Afghanistan, 2004. Walt Piatt, then a lieutenant colonel, and his unit received intel that a large group of Taliban fighters had amassed on a nearby mountain. This was a group they’d been tracking for months. They had received imagery of the site; they’d visualized the camp and everything checked out. It was the insurgent encampment. Piatt had already been given approval to bomb; the planes were in position. All parties had intelligence from the top levels that this was it. All he had to do was give the okay, and the camp would be obliterated.
Piatt and his soldiers, though, were already on the mountain. They were close enough to be able to hike up. It would be a tough climb—the camp was at eleven thousand feet, and it was starting to snow. But Piatt felt strongly that someone in the vicinity should get a good physical look at the camp. So on that cold morning, with whipping snow filling the air, a team of scouts headed further up, looking for final confirmation that this indeed was the Taliban cell.
As the team of scouts ascended, Piatt was getting messages from his leadership reminding him over and over that he had authority to engage—that the scouts weren’t necessary. But he waited. Finally, the radio clicked on and the lead scout called in to report. His team was close enough to see for themselves that everything checked out: encampment, tents, a young bearded man circling the camp, obviously standing guard. Then another guy, walking along with him: a pair of patrols.
“So that was it—game on,” Piatt recalls. “We had a camp, a couple of guards—it all confirmed what we already knew.”
Piatt was about to launch the ground assault when the scout’s voice came over the radio again.
“Wait a minute, wait a minute,” he said. “I don’t see a weapon on this guy. Repeat. No weapons!”
There was a moment of frozen silence.
“We’re so close,” the soldier said. “We can just tackle them!”
The soldiers rushed out of the snowy fog and took the guys to the ground. The rest of the patrol came in behind them with their weapons drawn, ready for a deluge of Taliban fighters to come swarming out of the tents. Instead: a very aggravated, tall, and imposing woman burst out of one of the tents, shouting. They couldn’t understand her, but the gist was: Let go of my men!
The intel had been wrong. The “insurgent encampment” was in fact the winter camp of a Bedouin tribe. The tents were filled with families. They had been making their way to this land for centuries, to let their animals graze. They had absolutely no affiliation with the Taliban.
In this situation, what we call “confirmation bias” could have killed a whole tribe of people. Confirmation bias is common—it happens when people essentially “see what they expect to see,” discounting any information that doesn’t line up with their expectation. The team of soldiers sent up the mountain expected to see a Taliban camp, so at first, that’s what they “saw.” It took only one person who was able to see things clearly to avert disaster.
Walt Piatt thought about that day on the mountain for years after it happened. He reflected on what a valuable skill it was to be able to quickly and flexibly drop expectations, and instead to see what was really happening right in front of you. It wasn’t something that typical military training covered—and that struck him as a big problem. He wondered: What gave that soldier the ability to see the scene so accurately, when everyone around him was viewing it through a biased lens? And was there any way to train other service members to acquire that ability?
One of the motivating reasons I wanted to work with military service members was exactly that: I wanted to know if we could help them not only to pay attention better, but also to be more discerning and situationally aware. Situational awareness—the mental state of constantly knowing what’s going on around you—is critical for people in a variety of professions, including police and first responders. Could mindfulness training, I wondered, help soldiers (or anyone) come into situations less susceptible to biased thinking so they could see more clearly, be less reactive, and respond appropriately and proportionately?
Our prediction was yes, because of how mindfulness practice guides you to use your attention: in the present moment, without judgment, elaboration, or reactivity. In other words: without making up a story about what you’re experiencing.
Sometimes a story is given to us and we quickly accept it—like the soldiers and the expected insurgent camp. Other times we arrive at the story ourselves, through our own mental simulation. We are incessantly concocting narratives about what might happen in an hour, or tomorrow, or about what others are thinking or feeling, or about their motivations. We visualize options and courses of action. We imagine how events might play out so that we can be more prepared; we troubleshoot various possibilities: If she says x, should I reply y or z? If that road is closed, what detour will I take? If the schools reopen while COVID cases are still high and new variants are emerging, will we send our kids? To visualize the possible answers to such questions, you create a whole world in your mind, with sensory details, characters, plot lines, and sometimes even dialogue. You experience emotions in response to this world you’ve created—it makes you feel sad, or anxious, or satisfied—and those feelings help you make decisions about what you may choose to do next.
We use simulations to arrive at mental models that guide our thinking, decision making, and actions. This is really what I mean when I say “story.” You come up with these mental models, or “stories,” rapidly and constantly—you simulate, arrive at one, then use it and move on; or you receive new information that causes you to update or dump that story and simulate a different one. The key ingredients for your simulations? Memories of episodes you have experienced in your life, fragments of these memories, plus everything else you have learned and remember. Add to the mix your capacity to think, reason, and forecast, and voilà—a freshly simulated new story!
The simulation process is vivid, detail-rich, and captivating, and the mental model requires our attention and working memory to come alive. But it also puts heavy demands on these limited capacity systems. That’s part of the reason stories are so powerful: they can become a kind of “shorthand” for efficiently framing and maintaining a situation, problem, or plan in mind—and this efficiency helps free up cognitive resources to do other things. But (there’s always a but) stories also constrain information processing. They capture and keep our attention locked onto a subset of data. Now our perceptions, our thinking, even our decisions are constrained. So when the story you come up with is wrong, then your actions and decisions after that can skew wrong, too—because of the way the story interacts with attention.
Remember that famous experiment with the dancing gorilla that I described to you earlier in this book? To refresh your memory: There are two teams on a basketball court, one dressed in black T-shirts and the other in white, and study participants are asked to count the number of passes that occur between players on the white-shirted team. In the middle of the “game,” a guy dressed as a gorilla walks through the scene, does a little dance, and then strolls off. And the people counting passes completely miss it. Why? Because they were asked to watch the white-shirted players, they (very appropriately and skillfully!) screened out everything dark—including that gorilla.
I presented that study to you to highlight the incredible power of attention, and it certainly does. But it also highlights a potentially catastrophic weak spot. The people in the study had a clear-cut, simple mission: filter out the color black, focus on the color white. Yet in a real-life situation, we usually don’t know ahead of time what we should focus on and what we should filter out. And in a real-life situation, the stakes for “missing the gorilla” can be a lot higher.
The mind’s job when it’s in “simulation mode” is to transport you.
Think of things that transport you so that you’re completely absorbed in another world and lose track of time: movies, books, video games. What are the qualities of these media? They draw you in because of their compelling narrative, their vivid detail, their rich emotional meaning. The end result of all this is that your attention is transfixed and doesn’t waver—that’s what a good story does. It’s all-consuming. And so is a simulation that you generate in your own mind. Your mind is a great simulator. It’s capable of that exact type of intensive, immersive, all-consuming story creation.
Our own minds are wildly versatile simulation generators: we can create “movies” on the screen of our whiteboards, reliving past experiences, predicting future ones, and more. Our simulations give us the capacity to relive and pre-live. We believe this is a unique capacity of the human mind—this ability to “try out” multiple different possibilities and time lines, to imagine scenarios before we enter into them. You don’t have to drive five different routes to figure out which is the best one: you simulate them mentally and then choose one and drive it, based on expected traffic congestion and maybe even the scenery. The ability to produce—in vivid detail—an imagined future based on our past experiences and knowledge is incredibly useful and powerful. This is a desirable feature of the brain—not a flaw. You would not ever want to be without it.
Simulations allow us to:
Let’s look at that last one. Over the past week, how many times have you imagined a potential outcome, just to see how you might feel about it? An outdated (yet still common) view is that feelings are a nuisance—a distraction that gets in the way of logical and efficient decision making. In fact, having an emotional reaction during the decision-making process is indispensable. Without emotion, we’d be left floundering. Emotion is how the brain determines the value of something (say, an event or a choice). If you choose A over B, do you feel: angry, happy, disgusted, sad, fearful? Your simulation—and the feelings that arise—allows you to come to a decision.
In the lead-up to the 2020 US presidential election, voters across the entire country were likely simulating what it would feel like to have a particular candidate win. And our simulations continued as the votes slowly came in, as projections shifted, as social media opined, and as lawsuits were filed. Simulations can be powerful not only in guiding decision making, but also in helping us emotionally prepare to accept particular outcomes.
Your brain is quite possibly the best, most robust “virtual-reality” machine there is. We can create entire worlds. We can project ourselves through time and geography and into the minds of others. We need this capacity for everything we are able to successfully do as humans: for imagining, for strategizing and planning, for decision making and problem solving, for innovating and creating, for connecting, and much more.
The problem? Our virtual-reality capabilities are a double-edged sword: our simulations can be too good.
To have your simulation inform your eventual decisions, plans, and actions, you need to feel as if you are there—to really see, hear, and feel it. To this end, the brain mobilizes its powers of perception, conceptualization, elaboration, and narration to create the most vivid, detailed, and realistic world that it can. And “vivid” in the internal landscape of your mind is the same as “salient” in the external landscape: think of it as very loud. It grabs your attention and holds it. Your flashlight snaps to it without any effort at all.
Remember perceptual decoupling? We talked about this earlier in the book when I introduced mind-wandering. When you’re mind-wandering, you sort of “unhook” from your actual immediate environment. Well, that’s exactly what happens when you have a simulation running. The simulation is salient and loud; everything else gets dimmed down. Sensory input becomes degraded and inconsistent; this effect gets even worse when we’re dealing with stress, threat, poor mood, or fatigue. When you’re deep in a simulation (aka “deep in thought”), someone could be calling your name and you would not hear them. Even touch may become dulled.
Our simulations are so effective that we get immersed and fused with them, and persuaded by them. Studies on the impact of advertising have shown that vividness is what grabs people’s attention and convinces them to buy. With simulations, we create our own persuasive content. So persuasive, in fact, that our bodies physically respond: When presented with an image of a slice of cake, people’s mouths will water; show a smoker a picture of a cigarette and they will experience intense craving. With a stressful memory or a stressful simulation, we’ll experience the release of stress hormones. Our minds and bodies begin to believe we are really experiencing the simulated event.
And finally: we are simulating all the time.
So far, I’ve been talking about simulating as something we do on purpose, for active decision making and planning. In fact, you are simulating all the time.
Remember that 50 percent of the time when you’re mind-wandering? As we discussed, when your mind wanders, your default mode network is activated. The default mode is massively involved in simulation: your attention and working memory are mobilized inward and you begin simulating versions of reality, projecting yourself into the past or future, or even into other people’s minds and lives. Much of the time that you’re mind-wandering, you’re simulating.
I was struck by a recent quote I read by the actor Jim Carrey: “Our eyes are not only viewers, but projectors that are running a second story over the picture we see in front of us all the time.”
I don’t know if Carrey has ever taken a basic neuroscience class, but I’ll say this: he’s spot on. And therein lies the problem. Our simulations happen even when we don’t actively choose to engage in them. They can constrain our information processing in confounding and unhelpful ways, affect our well-being, impair our judgment, and hinder our decision making.
This incessant simulating we do (largely by default) quickly becomes a problem when:
My family and I recently traveled to my mom’s house to celebrate a milestone birthday with her. On the day of her big birthday party, the house was crowded with longtime family friends, most of them Indian men and women in their sixties and seventies. As the party wore on, my sister and I rushed to replace platters of food and serve drinks. When the time came to serve the cake, I was at a loss—my daughter was nowhere to be found, and my sister was busy cutting and plating the cake while I ran frantically back and forth with two plates, trying to get to all the guests. Finally, I felt a hand on my arm. My husband, Michael, was standing there with our son and my nephew.
“Can we help you?” he asked, looking a little baffled that I hadn’t asked already.
I was startled and immediately felt silly: of course they could help! They’d been sitting right there, in front of me the entire time. I asked them each to grab some plates and, within minutes, everyone in the room had cake in hand.
Why didn’t I think to ask them? I reflected on it later, bothered by my inability in the moment to see the males in the room as helpers. Why had I only thought of my daughter and sister as “servers”?
Because men don’t serve food in Indian households!
I was shocked at the sexism in my own mental model. Yet I could not deny that my attention was biased, entirely on the basis of sex. My flashlight was only scanning for females who could help me. It was as if the males were blanked out of my field of view. My actions were then biased, too—with no females in sight, I felt compelled to serve the cake on my own. It took Michael’s gentle question for me to snap out of my own story. With the blinders suddenly off, my attention broadened to more easily see additional options on how to maneuver through the situation.
As a woman in the sciences, I’m acutely aware of the casual and constant ways that unnoticed biases can manifest, every day. It’s not uncommon for me to receive an email addressed “Sir,” or to answer my office phone and be asked “Is Dr. Jha available? When will he be in?” I still hear older relatives refer to seeing a “lady doctor” during a medical appointment.
As I reflect on my own biases, I want to shout, “But I’m not sexist!” Yet here’s the reality: our mental models rely on our memories and knowledge for their inputs. So if sexism exists in the world, it exists in my lived experience of the world. And this means that it also exists in the memory traces of this lived experience in my brain. Accepting this frees me up in a useful way. I can be on the lookout for sexist influences in my own mental models. And when I see them, knowing that they will bias my attention and my behavior, I can intervene. I can build a new, better-informed model.
However, when we’re unaware of the mental models that are guiding us, we may not be able to pivot away from them. The decisions and actions we make, while perhaps sensible under our model, may be inappropriate in reality and can have consequences for ourselves—as well as for others. The science of bias and attention has clear implications for the training of police and first responders, for physicians, for teachers, for lawyers and judges . . . well, for all of us. We all have a sphere of influence in the world. And we all have deeply seated biases that can show up in mental models, which means we have a responsibility to become more aware of the mental models we each hold.
A flawed mental model can affect us in all kinds of ways—bias is a big one, but any time we simulate a certain outcome and can’t drop it, we can suffer because of it. If you go into a conversation with someone expecting it to be contentious, that mental model can ensure that you selectively focus on the aspects of the interaction that reinforce that story, and dim down competing information that might have offered a better way forward.
Because mental models are made from fragments of our own knowledge and experience, along with our observations in the moment, they can be constrained in ways that can end up being limiting instead of helpful. Making predictions based on what has happened in your past experience can allow you to plan and prepare. Yet things don’t always unfold the way they have in the past or even the way you think they will based on information you’ve been given—like those soldiers going up the mountain in Afghanistan who’d received flawed intel. That day, after the dust settled (literally and metaphorically), Walt Piatt was invited into the tribe leaders’ tent to sit with the elders and share some of the hot chai they were pouring. The Army’s interpreter didn’t speak the tribe’s dialect, but they were able to communicate in some basic ways. As he sipped the hot liquid, Piatt looked around the dim room at all the people who would have lost their lives had someone on his team not been able to “drop the story” and allow in the contradictory information: the man was not carrying a weapon. Had they mistakenly obliterated the camp, they might never have come to realize their error. They might have carried on, believing the story that they’d successfully bombed a Taliban camp and achieved their mission.
Nuanced, flawed, and incomplete content is often the raw material feeding our simulations, from both long-term memory and the world around us, and the current brain science suggests that we have little to no conscious awareness of it. This is the content that scaffolds what we simulate in the stories we generate. So, what can we do about it? How do we use our incredible virtual-reality powers to imagine, plan, and strategize, without being limited and constrained?
How do we “drop the story”?
You’ve practiced finding your flashlight. That exercise was about identifying where your brain’s attentional orienting system is directing its “beam” and then moving it where you want it. You’ve practiced watching your whiteboard, noticing what’s occupying your working memory, and content labeling, which helps because when you do the work of “categorizing” that mental content, you cease to be lost in it.
The specific skills you’ve been practicing are already setting you up to “drop the story.” And keeping your attention in a mindful mode—that is, in the present moment, without conceptual elaboration—increases situational awareness: your ability to observe and see clearly what’s happening in any given situation you find yourself in. You’re not elaborating on what you see or think or feel. You’re not analyzing or extrapolating from thoughts or feelings. You’re not taking what’s happening in one moment and spooling it out into the future, imagining what might happen next, or connecting back to similar situations you’ve encountered in the past, expecting them to be the same. In this mindful mode, you don’t try to predict or strategize or analyze—you merely, but mindfully, observe.
You’re not simulating.
You may have noticed that there are many books, apps, and entire programs and workshops out in the world dealing with mindfulness. They describe a “mindful mode” as having specific qualities, many of which begin with “non”—as in non-elaborative, nonjudgmental, non-narrative. For many years, I wondered how these qualities hang together. But when we look at what it takes to have vivid, rich simulations, we see how they do. Simulation mode requires default mode activity. Meanwhile, mindfulness reduces default mode activity.
In short: mindfulness becomes an “antidote” to relentless simulation.
Looking at the table below, you might wonder: Why do I want to be in the left-hand column? The right-hand column seems like so much more fun!
My answer to that: It’s not that you want to live an entire life where you’re always in the “perpetual now”—that’s not what I’m advocating. But training the mind to be able to shift into a mindful mode vs. the highly prevalent simulation mode is a necessary safety net—because your mind is so prone to doing everything listed in the right-hand column.
Mindfulness is . . . |
Simulations are . . . |
Present-centered (this moment) |
Past- and future-focused (mental time travel) |
Direct experience (not imagined) |
Imagined, remembered, hypothetical, or projecting into someone else’s experience |
Embodied, sensory |
Conceptual |
Curious; no expectations |
Planning, expecting, anticipating |
Non-elaborative (not associating or “hyperlinking”) |
Elaborative, associative, conceptually rich |
Non-narrative (no story) |
Narrative (strong story) |
Non-evaluative; nonjudgmental (no assessing of good or bad, nor of other labels) |
Emotional evaluation (positive or negative; rewarding or not rewarding) |
No (or low) emotional reactivity |
High emotional reactivity (immersed) |
Without intervention, we live our lives almost entirely in simulation mode. We default to it automatically—we do it constantly, effortlessly, and often unwittingly. It’s very difficult for us to not simulate, not elaborate, not generate, which is exactly why we need to train for this capacity. We need to be able to shift out of a simulation mode into a mindful one so that we can open our eyes and see what is actually around us vs. the virtual reality of our making. This capacity is becoming more and more essential as our world becomes more unpredictable. In recent years, we’ve faced unprecedented challenges, from pandemics to politics and many more, and the future holds more uncertainty. We cannot live in simulation mode through this. To be resilient and capable, to preserve our attentional and cognitive powers, we have to be able to access the mindful mode.
Both of the columns in the table will lead you to a mental model, and both have their utility. The difference is, the mental model you arrive at by using the mindful mode, instead of the simulation mode, has a much better chance of being unbiased.
Ultimately, though, the goal is not to rely solely on a single mode all the time. Both modes are valuable. We can gather critical information from both. The goal is to have the capacity to shift into a mindful mode when you need it. We need to be able to toggle—to drop the story, for a few minutes at least, in order to create mental models that are the most accurate depictions of the situation we are in. If we can train ourselves to more quickly and effectively move into a mindful mode, that short break from the simulation mode will then allow us to reenter it with a better idea of which of the many possibilities we can choose from is the best one. So here’s a peak mind “cheat sheet” on how to use some of the skills you’ve already practiced . . . plus a new one.
In psychology, as well as in mindfulness practice, we call this practice of stepping out of your simulations and mental models “decentering.” Decentering emphasizes a perspective in which the experiential “I” is not at the center. From a decentered perspective, it’s easier to determine how well our simulations represent reality. They are only a guess—one of many possible mental models. When you can step outside of a constrained mode of thinking, you’re able to recognize a story that’s not serving you and can drop it quickly and flexibly instead of remaining locked in.
During the spring of 2020, in the early months of the COVID-19 crisis, we ran a study offering mindfulness training to older adults—a particularly at-risk population during the pandemic—specifically to help them manage fear, stress, and loneliness. Going into the study, we wanted to know if people were finding their own thoughts and worries about the pandemic to be disruptive, and if so, at what level.
To answer this, we used a “COVID Intrusion Scale.” We asked our participants—fifty-two individuals between the ages of sixty and eighty-five—how often they found themselves thinking about COVID, and when they did, how distressing those thoughts were. Did their thoughts come out of the blue? Were they unwanted? We also asked questions about their mood, their stress level, and their capacity to decenter, by which I mean that we probed their ability to see thoughts and feelings as separate from themselves. Did they naturally and automatically distance themselves from unwanted or intrusive thoughts? Or were they highly identified (fused) with them? Did they have the capacity to “sit with” unpleasant feelings and let them pass away, or did they get swept into a ruminative loop?
We found that those with higher decentering scores reported fewer intrusive thoughts, better mood, sounder sleep, less loneliness, and greater well-being. Their capacity to distance themselves from their mental content—to see their reactions to events and their internal stories as mental content that arises and fades away—benefited them in all these important ways.
Now, these participants weren’t guided by us in any way when these data were collected—we hadn’t put them through any kind of mindfulness class or instruction. We simply evaluated the mental tendencies they’d walked in the door with. But many other studies that have offered participants specific instructions on how to decenter found the same beneficial effects and more.
In one study, researchers prompted people to call up negative memories from their past—personally experienced events that they could vividly recall. Each memory was assigned a cue word. (If the negative memory had to do with being bullied at school, the cue word might be “bully.”) Then, during an fMRI brain scanning session, each participant was shown pairs of words while researchers monitored their brain activity. One was the memory cue word (bully) and the other had the cognitive stance they were to take toward the memory:
After each pair of words, participants rated the intensity of their negative mood on a scale of 1 (not at all) to 5 (very negative). Unsurprisingly, they felt the most negative after the reexperience instruction, followed by analyze, and the least negative after decenter—decentering was the most protective of their mood. But interestingly, their reports also corresponded with the fMRI results, specifically with the amount of activity in the default mode.
The study showed that decentering reduced default mode network activity—the network most involved in mind-wandering and simulation. And it revealed how powerful the impact of how we relate to our memories is on our mood. The interpretation of the brain imaging findings was that people had the least amount of default mode activity and negative mood during decentering because they weren’t transporting themselves back through time into the negative memory. They weren’t simulating.
I’ve been asked why I don’t emphasize “stress reduction” when I discuss the topic of mindfulness. My answer to that? I study attention, and mindfulness training entered my laboratory’s research in our search to find effective cognitive training tools to improve attention. Most of the groups we approach are not primarily interested in reducing stress—that is not their goal. Rather, their goal, like ours, is to strengthen attention and optimize attention-related performance. The great thing, though, is that mindfulness training does both: it reduces stress and improves attention. And being able to weaken the pull of simulations by decentering is key to achieving both of these benefits.
Some mindfulness exercises emphasize voluntarily paying attention, noticing mind-wandering, and redirecting it as needed (like the Find Your Flashlight practice), while other exercises target the capacity to decenter (you’ll learn such a practice up ahead). With greater control over the flashlight and awareness of where it is directed, we can catch our mind-wandering more often to get attention back on track. And with greater decentering, we can dial down the strong hold that our mind-wandering episodes have on us, especially for those that are filled with powerful, emotionally charged negative and worry-filled simulations. These are the ones that not only grab us but hook us. They capture our attention and keep it there to loop on, as in rumination.
Decentering is a powerful technique because it weakens the hold that mind-wandering episodes can have on our attention. You’re able to “drop the story” when it isn’t serving you or when it’s causing you distress. By unhooking attention in this way, decentering leads to reduced stress and even reduced symptoms of disorders like anxiety and depression.
Over the years, I’ve had the opportunity to give a lot of lectures. But when I got the request to come and speak at the Pentagon, I was . . . a little daunted.
I prepared meticulously, working on my slides in advance. I made sure I had our most recent science incorporated and fine-tuned the flow from slide to slide. I was ready. I packed up my laptop with the presentation loaded and prepared—backups for everything, just in case—and flew to DC the night before my talk. I arrived, had a nice dinner, and was preparing to turn in for the night so I would be fresh and ready. But when I popped open my laptop to quickly peek at my email and make sure there wasn’t anything urgent from the lab, a message grabbed my attention. It was from a colleague, an Army colonel and a professor at the Army War College. I’d sent him my PowerPoint slides the day before, asking if he had any thoughts or advice on how to optimize it for an audience of strategic military leaders. I imagined that if he had the time to take a look at all (given his busy teaching schedule), he might offer a few minor tweaks. But when I opened the email, my stomach sank—he’d run the presentation past a focus group of his students, and there were extensive notes on nearly every slide.
The suggestions were sweeping: Cut here, elaborate here, they didn’t like this, or this . . . My mind scrambled around, trying to work out how I could possibly make all these changes so last-minute. I was grateful for the time and thoughtfulness of his feedback, but with so little time, I also felt overwhelmed and worried. I could feel the swell of unhelpful and very negative thoughts fill up my mind. I’m never going to be able to get this done. I’m going to fail!
I closed the laptop and decided to take five minutes to do a mini-practice. I knew that what I needed to do was zoom out and get a bird’s-eye view of the situation. As always, I began by finding my breath. And then:
It was only five minutes. But what that mini-practice allowed me to do was decouple from the story that I had started narrating, one filled with worry and doubt. I was watching what was on my whiteboard, at a distance. I noticed thoughts, feelings, and bodily sensations arising and passing away without being overtaken by them. I quickly dropped the story and stopped drafting up worst-case scenarios. And seeing myself “in the third person” made me want to encourage Amishi instead of tear her down. I wanted to be supportive of myself, as I would be for a good friend. By the end of the mini-practice, I felt clearer and less reactive. Decentering in this way, for only a few minutes, allowed me to reconnect with my intention: to give my audience a successful learning experience.
And to do so, I needed to reach them, which was exactly what my colleague’s feedback would help me do. I returned to the presentation, curious about his suggestions instead of daunted and overwhelmed. As I opened my presentation file, I thought, In this file, there is useful guidance to help me educate and inform my audience. Let’s see what I can learn and apply in the time I have.
The day after my presentation, I got a text from the same colleague who had provided the feedback on my slides. He’d watched the livestream of my talk. It said: You nailed it!
A lot of people whom I work with have an initial resistance to the idea of “dropping the story.” They exist in worlds where planning, strategizing, visioning, and imagining next steps is absolutely critical for success. After that talk I presented at the Pentagon, during which I discussed my team’s research findings on offering a program called Mindfulness-Based Attention Training (MBAT) to conventional and special operations forces within the US Army, there was a short Q and A session with the audience. When it began, retired Lieutenant General Eric Schoomaker, the 42nd Surgeon General of the Army, raised his hand first.
“Why are you telling us not to engage in narrative?” he asked. “We need to build stories in order to be prepared for the future.”
“Absolutely,” I replied. “And there is nothing within mindfulness practice that instructs you not to build stories. It’s simply that you should be aware, in all circumstances, that you are building a story. And you should be aware that any story you have, at any point in time, is just one of many possible outcomes or interpretations. It’s not the only one, and it may not be correct.”
I conveyed to him what I convey to many who ask similar questions: “Don’t believe everything you think.”
You can cultivate an awareness of which simulations or elaborations are filling up your working memory without sacrificing decisiveness and action. In fact, having that awareness enhances those abilities by giving you the flexibility not only to reframe a situation, but to de-frame it based on the raw data that emerge.
Dropping the story is NOT about . . . |
Dropping the story IS about . . . |
Second-guessing yourself |
Reorienting to the present moment with agility |
Hesitating |
Observing what’s really happening |
Being indecisive |
Flexibly responding |
Returning to an important question we discussed earlier: Can mindfulness practice combat the strong biases that we all carry within us, based on the world in which we were raised?
The best answer I can give to that right now is: Maybe. Research is unfolding about whether or not mindfulness practice can help reduce implicit biases—this could have huge implications for all of us and for our institutions, for example our justice system. It’s promising, but we just don’t have the data yet. What we have looked at is the intersection of mindfulness and discriminatory behavior. Studies are finding that mindfulness training can indeed help people act in less-biased ways, perhaps because they are more aware of the mental models they hold and more able to drop the story.
A group of psychologists came to the lab to discuss incorporating mindfulness practice into their own training. They weren’t ordinary psychologists—they were operational psychologists with the US military, which means that they provide mission support to deployed units and are, on occasion, embedded in those units. One of their responsibilities is supporting service members who regularly spend long, twelve-hour shifts watching drone footage. The psychologists wanted to know what they could do to support the service members in that role.
To best answer that question, I needed an answer to one of my own first: When these service members are watching drone footage for a dozen hours straight, what is the purpose of their watching? Why are they doing it?
The reply: “They are a key part of the ‘kill chain.’”
It was a startling statement. I realized immediately what he meant: that they were in charge of spotting targets and relaying that information up the chain of command. Even with all the work I’ve done with the military, this made me pause. It’s easy to assume that it’s the people in charge who wield most of the power and carry most of the weight for the decisions that are made, and for the actions taken by our military. But every single person in our military carries the weight of every decision they make. It reminds me of why I do this work—to help them make the right ones. And in a situation like this one, it’s absolutely crucial for these people to be aware of what kind of biases they are bringing to the job. This is the place where the story you have is going to influence what you’re seeing—if you think someone’s a terrorist versus a civilian, every action you see is going to be interpreted through that lens. The operational psychologists reported that for these drone operators, it was very difficult to maintain mental resilience and flexibility over such long shifts. Their ability to do so was compromised by how long they were there and how tired they were. Meanwhile, they have somebody’s life in their hands.
What’s so interesting about this group of people is that they have the bird’s-eye perspective all the time. They view the landscape below through that distant perspective. But does that automatically offer them a clear view? Only if they are aware not solely of what they are viewing below them, but also of their own mental model.
Most of us, of course, aren’t military drone operators. We still need to be able to surveil our own mind. The stories we make up about other people’s intentions and motivations can do a lot of damage. They can derail a friendship. They can cause political divisiveness. They can even start wars.
This highlights the most important feature of going to the distanced perspective: the most important thing to include in the scope of your viewing is your own mind.
It’s one thing to practice decentering in your formal practice; being able to actually do it in your life, and under tough circumstances, requires using your attention in a different way altogether. In order to intervene in your own cognitive processes when they get off-track, you need to realize that you require intervention. In other words: the first critical step to dropping the story is to know that you have one. And that is one of the most challenging attentional skills to build.