How to Find Focus and Master Attention with Dr. Amishi Jha

Episode Transcript:

00:00:00 – Amishi Jha
Experiencing conflict is not a problem, but to realize that the conflict does not mean to translate into the elaborated notion that I’m a complete failure and is never going to work out. That’s the mind doing something else.

00:00:19 – Chris Forbes
Welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts. We have quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don’t strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don’t have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it’s not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf, thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Doctor Amishi Jha, a professor of psychology at the University of Miami. She serves as the director of contemplative neuroscience for the Mindfulness Research and Practice Initiative, which she co founded in 2010. Doctor Jha’s work has been featured at NATO, the World Economic Forum, and the Pentagon, and she’s been covered in the New York Times, NPR time, Forbes, and more. On this episode, Eric and Doctor Jha discuss her new book, Peak Mind find your focus, own your attention, invest twelve.

00:01:49 – Eric Zimmer
Minutes a day hi Amishi, welcome to the show.

00:01:52 – Amishi Jha
So great to be here.

00:01:53 – Eric Zimmer
I’m really excited to have you on. We’re going to be discussing your new book, Peak Mind, find your focus, own your attention, invest twelve minutes a day. So we’ll get into that in a minute, but we’ll start like we always do, with a parable. In the parable, there’s a grandparent who’s talking with their grandchild, and they say in life there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops and thinks about it for a second, looks up at their grandparents and says, well, which one wins? I and the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I’d like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do.

00:02:36 – Amishi Jha
Oh, it’s such a great parable. And I love that it’s really so central to what you talk about on this podcast because it so much relates to what I think about and the work that I do in my lab, because it, frankly, is about attention, and what you feed in my mind reflects what you pay attention to, what you value. So to me, it’s entirely describing the power of attention and the vulnerability of mind when we do not attend to things that serve us best.

00:03:06 – Eric Zimmer
Yep, I agree totally. And attention is a big subject in the work that I do. I’ve got a program called Spiritual Habits, and attention is one of the core principles there because you quote William Jhames in your book. There’s another statement that I don’t think you quoted in the book, although it’s possible I missed it, which is my experience, is what I agree to attend to. Fundamental attention really does describe. I wouldn’t say it’s the only thing, but it is a big factor in the type of life we experience.

00:03:37 – Amishi Jha
Absolutely. I mean, it’s funny, William Jhames. I was the father of the field that I’m a member of, psychology, but sometimes I think he’s like an alien from the future because he had so much right about his wisdom and insight into things and couldn’t agree more with your kind of take on that whole thing, which is the centrality of our consciousness. Experience is tied to the conduit for what becomes prominent in our minds, which is attention itself.

00:04:05 – Eric Zimmer
So where I’d like to start is with the title of the book, peak mind. You say a peak mind is a mind that doesn’t privilege thinking and doing over being. It masters both modes of attention. So say a little bit more about that, because a lot of the book is sort of talking about people who are in, for lack of a better word, mission critical type situations, you know, people who are trying to perform better in given circumstances. So there’s a fair amount of the book that’s devoted in that direction. But this statement really is speaking to something more broadly than how I perform.

00:04:39 – Amishi Jha
Yeah, absolutely. And part of the reason I wanted to make sure I made that distinction between thinking and doing is exactly because of the populations that make gravitate toward this book and toward the kind of projects that we do in the research we conduct, which are, as you call, a mission critical kind of folks, but also sometimes they’re referred to as tactical professionals. There is a task at hand, and we need to accomplish it, and there is a more successful and less successful way to accomplish it. And action is what it’s all about. And frankly, in my entire field, in the field of attention research, from the sort of traditional point of view, that is essentially what we see attention’s role as serving action and if we can’t pay attention, the chances of acting appropriately are going to not be there. But what I’m trying to highlight, which is part of the broader mission of a lot of contemplative practices and wisdom traditions, is that there is another way we can use our attention, use our mind. And there are aspects of even what sort of traditional attentional models within modern cognitive neuroscience described that can be amplified but aren’t currently amplified. So the being mode, from my point of view, is taking an observational stance, being receptive to what’s occurring, so that in between the action, there is reflection. And without that reflection, the chances to ensure that the action is appropriate are lessened. Because sometimes you can know sort of a ballistic orientation, like, this is what we’re doing, or the training that you have may guide you to say, this is what you do. But is it the right thing to do? How are you going to know unless you actually look at the circumstances? And, you know, a lot of times these tactical professionals or mission oriented folks talk about situational awareness as you got to know what’s going on around you. But what I’m highlighting with that statement of being mode, not just doing mode, is that part of the situation is what is occurring in your own mind, the set point you have, the expectations and stories and assumptions that you have. And the being mode allows you to take stock of what is present without taking any action in that moment, just allowing that to exist and percolating in it. And I think it’s highly undervalued, especially for a lot of the kinds of professionals that we end up working with. So it’s a new or novel aspect of what they might consider doing, which is being.

00:07:00 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah.

00:07:00 – Amishi Jha
And I put that in quotes because people can’t see me. So, you know, in some sense, the being new type of doing, if you want to approach it in that way.

00:07:08 – Eric Zimmer
You also say a peak mind. And this, to quote William Jhames, again, which I had not seen this quote before, and I love a peak mind balances the flights and the perchings. He says, like a bird’s life, the stream of consciousness seems to be made up of an alternation of flights and perchings. Say a little bit more about that. That’s very poetic language, I think, to speak to some concepts that you’ve certainly backed up with neuroscience.

00:07:31 – Amishi Jha
Yeah. And I think it touches on what you were asking me about a moment ago. Right. The flights in some sense is the doing and the purging is the being, and that this can be broken down in sort of the micro level. So even if we’re in the middle of executing a complex task, to not forget that the flights are going to be much more successful if the purgings are actually taking place. And it’s that dance, it’s sort of the important aspects of what wisdom is, is both reflection and action.

00:08:05 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. That quote made me think of. We interviewed a gentleman. I don’t know, and I’m going to get your opinion on this in a second. We interviewed a gentleman a while back by the name of Ian McGilchrist. He wrote a book called the master and his emissary. And it’s talking about right brain and left brain, and I’d like to get your opinion on that in a second. But one of the things he said was, and when he was talking about how the right brain and the left brain work, is that the right brain is more the perching. It’s watching everything that’s happening. It’s seeing the context. It’s, you know, and the left brain is more the flight, or he talked about like a bird pecking food out of a series of stones. I’m curious, in the work that you’ve done, has right brain, left brain shown up at all? I just kind of curious your thought on that theory. I don’t want to spend a lot of time there, but I can’t help but ask.

00:08:56 – Amishi Jha
Yeah, I mean, I don’t know that book, and I don’t know Ian at all. I don’t know how literally he was being or what research he was looking to. But frankly, from sort of a modern neuroscience perspective, the notion of right brain, left brain allowing for complex function to happen in a hemisphErically specified manner, has been debunked. All complex functions, whether it’s a broad observational stance or an action oriented focusing, will involve coordination between the entirety of the brain, in particular both hemispheres. But I appreciate the concept of these are distinct from each other. And I would not describe them as based on hemispheres. I describe them based on mental modes. And when we think about a mode in the mind, it’s essentially a configuration of whatever brain networks are involved in a particular process being more prominent versus a different set of brain networks. So definitely it’s the case that, and, you know, I describe it in some sense as two aspects of attention. And, you know, this notion of a flashlight, meaning focusing, narrowing, selecting versus a floodlight, broad, receptive, not biasing some information over other information. And those are two different modes. And typically, you cannot be in both modes simultaneously. And we know this. Right. If you’re sitting there and reading a deeply entrenched in a good novel or a good book, any kind of a good book could be peak mind. So if you’re entrenched in reading a good book, somebody walks in the room and says something to you, you’re like, huh, what? You’ve no idea what was said, not because you lost the capacity to comprehend language, but because you’re full focus was so narrowed that the input coming in in your broad, receptive stance was not quite up to snuff to be able to break down the sounds into language. From the brain science point of view, we know that a lot of these aspects of attention are mutually inhibitory. When one network is active, the other one will be suppressed. So I again would say that do not get too literal with regard to the hemisphere that it’s involved in, but the modal aspects, the mind being in different modes, is certainly very, very important.

00:10:59 – Eric Zimmer
You mentioned the two different modes in your book. You actually have three modes. You’re a little bit like the Buddha in that you’re a list maker. There’s lots of lists of three in this book. I’m sure someone has pointed that out before, but I actually like it as a way of organizing. It helps, but. So you talked about two of the sort of, quote unquote, subsystems that work together.

00:11:21 – Amishi Jha
Right.

00:11:22 – Eric Zimmer
The flashlight, which is. We’re narrowed in, we’re focused. You talked about the floodlight, which is a more broad and open. And then the third mode that you talk about is the juggler. Say a little bit more about what the juggler is.

00:11:34 – Amishi Jha
Sure, sure. All three of these are really, as you said, subsystems of attention. And in the broadest sense, we can say this mental capacity of paying attention is really just about prioritizing some information over other information. It’s thankfully an evolutionary inheritance we get to enjoy, even though it has its own consequences. But it is the result of, we think, at least kind of going back in time, a big problem that the brain had, which is that everything could not be processed. The brain just lacked the computational power to do that. So if you didn’t prioritize some stuff over other stuff, there was no way you were going to be able to make sense of the world around you or even what’s occurring within your mind. So just to keep that in mind as the anchor, prioritize some information over other information. Now, the flashlight, you’d say, is prioritizing some content over other content. So wherever you direct that flashlight is going to be the privileged content. But it’s directed towards something, some object. And that object can be something in the external environment or an object in the mind, like a thought or a memory. When we go to the floodlight, we’re talking about prioritizing not so much based on the content, because you’re not supposed to really advantage one thing over another. It’s about being this broad, receptive stance, but it is privileging something, and that is the moment. Now. So, formally, this floodlight system is called the alerting system, and you’re not being alert to something in the past or the future, but right in this moment, so privileging the present moment. And then, as you mentioned, the third system, formally called executive functioning, but I describe it as a juggler for shorthand, is really regarding prioritizing based on our goals. So these are internally held goals, intentions, plans, whatever it is you want to call it, that is guiding the way we’re going to interact with our own mind and our environment. You know, just like a juggler, you’ve got to do this with sort of a multiplicity in mind. You usually don’t have one goal. So in this moment, my goal is to have a fruitful conversation with you, but my goal is also to publish the papers that I’m publishing and to be a responsible citizen and to enjoy my life and my family. Those goals don’t go away, but obviously, I’m not actively doing all of those simultaneously. So I’m kind of keeping all the balls in the air and ensuring that every action that I undertake aligns with my goals. And when the juggler is not functioning so well, balls drop. We forget the goal. We don’t inhibit irrelevant information. And this could be a micro goal. Right? So I want to have a conversation with you. That’s my goal. But my phone buzzes, and then I go and start reading my text messages in the middle of this conversation. Why did I do that? Well, I failed to hold the goal and then control my behavior aligned with it. So I think that maybe helps frame it more broadly, that all of it falls underneath attention, because it all has to do with prioritizing some information or other information. It’s just the nature of what that.

00:14:24 – Eric Zimmer
Information is differs is the executive function, or the juggler, as we would call it, the part that is choosing where to point the flashlight.

00:14:34 – Amishi Jha
Yes.

00:14:34 – Eric Zimmer
I think attention is very interesting because it’s similar to the breath. It’s something that happens automatically and is also controllable, correct?

00:14:42 – Amishi Jha
Yeah.

00:14:42 – Eric Zimmer
You know, so if someone lit a firecracker off behind my head, right? Now, like, my attention is going there. There’s nothing I’m going to do about that. But beyond that, is it the juggler that’s sort of trying to say, let me align my attention with, to use a different word for what you were talking about, my intentions, the things that matter to me. Is that kind of falling into the juggler’s role, correct.

00:15:06 – Amishi Jha
Yeah. Executive control is the thing that guides goals. Now, the goal could be, pay attention to what’s happening right now. Don’t privilege any content over other content. So you’re driving down the road and you see big flashing yellow light, like maybe by a construction site, and the juggler would say, probably best to check out what’s going on right now. And it essentially calls upon that particular floodlight orientation or mental mode to be in. Or it could be get narrow and focused right now. So you can actually understand this conversation or read this sentence or whatever it is, get focused and directed. But there’s always the kind of push and pull of what the juggler intends to do and then other stuff that may derail what’s going on. And, you know, in some sense, the flashlight is a great example of that, where you already said it, you can direct it willfully, but it can get yanked. And what it gets yanked by is also very interesting because in some sense, it’s like the baked into us juggler. Right? It’s like, why would it be that a firecracker would pull your attention? Because your survival may depend on it, right. So essentially, these, you know, are things that are salient, that are novel, that are fear inducing or threatening, that are self related, are all sort of privileged into the way that our brain functions. We don’t have to try to make it that way. It just is sort of, by default, built in.

00:16:31 – Eric Zimmer
Right. You say the three main factors that determine, you know, how this attention gets deployed is familiarity, something that’s new. I’m going to give more attention to salience. Right. How important it is to me. And then finally, our own goal, our own attention. And so attention is sort of being, as you said, pulled by those things. And one of the things that you say early on that I really liked Washington, that there’s nothing wrong with our attention. We talk a lot about having attention problems these days, you know, crisis of attention. But you say our attention is working just fine. Just say a little bit more about that.

00:17:04 – Amishi Jha
Yeah. That’s the kind of ironic part of this moment. People feel a sense of struggle, an overwhelm or crisis, and they want to blame their brain instead of the circumstances in some sense. So let’s just talk about social media or technology kind of more broadly. The fact that there are algorithms that can be built around our willingness to continue engaging with particular pieces of software or websites, etcetera, tells us that our attention is working completely in a regular, typical, predictable fashion. And you already mentioned the three biggies that might get us familiarity and salience, for sure, and goals also. But when you can finally tune the. The familiar because you’re being exposed to it over and over again, or you can finally tune the salience because it’s so self related, or you can ensure that the goals are kind of kept in front of your mind. You know, like, at some point, you looked at, I talk about in the book, like, I was looking for this frying pan, like a, you know, pot or pan. And then I kept seeing pans all over the place because it was being forced onto me. Like, you look for pan. You must be interested in this.

00:18:15 – Eric Zimmer
Yep.

00:18:16 – Amishi Jha
So all of a sudden now, the goal that I had once is now kept at the front of my mind. It’s like, oh, yeah, I did want to get that pan. It’s like reminding your goals. So attention is doing what it does, but the circumstances are now aligning to tune up and really maximize engagement for the benefit of usually selling us a product, mining our attention to be exposed to potentially buying a product.

00:18:38 – Eric Zimmer
Right.

00:18:38 – Amishi Jha
So it’s totally driven by this whole structure. I just wanted to caution people that, first of all, don’t take it in. Like, it’s not like there’s something wrong with you. If you see your name and you want to click on it, that is, that’s the reason that your name and face are, or on every social media app, is because that’s the first step into hooking you in. And frankly, the other piece is that you can’t really fight against it because you’re gonna lose, because you’re not just dealing with your own kind of orientation toward social media content, but you’re dealing with very, very smart algorithms that are tuning up to you and a team of engineers that are programming it. So if we’re gonna take on this challenge, it cannot just be like, oh, my mind will not click on that bright yellow, shiny thing that’s saying, click here. Unlikely.

00:19:47 – Eric Zimmer
You say you can’t win that fight. Instead, cultivate the capacity and skill to position your mind so you don’t have to fight. Say a little bit more about that. I think that’s a really important point, is that if our goal is to bring our attention back to our own control and the things that matter to us. It does feel like it’s a fight. And like you, I tend to believe it’s a fight where we’re set up to sort of lose.

00:20:11 – Amishi Jha
Yeah. The way not to fight is to, at the kind of most fundamental level, pay attention to our attention to know where our mind is. Then there’s more sense of agency, just like anything else. Like I could have the most elaborate plans, but if I don’t know what the plans are are, and I’m not checking in with where I am relative to those plans, I’ll never be able to execute them. But what we lack, typically, is that checking in component or what we’d call monitoring. Right? We’re not monitoring ourselves and we’re not another kind of technical term, meta aware. We’re not aware of the contents and processes in our mind at play in any given moment. And we can cultivate the ability to be better at that. And that’s where mindfulness meditation can really be helpful, because it is a way in which we are better able to know our mind, not just in general, like I tend to be this way or that, but in this moment, what is occurring within me and around me so more fully, situationally aware.

00:21:08 – Eric Zimmer
I want to push on that a little bit and explore it a little further because I think it’s really important. I love the way you said in the book, we lack internal cues about where our attention is moment to moment in the spiritual habits program. What I say is, you know, if we’re trying to live a life, and basically I would say it would be living a life more based on principles that matter to us. Right. Living more by that goal orientation and the goal just be to be kinder. Right. So I think forgetting is the biggest problem. Your book advocates training, you know, twelve minutes in the morning with a couple different approaches and we can talk about what some of those are. I’m curious though, do you have suggestions on how else maybe during the day to get a little bit more of this? Because I do agree that a focused training period like you’re describing does help. And I know myself and a lot of people who do have morning mindfulness practice that we can still get pretty lost all day long and lose track of any of those internal cues. So do you have some ideas about how to weave those into more of the moments we have?

00:22:14 – Amishi Jha
Absolutely. First of all, I’d say that just to be clear about the prescription, it comes out of over a decade and a half of research, and the goal of that research is not how to maximize your spiritual fulfillment or life, but what is the minimum effective dose to protect attention in high stress circumstances? That’s a very different goal than other things. And that also that twelve minutes is not, in my view, the culmination or the be all, end all. It’s the starter.

00:22:42 – Eric Zimmer
Minimum effective dose.

00:22:43 – Amishi Jha
It’s the minimum effective dose. Thank you. Yes. And so I just wanted to mention that because people could say twelve minutes, what am I going to accomplish in twelve minutes a day? But it actually, we found, is beneficial. The other thing is that I don’t say when to do it. So do it whenever you’re going to do it still holds. The reason we do the formal minutes of day of mindfulness practice is so that the mental mode of mindfulness, which I describe as paying attention to our present moment experience without conceptually elaborating or emotionally reacting. We want to bring about more of that mode throughout the day because that is going to be the mode that allows us to connect with what’s happening in the moment and monitor the contents of our mind, as well as obviously taking stock of what’s happening around us, practicing so that we can just say we got it off our to do list. We’re practicing to elicit the more prevalence of that mode. But you’re right, there are ways in which we can advantage cueing ourselves to do that. So some of the things that we do, I’ll just give you an example from some of the research studies that we do, because we tell people what I just described to you, that we’re doing this so that we’re more mindful throughout the day. Not just that we’re olympic level breath followers. I mean, who cares, right? But how do you do that? So, for example, one of the practices that we give is these are all part of sort of the canon of what’s currently offered in the world of mindfulness training. And thankfully, that world is growing and more available to people. But something called the stop practice is a good one. And I recommend that people do this, and they use the cue of being stopped, meaning you’re stopped at a elevator, you’re stopped at a stop sign, you’re stopped at a crosswalk, you’re waiting in line. Anytime you stop and you notice the body is stationary, typically what happens in that moment? Pull out your phone, start doing stuff? No, use that as a moment to do this practice. And the practice is a mini mindfulness practice. So stop is an acronym for stop. You’re already stopped. Take a breath. And that’s just aware of one conscious breath, like you’re just. You’re not manipulating the breath or trying to take it more deeply. Just like we’ve been breathing this whole time but taking stock of it. Yeah, observe. So after that breath, you’re still kind of in that kind of mode of observing what’s occurring right now and then proceed. And, you know, I’ll tell you that one of the papers that we’re working on right now is a project we did in basic combat training with close to 2000 soldiers where they did this stop practice. They did a formal mindfulness practice, like we assign that I describe in the book. But then we asked them to do the stop practice, and we found benefited all kinds of things. Their sense of team cohesion, their ability to check out if the body was experiencing pain, to determine if they needed to take action. You know, like, for example, people talk about just fracturing their feet and legs and bones because they’re so negligent of taking stock of the body. But if you’re stopped in all these times and you’re just checking out what’s going on, and we actually guide them. Week one is the breath. Then it may be the environment, then it’s aspects of the body, then it’s people in your team. So it kind of follows different components of what the target of what you take stock of in that observe moment is, can really make a difference and cues people into that mindful mode repeatedly and multiple times a day. So that’s one thing that you could try.

00:25:56 – Eric Zimmer
I think that’s great. You know, I’m often thinking about triggers, like, what you use the word q q or trigger, like, how can we remember? And that’s a good one. I mean, I’ve talked about and heard about sort of like, if you’re stopped at a traffic light, but I love the idea of, like, stopped in any circumstance. That’s a great one.

00:26:12 – Amishi Jha
Yeah. And, you know, now I’m telling people more, like, if you feel the urge to pull out your phone, that’s a moment to practice. Stop.

00:26:19 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah.

00:26:19 – Amishi Jha
Because that’s giving you a sense of, like, something’s going on that makes you feel capable of doing that and maybe think, is that what I want to be doing now or my default thing?

00:26:27 – Eric Zimmer
Yep. There are so many places I could take this, but we’re a little bit time limited. So I’m gonna. I’m gonna pivot to this place because it’s something I definitely want to talk with you about. And I think it’s important to reiterate sort of what? You said that the research you’re focused on is about improving attention. But you talk about attention, you say there are three major forces that degrade our attention. Stress, poor mood and threat. But it also sounds like early on you say that if we’re feeling cognitive fog, might be depleted attention. If we’re feeling anxious or worried, it could be hiJhacked attention. If we can’t focus, it might be fragmented attention. So not only are some of those things causes of degraded attention, but it sounds like degraded attention is also the cause of some of those things. Right. It seems like it’s a bi directional relationship. Would that be absolutely accurate?

00:27:19 – Amishi Jha
Absolutely.

00:27:19 – Eric Zimmer
Okay. So given that, whether most people who are not tactical professionals are going to say, you know what, I want better quality of life, right. I want to be a little bit happier. I want to spend less time ruminating and regretting. I want to be more present to the people I love, et cetera, et cetera. So given that this is a boy, this is a long setup for a question, isn’t it? But I’m going somewhere here.

00:27:40 – Amishi Jha
I trust you.

00:27:41 – Eric Zimmer
You talk about some strategies that people use for some of these things, like think positive, focus on the good, do something relaxing, suppress upsetting thoughts. We’ve got these series of strategies that I’m going to just put them under a bucket. I’ve heard you used this bucket before and tell me if you agree. Reframing. They are sort of reframing our experience. And then you used a term, maybe it was in the book and I missed it, but I heard it on another podcast. You said, well, there’s reframing and then there’s deframing. And I loved that idea. I was wondering if you could say a little bit more about those two. And then I want to talk a little bit about when might it be appropriate to do one versus the other, depending on what we’re trying to accomplish.

00:28:23 – Amishi Jha
Yeah, well, reframing, I think you’ve laid out very, very clearly already that essentially it’s a replacing of one kind of mental content with other mental content, and that can happen through even paying attention differently. So we’re still using our attention, but now I’m going to highlight different aspects of my experience to put different content at the center of my mind. It’s still using attention in that focused way, that narrowed way, that action oriented way. In some sense, deframing is saying, get back into that perching or being mode. It’s like we’re taking a look at the structure that we’re within, you know, a framework is an interesting thing. Reframing is almost like you’re ignoring the framework and you’re just filling it with new stuff. Like, you know, it’s a, it’s an apartment building and you’re just going to bring in new furniture. The apartment building still stands with the way it is, or even, let’s say, a particular room still has a sofa and a chair and a table, but they’re different. They’re a different kind of sofa, you know, a more fluffy one or genuine leather, whatever it is that you want, that you think is an improvement over the prior set of things. But the framework is the same. What I’m saying with deframing is first step is essentially be aware that you are within a framework, you are within a story, you’re within a set of contingencies and conditions and you’re acting within that. So if we can just even look around and say, oh wow, look at that. I have take by default that there should be a couch and a chair and a table in this. Do I have to? Like, that’s the first step of deframing and you can build back the same sort of components if you’d like, but at least you’re doing it with a will and with knowledge that I’m going to put everything back in a way that I’d like, or maybe I’m going to tear the whole thing down and build it up differently. So I just think most of us don’t understand that this is within our capacity to do it. Seems too hard. But when you understand with mindfulness practice, for example, that every time even we do something as simple as a breath awareness practice, or what I call the finder flashlight practice, noticing that the mind has wandered away from the goal is a little tiny moment of, oh, I wasn’t in that framework anymore. And, you know, moving towards something like an open monitoring practice, we’re really just kind of disregarding all of that, all the stories and concepts and just trying to kind of be in the raw moment to moment flow of our conscious experience, it’s also way to practice deframing. So I think that once we understand why we’re intending to do it, and I think that there’s a very important reason to intend to do it, is that sometimes frameworks are wrong, stories are wrong. More fundamentally, to get at what you’re saying regarding, you know, spiritual practice. In a spiritual life, replacing the couch is not going to make you happier. It’s going to mean you have a different couch. You know, that’s sort of the deeper issue is that maybe you want to take a look at the assumptions you’re holding of what it means to be able to achieve the happiness you’re seeking.

00:31:20 – Eric Zimmer
So deframing in this sense, would we say it’s similar to the acceptance and commitment therapy term of diffusing. And it’s a way of sort of stepping back out of thought. Right. And trying to observe that all these thoughts are happening. Is that the essence of it?

00:31:38 – Amishi Jha
It’s at the essence. Diffusion, decentering, becoming meta aware, all of that. And it does require stepping outside of what’s occurring, at least from the conceptual terrain or getting more embodied in our sensory experience so we’re not stuck in the concepts that are driving whatever’s going on in our mind in that moment.

00:32:22 – Eric Zimmer
One of the things you say with things like thinking positive, focusing on the good, suppressing upsetting thoughts, that the problem with a lot of those is that they do require attentional resources to implement. They use up attention, and instead of strengthening it, you call them failed strategies, because while we try to use them to solve our attention problems, they degrade attention even further. Say a little bit more about that.

00:32:45 – Amishi Jha
Yeah. And this is where it comes down to the context that I’m talking about now. Positive psychology, gratitude, journaling, a lot of things that fall within the umbrella of positive psychology, powerful things to do. There is a really strong evidence base that this is a helpful thing to do. But I’m specifically talking about people under high stress circumstances, protracted periods of demand. Like, for example, if you think about a critical care nurse, over the course of this pandemic, the notion of saying, think positive, think positive thoughts, that doesn’t even make sense. It’s like I’ve gone through what I’m seeing and the level of demand that I’m facing and utilizing my attention, I can’t even take a breath to do that. And I think trying to do that is where it becomes a failed strategy. You’re pushing against, against and utilizing fuel that you don’t have to expend. You don’t have it in your gas tank, you can’t use it.

00:33:38 – Eric Zimmer
Yes, yes.

00:33:39 – Amishi Jha
It can really make things more problematic for people because they somehow think they’re supposed to be able to do that. And what I wanted more fundamentally for people to understand is that that is not a cost free thing to do. It’s not like the default of your mind is to have positive thoughts, and you are going in the wrong direction to have negative thoughts. It’s that when things are occurring and the mind is filled with negative thoughts. It will take attentional resources to cognitively reframe, and that will be requiring you to have those resources available.

00:34:09 – Eric Zimmer
How do we get to the point where our deframing defusion mindfulness practices don’t feel effortful in the same way? Because it feels like for me to sit down and follow the breath and keep bringing my attention back to it and then back to it is also an attentional drain. But your studies seem to indicate that’s not really the case.

00:34:31 – Amishi Jha
Yeah, the studies certainly indicate that what we’re doing is bolstering core attentional resources and working memory resources. It can feel like it’s difficult, it can feel like it’s difficult, but that doesn’t mean that it’s actually draining attention in the same way that a very intense upper body workout can feel tiring, but you are actually working towards growing your muscles. It’s sort of like that idea. And I think that there are many ways in which you can practice so that it feels less draining in some sense, easing up, not having that. That kind of conflict that a lot of people can experience in practice, and a lot of that, I think, is optional. I don’t think you need to feel like a failure because your mind wandered. But people think somehow that if my goal is to pay attention to my breath, my mind should not wander. And what I’m saying is, the goal is to pay attention to your breath. The mind will wander.

00:35:28 – Eric Zimmer
Right.

00:35:28 – Amishi Jha
And actually remember that the moment you realize that your mind has wandered is a win.

00:35:33 – Eric Zimmer
Yes.

00:35:33 – Amishi Jha
And then, so instead of feeling that conflict and that effort and that drudge of like, oh God, my brain isn’t even staying stable. It’s what’s wrong with me? It’s like, ah, got it, I know where I’m off. I’ve got to get back. So even the way we orient to the practice at this more micro level can reduce that sense of dread and effort. But to kind of more broadly understand that something that feels effortful can still be building resources instead of depleting them.

00:36:01 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, I love that. I think what you said there is so important, I’m kind of curious, does everybody naturally default to that sort of natural, like, oh, my mind’s wandering, so I’m failing. It just seems inherent with everybody I’ve ever talked to who’s taken up a practice like this. Do you come across people that don’t orient that way? Or is it just sort of natural to us to be told, if your job is to do this task, you just see that you’re not doing that task, you just go, oh, I’m not good at this.

00:36:29 – Amishi Jha
Okay. I think it’s even more fundamental than that. I think that this experience, this is what’s kind of interesting. Why are conflict states and negative emotion? Why do they co occur? Right? So anytime you have a mismatch between what you would like to have happen and what happens, there can be a slight dysphoria associated with it. That’s kind of interesting. So why is that? People have looked at this in cognitive neuroscience studies, where sometimes you just look to see if you impose a negative emotion on somebody, what happens to their cognitive control. And what you find is that sometimes the next thing that occurs, they’re better at it. It’s like that negativity can actually require us to bring more of our cognitive resources to solve the problem. So I think the yoking of conflict and what we call upregulation of cognitive control go hand in hand. It’s the signal that says, do something differently. Expend more mental effort to do this, bring more resources to bear. Even experiencing conflict is not a problem. But to realize that the conflict does not mean to translate into the elaborated notion that I’m a complete failure and this is never going to work out. That’s the mind doing something else. I think that it’s really interesting when you, especially when you talk to sort of long term practitioners, that conflict is seen with a neutrality that most of us don’t. When there’s a mismatch, it’s like, that’s data, that’s not, I suck. And I think that getting to that point, and especially, you know, within all of these kind of elite settings, I think people are trying to understand that, that if I add the layer of a conceptual story on top of the experience of conflict, it will slow me down in course correcting what the conflict signal is conveying.

00:38:13 – Eric Zimmer
Right, right. Yeah. And I just think it’s so important to work on not developing that aversive relationship with practice, because a lot of people, I think do, it’s that I’m failing at this, I can’t do this, I’m not any good at this. And I love that.

00:38:28 – Amishi Jha
I would even encourage people to just really break down the experience, like usually in our mindfulness practice. And, you know, and I talk about this too, it’s like you’re going to focus, you’re going to notice your mind wandering, and then you’re going to redirect back. But sometimes I will guide people to just hang out in the moment that they notice the mind has wandered away and really kind of get granular with that. What occurred first? What is the first thing that happened? Usually we’re having conflict, negative emotion. I suck. That’s a fast track. So what if it’s that whatever that visceral or, you know, feeling tone is of the mismatch? See if you can get more precise on that. Get cued into that mismatch feeling, and see if you can kind of take the elaboration that follows. And, you know, a lot of expert practitioners will talk about it. I remember talking to Mathieu Ricard, once, an adept practitioner, a buddhist monk, and he said it, and I thought it was so beautiful. He’s like, it’s not a storm. It’s like, I see slight undulations on the ripples of the pond. Whatever it is. It’s like, that would be awesome. If the slight movement of the water, the tranquility of the mind is disturbed, and you can say, ah, back on track.

00:39:38 – Eric Zimmer
Totally. Totally. Yeah. And I just wonder how much new practitioners have that ability to be that great.

00:39:45 – Amishi Jha
I think that it’s at least what we can do is say, observe it, see if you can track it. And it’s almost like what I would say to people, even when I think I do talk about this in the book, like, if you’ve ever had experienced or seen somebody experience a road rage, somebody gets cut off, and the next thing you know, somebody’s flipping somebody else the bird, or in, you know, terrible circumstances, there’s violence. What if you could actually grab ahold of the earliest moment that you. Whatever that initial inclination that I’m gonna have that feeling? And we know what that is. I mean, I always call it, as I noticed in my own practice when I was very early stages, is like, if there was a ballistic reactivity, I wasn’t gonna catch it. You know, if my kid did something and I was gonna shout, I was probably still gonna shout, but I would apologize more quickly.

00:40:31 – Eric Zimmer
Yes.

00:40:31 – Amishi Jha
Like, oh, I didn’t want to have that strong of a reaction. And I’m sorry, because even though I feel what happened was not okay, you didn’t need that extra stuff that just happened. You know, I don’t know if that gets at what you’re talking about, but that feels like part of the journey of what this is.

00:40:47 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, well, you quote Lou Reed at one point in the book and said, between thought and expression lies a lifetime. I love any time the velvet underground shows up in a book, between thought and expression lies a lifetime. Reminds me of the Viktor Frankl quote, between stimulus and response, right? And I’ve said that I think sometimes the most practical thing along history of different types of meditation practices given me, I think the most practical thing is that space between stimulus and response seems a little bit bigger. There’s a little bit more moment to be like, oh, hang on. You know, listeners couldn’t see that, but I sort of started to rise up in, like, a outrage and. But, you know, don’t get all the way there, you know. And to your point, then, yes, also learning to walk it back faster. And I love the idea that you just said about noticing that moment when your mind is wandered and really noticing what happens there, because in Buddhism, they talk about the five skandhas. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the five skandhas, but it’s describing a little bit of the way that we put together the sense of a self. There’s some initial, like vedana, like the very first thing, but they make a distinction between perception, like the raw sense data, and then all the layers that start getting added on top of that. Right. Positive, negative to the stories we might tell. Advanced practitioners say you can actually start to notice those extraordinarily fine increments. For most of us, it’s just like that. That whole process happens like that. But there is a way of breaking that down. I guess my question to you would be, what have you seen looking at the way our brains process data that might shed light on that or confirm that that’s kind of what happens. And do you see people being able to interrupt that pattern? Kind of the snap I just did. Do you see people being able to interrupt it or break it down?

00:42:46 – Amishi Jha
Yeah, I mean, I think the way that we look at it in my lab, there’s so many different people that are looking at this kind of thing. We can start to see even things like mind wandering. Let’s not even talk about sort of emotionally laden stuff. Obviously, mind wandering has that propensity. But what we know is that when people mind wander, for example, if we just have them do a simple task where they’re just pressing a button every time they see a digit on this screen, we know that the response times are going to become more and more variable when they are mind wandering. In fact, that’s the clue that they’re mind wandering, because usually a few seconds later, they’ll miss something or they’ll make an error or they’ll report back. Yeah, my mind was wandering so close in time to when we see a lot of variability. You see the costs of that variability on the consequential actions that need to be performed. And so what we know with mindfulness training is that there’s a reduction in that variability, and the performance is less prone to making errors like that. And people report mind wandering less. So I think that that’s a movement or that’s an insight that says, yes, the more you’re able to monitor moment by moment what’s going on, and you train your mind to do that through something like a breath awareness practice and the whole suite of practices. Now that I go into in the book, the more chances that you’re going to be able to course more quickly. And so even the windows, that’s the kind of thing we’re looking at now. It’s like the windows of variability. Can those shrink? Or what we know from, for example, the work that one of the postdocs in my lab, Tony Zinesko, is doing is we’re looking at what we call microstates. So these are essentially sort of the units of our kind of configuration of the brain, if you will, in a moment. And typically you can break this down into like 30 milliseconds. They’re small micro, micro kind of stability of the mind, these tiny windows. And what we know, for example, is that microstates tend to be temporally contingent. So the microstate you were in in one moment is likely to produce the next microstate. And we know what the microstates, at least the signature of what it looks like when people are completely off task or their mind is not on the thing they’re trying to do, or they’re highly variable. So if you’re in a highly variable kind of state, the next moment is likely to be highly variable. The question now is, with practitioners, can you see that the return back to a state of focus is more likely? So the temporal contingencies are actually being broken. And, you know, in some sense, it sounds, I mean, I’m going to leap now a lot, but if the mind is built for this kind of temporal contingency, which I think is definitely aligned with a lot of buddhist thought on, you know, sort of the contingent nature of reality.

00:45:31 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah.

00:45:31 – Amishi Jha
If you can train the mind to be less contingent, contingent so that there is kind of infinite potentiality from one moment to the next in the way that you can configure the brain.

00:45:41 – Eric Zimmer
Right.

00:45:43 – Amishi Jha
What are the benefits of that? And maybe that’s what we mean when we say even the term enlightenment is a non contingent mind.

00:45:50 – Eric Zimmer
It’s funny, I had up at the top of my notes, one of my favorite quotes by an old Zen master dogon, who said enlightenment is intimacy with all things. And I had that there because I think that speaks to attention. Intimacy is achieved by paying close attention to things. And what Dogon is saying is if we are truly that present, like you said, and that our micro states are not as conditioned to remain on the same thing. To your point, you’re starting to get towards something that looks more like enlightenment, which I think is fascinating, which is so interesting, right?

00:46:26 – Amishi Jha
Because in some sense there’s enlightenment and there’s psychosis when things aren’t in a contingent manner. So we’ve got to figure out the qualities that make it productive and warranted and worthy. And that’s where all of the other positive qualities and having an ethical orientation toward our existence can come into play totally.

00:46:45 – Eric Zimmer
Well, Amishi, thank you so much for coming on. I really enjoyed the book. It’s a great look into the neuroscience of attention. I read a lot of books about mindfulness. This is my job and yours stood out. I just found some of the ways you really dove into what’s happening to be truly fascinating, and we touched on a fraction of them. It’s a wonderful read and thank you so much for coming on.

00:47:07 – Amishi Jha
Oh, this is so much fun. Thank you for the great conversation.