You are missing 50 percent of your life. And you’re not alone: everyone is.
Take a minute to picture it—your life, I mean. Scroll through the individual events, interactions, and instances that come together over the course of a day, a week, a month, a year, a lifetime. Think of it like a quilt, each square a small block of time: Here, pouring yourself a cup of coffee. Over there, reading a book to your child. Celebrating a success at work. Taking a walk in your neighborhood, climbing a mountain, diving with sharks. The mundane and the extraordinary woven together and working together, forming the story of your life.
Now, take half those quilt squares and rip them out. The irregular patchwork that’s left—a cold, drafty blanket full of holes—is the part of your life for which you’re mentally present. The rest is gone. You didn’t truly experience it. And chances are, you won’t remember it.
Why? Because you weren’t paying attention.
Do I have your attention right now? I hope so—the idea that we’re missing so much of our own lives is pretty alarming. But now that I have it, I won’t be able to keep it for very long. As you read this chapter, it’s likely that you’ll miss up to half of what I say. And on top of that, you’ll finish reading these pages convinced that you didn’t miss a thing.
I say this confidently, even without knowing who you are, or how your brain might be different from the last one we tested in my lab at the University of Miami, where I research the science of attention and teach cognitive neuroscience courses. That’s because over the course of my career as a brain scientist, I’ve seen certain universal patterns in the way all of our brains function—both how powerfully they can focus, and how extraordinarily vulnerable they are to distraction—no matter who you are or what you do. I’ve had the opportunity to peek inside the living human brain using the most advanced brain imaging technologies available, and I know that at any given moment, there’s a high probability that your mind just isn’t here. Instead, you’re planning for the next item on your to-do list. You’re ruminating on something that’s been bothering you, a worry or a regret. You’re thinking about something that could happen tomorrow, or the next day, or never. Any way you slice it, you’re not here, experiencing your life. You’re somewhere else.
Is this just part of being alive? A side effect of the human condition, something we all just have to live with? Is it really that big of a deal?
After twenty-five years of studying the science of attention, I can answer these questions. Yes, it is part of being alive—in many ways, because our brain’s evolution was driven by specific survival pressures, our attention waxes and wanes, making us prone to being distractible. Our distractibility served us well when predators lurked around every corner. However, in today’s technologically saturated, fast-paced, and rapidly shifting world, we’re feeling that distractibility more than ever, and we face new predators that rely on and exploit our distractibility. But no, it’s not something we have to just live with—we can train our brains to pay attention differently. And finally, and most importantly: yes, it is that big of a deal.
Tell me if this ever describes you: At times, it feels like a struggle to stay focused. Your mind toggles between boredom and overwhelm. You feel foggy—as if the crisp thinking you need to rely on is simply not there. You have a short fuse. You’re irritable. Stressed. You notice mistakes you’ve made: typos, skipped words, or or repeated ones. (Did you catch that?) Deadlines loom but you find it difficult to pull yourself away from your news and social media feeds. You cruise through your phone, opening app after app—then you look up, some amount of time later, wondering what you were even looking for in the first place. You’re spending a lot of time in your head, out of sync with the flow of all that is happening around you. You find yourself spinning on interactions—something you wish you had said, something you shouldn’t have said, something you should have done better.
You may be surprised to know that all of this ultimately comes down to one thing: your attention.
In my research lab at the University of Miami, my team and I study and train people in some of the most extreme, high-stress, high-demand professions. We study medical and business professionals, firefighters, soldiers, and elite athletes, among others. They need to deploy their attention—and do it well—through extraordinarily high-stakes circumstances where their decisions could affect many people. As in critical surgeries. Deadly wildfires. Rescue operations. Active war zones. A single moment when performance can make or break a career, end or save a life. For some of these folks, if and how they pay attention is literally a matter of life and death. For all of us, it’s a powerful force that shapes our lives far more than we realize.
Your attention determines:
On a certain level, we all sense this already—consider the language we use when we talk about attention. Pay attention, we say. We ask, May I have your attention? We see and hear information that is attention-grabbing. These common phrases illuminate what we already know instinctively: that, like currency, attention can be paid, given, or stolen; that it is extremely valuable, and also finite.
Recently, the commercial value of attention has taken center stage. As the saying goes for social media apps, “If you aren’t paying for the product, you are the product.” More precisely, your attention is the product—a commodity that can be sold to the highest bidder. We now have attention merchants and attention markets. All this forecasts a brave new dystopia involving trading in human “attention futures” alongside cattle, oil, and silver. Yet attention is not something that can be banked or borrowed. It cannot be saved to use later. We can only use our attention in the here and now—in this moment.
The attention system exists to solve one of your brain’s biggest problems: there is far too much information in the environment for your brain to fully process. To avoid getting overloaded, your brain uses attention to filter out both the unnecessary noise and chatter around you, and the background thoughts and distractions that constantly bubble up to the surface of your mind.
All day, every day, your attention system is in action: In a crowded coffee shop, you zero in on your computer screen and your work, while the conversation at the table next to you or the hissing of the espresso machine seem muffled. At the playground, you scan all the kids in their colorful clothing on the slides and swings but can quickly pick out your own. During a conversation with your co-worker, you hold a point you want to make in your mind, even while listening and absorbing what she’s saying. As you cross a busy street, you notice a car moving too fast toward you, even as a hundred other distractions exist—people flowing down the sidewalk, a blinking crosswalk sign, horns honking.
Without attention, you would be completely at sea in the world. You’d either be blank, unaware and unresponsive to events happening around you, or you’d be overwhelmed and paralyzed by the sheer, incoherent mass of information assaulting you. Add to that the relentless flow of thoughts generated by your own mind, and it would all be incapacitating.
To study how the human brain pays attention, my research team uses a range of techniques—functional MRI, electrophysiological recordings, behavioral tasks, and more. We bring people into the lab and follow them out into their world—what we call going “in the field.” We’ve conducted dozens of large-scale studies and published numerous peer-reviewed articles in professional journals about our findings. We’ve learned three major things:
First, attention is powerful. I refer to it as the “brain’s boss,” because attention guides how information processing happens in the brain. Whatever we pay attention to is amplified. It feels brighter, louder, crisper than everything else. What you focus on becomes most prominent in your present-moment reality: you feel the corresponding emotions; you view the world through that lens.
Second, attention is fragile. It can be rapidly depleted under certain circumstances—circumstances that turn out, unfortunately, to be the ones that pervade our lives. When we experience stress, threat, or poor mood—the three main things I call “kryptonite” for attention—this valuable resource is drained.
And third, attention is trainable. It is possible to change the way our attention systems operate. This is a critical new discovery, not only because we are missing half our lives, but because the half we’re here for can feel like a constant struggle. With training, however, we can strengthen our capacity to fully experience and enjoy the moments we are in, to embark on new adventures, and to navigate life’s challenges more effectively.
We’re in a crisis of attention. We are exhausted and depleted, cognitively fuzzy, less effective, and less fulfilled in our lives. This crisis is partly systemic, driven by the attention economy, where inviting and highly addictive content-delivery vehicles that take the form of news, entertainment, and social media apps keep us scrolling and scrolling. Driven by predatory practices and a lack of regulation, our attention is lured and mined. And then, like mortgages and other financial products, our individual attention is pooled, repackaged, and sold for big profit.
If attention evolved because there was too much information for us to process, then right now there’s really too much. The content stream is too loud, too fast, too intense, too interesting, too unrelenting. And we are not only recipients of this information explosion, but also willing participants in it. We’re going full throttle to keep up and not miss out, because we or others expect that of us.
This doesn’t feel good. So why is it so hard to fix? We’re told to “unplug.” To “break up” with our phones. To work in shorter, more focused bursts. But our brains don’t stand a fighting chance. We can’t outsmart the algorithms designed by an army of software engineers and psychologists. The power of this artificial intelligence lies in its adaptability—constantly learning from us how to best grab our attention, and keep us locked in. It uses the same type of reinforcement that keeps people sitting in front of slot machines in smoky casinos for hours on end, with a dazed look on their faces and a bucket of coins in their laps. But it’s not a slot machine in front of us, it’s an app. And it’s not coins we’re feeding, it’s our attention.
I want to make one thing crystal clear: there is nothing wrong with your attention. In fact, it’s working so well, and so on cue, that computer programs can predict how it will respond. We’re in a crisis because our attention works so well. It’s doing exactly what it was designed to do: respond powerfully to certain stimuli. You can’t defeat algorithms on social media websites, the Pavlovian pull of your phone’s dings and bings, the blaring red notification bubble of your inbox, or the desire to complete one more quest so you can up-level. Yet, we aren’t helpless. We can solve this attention crisis.
The Art of War, traditionally accredited to Sun Tzu in the fifth century BCE, offers advice on what we should do when we are not in a fair fight—when we are plainly overpowered and outmaneuvered:
To win one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the acme of skill.
In other words: Don’t waste your energy trying to get better at fighting the pull on your attention. You cannot win that fight. Instead, cultivate the capacity and skill to position your mind so you don’t have to fight.
That’s the problem with existing solutions—they are instructing us to go to war against the forces that pull on our attention. Like swimming against a riptide, it’s exhausting and ineffective. Instead, we need to move away from that mode of struggling with our attention. Like a skilled swimmer who recognizes the ocean’s pull and swims sideways to safety, we need to be able to spot the cues.
Think about the things that suddenly clue you in that your attention is off-track. You might get to the bottom of a page you’re reading and realize you’ve absorbed none of it—it’s the physical turning of the page (or scrolling to the next screen) that cues you. You’re deep in thought when you hear the sound of your name and an irritated “Hello? Are you listening?” and you realize that you departed from the conversation quite a while ago—it’s the person’s voice that cues you. You block websites or limit your access by loading an app that times you out; it’s the “Time’s up!” notification that cues you. But by the time these external cues catch you, over and over again all day, you’ve already spent far too much time in a brain state that has depleted and degraded your attention, leaving you with declining cognitive resources and increasingly less capable of catching yourself—it’s an exponential downward spiral.
We think of this as an exclusively contemporary problem—a crisis born out of our high-tech era. Yes, it’s true that we are living in a period of unprecedented targeting of our attention. But we don’t need external stimuli to have a crisis of attention—this has always been a challenge for humans. We have records of medieval monks in the year 420 fretting that they could not keep their thoughts on God as they were supposed to—they complained they were constantly thinking about lunch, or sex. They felt overwhelmed with information, frustrated that the minute they sat down to read something, their restless minds wanted to read something else instead. Why could they not just focus? Why did the mind disobey? They went so far as to cut off relationships with family and give up all their possessions—the idea being that if they had fewer earthly entanglements to think about, they’d be less distracted. Did it work? No.
Over a thousand years later, in 1890, the psychologist and philosopher William James expressed the attention struggle, and the persistent lack of a solution:
The faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention, over and over again, is the very root of judgment, character, and will. No one is [master of himself] if he have it not. An education which should improve this faculty would be the education par excellence. But it is easier to define this ideal than to give practical directions for bringing it about.
Even if we could—with the swish of a magic wand—wipe away all our technology, our glowing late-night laptops and buzzing phones, it wouldn’t work. The mind’s nature is to forage for information and engage with it—whether it’s the phone in your pocket or the bubbling thoughts in your mind. You don’t need to be immersed in this digital ocean we all live in today to feel the pain of restless, depleted attention, and to suffer from it. We can look back a thousand years and see that our fellow humans were experiencing the same.
Our problem is not the phone, nor is it our rapidly filling inbox. It’s not that we are surrounded by attention-grabbing news and information at all times. It’s not the team of software engineers working on new and better ways to trap your attention with that buzzing and beeping rectangle tethered to you day and night. The problem is that we often don’t know what’s happening in our own minds. We lack internal cues about where our attention is moment to moment. And for this, there is a solution: pay attention to your attention.
If you were to participate in one of our lab’s studies, here’s what would happen: We’d fit you with a funny little hat that looks like a swim cap, elastic and snug, covered in electrodes designed to pick up your brain’s electrical activity. When enough of your neurons fire together in response to something we show you on a computer monitor, the electrodes detect tiny voltage jolts, which are transmitted to an amplifier, and passed forward to another computer to record and process. While all this is transpiring, there we sit, the research team, monitoring a screen full of jagged squiggles that shows us, in real time, millisecond by millisecond, what’s happening inside your skull. At the same time, we give you computer-based tests to probe attention-related behavior.
In study after study, we looked for circumstances in which people could pay attention without getting distracted. And here’s what we found: there are none. Across our increasingly targeted experiments, there were zero circumstances in which participants maintained their focus 100 percent of the time. And a growing body of research now finds that this isn’t unique to our research participants—studies from all over the globe find the same pattern. Research participants couldn’t continuously pay attention when they were instructed to. They couldn’t do it when the stakes were high or when they were motivated to. They couldn’t do it even when they were paid to!
Let’s pause and take a quick pulse. In the very first sentence of this book, I told you that you might miss up to 50 percent of what I was about to say. You may have taken that as a challenge to pay extra-close attention. So how’d you do? Think back and see if you can take a mental inventory of all the other things you thought about (or even stopped reading to do) since you started reading these pages. You might even want to jot them down so you can see how many tasks and thoughts and to-do’s your highly active mind is trying to hold all at once. Did you pause to send emails or texts? Did your attention turn to concerns about looming deadlines, worries about your kids or parents, plans to see friends, or thoughts about your finances? Did you give your dog a quick pat on the head or realize she needs a walk, or food, or a bath? Did you stop reading completely to check your news feed?
We all do it. You cannot simply decide to pay attention “better.” No matter how much I tell you about how attention works and why, and no matter how motivated you are, the way your brain pays attention cannot be fundamentally altered by sheer force of will. I don’t care if you’re the most disciplined person alive: it will not work. Instead, we need to train our brains to work differently. And the exciting news is: at long last, we’ve actually figured out how.
Scientists, scholars, and philosophers have long been focused on some key questions: What is attention? How does it work? Why does it work that way? I spent a long time early in my career exploring those questions. But I knew we needed to ask the next question: How can we make it work better?
I started searching for ways that attention could be strengthened. We’d tried all kinds of techniques in the lab, from apps offering brain exercises to mood-boosting music and even high-tech light-and-sound headsets. Yet, nothing had been consistently successful. To make matters worse, we started noticing a troubling pattern in our research with high-demand individuals in the field: soldiers, firefighters, and others who operate in high-stakes emergency situations. People in these professions often go through intense periods of preparation for what they are about to do: Soldiers go through months of intense training before they deploy to war zones; firefighters endure rigorous training before facing unpredictable and life-threatening situations. Think of anyone preparing for something important. A student studying for her exams. A lawyer preparing for trial. A football player in preseason, twice-a-day practices. We found that these individuals became attentionally depleted during that preparation period. Their attentional capacity took a nose dive. And this was happening right before they had to go out and perform at their peak.
These folks are not unique—a period of protracted stress or continuous demand is going to deplete you, leaving you with fewer resources when you actually need them most. But before we could devise a fix, we needed to figure out what, exactly, was degrading attention.
One of the biggest culprits? Mental time travel.
We do it all the time. We do it seamlessly. And we do it even more under stress. Under stress, our attention gets yanked into the past by a memory, where we get stuck in a ruminative loop. Or we may get launched into the future by a worry, leading us to catastrophize on an endless number of doomsday scenarios. The common denominator is that stressful intervals hijack attention away from the present moment.
This is how mindfulness first entered my lab as a possible “brain-training tool.” I wanted to know whether training our participants in mindfulness exercises could help them be more effective in high-pressure situations. Our basic definition of mindfulness was this: paying attention to present-moment experience without conceptual elaboration or emotional reactivity. I wondered if training people to keep attention in the here and now without editorializing or reacting, could serve as a kind of “mental armor.” Could it protect and strengthen their attention for when they most needed it?
We worked with mindfulness teachers and Buddhist scholars to identify the core mind-training practices that had persevered through the centuries. We offered these practices to hundreds of participants, exploring their effects in the lab, in the classroom, on the sports field, and on the battlefield. This work led to some exciting moments of discovery, and I’ll highlight several of these studies and stories throughout this book. But for now, I’ll skip to the end, to the zillion-dollar question: Did it work? Could mindfulness training protect and strengthen attention?
The answer was a resounding yes. In fact, mindfulness training was the only brain-training tool that consistently worked to strengthen attention across our studies.
Our crisis of attention is fundamentally an ancient problem, not a modern one. And an ancient solution—with some very modern updates—is the promising, science-based way out of it.
As a researcher, my mission has been to bring the lens of brain science to the millennia-old practice of mindfulness meditation to explore if and how it can train the brain. What we’ve uncovered is new evidence that, with training, mindfulness can change the way the brain works by default so that our attention—that precious resource—is protected and readily available, even in the face of high stress and high demand.
We are living in a time of uncertainty and change. Many of us are experiencing an atmosphere of stress and threat that constantly activates our minds’ tendency to mentally travel to an alternate reality. The more stress and uncertainty we face, the more our minds journey to a desired or dystopic mental destination. Often we are in fast-forward mode. We’re trying to puzzle through all the uncertainty. We’re mentally planning for events that aren’t plannable. We’re gaming out scenarios that may never come to pass.
Sometimes we mentally travel out of the present moment because it’s tough to be in it. Military service members tell me, “I don’t want to be in this situation. Why should I stay in the present?” We all want to escape sometimes. But as we’ll see in the coming chapters, escapism and other mental coping tactics, like positive thinking and suppression (Just don’t think about it!), don’t help us under high-stress circumstances. In fact, they make things worse.
We’re missing out on what’s happening right here, right now, right in front of us. And not only do we want to experience the moments of our lives, we need to be able to gather information from the present moment, to observe and absorb what’s happening in the here and now, so that we can navigate the actual future that unfolds, meet challenges as they arise, and be fully present when it matters most.
At the beginning of this chapter, I told you that your mind would wander, that you wouldn’t be able to keep your attention steady all the way through—that you’d miss half of what I said. It was, admittedly, meant as a bit of a challenge for you to try. But it wasn’t really fair. Imagine that, instead, I’d asked you to pick up the heaviest ball you can lift and then hold it in your hands the entire time you were reading, with no warning or preparation. Of course, you couldn’t do it for very long without training for this task first—by practicing holding up that weight for longer and longer stretches of time.
We tend to accept that, to improve our physical health, we need to engage in physical exercise. Somehow, we just don’t think the same way about psychological health or cognitive capacity. But we should! Just as specific types of physical training can strengthen certain muscle groups, this type of mental training can strengthen attention—if you do it. Lieutenant General Walter (Walt) Piatt—one of the many people you’ll meet in these pages who has transformed his life and leadership style through mindfulness practice—immediately saw the parallel between physical training and mental training when I started working with his troops. He said, “Mindfulness training gave our soldiers push-ups for the mind.”
I wish I could just tell you how to reclaim your attention, and you could go off and do it. I wish that reading this introduction was all you needed to do. But as we’ve seen over and over again, knowledge isn’t enough. Wanting it to be different isn’t enough. Trying isn’t enough. You actually have to train in a particular way. Our evolutionary history has primed our minds to work a certain way by default—we can’t simply stop it. Instead, we can train the brain to shift away from specific default tendencies that aren’t serving us. We can train our attention to better serve us when we need it most.
And here’s the good news you may have been waiting for: you can do this in as little as twelve minutes a day.
The precise science of how much and what kind of mindfulness practice is most beneficial is a rapidly developing field. But as of this moment, our research and best understanding of how to train the brain indicates that if you engage in regular mindfulness practice, for as little as twelve minutes per day, you can protect against that stress- and overwhelm-related decline in attention. If you can do more than twelve minutes? Great! The more you do, the more you benefit.
This book will take you deep into your brain’s attention system: how it works, why it’s so critical for everything you do, how and why it gets depleted, and what kind of consequences you suffer when it does. Then—like the finely tuned exercises that a personal trainer gives you—I’ll take you through specific exercises that target, train, and optimize the brain networks of your attention system. By the end, you’ll understand the vulnerabilities of attention, and know how to overcome them by training the brain. We’ll start with a “push-up,” and build up to a full workout.
Mindfulness training is a form of brain training. This ancient but enduring mental practice isn’t an abstract or exclusively philosophical endeavor. It’s a battle for the resources to live your life.
When I started this research, I was on a mission to recruit people who had highly demanding, time-pressured, and stressful professional lives. One group we partnered with consisted of active-duty military service members, deploying to war zones. During active combat, they experienced circumstances that were volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous—VUCA for short. They helped us put mindfulness training to the test. We wanted to know if it could help them under the most challenging circumstances—and it did. But when I began this work back in 2007, I never expected that a dozen years later, the whole world would become a VUCA laboratory.
We are all in a period of high demand. It can be intense, unpredictable, even scary. And we still need to get through it. Right now, this is what the future looks like: it’s going to get more information-dense, more interconnected, more technology-reliant. It may even become more divisive and disorienting as we rise to meet the challenges of the twenty-first century. If that’s what we’re up against, we need to train as if our lives depend on it—because they do. Our goal: not only to survive, but also to thrive. We need to continue to navigate toward what we most want to do, whom we most want to be, and how we want to lead both others and ourselves through the inevitable stresses of life, through times of uncertainty.
People talk a lot about resilience. What you’ll learn in this book is really about what I call “pre-silience.” Resilience means bouncing back from adversity. But what we want is to train our minds so that we maintain our capacities even as we are experiencing challenge. This means we need something that we can start doing right now. And that’s what we have at our fingertips with mindfulness training. You don’t need any special equipment. All you need is your mind, your body, and your breath. You can start immediately.
With mindfulness training we can learn to protect and strengthen our most precious resource: our attention. You can train yourself to pay attention to your attention, to know—moment to moment—what your mind is up to, if it’s serving you well, and how to intervene if it’s not. As you do, you will build the capacity not only to greet moments of joy and awe more fully, but also to rise to the moments of challenge with skill and even ease. A riptide can carry you farther out to sea if you fight against it. But if you know how to navigate those waters, you can even use that strong current more effectively to get to where you want to go.