Find Your Focus with Amishi Jha

Stephanie Domet: Hello, and welcome to Real Mindful. This is where we speak mindfully about things that matter. We meet here twice a month to introduce you to some of the teachers, thinkers, writers, and researchers who are engaged in the mindfulness movement. You’ll hear all kinds of conversations here about the science of mindfulness, the practice of mindfulness—and the heart of it. I’m Stephanie Domet. I’m the managing editor at Mindful magazine and mindful.org. And this is Real Mindful.

Today on the podcast, my guest is Dr. Amishi Jha. Amishi has been featured many times in Mindful and on mindful.org for her work with high-stress cohorts like first responders and military service members. We spoke with her in the early days of the pandemic about the military acronym VUCA, which stands for Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous—and how our brains react to VUCA circumstances, plus how mindfulness can help us regain ownership of our attention. You can read an excerpt from her book Peak Mind: Find Your Focus, Own Your Attention, Invest 12 Minutes a Day in the December issue of Mindful, which is on newsstands now. Amishi and I connected a few weeks ago for a Mindful Live session, and we’re pleased to bring you that conversation on Real Mindful today.

For now, I’m very pleased to welcome Amishi Jha to Mindful Live. Amishi is a neuroscientist and a professor of psychology at the University of Miami. She’s the author of Peak Mind: Find Your Focus, Own Your Attention, Invest 12 Minutes a Day, which has just been published by Harper One. Amishi’s research focuses on the brain basis of attention, working memory, and mindfulness based training. She was selected as a science and public leadership fellow by PopTech and she serves on editorial review boards of Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, Journal of Experimental Psychology General, Frontiers in Cognitive Science, and Frontiers in Psychology. She is a regular contributor to Mindful and mindful.org and as a person who’s currently struggling with focus, I could not be more glad to have you here today for this conversation. Amishi, hello, and thank you so much for joining us today. 

Amishi Jha: Oh, it’s so great to be here with you, Stephanie. 

SD: So I mentioned that I’ve been struggling with focus, and I wouldn’t be surprised if every interview you’ve done around this book has started with a similar admission from those. How common is the struggle?  

AJ: Oh, very, very common. And I would say it’s at the point where it feels like a crisis moment. Collectively, I think that probably already in the ramp up ramp up before the pandemic, so to speak, the notion of being constantly on call, being reachable 24/7 and having a serious industry effort from social media companies to create algorithms that are not only there to capture but really mine our attention contributes to all of that. I think the pandemic kind of put it over the top, though, for many of us, because of the nature of what we faced—the challenge, difficulty, uncertainty, etc. You’re not alone. But there is some good news and the first piece of good news that I really do want to acknowledge and that I really love to give people is it’s not your fault. 

I think the problem ends up being when people truly personalize the challenges that they experience, like, “I just can’t pay attention. It’s my brain. That’s the problem.” And no, I think that for the most part, the response we’re having is very normal and, in fact, indicative of a very well-functioning attention system. If you feel pulled by things that are intended to pull you, well, your attention is doing what it’s supposed to do. If you have a preoccupation with things that are life threatening, like a global pandemic and a deadly virus, that’s appropriate. That’s exactly what we should be doing. The hard part is trying to juggle all of that and trying to live what we consider a normal life. That’s where it feels like a crisis. But I think knowing that there’s nothing intrinsically problematic with us is important. 

The other piece of really good news, which is why I’m always thrilled to talk and do anything with mindful.org, is the reality that there’s something we can do. There’s actions we can take. We can actually solve a lot of this crisis experience through training that we can provide ourselves and the resources that are available to guide us to do that like those available on this platform.  

SD: That is all good news, and even with what I know about mindfulness and about the brain, it’s helpful just hearing you say that we tend to think it’s our fault and I think this all the time, “why can’t I focus?” If a friend said that to me, I would say “because we’re in a global pandemic and that does make it tough to pay attention.” And there is so much that can fracture our attention, especially right now, as you say, not just social media, but then we’ve talked with you about this before, the way the volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous situations play havoc with our ability to really focus our attention. Certainly, we have been in an extended VUCA period. How does the relentlessness of all this act on our attention? 

AJ: I think the first thing to acknowledge. I guess just in terms of my own background is that these are exactly the kind of circumstances that my lab has been studying for about 15 years now. Most of our work is with populations like first responders, military service members, military spouses, medical and nursing professionals, and part of my motivation for wanting to study those groups is because the nature of the circumstances when they are to perform at their best is characterized by the exact circumstances that are likely to deplete and degrade attention. You described those perfectly. VUCA: Volatile, Uncertain. Complex, and Ambiguous. That term is one coined by the US Army War College, but it’s not just that these individuals will experience that. It’s like, “You should show up at your best. We don’t want a surgeon that’s distracted during emergency surgery.” “We don’t want a firefighter feeling distracted when there’s a four-alarm fire going on.” We expect this of certain populations, and that’s what motivated us to start looking into solutions. 

I had no idea that if you had fast forward 12 years later that we’d all be in that position, but the reality is what we saw in the lab over and over again troubled me enough to want to find solutions for populations like the ones I mentioned when we tapped in and tracked their attention. We had them do laboratory-based experiments where we wanted to see how well they were performing on potentially demanding tasks. So they do these tasks, we get objective metrics or even sometimes brain metrics, and then several weeks later we’d have them do the same thing again, same kind of battery of metrics. If the interval between when we tested them—two to four or six weeks, sometimes even longer—if that involved these VUCA circumstances, attention significantly and reliably declined. It didn’t really matter if the nature of that demand was life threatening or even high stakes. For example, even undergraduates over the course of the academic semester who report increasing experience of stress will have less well-functioning attention at the end of the semester relative to the beginning of the semester. That’s just the reality of what happens now. 

The unfortunate side, which ends up turning it into a crisis even if attention is behaving as it should because it’s responding to the stress by engaging itself over and over is that for undergrads, for example, they still have to perform on final exams. For military service members we saw this during pre-deployment and they’re still going to be deployed. For all of us during the pandemic, we’re experiencing these circumstances. We still have to perform. It can be parenting our children and doing our work and showing up in the ways that we need to for family and friends, so that ends up being a problem. Does that answer your question, Stephanie?  

SD: It answers a lot of questions—that our attention can easily be frayed under