<p><em>New episodes come out every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for free, with 1-week early access for Wondery+ subscribers.</em></p> <p>---</p> <p>How to stay focused, fight distraction, and function at your peak.</p> <p><br /></p> <p><a href="https://amishi.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Dr. Amishi Jha</a> is 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. Dr Jha is the author of the national bestseller, <a href="https://amishi.com/books/peak-mind#order" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"><em>Peak Mind</em></a>. </p> <p><br /></p> <p><strong>In this episode we talk about:</strong></p> <p><br /></p> <ul> <li>What peak mind is</li> <li>Why meta awareness is important to practice and achieve peak mind</li> <li>The suite of mindfulness-based attention training practices</li> <li>Why humans developed attention in the first place</li> <li>Using the flashlight and floodlight metaphors to help us understand different types of attention</li> <li>The mental pushup for attention: focus, notice, and redirect</li> <li>The attention benefits for high stress populations who engage in contemplatives practices</li> <li>Multitasking vs. monotasking</li> <li>The real life and death consequences of confirmation bias</li> <li>Part of the reason why we may be experiencing a crisis of attention </li> <li>Giving our mind the freedom to choose where it goes next</li> </ul> <p><br /></p> <p><strong>Related Episodes:</strong></p> <p><br /></p> <p><a href="https://www.tenpercent.com/tph/podcast-episode/johann-hari-439" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Why You Can't Pay Attention - And How to Think Deeply Again | Johann Hari</a></p> <p><br /></p> <p><strong>Sign up for Dan's weekly newsletter</strong> <a href="https://bit.ly/3QtGRqJ" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"><strong>here</strong></a></p> <p><strong>Follow Dan on social:</strong> <a href="https://bit.ly/3tGigG5" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"><strong>Instagram</strong></a><strong>,</strong> <a href="https://bit.ly/3FOA84J" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"><strong>TikTok</strong></a></p> <p><strong>Ten Percent Happier online</strong> <a href="https://bit.ly/46TZglY" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"><strong>bookstore</strong></a></p> <p><strong>Subscribe to our</strong> <a href="https://bit.ly/3FybRzD" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"><strong>YouTube Channel</strong></a></p> <p><strong>Our favorite playlists on:</strong> <a href="https://spoti.fi/3Qa8kMT" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"><strong>Anxiety</strong></a><strong>,</strong> <a href="https://spoti.fi/3MjtMxF" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"><strong>Sleep</strong></a><strong>,</strong> <a href="https://spoti.fi/3QvyA5J" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"><strong>Relationships</strong></a><strong>,</strong> <a href="https://spoti.fi/3QxZASc" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"><strong>Most Popular Episodes</strong></a></p> <p><br /></p> <p><strong>Full Shownotes:</strong> <a href="https://www.tenpercent.com/tph/podcast-episode/amishi-jha-rerun-2023" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">https://www.tenpercent.com/tph/podcast-episode/amishi-jha-rerun-2023</a></p> <p><br /></p>
Actionable Insights
1. Practice Minimum Meditation Dose
Engage in mindfulness meditation for at least 12 minutes, four to five days a week, as this duration has shown beneficial effects on attention, mood, and stress in high-stress groups. Practicing more than this minimum dose will yield greater benefits.
2. Sustain Consistent Practice
Recognize that cultivating mental capacities like presence of mind and focus is an active, effortful process, similar to building physical strength, and requires continuous practice to maintain and improve.
3. Apply Focus, Notice, Redirect
Use the three-step mental ‘push-up’ during focused attention practice and in daily life: focus on your chosen target, notice when your mind wanders, and then redirect your attention back to the target.
4. Train Focused Attention (Flashlight)
Practice focused attention meditation (e.g., breath awareness) to cultivate your brain’s orienting system, enabling you to direct your mental ‘flashlight’ with precision to specific internal or external information.
5. Practice Open Monitoring (Floodlight)
Engage in open monitoring meditation to cultivate your brain’s alerting system, fostering a broad, receptive awareness that illuminates whatever is occurring in the present moment without privileging any specific information.
Develop an awareness of the current contents and processes at play in your mind moment by moment, allowing you to access the raw data of your experience non-judgmentally.
7. Act on Self-Awareness
Use your meta-awareness to inform your decisions; for example, if you notice you are reactive, pause before sending an email to make a more considered choice.
8. Avoid Task Switching
Refrain from attempting to ‘multitask’ between two or more intentionally demanding tasks simultaneously, as this is actually task switching that depletes attention, slows you down, and increases errors.
9. Disable Notifications
Turn off notifications on social media and other apps to protect your focus and prevent constant pulls of attention that lead to unproductive task switching and mental exhaustion.
10. Maintain Task Focus (Container)
When working on a demanding task, create a ‘protected container’ by staying goal-focused and resisting the urge to engage in unrelated activities, even brief ones, to preserve your mental resources.
11. Practice Decentering (Drop Story)
Cultivate the ability to ‘decenter’ or defuse yourself from the stories and biases your mind creates, allowing you to perceive the raw data of reality rather than a pre-conceived narrative (confirmation bias).
12. Intentionally Allow Mind Wandering
Dedicate periods of time to let your mind wander freely without a specific goal, as this ‘off-leash’ mental activity is valuable for positive mood, problem-solving, visioning, and generative thinking.
13. Protect Mental ‘White Space’
Consciously create and protect moments of ‘white space’ in your day, such as waiting in line or taking a walk, by refraining from using technology to allow natural, undirected mind-wandering.
14. Practice Loving-Kindness (Connection)
Incorporate loving-kindness meditation (rebranded as ‘connection’) to extend care, concern, and interest towards yourself and others, rounding out your contemplative practice with an ethical and professional mindset.
15. Acknowledge Task Switching Costs
If task switching is unavoidable, be aware that it will make you slower, more prone to errors, and exhausted; communicate this to others by asking for a moment to reorient when interrupted.
16. Unhook from Ruminative Loops
Utilize meditation skills, particularly an open monitoring orientation, to recognize when you are stuck in ruminative loops (e.g., worry, catastrophizing) and practice unhooking yourself to allow mental flow and reset.
17. Cultivate Non-Clinging
Develop a mind that doesn’t cling as much to thoughts and emotions, allowing them to arise and pass away naturally without active manipulation or resistance, fostering a sense of mental freedom.
18. Practice Body Scan Meditation
Engage in body scan meditation by systematically directing your mental ‘flashlight’ to different parts of your body, observing sensations as they arise and fade.