Mindfulness Meditation Trains Attention Systems for Leadership and Resilience

Key Quotes

"But it ends up that our brain was actually built for distractibility. So the fact that we have this wandering mind that kind of roams around everywhere is a designed feature, not a flaw. It's just that unfortunately for us in this particular day and age, the demands are unending and our attention does get not only yanked around, but actually is the target for many, many different aspects of our social media use and our technology use."

Dr. Amishi Jha explains that the human brain's tendency toward distractibility is an inherent design, not a defect. She notes that while this wandering mind is a natural feature, modern technology and constant demands exacerbate its effects, making sustained focus challenging.

"The metaphor that I use for this system is like a juggler. We're really trying to keep all the balls in the air and we are kind of dealing with the multiplicity of demands. And not only are we holding goals in mind, but we're using those goals to guide what the floodlight and the flashlight do. And all of these systems sort of work together in this coordinated fashion to allow us to have the full experience of our attention."

Dr. Jha uses the metaphor of a juggler to describe the executive control system of attention. This system manages multiple demands, maintains goals, and guides other attention systems, working in coordination to enable focused experience.

"When you sample attention at the beginning of some period of time, let's say eight weeks, and then you have people come back into the lab eight weeks later or even four weeks later, and what's been happening in that period of time intervening is high demand and protracted demands, attention significantly gets worse. Your flashlight is not staying where you wanted to be. The floodlight, the alerting system actually tends to be kind of hypervigilant where you might get even more reactive. And unfortunately, the jugglers drop balls all over the place. Executive control is starting to decline."

Dr. Jha presents findings showing that prolonged high demand and stress lead to a significant decline in attention. She observes that the orienting system (flashlight) becomes unstable, the alerting system (floodlight) becomes hypervigilant, and executive control (juggler) deteriorates under such conditions.

"The intention and the way that mindfulness is described is paying attention to our present moment experience. So being in the here and the now without editorializing or reacting. And just to connect the dots, one of the biggest culprits of our sense of distractibility and feeling like we're in this kind of mental fog is mental time travel."

Dr. Jha defines mindfulness meditation as focusing on present moment experience without judgment or reaction. She connects this practice to combating mental time travel, which she identifies as a primary cause of distractibility and mental fog.

"It's three steps. It's focusing, noticing, and redirecting and repeat over and over again. And you know, my military colleagues were used to doing all kinds of physical reps, called this the pushup. And what we found is that unlike all of those groups that degraded in their attention over that high demand, high stress intervals, people that did this 12 minutes a day under high demand circumstances did not decline in their attention."

Dr. Jha outlines a core mindfulness practice consisting of focusing, noticing when the mind wanders, and redirecting attention back. She highlights that individuals who practiced this for 12 minutes daily did not experience attentional decline even under high-demand, high-stress conditions, unlike control groups.

"STOP. It's an acronym. So whatever's going on, stop it mentally, physically, like just you're going to commit to not continuing to engage in that whatever was going on. So S is for stop. T, take a breath. Take a breath. That's one really conscious, mindful breath. You're observing fully the sensations of breathing. That's where your flashlight is. So that's T. So stop, take a breath. O is observe. Like after you've taken that one breath, just check out what's going on, internal landscape, external landscape. And then proceed."

Dr. Jha introduces the "STOP" practice as a quick, in-the-moment technique for recentering attention. She explains that "S" stands for stop engaging in the distracting activity, "T" for taking a mindful breath to focus attention, "O" for observing the internal and external landscape, and "P" for proceeding with the intended task.