BY: Amishi P. Jha, Ph.D.
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4 Thoughts
1. Attention is Everything (and yours is perfect)
“You may be surprised to know that all of this ultimately comes down to one thing: your attention.
- If you’re feeling that you’re in a cognitive fog: depleted attention.
- If you’re feeling anxious, worried, or overwhelmed by your emotions: hijacked attention.
- If you can’t seem to focus so you can take action or dive into urgent work: fragmented attention.
- If you feel out of step and detached from others: disconnected attention.”
In other words, attention is everything. As Dr. Jha points out, basically any issue we’re facing, from anxiety to cognitive fog, comes back to an attentional problem.
And one of the most surprising points she makes is that our attention is actually perfect. Thus, if you’re feeling anything on that list—like you can never concentrate, are always overwhelmed, or feel detached—it’s likely because your attention is working perfectly. Wait, what!?
“I want to make one thing crystal clear: there is nothing wrong with your attention. In fact, it’s working so well, and so on cue, that computer programs can predict how it will respond. We’re in a crisis because our attention works so well. It’s doing exactly what it was designed to do: respond powerfully to certain stimuli. You can’t defeat algorithms on social media websites, the Pavlovian pull of your phone’s dings and bings, the blaring red notification bubble of your inbox, or the desire to complete one more quest so you can up-level. Yet, we aren’t helpless. We can solve this attention crisis.”
How’s that for a mind-blowing perspective shift? Everything we interpret as attentional problems is happening because our attention works so well. It’s just that our environment surrounds us with perfectly-designed ways to use our attention.
But we’re not hopeless. Let’s look at how we solve this attentional crisis: mindfulness.
***
P.S. Unfortunately, escaping society (my dream) isn’t the answer. Dr. Jha says: “But we don’t need external stimuli to have a crisis of attention—this has always been a challenge for humans. We have records of medieval monks in the year 420 fretting that they could not keep their thoughts on God as they were supposed to…They felt overwhelmed with information, frustrated that the minute they sat down to read something, their restless minds wanted to read something else instead. …They went so far as to cut off relationships with family and give up all their possessions—the idea being that if they had fewer earthly entanglements to think about, they’d be less distracted. Did it work? No.” Talk about disappointing…my entire life goal is now ruined 😂😂😂.
2. The Only Thing That Works: Mindfulness
“You cannot simply decide to pay attention ‘better.’ No matter how much I tell you about how attention works and why, and no matter how motivated you are, the way your brain pays attention cannot be fundamentally altered by sheer force of will. I don’t care if you’re the most disciplined person alive: it will not work. Instead, we need to train our brains to work differently. And the exciting news is: at long last, we’ve actually figured out how.”
Dr. Jha studied a number of ways to improve attention in her lab at the University of Miami. As she points out here, sheer discipline doesn’t work. Neither will a lot of brain-hack games you see advertised. The one thing that does: mindfulness.
“I’ll skip to the end, to the zillion-dollar question: Did it work? Could mindfulness training protect and strengthen attention? [//] The answer was a resounding yes. In fact, mindfulness training was the only brain-training tool that consistently worked to strengthen attention across our studies.”
This is great news. We’ve already learned that attention is everything. Now, we have an ancient tool in the form of mindfulness for training that attention and improving every aspect of our lives. It means that, through mindfulness, “we can strengthen our capacity to fully experience and enjoy the moments we are in, to embark on new adventures, and to navigate life’s challenges more effectively.”
Sounds good to me. Let’s look at the basics of mindfulness training and how long we need to do it to get the benefits.
3. The Flashlight, Floodlight, and Juggler
Dr. Jha had an excellent analogy for our attentional systems that puts mindfulness training in perspective: the flashlight, floodlight, and juggler.
“The Flashlight Your attention can be like a flashlight. Where you point it becomes brighter, highlighted, more salient. Whatever’s not in the flashlight’s beam? That information remains suppressed—it stays dampened, dimmed, and blocked out. … You can point that flashlight beam anywhere: outward at your external environment, or inward, to your own thoughts, memories, emotions, body sensations, and the like.”
“The Floodlight This is, in some ways, the opposite of the flashlight. Where the flashlight is narrow and focused, this subsystem, called the alerting system, is broad and open.”
“The Juggler To direct, oversee, and manage what we’re doing, moment to moment, as well as ensure that our actions are aligned with what we’re aiming to do: this is the job of the juggler. […] The juggler’s job isn’t to do everything itself. It’s to make sure that the whole operation is fluidly ongoing. It’s to match up goals with behaviors to make sure those goals get accomplished.”
Training all three attentional systems is critical, but “finding our flashlight” is the most fundamental starting point for mindfulness training.
And, of course, this comes back to the breath: “To find your flashlight, you’ll draw on a foundational mindfulness practice often called breath awareness.” We point our flashlight at our breath, notice when it wanders away, and then bring it back to our breath. Simple enough.
However, this practice is actually even more potent because it simultaneously trains the floodlight and juggler, too:
“The breath awareness exercise targets all three systems of attention, because it allows you to practice focusing—as you orient attention to the breath; noticing—staying alert and monitoring ongoing mental activity to detect mind-wandering; and redirecting—executive management of cognitive processes to make sure we return and remain on-task.”
So, we focus on our breath to train our flashlight, floodlight, and juggler 👏 And as we’re about to learn, we don’t even have to do it for that long.
4. You Actually Have to Train (but not long—the most important finding of the book)
“Imagine a moment that calls for physical strength. Say you’re about to help a friend move a piece of furniture. You approach the heavy couch, realize you’re not quite up to the task and . . . drop to the floor and begin to do push-ups in an effort to gain the strength you need.
If that sounds silly, consider that this is what so many of us do every day, constantly, when faced with cognitive challenges—instead of developing a training regimen, making it a habit, and doing a little bit each day to build up our capacities, we drop and try to eke out a “mental push-up” or two once we’re under stress or in crisis, the whole time believing that it will help and that we’ll be able to stand up and “lift that couch.” Instead, we’ll only be more depleted.”
That’s such a fantastic analogy. It gets a central theme of the book across perfectly: We actually have to train regularly for this stuff to work. Throughout the book, Dr. Jha likens mindfulness training to physical exercise because it’s so obvious that regular training is needed there. But for some reason, we think our brains should be able to magically focus when needed without training. It doesn’t work like that. We actually have to train. Consistently.
And the good news is that we don’t have to train too much. In fact, Dr. Jha and her students ran tons of experiments to find the minimum effective dose. Here’s what they discovered:
“The pieces were falling into place. We were homing in on a recipe that time-pressured people were actually willing to do. And, when they followed it, their attention benefited. It was, to the best of our knowledge up to that point, moving us to a practical prescription, the minimum required dosage for training your attention: Four weeks. Five days a week. Twelve minutes a day.”
Using science to arrive at practical solutions is about as good as it gets: Twelve minutes a day, five days a week, for four weeks. And if you need more motivation, here it is:
“[I]f you come away from this book with anything, I want it to be a clear sense of how important this is. We’re busy. We’re time-pressured. We are always under the gun. But twelve more minutes of work is simply not going to catch you up as much as sitting quietly, and on purpose, with your breath.”
Amen to that 👏
1 Life-Changing Idea
Pre-silience: Maybe the Best Word and Concept Ever
“People talk a lot about resilience. What you’ll learn in this book is really about what I call “pre-silience.” Resilience means bouncing back from adversity. But what we want is to train our minds so that we maintain our capacities even as we are experiencing challenge.”
I saved this passage with “OMG lol.” My mind was blown while, simultaneously, I recognized how ridiculous I am, so I laughed at myself.
In any case, I just LOVE this word, pre-silience. It’s perhaps the best word and concept ever:
“[I]t means that you can be in a difficult situation, fully, and know that you have the cognitive resources to get through it.”
This is literally everything we’re trying to do with wisdom in the Learning Center. It’s not just “bouncing back better” (resilience); it’s also being able to acknowledge when times are tough and moving forward anyways. In other words, developing pre-silience.
And the best part? Breathing and mindfulness practices already build this skill:
“Mindfulness practice guides us to be present through stressful, upsetting, demanding circumstances, and know that we have the mental capacities we need to handle it.”
Just remember: “It works only if you do the practice.” 👏
1 Stack of Memorable Quotes
“Our basic definition of mindfulness was this: paying attention to present-moment experience without conceptual elaboration or emotional reactivity.”
“What you focus on becomes most prominent in your present-moment reality: you feel the corresponding emotions; you view the world through that lens.”
“What we’ve uncovered is new evidence that, with training, mindfulness can change the way the brain works by default so that our attention—that precious resource—is protected and readily available, even in the face of high stress and high demand.”
“[O]ur breath is always with us. It’s the most natural built-in target for our attention that we can always return to.”
“Mindfulness practice as attention training allows us to notice when we are no longer in the moment we want to remember.”
“It’s simple: To know if you’re getting grabbed by something and need to intervene, you have to be watching.”
“And attention is one of the fundamental building blocks for all social relationships: it’s what shapes our moment-to-moment interactions with other people. In fact, the Latin root for the word “attention” is attendere, which means “to stretch toward.” In this sense, attention is connection.”
“Attention, both its receptive and concentrative forms, is not only a precious brain resource—it’s a currency, one of our most valuable currencies. The people in our lives notice what, where, and who we spend it on. Attention, in a lot of ways, is our highest form of love.”
“We’re busy. We’re time-pressured. We are always under the gun. But twelve more minutes of work is simply not going to catch you up as much as sitting quietly, and on purpose, with your breath. For only a little effort and a small investment of time, you can reap an enormous reward.”