This episode is sponsored by Cure Hydration. All right, I’m going to be real with you. Drinking water is boring. My ADHD brain is like, wait, we have to do this again? Like every day, multiple times. What in the world? And because I’m running from meetings to coaching calls to kid chaos, staying hydrated is not something I’m naturally good at. It’s not something I naturally think about. That’s why I’ve been obsessed with Cure hydration packs lately. Cure is a plant based hydrating electrolyte mix with no added sugar, only 25 calories, and it actually tastes good. The watermelon and berry pomegranate have been on repeat for me. I’m actually like really running low on those flavors, which is so sad. They’re refreshing without being too sweet or artificial. It feels like my water finally has a little bit of personality, which I enjoy. I really do. What I love most is that CURE uses a science backed formula that hydrates as effectively as an IV drip. So when I’m scrambling through my day forgetting my water again, CURE helps me to catch up fast. I throw a few packs in my bag and it makes drinking enough water simple. Which for my ADHD brain is basically a miracle. So staying hydrated isn’t just about water. You also need electrolytes. And that’s why I love cure. It’s clean, tastes great, and it actually works. And bonus, CURE is FSA HSA approved so you can use those funds to stay hydrated. The smart way for I have ADHD Podcast listeners. You can get 20% off your first order@curehydration.com ihaveadhd with the code ihaveadhd and if you get a post purchase survey make sure to tell them that you heard about Cure right here on the podcast. It really does help to support the show. Don’t just drink more water, Upgrade it with Cure. Save over $200 when you book weekly stays with Vrbo this winter. If you need to work, why not work from a chalet? If you haven’t seen your college besties since, well, college, you need a week to fully catch up in a snowy cabin. And if you have to stay in a remote place with your in laws, you should save over $200 a week. That’s the least we can do. So you might as well start digging out the long johns because saving over $200 on a week long snowcation rental is in the cards book now@vrbo.com. Welcome to the I have ADHD podcast where it’s all about education, encouragement and coaching for adults with adhd. I’m your host, Kristin Carter, and I have adhd. Let’s chat about the frustrations, humor and challenges of adulting relationships, working and achieving with this neurodevelopmental disorder. I’ll help you understand your unique brain, unlock your potential, and move from point A to point B. Hey, what’s up? This is Kristen Carter and you are listening to The I have ADHD podcast, episode number 140. I am medicated, I am caffeinated, and I am ready to roll. What is up? What is up? You are going to lose your mind when I tell you all about our guest today. So sit back and get ready. Dr. Amishi Jha is a neuroscientist who studies attention and how to train it. That’s right, you heard me. We’re going to talk about what attention is and how it can be trained and improved. If you’re an adult with ADHD listening to this podcast, and obviously I’m a assuming you are, I want you to hear me loud and clear. Dr. Jha and her team have conducted studies on adults with adhd and those studies have revealed that mindfulness training absolutely can improve attention. And the best part about it, listen up. It only takes about 12 minutes a day. Now, I first heard Dr. Jha’s brilliance on another podcast and then I read her book. Okay, most of the book. I read most of the book. It’s called Peak Mind. And I want to really encourage you to multitask right now and go find Peak Mind on Amazon right now. Click that buy button because I’m telling you, it was absolutely life changing for me and it will also inform a lot of the work that I will be doing with my ADHD clients moving forward. So it was a very impactful book for me and I think it will be for you too. I loved it every second of my conversation with Dr. Josh. She is fun and funny. She’s a mom of two. She lived in Philly for 10 years, so we found a lot of common ground. So let me tell you all about her and then we’re going to get rolling. Dr. Amishi Jha is a neuroscientist and a professor of psychology at the University of Miami. She’s also the Director of Contemplative Neuroscience for the Mindfulness Research and Practice Initiative, which she co founded in 2010. Her work has been featured at NATO, the World Economic Forum, and the Pentagon. She has a new book out called Peak Mind. Peak Mind teaches you how to train your brain and how to pay attention differently. Please enjoy this conversation. Welcome, Dr. Jha. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you for your time, your attention. But really, this book that you have written has been such an eye opener for me and I can’t wait to just shout it from the rooftops for my listeners because I want them all to go out and buy it. Thank you for being here today. I love it. Thank you so much. It’s great to be here with you. Your book, I realized as I was reading it, was a really big surprise to me because I expected it to be a neuroscience textbook. I expected it. But even though I had heard you on other podcasts and you are very conversational, very relatable, I was still expecting a very difficult book to read. But it was so engaging, it captivated my attention. I was so surprised by everything I was learning while woven in with narrative and stories and laughter about your kids and your. Your dog, your husband. It was just. It was such a wonderful book. So thank you. Thank you so much. Oh, thank you so much. That means a lot to me because it’s true. I mean, I think that my intention going in was to make it so that it was a good read for people. And I mean, it’s awkward as a scientist to bring yourself in as a character and something you write. We never do this in our research papers, but there’s a whole narrative behind life, and it ends up that these concepts that I was interested in communicating aren’t reserved only for the lab. They permeate our moment to moment live. So I was excited to have the opportunity to share some of that and very, very gratified that people enjoyed it. So I appreciate the comment. Yes, it seems that I’m not the only one who’s enjoyed it. It’s being recognized. And tell me about the new status symbol that you have now. You are national bestseller. That’s right. Now it’s a national bestseller, which is very, very exciting. Yeah. That’s awesome. So what I was first struck by as I was reading it was even just in the intro, was that research that you’ve done and that others have done show that the mind wanders 50% of the time for everyone. And I really thought that this was exclusive to adhd, but mind wandering is a thing that everyone struggles with. I was shocked. Can you tell us a little bit about that? Absolutely. And that’s the thing about attention, you know, I mean, and thinking about it as a continuum. So there are ways in which our attention can be. It can function sort of very Very well. And then ways in which it can actually be problematic. And that’s true for many people. In fact, it’s not even true for many people. It’s true for all people. Like all of us will be somewhere on the continuum. We’re not always going to be in the same exact spot. And what I learned from my work with high stress, high demand professionals is that even if you tend to be on the attention works pretty reliably and pretty well side, the circumstances and demands of certain types of professions are going to push you toward the side of the spectrum that may feel more problematic. So I think that’s sort of the baseline and like you said, the 50% number, it’s an eye opener because most of us don’t realize that. And I’ll just tell you a little bit about sort of the journey with that whole discovery. You know, initially some of the most kind of prominent studies that were done, including one that was done by some colleagues at Harvard, it was trying to capture how attention can become off task in people’s everyday lives. So what they did in many follow up studies have also done is you get people to sign up for your study and you say, I’m going to ping you via text message anytime during normal waking hours and ask you a few questions. And the first question you will be asked is what are you doing right now? Like what is the task in which you are engaged? And it could be from all the things people do, right? So I’m reading a book, I’m having a conversation, I’m out, I’m having in the middle of a work meeting or I’m eating dinner, whatever it is. And then the second question was, where is your attention right now? Is it on the thing you’re doing or is it somewhere else? And that’s where we saw the 50% number. I mean those were the initial studies were done, like I said, by colleagues that were doing what’s called experience sampling. It’s only half the time were people reporting that their attention was in the thing that they were saying that they were doing. So that was like, okay, that is crazy shocking. But I was a little skeptical I would say because it’s like, you know people when they get, when they’re involved in these experience sampling studies, I thought the methodology that was used was superb. But it’s just the state of the participant, maybe that they don’t really take it seriously or they’re like, you know, I’m just gonna say whatever, I’m in the middle of doing something. So what we were interested in doing is like, let’s bring them into the lab and let’s do studies in which we tell them, you’re gonna now do an attentionally demanding task. In fact, we are testing your attention. There’s no secrets here. That’s what we’re doing. And so they would perform the task and every time they would do the experiment, about an 18 minute attentionally demanding task that they’re doing, and we’re recording their performance. Sometimes we’re recording their brain data as well. But every now and then we’d stop the experiment, kind of pause it and ask those same questions. Is your attention on the task right now? And still only half the time were they actually reporting that their attention was on the task. So that was like, what, you know, now you know, like, you know, you’re supposed to be paying attention and you’re not. And then other colleagues have done studies where they pushed it even farther and they said, we’re going to pay you to keep your attention here. And then they still ask people to be honest and probe, you know, are you paying attention to the task? Still around hovering around 50%. So, you know, the number tends to vary between 35 and 50%, but it’s really high. That is really high. And that does give us a sense of sort of the default nature of the mind. And now we can start seeing that a wavering attention isn’t necessarily a flaw in the design of the mind, but it was selected for. It’s happening on purpose. Yeah. Say more words about that because that when I was reading that section about how like this is even this isn’t a bug, I think, is what you said. Right. Like this isn’t a flaw in the system necessarily. This is actually part of the way that it’s designed. So tell, tell me why a wandering attention might be useful. Right. So, you know, if you think back to our ancestors long ago. Right. Yeah. If you had unflinching focus, you’re at, let’s say, a watering hole or you’re picking berries or something like that, you’re doing something that requires focus and you can focus. We’ve adapted for, for focus. So you’re completely fixated on the task. If that was so directed that you couldn’t break through from that, you wouldn’t notice a predator nearby. You wouldn’t notice a storm approaching. You would have no idea really what’s happening in your immediate surroundings that may require immediate action. And so pretty soon you’d be lunch or you’d be in some catastrophic situation and you Wouldn’t survive. So in some sense that’s why we think that it was selected for, is that it actually advantaged this notion of attentional cycling to have kind of a wavering attention could be beneficial because it keeps an agility for the organism to act as needed when emergent situations occur or when demands and challenges appear. But then when we think about it now, like fast forward to today, why would we need, you know, it’s like, hasn’t that been selected out now we’re not in grave danger, but frankly we need it as well. The ability and capacity to focus still very powerful, useful thing to do. But those micro excursions that we take are part of what we need to do. Right. So when I say micro excursions, what I really mean is that we’re, we’re taking a little trip away from the present moment to do something else. Now it may be to reflect on a past event and that event may be related to what’s happening right now or maybe completely unrelated. Yeah, we journey away to the past or we journey to the future. And either times we’re doing those, whether we’re fast forwarding or rewinding, we are using our mind in a different mode. We are simulating reality. Because whatever it is that our mind is attending to is not happening right now. It is being generated within the mind. But the downside for our attention as it relates to dealing with the task at hand, because that is only happening in the present moment, is that attention cannot be in multiple places at once. So if your attention is in the past, you are necessarily going to miss what’s going on in the present. And we know this not just from sort of a performance standpoint. People when they report that they’re mind wandering in all these experiments I was telling you about, we know that the performance will suffer. Your, your accuracy will be lower, your self reported confidence in the ability to the task will be lower. Your variability, meaning how reliably you respond is going to be, you know, less. So things don’t look great when we monitor away, so there are consequences. But it’s like we’re not going to be in two places at once. So there are costs to doing it, but there are benefits as well. We could never reflect on the past or plan for the future unless we were constantly being able to move our attention around in this way. So this is really fascinating to me because as an adult with adhd, who works with many, many adults with adhd, one of the hallmark not traits, but one of the things that we deal with so Often is the judgment that we have for ourselves when we do mind wander, when we are not on task, when we notice that our attention has moved. And so, you know, on top of having a wandering attention now we are heaping on judgment, self loathing and for many people that causes paralysis. And so to hear you say that this is a very normal, natural thing. Now for ADHDers, it’s to a greater extent, sure, that’s fine, right? But if we could even just forgive ourselves for that percentage that is quote unquote typical. You know, so like if the general population is struggling and they mind wander 50% of the time and we mind wander like 80% of the time, we could forgive ourselves for that 50% that everyone does. And we could maybe just cut our judgment down way, way, way like a ton. Right? Whether in half or even more. Do you co sign my hypothesis there? I love your, I love the way you’re thinking about it. But I would push you even to say drop the whole judgment thing together because in the moment it’s not going to serve you right. So. And you know, it’s funny because, and I do write about this a little bit in the book, like there’s this notion, this Buddhist concept of second arrow. And it’s this notion that, you know, if you get struck by an arrow, and of course this are ancient, ancient millennia ago, you know, we’re not worried about that. Usually today the arrow is going to cause pain wherever it strikes you. That is a real thing. But then there’s this thing called second arrowing which is like the fact you’re having pain about the fact that you’re having pain, which is causing exponential growth in the amount of pain that you have. The thing about judgment, the thing about rumination, the thing about really spinning and looping on the fact that errors are made or that you’ve been mind wandering, it’s not only that, it doesn’t serve you. You’re not going to get better at being able to pay attention when you’re doing that, but you’re actually spending out the attentional fuel you have uselessly meaning it’s not really providing any benefit. So halting that can be really, really helpful. The problem for most of us is like how do I stop that from happening? It seems very natural, like I lapsed and I’m mad at myself for lapsing. How do I break the cycle? And that’s where something like mindfulness training can be so useful because what it is allowing us to do is kind of reframe the whole situation not so much as my attention lapsed and I’m a failure, but my attention lapsed and I noticed that’s a win. Yeah. We know from the, from the research that that moment of acknowledging and recognizing that we have lapsed is a really sweet spot of opportunity. Because if we hadn’t noticed in that moment, there’s no way we could redirect ourselves back. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But if we could cultivate that capacity of knowing where our mind is with more granularity, with more reliability, then maybe we could catch ourselves much more often with much more frequency to get ourselves back on track and then observe without judgment, as you say, which is so fascinating because I was reading the section on meta thinking, all of that was so fascinating. And I was thinking, am I reading a life coaching book or am I reading like a neuroscience book? Because so much of all of the things that you were saying, especially like understanding your mind, wandering, observing it without judgment, being able to watch yourself think and not judging yourself for what’s happening, these are things that, like, I’ve been trained on as a life coach and I work with my clients on, but to have that woven in with all of the research, all of the science and, and all of the new information that you’ve brought to the field was just. I just feel like fireworks going off in my brain. Yeah. And I would say, you know, the wisdom of a lot of, you know, ADHD coaching and other forms of coaching and executive coaching, for example, there’s solution based approaches. And what the science many times is suggesting is there’s a reason those solutions are effective. And, you know, my interest going into it wasn’t initially to find solutions. It was really to understand how things work. But as soon as I understood that this is something that is not just common but vulnerable for many people circumstantially and for consequential professions where a lapse is life or death for you or somebody else. Yeah. Then we really want to figure out a way to train. And it ends up that that training modality can be helpful for people under certain professional circumstances. And frankly, all of us that have challenges with our attention whenever we do. 100%. I was just going to say, one of the things I want to say to you regarding ADD in particular is that, you know, in general, ADD ADHD is considered clinically significant when it results in problems in people’s ability to really function. There’s many people that would say they have aspects of ADD and ADHD in their lives, but they’re still functional. Right, Right. And so a lot of this is corrective, like you’re taking an action and you’re benefiting from people like you who are coaches to guide. But one of the common features, and I do describe this study too, in is that when people are diagnosed with ADD, just based on objective metrics of task performance of clinical interviews, et cetera, but they also happen to have this quality of the term. You already mentioned, meta awareness, which is that they wander a lot, but they tend to be able to notice that their mind is wandering. That is protective. So just noticing. Yep, there I go again. I’m off. Yeah. And what you do in that moment is very critical because if you go down the path of, gosh, I keep doing this, what’s wrong with me? Why can’t I get it together versus this is my moment, get back on track, like, without a lot of argument and deliberation, returning back such a powerful thing, and really reduces and corresponds with less functional impairment with a disorder. So to me, that was very exciting because it meant this is an intrinsic capacity that is part of the ADHD spectrum in some sense, and we can train for it. And that’s one of the things that mindfulness training can really help with, is cultivating meta awareness. So please tell us all of the things about mindfulness training, because I think that question comes next. Like, all of the listeners are going to be like, okay, so tell me. Which I know we only have a limited amount of time, and I really do think that the understanding that you present all of the signs, the research in this book, I just think that to gain a full awareness of, like, even the reason for why it’s so important, I want people to read the book. But tell me what mindfulness training even is. And then also, is it just emptying your mind? Because that. I know it’s not because I’ve read the book, but I think that is the first thing that comes in is like, I can’t do that. I can’t. I can’t just sit there. Right. Somebody with especially hyperactive ADHD is going to be very resistant to the idea of any kind of mindfulness. So could you tell me on it a little bit? Right, right. Yes. I mean, I think that the first thing is that there’s nothing about mindfulness that has to do with clearing your mind that is so good. Myth category, there’s never request to clear the mind. If you are alive and a human being, you will never be able to clear your mind. And because the mind is. That’s not its nature. Mind is A thought pump. We are constantly pumping out thoughts and this is part of the default, but it’s also a very useful thing that the mind does. So, so, so actually even attempts to clear it would be problematic. So forget that, don’t do that. Right. Something that’s required. There’s not even a mandate that we’re still meaning that we don’t move. So we can talk about all the different kinds of practices that, that are not stillness practices that can be offered and very easily, not easily. Very friendly. Friendly, yes, that’s a word. In a friendly manner you can include incorporate into your life. So that’s the great news about this type of cognitive training is that it’s infinitely flexible. And you know, mindfulness training now, after about 30 years of solid research on it in our, in kind of the Western psychological literature has had so many different ways it’s proliferated and benefited so many different kinds of groups. One of the things that I have been very interested in is how to cater the training so that it’s appropriate for the challenges, considerations and needs of whatever group we’re working with. And adults with ADD happens to be a particular kind of group where we’re not going to offer it in the same way we would if somebody came into a pain clinic with chronic pain. Right. So that we can definitely talk about some of those things. But maybe I want to start with, before we talk about mindfulness, let’s talk a little bit more about attention. Because even though, you know, people with ADD know that attention is a big issue, they understand when it doesn’t kind of cooperate and that can be very frustrating and harm us even at our self view and even our self esteem in some sense. Let’s break it down because I think that then it’ll make sense why mindfulness training could be a useful thing. That would be lovely. Let’s do it. And yeah, and so, you know, and this actually maps on very nicely to the subtypes of ADD and the clinical ways in which it’s diagnosed. So attention, even though we’ve been using it as one word, it’s actually a whole family of things, right? It’s a whole family of processes that have what we might call like a family resemblance aspect to it. They kind of cling together in some way. And the overarching way that I think about attention is that it’s a brain capacity that evolved to help us do something very, very important, which is prioritize some information over other information. That’s what we want to do. Why do we want to do that. Because the brain is limited. It’s only, you know, even though it’s the most complex thing we probably know of in the known universe, it is so limited it cannot fully process everything around it and everything occurring within it. So prioritizing allows there to be some advantaging of some information over other information. And that’s literally what’s happening in the brain with attention. It’s like we turn up the volume on the things that we prioritize and everything else is lowered down. So then the question becomes, okay, if that’s basically what it does, what are the ways we prioritize? Yeah. And there are three main ways, as you’ve read the book. Yeah, yeah, you hear me talk about. But I think they’re helpful to kind of review. So the first way I think is. Is probably very commonly understood as focus. So when we say focus, what we mean is that there’s content that I’m going to prioritize. It could be, you know, right now I’m looking at your lovely smile. I’m not even focusing on your gorgeous background because I’m putting it on you and our conversation. So that means that becomes the priority for me in my visual processing. If you now had a brain cap on me and were processed and we’re looking at brain activity and face processing parts of my brain, you’d see that they are more active. Yeah, right. Even though I’m seeing the stuff behind you, they’re more active because attention is being paid to them. So there is this, what we call, like a signal to noise advantaging. There’s more signal from the thing we pay attention to. And that term focus is really, really powerful because it gives us a sense of agency regarding our attention. It’s like, we can focus. We do this willfully. We do it on purpose. And often we think of focus as that narrowing and constraining. You know, this is the thing that’s important, not everything else. So the metaphor I like to use is think of it like a flashlight. I love that room. Oh, my goodness. It’s so helpful because whatever it is that you directed toward better information, everything else darkened around it. And it also has that quality of agency. I can hold the flashlight, I can point it. But it also has the vulnerability of this precious brain resource, is that it pulled. So I always think about this, like, if you’re in a darkened path and you need to be able to see so you don’t trip on something, you’re walking in nature. Flashlights, a handy tool. You point it toward the Ground, make your way across the path. But if you heard a weird sound behind you, you would just like that, take the flashlight and try to figure out what the heck it is. Yeah, you know, is it my neighbor who’s also walking nearby? Is it a dog? Is it a wolf? What is it? And you did that without thinking. So that capacity of this precious resource to be directed is there, but it can get yanked by things that we have been really, we have evolved to prioritize by default, threatening things, self related things, novel things, interesting things. You know, anything that could, we could say, grabs our attention is telling you how the brain was essentially baked into the way we process information. But I do think the flashlight’s a useful way to think about it because it captures that notion of prioritizing some information over other information. Definitely. But that’s not the end of the story because prioritizing things can be really. It can happen in multiple ways. So maybe we could talk about the second way that we prioritize, please. Which is, you know, it’s interesting because when I first talk about this, people are like, I don’t really get it necessarily. I don’t know if I do this kind of attention. So this is something called the brain’s alerting system. And what it prioritizes is the present moment, what is occurring right now. Not so much the content of what’s occurring, but what is occurring right now, meaning everything that’s occurring now. This form of attention is broad, it’s receptive, it doesn’t privilege certain content over other content. And you know, people would say, well, that’s not the way I pay attention. To me, attention is focused. Well, you do pay attention this way. Think of the last time you were driving down the road or walking down the street and, and you saw like a flashing yellow traffic light or even a thing on the ground that said caution. Right. What does that elicit in you? It’s like, okay, pay attention. And that’s a very different way. Be broad, receptive. You don’t know what’s going on or what will be relevant. But right now you are attentive to all the inputs you’re getting from around your environment. And so useful to do. Because if we didn’t see that flashing yellow sign or yellow light by a school zone, for example, we might not notice that children are walking across the street or there’s some weird traffic pattern, whatever it is. So once we clue into the fact that we naturally do this anyway and we know what it means, it’s very helpful to get that Can I interrupt you here just for a second? I think that adults with ADHD spend a lot of their time in this form of attention with the broad form. What are your thoughts on that? Because for us, it is such a treasure and a gift when we are able to hop into that hyper focus, that flashlight version of focus that is like very narrow and we’re just like focusing on the thing. What I experience is spending a lot of my time in that broad range of focus where I am like alerted to a lot of different things around me, the ping on my phone and all of the things that kind of pull me away from that flashlight version of attention. I think that’s probably very true for many people that have. Is that there’s potentially a dialed up alerting. Yeah. But here’s the other thing. I would say attention deficit disorder is essentially a dysregulation of attention. Yeah. So for example, when people, some people with inattentive subtype of attention would say, yes, I’m too, I’m too much in that broad receptive stance, it is difficult to narrow and constrain. Other people that have other subtypes, sometimes combined subtype and sometimes, you know, not inattentive subtype, have problems so that they hyper fixate. Yeah. Get so cued into one thing and locked in they can’t undo to actually broaden back out. And it can be all of these things, by the way. It’s not that it’s only inattentive. It could be sometimes you hyper fixate, sometimes you can’t disengage, and other times you can’t engage. And that’s unfortunately the slippery and, and complex nature of attention. But understanding that these are just basic features of the way Right. Brain works is helpful. Right. And I always like to visualize this as sort of. I don’t always think of like, you know, my husband likes to tinker around with mixing boards and, and you know, music gear. So I was thinking these are like different levels on some kind of mixing board. You know, you’ve got some set points of the flashlight and the alerting system that are probably more functional. And then you can dial up too high or too low. And now we’re in a problematic situation for sure. And there may be times when the circumstances of our lives, even if we’ve managed to figure out how to keep them pretty functional, the circumstances of our lives may drive us more toward dysfunctional set points. So being aware of that is very, very important. And it’s also another way to kind of think about your own attention like, ah, I’m a little too high on this lever. Let’s see if I can. What does it feel like to try to be a little bit dialed down here or a little ramped up here? Just gives you that sense of participation in your own mind instead of feeling that you’re just at the mercy of whatever it decides to do. Yeah, but I think your hunch is right. Many people will report that it’s very hard to constrain my information processing. And I’m just. And that, frankly, is also why, to me, in some of the research studies we’ve done, patients with ADD have been like, the most fun participants and the most creative participants for sure. I’ve never gotten such artistic gifts from research participants as I have with people with add. And I think it comes from that broad receptivity to see connections in ways that others may not. Okay. That is sparking a whole rabbit trail in my brain, which I’m going to press pause on. But I absolutely love that theory because I bet that you are right. And oh, Kristen, don’t do it. She gonna wait. She’s not gonna even go there. Okay. As long as I love, love, love that so many ADHD years are creative, but creativity is not exclusive to adhd. Right. And so when people try to, like, frame it as, like, well, ADHD is actually a gift because, like, you’re more creative, you’re intuitive, you’re empathetic, you. There’s so many ADHDers who are so inventive. My counter to that is like, sure, but like, there are neurotypical people who are just as creative and inventive and all of the things. So it’s hard to pinpoint it just to adhd. Exactly. So let’s just. I agree, like, we could go down that. But I’ll say one more thing about it, and then I want to move on to system of attention, too. So we can connect it back to your question regarding mindfulness training. It ends up that when we think about the science of creativity, there are two main components. There’s the generative component, which is the new linkages, the. The generation of new content. Right. But then there’s the evaluative component. And in some sense, you can say that the generative component is like the alerting system, broad, receptive, lots of input and novel connections between things. And that evaluative component is more like the flashlight. It’s narrowing, constraining. Yeah. So oftentimes, and this is where I think that people that may not have these ADHD qualities can be stronger in one versus the other. And ADHD people tend to have other strengths. Right. So maybe that people that. And this is frankly why a lot of teams can work well together. While some may really be good at generating, others may be good at evaluating. Yeah. But for people within and of ourselves, what we want to keep in mind is that even in a particular moment, let’s not put the challenge on our mind to be in a mode of generating and evaluating simultaneously. Because you’re leaning on two different systems. So if you can even say, I’m allowing myself to generate, I’m not going to put any bounds on this. Just proliferate ideas. And then at a different point, when I feel more capable and my mind feels a little more able to get in that mode, I will evaluate. Then you’re leaning on both systems. You’re benefiting from your strengths, but you’re appreciating that. You don’t want to be setting the brain up to battle itself. Because one of the things I’ll tell you is that each of these systems we’ve talked about, two out of the three so far, they are supported by specific neural networks. And those neural networks are actually what we call antagonistic toward each other, meaning they mutually inhibit each other. So if you are fully in and out in a. And by the way, the metaphor I like to use for the alerting system is floodlight. Yeah. If you’re in that kind of floodlight mode, everything is broad, salient to you and apparent, and a receptive way. The brain network that’s involved. In fact, it’s. It’s called the saliency network. It’s going to inhibit your ability to focus. Wow. And vice versa. So think about the last time we’re really engrossed in reading something so focused like you really were. It could be a juicy novel that you were reading. Somebody walks in the room and starts talking to you, you have no idea what they said. Right. It might take a couple times before they’re like, hello, Kristen, I’m talking to you. So why did that happen? Because the flashlight system, the orienting system, as it’s formerly called, is dialed up. That inhibits the floodlight. So broad acknowledgement of environmental stimuli will be dulled down. You’re not going to get as rich of an input. So it takes a little bit more stimulation for it to break the barrier, to actually be noted. I think just knowing that can help us. And also we can be a little bit kinder to ourselves. That it’s just the, you know, maybe my clutch between this antagonistic relationship is a little slower to shift. And that’s okay. It’s just the way it is. Giving yourself the gift of just a brief pause between the two systems would be so effective in dissuading ourselves from that shame spiral that at least me and my people love to hop on that shame spiral. And then we’re distracted by that rather than, you know, anything that we are wanting to focus on in the moment. So tell me about the third system. It’s the juggler. Right? Right. That’s right, the juggler. So that’s formerly called executive control. And executive control, you know, sometimes there’s another term that I talk about in the book, working memory. This system’s job is, you know, just to backtrack for a second. We talked about attention broadly as privileging some information over other information. Yeah, the flashlight is privileging certain content, like your face versus the background. The floodlight is the timing now versus before, you know, past or future, even content. The third system, this executive control juggler, is privileging based on our goals. So what is the goal that is held in my mind? And I want to make sure that that information is the most prominent in my information processing. So I like to use the term juggler because it is like that. It’s that there are many things that are going to be our goals we’ve got to manage. It’s a management process. You got to make sure all the balls stay in the air, that we don’t drop any of the balls. And just like the executive of a company, this system’s job is not to do each individual thing. You know, there’s multiple goals we have. It’s not going in and doing the tasks like all the workers in an organization. It’s overseeing and saying, you know, that behavior doesn’t really align with this goal if you really want to be fit. And that is an important goal that you have. Probably when you have the choice between cupcakes and carrots, choose the carrots. It’s like be goal congruent. And so holding what the goal is and then ensuring that you correct course when you’re not behaving in a manner consistent with that goal. Very important thing to do. Another pain point for a lot of people. I know I’m grimacing as you’re explaining this because this is, you know, in addition, obviously to distractibility. Working memory is something that we are so deficient in and of course, a spectrum based on the person. But yeah, so to hear all of that, it’s like Yeah, I want that. Is that on Amazon? Where can I go grab that? Well, so this brings us back to your question about mindfulness training. So we’ve got these three systems of attention. What we know is that under high stress, high demand circumstances, all of us will be worse at all three of these systems for sure. Our flashlight won’t be steady. It’ll be more prone to being yanked around, or it’ll just be diffused. It won’t even be narrow and, and a strong single beam. Our floodlight may be hyper vigilant so that everything feels like a flashing light. Or we’re so broad that we can’t even kind of make sense of what we’re seeing. It’s just like, like think of a floodlight or a fog light on high beam. It’s just kind of like you’re like in a, in a zone where you can’t see anything clearly. Is that where like overwhelm might come in? Yeah, overwhelm, hyper vigilance. You know, symptoms of PTSD often are. Yeah, are also tied to this sort of thing. And then of course, with people that suffer from problems having goal directed behavior, we see that the juggler can have problematic situations. So what I was interested in doing is trying to figure out how can we train all three of these systems in a way that is generalizable. Meaning the context in which I train can help in a lot of different ways because the solutions that are being offered most often by brain scientists at least, and you know, we’re just all learning about this, but is like, okay, let’s give them some brain training games or let’s zap a particular part of the brain. And none of these end up being all that effective because they suffer from this problem of generalizability. So what I mean by that is, you know, let’s just take the video game that you might play to try to get stronger attention, and it could exercise all three of these systems even. And there are many games that are available. The bulk of the literature, and there may be some cutting edge stuff that is now starting to break through, but the bulk of the literature finds that if people play brain training games, they get so much better at the games. Like, they are awesome. They get stronger and stronger. Their scores just go up and up and up. But then you give them a game that is essentially the same in principle, but the superficial stimuli have changed. So it’s not red X’s and yellow, you know, zeros. It’s like some other set of stimuli. They fall apart as if they’ve never seen this before. So the functions, the better ability to focus the flashlight or broaden the floodlight or juggle with the executive control, those are not getting trained. It’s just honed into that task context. So that’s a big problem. And what I was interested in seeing is if mindfulness training may actually help be more generalizable. Because if you think about what mindfulness training involves and we’ll, we can go through one of the specific practices if that’s helpful. But if you think about mindfulness training, typically people are doing this alone. By themselves. Yeah. With their eyes closed and they’re focusing on some body sensations or environmental sensations. And then how are we evaluating mindfulness training? Well, they’re coming into the lab and we’re usually looking at their brains directly or we’re having them do simple tasks on a computer. So the training context, sitting by yourself, focusing on the breath and the testing evaluation context, sitting in front of a computer screen and being evaluated on your performance of cognitive tasks very different from each other. Yeah. If we can see benefits on those tasks, that means something generalizable happened. And that’s exciting. That part was really exciting. Wow. I can focus on my breath by myself and I come in, I’m performing 10% better on a working memory task. That’s crazy. That’s amazing. Yeah. That is fascinating because I have been marketed to by these brain training games and I’ve, you know, maybe have fallen, not fallen prey. I don’t want to say it like that. Like, I was like, cool, this sounds great and it’s fun. It’s, it’s great. But I, I loved reading that sentence in the book where you said, you know, the, the study showed that people did get much better at the game. Like, things did prove your, your ability to play that game really, really improved. But it did not translate to normal everyday life. It did not translate to paying attention day to day or staying on task at work or focusing on your child in the moment when you wanted to be with your child. So to think that mindfulness training is something that you could do completely apart from the task that you want to focus on and it would have benefits to it is mind blowing. And also when you are talking about, like, being alone and breathing, I’m like, can I just play a video game? I can’t just play. Okay. So that’s a great opportunity for me to say, you don’t have to be alone and play a video game to benefit, but you also don’t have to be alone and breathe to benefit. So yeah, in the studies that we did with adults with add, we got that same feedback and we had a sense of that. Right. Like, you know, you would never make people that have a broken ankle want to run on a broken ankle because they want to. You would have to rehab, you’d have to and you’d have to. It may be the case that if you’ve got weak ankles, you can still run, but change the way that you guide people so that there’s not. And I don’t, I don’t mean to say that there’s somehow a broken aspect of add. All I’m saying is whether it’s, whether it’s. Whatever the issue is, right. So for chronic pain patients, we’d never have them sit in an upright, stiff posture, terribly problematic for their back. So we always want to accommodate based on, like I said, the context needs challenges, aptitudes of the groups that we’re working with. So what we decided to do is first of all, don’t start with like 45 minutes of silent practice, focusing on your breath. That’s a non starter. Instead what we did is we would give like a minute of practice that might be a stillness practice, but most of the practices were very active. So it would be mindfulness of walking, for example, where you spend the time focusing not on breath by yourself, but sensations that every time you touch your feet to the ground, you’re actually noticing the sensations. Very active. Right. And then other times it would be a mindfulness of eating, for example, where you’re actually tasting the, the sensations that arise when you’re drinking or eating something. So there are ways that we can infuse the same cognitive training aspects without requiring stillness. It still we think is useful to practice a little bit of stillness. And in our group with adults with ADD, we did work up to about 12 minutes a day, but it was over the course of eight weeks. We didn’t start that way and it was beneficial. The other thing we did is, you know, and I, by the way, this is one of the reasons I think that brain training games are not helpful to people. And that is because one of the things that we don’t get training to do in most brain training games, and like I said, there’s some innovation happening now that may be doing this. What we typically don’t get training to do in video games is training to check in with our own attention. Right. And that is what we’re talking about, the term meta awareness. Meta awareness is being aware, having an awareness of the processes and content of your current conscious experience. So that is it. Typically, you’re so focused on the external thing, you’re not thinking and where am I right now? Where’s my mind right now? So stillness practices can promote even more meta awareness. But we can also start incorporating into these active practices like mindful walking. And now a word from our sponsor. Hey, Kristen here. I’m the host of this podcast, an ADHD expert and a certified life coach who’s helped hundreds of adults with ADHD understand their unique brains and make real changes in their lives. If you’re not sure what a life coach is, let me tell you. A life coach is someone who helps you achieve your goals. Like a personal trainer for your life, a life coach is a guide who holds your hand along the way as you take baby step after baby step to accomplish the things that you want to accomplish. A good life coach is a trained expert who knows how to look at situations, all situations, with non judgmental neutrality, and offer you solutions that you’ve probably never even considered before. If you’re being treated for your ADHD and maybe even you’ve done some work in therapy and you want to add to your scaffolding of support, you’ve got to do, join my group coaching program, Focused. Focused is where functional adults with ADHD surround each other with encouragement and support. And I lead the way with innovative and creative solutions to help you fully accept yourself, understand your ADHD, and create the life that you’ve always wanted to create, even with ADHD. Go to ihaveadhd.com/focused to join and I hope to see you in our community today. Okay, so let’s break down what a mindfulness practice is to kind of connect the dots between what we talked about with attention and why mindfulness training can exercise. Perfect those systems. You know, let’s just think of like a very common. This is going to sound like a stillness practice, but. It is a stillness practice. But replace the word focus on the breath with focus on sensations tied to walking. So whatever target object that you want. But if you can, for those people listening to our conversation, try this for 10 seconds. Literally set a timer for 10 to 30 seconds and try this. You want to do it in very small doses because whatever it is that you do, the key to habit formation and to continuing this journey is it has to feel like a win. If it feels painful, horrible, unfun, and so challenging that it’s aversive, who’s gonna do that? Yeah. I’m not saying mindfulness training is always fun because sometimes when we explore the nature of the mind. We realize how incredibly distracted we are. Yeah. But we can handle the fact that we’re distracted in small bouts. It’s not. We just. That’s okay. You know, we did 30 seconds and we’re on to the next thing that we’re gonna do. Yes. So anyway, let’s say we’re gonna do this for 10 to 30 seconds and the instruction would be to find sort of a comfortable, quiet place and focus on breath related sensations. And what I mean by that is before you even focus, just check out the fact that you are sitting and breathing. Like it’s just happening. You know, it’s almost like if I said to you right now, Kristen, what is the feeling you have on the sole of your left foot? My attention just gets pulled all the way down, all the way down. And like feel okay, it’s a little bit, I feel like soft of my sock or my shoe. Feels a little squishy. Whatever it is. Right before I said that you were not thinking about probably unless you’re usually in pain, you’re not thinking about something like that. Right. But we have that capacity. So the same idea. We’re going to just take stock of the fact that we’re breathing and we’re going to now try to check in with all the things happening with our breathing. What’s prominent, what’s vivid? Is there anything that stands out? So for me it would. It’s something like the coolness of air around my, around my nose. Like I can kind of feel it more. It’s easy to kind of hone in on that. Whatever it is for you, it could be your chest moving up and down. Sometimes it’s helpful to sit, even listen to your breath. Like I can hear myself breathing fine. Whatever it is for you, pick something tied to breathing and then think of that flashlight of attention. And the goal for this practice, the kind of agenda is take that flashlight, direct it toward those vivid breath related sensations. That’s where we want to keep it pointed. That’s the game, if you will. But there’s a second step which is as you’re sitting there with attention anchored on the breath, notice has your mind wandered away from that. And that’s a continuous thing. You’re going to keep asking yourself, where’s the mind? Where’s the mind? If you notice that your mind is wandered away somewhere else, you know, anywhere else other thought, feeling, sensation, maybe an itch on your face, maybe lunch, maybe what you’re going to do next week, whatever it is, it’s not on the breath. But in that moment. Third step, redirect your attention back. So it’s literally three steps. Focus, Pick the target object, the anchor object. Notice if mind wandering is happening. And if so, redirect. Wow. Now that we work with a lot of military service members, like, that’s a push up. That’s like a mental push up you just gave me. And we can do that over and over again. And I think if you think about it, we engaged all three systems, right? We engaged the flashlight for pointing to the breath or whatever. We choose the floodlight for the noticing, and then the juggler, executive control, get back on task. So all three of the systems get exercised over and over again. And very, very important, especially for the point you made regarding people with add, pick whatever anchor for that flashlight you want. So let’s say now forget about the breath. I’m gonna go for a walk. I’m gonna feel the target is every time the ball of my foot or the heel of my foot touches the ground, I’m gonna notice that sensation. Notice that sensation. When my mind wanders away, I’ll return it back. Or I’m gonna take, you know, I’m gonna do a quick 60 second drinking my coffee practice. I’m really going to focus in on the prominent sensations of the feeling of drinking that coffee. My mind wanders away, return it back. So we can do this in so many different ways. Picking some formal time where we dedicate ourselves to doing it can be very, very helpful. And most important in any of this. And it ties back to your comment regarding the shaming. We can do the spiral of I’m a fail, I’m failing at this. My brain is not working right. Really, really emphasized the win. And the win is I noticed where my mind was and all I had to do was get it back where I needed it to be without the judgment, struggle, reactivity, argument with ourselves. Whatever it is, it’s a win. It’s like, huh, If I had never noticed that, forget it. I wouldn’t have been able to get back. I got back. I got back over and over again. So I actually call this practice, the find your flashlight practice. Because it’s not so much about pointing it, it’s about finding it over and over again. That is so encouraging because it’s noticing. If we can put our attention on noticing how many times we’re able to bring it back rather than how many times it’s wandered. And I think that that is just a very simple shift. But when we begin to notice how many times our attention has wandered. That’s when the judgment, usually it’s. And it’s habitual. So, you know, the judgment and the shame spiraling happens. But if we can say, okay, instead of noticing how much it wanders, notice how many times I can bring it back to focus on, you know, the original object. That is a huge win. Even if it’s twice, like, I brought it back twice. That’s huge. Exactly. And then there’s other tools we can add to our toolkit when it might be hard to bring it back. Because a lot of times, especially with add, as you already mentioned, if you’re in this, if the default is to be more broad and receptive, just kind of checking out where the flashlight is and having the control to bring it back may feel hard. Right. It may just feel like it’s effortful to do that, but it’s actually sort of just like a push up. There’s a little bit of resistance. Yes. That we have, but that is building that muscle. Yes, it is. So don’t worry so much if it feels hard. Just see yourself through. Right. Yourself through. Like, yeah, I did get it back. Took a little while. You know, I was kind of lingering here. I was questioning whether I really wanted to go back. I really didn’t want to go back. I like what I was thinking about, but really I made a commitment to myself. I’m going to get back. Yeah, there’s all these kinds of things we can do. And the other thing that I would say happens, because this is an example and I really want to pick up on your comment regarding this kind of shame aspect because in some sense, oftentimes, now let’s say we’re not doing a practice, we’re trying to do our work and we cannot get this email written. It’s like it just cannot get my head in the game here. I’m just. And then the whole thing starts. I can never focus. It’s always hard for me. And I’m never going to be able to focus and spin, spin, spin. We’re growing this thing. Remind ourselves in that moment. Every time I’m doing that, I’m actually depleting my own attentional fuel tank. So probably let’s see if I can halt that. But I find it very hard to halt it. I’m just saying, if I’m the person experiencing this, if I find it very hard to halt it, what can I do? It’s like, you know, you’ve convinced yourself and many of us have, that this is the reality of my mind. It isn’t Capable. That’s why I can’t pull it back from that thought. Because that’s the reality of the thought. That is my way. The, you know, you, you trust that the thought you had, that my brain is broken in this particular way is the truth. Right. Of course I’m going to not want to convince myself otherwise because I care about being honest. Right? Right. So we get a righteousness, even about our own shame and guilt and problems. We’re very committed to our own self judgment. Here’s another kind of trick we can use, and trick’s not really the right word, but supportive thing we can do for ourselves. So in that moment, because remember, I didn’t say we got multiple flashlights. We got one. So flashlights either in the experience fueling that shame spiral, or it’s on the breath or something else you’re doing. Right. It’s. It’s going to be in one place or another. So now let’s say you’re in that shame spiral. Let’s say you in the moment have that awareness, like, oh, wow, I am stuck here. I notice my mind has wandered away, what I’m doing from what I’m doing, but I cannot not pull that flashlight back. I am stuck so hard. It’s so hard I can’t pull it back. So here’s a couple things you can do. The first thing you can do is say, let me just sit here and check this out. Okay. Shame’s going on right now. I want to see shame. So you’re not going to do it by continuing to feed the shame. What you’re going to do is, and I describe it as sort of this bird’s eye view. You’re kind of going to imagine yourself lifting above yourself and being like a reporter from a helicopter above looking at you in this shame spiral in the moment. And you’re going to be a really good reporter. What’s going on right now? Okay. In this moment, I mean, she’s feeling frustrated. She’s feeling incapable of getting back to the task at hand. She’s feeling like this is the way her mind is like play by play. But notice the way I said it, I’m doing it in the third person because I’m reporting on this. I’m not in it. I love that. Yeah. And that’s what we call psychological distancing or de centering. Very helpful. And it’s a hard thing to get yourself to do, but just try it, like try the reporters or bird’s eye view. And if that really doesn’t work, just like Literally write on a post it and put it in your computer. Thoughts are not facts. Huge so. And I think it’s just little clues for ourselves, like, you know what? This is a thought I’m having. I don’t know if it’s true or not. So a good reporter is going to report what is being observed, but it’s not necessarily that the thing the person is saying to him or herself is not reality. So we’ve got to try all these different ways to break out of the shame cycle. Another approach could be don’t go above. Go deeper within body sensations tied to the feeling of shame. Because now all of a sudden you’re like, oh, my hands feel clammy, My face feels hot and red. Flashlight is no longer feeding the shame spiral. It’s focusing on body sensations. This is a way to kind of reduce the fuel that is perpetuating that particular mental content and redirecting it in a gentle and supportive way towards something else that’s also present there. So, I mean, I hope that this sort of helps get the broad. Yes, I appreciate it so much. And I want to just have you tell us a little bit about what you call simulating, because I think that that ties in beautifully with what you’re talking about now. And this is so much a part of the work that I do with my clients, which is helping. And my coach does this for me. I did this for my clients, like, helping them to see when they are simulating, which is like, essentially creating stories around the facts that we have in our life. Right. So, like, this pen is black, but then I have, like, an aversion to this black pen, because when I was little, you know, somebody stabbed me with a black pen. And all this, all of these stories and feelings that I have around just a cold, hard fact. And we spend so much of our time simulating, and we’re not aware of it. And that’s the problem. It’s not the problem that we’re simulating. That’s just natural. It’s what the brain does. But the fact that we are not aware of the stories, we’re not seeing them as stories. And so we’re not able to then separate ourselves. And you called it uncoupling or decoupling. What did you call it? Diffusing? Refused. Yeah, yeah, decentering. There’s a whole bunch of words that you could use. Is there a coupling word? Because I loved that word. It was like. It was a word that was like, detaching yourself from the story, which I think is just that if we can learn to do that, everything changes. Our attention can still be wandering and we can still have the difficulty of bringing it back, but we are not so. So attached to the story that we’re creating. That’s right, yeah. No, I think that it’s a very, very powerful tool. And I don’t remember the exact word that we use, this diffused descent. You’re like, I used so many words. Kristen, the book is 350 pages long. What do you. I’m glad it spoke to you. So, you know, highlight it when you. When you spoke to me. I’ll find it while you give your answer here. But. But I think that the key is that, like you said, simulating stories is very, very powerful. We do it all the time. That’s how we make sense of the world. I want to stop doing that. But we have to remember, and it’s tied to that thoughts, art, facts thing. The story we created may or may not be some part of some objective reality, and frankly, it may not be what we want to engage in right now. We have a choice. Like, the mind does this, but we don’t have to always be along for the ride. We can actually make a different choice. Like, yes, I could think about all the possible ways Omicron is going to change my life. And I’m going to. Everybody around me is going to get horribly sick. I could do that. Is that the best use of my mental energy right now as I’m trying to write this email? And then I can be like, oh, the mind had that thought, but I have agency to decide. First of all, I noticed that the thought arose, and then I have agency to decide whether I’m going to continue to feed that thought. I don’t think we all believe that, and I don’t think that’s widely. It’s just not widely known. I’m so glad that you are saying it, because I think we are. Most of us feel at the mercy of our thoughts, at the mercy of what’s going on in our mind, which then those thoughts are like creating these emotions in our bodies, which we get super agitated or triggered, and then we’re behaving in ways that maybe we don’t even really align with. Right, Absolutely. And I would say this is where some of the other practices that I describe really hone this capacity to watch thoughts. In fact, there’s a practice called river of thought, where we’re going to be stable and we’re going to actually just practice watching the mind do its thing. I love that I didn’t get to that part. Yeah. We’re just observers watching it. So we can actively practice doing this decentering process. Being the great replacement porter on the sidelines. Taking note of what’s occurring without participating in takes practice, though, because like you said, it’s not the default of the way we typically operate. Right. But the more we do that, the more we can understand and even have heart and care and tenderness for what we are doing and what our mind is doing. But to be like, oh, yeah, you know, you feel that right now, or you’re having that thought right now, but you need to get back to the task at hand, or let’s not continue to feed that because it’s not serving us right now. Right. Or you could just have like thousands of choices you can make. You don’t. You’re not just at the mercy of continuing to think so many choices and really potentially jeopardizing the thing you actually need to get done in the moment for sure. Now you talk about the idea of working up to 12 minutes a day and how that, like your research has shown that that is so effective for training. Attention. Here’s my question as an adult with adhd, like, I’m in. I’m like, let’s do it. I’m in. But I am wondering if there’s any knowledge that you have on whether or not it’s effective for those types of brains or humans that are not consistent. So if I’m persistent with it, if I’m able to do it, you know, for two weeks in a row every day, and then I forget about it for three days, and then I pick it back up and I do it for a week, I get sick and everything goes out. The like, is this something that can be helpful if we’re persistent or do we have to be consistent? Okay. I mean, first of all, we haven’t tried that, right? We haven’t. You’re like, well, data shows you better do it every day. Well, no, that’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is I don’t. I don’t have an answer for you. But just this way, just like the body, right? If you have an exercise routine where you’re trying to build upper body strength and you are consistent, and then you drop off and you’re, you know, you do it again, you drop off, you know that it’s going to take a little bit longer and potentially never see those results because it’s just biology. It’s setting those pathways in motion, it’s strengthening certain relationships between brain circuits. So the more reliably we’re able to exercise those particular set of processes over and over again, the stronger they will be. And that’s what we’re trying to achieve. So one of the recommendations I would make is start very, very small and work on getting it to become a habit. So do not start with 12 minutes, especially if add is a particular, you know, orientation of your brain. What I would suggest is do something where you get a solid sense of, I got this. I’ve got it as a win I can get every day. Yeah. And it literally could be one minute after you brush your teeth in the morning. Yeah. I was just thinking that, like tying it to another habit, stacking it. Like James Clear talks about stacking habits. Yeah, Definitely stack it with another habit. Benefit from all those behavior change tools we know about. Yeah. But do it with the knowledge that, you know, especially for the practice. We already talked about this. Find your flashlight. Practice. You are engaging the flashlight, the floodlight, the juggler. You’re doing it consistently. You’re actually dialing down the default of the mind to simulate so much that you get sucked in. And you want to do that solidly and repeatedly so that you know that experience and then, you know, increase it. Maybe the on ramp may be a little bit longer if ADHD is a challenge, But I still think that the 12 minute is a great minimum effective dose to continue. I love that the on ramp may be a little bit longer. That’s totally fine. That’s not a problem. That’s just one of those other things that we observe without judgment and we say like, okay, it’s going to take a little bit longer. It’s going to be a little bit harder. It’s not a problem. It’s not a problem. And the on ramp is longer for many different kinds of people. Yes. That is so true. That is so true. You know, the circumstances of your life, other types of challenges that people face. For example, same thing would probably be true for somebody that’s suffering from a severe anxiety or depression. Yeah. We’re going to be taking care with the particular set points of that kind of approach brain. And that’s all we’re doing. We’re gonna, you know, in the same way that if you think about a child, you know what the child’s propensities and talents are, and you’re not going to push them towards something that you know is going to be so problematic that they’re going to give up. You want to be supportive and you want to treat yourself in that same self supportive manner. But the most motivating part is that it’s actually helping do the thing that you already find challenging. It’s actually supporting you to do that. You’re not working against the grain of your mind. Yes. All the aspects that already you no function, you’re just trying to tone those up a bit. So instead of resisting the brain wandering, just notice it and bring it back all day every day. Not a problem. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And that’s a great simple way to think about it and also practice letting it wander without judgment but watching it. Yeah, that part, my goodness. Did you see my eyes like rolled even a little bit? I’m so sorry. So disrespectful, thoughtful. I really, that part is the part that I think, you know, we are just so connected to our own self judgment with this attention thing which you know, has so many reasons why. But if we can just really practice letting it wander. Just let it wander and don’t judge it. You’re not letting it wander. In a typical way that’s very important to say, not letting it wander and having all those thoughts come up and being in the. And then this is why I’m going to be a failure at this. And this is why you are the reporter. You are standing at the sign lines and you’re saying, oh, there’s the thought. You know, that one’s on heavy rotation. That thought. Oh, that came a lot. And I was almost like, to visualize it like you’re at the bank of this river and there’s, you know, almost like every thought is like a leaf or a fish or something and there it is, Just let it go. Like you’re not going to hold on to it, you’re not going to feed it, you’re not going to chase it. Just you’re steady and you’re watching this go, but you’re not doing anything to, to promote it or suppress it or manipulate it. That is an advanced practice. I just want to say if it feels like it’d be hard, it is hard. That’s why we start with the find your flashlight. Yeah. Because what we notice when we find your flashlight is we will start noticing, oh, I’m chasing this thing. Like no. Yes, no. And then you can lean on. When you find yourself, even when you’re doing that kind of observational reporting from the sidelines, when you notice that your mind isn’t doing that task, it’s actually engaging in mental content, you just go back to the breath or your anchor, whatever it is, and stay steady. Again and then continue with the, with the second practice. So, you know, I’m excited for you to get to that part of the book because each of the practices that I offers is like a different window into these same concepts. They reinforce each other, but they give you kind of like a, kind of like a core workout where, oh, I love doing, you know, you’re like a cross training for the mind, various aspects of attention. And you can do all of these as mini practices. Start them, start them off as one minute. Don’t do, don’t go for the 12 minutes till you feel comfortable. Yeah, our all or nothing brains are going to be like 12. I’m going to do four hours in a row, like the first three days and then I’m going to be like, that was terrible. I never want to do that again. Can recommended, not recommended. We’re going to start with 30 seconds. Thank you so much. I just appreciate you being here, sharing your expertise. It’s just been so eye opening for me and I know that my listeners are going to be just thrilled to learn from someone who’s on the cutting edge of this science. I’m just in awe of your work. Oh, thank you so much. And I hope that one of the takeaways for you and for anybody listening is, you know, that’s the really exciting news about the brain science is that we do have some answers now. And it’s not some newfangled drug that only three people can get. It’s something that literally if you’ve got a body and a brain, you are fine. You have all the tools you need to begin doing this. The excitement that just welled up within me was like I couldn’t even speak because it is so exciting how accessible this is and how non discriminatory it is and how anybody can do it for free. And you know, whether it’s on their own or you know, ask someone to kind of be a body double and just sit there with you while you do it, like whatever you need to do. But it doesn’t have to be, it’s not exclusive, it doesn’t have to be expensive. Like it’s, it’s just like 30 seconds of your day, one minute of your day, five minutes of your day and anyone, wherever they are in the world can do it. So exciting. Absolutely. Yeah. And I would definitely encourage community and partnership, you know, to support each other. You know, like my husband and I will practice together and we don’t actually ask our children to do it. But it’s interesting because they see us taking Time saying, don’t come in the living room. We’re going to be practicing and we’re just sitting there for 15 minutes practicing together. When they have challenges in their lives or find that they can’t focus, they will ask to sit with us. And that, to me, is a real interesting learning that I got. Like, you know, we’re not forcing anything, but they see it as a tool and they’re taking advantage of that tool when they need it. That’s beautiful. What a beautiful picture that is. And I appreciate you saying like that. It can be, and maybe even in some cases should be done in community because again, with the isolation of, do I have to be my by myself? Does it have to, you know, does it have to look a certain way? And I love the flexibility that you offer. Or, I mean, really, I know it’s been very well researched, but the flexibility that’s available to us. Yeah. Most of these practices are done in community, frankly, through the traditions as well as. Even when they’re taught, like all of our studies, we have groups of people practicing together. They may practice that on their own outside of class, but for two hours a week, when we’re meeting as a group, they’re practicing in the room together. And, you know, if you say, well, I’m not going to do that. I’m not going to sit there with other people with my eyes closed or walk around and, you know, I didn’t think I’d ever. It would come to pass, but I’ve seen active duty soldiers, special forces, big strong Marines, football players do this stuff and really benefit. So it doesn’t have to look a certain way. And really the proof is in the benefits that people experience. And we’ve seen them over and over again through our objective data as well. Thank you. All right, all right, all right. I hope you enjoyed every second of this interview. I hope you certainly loved it. My mind was blown. And I want to make sure to encourage you to go buy Dr. Jha’s book, Peak Mind. It’s a fantastic read. It will for sure change the way that you view attention. It will encourage you because your attention is trainable. Have a great week. I’m going to see you next time. Bye. If you’re being treated for your adhd, but you still don’t feel like you’re reaching your potential, you’ve got to join Focused. It’s my monthly coaching membership where I teach you how to tame your wild thoughts and create the life that you’ve always wanted, no matter what season of life you’re in or where you are in the world. Focused is for you. All materials and call recordings are stored in the site for you to access at your convenience. Go to options ihaveadhd.com focused for all the info.
