01:17:22.000 It's just like you in the sense of a deprivation chamber.

01:17:24.000 Sometimes you get insights and it sort of changes you in a way, but you can't really capture what that is.

01:17:31.000 And I wanted something in the training we were providing to be enduring for people so that they didn't have to go...

01:17:37.000 You know, it's almost like...

01:17:38.000 If 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.

01:17:45.000 You probably can't do heliotropic breathing and you probably can't get the zapper out and zap your brain.

01:17:50.000 You just got to have it embodied within you.

01:17:52.000 And it needs to be on demand in that moment.

01:17:54.000 You need to be mindful on demand and you're up against a lot.

01:17:58.000 50% of your waking moment, your attention's going to be off somewhere.

01:18:01.000 That's what I wanted to help people cultivate.

01:18:03.000 And 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.

01:18:12.000 So in your book, do you lay out like a specific strategy for achieving these states?

01:18:18.000 I do.

01:18:18.000 And it's based on 15 years of work where, you know, at the time I started this work, there were solutions.

01:18:27.000 Mindfulness-based stress reduction is an awesome program.

01:18:31.000 Gold standard, really, of mindfulness training.

01:18:34.000 It takes a long time.

01:18:35.000 Eight weeks, 24 hours, 45 minutes of practice a day.

01:18:40.000 Service members were not up for that.

01:18:41.000 In fact, I had like $2 million in grant funding from the Department of Defense.

01:18:45.000 Nobody would take my project.

01:18:47.000 They're like, yeah, that's not too much time.

01:18:48.000 I'll give you an hour, you know?

01:18:50.000 I'm like, I need like eight weeks.

01:18:52.000 So I ended up writing another grant that said, let me systematically see if I can get a minimum effective dose.

01:18:58.000 Let me go from eight weeks to four weeks and maybe two weeks.

01:19:01.000 Let me cut the hours.

01:19:02.000 Let me cut the daily practice time.

01:19:04.000 That led us to an answer, which is that you can go too low, so it's not effective.

01:19:09.000 But there is sort of a sweet spot that looks like it's about four weeks of training.

01:19:15.000 8 hours and about 12 minutes a day.

01:19:18.000 That's it, 12 minutes a day.

01:19:20.000 Interesting.

01:19:21.000 Now, how did you get involved with the military?

01:19:25.000 Did they approach you or was this something that, no?

01:19:28.000 You felt like they would be a good vehicle for research because of the stress that they're under?

01:19:34.000 Yeah, I was like, what we're seeing is like, your attention's worse during pre-deployment and then you're going to be deployed.

01:19:40.000 Right.

01:19:41.000 And just because my personal interest was in helping people that were experiencing high stress still perform well.

01:19:46.000 In fact, I was not sure what would happen.

01:19:49.000 Remember, I told you about those people in the retreat.

01:19:52.000 We saw attentional benefits there.

01:19:53.000 The first time we ever did work with the military, we actually didn't even have DOD funding.

01:19:59.000 I had private funding, and we found a marine unit that was willing to do it.

01:20:04.000 And even the guys that welcomed us in were like, yeah, this is never going to work.

01:20:08.000 But we'll give it a try because, frankly, at that point, it was around 2006 and 2007, nothing was working.

01:20:15.000 Deployment after deployment, suicides going up the roof, anxiety, depression, rampant suicidality, and they just were opened.

01:20:22.000 Like, let's try something else.

01:20:23.000 So we did our first study, even without military DOD funding, and found these beneficial effects, protective effects.

01:20:31.000 And 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.

01:20:42.000 And how did you develop that protocol?

01:20:44.000 Say when you're first working with them and they're like, this is not going to work, but we'll give it a try.

01:20:49.000 How do you know what to start them with?

01:20:52.000 Is it experimental?

01:20:54.000 Right, so what we did is we took really, it's science, so we took a very incremental approach.

01:21:00.000 Tiny little steps.

01:21:01.000 So we had eight weeks of this program called Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction.

01:21:04.000 Many, many studies were done on it.

01:21:06.000 Got 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.

01:21:14.000 It's a really nice suite of practices.

01:21:17.000 Start of that.

01:21:19.000 Are you getting bored now?

01:21:20.000 No, I just yawned.

01:21:22.000 I'm not bored.

01:21:23.000 Okay, good.

01:21:24.000 Just an inadvertent yawn.

01:21:26.000 No problem.

01:21:27.000 So we just said, let's take this same program and contextualize it for service members.

01:21:34.000 Let's use language that's related to their life.

01:21:38.000 Let's have the discussion regarding the benefits of this program.

01:21:41.000 When you say language related to their life, like how so?

01:21:44.000 Well, like in the program that we use now, for example, you know, we talk about why you need attention.

01:21:49.000 We use terms that have to do with what they know regarding the use of attention in their life as a soldier.

01:21:55.000 So you know that you have to zero your weapon to calibrate it to be able to do the job.

01:22:00.000 Zero the mind.

01:22:01.000 So 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.

01:22:15.000 Do you have any experience at all in the military?

01:22:19.000 Did you ever deploy?

01:22:21.000 Nothing.

01:22:22.000 Look at me!

01:22:23.000 No, I'm just asking.

01:22:25.000 How would you go about finding what the requirements are?

01:22:29.000 Totally.

01:22:29.000 Well, the first project I did, I collaborated with a former service member.

01:22:33.000 She'd been deployed and was a mindfulness expert.

01:22:37.000 Oh, that's convenient.

01:22:38.000 Very.

01:22:39.000 And then we've been able to now do studies where we partner with people that train soldiers and teach them to be trainers.

01:22:48.000 So what your goal is, is to make them perform better under these periods of high stress.

01:22:55.000 The goal, ultimately, not just perform better, but feel better.

01:23:00.000 And we do it by looking at attention and psychological health.

01:23:04.000 So we know if we do nothing under pre-deployment and even deployment, attention is going to tank, mood's going to get worse.

01:23:11.000 Can we do anything to protect against that?

01:23:14.000 So 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,

01:23:30.000 or both?

01:23:32.000 Both.

01:23:33.000 Both.

01:23:33.000 So when you're thinking about them being deployed and them being in combat situations, how are you calculating?

01:23:42.000 How are you deciding what to show them, what not to show them?

01:23:46.000 Are you working with imagery and visualizations?

01:23:51.000 How are you maintaining their focus?

01:23:54.000 Very, very...

01:23:57.000 Simple.

01:23:57.000 I mean, in some sense.

01:23:59.000 Remember, back to what we were saying, these are fundamental capacities.

01:24:03.000 We need attention to think, to regulate our emotions, to connect.

01:24:08.000 What 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.

01:24:17.000 We didn't say anything in particular regarding how they might use this during deployment.

01:24:22.000 And this is not like a...

01:24:24.000 This is just like any kind of good physical fitness routine.

01:24:27.000 Like, 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...

01:24:35.000 It's like, no.

01:24:36.000 If you've got this, you know how to use it.

01:24:39.000 What 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.

01:24:49.000 This is not training anymore.

01:24:50.000 You could die.

01:24:53.000 What I was really surprised by was what we saw in the Marines themselves.

01:24:58.000 So, you know, we offer this program.

01:25:00.000 We find that it's protective if they do 12 minutes or more.

01:25:04.000 And then not everybody did 12 minutes or more.

01:25:06.000 We had like a group of them that were kind of resistors.

01:25:08.000 They thought I was full of it.

01:25:10.000 I don't care.

01:25:11.000 You know, I'm not doing this.

01:25:12.000 And they didn't practice.

01:25:13.000 And that subgroup actually looked like the control group.

01:25:16.000 They got worse over time.

01:25:17.000 Even though they went to the training, they were not interested.

01:25:23.000 They come back, we test them again, and this subgroup looked better than before they were deployed.

01:25:31.000 I was like, what?

01:25:32.000 This takes no sense.

01:25:34.000 How do they go from being worse over eight weeks?

01:25:38.000 Now they're deployed to a war zone, they come back and they're better than that. 0.89

01:25:41.000 And they had all these grandiose ideas as scientists do, like maybe they felt activated by their mission and that got their attention up.

01:25:47.000 So I asked my colleague, the trainer, like, was there anything that stands out about this particular group of names?

01:25:53.000 Because they just, they're not showing the normal pattern of essentially more degradation.

01:25:57.000 And she said, oh yeah.

01:25:59.000 These 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. 1.00

01:26:09.000 They're coming back from mission and patrol and not getting the shakes.

01:26:12.000 Teach me that.

01:26:13.000 So they actually started practicing while they were practicing.

01:26:18.000 Deployed.

01:26:18.000 And then when they came back, we saw the benefits in their attentional performance.

01:26:23.000 So I would say we're not being overly prescriptive.

01:26:26.000 We trust the expertise that the service members have to implement these skills in their lives.

01:26:31.000 But we are providing them the tools so that the training regime is like a cross-training for their attention.

01:26:39.000 You got all three systems are going to get activated.

01:26:41.000 And you got this meta-awareness so you kind of know where your mind is.

01:26:43.000 You can get back on track as you need to.

01:26:45.000 Did you have to tweak the protocol?

01:26:47.000 Did you have it pretty firmly established before you started working with soldiers?

01:26:52.000 How did you develop how to get them going with this?

01:26:56.000 We used that same 8-week program that was established.

01:27:01.000 And then the only thing we really did was start tweaking the time.

01:27:05.000 Like, okay, if you can't be with a group for 24 hours, you got to cut something, what should we cut?

01:27:09.000 And this is where it got really interesting, too.

01:27:11.000 Because I kind of just used my hunches with regard to physical training.

01:27:15.000 Like, if you're going to go learn some new particular, let's say you're just going to go get a personal trainer.

01:27:21.000 You want to know how to do the workout.

01:27:24.000 You want to maximize the benefits.

01:27:26.000 If 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?

01:27:39.000 Can we just do it?

01:27:39.000 Can we do the reps together?

01:27:40.000 So that's sort of what we did.

01:27:41.000 We took the program and we kind of Split it up.

01:27:44.000 We had gotten it down to 16 hours or so.

01:27:47.000 And 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.

01:27:58.000 And then we put them head-to-head.

01:27:59.000 So we had one group that got nothing, one that got the training focused, and one that got the talking about it.

01:28:05.000 And the talking about it was pretty much just like the no training at all.

01:28:10.000 It was just get to the workout.

01:28:12.000 That also helped us shrink the time down to eight hours.

01:28:16.000 So this has been where we've been kind of honing it over and over again.

01:28:19.000 We did a project with special operators where At that point, we were about four weeks and eight hours, and I said, can we crunch it more?

01:28:25.000 Can we get to two weeks?

01:28:27.000 And we couldn't.

01:28:28.000 Even 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.

01:28:37.000 So you're doing basically 12 minutes a day for four weeks?

01:28:42.000 And does it vary, or is it basically the same type of exercise over and over again for that four weeks?

01:28:49.000 It's a suite of practices.

01:28:51.000 So the one aspect is this finding your flashlight, as I call it, practicing, focusing.

01:28:56.000 The other one is really something that goes back to actually your comment regarding the deprivation chamber.

01:29:03.000 What did you call it?

01:29:04.000 The sensory deprivation chamber.

01:29:07.000 Exercising the floodlight.

01:29:09.000 And that we call open monitoring.

01:29:11.000 It's a totally different kind of practice.

01:29:12.000 So, and I can say more about that.

01:29:14.000 But then there's another practice that is actually what we call connection practice, but it's about offering kind of well wishes toward yourself.

01:29:21.000 So it's a suite of practices that rounds out these multiple aspects of attention.

01:29:27.000 But maybe we talk about open monitoring if you...

01:29:29.000 Sure, yeah, please.

01:29:30.000 So, 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...

01:29:43.000 Basically, divergent thinking and generation of mental content, let's just say.

01:29:54.000 Let me just give you an example of something I describe in the book.

01:29:58.000 This is now, because remember, at the core of it, mindfulness training is about taking an observational stance.

01:30:04.000 It's like, whatever's happening is happening, and you're there watching it.

01:30:08.000 You're watching.

01:30:09.000 You have a goal, you know.

01:30:11.000 And for the practices we've talked about so far, the goal is focus on something in particular.

01:30:15.000 Notice that you're staying focused.

01:30:17.000 If you're not, come back.

01:30:19.000 Right?

01:30:19.000 That's what we talked about already.

01:30:21.000 Beneficial effects when people do that.

01:30:22.000 This is, the goal is...

01:30:26.000 Don't focus on anything.

01:30:28.000 You're not going to actually engage in anything.

01:30:32.000 The goal is that you don't focus.

01:30:34.000 Now, not resisting focusing, but allowing thoughts, feelings, sensations, any mental content, any external stimulation to come and pass away.

01:30:44.000 So it was funny that you're talking about fishing because the practice, I named it just like river of thought.

01:30:50.000 So you kind of visualize yourself sitting at the bank of a river, like maybe there's a little rock there.

01:30:57.000 You're sitting, you're solid, you're stable.

01:30:59.000 And 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.

01:31:13.000 And you're not going to go for the fish or follow it or follow the leaf.

01:31:16.000 You're just going to allow whatever arises to come up and then pass away.

01:31:22.000 And that's what's interesting about working memory, like we were talking about before.

01:31:27.000 Working memory is the scratch space of consciousness.

01:31:30.000 And for anything to stay in our conscious experience, we need to keep rewriting it.

01:31:35.000 We need to follow it.

01:31:36.000 We need to hyperlink it.

01:31:37.000 Or else it's going to dissolve away.

01:31:38.000 It just won't stay on the whiteboard.

01:31:40.000 So you're practicing allowing whatever occurs to occur without chasing it or pursuing it, just watching it.

01:31:47.000 So just the idea of the river is just like a vehicle for allowing you to let these thoughts just flow through your mind?

01:31:55.000 Yeah, some people say, you know, you could imagine this mind is a vast open sky and thoughts, feelings, sensations are like clouds passing it.

01:32:01.000 There's a lot of images you can use, but the goal is...

01:32:04.000 You are aware, you're meta-aware of what's happening, but you're not grabbing onto anything.

01:32:10.000 You don't have a thought pop up and be like, oh, I need to write that down.

01:32:13.000 Or like, what are five things that are related to that?

01:32:15.000 You're not making your mental grocery list.

01:32:17.000 You're like, ah, I had a thought that said, I need to get milk.

01:32:21.000 Move on.

01:32:21.000 So for people that are listening to this and they go, okay, but how does that help?

01:32:25.000 How does that help?

01:32:26.000 How does that help me?

01:32:29.000 When you are in a situation...

01:32:33.000 Where you are stuck, ruminating, worrying, catastrophizing.

01:32:42.000 First of all, you're usually not aware that that's happening.

01:32:45.000 So this practice allows you to cultivate an awareness because that's all you're really doing.

01:32:49.000 You're just being aware of what's happening.

01:32:51.000 You're not doing anything with it.

01:32:53.000 So you want to cultivate that.

01:32:55.000 But also, typically, when we're in those kind of really sticky states where We don't know what to do.

01:33:00.000 We keep looping on them, or we dig ourselves further into a hole.

01:33:04.000 We don't have the capacity to distance and broaden.

01:33:08.000 And if we do that, we can allow the content to pass away.

01:33:13.000 And that's where it becomes extremely powerful.

01:33:16.000 We can psychologically distance or de-center ourselves So that there's a steadiness and watchfulness.

01:33:22.000 And we're not so caught up in the negative and destructive mental content that we can't see our way out.

01:33:29.000 So is it kind of like cleaning the mind's closet?

01:33:32.000 Or getting rid of unnecessary things that could be there that you would concentrate on?

01:33:39.000 No, you're not getting rid of anything.

01:33:40.000 No?

01:33:42.000 No.

01:33:42.000 Is there any cleansing effect?

01:33:44.000 There's cleansing effect in that you're staying It's observant yet disengaged.

01:33:51.000 Now, when could this be useful in a real situation?

01:33:54.000 You're in a really heated conversation.

01:33:56.000 You're angry.

01:33:57.000 You're super angry.

01:33:58.000 But you need to get along with this person because there's some deliberation.

01:34:00.000 And military leaders will talk about this.

01:34:02.000 In fact, one of the most powerful ways this practice shows up in real life is listening.

01:34:08.000 So what does it mean to actually listen, especially when there's hostile, complex content that's happening?

01:34:14.000 And 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.

01:34:25.000 He 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.

01:34:35.000 And so he had to go to these various places right after ISIS had been sort of defeated.

01:34:42.000 And 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.

01:34:51.000 So he had to go and talk to three leaders.

01:34:54.000 They come together and they're so angry.

01:34:57.000 They're so angry with the United States.

01:34:59.000 They're so angry at each other.

01:35:01.000 And he basically was taking this—he used his mindfulness practice because he started practicing when we first introduced this to his soldiers.

01:35:10.000 And he said it was so powerful to be able to just really listen and for them to experience somebody really listening.

01:35:18.000 And he was taking it in.

01:35:20.000 He was taking in what he was hearing.

01:35:21.000 He wasn't giving his responses.

01:35:23.000 And 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.

01:35:35.000 We can actually work with you because what he didn't do is get caught up in his own reactivity.

01:35:39.000 He didn't start formulating responses.

01:35:41.000 He didn't take that flashlight anywhere.

01:35:42.000 He 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.

01:35:55.000 And 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.

01:36:05.000 We can intervene, of course, but we're not so driven to intervene before we really are able to observe first.

01:36:12.000 This practice of using this in the military I think would be insanely beneficial.

01:36:17.000 But 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.

01:36:32.000 Yeah, you know, right now it's starting to get a lot of traction.

01:36:36.000 It'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.

01:36:52.000 To have sort of an international conversation regarding this.

01:36:55.000 So it's not quite there yet.

01:36:57.000 It's not like a program of record.

01:36:58.000 People can go on the website and sign up for it.

01:37:00.000 But it's starting to get noticed.

01:37:03.000 And right now we're doing a project.

01:37:04.000 We did a project in collaboration with Army scientists with basic combat training where we offered this program, which was mindfulness and yoga, to people.

01:37:16.000 New recruits, and it's beneficial, had a lot of beneficial effects.

01:37:21.000 We're also doing a project with all the newly minted one-star generals in the Army.

01:37:25.000 So we're trying to get sort of through the career path also different points at which this could happen.

01:37:31.000 We're also doing a project with schoolhouse settings.

01:37:34.000 So the Special Operations Qualification School will now start, will be testing this.

01:37:39.000 But it's mostly through research right now, and really my lab has been one of the only ones that's been consistently doing it.

01:37:45.000 You 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.

01:38:00.000 When you do put this protocol together and you do work with these soldiers, Are you trying to have a specific time?

01:38:12.000 Do they wake up in the morning?

01:38:13.000 Is that one of the first things they do in order to start the day correctly?

01:38:17.000 Is there a good way to do it?

01:38:19.000 Is it good to do it at the end of the day when you're reflecting?

01:38:21.000 When is the best way to get this and to implement it?

01:38:26.000 The short answer is the best time to implement it is when you're going to implement it.

01:38:30.000 You got to get yourself to do it like any habit.

01:38:32.000 If you have discipline, like if you're a professional athlete, they're very, very disciplined.

01:38:37.000 Absolutely.

01:38:37.000 So we have not...

01:38:40.000 As far as I know, there are no studies that have...

01:38:43.000 I think?

01:39:04.000 For 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.

01:39:11.000 You're going to do it every day.

01:39:12.000 Maybe it's right before or after you brush your teeth or have your morning coffee.

01:39:15.000 So there's no question of debating whether you're going to do it or not.

01:39:19.000 And then start really, really small.

01:39:21.000 Don't start with 12 minutes a day.

01:39:23.000 Say you're going to do three minutes.

01:39:25.000 And then cut that in half and that's going to be your goal.

01:39:27.000 Because you've got to get it to the point where it's achievable and you get that experience of like, I'm doing it.

01:39:32.000 I'm committed.

01:39:32.000 It's habit formation.

01:39:34.000 And then slowly build up to 12 minutes.

01:39:38.000 Do you think there's benefit in starting your day with it, though?

01:39:41.000 It seems like...

01:39:43.000 For me, there is.

01:39:44.000 I mean, personally, that's when I like to do it during the day because it sort of sets the...

01:39:48.000 I know this from our lab of what the objective results say.

01:39:54.000 For me, I like doing it in the morning, because usually if I do it at night, I'll fall asleep, frankly.

01:40:01.000 Probably good to help you fall asleep.

01:40:03.000 That's what a lot of the soldiers say.

01:40:04.000 They're like, your mind is racing.

01:40:06.000 You can't fall asleep.

01:40:07.000 You start supplementing with things that probably aren't that useful.

01:40:09.000 Oftentimes, not the kind of stuff you probably would recommend for sleep.

01:40:12.000 And 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.

01:40:20.000 And I do it too to fall asleep, but if I'm not doing it, the intention is not as a relaxation and sleep aid.

01:40:26.000 I like to do it in the morning because in some sense it's like I found my flashlight again.

01:40:34.000 It'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.

01:40:45.000 But you can if you want to because you're aware of it.

01:40:48.000 So, 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?

01:41:02.000 I mean, that's why I wrote the book, frankly.

01:41:04.000 Same way?

01:41:04.000 Very similar ways.

01:41:05.000 Of 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,

01:41:21.000 I've got to get it back, where am I right now?

01:41:30.000 I could see my spouse again.

01:41:32.000 I could actually listen to him.

01:41:33.000 I could see the look on his face.

01:41:34.000 I could look at my child.

01:41:36.000 It changes the nature and quality of the way we interact with other people.

01:41:42.000 So not just for improved ability to think.

01:41:45.000 Your attention is more available.

01:41:46.000 Your working memory is more available to you.

01:41:48.000 It stress-proofs those kind of abilities because you're not in mental time travel to the past or future.

01:41:54.000 You're here when you want to be.

01:41:56.000 But...

01:41:58.000 Our emotions can be better regulated.

01:42:00.000 Our connections are stronger.

01:42:01.000 So it ends up showing up over and over again for everybody.

01:42:05.000 And that is what motivated me to write the book.

01:42:08.000 I'm like, if it can help these people, how do we bring it so that everybody can do it?

01:42:12.000 And also just educate them about the nature of their attention so they understand what the vulnerabilities are.

01:42:18.000 Isn't it kind of incredible that we got to 2021 without this being a normal, regular part of most people's life?

01:42:28.000 Right?

01:42:29.000 If 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.

01:42:47.000 Because it's so important.

01:42:50.000 Everybody'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.

01:42:57.000 How few people actually apply techniques to enhance that, it's kind of stunning, right?

01:43:05.000 Because it's not cost prohibitive. 0.84

01:43:08.000 It's not like it's something that takes a deep education of many, many, many years of training and fucking esoteric arts. 0.98

01:43:17.000 No. 0.98

01:43:17.000 12 minutes a day. 0.98

01:43:19.000 Kind of crazy, right?

01:43:21.000 Well, I love that you're saying that.

01:43:23.000 I love that you're having that kind of slight outrage about it because this has been like a huge passion of mine.

01:43:31.000 A hundred years ago, if you saw somebody running down the street, you'd think they were nuts.

01:43:34.000 They're getting chased by a bear.

01:43:35.000 Like something serious is going wrong.

01:43:37.000 Right.

01:43:37.000 Now it's normalized.

01:43:39.000 We know that you need to physically move your body in a certain way for a certain number of minutes a week for you to stay physically fit.

01:43:47.000 You don't think they ran in 1920?

01:43:49.000 Okay, maybe 1900. Right.

01:43:51.000 Maybe 1820. Maybe 1820. We're running from Buffalo and shit.

01:43:54.000 Yeah, but when the military instituted, and it was the first real organization that instituted physical fitness, there was a lot of pushback. 0.94

01:44:03.000 Like, what?

01:44:03.000 I'm going to sit here and jump up and down?

01:44:06.000 No, I'm not doing that.

01:44:07.000 The military was the first to implement it?

01:44:08.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:44:09.000 In fact, it was a Navy scientist who used the term aerobics.

01:44:15.000 What's his name?

01:44:15.000 Oh, I can't remember.

01:44:16.000 Cooper.

01:44:17.000 Cooper.

01:44:17.000 Cooper?

01:44:17.000 Yeah, I think it was Dr. Cooper.

01:44:19.000 So this is from when?

01:44:20.000 Not that long ago.

01:44:22.000 I mean, the aerobics thing was, you know, then it turned into the whole aerobics, aerobic activity, Jane Fonda.

01:44:27.000 Right.

01:44:28.000 Good old days.

01:44:29.000 But so think about how far we've come.

01:44:31.000 Yeah.

01:44:31.000 Over, let's say, not 100 years.

01:44:33.000 200 years.

01:44:33.000 Oh yeah, it's fascinating.

01:44:34.000 The mind is no different than the rest of the body.

01:44:38.000 We need to exercise it regularly to stay psychologically fit and optimize our performance.

01:44:44.000 The question has been, how do you do that?

01:44:46.000 And the funny thing when writing this book is like, oh, it's that thing people have been doing for thousands of years.

01:44:51.000 We'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.

01:44:56.000 It'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.

01:45:09.000 There's so many people that make a living showing you workouts.

01:45:13.000 A 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.

01:45:25.000 Where you look at, like, the way people look today, you know, just the physical stature, the muscles that they have, and the fitness.

01:45:34.000 Like, that was really rare just 60 years ago.

01:45:37.000 Very rare.

01:45:38.000 And the fact that this has changed so radically within, you know, this generation.

01:45:43.000 It's pretty amazing.

01:45:45.000 If 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,

01:46:00.000 the way we get through our lives, what we can focus on, what we can accomplish, and probably happiness too, right?

01:46:08.000 Exactly.

01:46:10.000 So, you know, a lot of...

01:46:12.000 I love that you're saying this.

01:46:13.000 I can't tell you.

01:46:14.000 Remember back to the days when they said it was career suicide?

01:46:16.000 And I just was like, I don't care.

01:46:17.000 I'm doing this.

01:46:18.000 I think it's some value.

01:46:19.000 So to me, it is extremely gratifying to hear you say that you get it.

01:46:23.000 And also the fact that you think that the fact that it was considered as career suicide is like...

01:46:29.000 Weird.

01:46:30.000 Not 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.

01:46:43.000 And 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.

01:46:55.000 I mean, the last couple years with this pandemic, I mean, same idea.

01:46:58.000 The challenges are going to amp up and we need to arm ourselves, meaning we need to prepare our minds for a type of...

01:47:07.000 Mental armor.

01:47:08.000 We'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.

01:47:18.000 And for some people, they get really fixated in conflict and getting in these little arguments with people that are nowhere near them.

01:47:27.000 When they're doing it online and arguing about, you know, political things or social things.

01:47:33.000 Well, you know, it goes back to something you said a while ago about the benefit of having, what did you call it, getting bored.

01:47:39.000 I would say I call it essentially task-free work.

01:47:45.000 Like, create active white space in your day where you're task-free.

01:47:49.000 And 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.

01:47:58.000 And if you think that being on social media as your downtime is giving your attention a break, you're wrong.

01:48:04.000 You are in a task situation.

01:48:06.000 Context.

01:48:07.000 And you are expending out your attention every time you scroll.

01:48:12.000 In fact, that's why these social media companies are making gajillions of dollars.

01:48:16.000 Your attention is the commodity.

01:48:17.000 You are giving it.

01:48:19.000 That is the product.

01:48:21.000 So to be aware that it's not innocuous.

01:48:24.000 It actually is problematic.

01:48:26.000 And to be aware that, you know, a solution like breakup with my phone is not a reasonable and realistic solution.

01:48:32.000 You're going to need your phone.

01:48:34.000 Even if I think about my kids, I ask them, what are you guys doing?

01:48:37.000 I don't even have to ask them, they tell me.

01:48:40.000 They got rid of all their social media apps, so it's not distracting.

01:48:42.000 But for some apps that they have to use, they just use another piece of software that limits the time.

01:48:48.000 This is your children?

01:48:50.000 Yeah.

01:48:51.000 So they go in and they're like, I got three more minutes to use YouTube.

01:48:54.000 They've done this voluntarily?

01:48:56.000 They did, because they have to figure out a way to manage their own things.

01:48:59.000 How old are they?

01:49:00.000 15 and 19. Really?

01:49:02.000 Interesting.

01:49:03.000 Now, do you think that's because you're their mom?

01:49:04.000 Maybe.

01:49:05.000 I don't know.

01:49:06.000 They're more hyper-aware of the problems with not focusing and not paying attention to things?

01:49:11.000 I don't know if that's it or they're just like...

01:49:13.000 It's gotta be. 1.00

01:49:13.000 No 15 and 19 year old does that shit on their own. 1.00

01:49:15.000 I mean, you'd be surprised. 0.99

01:49:16.000 I think that we think that children are unaware of the costs of social media on their attention and we're wrong.

01:49:23.000 They are suffering and they know it.

01:49:25.000 They're just...

01:49:25.000 You know, they're gonna fix it.

01:49:26.000 Facebook changed their name.

01:49:28.000 They're fixing it.

01:49:29.000 Now it's not gonna be a problem anymore.

01:49:31.000 Do you hear that?

01:49:32.000 They decided to change their name.

01:49:34.000 Okay, well...

01:49:35.000 What's that?

01:49:35.000 The Metaverse.

01:49:36.000 The Metaverse?

01:49:37.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:49:38.000 They're changing the whole company, man.

01:49:40.000 What's it called?

01:49:41.000 They haven't announced it yet, but they're focusing on that new thing that's taking over the internet.

01:49:46.000 What is the new thing?

01:49:47.000 What are you talking about?

01:49:47.000 The metaverse.

01:49:48.000 I've been trying to tell you about it for a few weeks.

01:49:49.000 Well, explain yourself.

01:49:50.000 I don't really know how to explain it, honestly, but it's like Web 3.0.

01:49:55.000 I've heard it discussed that way.

01:49:57.000 It's a combination of VR, AR, NFTs, Bitcoin, cryptocurrency, decentralized social media.

01:50:05.000 And this is what Facebook's concentrating on now?

01:50:08.000 Yeah.

01:50:11.000 Responsible behavior from social media companies is awesome.

01:50:14.000 Great.

01:50:15.000 Please continue.

01:50:16.000 I don't trust it.

01:50:17.000 I don't believe that's what they're doing.

01:50:18.000 They're trying to stay alive.

01:50:19.000 They're also the corporate version of it, so it's very hot to take over, and that's why they're, yeah.

01:50:23.000 But here's what I do know.

01:50:24.000 If you train your attention in this way and have more meta-awareness, use it in the context of your social media use.

01:50:33.000 Notice you're going for the phone.

01:50:35.000 Notice you're picking it up.

01:50:37.000 Notice that your face was recognized.

01:50:38.000 You're clicking on the app.

01:50:40.000 Be aware as you're scrolling. 0.98

01:50:42.000 We 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. 0.99

01:50:53.000 Confused. 0.88

01:50:54.000 Anyway, going back to that white space idea.

01:50:59.000 The 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.

01:51:12.000 Our chances for positive visioning, creative problem solving, insight...

01:51:18.000 And frankly, positive mood, we're all, we're disadvantaging that.

01:51:22.000 We're cutting out the thing that will help us with that.

01:51:25.000 And, you know, I always think about it.

01:51:27.000 It's like actually even more than that.

01:51:29.000 Like, 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.

01:51:36.000 Every morning, my husband takes him or I take him.

01:51:39.000 He's on a leash.

01:51:40.000 We got our thing to do.

01:51:41.000 Sure, you may wander around, but I'm pretty much keeping the leash.

01:51:45.000 That's attention.

01:51:46.000 We're in line.

01:51:47.000 We're trying to do what we do.

01:51:48.000 Frankly, 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.

01:51:55.000 And maybe you do this with your dog, too.

01:51:57.000 Taking the dog to the dog park.

01:51:59.000 Take it off leash.

01:52:00.000 Runs around.

01:52:00.000 He's so joyful.

01:52:01.000 I feel joyful.

01:52:02.000 Like, there's a freedom in that.

01:52:04.000 And we need to do that with our own mind, with our own attention.

01:52:08.000 We need to know that this is a valuable thing to do.

01:52:11.000 And we need to take the moments, and they could be micro-moments.

01:52:13.000 When you're standing at the checkout line...

01:52:16.000 Don't check out.

01:52:17.000 Don't pick up the phone.

01:52:18.000 Just be there with yourself.

01:52:20.000 Allow your mind to go where it will.

01:52:22.000 Take those moments in nature.

01:52:24.000 Take the walk from the office to the car as just to be with yourself.

01:52:30.000 Maybe 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.

01:52:37.000 You know, we need to return to these moments because, frankly, We need it.

01:52:44.000 It's fascinating that you're saying something that seems so simple.

01:52:46.000 Just 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.

01:53:04.000 What about other physical activities?

01:53:07.000 What do you think the benefits are, whether it's yoga or running or something like that?

01:53:12.000 How much of...

01:53:13.000 Because there's a thing that when I was younger, they discussed martial arts.

01:53:18.000 They talked about it as a moving meditation.

01:53:20.000 And I remember thinking that when you're doing it, it's so difficult to do that all you can think about is it.

01:53:28.000 And there's some sort of an effect while you're engaging in that that it helps the mind.

01:53:35.000 It cleanses the mind.

01:53:37.000 It removes... 1.00

01:53:38.000 It removes the significance of a lot of these internal dialogue and the bullshit that you have going on inside your head. 0.99

01:53:46.000 Yeah. 0.96

01:53:47.000 And in some sense, these are also traditional practices, right?

01:53:53.000 So 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,

01:54:08.000 because they have to be.

01:54:09.000 Like, if you cannot be distracted, you will fall over, right?

01:54:13.000 Or you'll get punched in the face.

01:54:14.000 Like, whatever it is, you are not going to be able to go away from the now.

01:54:17.000 You are in the now.

01:54:19.000 But you're doing it, and that actually moves us more toward why we do this in the first place.

01:54:23.000 We're not sitting there quietly focusing on our breath because we want to be, like, Olympic-level breath followers.

01:54:28.000 Nobody cares about their breath or following it.

01:54:30.000 It's just that we're trained.

01:54:32.000 In 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.

01:54:40.000 So 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?

01:54:48.000 So we want to keep translating that over and over again.

01:54:51.000 I think movement-based practices, active practices, are getting us even more aligned with dealing with the fluidity and complexity of real life.

01:54:59.000 Do you apply that also to your work with the military?

01:55:03.000 Like is maybe that something that like while they're doing physical training is there a way to think during that that helps?

01:55:11.000 You mean orient to the physical training?

01:55:13.000 Yeah.

01:55:14.000 Well, a lot of this is why you already mentioned that you have friends that are athletes that are using this.

01:55:17.000 In many ways, what are the things that drive down performance excellence?

01:55:23.000 If you think about that, right?

01:55:25.000 You're a competitive athlete, and what is it that's going to mess you up?

01:55:29.000 It's probably not.

01:55:30.000 You've already perfected the physical.

01:55:31.000 You know the movements.

01:55:32.000 You've practiced them thousands of times.

01:55:34.000 It's the inner dialogue.

01:55:36.000 So it's either the, I'm the best thing ever.

01:55:39.000 I got this.

01:55:41.000 Or, I really messed up.

01:55:44.000 How am I ever going to recover?

01:55:46.000 Or, this other team is doing this, and you have a story about it and you're imposing it.

01:55:51.000 These are all ways that the mind is behaving that, frankly, disadvantages getting more information about what's actually occurring.

01:55:58.000 Yeah, it's often paralysis by analysis is a big one.

01:56:01.000 The fear of consequences.

01:56:02.000 That they concentrate on the negative possibilities, the negative consequences, and that becomes crippling.

01:56:08.000 And the anxiety of fear overcomes them.

01:56:12.000 It'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.

01:56:24.000 You could use it to cook your food or it could burn your house down.

01:56:27.000 Like 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.

01:56:44.000 But you also can't let it just run away because if it just burns you down then you'll be paralyzed with fear.

01:56:51.000 Exactly.

01:56:51.000 There's a balance there, but how to achieve that balance?

01:56:55.000 Exactly.

01:56:55.000 And that's the question.

01:56:56.000 So you can understand this conceptually, but how do you not let fear turn into a raging fire?

01:57:02.000 I mean, most of the ways we approach this is distract yourself or pretend the fear is not actually worthy of feeling fear or suppress it.

01:57:12.000 These are not effective approaches.

01:57:14.000 They're not.

01:57:16.000 Yeah.

01:57:36.000 Whatever 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.

01:57:48.000 We acknowledge the existence.

01:57:50.000 The river could be burning content over and over again.

01:57:53.000 Yes, it is here, and I'm here for it.

01:57:56.000 That's a different way to address this and to achieve it, and this is not just an idea, it's training.

01:58:04.000 Right.

01:58:05.000 Now, 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?

01:58:23.000 This seems like something that's practical.

01:58:27.000 You can get people to do it.

01:58:29.000 It's applicable.

01:58:31.000 But is it optimal?

01:58:35.000 I love this question.

01:58:36.000 Okay.

01:58:37.000 12 minutes a day is the answer to what is the minimum effective dose for me to benefit?

01:58:43.000 Every study we've done with mindfulness training where we offered people the opportunity to practice, as long as they got to 12, they benefited.

01:58:50.000 12 to 15. The more they did, the more they benefited.

01:58:55.000 So that's the first thing to say, that it is like physical activity.

01:59:00.000 You don't have to limit yourself to 12 minutes.

01:59:02.000 I almost think of 12 minutes as like couch to 5k.

01:59:05.000 It's enough of a load that it's helping.

01:59:07.000 It's definitely helping.

01:59:08.000 Now, if you want to keep going, go for it.

01:59:11.000 If you want to double that, go for it.

01:59:13.000 In fact, for me, in circumstances where I know I'm going to be under a heavy load, Like even coming here today.

01:59:18.000 Maybe I'll do 24 minutes.

01:59:20.000 Maybe I'll do a half an hour.

01:59:21.000 What'd you do today?

01:59:21.000 Just 30 minutes in the morning.

01:59:23.000 What'd you do?

01:59:23.000 I did two things.

01:59:25.000 I did the focus attention practice and I did something else called loving kindness.

01:59:31.000 And loving kindness is that third category.

01:59:33.000 I talked about concentrative practices, receptive practices, and these are really heart practices, compassion practices.

01:59:40.000 That one is actually really helpful when you've got a big performance coming up.

01:59:46.000 Because frankly, for all of us who are interested in excellence in how we perform, that can take on an edge of self-punitive action.

01:59:59.000 Orientation, where we're so fixated on the things we want to do better, we forget what we wish for ourselves.

02:00:05.000 So 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.

02:00:17.000 Have you heard of these kinds of practices?

02:00:19.000 No, not that one.

02:00:20.000 Okay, so loving...

02:00:21.000 I mean, it's called loving kindness.

02:00:22.000 I never caught loving kindness because...

02:00:24.000 What do you call it?

02:00:25.000 Connection practice.

02:00:26.000 Okay.

02:00:26.000 Because that's what you're connecting with yourself and other people.

02:00:29.000 Does loving kindness practice sound too...

02:00:31.000 You tell me.

02:00:33.000 Would you jump on...

02:00:34.000 Would you sign up for something if I said...

02:00:35.000 Yeah, I don't have a problem with it.

02:00:37.000 Thank you!

02:00:38.000 Because we need that kind of shift in orientation.

02:00:41.000 Most people, they'd probably like, I'm not up for it.

02:00:44.000 Really?

02:00:44.000 Isn't that funny?

02:00:45.000 That they would shy away from love and kindness?

02:00:47.000 It is a shocking thing, but, you know, I don't care.

02:00:53.000 I mean, at some point we'll call it loving kindness.

02:00:55.000 I think those phrases have been co-opted by fruits.

02:00:58.000 Like crazy people with like wooden beads who are like, you know, trying to be a guru.

02:01:02.000 That's sort of the thing.

02:01:04.000 It's like it's affiliatively kind of problematic and it's very plain.

02:01:09.000 And actually with a lot of the groups that we work with, shockingly maybe, they love this practice.

02:01:14.000 Like, the cadets I was talking about, it's one of the ones that they ask for often.

02:01:18.000 I think it's a good practice, but I think it's one of those things like when people say, I'm spiritual, you go, oh, are you really?

02:01:23.000 You know, it's like those phrases have been co-opted by so many people that are kind of fraudulent.

02:01:31.000 There's a thing that people do where they want you to think that they're enlightened, right?

02:01:38.000 Yeah.

02:01:38.000 And it's annoying.

02:01:40.000 I think basically that sums it up.

02:01:43.000 It's annoying.

02:01:43.000 It's annoying because you know they're hustling.

02:01:45.000 Yeah, or there's another agenda that doesn't really have to do it.

02:01:48.000 So 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.

02:01:57.000 It's a great phrase, though.

02:01:59.000 I love it.

02:01:59.000 It really is.

02:02:00.000 Love and kindness is really the right way to look at it.

02:02:02.000 Maybe we should just ignore the cuckoos.

02:02:04.000 And just call it that.

02:02:05.000 One of my favorite, one of my, you know, Jack Kornfield, and he talks about this, but another teacher named Sharon Salzberg.

02:02:12.000 She is amazing.

02:02:13.000 She was actually one of our consultants for the military project.

02:02:16.000 So can I just tell you a little bit about loving kindnesses?

02:02:18.000 Add to your toolkit.

02:02:20.000 All right.

02:02:20.000 So in the sequence of things, first we teach people these concentrated practices.

02:02:26.000 Then we bring in the open monitoring because it's a little bit more complicated to stay steady enough to...

02:02:30.000 Not wander.

02:02:31.000 This loving-kindness category is the last thing we teach them.

02:02:34.000 It kind of rounds out the program.

02:02:36.000 So 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...

02:02:46.000 It's a practice of well-wishing.

02:02:49.000 Like the way you might say, happy birthday or have a good day.

02:02:52.000 You're not demanding anything.

02:02:54.000 It's not positive self-talk.

02:02:56.000 It's not manifesting.

02:02:58.000 It's a well-wishing.

02:03:01.000 All right?

02:03:01.000 And you do it because you're bringing to mind, keeping on your whiteboard, working memory, what matters.

02:03:08.000 So, for example, in the way that I do it, you start out with yourself.

02:03:12.000 And today I did it only for myself.

02:03:15.000 But what you typically do is you say these phrases, and I'll say them in a second.

02:03:18.000 You start with yourself, and then you move to a close other, a benefactor, somebody who's been good to you.

02:03:24.000 Then you move to a neutral person, somebody you never, we don't know, maybe a cashier at a restaurant or in a store you go to often.

02:03:32.000 And then a slightly more difficult person.

02:03:34.000 And then you kind of expand to your team, to your community, to all beings everywhere.

02:03:41.000 And it's like you're doing this to kind of broaden the circle of care and concern.

02:03:46.000 Who matters?

02:03:47.000 What matters?

02:03:48.000 So the kind of phrases you say are...

02:03:51.000 I'm just giving you mine and you can choose whatever, but short, sweet, simple.

02:03:56.000 May I be happy?

02:03:58.000 May I be healthy?

02:04:00.000 May I be safe?

02:04:03.000 May I live with ease?

02:04:06.000 And every time you say that, just happy, healthy, safe, ease, is just, what do I wish for myself?

02:04:13.000 Like, in my life, ultimately, what do I want?

02:04:16.000 I want to be happy.

02:04:17.000 I want to advantage that.

02:04:19.000 I want to feel psychologically safe.

02:04:21.000 I want to feel physically safe.

02:04:23.000 I want to have ease in my life.

02:04:25.000 Who wants a headache? 0.59

02:04:26.000 So you say this to yourself over and over, and it's like reminding you of, like, fundamentally, what do I want?

02:04:31.000 I wish this for my loved ones.

02:04:33.000 I wish it for...

02:04:35.000 You.

02:04:36.000 I wish it for Jamie.

02:04:37.000 I wish it for everybody in this building.

02:04:39.000 I wish it for everybody in...

02:04:40.000 You can see how you expand the circle.

02:04:42.000 For our military service members, in some sense, they have no problem wishing it for their team.

02:04:48.000 Of course you want everybody on your team to have these qualities.

02:04:52.000 Oftentimes a little bit trickier to wish it for yourself, but something really interesting starts happening when you do this.

02:04:59.000 A lot of the sort of self-critical and self-punitive wars we have with ourself can start getting dialed down.

02:05:06.000 It'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?

02:05:15.000 And it really helps, by the way, with the kind of maybe very loved one that can also sometimes be the difficult one.

02:05:22.000 So 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.

02:05:29.000 And 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.

02:05:48.000 It just keeps that kind of orientation of what the purpose is of what we're doing in our lives in mind.

02:05:56.000 Don't you think there's also room for...

02:06:01.000 If you want to achieve things in life, one of the things that you do have to do is you have to be self-critical.

02:06:06.000 You 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.

02:06:24.000 You're being honest with yourself and objective.

02:06:26.000 So in that regard, you kind of got to be a personal critic.

02:06:31.000 So how do you balance that out?

02:06:33.000 Nobody has to be taught how to be a personal critic.

02:06:36.000 Some people do.

02:06:37.000 Maybe, maybe, maybe.

02:06:38.000 Some people are delusional.

02:06:39.000 But what's interesting, those people don't really get anywhere.

02:06:41.000 The 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.

02:06:50.000 And in doing so, they deny themselves the opportunity for growth and learning.

02:06:55.000 Absolutely.

02:06:56.000 So I think you kind of answered your question, which is, this is a corrective.

02:07:01.000 The default is being self-critical.

02:07:04.000 And 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.

02:07:13.000 And 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.

02:07:25.000 Whenever we have to do that, there's going to be those around the edges aspects of evaluation.

02:07:30.000 Those are natural.

02:07:32.000 They should happen.

02:07:32.000 That's how we get to be as good as we can be.

02:07:36.000 This is just adding that other piece in like a loving person in your life might, but toward you.

02:07:45.000 To say, yeah, of course, you know, yeah, you better look at it.

02:07:47.000 And by the way, all those other practices are to do that first part.

02:07:50.000 See what is.

02:07:51.000 How was that?

02:07:52.000 Did I actually perform at my best?

02:07:54.000 What could I have brought in that was better?

02:07:56.000 How could I have actually been clearer?

02:07:58.000 Whatever it is, we're trying to see with that non-reactivity.

02:08:01.000 And this is the heart that we're putting around it.

02:08:04.000 We'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.

02:08:16.000 Self-hatred.

02:08:17.000 So how does one balance out self-criticism and not let it turn into self-hatred?

02:08:22.000 Yeah, we want productive.

02:08:23.000 Just like for anybody else.

02:08:24.000 If I were going to critique you, you'd probably want me to do it in a way that's going to be helpful to you.

02:08:28.000 Instead of saying, yeah, but you know, I don't like you at all anyway. 1.00

02:08:31.000 You're a jerk. 1.00

02:08:32.000 You know, nobody wants that. 1.00

02:08:34.000 But we do that to ourselves.

02:08:35.000 We turn the things that are problematic and are worthy of our looking at into some kind of deep character flaw.

02:08:43.000 Instead of being able to keep it at the level of, I see what there is to do and I'm just going to do that.

02:08:47.000 Right.

02:08:47.000 I don't have to hate you for it.

02:08:49.000 Just do it differently.

02:08:50.000 Right.

02:08:52.000 The 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.

02:09:06.000 It requires you being obsessed.

02:09:08.000 Yeah.

02:09:09.000 It's very difficult to balance obsession with these hyper-focused super achievers with self-love.

02:09:18.000 There's very little self-love going on when you're obsessed.

02:09:20.000 I think that that may be the default of how things turn out, but I don't see them as contradictory at all.

02:09:25.000 I think you totally can love yourself and totally be striving for excellence.

02:09:32.000 Why can't you?

02:09:33.000 I don't know.

02:09:35.000 Well, look at that.

02:09:36.000 See, the thing is, there's not that many of them out there to study.

02:09:40.000 When 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,

02:10:01.000 including with their own personal demons.

02:10:03.000 They're like constantly in combat.

02:10:05.000 And with those people, I think their periods of happiness are brief and they come after success.

02:10:13.000 And then they constantly chase that dragon.

02:10:16.000 And 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.

02:10:24.000 There 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.

02:10:38.000 They're ferocious.

02:10:40.000 I 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.

02:10:52.000 Second thing is nothing I said about any of these practices is about being nice or happy.

02:11:02.000 But self-love is kind of about being happy, right?

02:11:04.000 It's about wishing.

02:11:06.000 It's not about nice.

02:11:07.000 No?

02:11:08.000 And it's not even about being happy.

02:11:11.000 It sounds terrible to say this, but the goal is not to contrive more positivity.

02:11:19.000 Okay.

02:11:20.000 The goal is to be clear on what the intention is behind what you're doing.

02:11:26.000 And my intention in my life is... 0.96

02:11:29.000 I wouldn't bust my ass unless I wanted some fulfillment, some sense of joy, some ease. 0.97

02:11:36.000 That's why we're doing it. 0.99

02:11:38.000 We forget.

02:11:38.000 We're so in the chase that we forget, wait, why am I doing this?

02:11:42.000 Why am I going to do yet another thing?

02:11:44.000 Oh, I want those things.

02:11:46.000 Keep those in mind.

02:11:47.000 Balance it out.

02:11:48.000 Bring those back in. 1.00

02:11:49.000 Keep them on the whiteboard.

02:11:50.000 So that in the pursuit, I don't get lost.

02:11:53.000 I don't get burnt out.

02:11:54.000 I don't harm myself or other people.

02:11:57.000 Because you're right.

02:11:58.000 There is always this sort of pendulum of extreme behavior toward ourselves or other people that we interact with.

02:12:07.000 And this becomes very important for leaders, too, by the way, even if it's not in the professional athletic context.

02:12:12.000 We've got to be aware of that pendulum.

02:12:17.000 Yeah, that is a real problem with people that are hyper achievers, right?

02:12:23.000 Whether 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.

02:12:31.000 You 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?

02:12:40.000 But they're obsessed with numbers.

02:12:43.000 They're obsessed with stock market goals or whatever it is they're trying to achieve.

02:12:47.000 And they're, on paper, very successful.

02:12:50.000 Like, look at him.

02:12:51.000 Look at his beautiful car and his beautiful house.

02:12:54.000 But really, they live in hell.

02:12:57.000 Yeah.

02:12:57.000 Yeah, and they're constantly stressed out and they don't like that life.

02:13:02.000 But they're trapped in this quantifiable contest where they're trying to achieve numbers.

02:13:11.000 Yeah.

02:13:12.000 And it kind of brings it back to where I was, where I was grinding so much I couldn't feel my teeth.

02:13:18.000 I'm sitting here with my...

02:13:21.000 It's a smaller scale.

02:13:22.000 I'm not a CEO jet setting everywhere.

02:13:24.000 But I had all the things I wanted in my life.

02:13:27.000 I had this awesome job.

02:13:28.000 I married to the guy I love.

02:13:30.000 Beautiful baby.

02:13:32.000 Nice house.

02:13:33.000 I was not there for any of it.

02:13:35.000 And I could feel that.

02:13:37.000 And 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.

02:13:45.000 I don't want to change any of this.

02:13:46.000 The external circumstances are great.

02:13:49.000 I need to be in it with the fullness so I can enjoy it.

02:13:53.000 And that's all we're talking about right now.

02:13:56.000 We're talking about a way in which not to not kill it, but not kill yourself in the process or anybody else.

02:14:04.000 It all sounds great.

02:14:06.000 I like what you're saying.

02:14:23.000 Why I'm striving in the first place.

02:14:25.000 Like, what is it that I want?

02:14:26.000 And going back to this morning, partly the reason I wanted to do that is because my book just launched yesterday.

02:14:33.000 And it's such a momentum.

02:14:35.000 I mean, with any kind of success, there's like, yeah, go, crush it!

02:14:39.000 And I wanted to just take that time and give back to myself of like, you know what?

02:14:43.000 Enjoy it, too.

02:14:44.000 Be here.

02:14:45.000 Remember what you wish for.

02:14:46.000 This is going to be fun.

02:14:47.000 Like, this was fun.

02:14:49.000 But reminding myself of...

02:14:52.000 Of what it's all about, not on my deathbed, but every morning, it's a pretty useful thing to do.

02:15:00.000 Well, in a lot of ways, especially what you just said, that it really is most of your life because thinking is constant.

02:15:11.000 It is a part of your life.

02:15:13.000 And attention and focus, it's everywhere.

02:15:16.000 It's the entire life.

02:15:18.000 So this book and you concentrating on attention and trying to give people the tools to help...

02:15:27.000 Accelerate their attention or focus their attention or utilize their attention more efficiently.

02:15:31.000 That really is life.

02:15:33.000 It's so much of life because it's applicable to basically everything we do.

02:15:38.000 Absolutely.

02:15:39.000 I mean, really, it sounds like I'm being a little bit grandiose, but what you pay attention to is your life.

02:15:45.000 Yeah.

02:15:46.000 It really is.

02:15:49.000 Like, they're so exhausting. 1.00

02:15:51.000 And the problem is, like, they'll drag you into their waters with them and drown you in their bullshit, right? 1.00

02:15:58.000 That's a real problem because when people are always negative, like, oh my god, man, all you're concentrating on is the wrong shit. 1.00

02:16:05.000 It's like someone with a poor diet and they get obese and start having heart attacks. 0.99

02:16:10.000 You're concentrating on eating the wrong things.

02:16:12.000 You're concentrating on living the wrong way.

02:16:14.000 Well, 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.

02:16:26.000 The jealousy and hatred towards people they don't even know because they might see them on television or whatever.

02:16:31.000 Yeah.

02:16:32.000 That's why actually, and in the context of feeling that, somebody else's Dysfunction.

02:16:39.000 What are you going to do in the context of that, right?

02:16:43.000 So, 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.

02:16:57.000 And then it speeds off again.

02:16:59.000 And I was just really terrified.

02:17:01.000 And also, like, how is this driver going to respond?

02:17:05.000 And he's like, you know what?

02:17:07.000 I'm just...

02:17:07.000 I deal with this all the time.

02:17:09.000 I don't know what his life is that's making him do this, but that's not my life.

02:17:17.000 It's unfortunate that it happened, and I'm just going to keep driving us to the airport.

02:17:20.000 I'm like...

02:17:21.000 Thank you, thank you, thank you.

02:17:22.000 Yeah, you got a good one.

02:17:23.000 But I did.

02:17:24.000 But the thing is, remember back to the loving kindness practice, we don't just practice for ourselves and the people we love and care for.

02:17:31.000 We move it into the neutral.

02:17:32.000 We move it into the difficult person for that exact same reason.

02:17:36.000 Because 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?

02:17:45.000 My true wish for you is not this stuff.

02:17:48.000 You obviously are saying this to yourself privately.

02:17:50.000 It changes your orientation toward the person and the way you're going to engage with them.

02:17:54.000 In some sense, you start having more compassion.

02:17:56.000 Like, man, you are so...

02:17:58.000 Sad or fearful or angry.

02:18:01.000 It's taken you over.

02:18:02.000 That's not what I wish for you.

02:18:03.000 So at least in the way that I interact with this person now, I'm stable and I'm aware of what I'm seeing.

02:18:10.000 And I remind myself of what I want for any other person.

02:18:14.000 And 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.

02:18:24.000 I mean, I think all of it is information, and you get good information from bad examples.

02:18:30.000 You get information about the ways of life that you don't want to live.

02:18:35.000 You get information about the way people interface with their surroundings and other human beings that you don't want to mimic that.

02:18:42.000 And 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.

02:19:03.000 You 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.

02:19:12.000 Now, you're not going to fundamentally change somebody.

02:19:13.000 A little bit, yeah.

02:19:14.000 I remember once I was at the airport and I saw this woman screaming at her kid.

02:19:20.000 She was losing her mind, screaming at this child.

02:19:24.000 It was so obvious, like, you're losing it.

02:19:26.000 And I was like, you know what?

02:19:28.000 I could avoid her or be like, oh God, this...

02:19:30.000 And 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.

02:19:47.000 And it helped.

02:19:48.000 Like as soon as I kind of entered her space, she's like, you know, kind of like collected herself and kind of started calming down.

02:19:54.000 And I was like...

02:19:55.000 Small, just a tiny little thing.

02:19:57.000 I was doing it in a very compassionate way.

02:19:59.000 I wasn't to judge her.

02:20:00.000 I didn't go scream at her for screaming at her kid.

02:20:01.000 I just wanted her to nudge her in a way that might remind her of what her purpose is.

02:20:07.000 The kid maybe ran away.

02:20:08.000 I have no idea what happened.

02:20:10.000 But I knew that her reaction was...

02:20:26.000 Last question.

02:20:27.000 Do you have an audiobook?

02:20:28.000 Yes.

02:20:29.000 Did you read it?

02:20:30.000 No! 1.00

02:20:31.000 Damn it! 1.00

02:20:31.000 I know! 1.00

02:20:32.000 Why didn't you read it?

02:20:33.000 You have a great voice.

02:20:34.000 Thank you.

02:20:35.000 Thank you.

02:20:35.000 I wanted to.

02:20:36.000 I just couldn't figure out how to have a week where I could do that.

02:20:39.000 Oh, well, that makes sense.

02:20:41.000 Maybe next time around.

02:20:41.000 Because you're very busy.

02:20:42.000 Do you have a copy of it?

02:20:43.000 I do.

02:20:44.000 I do.

02:20:44.000 Yeah.

02:20:45.000 Grab it.

02:20:45.000 Is it here?

02:20:46.000 It's over there.

02:20:46.000 Over there.

02:20:47.000 Go grab it.

02:20:47.000 Grab it so we can hold it up and let everybody know.

02:20:49.000 And it's out today.

02:20:51.000 It was out yesterday.

02:20:52.000 Yesterday.

02:20:52.000 Okay.

02:20:53.000 So, hold please.

02:20:56.000 We're going to grab it, pull it up so you can have an actual copy of it.

02:21:03.000 Oh, Jamie's got it.

02:21:04.000 Right there.

02:21:07.000 Peak mind.

02:21:09.000 Find your focus.

02:21:10.000 Own your attention.

02:21:12.000 Invest 12 minutes a day.

02:21:14.000 How many pages is it?

02:21:17.000 It's a lot of work to read all this.

02:21:21.000 And it guides you through this.

02:21:22.000 Yeah, there's a whole four-week program at the end to help with what you should do for the 12 minutes every day.

02:21:27.000 All right.

02:21:27.000 It's available now.

02:21:29.000 Ladies and gentlemen, go get it. 0.70

02:21:30.000 Even though she didn't read it, you can get the audiobook as well.

02:21:33.000 Available everywhere.

02:21:34.000 Thank you very much.

02:21:35.000 Thank you.

02:21:36.000 I had a great conversation.

02:21:36.000 I really enjoyed it.

02:21:37.000 Oh, me too.

02:21:37.000 Me too.

02:21:38.000 It was fun.

02:21:39.000 And I think it's such an important subject.

02:21:41.000 I think it's just...

02:21:42.000 The way you think about things is like...

02:21:44.000 It can make just a gigantic impact in the quality and just the way your life progresses.

02:21:50.000 Absolutely.

02:21:51.000 All right.

02:21:52.000 Thank you.

02:21:53.000 Bye, everybody.

The Joe Rogan Experience - October 21, 2021

Joe Rogan Experience #1723 - Amishi Jha

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Transcript