Peak Mind: Find Your Focus, Own Your Attention, Invest 12 Minutes a Day
by Amishi P. Jha, Ph.D.
Dr. Amishi P. Jha, an attention researcher, explains that the human brain was built to be distractible and that you can train the brain to pay attention more effectively through specific mindfulness techniques.
Since our brain’s evolution was driven by specific survival pressures, our attention waves and wanes, making us prone to being distractible. Our distractibility served us well when predators lurked around every corner. However, in today’s technologically saturated, fast-paced, and rapidly shifting world, we’re feeling that distractibility more than ever, and we face new predators that rely on and exploit our distractibility (like social media). After twenty-five years of studying the science of attention and using the most advanced brain imaging technologies available, Dr. Jha found that mindfulness training was the only brain-training tool that continuously worked to strengthen attention across her studies. She uncovered new evidence that:
…with training, mindfulness can change the way the brain works by default so that our attention–that precious resource–is protected and readily available, even in the face of high stress and high demand.
Dr. Jha defines mindfulness as “paying attention to present-moment experience without conceptual elaboration or emotional reactivity.” She explains that mindfulness for attention training is not about “feeling better.” Instead, mindfulness is about building your core capacities:
The ability to notice where your attention is, to bring your mind back when it wanders. The ability to fill your whiteboard with the present-moment experience. The ability to resist story-making and to simply observe. The ability to become aware of when your mind needs to be redirected.
She explains that what she teaches is “pre-silience.” Resilience means bouncing back from adversity. But we want to train our minds so that we maintain our capacities even as we are experiencing challenge. The book lays out the research and a four-week training guide to help us take back our attention and function at our peak so we are present for all that truly matters in life.
FAVORITE INSIGHTS
“Like currency, attention can be paid, given, or stolen… it is extremely valuable, and also finite.” (p. 4)
“Whatever we pay attention to is amplified.” (p. 6)
“We lack internal cues about where our attention is moment to moment. And for this, there is a solution: pay attention to your attention.” (p. 10)
“Your attention, quite literally, alters the functioning of your brain at the cellular level. It truly is a superpower.” (p. 33)
“Many studies on mindfulness practice suggest that if you accept and allow instead of resist… stressful content will pass away.” (p. 79)
“Stress hijacks your attention away from the present moment.” (p. 79)
“A peak mind is a mind that doesn’t privilege thinking and doing over being.” (p. 88)
“Working memory is degraded by the very same forces that corrode attention–stress, threat, and poor mood.” (p. 126)
“Working memory is where you hold a goal in mind so you can move toward it.” (p. 138)
“Mindfulness training helps to declutter the mental whiteboard, so that working memory works better.” (p. 144)
“Rumination is one of the most potent forms of mental time travel. It involves getting stuck thinking about the same thing over and over.” (p. 145)
“As you train yourself to monitor what’s happening in the present moment, you’ll default less and less to long, unproductive, and off-task bouts of mental time travel.” (p. 150)
“What we think is a memory problem is often an attention problem.” (p.161)
“What you remember is filtered through your experience of what happened, as well as the experiences you had before and after.” (p. 163)
“Our memories are strongly tied to our senses. So, one way to boost our changes of remembering the things we care about is to use mindfulness training to root ourselves in the body.” (p. 177)
“Simply being physically present for something doesn’t mean you’ll absorb it. You need to intentionally place your focus (flashlight) on what you want to encode.” (p. 179)
“When there’s something you really want to remember, zoom in.” (p. 181)
“We fail to remember when we fail to notice what our attention is up to.” (p. 183)
“Don’t believe everything you think.” (p. 209)
“Mindfulness training unlocks a new mode: noticing, observing, and being.” (p. 214)
“The attentional force multiplier you need to acquire is your capacity to be meta-aware, to notice.” (p. 228)
“Meta-awareness offers us a window into our own minds as if we are watching it from someone else’s perspective, but it also allows us insight into others. Using your attention, you can not only time travel, but mind travel.” (p. 235)
“We need to be aware of our emotional state so we can intervene to regulate it, as needed.” (p. 244)
“Having a peak mind means living fully in the face of everything we have to deal with as human beings. Through stress and grief, through joy and tragedy.” (p. 299)
“A peak mind balances and values the flights and perchings, the doing and being, the directing and receiving.” (p.303)
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