Cooper’s work on aerobics would soon spread out of the lab and into homes, where many pulled on leotards, tights, and leg warmers and did their best Jane Fonda imitation on the living room rug. But it also kicked off a sea change in the way we thought about exercise. Running grew more popular as it became widely understood that the way to achieve cardiovascular health was to physically train for it in specific ways. We now have decades of research into why and how physical exercise makes us stronger and healthier. And public health officials use that research to issue guidelines regarding which types of activity help us to become more physically fit in specific ways.

So why aren’t we getting the same kind of science-backed guidance on how to keep our minds fit?

This was exactly what drove Walt Piatt to take on our study on mindfulness in the military when others said no: “Every day we did at least two hours of physical training,” he says, “but we spent zero time on mental fitness.”

Walt worried about sending people out on combat or diplomatic missions without any kind of mental training to really prepare them—to develop the kinds of cognitive capacities they so desperately needed to not be reactive, to see clearly, to observe and listen, and ultimately to make the right decisions in the heat of the moment. And then, when they returned home, soldiers were having trouble integrating back into civilian life. As a leader entrusted to ensure the well-being of his soldiers and military families, Walt saw breakdowns there every day.

“We’d tell them, Don’t spend all your money, don’t take out your anger on your family,” Walt said, “but we had no tools to give them.”

All of this—the Colorado study and the West Palm Beach study—was encouraging: promising evidence that the link between mindfulness practice and strengthened attentional capacity was real. What we needed to figure out next was what solution would have a practical application for people in the real world, in their everyday lives.

A “STRONG” Test

When my team and I flew out to the US Army’s Schofield Barracks site in Hawaii to begin a study, we had a couple hiccups. The base was smack in the middle of the island of Oahu, and had no state-of-the-art brainwave lab like the one we used back on campus. What we ideally needed for a brainwave study was a Faraday cage: a room surrounded by a conductive metallic mesh that blocks out the electromagnetic fields around it. But getting a massive quantity of metal, weighing close to two thousand pounds, to encase an entire room on a military base in Hawaii wasn’t really a possibility. So we did the best we could and built the brainwave recording lab in a broom closet, precariously positioning our equipment to avoid electromagnetic interference.

We cleared everything out—brooms and dustpans and boxes, cleaning supplies, industrial-size packages of toilet paper, metal shelving—and drove all over Oahu searching for materials to insulate the walls for light-and-sound dampening so that we could create a better controlled environment for our experiments. We found a Walmart and bought out all their bolts of black felt. Back on the base, we stapled layer upon layer of felt to the closet walls. We dragged in boxes of computer equipment, cables, and amplifiers that we had mailed in advance. In the room next door, we set up computer stations for the soldiers to use during testing, partitioning them as best we could with poster board from the local office supply store. It wasn’t perfect, but it would have to do.

• Was mindfulness training any better than getting other forms of mental training?
• What type of information should training contain? Was spending class time learning about stress and the benefits of mindfulness as beneficial as actually doing the practices?
• Finally, and perhaps most important, what was the minimum amount of time that people would have to spend in mindfulness practice in order to see attentional benefits? (For time-pressured people, answering this question was critical.)

Positivity: Worse than Nothing

We wanted to compare mindfulness training to another type of program the US Army had already begun implementing. This form of training offered exercises prompting participants to generate positive emotion by remembering positive experiences or reframing current challenges through a positive lens.

Other studies confirmed the same: mindfulness training strengthened attention better than other time-matched programs. Remember the college football players to whom we offered training in the weight room during their preseason training? We chose that setting on purpose, to align the trainings they were receiving with the idea of “exercise.” One group received mindfulness training, the other relaxation exercises. Relaxation did have upsides for participants, but these upsides weren’t unique to this training. Players who adhered most to either program, be it mindfulness or relaxation, reported better emotional well-being than those who adhered least, but only those who received mindfulness training benefited in their attention.

Finding that mindfulness training was better than other forms of training (such as positivity and relaxation) signaled a big advance. It made it clear that it was mindfulness exercises—not merely any active form of training—that were doing the work of improving attention and working memory.

Content: Just Do It!

Now to the next question: What should the training contain? Did it help participants to have what we call “didactic content,” or learning about mindfulness and why it benefits you?

Mindfulness training in a research setting has two requirements for participants:

1. Attend the weekly course meetings, where a skilled trainer introduces them to practices and related content, and
2. Engage in the daily out-of-class mindfulness practice (“homework” exercises) that they are assigned to do.

The first study from the STRONG project (comparing mindfulness to positivity) assigned participants thirty minutes of practice, daily for eight weeks. But we’d cut the number of hours with the trainer from twenty-four hours down to sixteen. We were excited to discover that the mindfulness training was still beneficial, even with this reduction in hours with the trainer. This was great news for our time-pressured participants. Could we reduce it even further? Could we cut it in half?

To whittle it down that much, we needed to figure out what pieces of the training we absolutely had to keep, and what could be thrown out. Other studies across a variety of high-stress groups had shown us that practice itself really matters for seeing benefits. So it was this feature of the program that we keyed in on.

It seems fairly intuitive: if you don’t do the workout, it’s probably a waste of time. And that’s exactly what we found. The practice-focused group outperformed the other group, which looked no different than getting no training at all. This discovery was a big win for us: we could cut the course duration in half, from sixteen hours down to eight, as long as we focused a lot of the class time on actual practice.

There was one more roadblock, though. We were seeing a troubling pattern across all our studies in the STRONG project, which was that participants weren’t doing anywhere near as much practice as we were assigning. Their actual practice time was well below the thirty minutes. They most definitely were not doing their homework. What gives?

Our best guess? Practicing thirty minutes a day was just too much. It seemed like an impossible lift. It sounded too hard and too long. We wanted them to feel the burn, but they were fearful of pulling a muscle. They couldn’t fit it in to their packed schedules, and so chose not to regularly practice. Sure, thirty minutes of mindfulness practice per day was going to help people if they did it, but none of this was going to help anybody if it wasn’t realistic.

And I had another problem to contend with: the US Army, excited about our efforts, asked me how quickly I could scale up to offer it to many, many, more soldiers. They wanted me to get trainers out to multiple military bases—fast. How many trainers did I have available? My answer: one. Our one and only trainer on all of these studies was my colleague who had developed the program, informed by her own experience as a veteran and mindfulness practitioner.

I needed to take a different approach. The program had to be time-efficient and scalable. It had to be the lightest, most compact, most impactful version we could offer. What was the minimum required dose for these time-pressured people, who desperately needed this training, to see results?

Getting to the Minimum Effective Dose

If mindfulness training is beneficial, but nobody actually does it, who is it helping? Nobody.

We set out to drill down to a real “prescription” we could offer people. Now, there were a couple ways we could do this. The most obvious would be something like this: recruit a thousand participants, divide them up into groups, assign them different amounts of time (as in, Group A does thirty minutes, Group B does twenty-five, Group C does twenty, and so on), and then test them all and compare. Makes sense, right? A lot of scientific studies are run this way—for example, studies on the efficacy of drugs, when researchers want to determine a “minimum effective dose.” The problem is that with mindfulness, it just doesn’t work. It’s not like giving a drug dosage that people can take. Participants simply don’t do what you tell them to do. You can give them an assignment like “Do thirty minutes a day,” but there is no guarantee that they’ll do it. In fact, as we quickly learned, they probably won’t.

I partnered up with Scott Rogers; he’d already written books on mindfulness for parents and lawyers, and his style was flexible, practical, and accessible. This was the kind of help we needed. Looking back at the data we’d already gathered comparing two groups—a mindfulness-training group and a group that didn’t get the training—the results were not great! There was no real difference between groups afterward in the attention tests we gave them. Why? Was it because mindfulness doesn’t work? Or was it because people were all over the place in their homework practice? Some did the thirty. Others did zero.

Thankfully, there was some buried treasure, data we could use that hinted at an answer and told us what might really work for people. We’d broken the training group into two smaller groups instead of lumping them all together: a high-practice group and a low-practice group. Here we hit on something. The high-practice group did benefit. So we zoomed in on them. The average number of minutes per day that this group practiced? Twelve.

We had a number. We took it and designed a new study. We asked our participants (football players this time) to do only twelve minutes of practice. And to help them hit the nail on the head, Scott recorded twelve-minute-long guided exercises for them to use. They didn’t have to set their own timers or even push stop—they just had to follow along. We made it as user-friendly as possible.

We ran the monthlong study asking them to do their guided twelve-minute exercises every day. Once again, we broke the sample into two groups: high practice and low practice. And once again, the high-practice group showed positive results: attentional benefits. And on average, these guys did their twelve-minute exercises five days per week.

The pieces were falling into place. We were homing in on a recipe that time-pressured people were actually willing to do. And, when they followed it, their attention benefited. It was, to the best of our knowledge up to that point, moving us to a practical prescription, the minimum required dosage for training your attention: Four weeks. Five days a week. Twelve minutes a day.

Finally, we were able to design a program we could easily teach to other trainers so that they could deliver it more widely to demographics that needed it. And we could teach them fast. We wanted to stay with high-pressure, high-performing groups, like athletes, so we conducted a study in elite warriors, special operations forces (SOF). We were fortunate to partner with a colleague, an operational psychologist who worked with SOF, who was certified in offering mindfulness-based stress reduction. He flew to Miami and we trained him to deliver our program. We called the program Mindfulness-Based Attention Training (MBAT). As we had done before, my research team and I packed our laptops and headed to yet another military base, to see if this training actually worked outside of our campus environment and out in the field. We tried two variants of MBAT: one that would be delivered over four weeks, as we designed, and another over two weeks. The results were exciting and promising: MBAT benefited attention and working memory in these elite warriors. The benefits were only there when the program was delivered over four weeks. Two weeks was too short.

We were on our way. Since then, we’ve trained a lot of trainers: army performance coaches who then went on to train soldiers; military spouses who trained other military spouses; medical school faculty who trained med students; human resource professionals who trained employees. Most of these trainers had no prior mindfulness experience, but in just ten weeks, we were able to get them up to speed on delivering MBAT. The key to success was that even though they didn’t know much about mindfulness before delivering the program, they were intimately familiar with the context and challenges of the groups they set out to train.

Now that you know what to do, how can you make sure you do it? I’d recommend putting it on your calendar or setting a phone reminder to ping you. Twelve minutes. It isn’t a lot. But it’s the minimum required dose. And if you come away from this book with anything, I want it to be a clear sense of how important this is. We’re busy. We’re time-pressured. We are always under the gun. But twelve more minutes of work is simply not going to catch you up as much as sitting quietly, and on purpose, with your breath. For only a little effort and a small investment of time, you can reap an enormous reward.

I get asked by many high-achieving, high-stakes professionals whether this practice can be condensed even more. Inevitably, someone will ask: “Four weeks is too long—can’t we just do something in an afternoon?” Or “Twelve minutes is too hard to find in my day, so can I do less?”

My answer? Sure you can. And it might benefit you temporarily, like going for a walk can benefit you. But if you want to train for better heart health, you’d want to do more than go for the occasional leisurely walk. In the same way, if you want to protect and strengthen your attention, more is required. We have a growing body of research now. The science is clear. For this to work, you have to work it.

Working It . . . and Working It In

Paul Singerman is a bankruptcy attorney and co-chair at one of the most prominent business-law firms in Florida. He’s one of the busiest people I know, and he operates in a world that is extremely high-stress: he spends most of his days working with and representing individuals and businesses going through Chapter 11 bankruptcy. He wakes up before dawn; spends full workdays in meetings, on calls, and in court; then caps them off with paperwork, research, and writing in the evening. Through the stay-at-home, quarantined months of the COVID-19 crisis (which is when he and I had the chance to catch up), he was still going to court—but via Zoom. It was one of the busiest times in his entire thirty-seven-year career—and the hardest.

“We are blessed to be busy,” he said, “but it is the saddest ‘busy’ I have ever been. There’s an immense destruction of enterprise value. People losing everything, due to no fault of their own. It’s an intense time, it’s a sad time, it’s an exhausting time.”

I inquired: Was he still able to find the time to practice mindfulness, through this crisis and all the extra demands?

“Absolutely,” he said. “It’s the first thing I do every morning. Taking the time to do the practice pays me back in all kinds of ways, all day long. You know what they say: if you don’t have time to meditate for five minutes, then meditate for ten.”

Paul wasn’t always into mindfulness. He came upon it in an article in the New York Times Sunday Business section.

“It caught my eye because it was in the business section,” he says. “If it had been in Sunday Styles, I probably would have flipped right past it. I thought mindfulness was bullshit.”

This article was about an engineer, Chade-Meng Tan, one of the earliest engineers at Google and the 107th employee at the company, who had taken up mindfulness practice and found that it felt useful and evidence-based. Paul’s interest was piqued. He gave it a shot. And he quickly found that the practice—far from being the “soft, fluffy” sort of activity he’d initially taken it for—helped him to be more effective in the courtroom, and in other areas of his law practice as well. Like a lot of lawyers in his field, he used to believe that his professional edge came from being aggressive. Mindfulness sounded like the sort of thing that would soften that edge. In fact, he found that it only enhanced his capacities. Made him sharper. More effective. And it’s because of the core strengths that mindfulness develops: the ability to stay present; to stay nonreactive; to stay aware of your own mind, of others, of the immediate environment.

“I’m striving to be a more efficient, effective, and better data-gatherer in three buckets, all the time, every waking minute,” he says. “Those three buckets are: myself, the other person, and the environment I’m in . . . and frequently, that’s the courtroom.”

For Paul, it starts with himself—with the awareness of what’s going on in his own mind. And that includes not only the awareness of off-task thoughts, but also awareness of his own emotions and sensations through the high-stress, adversarial situations he regularly finds himself in. Frustration, anxiety, fatigue, anger, hunger—they can get the better of any lawyer in a courtroom situation that is both lengthy and contentious. But because of Paul’s mindfulness practice, he now has the tools to bring himself quickly back to the present. In his line of work, attentional lapses really add up. He often says to his team of lawyers after meetings, courtroom encounters, and other interactions: “That would have gone so much differently ten years ago.” It happens multiple times per week—the cognitive capacities built by mindfulness practice show up in impactful and practical ways and change the way things go.

“It basically gives you the ability to control the future—to meaningfully influence it,” Paul says. “You avoid a reactive behavior, you avoid the mess that follows it. . . . I used to do and say things in the moment that I’d regret later, because the fallout would suck up my time—and my energy. I think of it this way: I’m now controlling the future, because I’m giving myself the ability to do more worthwhile stuff with my time.”

Paul saw such an impact on himself, his work, and his capacities, that he wanted to bring others in. I met him when he invited me to the first mindfulness workshop he hosted for his entire firm. Now, my colleague Scott Rogers and I continue to provide trainings for his firm—they’ve seen the benefits, and they make it a priority.

For Paul and the other time-pressured, extraordinarily busy people we’ve met in this book—from Lieutenant General Walt Piatt, whose day is scheduled right down to the last minute, to Sara Flitner, who ran both a town and her own consulting business at the same time—their mindfulness practice is the last thing they would give up in a packed day where “something’s gotta give.” More than taking up time, these high-functioning, high-achieving people have found that mindfulness practice creates time. Paul puts it this way: “My study and practice of mindfulness has yielded the single greatest return on an investment I’ve ever seen.”

You Can Start Now and Benefit

During the COVID-19 crisis, I heard from a lot of people who wanted to know if mindfulness training could help them cope. The pandemic was a long period of challenge. This is exactly what we mean by “period of high demand.” It has all the qualifiers. We use an acronym to describe the most potent, high-demand, high-kryptonite circumstances that degrade attention: VUCA.

Volatility. Uncertainty. Complexity. Ambiguity.

The COVID-19 pandemic, as it unfolded throughout 2020, was an extreme example of VUCA. It was constantly changing. Information was sparse, then contradictory and incessantly updated. No easy answers or solutions were offered. It was the kind of circumstance that’s excellent at engaging and draining attention. People would tell me it was the only thing they could think about—that their thoughts were racing. I heard from many people who just had this fog. As if their brains had gone sluggish, unable to focus on the simplest of tasks. I know that feeling. I felt it! I felt it as I re-created my lab virtually, moved my courses online, supported my family and friends as they adjusted to a new world—all with an impending sense of unease that “it’s all too much. I just want to go to sleep and wake up when this thing is over.”

People urgently wanted to know: Could mindfulness practice help them, right now?

My answer was: “Yes, absolutely. Start now.”

What I told people was this: You can pick up these practices any time. They are free. They are simple. They require no special equipment, no particular location. They are always available to you. You can use them to start protecting your attention and working memory today. If you’re already “deployed”—in other words, in the throes of a high-demand period—you will still be able to protect your attention during this time.

The lesson is: Start wherever you are. Start if you’re going through a time of high stress and high demand. Start even if you’re not going through a time of high stress and high demand. Don’t wait until pressures rise. Begin building your capacities now.

We are all always in “predeployment,” so to speak, and we never know when the next big challenge will come along and ask us to rise to it. So start now.

How Do I Do It?

In this book, you’ve tried out two types of practices: the Core Practices or “formal” practices, in which you sit or stand and do the mental workout for three minutes or more, and the “On-Demand” and Optional Practices. Both are important. The first is foundational, and the second can help anchor your day in mindful moments that give you attentional boosts.

At the back of this book, you’ll find a suggested weekly schedule for how to structure your first four weeks of practice. This is infinitely customizable, though. Exercising attention in the ways I’ve outlined can set you up for success.

We’re at an exciting moment: we have an amassing evidence base of research. We are learning more and more about what works, and this is going to continue to get better over the coming years and decades. Right now, this is our best understanding of what can help you in terms of your attention and working memory.

When Should I Do It?

There’s no particular time that I’d prescribe for you to do your formal daily practice. A lot of people choose to do it in the morning, to begin the day with a mental workout the same way they would start the day with a physical workout. Paul Singerman does his practice as soon as he wakes, often before the sun is up. Sara Flitner also prefers to do hers first thing in the morning—both put a premium on the time of the day before they look at their phones, read the news, see the messages that have rolled into their in-boxes overnight. The time before they have to engage with the demands of the day is the right time, for them, to mentally prepare.

Walt Piatt, by contrast, squeezes his in where he can. It’s tough in the military, even as mindfulness is gradually becoming more accepted as a valuable “mental workout.” It’s still hard for him to get even five minutes to “do nothing.”

“People at the Pentagon think you’re crazy,” Walt says. “Five minutes to do nothing? They think, I could do ten things in those five minutes! My attitude is, Yes, but if you take five minutes to do ‘nothing,’ you can do a hundred more things after.”

On his last deployment to Iraq, Walt would tie the practice to his fitness routine. After his regular morning workout, he’d end it at this particular grove of palm trees that had turned brown in the dry desert air. He would sit and gaze at them, fix his focus there, and do his breath awareness practice every day that he could manage it.

In Iraq, he had less time to practice, and it was even more critical that he do so. He wedged in micro-moments of practice wherever he could. During helicopter flights—which would always end in a new location and a new situation, whether diplomatic or otherwise—he’d take the time to do a practice. He’d turn off his headset for a few moments, silencing the chatter of the pilots. As the copter jolted and bounced along at 150 mph, he would lower his gaze and do a “drop the story” practice. He would remind himself:

This will probably not be as I expect.

There is so much more I don’t know.

And what I do know is probably incomplete.

“What these practices do for me is help me self-regulate,” Walt reports. “You can feel when you don’t have the capacity to make a good decision. When you don’t have the mental energy.”

In Iraq, when he started to feel that way, he would go outside and water a tiny patch of grass at night—10 p.m., 11 p.m., midnight. He would have been going since early in the morning and would still have hours of work left to do. But he knew he needed the attentional refresh.

“It was the mental exhaustion that would start to get to me,” he says. “The distractions would start going up. I could feel myself not focusing, not listening.”

When he first arrived on base and planted the patch of grass, nobody thought it would grow. But it did. So, late at night, when he was losing the attentional capacities he relied on, he’d go out and water it. He’d take the hose and put his thumb over the top and shower the bit of grass as gently as he could. One of the soldiers in his unit, trying to be helpful, offered to get him a sprinkler: “Sir, if you need the grass watered, we can take care of it!” He said no. The point wasn’t getting the grass watered. The point was that he watered the grass. He used the watering time as practice time. Almost like a body scan, he filled up his mental whiteboard with the sensory experience of the activity. The cold water going smoothly past his thumb. The smell of the grass. The smell of the desert.

And then he’d end up having conversations with the people who passed by, who were perhaps startled to see the general out late at night with a hose, watering a tiny patch of struggling grass. People who worked for him would pass by, and they’d chat briefly—he’d hear things about the nitty-gritty of their days that he wouldn’t have otherwise known. One of the Iraqi generals would sometimes be out strolling at the same time, and they’d end up talking. They chatted about farming. About the little town the Iraqi general came from. About how many date trees he grew on his farm at home, far away.

The practice will benefit you, too, if you make the time for it—both the formal practice and the informal practices that you can fill in throughout the day. Try this: When you wake up in the morning, don’t roll over and grab your phone, or hop right up. Lie on your back. Take ten or even just five deep breaths. Focus on the breath. And maybe notice the thoughts that arise. It’ll give you insight—information about yourself, your mind, your attention—that you can use today.

Try mindful teeth brushing. As you brush each tooth, direct your flashlight to those sensations. On the bus or subway, don’t pull out your phone. Sit as you would in formal practice, embodying an alert, comfortable posture; close your eyes or lower your gaze, whatever works best, and take five minutes—or the length of the ride. Or perhaps offer the loving-kindness phrases to the people on the train with you. Sharon Salzberg, my friend and trusted meditation teacher to many, made a New Year’s resolution one year of “no overlooked people.” When standing in line, waiting for anything, or walking down the busy sidewalks of New York City, she would make a point to notice the people around her and simply offer each one a silent, simple wish for happiness: “May you be happy! May you be happy! May you be happy!” She mentally doled out well-wishes of happiness in all directions, the way Oprah used to give new cars to everyone in her TV audience. Noticing those around us and directing our attention outward in this way boomerangs back toward us, benefiting our interactions with others and our sense of happiness and well-being.

“You can do it sitting in a chair, sitting on a mat,” Walt Piatt says. “I did it watering the grass.”

Your Starting Point: The Mixing Board of the Mind

Amy is a freelance writer; her husband is a high school teacher. She visited our lab when she was researching an article on mindfulness and attention, and she posed an interesting question.

She’d noticed that she and her husband seemed to have wildly different attentional strengths and weaknesses. Her husband seemed to have terrible working memory—stuff dropped off his whiteboard right and left. At the same time, he often seemed highly skilled at staying in the moment, even when there were major pressures that might have easily pulled him into mental time travel and rumination. She’d watched him many times glance at a combative email from a parent . . . and then just close the mail app and happily move on with his day. He seemed unaffected—he was able to shield his attention from the “loop of doom.”

“If I open an email like that,” Amy said, “that’s it. I’m done for. I’m sucked into thinking about it until I deal with it or solve the problem—even when I know for a fact that now is not the time, and it’s not solvable. I just can’t stop myself.”

And yet, there were other attentional challenges when she saw herself excel—like holding a lot in working memory.

She wanted to know: Why was her husband so naturally terrible at one aspect of attention, and great at another? Where do these natural abilities and vulnerabilities come from?

My answer might not have been very satisfying: We don’t really know where they come from. Your attentional profile is shaped by all kinds of forces, from the chemistry of your brain, to your upbringing and life experience, to the way you use your attention now. I call it “the mixing board of the mind.” Just like the mixing board in a recording studio, we all have different levels, different settings. Each attentional profile is wildly unique. But whatever your “settings,” you can benefit from mindfulness training.

Embrace the Suck

Anybody who’s ever taken up a new physical exercise regimen knows how it feels at first: worse. If you take up running, the first few weeks are going to be rough. You’ll be acutely aware of your body struggling to do what you tell it to do. The same can be true with a new mental exercise regimen, and with your brain.

One of the challenges we have is that after a week or two of participating in a mindfulness training course, some people say, “I feel worse, I feel more stressed.”

My answer to that? It’s a good sign. It means it’s working. You temporarily feel worse because you’re becoming more meta-aware. Whereas before, you might have been mostly unconscious of your own mind-wandering, now you’re noticing that you’re doing it all the time. You’re noticing when you can’t get your mind out of the loop of doom, or when your thoughts stray back to the same sore subject over and over again, and you can’t stop it. It’s not that these things are happening more—it’s that you’ve become more aware of them.

It’s hard, because the first thing that happens with mindfulness practice is that you become acutely aware of the ways your mind can rebel against what you actually want it to do. You see how it’s restless and squirrelly. It doesn’t want to do the twelve minutes of breath awareness. It wants to do something else. Anything else!

“But it’s boring!” is the protest I hear most frequently from those who are just beginning mindfulness training. My response? Yes, it is! And that’s the point.

It’s hard. You get bored—quickly. We know how quickly the restless mind wants to move on to something else—how rapidly it reverts to its self-focused “default mode.” Your mind wants to wander; your work is to notice that, and then (for some practices) to guide the mind back—over and over. That’s the workout. When you’re doing your basic breath awareness practice, each time your mind drifts, you notice the drift, you gently pull your awareness back to your breath sensations. . . that’s a push-up.

Try reframing it this way: mindfulness can be helpful because it gets boring. Boredom is ultimately what’s at the root of our 24/7 engagement—it’s what drives us onto phones and news feeds in the middle of other tasks, or in any moment of downtime, denying us creative spontaneous thought and memory-consolidation time. And what we know from our lab studies is that anything can get boring if you do it long enough—even the most thrilling or high-stakes activity. The vigilance decrement—the waning of task performance over time—shows us that this is true even in situations where keeping your focus is a matter of life and death. Boredom drives us to pick up our phones and scroll, or even to scan our own minds for content. Boredom fuels our incessant search for other types of cognitive engagement. And what we know about continual engagement is that it saps resources.

When you feel bored, like you just want to be doing something else, that’s when you need to get curious. With physical exercise, we call it feeling the burn. That moment, the moment of “Do I really need to do twelve minutes?” or “How much longer until the timer goes off?” or “Can’t I do a different practice?”—that’s your “mental burn.” It’s the equivalent of a muscle burn as you do a squat, though it feels like restlessness. Boredom. Discomfort. Walt Piatt says that his service members like to say, “Embrace the suck.”

You have to deal with that mental chatter, resistance, and boredom, because this is where you want to build tolerance. The next time you’re in a situation in real life, outside your formal practice, when you’re dealing with that kind of mental resistance to focus and stay present, you may be able to handle it that much better.

This Is Not About “Feeling Better”

I was invited on a radio show to talk about my research on mindfulness and attention in high-stress groups. The show began with another invited guest, a self-described meditation teacher, leading a practice right on the air. The teacher began by asking us to close our eyes . . . and “imagine fields full of flowers, blue skies.” This person proceeded to lead us through a mental activity focused on pleasant visualizations and relaxation.

My red flags were going up all over the place. He described this as a mindfulness exercise, but there was nothing emphasizing those key aspects of present-centered, nonjudgmental, and nonreactive qualities of attention. And as we’ve discussed throughout this book, this sort of approach does not work well under high stress; positivity and relaxation don’t work under high stress. You’re spending your cognitive fuel trying to build that lovely, imaginary world instead of 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. These are the skills that will serve you, especially during challenging circumstances.

After the other guest’s “mindfulness” exercise was over, the radio host turned to me next, welcomed me warmly to the show, and began the interview. “That was lovely,” she said. “Now, Dr. Jha. Why does mindfulness make us feel better?”

“Well,” I said. “It doesn’t.”

Into the startled silence, I explained: Mindfulness practice is not about making you “feel better.” It is not about achieving a special state of relaxation or about being blissful or joyful. Remember: the basic description of mindfulness practice is paying attention to present-moment experience without telling a story about it. And that’s the promise: that you will become, if you engage in these exercises, more able to be your best, most skillful, most capable self through the present moment—even if that present moment is hard.

There is nothing wrong with wanting to feel better! But as we’ve seen in this book, those common tactics we so often use to try to feel better—avoiding upsetting thoughts, suppression, escapism—actually sabotage us, drain our attention more, and usually leave us feeling worse. We might not be able to “feel better” about the present moment. But the truth is, the present moment is the only one we are ever alive in. What we want to build is a kind of mental agility—not to push away difficulty or shield our self from it, but to be with the situation that arises. And with that you become better able to maneuver through difficulty.

Here’s the bottom line: if you engage in mindfulness training, you will feel better, but not simply from the practices alone. The practices will build your attentional capacity and that will help you fully experience moments of joy, thrive in demanding circumstances, and successfully navigate moments of crisis with a reservoir of resilience.

I’m surrounded by people who changed their lives because of their mindfulness practice. From students who’ve worked in my lab, to my own family members, to some of the extraordinary people you’ve met throughout this book, including an Army general who meditated under thirsty brown palm trees while deployed to Iraq. I know mindfulness practice changed my life—it allowed me to continue doing all the things I wanted to do at a time when I felt like I was running out of options. To be a scientist and a mother, to run a lab and be present for my spouse every day, to have the life and career I envisioned . . . I needed mindfulness practice. Not to feel better, but to experience my life better . . . and then, almost as an afterthought, I started to feel better.

We Can Do Hard Things

When I went to India recently to present my research at a conference that the Dalai Lama was convening at his monastery on the topic of mindfulness and education, I was . . . well, unsettled. Buckling my seatbelt for the eighteen-hour flight, I felt preoccupied. At this late hour, I was still debating what I wanted to emphasize from all the slides I had prepared. Was my topic central to the theme of the conference? Most of the other presentations would be about research in children, but I’d done only a few studies with kids, and they were not part of my latest research. All of a sudden, I felt a twinge of worry, but was comforted by the fact that I could use the long flight to puzzle through my concerns, and finalize my presentation before landing.

The plane took off with a bit of bumpy turbulence. In the seat next to me was a girl, about eleven years old. She was looking right at me.

“Are you scared?” she asked. “If you’re scared you can hold my hand.”

Despite wanting to just focus on my presentation, I smiled at her. I noticed that she was hanging onto her mom’s hand with a death grip. I realized that she was the one who was scared. She was clearly terrified of flying. A couple more air bumps and sudden dips, and she was almost hyperventilating.

So I asked, “Hey, how about I hold your hand?”

I started talking her through a body-scan practice. I probably picked it because I often used it with my own daughter right before gymnastics meets or dance competitions. I asked the girl to close her eyes. I asked her what was happening in her big toe. In her knees. In her stomach. I asked her to describe what she was feeling. Afraid, she said. I asked her what the fear felt like. She told me it felt like butterflies in her stomach, then like a tightness in her chest. She got calmer, even as she was more attuned to the fear she was feeling. The plane stabilized; eventually she drifted off to sleep, head on her mom’s shoulder.

Her mother leaned over to me with soft eyes, her sleeping daughter in the seat between us. She held her hand out to show me her fingers. She had deep nail marks from where her daughter had dug into her skin.

“I’m so thankful for your help,” she whispered. “It’s the first time she’s ever fallen asleep on a plane.”

The body scan, as we talked about earlier, involves paying attention to physical sensations in the body. And while the mind may be preoccupied with worry or fear, doing a body scan occupies the mental whiteboard with something else—something more useful and productive. But it’s not about distraction or suppression. I wasn’t trying to distract this girl from her fear. The body scan—and so many of the other mindfulness practices we’ve worked on throughout this book—is about being embodied in the present moment. In this case, I was guiding the girl to notice the sensory experience of fear and moving her awareness toward those sensations. Locating it in her body, putting descriptors to it, and noticing these sensations would shift and change as she paid attention to them over time. It also allowed her to get a little distance from her fear, as she had to pay attention differently to report back to me what sensations were unfolding in her body as we did the practice. By the time I’d finished leading her through the practice, my own worries about the conference lessened, as well.

There’s this idea that a lot of us believe that resilience is something you either have or don’t have. That it has to do exclusively with how you grew up, or your personality, or your coping skills. What we know from the science of attention is that cognitive resilience is something you can train and build.

After I did the body scan with the girl on the plane, I was able to pop my laptop open. With a clearer and less agitated mind, I could more easily identify where surgical revisions would strengthen my presentation. After making those strategic changes, I put away my computer and eased into the long journey feeling confident in the presentation I had prepared.

In my work, I research how to best train high-performing groups as they prepare for periods of high demand. For a lot of these groups, we know exactly when that period will be. For soldiers, it’s deployment. For students, it’s exams. For athletes, it’s competition or playing season. However, most of us don’t know when periods of high demand may occur. What we do know is, they will occur. Periods of high demand are really the circumstances of our lives. Mindfulness training allows you not only the peak mind you need to navigate through those periods successfully, but also the embodied confidence that you can. That you can be present, focused, and capable through difficult circumstances. I told the girl on the plane that the turbulence would end—and so would her fear, and all the sensations that went along with it. It would all pass, the moment would change. She just needed to realize, in each moment, that she was okay in that moment.

“Do you know what the pilots do when the plane runs into this kind of bumpy air?” I’d asked her. She shook her head. “Nothing!” I said. “They can’t out-muscle turbulence, or swerve around it. They simply let it happen, and let the plane pass through. They hold steady until the pocket clears.”

What we gain from mindfulness—from the capacity to keep our attention where we need it, in the form we need it—is this fundamental understanding that everything passes. Everything changes. This moment will pass quickly, but your presence in this moment—whether you’re here or not here, reactive or nonreactive, making memories or not—will have ripple effects that expand out much more widely. So the question is: In this moment, can you be present? Can you place your flashlight on what matters to you? Let the ink fade on what doesn’t? Drop your expectations and see what’s right here? Avoid reactivity, judgment, and story-making and see what is? Can you really be here for this experience, so you can feel, learn, remember, and act in ways that make sense in your life, for your goals and aspirations, for the people around you?

You don’t have to be born with expertise in these capacities—nobody is. We have to work to hone them. But now, at least, we know how.