On a recent trip to California, I flew into San Jose and drove a rental car south. The bright blue sky had a freshness that cleared away my jet lag. There was barely any traffic—the highway was four lanes, wide open, and my attention widened, too. I cruised along, having all kinds of thoughts. . . . I mentally worked on a paper I was writing, puzzled over an idea for a new experiment, made a mental checklist of the questions I needed to ask my kids when I called them in the evening. As I glimpsed the tall evergreen trees peeking above the concrete sound barriers, so different from the landscape at home in Miami, I sang along to my playlist. My mind shifted rapidly between these various currents of thought like a fish in a slipstream, from one to the next and then back, and that was fine—until I merged onto Highway 17, a narrow, curving, often dangerous road that winds through the foothills leading down to Santa Cruz on the Pacific Ocean. All of a sudden, it seemed, a veil of clouds slid over the sky. A fog surrounded my car; the rain started pouring and the asphalt got slick; the traffic thickened. The road pinched down to two lanes and a driver cut in front of me; at one point, a mudslide edged into the road. My thoughts narrowed with the road, down to a single intense point: Get to where you’re going alive! But worry set in, and then, worry about being worried. I knew this would not serve me. I needed to funnel all my cognitive energy into navigating the road ahead. I had to focus.
Obviously, I made it past the mudslides and the daredevil drivers of Highway 17, or I wouldn’t be reporting back to you now. The point of this story is that sometimes you need to be able to grab the flashlight of your attention, aim it, and hold it where you need it. Other times, your focus can meander, flitting about, occasionally taking hold of something in the landscape or your mindscape. Either way, your flashlight is affected, and that’s something that most of us don’t have much awareness of, or ability to control . . . just yet.
Your flashlight represents your capacity to select a subset of information from all that is out there. When I say focus, this is what I mean—that the information you’ve selected, whatever it may be, is being processed better and is of higher quality than everything else around it. Remember that “war” inside your brain: when attention is directed toward something, be it a place, person, or object, the neurons coding it temporarily win influence over the brain’s activity. Focusing on something dials up its “brightness” while dimming down information that is irrelevant for our current goals. Without this capacity, we would often be frozen, confused, and overwhelmed.
We rarely notice the way our attention shape-shifts, from narrow to broad, depending on circumstances and the demands of the environment. But I’m betting you do notice when your flashlight isn’t where you want it—the times when you need to focus on something important, yet struggle to stay on-task. It may be other thoughts, strong emotions, or personal preoccupations that are pulling you away. In an ironic twist, the pressure and stress of having to focus on a task or demand may be the very cause of your distractibility. And when this happens, you may attempt to soothe or distract yourself in unproductive ways, leading to mindless mental scrolling and clicking, so to speak, that move you even further away from accomplishing your task. If you’ve had to fight your way back to focus, you are not alone. A recent survey of social media use in the workplace reported that while it can help provide a “mental break,” 56 percent of employees said it distracts them from the work they need to do.
What we are aware of is that we’re struggling to keep our thoughts from straying from the task-at-hand. How many times in a day do you look up, realizing that your mind is anywhere but on the work right in front of you? It can be incredibly frustrating—you know that there are real consequences for losing focus (a missed deadline, a car approaching that you don’t notice, or something worse), and yet you simply can’t seem to keep it where you need it.
We conducted a study with undergraduate students at the University of Miami where we asked them to come into the lab, sit at one of our computers, and silently read chapters from a psychology textbook, presented one sentence at a time on the screen. Most of the text flowed normally. But then we’d throw in a completely out-of-context sentence. We did this infrequently—only about 5 percent of the time—but if you were paying attention, it’d be obvious that the sentence was out of place. The participants’ job was simple: after each sentence, press the space bar to advance to the next sentence, or, if a sentence was out of context for the paragraph, tell us by pressing the shift key instead. I love eating tangerines. If you were in our lab for this experiment, you’d have pressed the shift key when you read that last sentence.
We encouraged them to pay close attention and gave them a clear incentive: there would be a quiz at the end, and they were receiving course credit for their time.
How did they do? Not well at all. They missed the out-of-context sentences most of the time. And naturally, the more sentences they missed, the worse they did on the quiz that came after—they were clearly not retaining the material.
You might protest that the experiment is too tough—textbooks can be so dry and dense, you say, and pressing a space bar often over twenty minutes sounds pretty darn boring. Perhaps. But. Other experiments have found the same thing with easier parameters: Read the text that appears on the screen, and if it’s an actual word, press the space bar. If it’s not, press the shift key. When participants read word after word, pressing the space bar ovet arp thj usult grept frew bramt. I have to ask—how many words did you read before you noticed that they weren’t, well, words?
In the study, now repeated by many labs, people fail to immediately notice that the words are meaningless 30 percent of the time, and continue pressing the space bar an average of seventeen times before they realize the text they’re reading is actually gibberish.
Maybe that wasn’t fair—I didn’t warn you it was coming! Let’s try another exercise, with all the rules on the table. This one’s very simple, and it won’t take more than a few seconds. You don’t even need to move from where you’re sitting.
When I say “Go,” I want you to close your eyes and take five breaths. If you already have a meditation practice, make it fifteen. Regular, even breaths. Your job is to focus on your breath—in, and then out—and only on your breath. As soon as you notice your thoughts moving to something else, or an intrusive thought popping in, stop and open your eyes.
Ready? Go.
All right, let’s assess. How many breaths did you make it through before you experienced a distraction and stopped? I’m guessing not five. Not even close.
Admittedly, this was just a quick, low-pressure, on-the-page game—there weren’t any stakes here. Perhaps if there were real consequences, you’d have been able to hold your focus on your breath (or any target) a bit longer. But what we’ve found in the lab, as well as in the field of attention research, is that it’s the same when the stakes are high. People cannot hold their focus, no matter what. Not if they are paid. Not if their task is solely to enjoy an activity. Not even if the consequences for losing focus are disastrous.
I got out of the cab on a cold, gray winter morning, coffee cup in hand, and headed into the looming hospital building on the campus of a major academic medical center. It was 6:30 a.m.—plenty of time to find the lecture hall for my 7:00 a.m. grand-rounds presentation. “Grand rounds,” if you aren’t familiar with the phrase, are a weekly event for medical teaching institutions, and usually involve a presentation on a particular malady or patient profile. Today, I would be the presenter, the audience would be a group of neurosurgery residents, and the topics would be mindfulness and attention.
I got my slides set up and waited patiently to begin. The clock ticked ticked ticked. Now it was 6:55 and not a soul was in the lecture hall. Had I gotten the day wrong? At 6:57, the doors burst open with a blast of noise and clamoring voices as some forty people rushed in to find a seat. Every chair in the room quickly filled. I was relieved—I hadn’t gotten the day wrong, after all.
But as I began my talk, my relief faded. I wasn’t sure what exactly was going on, but I definitely didn’t feel that I had an interested audience. Phones buzzed. Chatter rippled through the room. People shifted about, rustled paper. There was a palpable restlessness in the air. I felt good about the material I presented, but when I finished I walked out of that lecture hall thinking it was the worst presentation I’d ever given. So I was dumbfounded to get a call, a week later, from the chief of neurosurgery. He told me my talk had been a hit. Really? I thought. But they seemed so distracted! Then he asked me if I could train all the residents in mindfulness.
“They need it,” he said.
And, he added, he needed it too. He shared a recent experience. He regularly performed demanding, highly technical brain surgeries that could last up to eight hours at a time—a really long time to stand, tinkering with near-microscopic-precision inside an exposed human brain. The problem was that recently he was finding himself distracted. Not just during lectures, but during surgery. Hearing my talk helped him realize that his mind was wandering . . . a lot.
He described an episode that was emblematic of a larger pattern not just for him but for many surgeons. One night, he had a disagreement with his wife that got rather heated and went unresolved. The next day, in the middle of a surgery, one of the nurses came in to deliver a phone message to him. It was not unusual for him to receive messages or answer questions during the course of a surgery—brain surgeries like the ones he performed stretched through a whole day. But this time, the message was from his wife and was related to the argument they’d been having the night before. He could feel how difficult it was to return his full focus to the incredibly high-stakes surgery he was performing. The message was an intrusion. But even before the nurse walked in with that slip of paper, he’d been mentally traveling back in time to the disagreement. Why? Because of a very common need we all have, something referred to as a need for cognitive closure. This is that tug of wanting to achieve a resolution to something that is confusing, unsettling, or even ambiguous. While the surgery was properly in the foreground of his attention, whenever his mind would drift, it drifted to how to resolve the disagreement with his wife.
Very far from any operating rooms, Garrett, an engineer for the Washington State ferry system, started looking into mindfulness training as a potential tool for coping with long shifts when his focused attention is required but difficult to sustain. As chief engineer, he spends twelve-hour night shifts in the belly of an Olympic Class ferry. It gets up to speeds of almost twenty knots, carries as many as 1,500 passengers and a maximum of 144 vehicles, and weighs more than four thousand tons. Operating one requires both precision and advanced planning—it takes a great deal of lead time to turn or slow one of these white-and-green whales. Much of Garrett’s job requires standing in front of gauges and other meters, monitoring every dial to ensure that everything is working correctly, and standing at the ready to receive orders from the captain to change course or speed. At 3:00 a.m., on the last of many sailings, this can get challenging, and the consequences of a mental lapse are extremely dangerous. Missing a problem could mean millions of dollars in damage, or even an accident resulting in loss of life. Garrett told me, “I’m doing repetitive menial tasks that have enormous consequences if I mess up.”
Garrett was concerned that he couldn’t sustain focus well enough to do his critical job safely. So he came up with his own system—he sets an alarm on his phone to go off every ten minutes. When it buzzes, he starts at the first display and works his way through a check of everything. Without it, he could easily get lost in thought, and the minutes would slip away like the water rushing under the hull.
To the chief of neurosurgery I said, “Well, first of all, ask your staff to stop giving you messages during surgery! But we can do more.”
And to the chief ferry engineer, “It’s good that you’re aware of your attentional limits and set up a system to help. But we can do more.”
It’s not realistic to expect someone to stay focused through an eight-hour surgery or twelve-hour night shift on dark waters. It’s not even realistic to expect them to do so for a single half-hour ferry crossing. Our focus—our flashlight—is very easily impacted. If you didn’t get through all five breaths in that exercise above—if you didn’t even get through one—don’t feel bad. Your attention is built to behave this way. Why? The answer to that is rooted in some of the most basic ways the human brain’s attention system functions, and will lead us through the major neuroscience concepts I’ll unpack in this chapter, load theory, mind-wandering, and the vigilance decrement, along with the implications for each when it comes to training your attention. Learning about these will enable you to understand how your flashlight is working now, recognize the challenges it faces, and learn to control it with greater ease. The first thing to get clear about is what’s happening when you start to become “mentally fatigued” and feel yourself losing the ability to focus. It can seem as if you’re “leaking” attentional resources, as if your cognitive gas tank were running low. It makes sense intuitively—this notion that you’ve been burning cognitive fuel through your day, or through a task, and now you’re running out. But that’s not actually how it works.
Attention never vanishes, even though it might feel as if it does when you’re struggling to focus and simply can’t. When attention begins to get fatigued or degraded, it makes it harder to place your attention where you want it. But it doesn’t just fade away. In cognitive neuroscience, this is explained through load theory. What load theory boils down to is this: the amount of attention you have remains constant. It just gets used differently, and maybe not how you want it to be used.
Take the example of my navigating Highway 17 through the Santa Cruz mountains. The demands (or “load” in neuroscience-speak) were low during the leisurely part of my drive, while during the treacherous part my attention was distributed differently. During the low-load portion of the drive, I had attentional resources available to engage in other types of thought—planning, daydreaming, enjoying the scenery, listening to music. When the load was high, I didn’t have the bandwidth for that—all my attentional resources were focused on the task-at-hand: driving safely toward my destination. Yet the total amount of attention did not change. You can think of it like this: You always use 100 percent of your attention. Attention always goes somewhere. So the question becomes: Where?
Take any task that you might ask someone to do over a period of time and graph it: you’ll find performance declines. Errors go up, responses become slower and more variable. In the lab, we’ve mapped this vigilance decrement with a test that requires accuracy during a long, repetitive task. Participants sit at a computer screen that shows them a different face every half second. They are given these instructions: When you see a face, press the space bar. But if you see an upside-down face, don’t press.
The results?
Wow, people are terrible at this! During the first five minutes of the experiment, they catch themselves and don’t press very often when the face is upside down. After that, they start pressing when they aren’t supposed to. Over the forty-minute study, their performance gets worse and worse.
You might say, Well, but that experiment is so boring—that’s why they stopped paying attention.
First of all: we see this pattern of decline in performance over time across many tasks, ones that vary in degrees of complexity and demand. Yes, it happens faster with simpler tasks, but with more-complex or varied activities, the vigilance decrement kicks in and performance begins to steadily decline, even during a short, twenty-minute task. When you think about how long we regularly need to be able to accomplish things that stretch across a much longer time frame (think about the eight-hour critical brain surgery, the twelve-hour ferry shift at night), twenty minutes is a very, very short window to achieve accuracy and good performance. And second: the word boring is subjective—is brain surgery inherently boring?
And finally: you’re right. That experiment was boring. Or, in more accurate terms, it was designed to produce boredom as quickly as possible in the laboratory so that we could investigate what was really going on with our attention over time. We used to think that the vigilance decrement was due to a kind of mental fatigue—the brain got tired, just as a muscle would when asked to perform over a long period. If you were asked to do a hundred bicep curls in a row, your performance would most definitely decline. But this didn’t mesh with what we knew about how the brain functions. It doesn’t “get tired” like an overworked muscle—it doesn’t work that way. Think of it in these terms: your eyes don’t stop seeing if you’ve had them open for a while; your ears don’t stop hearing after twenty minutes. The whole idea of the brain becoming fatigued didn’t really make sense. And what we found was that as performance declined, mind-wandering went up.
I call mind-wandering the “dark matter” of cognition because it’s both invisible and ever-present—and it has consequences. We are in a constant state of mind-wandering, yet often we don’t even notice. It’s a category of brain activity that falls under the general umbrella of spontaneous thought, which is exactly what it sounds like: unconstrained thinking, leading to thoughts or ideas that pop up without your conscious, voluntary choice.
Now, spontaneous thought can be great. When there’s nothing else you’re supposed to be doing and you can go ahead and let your thoughts roam, it can be creative, energizing, and generative. Think of taking a walk and allowing your mind to wander, like a dog on a long leash, exploring some flowers or hedges. Some of the best, most innovative ideas come from this type of spontaneous thought, which we scientists call conscious internal reflection, or, more simply, daydreaming. And it can not only lead to ideas and solutions you might not have arrived at otherwise; it can also be beneficial to attention, by recharging your attentional capacities, boosting your mood, and relieving stress.
Mind-wandering is in the same category as daydreaming, though it’s a quite different animal. It’s the other type of spontaneous thought—the kind that happens when there’s something you want or need to be doing, and yet your thoughts still veer away from that very task. In the lab, we classify it as any kind of task-unrelated thought (TUT for short). Think of the “taking your dog for a walk” example. On a leisurely stroll, letting your pup roam and explore is relaxing and harmless. But if you’re trying to get somewhere, and you have to keep stopping to rein him back in, over and over, it’s going to start getting problematic pretty quickly. It’ll be harder to watch where you’re going; it’ll take you longer to get there; you’re going to start getting irritated and stressed.
There’s a big cost to task-unrelated thought. When we mind-wander, it rapidly becomes a problem in three major ways:
And finally . . .
To sum up: When you need your attention to accomplish a task, be it a work demand, a conversation with a child or partner, or time alone to read a book, having a mind that wanders off-leash is not a harmless little stroll. You miss stuff, you make mistakes, your mood sours. It’s as if you just aren’t there for the things you need to do, for others, even for yourself.
This all raises the question: Why on earth do we even have mind-wandering? When we consider that the brain is the success story of tens of thousands of years of evolution, we have to wonder: What possible reason could there be for us to have inherited this damaging, problematic tendency? Why build a mind that wanders?
Let’s rewind some twelve thousand years. Picture yourself in the forest. You’re hunting for an animal, perhaps, or for edible berries—you need your focus to be able to find something to feed yourself today. We already know what happens to your attention system when you’re scanning for something specific: your brain is now biased (selectively attuned) to a specific set of colors, sounds, and smells. When you spot the flash of movement behind a screen of leaves, or the specific hue and shape of a delicious fruit, your focus narrows and everything else falls away. You close in. And then . . . you get eaten by the tiger that you didn’t even notice was there.
Would a mind that wandered have saved you? It’s possible! Perhaps the early humans who toggled in and out of focus, those who got distracted and looked up every now and then—pulled out of their task by a wandering mind—were the ones who realized they were in danger of becoming prey themselves and acted appropriately, surviving to pass on their (distractible) genes.
In the lab, we’d observed across multiple studies how the human brain will actively resist staying focused on a task. The mind was determined, it seems, to roam. To figure out why, we needed to consider that, as destructive and problematic as we knew mind-wandering was, it could also be seen, paradoxically, as an asset.
To take you through how we investigated this, I first have to point out the difference between voluntary attention and automatic attention. Voluntary attention, as you can probably guess, is when you choose where to point your flashlight; automatic attention is when your attention is captured and pulled toward something without your active choice. Attention-grabbing: it’s a figure of speech, but a very accurate one. Think of using a flashlight in the dark. You choose to point it ahead of you to illuminate your path: voluntary attention. Now think of what happens if you were to hear a sudden sound off to the side—the snap of a branch, for example. You’d instinctively swing the flashlight in that direction. You’d do it without even thinking: automatic attention.
Here’s how we test this in the lab:
The computer shows a large blank screen with a plus sign (+) in the middle; we tell you to keep your eyes resting on that plus sign. The reason: your eyes and your attention are generally yoked together, but you can decouple them in certain situations (think of focusing on someone you’re talking to at a party, while your attention shifts to the conversation behind you—eyes and attention decouple). For this experiment, we want to make sure the only thing that moves is your attention.
Your job: Press the space bar when you detect a large X on either the right or the left side of the screen. When you spot it, hit that bar as fast as you can. The twist: Sometimes there’s a flash of light that appears immediately before the X does. And sometimes that flash happens in the same spot as where the X will appear; other times not. You’re instructed not to worry about that flash. Just press when you spot the X, no matter where it happens. That’s it.
Pretty simple, right? It is. But we’re looking at how long it takes for participants to respond when they’re cued by the flash of light versus when they’re not. And as you can probably guess, when the flash of light precedes where the target will appear, the responses are much faster and more accurate.
Nothing may seem earth-shattering about this—obviously, the flash of light got their attention. Well, exactly. The flash “got” their attention. What this shows us is that attention can be drawn without our conscious or active choice. If somebody shouts your name on a busy street, your attention snaps to their voice. You didn’t make the choice to place it there. And (crucially, for this discussion) there’s nothing you can do to stop it. This is probably something you already know intuitively—you don’t need me to tell you how it feels when you hear a distinctive buzz and your focus immediately flickers from whatever you were doing to the lit-up screen of your phone. What’s important about this study is that it’s demonstrably true that attention functions in this way. It doesn’t just feel as if you can’t easily stop your brain from attending to these distractions—you actually, literally, can’t.
That gives us one level of understanding as to why your mind might wander away from a task: a distraction pops up, either from the environment (external) or from your own mind (internal), and your automatic attention bops right over to it. And that does explain some of the mind-wandering we do. But there’s more to it than that. Let’s go back to the screen with the flash and the target “X.” I want to show you how we take it one step further—to investigate a really fascinating phenomenon in the brain—by making one teeny, tiny adjustment to this experiment.
Just as before, we show you the flash. And just as before, it appears exactly where the X is about to appear (cued) or not. But instead of presenting the target immediately after the flash, we pause ever so slightly—to the tune of a few hundred milliseconds—before we show you the target. And you’re much slower. That advantage you got from the warning of the flash, that speedy edge? Gone.
But wait—why? If the flash pulled your automatic attention to the specific location where the target was about to appear, how on earth would you miss it now? What difference does a couple hundred milliseconds make?
Let’s hit the slo-mo button and go through what happens, beat by beat:
We call this phenomenon the inhibition of return: Your attention is, quite literally, inhibited from returning to that original location. If your attentional flashlight is drawn to a certain spot, and nothing happens or appears there, you’ll automatically disadvantage that space. In other words, you eliminate it as an area of interest. And let me emphasize: this happens fast. It takes only five hundred milliseconds, total, for all these steps to occur in rapid succession, without your even being aware of them! And this happens across all types of sensory input. In the first study I published on this, we did it with sounds, and found the same.
Why does your brain do this? Well, it’s likely a scanning strategy. Imagine yourself once again in the shoes of that imaginary ancestor in the long-ago woods. You’re hunting or foraging, while also trying to be aware of being hunted. You hear something off to the left. Boom, your attention automatically goes there and scans the area. If you see/hear/smell nothing, your attention rapidly moves on and begins scanning the other areas around you—because whatever it was that made that sound is probably still close by, and it probably moved.
Obviously, we’re no longer hunter-gatherers. You’re not out there in your day-to-day life hunting for food or being stalked by a tiger. But it’s important to recognize that while the origins of this brain activity might lie with our distant ancestors, this pattern isn’t outdated—it still serves you in all kinds of situations. And while we contrive situations in the lab where we study either automatic attention or voluntary attention, in our everyday life we use both, and there is a constant dynamic interplay between them.
The human brain is efficient and strategic. It’s always trying to maximize its activity for the greatest possible gain. Mind-wandering may have ultimately been selected for over the course of human evolution to maximize opportunity costs—the brain predicts that whatever it’s giving up (focus and follow-through for the task-at-hand) is worth it in the long run for a larger potential gain (whether it be survival, protection, or finding out what else is out there that might be better). Boredom, as I said, is subjective—anything can get boring. Boredom might very well have evolved in order to simply force us to go find something else to do. We used to believe that the vigilance decrement was exclusively driven by mental fatigue, as we spend our cognitive resources. But I think (and others do, too) that it’s actually more than just that. It’s likely linked back to this essential survival mechanism. What this all means for you—a modern, twenty-first-century human—is that if you try to sustain your focus for a long time, you will begin to experience your attention resisting, and eventually scattering off in some way.
I’ve taken you through all this nitty-gritty cognitive science because I think of it as an opportunity—to realize that you’re biologically predisposed to mind-wandering, and to embrace it (to a certain extent) as a necessary “capacity” you have. If you had a brain that wasn’t susceptible to it, you could drive yourself in the wrong direction or no direction. Some people diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) will often report that the problem is not that they can’t focus—it’s that they get focused on the wrong thing. When we get overly focused, we can lose track of our in-the-moment goals. We lose touch with whether our current behavior aligns with those goals. And we don’t realize when we need to course-correct or address curveballs (tigers!) that come our way. There can be a real benefit to a waxing and waning of focus, and this is something we’ll be talking about. But just because this mental behavior has potential benefits doesn’t mean it’s always the right way to be. And just because we’re neurologically predisposed to it doesn’t mean we have to simply accept it.
That was a fair amount of information we just whipped through. And as we already know, you might have missed a chunk of it. It’s not your fault. Thank your savvy ancestors’ survival instincts! Let’s do a quick review.
Because you always use 100 percent of your attention (load theory), it always goes somewhere, so if you’re not focused on your current demands, it may very well be because you are mind-wandering (experiencing task-unrelated thought) and are not mentally present in your current surroundings (perceptual decoupling). Mind-wandering is something your brain is predisposed to do, for various reasons involving, but not limited to, fast-moving saber-toothed tigers (inhibition of return), and it likely drives the vigilance decrement, which ensures that the longer you do something, the worse you’ll perform. While mind-wandering may have its roots in something useful (opportunity costs, attentional cycling), it’s bad for our ability to perform well on what we are trying to do (our “task-at-hand”) and our mood.
Now that we know why we wander, we need to talk about what we can do about it. The first step is a simple one:
LEARN TO RECOGNIZE THAT YOU’RE MIND-WANDERING
A few years after I had my crisis of attention, my husband was plunged into one of his own. Since he’d started a demanding graduate program, both of us were doing our best juggling the demands of work and parenting one small child, and then two, after our daughter, Sophie, came along. Once he began his program’s finite math sequence, Michael was having so much trouble focusing that he participated in a pilot program we ran on adults with ADHD, where we tested whether mindfulness training could help. We didn’t ask participants to go off their prescribed medications if they were taking any—instead, we wanted to see whether mindfulness training could help strengthen attention wherever they were starting from, meds or no meds, so that we could measure any improvement from their baselines.
They did improve. The common feedback we got from participants was that they didn’t change their medication because of the training, but they reported being able to use it more effectively. What our participants reported was a better ability to notice where their flashlights were pointing and to be able to redirect them when necessary. One sample comment: “I’m not just sitting in front of the computer all day going from website to website. Instead, I’m aware of what I’m trying to do, and I’m deciding to use my attention to do it.”
One of the activities we conducted was having a recording of a bell sound every five minutes. The idea was that people would use it during a formal mindfulness exercise to remind themselves to bring their focus back to the task-at-hand. But after the first few weeks, my husband brought that dinging bell recording home to use while he did his homework in the evenings. It helped so much that he started playing it all day long at work. He’d realized that he was off-task frequently and used that reminder, every five minutes, to come back to what he was trying to do.
It was a real wake-up call for me about how common this problem is, and how much help we need. Just a few years before, I was doing my own personalized mindfulness “case study” on myself, and one of the first things I noticed in my earliest sessions was how often my mind jumped like a grasshopper all over the place. Then I noticed that it wasn’t only happening during those few minutes every morning when I sat down to do this still-unfamiliar practice. It was happening constantly. I was shocked by how much I was mind-wandering throughout my day. I started checking in with myself to see how often I was actually on-task.
The answer? Not very often.
For both Michael and me, the essential step was realizing how much of the time our flashlight was pointed somewhere we didn’t want it. Try this: for the rest of the day, start checking in with yourself every so often and notice when you’re on-task and when you’re not. You might even set up your phone to ping you. If you don’t want bells going off every five minutes all day long, as my husband did, you might set it for every hour. When the alert pops up on your phone, do a quick check-in, and be honest with yourself: What were you doing? What were you thinking about? Where were you, really?
If it works for you, use the chart below to keep track over the course of one day. (Or make one in a notebook you can carry, or even in the Notes app on your phone. This needs to be easily accessible so that it’s quick and easy to accomplish.) Jot down the time, your task, and where your flashlight is. When you look back at the chart at the end of the day or week, you should get a fairly clear picture of not only how often you’re off-task, but also where you tend to go.
Since we tend to engage in mental time travel whenever we mind-wander, you may find yourself in the future, planning and worrying—or you may get pulled into the past, into rumination loops. (Rest assured, I’ll address this soon.) Either way, gathering data on what pulls you out of the present moment and how often it does so will be helpful moving forward. It’s going to give you a leg up in terms of identifying and addressing any challenges you may be experiencing.
Time |
Task |
Flashlight |
10 a.m. |
Finishing grant application |
Thinking about Sophie’s dance competition this weekend and everything I need to do to get ready. |
12 p.m. |
Call with my sister |
Listening to her describe her recent trip to Berkeley. Fully present. Excited about her successes and adventures. |
2 p.m. |
Giving a tour of the lab |
I was very engaged at first, but started feeling distracted and worried about getting back to our grant. |
You might notice that you’re frequently pulled off-task by digital distractions like email, texts and phone calls, social media, and so on. It’s tempting to think that if we could just eliminate those distractions, we’d be all set.
We’re bombarded by the idea that at the root of our attention issues lies a single powerful culprit: modern technology. If we truly want to focus, it seems, we need to turn off all our devices, quit social media, and retreat into the woods for a digital detox.
Here’s my resistance to that idea. At an elemental level, this particular era is no different than any other—there has always been a “crisis of attention.” Historically, people have turned to meditation (and other forms of contemplative practice) to deal with feelings of being overwhelmed and scattered in focus, and to refocus and reflect on priorities—our inner values, intentions, purpose. This can certainly be a spiritual process, if that’s how you define it. But we’re discovering that mindfulness impacts the attention system and how it copes with the distractions that surround us—and those that are generated internally. In part, that’s what meditation practitioners have always been pursuing. Think about life long ago: people in ancient India or medieval Europe didn’t have smartphones and Facebook, but they were still suffering in their own minds. They still turned to any number of practices for relief. They still described the same challenge: I’m not fully present for my life.
A crisis of attention can happen anytime you don’t allow yourself a break—when you don’t allow your mind to “rest” without having any task-at-hand. Remember our distinction between mind-wandering (having off-task thoughts during a task) and daydreaming (task-free spontaneous thought and opportunity for conscious reflection, creativity, and the like)? Well, one problem today is that we are always engaged in something. With these digital tools at our fingertips, we have constant access to all these forms of communication, content, and interaction, and we don’t tend to gravitate toward letting our thoughts meander, unconstrained. Of the two types of spontaneous thought we discussed earlier, it’s the beneficial type—the daydreaming—that we barely get at all. When was the last time you stood in line at a store and just . . . looked around? Thought about whatever surfaced in your mind? Or did you pull out your phone, check your texts, read your email?
We all do it. I catch myself all the time, going from one type of mental engagement to the next. I call it hypertasking. Like surfing hyperlinks online (clicking from link to link as they grab your attention), we go from one task to the next and the next. You are probably doing it right now. We are “all task and no downtime.” And we’re asking an enormous amount—too much—from our attention systems. Your attentional capacity is not less than someone’s from hundreds of years ago. It’s only that right now, you’re using your attention in a particular focused way, all the time. We’re taxing our focused attention to the max. Hypertasking is hyper-taxing! Even something you might think of as relaxing (scrolling through Instagram, for example, or reading an article someone shared) is more engagement. It’s another task. Checking your notifications may seem “fun,” but it’s work for your attention. Task: check to see who posted what in response to my post. Task: check how many likes I got. Task: check who shared my funny meme. Your attention was focused on task after task after task, with no attentional downtime, not a moment for the mind to roam free.
It’s not always realistic to unplug. We can’t just turn off our phones and pause our email. We cannot create a distraction-free world. The issue is not the existence of this technology; rather, it’s how we’re using it: we are not allowing our minds to pay attention differently. And this is where mindfulness comes in, as a way to steady your flashlight so you don’t end up swinging it around at any and all possible distractions—digital or not.
To find your focus, the first skill you need to develop is to notice when your attentional flashlight has wandered away from the task-at-hand. In this first “core exercise,” your goal is to repeatedly find your flashlight. This is the workout: orient attention to a target object, notice when it wanders off-target, and then reorient it back to the target.
Think of this like training a puppy. Wandering around is just what puppies do. No need to be harsh or mean. But you should be consistent and clear with your instruction, over and over again. If the puppy does not follow a command, we don’t indulge stories about how bad, flawed, untrainable, or unlovable the puppy is. Instead, we simply begin the training exercise again. Adopt a similar supportive-yet-firm attitude as you engage in this workout—and notice when old mental habits like justifying, chastising, or ruminating show up when you notice your mind-wandering. Now, reframe “mind-wandering” itself: it’s not a failure or error, but rather a cue to begin again and reorient back to the target object. The more often you gently guide your attention back, the more easily it will follow—just as your puppy will learn to do. Your mind will begin to get more attuned to noticing when you’ve wandered off, as well: with more practice, you’ll grow more able to notice the initial pull on your flashlight away from the target object, instead of becoming completely lost or hijacked before you do. All this will make bringing it back to the target easier, too. When we are able to find our focus more easily, we waste less time, experience fewer dips in mood and fewer spikes in stress, and worry less when we have something important to get done—whether for work, for others, or for yourself.
And interestingly, just as you improve your ability to notice when your mind has wandered, you begin to notice when you may need to truly let it freely roam. When we got our dog, Tashi, I loved taking him to the dog park for this very reason. Once the leash was removed, he was off, exploring, playing, running free. I felt like I was seeing a new part of him, his curious, exuberant-friendly-joyful side. And for those few minutes, I would choose not to take out my phone. I let myself get reacquainted with my mind without an agenda—no problem to ponder, no emails to answer. This small act was like a gift I gave myself. I noticed creative ideas bubbling up, a feeling of good-heartedness reemerging, and a buoyant energy returning back to me. Tashi and I would both return home with an extra little bounce in our steps. But I would not have been able to really let go of my flashlight if I didn’t know where it was or how to hold it in the first place.
To find your flashlight, you’ll draw on a foundational mindfulness practice often called breath awareness. This practice has been around for millennia. Contemplative traditions tell us that it cultivates concentrative focus. And now we know, after many studies, that it is also part of a suite of practices that can serve as cognitive training for attention. Breath awareness can seem deceptively simple: focus your attention on your breath, and when the mind wanders, return it. The instructions are quite basic, yet what the exercise is actually doing to your brain’s attention system is anything but. The breath awareness exercise targets all three systems of attention, because it allows you to practice focusing—as you orient attention to the breath; noticing—staying alert and monitoring ongoing mental activity to detect mind-wandering; and redirecting—executive management of cognitive processes to make sure we return and remain on-task.
Why do we use the breath? We could potentially place our focus on any number of things. Training the flashlight of your attention on anything, and then bringing it back when it wobbles away, can certainly help you, and in fact I encourage you to try this during the day when there’s something you want to bring your full attention to: listening to a lecture, briefing, or podcast; reading or writing a report; practicing a musical instrument. But for this daily practice, we use the breath for a couple of important reasons: It anchors us in the body. It allows us to experience the body sensations that are unfolding in real time as we breathe, in the here and now. This helps us more easily catch when our minds have wandered away from these sensations to thoughts about the past or future. And finally, our breath is always with us. It’s the most natural built-in target for our attention that we can always return to.
Your breath is a changing, dynamic target, and in this exercise, your attention is to be constrained to a single, prominent, breath-related sensation in a specific body part (like your chest, nose, abdomen). The key is to select a specific target object and stick with it for the duration of the formal exercise. Remember that this is a concentrative practice—the flashlight’s beam is narrow and steady on the target. One of the next practices will ask you to take that beam of your attention and sweep it through the body; later, we’ll progress to a practice where you have no target to focus on, but will be monitoring the shifting contents of your moment-to-moment conscious experience—your memories, emotions, thoughts, and sensations—without getting caught up and swept away by them. To succeed at any of these later practices, you need to strengthen your flashlight first. And all these together are helping you learn how to pay attention to your attention.
CORE PRACTICE: FIND YOUR FLASHLIGHT
That’s it! That’s your first practice. It’s pretty simple. But in its simplicity lies its beauty and its utility: in that one basic exercise, we’ve figured out how to do two difficult things that we were most likely completely challenged by and largely unaware of before—noticing our mind-wandering, then redirecting our attention. As I hope you now know, mind-wandering is ubiquitous, it’s common, and there’s no reason to fight against it—it’s just the nature of the mind. If you are conscious, mind-wandering will happen. But for the “formal” period of time you dedicate to doing the core breath awareness practice, during which you sit down to practice and point your flashlight intentionally at your breath, we do something different when mind-wandering occurs: we note it and then redirect our attention back.
The events in this sequence are:
This is what we might call the “push-up” of a mindfulness breathing exercise. I hope you’re getting a sense of how doing this repeatedly over a period of time may not only engage attention, but strengthen it by exercising it over and over.
An important question: How long should I practice?
I told you earlier that twelve minutes was the “magic number,” and in the final chapter of this book, “Feel the Burn,” we’ll be talking more about that “minimum dose” required for truly transforming your attention system. But just as you wouldn’t start physical training by trying to bench-press your own weight, you’re not going to start mental training by sitting down to a long mindfulness practice session right off the bat.
I recommend starting small. Try three minutes—set a timer on your phone. Three minutes: That’s less time than it takes to boil water or make toast. Less time than even the quickest shower. I’ve waited for elevators that took longer than three minutes to arrive.
A heads-up: three minutes might be quick, but when you are new to mindfulness meditation practice, even a minute or two can feel like forever. You will probably have to move your flashlight back to your breath so many times, you’ll wonder how you ever get anything done! Know this: it will get better. If you commit to daily practice—starting with just three minutes per day—you’ll be laying the groundwork for a potentially transformative mental workout regimen. So start small, but do it consistently. It will be easier to expand your workout once you already have a place for it in your day. If you find you would like to continue beyond the three minutes, of course feel free to continue practicing, but don’t feel you “have” to go beyond the time you’ve set as your goal.
Now that you have a sense of the work involved in using your flashlight, here’s a final, but very important, directive to keep at the front of your mind:
DON’T MULTITASK!
When Leo was in the fifth grade, he started to get bothered when he noticed people talking on their cell phones as they drove alongside our car. As a curious, smart kid, interested in lots of things, including what I was working on in the lab, he certainly knew more about brain science and attention than your average ten-year-old. He figured that trying to do two things at once, when each required a certain level of focus (talking, driving), was going to take a toll. So he set out to test it.
For a school science project, he set up an experiment: He had some friends come over and play car-racing video games on our Xbox 360 console in the living room. He’d call them on his phone from the next room and engage them in conversation while they were on speakerphone, asking them all kinds of questions. No surprise: the kids who were talking on the phone performed worse in the game than the ones who weren’t.
I admit—this is a fifth-grade science fair project. But as it turns out, the science backs the kid up! Multitasking—or, more specifically, task switching—is terrible for our performance, accuracy, and mood. Leo was gratified but indignant: Why was it legal to talk on the phone while driving? To his credit, a lot of states now have strict laws prohibiting the use of handheld phones and sending or receiving texts while driving—but the reality is that, given what we know about attention, the laws don’t go far enough. When we try to do two things at once that both require our attention, it’s really hard to do either of them well. It doesn’t matter if you’re holding your phone or not. Hands-free or talk-to-text still require attentional engagement.
Think of it this way: You only have one flashlight. Not two. Not three. And your one flashlight can only ever be shining at one thing at a time. (To be clear: I’m speaking of tasks that require your active, focused attention—not “procedural” tasks like, say, walking, which doesn’t demand attention in the same way.) When you’re trying to accomplish multiple tasks at once that require your focused attention, what you’re actually doing is moving your flashlight from one thing, then to the next, then back to the first . . . and you get it. Why is that a problem? This comes back to our conversation about biasing.
When you select and engage in a task—whether it’s writing a legal brief, planning a budget, watching your child biking in the driveway, puzzling through the development of an app you’re building, anything—your attention calibrates information processing to that specific task. What that means: everything that your brain is doing is now in service to that job, and it aligns all its activity to that goal. In the lab, I could show you this by having you identify dots (hit the space bar when you see a red one) or letters (hit the shift key when you see the letter “T”) as fast as you can. If you get nothing but dots repeatedly, you’re going to be really fast and accurate at identifying the red ones. Same with the letter “T.” But when I interleave the two tasks, so that you have to do the dot task for less than a minute and then switch to the letter task and then go back to the dot task, back and forth repeatedly, your speed and accuracy take a huge hit. It’s because your attention has to recalibrate after every switch.
In real life, of course, we’re not exactly dealing with dots and letters. We’re switching from crafting an email to taking a phone call; from taking the phone call to talking to the person who walked into the room and started speaking; from wrapping up that meeting to adding stuff to your calendar, and on and on and on. And recalibration to a new task-at-hand takes time and energy. There will always be a lag.
To get a sense of what this means for your cognition, imagine a studio apartment. There is only one room. Every time you want to use the room, you have to completely change out the furniture. Want to sleep? Set up a bed and nightstand. Want to host a party? Take down the bedroom and set up couches and coffee tables. Need to cook? Drag that all away and set up a stove, counter, and cooking supplies. Sound exhausting? It is! And it’s the same for your cognition, when you switch from task to task.
In a day when you do a lot of task switching, you’ll start having less integrity in any of the states your attention is in. That living room is going to look . . . disorganized. Your kitchen won’t have the stove plugged in. You’re going to become slower, more error prone, and emotionally worn down. What that will feel like to you is mental fatigue. And what it’ll show if we brought you into the lab is that not only are you slower, but, worse, your mind-wandering is going way up. And to escalate everything, the mind-wandering itself will require more task switching, over and over, back to the task-at-hand. Which means things get even slower. Errors go up. And mood goes down.
The solution? Well, one is to start the mindfulness training exercises, which will help you in any instance when mind-wandering becomes an issue. But also: monotask as much as possible. Get rid of the problematic idea that “multitasking” is impressive, desirable, or superior. And when task switching seems unavoidable—as it sometimes is in real life!—realize that you’re going to be slower. That you will need a moment to reengage. If you take your time, accepting and then facilitating the “recalibration lag” of task switching, you may very well be faster and more efficient in the long run. You’ll miss less, make fewer errors, and (science suggests!) stay happier.
When she was president of the University of Miami, I remember walking into Dr. Donna Shalala’s office for a meeting—I’m sure it was one of many she would have that day. She was deeply engaged in writing an email when I arrived. She didn’t even look up. As I stood waiting, she continued typing, her focus seemingly unbroken. It probably only took a minute tops, but it felt much longer. Then she closed her laptop, took a brief pause before she looked up, and gave me what felt like her full attention. I have to say, the difference was palpable. It set the tone for the entire meeting—and I don’t think she missed a word I said.
Several years later, I had the honor of speaking to a retired three-star general who had not only worked with many other senior military leaders, but also served as an advisor to them after he retired. I asked him what he noticed as a common feature across these incredibly successful individuals. He said that one thing stood out. He called it “pivot leadership.” From what he observed, there was no residue from the last event, meeting, or gathering to the next one. The leader could completely pivot, with 100 percent of her or his full attention.
The moral of the story is: monotask when you can, accept the lag of task switching when you must, and do your best to reduce its effects. Give yourself time so that you’re not still trying to process the old task, and then fully shift your attention to the new task. Of course, being able to do this requires becoming more aware of what’s happening in the moment, including where your flashlight is focused.
Finally, realize that even if you do all this, and do your daily breath awareness practice diligently . . .
YOU WILL STILL NOT ACHIEVE PERFECT, UNFLINCHING FOCUS
In the introduction of this book, I compared holding your attention steady for a long period of time to being asked to hold a heavy weight. It wouldn’t be reasonable to expect yourself to have the endurance and muscle mass to hold up that weight without physical training. Yet somehow we seem to expect ourselves to be able to summon up mental stamina without similarly rigorous mental training. I stand by my point—though it was actually incomplete.
What automatic attention teaches us is that our focus will be pulled away from the task-at-hand—there’s not much we can do to change that. And from observing mind-wandering we know that even if there isn’t an external distraction yanking us away, our minds will periodically go searching for one. When you catch yourself off-task, it’s not a failure or a reason to give up on attention training—your brain was built to do this! Even with training, we can’t expect ourselves to hold our focus the way we would hold a weight for an extended period. Instead, I want you to picture yourself dribbling a basketball:
The ball drops away from your hand, and bounces right back.
Your focus shifts away from the task-at-hand, and then comes back.
Each time the ball falls away from your hand is either an opportunity (to reengage in your task, knowing you’re still where you want to be) or a vulnerability (lose the ball, then spend effort and cognitive energy getting it back). The more you practice mindfulness exercises, the better you get at “dribbling.” More and more, that ball will bounce back into your hand instead of rolling away. But you have to keep dribbling! Just as in basketball, there’s no other way to effectively function. If you want to be, say, the Steph Curry of attention skills, you can’t carry the ball across the court. You’re going to have to dribble it effortlessly while some of the best athletes on the planet are trying to steal that ball from you—while you’re getting exactly where you want to go.
I’ve been practicing mindfulness exercises nearly every day for a long time. At this point, I appreciate and accept that on some days I’m going to be more distracted than others, and that’s fine. But at the very beginning, when I was starting out, I remember struggling through an especially unsuccessful session and feeling defeated. My thoughts were pulled in so many different directions, I felt as if I was going backward, getting worse. So I inquired with a colleague who ran the mindfulness clinic at a major medical center. He had been meditating for more than thirty years. By most measures, he was an expert-level meditator. I asked how long he was able to hold his focus so I could get an idea of what to aim for as a goal. I figured, after thirty years, it had to be something amazing—ten minutes? Longer?
“Hmm,” he said. “The longest I can hold my attention without it drifting to something else? I’d guess about seven seconds.”
Seven seconds? I was shocked. But then I quickly remembered one of the most important tenets of mindfulness training: the point is not that you’re never going to get distracted. That’s not possible. The goal, rather, is to be able to recognize where your attention is moment to moment so that when you do get distracted, you can easily and adeptly move your flashlight back to what it needs to be on.
And there’s another vital reason why training our focus is so important. It determines what goes into your working memory, the dynamic mental workspace that allows you to hold, temporarily, information that you need to use for whatever you’re doing. Think of it this way: whenever you’re thinking about anything—remembering something, working out a problem, mulling over an idea, holding onto a point you want to make while someone else is talking, visualizing something—you’re using your working memory to do that. We need working memory for nearly everything we want to do. Meanwhile, working memory is degraded by the very same forces that corrode attention—stress, threat, and poor mood. And at the root of most working memory failures is one of the more damaging habits of the mind: mental time travel.