EFR 539: The Science of Paying Attention and How to Develop a Peak Mind in 12 Minutes a Day with Dr. Amishi Jha, PhD

Chase: Paying attention has not always been my strong suit, not because of any like diagnose, ADD or anything like that. I don't think I'm ADD. But for me, my mind is just always going a million miles an hour, even when I'm concentrating on something. And so when I came across your work of understanding what is attention, what is happening in the brain? Can we even really fully pay attention no matter how hard we try, I was really intrigued. So I'm so glad to have you here and to help us really understand what is going on up top when we're trying to the best of our efforts to pay attention. What is out of the gate, what is attention deficit? Let's define our terms.

Amishi: So the first thing to say about it is despite all the distractibility we feel, etc, our attention system, it is the success story of our evolution. In the brain, we have basically right now, even with a number 50%, as the time that we're mind wandering, so the, that's more of the downside of the way that our mind works. So it ends up that and this may make you feel better Chase. So the baseline number of the amount of time, the percentage of time that our attention is not on the task at hand, is 50%, half. So in these studies were done. You know, there have been so many different kinds of studies. But basically, what would happen is you sign up for this study, and you agree to get your cell phone pinged. And anytime have sort of normal waking hours, you'd get a text message at any point. And the questions would be something like, what are you doing right now? And you could even like, pick categories of things, and people were doing all kinds of stuff in their lives.

Chase: It's not like a nosy ex boyfriend or girlfriend.

Amishi: No, it's more like reading a book interacting with the person like it's just categorical. And then the second question was, where's your attention, essentially, being able to tell the experimenter is on the task that you just said you are doing, or somewhere else, and only about half the time where people actually attending to the task that they were, themselves saying that they were engaging in?

Chase: So what would example be like I'm at work working on a project, but then my attention span is thinking about what dinner or

Amishi: not even that it's just the simple question. Are you on task or not? Okay, and yes, I'm on task, or no, I'm not, I'm actually thinking about something else or doing something else.

Chase: So then I guess the question is, why can't we pay attention to the task at hand?

Amishi: We can half the time. 

Chase: So, over that, 50%? 

Amishi: that's the question. So that's why I started out by saying, the brain we have right now the nature of our attention system right now, is the success story of evolution. Okay, so the fact that we wander 50% of the time, is by design, which is an interesting to think about, right? So you, you start out with a great question, broadly speaking, what is attention. And the most fundamental way to put it as attention solves a big problem that our brain has, which is that there's far more information in the environment than we can fully process. There's no way. Even if we're the most straightforward, simple environment, we cannot fully process everything. So attention allows us to advantage and more deeply process a subset of information.

Chase: I heard we process something like billions and billions of fragments of data, especially through our eyes. And if we actually could take all of that in process and to your point, pay attention to that, we would be, I guess, overwhelmed is the biggest understatement of the year in that process. Yeah, I hear you say that, like, it's by design, so that we actually like don't fry our brains.

Amishi: I mean, I think that these are two different things. So we'll talk about the mind wandering in a moment just in terms of our why does attention exist? Even if you're all the time in the world, you couldn't take it all in. So you need to figure out a way that you're going to subsample the environment. So I'm going to get Pete bits and pieces to try to put it together. And the whole point of this whole system is so that I can act and interact with my environment. That's the reason it developed long, long ago with our evolutionary ancestors. And so then the question is, well, how do you select right, because you have to privilege some information over others. So one way to select is very straightforward when we use the term focus, that's what we're talking about, just hone in on certain kinds of content. So right now might be me looking at your face, I'm focused in you know, I can get more granular detail. And then everything in the surrounding is sort of fuzzed out. Another way we can pay attention those not based on what but sort of when. So right now, my attention should be what's happening right now, I should not be thinking about what I had for lunch, or what I want to do. As soon as I leave here, it should be in the present moment. So what, when and then and then the other way, the third way, is almost how. So based on the goals that I have for the moment that will orient my attention so if my goal is right now to have a really fun conversation with you, I'm going to orient oriented in one way versus I got to get out of here as fast as possible. So this is just giving you a sense of if the brain has this problem, and it needs to sub sample, the way it's going to go about sub sampling is going to be based on these different kind of qualities. And it ends up that there are distinct brain systems independent, primarily independent and interacting with each other that do each of those things. So, yeah, so we can talk about those if you'd like. 

Chase: one thing that just came to mind though, we've been kind of talking about what we see and how that influences or helps our attention is sight the main attention driver, what are the other senses contributing to or taking away in terms of attention, every everything? So it's all at once?

Amishi: not necessarily all at once, but we have the capacity. These are processes, right? This is a way that information is handled, so it can be selection based on site, but like right now, if I said what's the sensation has Putting in the bottom of your left foot.

Chase: I feel my shoe insert.

Amishi: But I bet before I said that you were not thinking about the shoe insert, so you can do it through tactile information. If I said to hear the hum of the air conditioner, you could focus in on that. So you have the capacity to select information in all of our sensory modalities. And it's not just that it's based on concepts, thoughts, memories, all of these can be the recipient of our attention. And but all of that would be in that first category of based on the content, the nature of the content, because you are selecting some information over other information.

Chase: Would you say, depending on our environment is would it be more environment driven or goal driven, that we should really pay attention to our senses to help us pay more attention? Does that question make sense?

Amishi: It's going to always be a battle. It's going to be a battle between what is needed and what is most prominent. So even if I say no, right now, I really want you to just pay attention, my voice, if there was a fire alarm going off, I guarantee you're going to be like, no override, you knowso it, that's why we have these multiple systems. So just to break it down a little bit more as it relates to how we how the brain does this. So this first way of selecting information just based on what we call the orienting system of attention, I like to use a new if you, you know, you read the book. So you have a little bit of background on this. This is what I call the flashlight of attention. So just like an actual flashlight, which would be for the visual domain, obviously, wherever I find it, I'm gonna get privileged access, everything else is going to be fuzzed out that flashlight can shine on the external environment, it can shine on essentially the internal environment. We just did that with that little what's happening with the body scan, attention scan. So it can go to the visual domain and go to the tactile domain, I can actually say, tell me what you had for breakfast this morning.

Chase: The Hercules smoothie from Bowls? 

Amishi:  I remember that. But what you did is you brought information up and you were shining a flashlight on your memory. So this is a very flexible system. To kind of foreshadow how it relates to the question you just asked, in addition to be being able to direct that flashlight willfully. Like if you are in a darkened path, and you're trying to make your way the flashlight also gets yanked. So if I you know, if you're if you're looking over there, and I feel like this, you're going to be like what you're going to orient to it, your flashlights gonna get pulled. That's also by evolutionary design, and the kinds of things that we will get magnetically pulled by are things like fear inducing information threats.

Chase: anything from sympathetic to parasympathetic,

Amishi: yeah, basically, but it's also anything that is self related bright, red, shiny objects, if it has your name on it. So if you think about what think about the way social media is organized, they've perfected it, so that all of the different inputs are going to be the thing that our attention system says, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, flashlight will be drawn to it. So that that's still only one of the three systems of attention. So that's the focusing system that we talked about, but the other system to get back to your question regarding wanting to have goals, but then what do you pay attention to? The next system of attention is something called the floodlight. And that's something that is really regarding broad receptive attention. So you're not narrowing and privileging, you're actually privileging the present moment, but you're not saying what I'm going to be paying attention to. And that's why I say it's like a floodlight, like, I've got a floodlight over my garage. And you know, it's kind of a motion detector. So if a raccoon passes by, or a neighbor or whatever, all of a sudden, they'll go on and it's basically doesn't care what the information is, is just illuminating some very wide range area, yeah, wide receptive, not selective. And formally, it's called the alerting system, because it's alerting you to something happening in the environment that may require you to then focus the flashlight. So that system was really, really useful, again, for our safety for our ability to notice and it's the thing that probably when we devote that to the internal environment, we can get a lot of information regarding what's going on. And it's related to something that you know, you and your, with your military background, probably, you know, well, the notion of situational awareness, just the broad receptive stance that you take toward your environment, what's going on,

Chase: head on a swivel; all these things that we're trained to be aware of.

Amishi: you're capitalizing on the presence of that system, and you don't want to be distracted by the flashlight going anywhere. You want to be able to stay steady and observing.

Chase: That brings up an interesting point, you kind of join my military memory now. Is it more when we're talking about understanding how our bodies and our senses pay attention to things and how we want to pay attention? Is it more so getting better at we want to increase our attention, right? Or our attention span or ability to pay more attention? Is it more learning how to hone in o to drown out? Is it I want to focus on something right here right now and get better at that? Or do I need to get better at drowning out other things that don't currently serve me?

Amishi: So they're the same thing? They're both two sides of the same table. It's a good question. But you know, just to, for you to understand how the brain is organized, there is an antagonistic relationship so that if I focus on things like literally in the visual environment, if you focus on one part of space, the neurons that are perceiving that part of space are actively inhibiting the neurons representing other parts of space. That's when I focus on you everything else because essentially, there's a competition. So even if you, like, if we did a little experiment right now, and I said, Okay, I want you to, you know, if I had my hands up, and I said, I want you to pay attention, keep your eyes right on. Okay, but pay attention to my right hand, like just move your attention out your eyes. Right, you can do that, we do that at cocktail parties or parties all the time when you want to talk to her don't want to talk to somewhere in your periphery. So but so what just happened there the reason the input, the perceptual input was the same. When you were looking at me and paying attention to me versus looking at me and paying attention to my, to my right hand, what changed was where your attention was. And the reason that you could make out the right hand more than the left hand, is because essentially, the neurons processing that part of space all of a sudden, got the energetic push from the attention system that said privilege that inhibit the other guys. So drowning out is literally the opposite of enhancing.

Chase: Our brains never cease to amaze me. It's crazy. It's crazy. Actually, I was telling you earlier, I, I loved your work so much. I prepared actually, a couple questions I want to my audience is like what she's doing and looks at questions.

Amishi: But yeah, it's good. I want to just kind of round out I was saying before. So we've got the flashlight, the floodlight, and there is a third system that is important to kind of bring up because then we'll be able to talk about all three and the relationships to the various even the question that you asked me regarding our rules. So the third system is something that we call executive controller executive attention. And we use that term intentional, sorry, executive, to really be like the executive of a company, the job of the executive is not to go in and do every individual task of every member of the organization, but to oversee and manage to make sure broadly speaking, that the goals and the behavior align. And if they don't, it's got to course correct, like the, you know, the leader has to come and say, don’t do that, do this instead. So it has a very important kind of management role, which is, again, a third type of attention. So I hope that that makes sense, like very directed and narrow, broad and receptive. And that kind of that the metaphor I like to use, there is like a juggler, you're really, yeah, absolutely. All the balls in the air. So and you were saying earlier, you were asking me? What do we do? Should we pay more attention to what our goals are, or what's relevant in the environment. And essentially, at some level, it's what's going to happen is going to happen, whatever forces are overriding can happen, but there will be battles between these systems. So for example, if you are really wanting to focus on a report, you have to write or an email you want to send, you're gonna have to be thoughtful about it, you have to sit there and do it. And then you get a text message. And it's like, your friends, and they're planning this, like, there's a group text going, you know, group chat going on, and they got a plan

Chase: attention suckers.

Amishi: you've got to figure out like, Okay, right now, in this moment, well, first of all, if you can, if you can actually assess what's going on, that's a win. Usually, we just go to the thing that was calling to us, our attention will be lured by that design to itself related, it's interesting, it's exciting. It's, it's affiliative, because it's our social connections, right? So we're gonna go to it, but then, you know, essentially, this the strength of this executive system, per se, now, right now, you know, resist that poll, and flashlight, get back to that email you're trying to write. So these systems are coordinated, but they're also battling each other all the time.

Chase: That just made me think of something; when we're trying to kind of step into the driver seat more of our minds. I don't think anybody listening would disagree with me that I would love to have more control over my thoughts, I would love to be able to pay more attention and everything you've been sharing definitely kind of helps understand what is going on in our bodies and our brains. Is there a way to kind of hack this system? Is there a way it's to develop a sense of awareness around? I may be trying one way one of the three you described but clearly my body, my brain is kind of overriding into another one? Is there a way to like go a layer deeper there? So we can go from what I'm trying? What is actually happening? And then kind of taking control to really get what you want?

Amishi: Yeah, I mean, that's the whole reason I wanted to write my book because it's a great question. It's actually exactly the question I was pursuing in my work. Because what we realized is that these three systems are extremely powerful, right, they determine, really, every single thing we do is impacted by one of these three things. I mean, think of it, you can't really think of something in which one of those three is not going to be involved. One of those it's always happening. And it's used for every kind of information. So it's used for the way we think it's used for our emotions, it's used for our social connections. So it's really pervasive. And it led me to the point where I'm like, this is really a type of fuel for our mind, our attention, fuels our performance. So then the question is, well, okay, we've we realize it's powerful, what makes it not work so well, what makes it weakened and what's like kryptonite for it. And that's also very, as a whole kind of research approach. And we were starting to get a lot of answers regarding that because we put people in, in the scanner, or we'd have them in the lab doing these various tasks and their attention would be okay, and then we do something and they would just fall apart. Like their attention would just start falling apart and the things were very, we could start identifying what those are. And there's basically three big ones that we found in my lab over and over again, and while we're there, stress, meaning perceived stress, threat, and poor mood.

Chase: Really, our mood is one of the one of the three influencers where our attention goes?

Amishi: yeah, it's both a deleter and a driver of where our attention goes,

Chase: how so can we start there? I would love to dissect all three. But can we start with mood?

Amishi: Sure, sure. So, what goes to something that? Well, you and I were talking about a little while ago, like this notion of mind wandering? So what exactly is mind? Honor? What has happened to these people? When they say 50% of the time? You know, they get pinged on their, their cell phone? They're like, Yeah, I'm not here. Where the heck did you go? Your eyes are staring at your computer screen or you're holding your book? You know, your eyes are at the bottom of the page. Where did you go?

Chase: Yeah, what did I just read what?

Amishi: Exactly so the so this now brings up another thing that we all do all the time. And everybody knows we do this, but maybe bringing it up will be helpful. Mental time travel? So yes, so this aspect of our brain is probably the thing that makes us so powerful in terms of our humaneness. I mean, really, I don't know if we can say our dogs and cats don't mentally tie.

Chase: I asked myself this question all the time, I look at my dog and other animals. I go, are you here? Are you thinking? Are you remembering like, you look at me, and you acknowledge me, but can you do what I can do, basically? And I think

Amishi: the answer is no, they're in the never, ever present, right? Maybe you'd have a dog that might have a dream, and they might not express them like, but for the most part, they're here, like they're here right now. They're observing, they're noticing they're here right now,

Chase: what a goal to just eternally be fully present. 

Amishi: but you know, you say that, but think about what we wouldn't be able to do if we couldn't mentally time travel, you could not plan you couldn't have gotten here. If you couldn't mentally time travel, you had to think okay, what time to have to leave? Well, she's going to be there at this time. Planning is so important for functioning at our human level, right? Planning, visioning, like what is it going to look like? And then for the past, you have to reflect on the past in order to learn from it. So even to know that I should plan so I can get there on time, is because of a past event. So the ability to reflect on the past to learn from it, or to anticipate the future to plan for it very, very powerful things and it's not just that we can time travel, we can actually do something even more cool, which is mind to travel. So I can actually but you might not it's not really it's so ordinary, right? So like, I can think to myself, Oh, I wonder, I wonder if, you know, if he's liking this conversation, everyone's Chase is actually interested in what I'm saying. I've just mine traveled, I've gone in your mind. I've looked back at myself and said, Oh, what is the what does he receiving from what I'm saying? We do this all the time, as well. It's such a powerful part of our ability to be social creatures. And we know for example, and disorders like autism, when people cannot do that, cannot anticipate or understand the intentions of others. Things Fall Apart fast, in terms of being functional. So anyway, this is to say, these are things we do all the time and it connects back to your question about mood. So unfortunately, under certain circumstances, especially those that end up having those other qualities of stress being stressful or threatening, our attention can get hijacked to the past in a way that is not productively reflecting on it, but actually is stuck ruminating on experiences that have already happened. So now you are ruminating on a negative experience. And you know, to the point where sometimes we call it attentional rubbernecking, you know, like you're driving your car, it's like, it's so sticky the content that we just keep going back to it, even though we saved ourselves. I don't want to keep thinking about that. But we cannot help ourselves. Our attentional flashlight is just stuck pointing to those past events. Or if you're thinking about the future, you're not productively planning you're extra catastrophizing and worrying. So both the rumination and the catastrophizing drive negative mood. And the reason they're related to our attention is because when the art our mind is in the past, or the future, our attention is as well. Oh, yeah, but so we're the reason it looks like if we have somebody to do a task in the lab, and we ask them, when their mind wanders, where is your mind right now and they say it was to pass negative event or a future worry, their attentional performance in the moment looks terrible. So that's why I say that it actually can be sort of like a form of kryptonite for our attention, negative mood and same thing with threat and same thing with stressful experiences. So it really has to do with how we put this powerful capacity to use.

Chase: Amazing. Before we get into the other two there, have one follow up question there from mood. I kind of took that as and I guess this is a good example mind wandering. I'm hearing what you're saying in my head. I'm like, oh, that gives me another question.

Amishi: No problem.

Chase: The problems of being an interviewer, I guess, when it comes to mood and attention. Is this a hack? If we want to get better at paying attention can we do things to put us in a better mood? Will it work kind of that easily?

Amishi: yes. I think so. We haven't really talked about the hack part yet. We're just still just trying to figure out what's going on. But you can really back in Yeah, we can get there later. No, it can, it can help. But it's probably not the way you think. So oftentimes when people say, oh, can I use my attention to hack my mood, they might say, Okay, if I know I'm in a bad mood, because I've moved to negative content, I'll just generate a bunch of positive content. And then I'll put my attention there. And it may actually have a beneficial effect, okay, in the short term, but the key is that you have enough attentional fuel to do this. Okay, so because it is very energetically costly, attentionally costly, to create an alternate reality to the one you're experiencing. And something about your present moment is resulting in a negative mood. So actually, related back to your prior military experience, we did a study in which we looked at people during pre deployment training. And we knew from our, from our work with them, we anticipated that if we do nothing at all, during an eight week pre deployment interval, which, you know, in this case, it really was pre deployment, they're about to be deployed. But there are other studies in which we've just done readiness training. So sure, yeah, it's not even like they're getting ready to go. But just something intensive that you have to do, probably somewhere where you're

Chase: just daily life in the military that's readiness training. 

Amishi: But it's like there's a ramp up. And the challenge may become more and more intensive, but it's definitely protracted. So if you take people and we did this, we took our we actually took a whole bunch of laptops to military base in Hawaii set it up. And we asked people to come in and do a set of attention tasks. And then eight weeks later, through their they had their normal pre deployment training. Eight weeks later, they came back and they did it again. And what we found is that everybody's attention as a group was worse. What? Yeah, and now they're about to be deployed. I mean, this was like a wake up call. So their attention was worse, their mood was worse, their stress levels were higher. And if you remember back to what the experience was, like, you're like, maybe you could understand that. It's like, yeah, it's very intense. It's very demanding. The demands don't let up. And there's a performance pressure to I mean, oftentimes, you're getting evaluated, whether you're going to pass this, you know, marksmanship test, or whatever the heck it is that you have to do. But this was in my mind a wake up call, because what it said is, the normal course of operations in the military that is intended to prepare people for deployment, is actually degrading their availability of their attentional resources. And now if they need their attention, in order to do all these things, we talked about think, feel, connect, perform successfully on anything they have to do, there's less available. And we saw this not only with the military, we've seen it with undergrads, we've seen this with elite athletes, we've seen this with so many different groups where there's some preparatory interval that's intensive and demanding. So anyway, so that was the so going back to your question about positivity. So then we said, Okay, let's try offering other forms of training. This is what happens if we do nothing. Now what if we offer some type of training? Well, it should hopefully have a beneficial impact. So the one program, we kind of put a head to head of two different kinds of programs. One was a positivity training, where they're in the intention was exactly what you said, cultivate more positive emotion in your life. Look, on the bright side, see the good in what's going on, see the value of what's going on, is to bring to mind everything that could uplift you, in a way and do this out of the negative, right, do this intentionally. Right. So that was one kind of program. The other program was a mindfulness training program. And we'll talk we can unpack what mindfulness is, but I just wanted to give you this, the what happened, give you the results from that study. So as I already told you, if we give people nothing at all, they declined. If we gave them mindfulness training, they stayed steady, meaning they didn't decline. So that's a that's a really cool thing,

Chase: they improve.

Amishi: that's a win, because they didn't decline. Okay, there are groups that did improve, we can talk about that. So what happened to the positivity group? Well, our prediction was like we didn't really know because positive mood can boost attention. There are some studies in the laboratory where you can actually find people are a little more present. And there are some hypotheses that maybe there's more dopamine.

Chase: I was just gonna say maybe more positive hormone kind of flooding the system. 

Amishi: that was that sort of the hand wavy kind of thing, a lot of it. But we wanted to see what would happen because now this is not a normal circumstances, this is not steady state living. This is pre deployment training, and the baseline is a decline. So what we found was that they were basically the same as getting nothing at all, they all significantly declined. Yeah. But that was a really good thing to know. Because that meant, you know, and then it made us really question. But let me just finish my sins. That meant that that's not a path that shouldn't be pursued to help people with their attention is a pre deployment training tool. Like that's, that's out of the box; to know not what not to do. So why would it be that cultivating a positive mood in that interval is so problematic? And this goes back to how you actually go about creating a positive mood and what you have to do is very attentionally demanding you're basically creating an alternate reality in the presence of something. And you know, pre deployment training, maybe it's difficult when we saw that in the lab. But you can imagine if you carry that same kind of load on you during deployment, something terrible happens, you get an injury, somebody gets seriously hurt, or there's consequences to actions that are unfortunate and problematic. And absolutely, you cannot always reframe those positively. And if you try to, you're basically emptying your attentional gas tank; you're just pushing against the reality of the situation. So I thought that was a very useful learning of like, you know, probably you might positivity may be beneficial under normal circumstances. Military pre deployment training is not one of those circumstances.

Chase: Yeah, it's, it's really interesting when you kind of break that down, because I can think back to so many times have, we call them warrior tasks and drills in the army, it's just repetition of skill, set repetition, repetition, hands on training, to get you as ready as possible for when you actually go from, you know, in, in the field to, you know, in theater. And I never really stopped to think of course, I didn't have time, since being yelled at. You know, is there something more that can be done is, is the best way to train beyond just repetition to get things down, so that, to some degree, I think it does help because if ever, my weapon would jam, I knew exactly what to do, right? If I needed to zig zagging, I knew exactly what to do, we'd go back on our tasks and drills or SOPs. But if we had this ability to kind of mind travel and to become more attention, pay more attention to our attention. I think that might have served us better sometimes. 

Amishi: thankfully, this is something the military is actively pursuing. Because I think you're right, I think that the way in which military training does, it has done, there's a lot of aspects to the process that are beneficial. I mean, frankly, speaking, I mean, the US military is one of the best in the world. And I think their training approach is Marine, I think their training approach is very good. But knowing this means we can probably do better. And it's not taking away from the approach taken with the training. But this supplemental form of training, the mindfulness training, could actually really up level the whole thing, because now you're not only getting all the benefits of the training in terms of the SOPs, you default to you don't have to think about it. But you don't get that dip in attention. So you're not depleted attentionally when you end up landing, and wherever you're deployed to

Chase: well said, absolutely. So that's kind of mood. Can we go back and kind of drive home the other two components here?

Amishi: Yeah, I think that they're very similar. I mean, it's basically the notion of having things that hijack you in time, and hijack you in perspective because when you when that happens to you, your attention is no longer in the present moment. And when I was really, you know, as an attention researcher, you know, understanding how powerful attention is, it can change the way we perceive things, how vulnerable it is that stress threat, poor mood actually deplete and degrade attention. That's when I became very curious about the solution. Like this is the brain hack aspect, I was like, there’s got to be a way we got to be able to train this. And so we pursued all of these different approaches. In fact, positivity was one of the ones we actually brought into the lab, as well. And, you know, under certain circumstances, it can work and other circumstances it does not. We also use things like kind of video game forms of brain training, really not all that beneficial lately,

Chase: virtual reality 

Amishi: Not quite yet. At that point, this was like the mid 2000s. It wasn't that fancy, but just kind of brain games, like you might be able to download an app on your phone. And there are a lot of commercially available ones now. And you do get better at the game, but it wasn't transferring over into our attention task. So it was just better at that specific game really no generalizability. 

Chase: it kind of sucks, because it makes you feel like you're accomplishing a task and getting better, quicker, or my neurons are firing faster. I can pay more

Amishi: But now give me a slightly tweaked version.

Chase: Man, there are a lot of angry listeners right now to some simulation games, I'm sure.

Amishi: Okay, but simulation games in the context of even like, if you think about combat simulation, I don't think we're talking about the same thing. Because the the context and you're gonna have to, you're going to have to operate is very similar to the trading contracts. Absolutely. I'm talking about sitting in front of a computer screen and looking at little blips and dots and stuff like that. And now I take you to a driving simulation where you have to do something very different in a very different context, that transfer we don't tend to see. So the problem tends to be something called generalizability. You can't go from training one aspect of attentional functioning and benefit the other which means it's not actually fundamentally changing your attention system. It's changing your specific task, sort of action sequence,

Chase: so not your attention system isn't getting better your ability in that particular task the brain attention is getting better.

Amishi: Exactly. And the brain is gonna just do the thing that's good. It's gonna get better. I mean, we just know that right? We know that certain things can get we can get better at. But it doesn't necessarily mean they transfer over into other aspects of our lives. So which my point is just that we tried a bunch of stuff and nothing was really sticking, we couldn't transfer tasks and still see a carryover effect. And that's actually how mindfulness ended up coming into my lab is that I was like, I was actually on a mindfulness journey separate from that, just because I was having a lot of attention problems at that particular point in my life. And it was super ironic, because I just mentioned that I could not find anything in the literature of how to help myself, how do I up level my own attention? I was not I was not I could study everything in the entire literature. And nothing was really giving me answers. And I was a little bit desperate at that point, like, how do I actually benefit this system? And it ended up that a colleague of mine threw out the term meditation. And I was like, what? No, I don't think so. But I was curious enough that I started pursuing it started actually practicing a particular type of meditation, mindfulness meditation, and I found it to be beneficial. But it was really interesting when I started doing it, because I was like, Oh, my goodness, this thing is like, hitting all the marks of where we know our attention can be problematic. It gets hijacked in time, we mind wander, we make stories about reality, and we're not actually getting the raw data of the present moment. So then it ended up that when I looked at even the description of what mindfulness is, it's like, okay, it's about paying attention to the hero in the now. Alright, that's really useful, non reactively. And without a story about it, I'm like, ding, ding, ding, ding, this is exactly what we've been looking for. Okay, how do we train for that? And lucky for me that there's a 25 year old tradition, 2500 year old tradition, that's part of the world's wisdom traditions, where people have cultivated this capacity to train the mind using mindfulness practices. So it was a very weird experience to be like, the cutting edge of our humanity, our problems that are so modern, may be addressed by something that is quite ancient. And that actually taps into the system that I know something about. So I got super curious about how we could test this, put it to an objective test. Now my own reflections on maybe it's beneficial, and a hard test, like, let's take it, let's take it to pre-deployment soldiers, let's like give it to people that if it was ever going to work, it would be helpful if it worked out, but the chances of it working in this environment are going to be really low, like it's probably not going to work, you know, if it's really a wimpy and weak effect, giving it to soldiers that are about to be deployed, it's not going to work. And I'll just say that some of the initial studies that we did, I was very unsure about whether it would have an impact if mindfulness would actually train attention. So I went in the other direction. I was like, what does it have the best chances of actually probably showing some benefits. So we partnered with this retreat center in the middle of Colorado, where people were meditating, practicing mindfulness meditation, for 10 to 12 hours a day for a month. And I'm like so Vipassana, it was actually was a shambhala meditation retreat, but it had a lot of those shambhala but with Vipassana components. And so I was like, Okay, well, if, if it is gonna work, that we're giving it a heavy dose. So let's see. And yes, in that context, we were finding that our objective metrics of attention were actually substantially improving. So that was sort of the initial test that we did. Then we tested it out in, in medical students and nursing students that were also going through an intensive period, but not quite as intense as pre deployment training. And then we brought it to pre deployment soldiers, and actually Marines at first and then soldiers. And we found that yes, it can benefit attention. So that was the really exciting part of this is that the solution wasn't tech, a high tech solution, it was people closing their eyes and focusing on breath related sensations. And when their mind wandered, they returned it back. And at some point, especially in this current day, when the term mindfulness or mindfulness meditation people are kind of like, what is that some spa vacation or something, and people have heard of it, but they don't have a very brain training kind of orientation toward it. But if you go back to what I was saying about the systems of attention, it ends up that mindfulness practices target all three systems and exercise all three systems.

Chase: Is the fight for our tension relative or at some level, is it is it just primal across the board, because you were talking about? We wanted to kind of take it to the real world, you know, we want to take it to these people that are going to have to really literally be fighting for their attention, pre deployment, soldiers Marines, versus, you know, medical students, nursing school students. I guess my question here is where I'm going is the stressors we face in our day to day life, the stressors we face in our job. There's a scale right. But for me, the peak of that scale is the peak of my scale, the fight for my attention, the height of my stress. You can be totally different than yours. I could be a soldier in theater, I could be preparing for it, you could be a renowned neurosurgeon about to go into some crazy exploratory brain surgery like that. Is it relative? Or is it real? Is the baseline real?

Amishi: there's definitely a you're talking about, like our other individual differences in our attentional capacities. Yes, yes, there are individual differences in our attentional capacity and some people have tend to have very strong ability to pay attention in this focused way. Other people don't mean and the extreme would be something like a diagnosed ADD disorder. And the other side might, you might say, is maybe Special Operations, people that are really selected for this? And it seems to be the case that yes, there are differences across people. But the one thing that we find consistently is there's going to be some cost if you're in a very intensive circumstance. So actually, it was funny, you were asking me before, they don't get better, they just stay stable over time and with conventional forces. The win is, overall, as a group, people that get the mindfulness training, they stay stable, they don't decline, what within that group, those that practiced more than the kind of minimum dose that we could talk about what that is. It's basically the subtitle of my book, 12 minutes a day, people that practice more than that they benefited more they weren't, some of them actually did get above their baseline. And just as a group, they tended to look stable over time. But when we look at special operators, right, who were selected for their cognitive ability, we didn't see the degradation, the baseline was steady, stable. And after mindfulness training, they increased even though they were in pre deployment training, as well. So made me kind of feel good that, you know, the way that the army is selecting special operators is good, it works. It's true. But the really cool part was even they who were at this elite level, improved with this practice. And even within them, the more they practice, the more they benefited,

Chase: fascinating. I can only think back to I did some, some training and some events, with some special operations, guys, and there was always just something to them the physical aspect, of course, but then just the mental acuity and just the sharpness that had to be there. I always wondered, were you like that? Or was this something you got in training? You know, in a different school that I haven't gone to was someone's like, how do I get DAGs? I feel like I'm pretty sharp sometimes. But that aspect, yeah, has to be 10 out of 10.

Amishi: That's right. But I think this is where these kinds of practices can be the unusual solution, because I think they allow us to up level a basic capacity and, and really reduce a basic vulnerability that we all have. And we do it in a way that it's not magic, it really is. Exercise for the mind. It's like if you think of those, those it's funny the way that that some of the military service members that I've become friends with over these years, they basically one of the leaders, I remember he said, You know, I told them about the mindfulness practice, like, Okay, I want you to sit there, we need to focus your attention on the sensations of breathing, get that flashlight right on those sensations. When your mind wanders, I want you to notice, my mind wandered. And then I want you to redirect the flashlight back. And essentially a describing sort of the way I just did with you that you're exercising that orienting system, you're actually keeping that floodlight broad and receptive in every moment. And then you're using the executive control to get it back on track. And you're doing it over and over again. It's like, oh, you're just giving me a push up for the mind. And I was like, Yeah, that's right. It's a push up. Because it is a type of sequential activity that pushes against in this case is not gravity. It's your own minds, gravitational pull toward distractibility. And you can strengthen beyond that. But doing that really does empower you in a way that can have effects on all the aspects of your life, I mean, not just doing your job better, but like being a better partner being a better parent. And of course, we're seeing over and over again, that people are better at their jobs. They report not just better performance, but more enjoyment as well.

Chase: More enjoyment is never a bad thing. To think if I would like to add a couple other things that might be some spin offs there or want to kind of track back onto here. Let me ask you, would you be comfortable talking about or could you talk about we've been talking about some mindfulness practices, ways to use our mind to better our mind. I've found value in supplementation, key nutrition, certain things that actually contribute to quite literally my brain firing faster, quicker laying down more neurons, neuroplasticity, neurogenesis. Anything that you can shine a light on a floodlight or a spotlight, in your research that you've seen actually directly contribute to really helping our attention span. I talked about areas of supplements like nootropics, certain foods, certain functional mushrooms, Lion's Mane MCT oil, just you know in brain healthy foods in general, you know healthy fats, fish oil, things that can actually cross the blood brain barrier to increase neurogenesis and neuroplasticity to quite literally biochemically help us pay better attention.

Amishi: No, I don't have any insight into those. I think there is some growing data that suggests that but remember, like, my perspective, is around understanding the way attention works, and then training it training the system itself. And it ends up that mindfulness does have the same kinds of effects that you're talking about. But you don't need to take anything to do it. I mean, in the same way that you can be fit without supplementation, if you choose to buy a certain kind of exercise and a basic kind of a diet. But it is the case and let me know I don't know if you're familiar with these studies, that when we have people practice these, these practices like the like the simple breath awareness practice, I was describing the brain systems that are responsible for focusing like the orienting system, and the brain system that's responsible for the receptive attention, this kind of broad floodlight. They function better there is cortical thickening in certain nodes. And the coordination is better something we call functional, dynamic functional connectivity. And mobile I mean, but it basically just means the coordination of the functioning of these systems like they're, they're holding make sense, as you're, as you're saying, yeah. I mean, it's like if you think of these systems as sort of dancers, I mean, they're coordinated dance partners, and one is going to handing off and the other ones taking over in a more fluid way. There's not a battle between them where things get glitchy. But yeah, the technical term is functional, dynamic, functional connectivity. But um, the other thing to say that I think is important, and I don't I mean, I'm not answering your question, because I actually, I don't have much to say I was just curious if you had to come across. But it is, I mean, those same metrics are things that we're interested in. And the other thing I wanted to tell you is that this mind wandering that we're talking about, there is a brain network that's responsible for mind wandering. And it's something called the default mode network. And this term default is actually because we default to mind wandering, I mean, like I said, half the time, we're not doing our fault. Dump your fault, it's not your fault, that work is default, like a default to it. But this is really important that these networks, the attentional networks in the default mode, they are mutually antagonistic. Like, if the default mode is active, those attention networks can be suppressed in the same way that, you know, when you're attending here, the neurons processing this part of the CENER are suppressed. So there is a battle unfolding in our minds over and over again. And what we find with mindfulness training is that you dial down the activity of the default mode. So you are more attentive, you actually aren't getting pulled away by distraction. And this it ends up that this distractibility, and this, that the positive kind of overcoming affects of mindfulness training, they have an impact at the cellular level. I don't know if you're familiar with any of those studies, but there have been one of my post docs, for example. So do you know have you heard of the term telomeres? Oh, of course. Right. So telomeres

Chase: right about resilient aging over here.

Amishi: Exactly. So it ends up that in the initial studies, it was that the more people were practicing mindfulness training, the more telomerase there was, which is this reparative enzyme, but now we're finding that actually telomere length is preserved and supported by mindfulness training. 

Chase: Wow. Okay. I think you just hit the nail in the coffin for me.

Amishi: Hopefully not the coffin; it's literally advancing your lifespan. I mean, wow, it's happening at the cellular level where cellular longevity is improved, but that's translates into, you know, telomere length is your life length.

Chase: Yeah, this brings up read lifespan, David Sinclair, that there's a section in his book, I think he talks about this, and it's something that I'm familiar with. And I've heard, oh, all these things matter. All these things contribute to the overall system, but also unique systems in our body. And I mean, look at meditation, people who've been practicing meditation, this is what I'm talking about mindfulness, and so I'm just connecting some dots. 

Amishi: I think you get it that it's really regarding. So the problem with taking certain kinds of supplements, especially those that might improve telomerase levels, is that we know that cancer cells also like to Emirates and they're going to proliferate. So, what you want is some way to I mean if you want to use the term hack the system you want to be to have the system function more efficiently itself. And here's the other piece that maybe is not obvious. A study that was done by one of my dear colleagues, Elissa Epel, at UCSF she looked she had people that were the mothers of children with special needs. So these are very stressed out moms that were really having to invest a lot of their life in caretaking for their children, a lot of attention a lot of attention. And, and what she did is she asked them for kind of their daily reports and how much their mind wandering. And what she found was that the more there were, they were mind wandering, the shorter their telomeres. So now we have a correspondence between the state of mind moment to moment whether you're there or not probably tied you know, we know it's tied to things like your stress levels, etc. But it corresponds to our attention is working. If you're highly distractible, your mind is constantly flitting around to the past or future and unproductive ways. It's shortening your lifespan. And this is where the benefits of figuring out and training your mind to pay attention better in the you're in the now moment by moment lengthens your lifespan. So you don't when they think when you go back now and think, Oh, we've always talked about like, meditation practices is like, peace promoting and life for money. It's like, literally biochemically, yeah, that is happening. So yeah, it's really neat work. But I think for me, it always comes down to the fundamentals. Like if you don't do it, it doesn't matter. It can be the neatest work in the in the world, you got to get yourself to actually practice. 

Chase: is there any topic here, you know, I've talked about so many things gonna have three main columns, fitness, nutrition mindset and if you don't consistently do things, and it's not gonna matter,

Amishi: exactly. And that was the kind of that was where my energy went, I was like, this is a great tool. Mindfulness is an awesome tool, we found it to work over and over again. But frankly, for the first time, I got my two big grants from the Department of Defense. The gold standard for offering mindfulness training, which is still the gold standard in the public realm in the medical context realm, is something called Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction. Jon Kabat Zinn is a eminent person this, okay, so it's an eight week program that's available, over 750 medical centers around the country, where you get together with a train trainer, in a group with a group of people. Now, of course, they're happening all online in virtual, and you connect for eight weeks, two and a half hours a week, where you learn about a particular mindfulness practice in a particular topic. And then you go away for a week, and you practice in a homework exercise daily, 45 minutes a day. And then you come back the next week and revisit a new topic and same thing. So for eight weeks, you're meeting with the trainer, getting the lesson, and then doing the workout. And this now has really generated an entire universe of, of papers. And so our starting point, when I started this work with the military was like, Okay, we know model that works. We know that it helps mood, we know lower stress. We didn't know too much about how it affects attention. But I was willing to say probably there's some benefit there. And we've done one study where we found that it actually helps, helps attention. So I was pretty sure it would here as well. So I wrote this grant, and I said I need 24 hours of free deployment time, over eight weeks. And I need a lot of people to do is not a lot of soldiers and it was like, for a year, I got the door slammed in my face. So what I did is I wrote a grant a series of grants, actually where I said, Okay, you know, fine, maybe 24 hours won't work. But let us at least try it. And then we'll go down to 16, then we'll go down to eight, then we'll go down to four. And we'll crunch the number of weeks, we'll have eight weeks, we'll have four weeks, we'll have two weeks. And let me find the sweet spot so that I won't waste anybody's time. But if you don't let us let me answer this question. You're just not going to benefit from the training? I know we have. So it took me about eight years to do all these different combinations. But we did end up with clear answers. What we found is that, yes, you can reduce the time, you don't need eight weeks, you can go down to four weeks. But you can't go down to two weeks, even the special operators didn't benefit with two weeks of training. And for a neuroplasticity perspective, that makes sense. Even if you're just like you can't train for a marathon in a weekend, I mean, takes time for the body to actually adjust. And then in terms of the number of hours of time with the trainer, we found that you know, 24 was worked 16 worked. Eight hours worked. Four hours didn't. So it's like, okay, we need about, we need about four hours and we sorry, we need about eight hours over four weeks. That's a good prescription. How much home practice should we offer them? Well, we knew that 45 minutes works. So we in our first studies, we asked people to do 30 minutes a day soldiers active duty soldiers. And nobody did 30 minutes. And there's like, Yeah, that's great lady. We're not gonna do that. So what we did is we actually asked them to just be honest with us, how much did you actually practice now of course, we've got apps that can track how much they practiced. But at that point, we just asked them what we found, which goes back to why I put this on the cover of the book. 12 minutes was the sweet spot. So 12 minutes a day and their attention was perfect no more, no less. If they did more they benefited. But if they didn't get up to 12 minutes really didn't see a lot of benefit. 

Chase: So that's the minimum threshold. 

Amishi: So now we're triangulating on this prescription, about eight hours of formal training over four weeks as a ramp up, and 12 minutes a day. And all of a sudden, now when I would go into military leaders, offices, or corporations, and they'd say, you know, I'd say I'd like to offer a mindfulness training partner with you on a research study, it wouldn't be like, I'll give you an afternoon, if they could say that, I'll say, you know, don't give me an afternoon because that's not gonna do anything. I can say, look, this is what works. And this is the lowest, we tend to be able to go and still find benefits. And here's the proof. And then you've got, yeah, like numbers of papers that have found this. But it gives me more confidence that I'm not wasting people's time that it really I know how time pressured and performance pressured, not just military service members, but all of us are. And that's actually what kind of inspired me to write the book. I'm like, let's not keep this to ourselves. All of us are stressed. And we don't know when the next high stress intervals happen gonna happen to us. So let's train like our life depends on it today.

Chase: What did you not get to put in peak mind? What maybe was a piece of research that I was not quite finished yet? I don't want to know what was left out that you're just like?

Amishi: I mean, you know, there's two different ways to think about it. One is really more information that we have regarding scalability, how do we get this to more people faster? Because even? Yeah, even if we even if I found this prescription, if I don't have trainers that can offer it that know what it means to live a particular professional life? No matter? I mean, it's not going to go anywhere. So a lot of the work we've done since our well, really starting when I was writing the book, but have pursued has been around training trainers. And we've sort of perfected that well not perfected, but we've really come a long way with that. And we've been able to now there's your scale, we've now been able to get trainers trained up. So by the way, that mindfulness based stress reduction, I was telling you about, about a two year window to get people trained up. We can we've been able to train up people in 10 weeks. But the key is that the trainers need to come from the context, the group that you're working with. 

Chase: actually, that's monumental. That's really profound.

Amishi: it is just actually just yesterday, I posted this on social media, we did a study with military spouses, and we trained the spouses to deliver it to fellow spouses when we came in as outsiders and delivered it was they liked it, but didn't like it as much. So now we trained up a group of spouses over 10 weeks, they delivered it to other spouses, and we saw significant reductions in depression symptoms, their positive mood went up and their attention went up. So that's one answer to your questions, really, solutions that are actionable and scalable. But if you really want to know what the other kinds of things that I think about the exact opposite side, not actionable, not tied to applied settings, which is geeking out about how the heck the brain works. And a lot of the work in my lab, and I'm kind of pursue both things like, like, how does it attention work in the real world? And what do we know about its fundamental nature. And so the other part that I would, that I didn't get to put in the book that I would, that I've, we're actively pursuing, and I'm really excited about is, I mean, it's gonna sound like a technical term, but it's something called brain micro states.

Chase: Micro states. That's, that's a new one for me, okay, I'm all ears. So I'm all brain.

Amishi: So, you know, we were talking about mind wandering its nature. And that's happens like 50% of the time. And there's a lot of brain imaging studies using functional magnetic resonance imaging, where you put people in a scanner, and then it tracks the oxygenation level of their blood flow. And you can see, oh, there are different brain regions that are active. And that's tied to the reality that when our brain is active, neurons that are active need more oxygen, which means they require more blood. So what the MRI is tracking is not actual neural activity, its tracking blood flow. And it's tracking the amount of oxygen in our blood to be able to say, oh, that's probably where more neurons are getting activated.

Chase: So once I get there, I just want to get them to clear so I because I've looked into so many of these examples and studies, my hearing you correctly that when we're looking at, I want to see the brain on certain task or activity. Yeah, you see, look at the brain fire up. That's not actually like saying the part of the brain where this is related, but just saying it needs more energy in order to do this task. That's what we're seeing.

Amishi: It is still brain parts, but it's actually the indirect measure of brain activity by looking at oxygen consumption through blood flow. So it's still the anatomy is great with MRI, you can get great anatomical pictures like you know exactly the part of the brain that's active, but it's not actually neural firing. It's blood flow, which is slow blood flow is slow. So if you want to know something about the moment to moment nature of our brain, and that is actually I think, a fascinating thing because all we have is moment At the moment nature of our brain, that's all we have, like, in any moment. It's just the next moment, right? It's just we're just that’s life. So what's a better way to track actual neural activity. And this is where another technique that we use in my lab, a brain, electrical recordings are fantastic. We can measure brain activity, direct brain activity, the firing of neurons, at the level of a 1,000th of a second. Wow. So now we're looking at actual neurons firing, and its and its nature. And what we can do is, you know, think of any particular state, you might feel like you're in whether it's a happy mood, or sad mood or whatever. Why do we even call it a state, we call it a state, because whatever the set points are of the brain, there's some stability, it's like, the, whatever the if you think of the brain is just a bunch of levers, right? And they're all calibrated, just like a mixing board. It's like, it's all set in a certain way. That's a state, there's stability there. Well, the brain is constantly, the levers are constantly moving up and down. But they're when we categorize something as a state, there's stability of that particular set point. So now, if you want to see what is the actually smallest unit of brain states, how stable can something be? Before it switches, that's when you get to microstates? Like, the smallest amount of time and what we know is that, for example, and this is the work of one of my postdocs, 20 distinct states in a second of the brain. And now you can start tracking, how does the heart of those brain states correspond to things like potential performance mood? So this is your ask, don't tell me like, this is the kind of thing I geek out on, it's like we are going to get, we can get really granular information about how this works. And you know, when you think about sort of scary science fiction, you can probably guess, what somebody is what their what is going on in their brain based on the nature of this micro state. So like, if you just had a flash, and you had a particular thought, oh, yeah, I saw that. I saw that in my readout. 

Chase: yeah, absolutely. Which that’s fascinating I know what I know what I'm looking at, when I get home now. I've just been into micro dosing, a whole new level, they're actually related. Even better, we'll save that for part two. I could definitely talk to you forever, literally, and figuratively blowing my mind. I want to first before we get towards the end here, acknowledge your work. I thank you for coming on here and sharing your time and expertise. 

Amishi: Thanks for such great questions. 

Chase: Oh, I try. I try and we're going to have peak mine down in the show notes for everybody. Definitely make sure you check out the book. Boom, there we go. Before I get to my final question, what you're kind of just talking about there sparked another question that I think has been top of mind for me and my growth over the years of becoming more mindful, whether that's through just increased awareness or actual mindfulness practices. a limiting factor that I think that I have is because I see other people not being as mindful, and their lack of mindfulness is distracting from my mindfulness. So I guess my question here is, how can we increase our mindfulness, right? And we're good, right? A new state? How can we try actively passively to influence the mindfulness and the state of awareness of other people, so that kind of, not to say, matches our mindfulness, but I'm sure if you and I are very mindful beings together, we're both gonna be operating individually very well, but also together? Is there anything we can be doing actively or passively to contribute to, in a conversation just, you know, with a friend, a loved one, a boss, whatever, to like, help them kind of get better at the mindfulness, like in a particular moment? Or is it just so unique and individual that we can't, we can't influence that? Basically,

Amishi: Basically, interesting question, you're not gonna like my answer. The best way that you can actually do that is by increasing your capacity to accept the moment as it is.

Chase: you know, I respect that. I like that. I like that answer. I do, okay,

Amishi: because, frankly, there's nobody else's mind, we can control but if you're able to be if you're able to embody an okayness, with whatever else is occurring, you know, somebody else's distress, somebody else's pain, anger, if you are the mountain that is there to witness it, and to hold it, that is going to have a ripple in the world. I mean, it's undeniable, we know what that feels like when we're around people that have a steadiness and a supportive, even a self supported orientation. So whenever you start looking toward trying to fix other people, and I get this question, often, I'm not saying you're doing that, but I'm saying like, for example, parents will say, how do I get my kids to be better using their social media? Like, what's your social media use? I mean, I don't myself, there's been times when my children come and say, Mom can ask you for and they take and put in the other side of the room. I mean, I got to do as I say, not as I do. Well, exactly. So we don't want to do that. We want to actually work on cultivating this and by the way, just want to make very clear, there's nothing extraordinary about a mindful state, it's the most ordinary, it's the most fundamentally ordinary aspect of our existence. And sometimes we just refer to it as bare attention. And the fact that it is so fundamentally ordinary and not mystical is its power because if we can be that we can have that kind of presence of mind. Regardless of the anxiety, pain, you name the difficult emotion, we're going to be the ones that people are going to go to because we can function in those circumstances and we can support others who cannot. So seeing that is actually quite motivating other people like, how are you doing that? How are you able to be here? I mean, just like you felt when you saw the special operators, I want that, right. In some sense, I want that. And I'm what I'm saying is train for it. You can train for it, everybody can train for it. And you can begin today and it only takes 12 minutes.

Chase: I love that answer. I love that. That was amazing. Thank you. So my final question, bringing you back to the theme of the show here is living a life ever forward fitness nutrition mindset, like I say, are kind of the three columns of our content here. But I always like to ask my guests that question through their lens, their unique perspective, their expertise. When you hear those two words ever forward, what does that mean to you? How can we live a life ever forward through this lens, if you will, of mindfulness of attention? What does that mean to you? 

Amishi: You know, even when I heard the podcast name, before I looked you up and was able to learn a little bit about your work. I really thought it resonated with a topic of mindfulness. Because here's the reality, moments will pass, everything is impermanent, we are going to be ever forward if we're so lucky, ever forward, we will be moving into the next moment. So can you be here right now without missing it. That's what it means to me Ever Forward is present in the moment, so that the next moment is able to continue to hold us.

Chase: That has actually been more of my, I'll say newfound interpretation of this. You'll appreciate this. So before it actually came from my late father, it was his unit, he was in the army as well. His first unit, their creed they're saying was ever for comes from the 100 and 16th Infantry Regiment. And I used to think, and not say that it didn't serve me. But it was always just, you got to find a way to move forward, you got to find a way to put one step and one foot in front of the other. And I think it does at times, but for me personally, where I'm at in mindfulness and just life is really just how do I just get so damn here and now and present? A phrase it's really been helping me with this is b where your feet are. Good friend of mine said that to me recently. And it just really stuck. And so if I can just get better at being where my feet are to be more present. Living in that presence is eternity. And it's just moment after moment after moment of that, and then you just turn around, you're like, holy shit, I have been just moving forward in a direction

Amishi: microstates or state,

Chase: micro forward.

Amishi: I love that you've come to that as well.

Chase: Well, thank you so much for your time again. Any closing remarks for your work for peak mind?

Amishi: Yeah, no, I'm just happy to you know, this book I wrote to offer all the things we've learned from military service members and other kinds of elite groups to bring it to all of us because we're all going to be in challenging circumstances and we can all benefit from cultivating a peak mind.

Chase: For more information on everything you just heard, make sure to check this episode show notes or head to www.everforwardradio.com