Episode: 337
12 Minutes to a Better Brain: Neuroscientist Reveals the #1 Habit for Clarity & Focus
with Dr. Amishi Jha, PhD
Get a step-by-step guide to improve your focus, attention span, and mental clarity.
World-renowned neuroscientist Dr. Amishi Jha is here to share groundbreaking research about how attention works – and why yours is under attack.
Dr. Jha also gives you the 12-minute daily habit that sharpens your focus, improves memory, and builds mental resilience.
And you’re going to want to listen to this entire episode, because what she says about multitasking and your brain will completely change how you work and live.
Listen on:
"Attention is power. You can direct it—but most of us don’t. Mindfulness is the training that gives you that control back."
Dr. Amishi Jha, PhD
All Clips
Transcript
Mel Robbins (00:00:00):
You said attention is something that you hold.
Dr. Amishi Jha (00:00:04):
Your attention is an extremely powerful capacity that you hold, but it's incredibly fragile. The very hopeful news, and we'll talk about how to do this, is that it is trainable.
Mel Robbins (00:00:17):
Hey, it's Mel. Today on the Mel Robbins podcast, you're going to learn how to build a better brain in just 12 minutes a day. This is one habit for clarity and focus that's research back from neuroscientist. Dr. Amishi Jha.
Dr. Amishi Jha (00:00:30):
Attention is an incredibly powerful brain system. That's the first thing we already know that it is in some sense, the boss of the brain. Wherever attention goes, the rest of the brain's computational functions are aligned with whatever it is that you pay attention to. That's why it's so powerful. The metaphor I like to use is that it's like a flashlight. Wherever it is that that flashlight is directed toward, you get crisper, clearer information.
Mel Robbins (00:00:55):
What do you think the most important thing to do is?
Dr. Amishi Jha (00:00:59):
The biggest call to action, and it's a very simple one, is pay attention to your attention. Focusing, noticing, refocusing, repeat. That's the pushup for the mind.
Mel Robbins (00:01:12):
What happens if you do this 12 minutes a day, four days a week for four weeks?
Dr. Amishi Jha (00:01:17):
Really good news, you're going to get better than where you started. The best time to do it is when you're going to do it.
Mel Robbins (00:01:22):
Hey, it's friend Mel, and welcome to the Mel Robbins podcast, Dr. Amishi Jha, thank you. Thank you. Thank you for hopping on a plane and being here with us and our Boston Studios. Welcome to the Mel Robbins Podcast.
Dr. Amishi Jha (00:01:40):
Thank you. It's so great to be here.
Mel Robbins (00:01:42):
I am so excited because I got to be honest with you. Is it common when people interview you for them to feel like they're unfocused? I was preparing for this. I was like, wait a minute. Why am I suddenly feeling all scattered before Dr. Amishi walks in here? Is that like a thing that happens with people?
Dr. Amishi Jha (00:02:03):
I certainly don't want it to feel like some kind of test of your attentional capabilities at all because frankly, all of the work that I do comes from my own journey with attention. It doesn't matter how much expertise I have, it doesn't matter how much I study this. The notion of having a crisis of attention or feeling scattered every now and then is part of the human experience. So please don't feel that.
Mel Robbins (00:02:23):
Thank you for saying that because I think when you think about attention and focus and training your mind to be a peak mind, you all of a sudden sit up and lean in and you're like, okay, we got stuff to do. And so there was something very, I think optimistic and accessible to this idea that you are going to have a scattered mind at times.
Dr. Amishi Jha (00:02:47):
Oh yeah, absolutely.
Mel Robbins (00:02:48):
And I take it you're going to teach us how to recognize that and pull your attention back to what's important when you do.
Dr. Amishi Jha (00:02:55):
Yeah. With no promise that you're going to necessarily be less scattered. But through the journey of what we'll talk about, hopefully come to an understanding that as we become more intimately familiar and friendlier with our own mind, we treat that scatter differently,
Mel Robbins (00:03:12):
Intimately familiar and friendlier with our own mind. That is so cool.
Mel Robbins (00:03:17):
Yeah what I'd love to have you do, because your research is so interesting and the results are mind blowing, I would love to have you speak directly to the person who's with us right now. They're listening or they're watching us right now, and they have not a lot of time, but they have made the time to be here to learn from you, and I would love to have you share a little bit about what might be different about their life if they take to heart everything you're about to teach us today and they apply it.
Dr. Amishi Jha (00:03:51):
Absolutely. So the one thing I'll say is that your attention is an extremely powerful capacity that you hold, but it's incredibly fragile. It's going to fall apart every now and then it's going to be scattered. The very hopeful news, and we'll talk about how to do this, is that it is trainable. We can train our attention to be stronger and function better. And this isn't just some abstract thing that we want to be able to do. We do this because we want to not only have a peak mind, but we want to have a fulfilling life. We want to befriend our own mind for the service of enjoying our life and making sure that what we do is meaningful to us. So the path there is what we'll be talking about during our time together.
Mel Robbins (00:04:36):
There was something that you just said that really caught my attention. I didn't even mean to make a pun, but it just fell out of my mouth. You said attention is something that you hold. And here what was interesting about that, my experience of the concept or the term attention is that it's something that kind of comes and goes. I have it. I don't have it. It's all over the place. I'm trying to grab it. When you said attention is something that you hold almost like I'm holding your book peak mind. It made me look at it differently because the word hold attention is something that you hold. It means it is in your power at any time to recognize that you're the one that holds it. You're the one that can learn how to direct it, that it is always there for you to be able to use to your advantage. And I've never thought about it that way because I think as somebody that's really struggled with directing my attention, with being very scattered all the time, easily distracted, which I think is probably most people these days, I've always felt almost powerless around it. And I've made myself wrong in many instances about my inability to focus on something or my inability to stay organized or my inability to remember things and thinking about it differently. No, no, no. Attention is something that you hold. The power is in your hands and today you're going to help us tap into it. I really love that.
Dr. Amishi Jha (00:06:07):
Can I say something about that, please? So one of the things that I want to say just at the outset is that this notion of holding our attention can give us that sense of agency, which is really, really powerful. But I would like you to just consider expanding what it means to hold, kind of like the way we think about maybe holding our child,
(00:06:25):
That there's a holding that is an aspect of you're going to support and control in some ways just like we would when we parent, but there's also just letting it be there and observing it. And as we talk through the various types of attention, we'll realize that holding can mean all of those things. It can mean directing it. It can mean acknowledging it. It can mean checking in with it without doing anything differently. And as we expand the repertoire of how we hold our attention, we can develop that sense of friendliness and self-supportive orientation toward our own mind.
Mel Robbins (00:06:56):
Oh, I love that because realizing as you said that just letting it be, I'm like, but I'm gripping the wheel Dr. Amishi. What is attention? Not like the buzzword, but this is what you research as a neuroscientist in your life. What exactly is attention in your brain?
Dr. Amishi Jha (00:07:15):
So attention is an incredibly powerful brain system. That's the first thing. We already know that it's a brain system. It is. And it doesn't actually fully develop until we're about 25 years old. Wait, what? Yes. And that age 25 is because attention relies on a very important part of the brain that's quite slow to develop the prefrontal cortex. So we need our attention for everything that we do. And things like thinking, things like feeling, things like connecting with other people, all of those require our attention. Before we talk about in more detail what attention is and all of the different ways that it functions, I think it might be useful to mention something about why we even have an attention system. Through the course of human evolution, we are benefited by the fact that we hold this thing called attention in our own brain, that the idea that we consider is that this system developed because of a very big problem that the brain had, and this is even before we were human beings, which is that there's far more information in the environment than the brain can fully process. So already you have an overloaded system.
(00:08:23):
If you cannot fully understand and process everything happening, you've got to come up with a solution. So the solution of attention is to prioritize a subset of information that's available to us and use the full computational power of our brain to interrogate it, to understand it, and then sort of sample it bit by bit to put together everything that we might be surrounded by. And frankly as we developed as organisms even to understand fully what's going on within us.
Dr. Amishi Jha (00:08:54):
So we use our to prioritize some information over other information and use that to benefit our understanding of what's happening in our environment, internal and external.
Mel Robbins (00:09:04):
You could think about your attention system as this super computer function that is sorting through information and prioritizing it and helping us make sense of it.
Dr. Amishi Jha (00:09:17):
Yes, but it prioritizes it in multiple ways. In fact, attention isn't one thing. It's actually three things. It's a trio of functions that are probably going to be important to think about because it helps us understand that to do this prioritizing, we need to orient our experience in multiple ways.
Mel Robbins (00:09:35):
So what is happening in your brain when you're using this attention system?
Dr. Amishi Jha (00:09:41):
So it is biasing every single thing that the brain does. It is in some sense the boss of the brain. Really, wherever attention goes, the rest of the brain's computational functions are aligned with whatever it is that you pay attention to. That's why it's so powerful, because when you're paying attention to the right things, meaning those that serve you and align with what you're trying to do, great, but when you are not, everything is basically going to go in the wrong direction.
Mel Robbins (00:10:10):
Now here's a crazy question because when I hear the word attention, I think eyeballs and ears. Is there other parts of the body this is going to sound, so I'm feeling self-conscious, paying attention to the fact, I'm feeling self-conscious about my question, but are there other parts of the body that are also ways that you pay attention?
Dr. Amishi Jha (00:10:33):
Absolutely. Every sensory system connects with attention, and it's not just about our perceptual ability or our sensory experience. Even the internal domain of our entire minds is accessible through attention. So when we talk through the various types of attention, I think that'll become very, very clear. But you honed in on the right thing, which is that attention is tied to perception. And what it does in one way it functions is by turning up the volume on what you hear, making more clear what you see. If it has to do with our sensory experience, it's like amplifying the tactile input that we get. It is a type of amplifier and we can use various metaphors to describe what the brain does when we talk about this.
Dr. Amishi Jha (00:11:22):
This particular way of paying attention. That's about prioritizing inputs, selecting information, and prioritizing that. The metaphor I like to use is that it's like a flashlight. So if you were in a darkened room, flashlight's a very handy tool. Why? Because wherever it is that that flashlight is directed toward, you get crisper clearer information. And that notion of advantaging perception through retention, very real. We see that when we look at brain imaging studies, when we look at brainwave recordings right now, for example, as I look at you,
(00:11:57):
The parts of my brain that are doing face processing are more active because I'm getting the visual input from you and everything else around your face is a little dulled out. I'm not getting strong input from that.
Mel Robbins (00:12:07):
Well, that's true because, and even if you're not watching this as you're listening to Dr. Amishi, your flashlight, so to speak, is dialing up and paying attention to listening to her voice. And you may not be paying attention or noticing as much other sounds outside or even kind of the room that you're in because you are more focused on the words that you're listening to. Is that kind of how this works?
Dr. Amishi Jha (00:12:38):
Absolutely, absolutely right. So the auditory input is going to be increased and then everything else that follows from that. So because you're honing in on certain words, your comprehension of those words is going to be better. The thoughts that you have based on those words is going to be more fine grained the memories that might get elicited by those words. Everything else follows from the fact that you're getting this better input from what it is that you're paying attention to.
Mel Robbins (00:13:03):
That's so helpful because just as a normal person, when you hear the word attention, I always have just thought about the act of looking at something, paying attention, just sitting still. And it didn't even dawn on me that there is a much larger system and mechanism that has massive issues to deal with, to keep you alive and to be crunching the data to determine everything that's happening at any given time. And kind of starting from that point is very helpful because it's so easy to get down on yourself if you can't pay attention or if you're scatterbrained. And if you start with this bigger understanding like whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Your attention system has big ass jobs. So let's not just keep trashing yourself right now and let's hold it a little more gently and let's learn how to work with it. Dr. Amishi, in peak mind and all your research, you break attention into three systems. What are they?
Dr. Amishi Jha (00:14:08):
The flashlight, which is selective attention, the floodlight, the alerting system, and the juggler, which is executive functioning, this trio of functions, the first one we already talked about, and this flashlight metaphor describes it. Sometimes we might call that focus. When we say we focus, we're really talking about the flashlight, which is we hone in, we're narrow, we're restricted, we have this sense of agency, we can direct the flashlight wherever it is that that flashlight is pointing, we get prioritized information from there. Everything else is dulled out. The important thing to think about with that is that it is not only important for the external environment, so that like you said, we think about our eyes as attending, but we can use that same resource for the internal environment.
Mel Robbins (00:14:55):
What do you mean?
Dr. Amishi Jha (00:14:55):
Yeah. So if I ask you right now to think about what you had for dinner last night, you don't have to tell me, but can you think of it?
Mel Robbins (00:15:05):
Yes.
Dr. Amishi Jha (00:15:06):
Okay. Were you thinking about it before I asked you about that? No. Right. So what happened in that moment? I dunno what happened. I'll tell you, but could you bring it to mind actually visualize what you were having?
Mel Robbins (00:15:16):
Yes. Okay. I could. And then I thought, hope she doesn't ask me what it was because I ordered so many different things off the menu. You would be like, wait, what? You had ate different dishes of food last night,
Dr. Amishi Jha (00:15:29):
But the cool thing is that you were able to access that. So what happened to that moment? My cue, my prompt dinner last night required you to kind of bring up the entire episode of your evening. From that you used your flashlight to hone in on the specific episode of dinner. Then you even went even more fine grain and visualized, maybe even if you thought about it, it was a delicious meal. You might even get your mouth might start watering. So this ability to pay attention is what allows us to have access to everything we hold in our memory.
Mel Robbins (00:15:57):
That's exactly what happened because the second you said it, it's as if I flooded the movie scene of my mind. I was in the restaurant, I was with the three people I was with. Then I immediately zoned in on the pasta dish, bright green pesto, absolutely delicious, that delicious. And then all of a sudden my mouth started to go. That's incredible. And I bet as you were listening or watching Dr. Amishi, you probably were like, oh yeah, I remember what I had last night.
Dr. Amishi Jha (00:16:28):
Yeah,
Mel Robbins (00:16:29):
That is so cool that we can do that.
Dr. Amishi Jha (00:16:32):
So I think that the flashlight gives a sense of agency. You hold the flashlight, you can willfully direct it, you can give yourself guidance to do that. Somebody else can prompt you to do that. But there's another thing to keep in mind about this flashlight metaphor, beyond the fact that we use it for the external environment and the internal environment, which is that it can also be grabbed or yanked.
(00:16:54):
So if you actually think like you are walking down a path at night and you've got this wonderful flashlight tool so handy, you can maneuver your way, et cetera. If you heard a strange sound of rustling in the foliage around you, all of a sudden the flashlight is going to go directly to where you thought you heard that sound come from. Why? Because literally it grabbed your attention. It could be something concerning, it could be an animal, whatever it is. So we have to keep in mind that not only can we direct it and do we have agency, but we are vulnerable to it being captured. And that capture is not only for the external environment, it's also the internal environment.
Mel Robbins (00:17:30):
What's your take on multitasking? Is that even possible? Is that like a myth?
Dr. Amishi Jha (00:17:35):
So this whole time, and you've been going with me on this, so I didn't notice, I never said flashlights of attention, I said flashlight of attention. Our attention has this unitary quality. When we we're multitasking, what we think we're doing is I got five tasks and I got a flashlight in each of them and I'm good. I'm doing all of it at once. And you are whoever's thinking this, you're kidding yourself because multitasking actually doesn't exist. What we're doing is task switching. So if you've got more than one attentionally demanding thing that you're trying to do. You are putting the flashlight on that task now you're removing it, you're engaging in another task, removing it, engaging in another task. And if you want to exhaust your attention system, feel free to continue multitasking. It is a terrible way to expend out, spend out all of your attentional energy because that engaging and disengaging, I mean, think about it like gears in a car. I mean you got to get in whatever mode you're in, but then you got to shift out of it. And if you do this enough times, there's going to be a couple things that'll happen. You're going to make a lot more mistakes. You're going to tank your mood and whatever it is that you're trying to achieve, you're going to lose what you're trying to achieve and not be able to do it.
Mel Robbins (00:18:53):
That makes a lot of sense.
Dr. Amishi Jha (00:18:55):
So my guidance would just be monotask as much as possible and privilege monotasking,
Dr. Amishi Jha (00:19:03):
Do not see it as a badge of honor to try to multitask because it's not helping.
Mel Robbins (00:19:07):
You got one flashlight baby.
Dr. Amishi Jha (00:19:07):
You got one flashlight.
Mel Robbins (00:19:09):
So the first subsystem is the selective attention, and that's the flashlight. What's the second one?
Dr. Amishi Jha (00:19:15):
The second one is almost the exact opposite of the flashlight. It's not narrow and restrictive. It's broad and receptive. So the way that I would describe this is, I mean an experience would be if you're driving a car, let's say we're walking and all of a sudden you're in the middle of a school zone, you see flashing lights, what happens that moment? You might even say to yourself, pay attention. But that's not this narrow restricted type of attention. It's broad and receptive. You don't know if you're having a strange traffic pattern or you got to watch out for children or vehicles or whatever it is. You're paying attention. But what you're prioritizing is actually everything happening right now.
Mel Robbins (00:19:52):
And that's what happens when you walk into a room. If you've ever walked into a networking meeting or a school cafeteria, you kind of see everything,
Dr. Amishi Jha (00:20:01):
Right? I mean, if you're going into that room with the idea that you got to meet one person and you're looking for them, then you're going to use that flashlight.
(00:20:07):
But if you're going in kind of warm and open to what's going to happen, you're going to be using this second system, which the metaphor I use for this is that it's like a floodlight. It's broad and diffused, and it's formally called the brain's alerting system because it is about being alert and receptive. And the important thing to think about with that is just like the flashlight, it can be for the external environment or the internal environment. So we can be broad and receptive if we're around people and we just want to take in the social scene. But from the internal point of view, it would be something like a brainstorming session. All options are on the table, what's arising right now.
Mel Robbins (00:20:44):
Got it.
Dr. Amishi Jha (00:20:44):
Be present to everything here right now. And so where's the flashlight privileges content? The thing you're trying to hone in on, the floodlight privileges the moment right now. And it makes sense because you can't actually be alert. You can't save up being alert for the past or for the future. It's right now. So that is what we're trying to do when we're talking about that. And these systems, by the way, I'm just describing them with metaphors, but we know that they have very specific brain networks that support them, and these brain networks are actually antagonistic toward each other.
Dr. Amishi Jha (00:21:19):
They fight each other. So you can't be both narrow and restrictive and broad and receptive at the same time. They're actually battling each other in the brain.
Mel Robbins (00:21:27):
And what's the third system?
Dr. Amishi Jha (00:21:29):
Yes. So the third system is the metaphor I'll use because I think that's a good way to anchor around it, is it's like a juggler. And this is something we call executive functions. So that term executive is very much like the executive of any enterprise. The executive's job is to ensure, and that's what the system does, that our goals and our actions align. It's monitoring and checking in on what's going on. So the juggler is like you got all the balls in the air, you got multiple things you're trying to do, but you're overseeing the coordination of that so that none of the balls drop.
Mel Robbins (00:22:02):
So can you give me an example of daily life?
Dr. Amishi Jha (00:22:05):
All the time? Everything we do, pretty much even just making my way here, planning ahead to what I have to do to get myself to the airport or I've got a plan to make sure I've got, the goal is to get to the airport on time, all the things that need to happen in whatever order to sequence and manage. And it ends up that if the system is not working great, you're not going to be having the right goal. You either forget the goal or your behavior is not aligned with the goal. And when that happens, the system has to kick in to fix things. So either update the goal all of a sudden, if I'm planning on going to the airport and I realize I learn through a text message, you have six hours or flight's delayed, it would be a bad goal to continue on that path to try to get there within an hour.
(00:22:51):
So I've got to update the goal, no longer have the goal of getting there, but if all of a sudden instead of that kind of a situation decide, you know what? I think I'm going to check a few more emails. Well now my actions aren't aligned with my goal, so I've got to fix my action. No, no, no. Put the phone down, get yourself packed and get there. So this system is so good and so important for us being able to make sure that moment by moment in our lives that we are aware of the goal, we're checking in with what we're doing, and we're constantly negotiating between those two, is this the right thing or is my action have to be corrected? And when we are successful, everything feels fluid, the ball's up in the air and everything's great. And when it's not functioning well, we feel that too. I failed at meeting this goal or ensuring that my actions align with that goal.
Mel Robbins (00:23:40):
It's interesting that you said that the attention system doesn't fully develop until 25. And so is it really common, especially for somebody that is younger or a young adult or a child, to have a delayed development in the attention system because it takes time for these things to develop?
Dr. Amishi Jha (00:24:01):
Absolutely. And oftentimes what might, somebody may be characterized as having attentional problems, but then by early adulthood they're totally fine because in some sense, whatever that path was, whatever that timeframe was, full maturation happened and then they were fine.
Mel Robbins (00:24:16):
Yes.
Dr. Amishi Jha (00:24:17):
But the other thing to keep in mind about this aging related aspect is not only does it slow to develop, but it's also fast to decline. What do you mean? So in general, all three of these systems of attention, flashlight, flood, light, juggler, this kind of category of attention doesn't fully develop till we're 25. Then we've got a good solid 10 year run, 25 to 35, where our attention, all three systems are functioning quite well. Okay, peak, peak attention. But if you're older than 35, then we're on sort of a normal healthy aging downward slog of the functioning.
Mel Robbins (00:24:50):
Why 35? That sucks. We had a lot of life to live. Dr. Amishi, why is it declining at 35?
Dr. Amishi Jha (00:24:54):
That's just the nature of the brain. So partly we think this is because the kind of habits people start engaging in, and this is actually the kind of point of everything that I've been up to in my lab, which is that if we know our attention is vulnerable, how can we train it? What are the best ways that we can spend a little bit of time every day so that we can keep our attention in peak shape?
Mel Robbins (00:25:14):
So based on all the research that you've done, you can train this system to be stronger and to work better for you. Absolutely. What made you want to study all this?
Dr. Amishi Jha (00:25:28):
So attention was just a topic that I was fascinated by because really I was interested in a kind of bigger topic, which was you might use the technical term, neuroplasticity, the power of the brain to change itself. Originally in my early days, I thought I was going to be a medical doctor. I thought maybe I'll be in hospitals helping patients. Pretty soon I realized, no, that's not going to be for me. I'm not going to be a great clinician. It doesn't motivate me.
Mel Robbins (00:25:57):
You don't like people. You can say it, you don't like people. I'm just kidding.
Dr. Amishi Jha (00:25:59):
I love people, but I don't necessarily want to be around people solving their problems when they're not. Well, that was not the thing that was exciting to me. I really lucked out very early in my journey to trying to become a physician that helped me realize that I don't want to do this by volunteering in a brain injury unit. And this was when I was at the end of high school and my job was what they called candy stripers. In those days, we'd go around and we'd help the patients. It was really more, thankfully, I was able to interact with patients at that point. And I super lucked out because the position I had was in a brain injury unit,
(00:26:37):
And I was starting to get that feeling of probably I'm not going to be able to deal with medical school, but I really think this brain thing is very, very cool. And one of the patients that I met really was sort of my light bulb moment. He had come in, it was sort of a long-term care facility to help people rehabilitate after brain injury. And he had been in a motorcycle accident. In fact, for the most of the time I knew him, I thought he was a quadriplegic. So I would have the fun job of getting him outside for some fresh air and be his conversation partner. And he was in a chair that was very clearly for a quadriplegic. And then a few months later, all of a sudden he's in a very different chair and I see him moving the chair by himself with one of his fingers.
(00:27:21):
And in our conversations, I learned that he was doing physical therapy and he was recovering function. And at night he told me that, yeah, I'm going to PT every day, but you know what I do that's really cool at night when I'm trying to fall asleep when I do is I exercise my brain. And I was kind of like, what? He said, I close my eyes and I visualize my hand moving that little lever on my wheelchair. I'm exercising that pathway over and over again. And that type of mental exercise he felt was really, really helpful to him so that it made it faster for him to be able to actually do that. To me, that was amazing. What you're exercising your brain, you're changing your brain fast forward. Now I'm in graduate school and absolutely, he was absolutely right. Mental practice is a way to strengthen the brain.
(00:28:10):
So when my first child was very young, I had just started my first job as a faculty member at that point. I was at the University of Pennsylvania in my lab. We studied attention. That's literally if anybody at the university got a call from any media that said, we want to learn about attention, they'd call me. And while he was a young child and my husband was in grad school, we bought a hundred year old fixer upper, I was in such a state that I felt I could not pay attention, and it was annoying. I'm like, I know about this system. Just come on, get it together, pay attention. And then I'm like, okay, fine. I got to go beyond myself. There's got to be solutions. In the literature going into literature, what I realized is there really is no advice. There was no solid advice on what you do when it's not a clinical disorder. It really is. I don't feel like I have hold of my own flashlight,
(00:29:03):
So what do I do? And I kept coming up empty. What I also knew is that this was just not acceptable. I mean, I had made a commitment that even though I was going to be a busy professional, what was really important to me was going to stay central to my life. And in that moment, it was making sure no matter what my day looked like, at the end of the day, I was going to sit down with my baby and read him a book. And I started noticing that I couldn't even be there for those moments where I was doing this thing that I had promised myself and I knew was the most important thing I was going to do all day. And it got me super panicked, like, Ugh, not only do I study this and not know what to do, but consequential, if I can't show up now, what's going to be like when he actually really needs me?
(00:29:47):
And so I kind of became interested in figuring out what to do about it. What is it that I can do to bring some tools into my life? And I was very, very fortunate that by chance a colleague of mine suggested something I might try not so much to make my attention better, but really just to feel better because it was obviously cascading into I can't pay attention, I don't feel good about that. And then it was turning into a mood problem. So all that stuff can start happening, and it was really the one word that got me what, this is what I should try. And that word was meditation. And at that moment, as again, a up and coming neuroscientist, a serious person who devoted our life to science, I was like, yeah, I'm not doing that. I had written it off entirely, not only because it was not something that I thought a serious scientist would study at that point. This is the early two thousands.
(00:30:46):
But I had this whole cultural background where I had known about meditation. In fact, my earliest memories are seeing my parents meditating. And I thought it was great for them, but not something I would do. But I did give it a try. I actually went into Penn's bookstore and looked in the meditation section and super lucked out because the book I ended up picking up was something called Meditation for Beginners by Jack Kornfield that got me to start following a path that was really about practices that I could do daily. And it was actually a recording of a retreat. So he was giving guided practice. It was the CD came with the book. And what I realized after about a month of doing this is not only did I felt like I was there again, I had control over my mind. My attention was back available to me, but that everything in these instructions was about attention.
(00:31:38):
And so it became sort of like, I've got to study this. So my lab's entire research program sort of pivoted toward incorporating not just understanding how attention works, but what we can do to make it stronger and more capable in the face of high stress circumstances like those I was experiencing as a professor. So part of my journey into why I'm interested in working with groups like elite performers and military and medical and nursing professionals
Dr. Amishi Jha (00:32:07):
Is because we know all of us attention matters, but there are going to be circumstances, high demand, high stress circumstances where it will become challenged and may fail, and nobody wants that to happen.
Mel Robbins (00:32:19):
I love that your own experience had you turn your neuroscience researcher brain back on yourself and that in an act of desperation, you're like, fine, I'll try this thing. Because when people hear the word meditation, they're like, I already know this. Or they roll their eyes. And I love that it happened to you because here you are studying attention academically and you know that there's a deficit in research around what actually strengthens it. And if you even can. But now you conducting an experiment on yourself that pivots the entire trajectory of that lab, of the body of work and research that you've produced, and now what you have found when you're working with first responders and special forces and elite performers and what happens to attention under stress, how does the system of the spotlight, the floodlight and the juggler get impacted when you're stressed out?
Dr. Amishi Jha (00:33:23):
All of them fail. All of them fail. And we'll talk about specifically how they fail. But just wanted to say that if anybody deals with high stress circumstances and it feels like life isn't working, that you're feeling fuzzy and foggy, probably the logical thing to do is change your life. Just do something that doesn't produce those effects. Change your job, don't do as much stuff give up in some sense,
Mel Robbins (00:33:49):
But a lot of us can't.
Dr. Amishi Jha (00:33:50):
Well, what I was going to say is my whole orientation toward dealing with the situation that said, I'm not changing my life. I am going to change the way my brain functions came from those formative experiences, seeing literally a patient change his own brain.
Dr. Amishi Jha (00:34:06):
So the notion of neuroplasticity is the reason I turned toward the situation and said, I've got to figure out how to train this brain so that it can face the challenges that it's experiencing right now. I'm really glad that I happen to be a neuroscientist who knew that this was possible.
Mel Robbins (00:34:22):
So after two decades of digging into this, what are some of the biggest insights that excite you?
Dr. Amishi Jha (00:34:28):
Yeah, I think the biggest insights that excite me are that each of these systems, the flashlight, floodlight, and juggler, are incredibly powerful when we think about elite performers, but really anybody that would feel the sense of agency and success in their life. You don't have to be an Olympian to experience this, but we know what that feels like when the flashlight is on the right thing. When you're broad and receptive when you want to be and narrow and selective when, when the goals are in your mind and your actions are aligned with it, we know what that feels like. Some might even call it that feeling of flow. And many people that are exceptional in what they do are capable of that they can do it. But the other thing to know is that people that are in these demanding positions, and again, this is all of us, will reach that moment because we're always going to push ourselves. It's almost like we push ourselves to the first moment of discomfort, and we probably push past that all of us who function fine under certain circumstances will be vulnerable to the flashlight not staying on the right thing to feeling captured more than you want to. Being overly broad when you know need to narrow or not narrow enough when you need to be narrow. And what I realized is that for people undergoing multiple weeks, months of high demand, what they felt that they had the agency to do, what they felt was their peak performance will start to slip if the level of demand maintains itself. So if you think about somebody, and this happened to me, in fact, one of the very first studies we did, I went into a military base and I was talking to a group of Marines and I was talking about some of the dangers of high stress intervals and literally this very tough and scary looking Marine stands up and says, no, ma'am, stress activates me.
(00:36:20):
I perform at my best under stress. And was first like, oh my gosh. But he was right. He's right. It is the case that stress can be very powerful to get us to perform at our best. But what he also needed to understand, we had already studied this, is if the moments, the circumstances that make you feel like this is the peak moment, if that level of demand persists, you are going to start dipping into distress and dysfunction. And there is a very specific law within psychology called the Ys Dodson law that explains this.
Mel Robbins (00:36:56):
The Yerkes-Dodson law, that sounds like a dog. It's cross between a yorkie and a dachshund.
Dr. Amishi Jha (00:37:04):
It's not a new breed of dog. But basically, think about it like this, think of a graph. And the graph has an inverted U-shaped like just a U upside down, an upside down U.
Mel Robbins (00:37:15):
Yep.
Dr. Amishi Jha (00:37:15):
So on the X axis is the level of stress, low stress to high stress.
Mel Robbins (00:37:23):
Got it.
Dr. Amishi Jha (00:37:24):
And on the Y axis is your performance not performing well, excellent performance.
Mel Robbins (00:37:28):
Okay.
Dr. Amishi Jha (00:37:29):
So what we know is that when stress is low, so something like you need to get your taxes done, but not till next April, stress is low, performance is low, we're not going to engage when there's no demand.
Mel Robbins (00:37:39):
Yeah, the flashlight's off.
Dr. Amishi Jha (00:37:41):
Yeah,
Mel Robbins (00:37:41):
I'm thinking about something else right now.
Dr. Amishi Jha (00:37:42):
Exactly.
Mel Robbins (00:37:43):
So I've got no stress about my taxes. Right?
Dr. Amishi Jha (00:37:44):
As we get higher and higher in terms of the amount of demand, performance will start picking up, is it a week or two before taxes are due? Yeah, you're on it and you're going to get it done. Right. Now, you, and now this analogy may fall apart, but if you maintain that level of stress over a longer period of time, pass just that peak to allow you to get it done, you're going to now go from the peak performance to dipping back down.
Mel Robbins (00:38:10):
And isn't that what happened to you? Because you were under a period of chronic stress as a new mom running a lab, a husband who's in graduate school. And that is so relatable because I think so many of us have a lot of pressure and we feel like we can't drop a ball. But then all of a sudden, all the balls in your brain are starting to drop and you feel like you just are losing it. And I'd never thought about it as a overload on the attention system that's controlling everything about you because of the way that the stress is impacting you. And now the way that the system operates.
Dr. Amishi Jha (00:38:50):
And I think what's more confusing to people is like, well, I mean I can do this. I've been doing this. It's just that you haven't been doing it for that long.
(00:38:57):
And so even though outwardly everything looks like the same as it did when you were functioning fine, we forget the fact that we've been asking ourselves to perform at that level for a long period of time. And so when that Marine said to me, no, stress activates me. He was right. But now after his fourth, fifth, sixth deployment, it's not going to function the same even if the level of challenge and demand is the same. And that's what I really wanted to get across, is that you actually are more vulnerable. Your performance is dipping. And unfortunately, one thing that goes in addition to your performance dipping is your awareness of your own performance is going to be less and less. So you become less and less aware that you're falling apart. And that can be very catastrophic for people in those kinds of positions because it's not a child that's telling them, mommy, you're not paying attention. It's other things that could be very, very consequential in life or death.
Mel Robbins (00:39:51):
So what do elite performers and special forces and folks that are under and first responders under a lot of stress, how are they able to hold their attention better than the rest of us?
Dr. Amishi Jha (00:40:05):
I don't think they are. They're not. So that's what we learned through multiple experiments. So the approach that the military takes to prepare people for high stress circumstances is that they do what's called stress inoculation training or readiness training. So you put people through very, very grueling circumstances. So they get habituated to that, and that's part of your training. And then that's called also pre-deployment training. And then you're deployed to a war zone, let's say.
(00:40:34):
What I had, my hunch was that that training in and of itself may actually deplete attention. So I asked if we could partner with military service members at the beginning of pre-deployment training and then again, test them in terms of their attention. Come back four to eight weeks later, test them again and let me see how their attention looks. And what did you discover that I was right? Unfortunately, I was right. What we found was that while their attention looked pretty good at the outset, after four to eight weeks of ongoing demands, their attention started to slip and they were significantly worse in their performance and getting away from military service members. When we talk about other groups, undergraduates, for example, going through the academic semester, same thing from the beginning to the end of the semester, attention is worse. And think about that. Now they've got to take final exams, preseason training for athletes. Same idea from the beginning to end of preseason training. Attention is worse now they're going to compete. So this is a general approach to how the brain's going to respond to a ongoing period of demand. And knowing this is troubling, but it also means maybe there's an opportunity to do something to protect against that,
Mel Robbins (00:41:50):
Especially if we know we're about to step into a period of our lives or we are in one where we are going to be experiencing a lot of stress or just really cranking on the attention system. One of my favorite moments in your book Peak Mind, it's on page 1 56, is this story about a service member and their wife. And it was the story about something that the wife was always saying to her husband. And Cynthia was always saying to her husband, don't deploy before you deploy. Because through his multiple deployments, she had noticed that before he had physically gone to a war zone halfway around the world, he would already be mentally gone. Immediately. I thought of all the myriad ways so many of us might deploy before we deploy, spending so much time in our heads planning and imagining the next upcoming thing, that we completely miss our lives in the moment. Can you unpack that insight for us? Because that is so, you don't have to be in the military to understand when you're not there because you're already six weeks ahead where you're not here because you're thinking about something that's stressing you out at work. Talk to me about what's happening
Dr. Amishi Jha (00:43:13):
There. Absolutely. So we were just talking about how high demand intervals engage attention and deplete attention through the kind of demands that you've got on yourself. But remember we said at the outset, attention is external and internal. And if the scenarios that we are crafting in our mind are simulations of those high demand circumstances, that also seems to deplete attention.
Mel Robbins (00:43:40):
Okay. So lemme just see if I can get this. Hold on a second. Because the brain doesn't truly know the difference between doing the real thing versus being up in your mind, thinking and worrying about the thing, both of which require you to tap the attention system. And you're basically saying anytime you spend worrying about what's coming or ruminating about what's happening, you are not only using the attention system, you are stressing it out and weakening it before the actual thing you're worried about.
Dr. Amishi Jha (00:44:20):
Absolutely. So that is don't deploy before you deploy. It's a really wise reminder that says there is no need to simulate in that way because actually life is happening right now. I mean, I think what she was calling upon was her husband was gone every other year in those early days of post nine 11, and he was missing his children. He was missing his time with his spouse because he was already in back in the war zone. So I think that's a really powerful reminder to tell us that we should really be thinking about not just the challenges ahead, but the costs of being in those challenges before they arise. What are we missing if we do that?
Mel Robbins (00:45:05):
So one of the things that you recommend based on decades of research in terms of training your brain and strengthening the attention system is 12 minutes of a day of mindfulness training. How the heck did you arrive at that specific time? 12 minutes.
Dr. Amishi Jha (00:45:23):
Yeah. I mean, it was a long journey to figure it out, but basically I knew that if we're dealing with busy people with consequential jobs, and frankly again, that's all of us, we don't want to spend a moment more than is needed. We needed a minimum effective dose. So let's talk about the term meditation. I want to demystify that as well. From the neuroscience point of view, meditation, which is part of every major world spiritual tradition, I see it as engaging in specific activities to cultivate specific mental qualities specific. So think about the analogy of the term meditation to the term sports per sport. You have a general category of, okay, yeah, you're doing something, it's physical, but there are a whole variety of sports. What somebody has to do to become an Olympic level gymnast is very different than going and golfing.
Mel Robbins (00:46:14):
Got it.
Dr. Amishi Jha (00:46:15):
So the specificity matters, but it tells us that meditation is a good umbrella term for a category of human activity to cultivate something usually good stuff. That's why we would say it's connected to wisdom and spiritual practices. Mindfulness meditation is a very specific way that we're going to do exercises to cultivate a mindful mode. And I'll tell you what I think that means. So mindfulness is a mental mode, A, we all can be mindful. And that mode meaning a way to make your mind has to do with paying attention to our present moment experience in a particular way. So what's the particular way? I would say paying attention to the here and now without reacting to what's going on or what I'm going to say is conceptually elaborating on what's happening. So plainly saying, be in the here and the now without a story about it. That's what you're doing when you're being mindful. Now we can do that. I mean, think of the last time that you've really felt it was a beautiful sunset or a conversation with a partner. We can be mindful. And the challenge, the reason that we have mindfulness meditation is because we want ready access to that mental mode on demand. So we've got to cultivate through practices, getting ourselves to exercise that way of being so that it arrives in our mind and is strengthened to be present and accessible to us at any time.
Mel Robbins (00:47:45):
What does that have to do with attention?
Dr. Amishi Jha (00:47:46):
Okay, so let's Thank you. Because I think that the term mindfulness has the word attention in it, present centered attention.
Mel Robbins (00:47:55):
Well, the reason why I am trying to be very specific is because there's a lot of information about meditation.
Dr. Amishi Jha (00:48:05):
Yeah, absolutely.
Mel Robbins (00:48:06):
But you have a research backed rigorous scientific recommendation based on being a world renowned neuroscientist, who is the expert on the system of attention in your brain, how it works, how stress impacts it, the fact that it can be strengthened and your recommendation is a particular type of meditation that is going to help you build and strengthen the attention system. And so I want to make sure that as you're listening or watching this, you understand the foundation and the context for where this recommendation is coming from.
Dr. Amishi Jha (00:48:55):
Absolutely. So let's connect the dots between what I talked about with regard to these three systems of attention. Great. And a mindfulness meditation exercise.
Mel Robbins (00:49:03):
Okay, great.
Dr. Amishi Jha (00:49:04):
Okay, so because we already know the definition of mindfulness, attention is front and center, but it's that specific way of not being reactive to what's going on, getting the raw data of our moment to moment experience. So in a mindfulness meditation practice, and I'm going to give you just one very common example, and what we need to do is pick an anchor for our attention. So let's say you decide you're going to do one of these 12 minute practices. I would instruct you to sit down in a comfortable position. Doesn't matter if sitting on the floor chair, doesn't matter to me, but comfortable, alert, present centered with your intention. So the anchor, the instruction that I'm going to give you is pick an anchor for your attention. Pick an anchor for where you're going to direct that flashlight for 12 minutes, and I'm going to give you the anchor. This time I'm going to ask you to use the sensations of your breath as the anchor for your attention. And this practice is called mindfulness of the breath. So the first thing you do is you settle into sitting. We've been breathing this whole time, but now we're going to pay attention.
Mel Robbins (00:50:13):
Once you said it, I literally was like, am I breathing?
Dr. Amishi Jha (00:50:16):
Exactly. No, you're breathing, you're breathing. We'd have bigger problems if you weren't breathing, you're breathing. But now you're going to actually take that attentional flashlight and pick something specific tied to breathing and the sensory experience of breathing to focus it. So it could be the coolness of air moving in and out of your nostrils. It could be your abdomen moving in and out for the period of time. We're going to do this practice. Take that flashlight of your attention and direct it to those breath related sensations.
(00:50:48):
You just did step one, you found an anchor, you got your attentional flashlight on it. The second step, notice as we're progressing through this practice, notice where is your attention? Is it still on the breath related sensation, or is it gone away somewhere else?
Mel Robbins (00:51:02):
Oh, it's already gone. I was thinking what's step two?
Dr. Amishi Jha (00:51:04):
Exactly. Step two is notice where your attention is. And if you notice, because it'll happen, it's very normal that the mind is wandered away from that anchor. Step three, refocus, get it back. So you're holding your flashlight, you're directing it toward breath related sensations. You're finding your flashlight. Where did it go? And once you find it, you're refocusing. This is what I describe as the pushup for the mind focusing, noticing refocusing, repeat. When we do a mindfulness practice, we are doing pushups for the mind to strengthen, connecting it back to attention. All three of those systems of attention, the flashlight, we're holding it, we're pointing it, the floodlight, we're broad, receptive, noticing what's happening right now, alert to what's happening right now, and the juggler, where's my task? Am I on the task or not? Am I following my goal directed behavior? Maybe I'm not. Let's get it back. Wow. All three systems get engaged. And through that repeated engagement of doing this 12 minutes a day, we strengthen our attention.
Mel Robbins (00:52:08):
I can see how that would work. So let's talk about the 12 minutes, because I know that the person listening is a lot like me. It's like, okay, tell me exactly what to do. Am I setting a timer? Why is it 12? If I do it for eight, am I not going to get the benefit? Should I do it longer if I'm an overachiever? What is it about 12 based on the research that this makes it the magic number to train your mind?
Dr. Amishi Jha (00:52:29):
Yeah. So it is the minimum effective dose, meaning get to 12. If you do more, the more you do, the more you benefit.
Mel Robbins (00:52:35):
Really.
Dr. Amishi Jha (00:52:36):
Yes, absolutely. It is like physical exercise. The more pushups you do, the more upper body strength they're going to have. So how we came to this number was actually because we gave people the instruction to do a lot more than 12. Most mindfulness programs will say 45 minutes a day.
Mel Robbins (00:52:52):
Oh my gosh.
Dr. Amishi Jha (00:52:52):
Seven days a week.
Mel Robbins (00:52:54):
Who has that time?
Dr. Amishi Jha (00:52:56):
Most of us. And frankly, most people don't do it, even if they're in those programs. In our initial studies with military service members and other firefighters, other groups, we said, do 30 minutes. We thought, okay, they're not going to do 45, so let's try 30. What we also did is we said, tell us how much you're doing. So every week they had a log. Every time they practiced, they'd have to enter it. And we said, just be honest with us. This is part of a research study. Be honest with us. And they were, some said zero, they didn't do anything. Others told us exactly how much they did. Almost no one did 30 minutes. Maybe we had one person that did 30 minutes. Everybody else was in some range from nothing to 30. And what we wanted to see, because we had these objective measures of attention, and in some cases even brain metrics, we wanted to see was there some point in that long range in that broad range where we could see if they do this much, we're starting to see that the brain and attention are looking like they're being benefited. And if they do less, we're not seeing it. Wow. And that number was 12 minutes. When people did 12 minutes or more, their attention was protected and strengthened. And if they did less, it was not,
Mel Robbins (00:54:00):
You're kidding.
Dr. Amishi Jha (00:54:00):
No, not kidding. So
Mel Robbins (00:54:03):
You could be meditating every day for less than 12 minutes and you're not
Dr. Amishi Jha (00:54:07):
Reaching that threshold. In some ways, this makes sense to us, right? So if I said, be you have to do 150 minutes of cardiovascular, it's moderate intensity exercise to benefit your heart. If you say, I don't want to do 150 minutes, I'm going to go for a walk every now and then, is your heart going to benefit? Probably not. So there is something about reaching that sort of sweet spot of challenge and engagement that can do the trick. What we did after that, this was just happenstance. We found that 12 minutes was it, but that wasn't really a test. We went on after that and we said, let's prescribe people 12 minutes. Let's tell them to do 12 minutes. Initially we said do 12 minutes, seven days a week. And the good news was people were much more likely to do 12 minutes than they were 30. So they were actually doing it. Most people were not doing seven days a week. So we looked again, how many days a week should they do these 12 minutes to actually get benefits? And the number was four days a week. I could do that. So our prescription now is 12 minutes a day, four days a week, and do this for at least four weeks to get the ball rolling and then continue that as much as possible because that's going to be a way to keep that attention system strength.
Mel Robbins (00:55:12):
And if I do 12 minutes a day, four days a week for four weeks,
Dr. Amishi Jha (00:55:18):
Yes.
Mel Robbins (00:55:19):
Based on the research studies that you've done, what would I experience?
Dr. Amishi Jha (00:55:24):
So let's first talk about what happened if you didn't do that.
Mel Robbins (00:55:27):
Okay.
Dr. Amishi Jha (00:55:27):
The group that gets no training at all. You're undergoing a high stress interval, whether it's fire season is a firefighter or an undergrad and academic semesterw, whatever,
Mel Robbins (00:55:35):
Whatever, caregiver or a first responder, or you work in a hospital as a nurse, oh my God,
Dr. Amishi Jha (00:55:39):
A teacher going through the end of the school year. If you don't do that and we track your attention, your attention is going to be worse. Objectively, your stress levels are going to be higher and your mood is going to be worse. You're going to have higher negative mood and less positive mood. Everything is going the direction of bad news. If you do this 12 minutes and now this is not just me guessing. We've now confirmed this after study, after study, you don't show that pattern. Attention is stable over time. It doesn't decline the comparison group that didn't do it. Same exact circumstances decline. If people do more than 12 minutes, they actually look a little bit better than where they started. Same thing with mood. Mood doesn't tank. It actually stays stable. Positive mood actually looks not impacted. Negative mood, not worse. Again, more they do. They can even improve beyond that. Same thing with stress levels. So everything is starting to look like you're protected and strengthening if you achieve that number,
Mel Robbins (00:56:36):
If you're not in a period of stress, but you just want to do better.
Dr. Amishi Jha (00:56:39):
Yeah.
Mel Robbins (00:56:40):
What happens if you do this 12 minutes a day, four days a week for four weeks?
Dr. Amishi Jha (00:56:45):
Really good news, you're going to get better than where you started.
Mel Robbins (00:56:48):
And what does that look like? Happier, more focused, more energy.
Dr. Amishi Jha (00:56:52):
Exactly. You're going to feel in general. I don't want to promise happiness. Okay. Because that is a slippery slope.
Mel Robbins (00:56:59):
Yeah. Of course
Dr. Amishi Jha (00:56:59):
You'll be more aware of what you're experiencing moment by moment. You'll be more capable of holding that attentional flashlight and directing it willfully. Negativity may arise, but you notice it for what it is and you relate to it differently so that you're not ruminating and stuck or catastrophizing, but you see it and respond responsibly toward yourself.
Mel Robbins (00:57:20):
It sounds like you have more power and more peace. You're not as reactive and your attention isn't as easily hijacked. Because it's interesting when I am really stressed out or we did a tour this year and at the end of it I was so gassed from just the nonstop travel and the performance and being out of schedule and just all doing a, an experience like that in that state, I was more likely I was on my phone more. I was mindlessly scrolling, I was procrastinating, I was irritable. And now that I understand everything that you've taught us, it makes so much sense because the stress of all of that and the fatigue had weakened my attention system, which made me so much more susceptible to more stress, more distraction, being really annoyed about everything and frustrated and irritable. Oh my gosh,
Dr. Amishi Jha (00:58:22):
Absolutely.
Mel Robbins (00:58:23):
Well, let's get specific about how you implement this. I think it's really exciting that in 12 minutes a day for free, you can utilize this research to strengthen your attention system and train your brain is should you set a timer if you're new to this. You know what I mean?
Dr. Amishi Jha (00:58:40):
Yeah. So after we've been doing this research now for about 15 years in the military, and at the end of my book, I actually gave the entire prescription. It's all written out. This is what you do on day one and day two, basically for the four weeks, what you need to do. So my intention for all of this is really to give people a very simple way to invest and do this. But I would also just want to say that if you do happen to have something like somebody listening might have attention deficit disorder, that's a difficult goal. And if you jump in with an expectation that you're going to do this, you're going to white knuckle your way through and then all of a sudden at the end of this time, you should feel blissful, productive, happy. That's the wrong mindset to go in.
Mel Robbins (00:59:27):
What's the right mindset?
Dr. Amishi Jha (00:59:28):
Well, I'll just tell you, for the adults that we've worked with with a DD, we didn't start them off with 12 minutes a day. We didn't have them do stillness practices where they were closing their eyes and focusing on the breath. We started with very active practices. They're walking, they're moving, sometimes even interactive practices where they're listening to other people. It wasn't until the end of eight weeks that we built them up to 12 minutes a day. So the solution for different people may vary depending on their particular circumstances, but this is a good sort of general way to approach it to strengthen attention.
Mel Robbins (01:00:01):
I can feel the person that's listening, leaning in, and I know they've already shared this with somebody that they care about because I do think the research is very exciting and the way you explained just that one exercise felt immediately accessible. Do you set a timer? Is that the best way to start?
Dr. Amishi Jha (01:00:22):
Before we even start a timer for 12 minutes, there's another thing I'd want people to do.
Mel Robbins (01:00:25):
Great. What do you do?
Dr. Amishi Jha (01:00:27):
Start by figuring out when in your day you're going to do this.
Mel Robbins (01:00:30):
Now, is there a better time based on the research?
Dr. Amishi Jha (01:00:32):
The best time to do it is when you're going to do it. That is the best time to do it. So the operating principle is this, stack it into something you already have the habit of doing. You brush your teeth every day at a certain time. You always have your morning cup of coffee, wedge it in there and have the goal be to have an extremely small amount of time. So if you think you can do 12 minutes, start with three minutes.
Mel Robbins (01:00:55):
Oh, I love that. Now why?
Dr. Amishi Jha (01:00:57):
Because none of this will matter unless you have it as part of your routine to actually engage in it. This is not mindfulness. Training is not about understanding what mindfulness is. I love that people will listen to this and understand hopefully what mindfulness is and what attention is. Will it actually make their attention stronger? To understand that it will not. It very much is like physical exercise. You have to do it to benefit. So the most important thing is that you figure out when you're going to do it and be reasonable with yourself. So start with three minutes and see if you can do it for a week, four days in a week. If you can do that for a couple of weeks, maybe increase it to six minutes. If you feel good about that, then move on to the 12 minute path and do it not only for the one exercise that you might be doing these shorter term practices with, but round it out so you have the full scope of the suite of practices.
Mel Robbins (01:01:49):
I think that's so great, Dr. Amishi, that you're so realistic and encouraging and that these simple details that, okay, stick it in wherever you'll do it. Don't fuss about getting it right. It feels like something that you could actually do. Okay. When I sit down and have my coffee, instead of wasting 22 minutes looking at social media and reading emails before I head off to work, why not set the timer for three minutes?
Dr. Amishi Jha (01:02:18):
Set the timer. Like you said, you were asking me if you should set a timer. Yes, set a timer. Make it that simple. You could do it with a buddy say every day right around nine, let's get on the phone or let's FaceTime each other. We can both have our eyes closed and just do these three minutes together. So that would be the first thing is get in the habit of doing it. Set your goal to be very, very small amount of time every day. But there's a second important thing I want people to be thinking about if they want to go on this journey, which is let's be reasonable about what to expect. This is not mindfulness training is not about having unbridled joy and peace instantly. We are not doing this with any end goal other than being more aware of what is happening to us moment by moment.
(01:03:02):
And sometimes if people have the expectation that it's going to be joyful or have them feel really, really positive, they will be very disappointed because usually what people find is like, oh my gosh, my mind is really a mess. I mind wander a lot. And so I want to just start out by saying, if you notice that your mind is wandering, if you spend three minutes or 12 minutes noticing that your mind is wandering a lot, that is a win. That is a win. You now understand the nature of what is going on. You're watching your mind. You're cultivating a friendship that's there with you saying, here we are. Look, we drifted away. Let's get ourselves back. And the more we deepen, we might even start noticing, oh, there's a kind of a flavor of what I'm drifting toward. Maybe that's something I'm going to consider after my practice is over. So we start develop. When I say we develop a friendship and an intimacy with our own mind and our own life, that's what I mean. So it's not about forcing anything.
Dr. Amishi Jha (01:03:58):
It's not about false expectations that you're going to instantly be very focused or very happy. It really is about better awareness of what's happening to you moment by moment in your
Mel Robbins (01:04:08):
Life. Dr. Amishi, can you tell us another example of one of these 12 minute exercises just to give us a sense of the breadth of the different things you can do?
Dr. Amishi Jha (01:04:19):
Yeah, there's really, I mean, I'll tell you, I'll give you the general idea of what all four of them are. By the way, I'm sitting here, I'm talking to you, I'm talking to you from a neuroscience point of view. But these practices are part of the world's wisdom traditions. There are many teachers, there are many apps, and I use the language of attention in the way that I describe it. So this breath awareness practice we talked about where you focus on your breath, your mind wanders. I call that the find your flashlight practice. And I did that on purpose because it's not about get your flashlight where it needs to be and stay there. It's like, no, no, no, find it. Where is it? Oh, there it is. Let's get it back. It's a more gentle, self-supportive and very clear set of instructions. It's not let your flashlight go over wherever it wants.
(01:05:00):
It's find it so that you can get it back to the goal. The other kinds of practices are really around these same ideas. And again, I use the language of attention. So the next in the sequence is something called the body scan. So I love that at the top of our conversation, you were saying, Hey, is it about just the eyes and ears? No, it's about attention to much more including the rest of the body. So in this practice, we sort of up the ante a little bit. It's not about one sensory experience and returning our flashlight there. It's about scanning the body. So we start with the tips of the toes and we say, okay, and you're guided to do this, so you're going to focus your flashlight on your big toe and you're going to kind of progress through the body.
(01:05:42):
And again, wherever you're being guided to pay attention, you're going to wander off. You're going to come back. And this allows you to have sort of a moving target, if you will. But the other really powerful aspect of this body scan practice, which is what it's called, is you start really understanding what's going on in the body. And what you start even getting a sense of is, oh, sometimes when I'm having a really hard time when I get to my shoulders and I feel like this is knot in my shoulders, it's accompanied by a particular thought or a set of emotions or a memory. So we're getting a sense that the body is embodying what our mind and our life is all about. And that helps us, again, grow in a familiarity and intimacy about what's going on with us. So the body scan practice still strengthens all three of those systems of attention and has this extra bonus of making us more familiar with our embodied life.
Mel Robbins (01:06:35):
Can you just walk me through toes to knees so we can get a sense of what this is like?
Dr. Amishi Jha (01:06:40):
Yeah, sure. Okay, sure. All right. So go ahead and sit comfortable, upright, alert, posture, and you can lower or close your eyes, whichever you prefer. And let's just start by just three deeper breaths just to kind of anchor ourselves here. And now just breathing in, breathing out, breathing in and out. And one more time. And now that we are here, their bodies fully present, sitting and breathing, let's take that flashlight of attention and point it to our big toe. Just direct it there. All you're doing with your flashlight there is just noticing any sensations happening in the big toe. Pick a side, let's say your left toe, what's going on, coolness, tingling or maybe no sensation at all. And now move your to the rest of your toes. Just broaden it out a little bit, checking out what's going on in the rest of the toes. Move the flashlight up to your ankle on your left leg, staying right there. The sensations, the left ankle. If your mind wanders, no problem, just return it back to this part of the body and you can now guide your flashlight up to your calf. What do you feel there? Tension, maybe soreness, coolness. Try to get really granular in the sensory experience that's going on right now in this part of the body. Your mind may drift away. That's okay. Just notice it and bring the flashlight of attention back. And finally, let's move up to the knee, the left knee, the front of the knee, the back of the knee, noticing what's going on right now in this part of the body. And as we end this practice, let's just take the entire lower part of our left leg, broaden the flashlight out. So we've got the entire part from tips at the toes all the way to the knee. We're shining our flashlight there, paying attention to this part of the body. And when you're ready, in the next moment or two, feel free to open your eyes and return your attention back to us.
Mel Robbins (01:10:38):
That was pretty cool. First of all, you had an incredible voice for guided meditation. Very, very soothing. But I cannot believe how wandering my mind is. Every time you had a cue, I would go, and then my mind was somewhere else. When you queued the ankle, you know what my thought was? Wait the ankle on both sides of your legs, or is it only on the outside? Is there an inner ankle? And then I started going, why do I not know this?
Dr. Amishi Jha (01:11:13):
Totally fine. But that's really cool that you noticed that that is really a win. So the fact that you noticed, wow, I had this whole conversation when I said mindfulness is about paying attention to our present moment experience without conceptual elaboration. You just experienced conceptual elaboration and you caught it. You said, ah, look at me. I'm just proliferating all these thoughts. And then all the good news is all you need to do when that happens is back to the ankle.
Mel Robbins (01:11:39):
Yeah, I just would go like, okay, flashlight, back on the outside. We're just going to go the outside. We're not going to think about the inside. Now I'm making thoughts again. So we're going to go back on the outside. It was, it's really fascinating because now that we have the baseline understanding of the three parts of the attention system, you can see how you go from focus to broad to then the jugular, jugular, the jugular.
Dr. Amishi Jha (01:12:07):
Executive functioning.
Mel Robbins (01:12:08):
Yeah, the executive function, grabbing the flashlight. Come on. Now back here, it's really neat how it uses all three of those things.
Dr. Amishi Jha (01:12:17):
That's right over and over again. And there's no mandate that says you can't just begin again. Let's say I talked about the ankle and you totally missed it. Well, you can go back to the ankle or you notice, oh, there's something really, I'm getting a strange sensation in this part of the knee. And you start getting captured by that. That's okay. Notice it's just a thought.
Mel Robbins (01:12:39):
Well, what else is cool about this is that you can do it anywhere. Whenever I get on a plane, I have got my book, I'm doing all this stuff. I'm texting every, my husband drops in, he closes his eyes, he just drops into a meditation practice. And so while I'm basically stressing myself out and maxing my attention system, Chris is over there doing reps in the seat next to me. You could be doing this waiting at a doctor's appointment.
Mel Robbins (01:13:09):
You could be doing this during a boring meeting at work, and nobody even knows you could do this anytime you want,
Dr. Amishi Jha (01:13:16):
Anytime you want. And I do have a little recommendation for when people help. People can get started, even if they don't want to start with a formal recommendation. And it's like doing a mini practice. So this is something called the stop practice. And if you want to remember when to do it, do it anytime you're stopped.
Mel Robbins (01:13:32):
Oh, like sitting at a traffic light or anywhere. Standing at an elevator. Oh, standing in line at a store.
Dr. Amishi Jha (01:13:37):
Standing in line at a store. Okay. Anytime you're stopped. And by the way, if you're not stopped, you can feel free to stop. So it's an acronym, the stop Practice itself. And it is like this. So first is S stop. Literally stop. So don't move. Just stay still. T take a breath, O observe. And that really is this broad receptive quality of like what's going on right now, p, proceed.
Mel Robbins (01:14:11):
That's beautiful. Really, really cool. I love how you are so driven to help people and to make a difference with this research. I mean, I realize that's why researchers do research, but you can just, it comes through
(01:14:25):
In your passion for it and the heart that's behind it. Toward the end of your book, you have this incredible, beautiful section that is labeled Attention is your highest form of love. And there is this wonderful quote. This is on page 2 51. To me, a peak mind is not about perfection or being at some imaginary pinnacle like you might see on a accessory poster. The woman on a mountaintop arms flung in the air reshing her peak experience. A peak mind is not about striving to get somewhere else. It's simpler, more elegant and doable. I think of it like a triangle. The base is the present moment, and the sides are two forms of attention. One side receptive attention so we can notice, observe, and be, and the other side concentrative attention. So we are focused and flexible. Why is your attention your highest form of love?
Dr. Amishi Jha (01:15:39):
If you think about it from your own experience, how do you experience care from another person? It starts with attention. And extending care starts with attention. So from my point of view, one of the real values of cultivating your attention is to use it in the service of the deepest and most meaningful things that we do in our lives as it relates to our relationships with other people. So it is a form of love. Attention is a form of love. It's the most you can give of yourself. It is literally giving the full capacity of your brain and devoting it to another person.
Mel Robbins (01:16:19):
That is so beautiful. I would love for you to speak directly to the person that's been here with us just listening and learning from you. And there's so much that you shared with us that you taught us, that you've given to us. So thank you. But if there was one thing that they were to do after hearing all of this from you, what do you think the most important thing to do is?
Dr. Amishi Jha (01:16:50):
The biggest call to action, and it's a very simple one, is pay attention to your attention. Really pay attention to your attention. It is the most powerful thing you can do for yourself and advantaging everything else in your life. And it's not a big to-do. It's literally checking in and seeing where it is.
Mel Robbins (01:17:12):
Dr. Amishi, what are your parting words?
Dr. Amishi Jha (01:17:16):
My big thing that I want to say to everybody that's listening is that we now know in 2025, that daily physical exercise is necessary for our physical health. And I'm very happy to say that now we also know that there is something we can do to exercise our mind so that our wellbeing and our mind's health can be optimal. And you can do this with investing as little as 12 minutes a day.
Mel Robbins (01:17:45):
Well, all I can say is thank you for being here. Thank you for teaching us all of this. Thank you for the work and the research that you do. Thank you for the difference that you're making. It is true that where your attention flows determines your experience of life. And I am grateful that I feel like so much smarter. I've never understood the system of attention the way I do now. I've never understood more simply what is going on in an A DHD brain. And I've never felt better equipped and empowered to do something 12 minutes a day to train my mind and to really strengthen my attention. And I know that that will directly impact my life in a very, very positive way, and it will impact the person's life who's listening. So thank you, thank you. Thank you, Dr. Amishi.
Dr. Amishi Jha (01:18:39):
Thank you so much.
Mel Robbins (01:18:40):
You're welcome. And I also want to thank you. Thank you for being here. Your time, your attention are the most valuable things that you have in life. And the fact that you spend time and you give me your attention, I do not take that lightly. It is a privilege. So I am so honored to be here with you. I'm also proud of you for spending your time and pouring your attention into listening to something or watching something that'll make your life better. That is so cool. And in case no one else tells you today, as your friend, I want to tell you that I love you and I believe in you and your ability to create a better life and being present for your life and protecting your attention, wow, that's going to make a huge difference. So thank you for being here. Alrighty. I will see you in the very next episode.
(01:19:28):
I'll be waiting to welcome you in the moment you hit play. I'll see you there. I want to thank you for giving us your attention and being here watching this on YouTube with us. I don't take that lightly. So thank you, thank you, thank you. And I also want to thank you for hitting subscribe. It's one way that you can support me and the team who is doing so much to try to support you. I mean, didn't you just love this? Thank you for hitting subscribe. Thank you for sharing this, and I know you're thinking. All right, mal enough. Tell me what I should watch next. You're going to love this video. This is definitely worth your attention, and I will be waiting to welcome you in the moment you hit play. I'll see you there.
Key takeaways
When your focus feels hijacked, remember your attention is power—it’s not gone, it’s under attack, and you can train it back to serve you every single day.
Attention is love. When you give someone your full presence, you’re offering the most powerful gift you have—your mind, your focus, your entire self.
You only get one flashlight of focus, not five—if you keep multitasking, you’re not superhuman, you’re draining your brain and setting yourself up to fail.
Your brain’s attention system starts peaking around 25, but it declines fast if you don’t train it—12 minutes a day can keep your mind strong and clear.
Stress doesn’t make you stronger forever; push past the peak too long, and your performance, mood, and clarity start to collapse before you even realize it.
Guests Appearing in this Episode
Dr. Amishi Jha, PhD
Dr. Amishi Jha is a cognitive neuroscientist, professor at The University of Miami, and expert in attention, focus, and mindfulness. She studies how to train the brain for peak performance.
- Check out Dr. Jha’s website
- Explore Dr. Jha’s University of Miami Profile
- Follow Dr. Jha on Instagram
- Dive into Dr. Jha’s research
- Pre-order Dr. Jha’s app
-
Peak Mind
Whether you’re simply browsing, talking to friends, or trying to stay focused in an important meeting, you can’t seem to manage to hang on to your attention. No matter how hard you try, you’re somewhere else. The consequence is that you miss out on 50 percent of your life—including the most important moments.
The good news: There’s nothing wrong with you—your brain isn’t broken. The human brain was built to be distractible.
The even better news: You can train your brain to pay attention more effectively.
Stay with me a little longer and soon you will be able to:
- Focus without all the struggle.
- Take back your attention from the pull of distraction.
- And function at your peak, for all that truly matters in your life.
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