Distractions — can’t live with them, can’t live without them. As the human race advances towards the future, our access to a plethora of content and information has never been this massive. Whether we spend our time scrolling Instagram or streaming Amazon Prime, we have more and more reasons to stay distracted and divert our attention from things that matter and are important to us.
Technology has simplified our lives in more ways than one, but it’s also important to counter its downside. Some tools and practices can help us in overcoming this menace of distractions, finding intent and focus, and decluttering our minds. The first step is to realize that you are distracted and make a conscious decision to direct your efforts toward coming out of this bubble.
For the remaining steps and tools, I have just the right person with me today at The School of Greatness — Dr. Amishi Jha. Dr. Amishi is a psychology professor and a mindfulness research expert who is convinced that distractions are causing us to miss out on 50% of our life experiences! An advocate for the science of mindfulness, Dr. Amishi aims to help people live a more meaningful and healthier life.
“Dedicate some time [in a day to just focus on your breath]; it can be as short as a minute.” – Dr. Amishi Jha
If you are willing to dedicate time to your physical and mental well-being, you will find this episode quite helpful in learning how to enjoy life’s precious moments. Before that, let’s get to know our inspiring guest a little more.
Who Is Dr. Amishi Jha?
Dr. Amishi Jha is a professor of psychology at the University of Miami and serves as the Director of Contemplative Neuroscience for the Mindfulness Research and Practice Initiative, or UMindfulness, which she co-founded in 2010. She received her Ph.D. from the University of California Davis and post-doctoral training at the brain imaging and analysis center at Duke University.
Author of the book Peak Mind: Find Your Focus, Own Your Attention, Invest 12 Minutes a Day, Dr. Amishi’s work has also been featured at NATO, the World Economic Forum, and The Pentagon. She has also received coverage in The New York Times, NPR, TIME, Forbes, and more.
Mindfulness has become a massive buzzword in the last decade. Still, Dr. Amishi has spent the last 25 years researching the science of attention through extensive work with elite sports teams, US military medical professionals, and more. Through her work, she aims to answer the pressing question — “Does mindfulness really work?”
If you are excited to know the answer, then keep reading this post. Dr. Amishi and I talk about distractions and how to help you calm down and retrain your mind to master a peak mindset, find your focus, and own your attention.
Training Your Mind to Have More Attention and Focus
For most of her career, Dr. Amishi has been on a quest to understand how the brain works and how we can train it to focus better. Through her research, she learned that the top three things that our brains are vulnerable to are stress, threats, and mood, and she wanted to find out if there was a way to overcome these feelings.
“I became extremely interested in figuring out how to train our brains. … We had known about neuroplasticity, [the ability of the brain to change and react based on experience], for long, but the notion that we could train our brains was new. … We tried positive psychology, high-tech lighted sound devices, … but none of it was reliably working. … Then we did something unthinkable. … We tried mindfulness meditation, … even though I was probably the biggest skeptic of this [practice].” – Dr. Amishi Jha
It was with the help of her senior colleague, Richard Davidson, that she was introduced to meditation and mindfulness as a window to peek into the depths of our minds. Being Indian, meditation was not something alien to her, but being a scientist at the same time, she had not yet seen enough proof of its relevancy. But this was also a time in Dr. Amishi’s life when she was feeling stressed and overwhelmed — she had plenty of reason to give mindfulness a fair chance.
“I was feeling as if I wasn’t paying enough attention in life. My [colleagues] in the lab were all devoted to attention, but I couldn’t keep my head in the game. [That’s when I decided to] check mindfulness out. … I went to the bookstore and purchased a book and CD called Meditation for Beginners by Jack Kornfield, … and I started meditating. … I realized that it was all about attention, [focusing on] your breath, noticing your mind wander[ing], and bringing it back, and it was such a simple yet elegant instruction. … After about a month of doing this, I was feeling completely transformed. … The pressure and the strain hadn’t changed at all externally, but I was a different person, [and my response to the pressure had shifted].” – Dr. Amishi Jha
Dr. Amishi’s personal experiment led her to start giving some serious thought to meditation as a way of transforming our perception. She found that this simple practice allowed her to reach a state where she was just showing up differently to the stress, emotional or psychological threats, and poor moods. It tends to become fuel for our success and for our ability to think, feel, focus, and connect.
