As we’ve discussed throughout this book, you need attention for almost everything you want to do, and to do it well. The brain’s attention system serves as our mental core. Like the body’s physical core:
While a plank, bridge, or sit-up each targets slightly different muscles, they all improve coordination between muscle groups and bolster core strength. Mindfulness exercises are intended to strengthen and improve coordination between brain networks that carry out a variety of attentional functions: our ability to direct and maintain focus, notice and monitor ongoing conscious experience, and manage goals and behavior. With more repetition comes improved coordination between these brain networks—and greater core strength. What this feels like in our lives is greater mental stability and agility, which ultimately empower our effectiveness and fulfillment, and deepen our sense of well-being and purpose.
This book has introduced you to three types of practices that work to strengthen attention. The first category of practices was about strengthening concentrative focus—the intention was to narrow and steady the beam of your attentional flashlight. These practices build your attentional control. Your goal was to direct your attention first to a specific target object—your breath (Find Your Flashlight)—and then to specific bodily sensations (Body Scan), and maintain it there for some period of time. When your attention wandered away from that object, you brought it back. Together, each of these steps comprises the “attentional reps” of the practice. Focus, maintain, notice, redirect. Repeat. The more reps you do, the more you strengthen these aspects of your attention.
The second category of practices is about keeping watch, as you monitor and notice the ongoing processes and content in your moment-to-moment experiences. Unlike the concentrative practices, here your attention should be receptive and broad. These were the open monitoring practices you tried. The challenge with these was different: There was no particular target for your attention; instead, you maintained a stable watch—noticing, monitoring, receptive, open. You took an observational stance. You allowed thoughts, emotions, and sensations to arise and then pass away.
We find that when people train using open monitoring techniques, which are some of the more challenging exercises, they strengthen that open, receptive form of attention. Practice this regularly, and you will be more capable of recognizing, faster, that your thoughts are not facts. You’ll be able to decenter and drop the story with more ease. Just as your body grows stronger by doing regular physical training, this mental training will build meta-awareness, a heightened awareness of the rising and passing away of the contents and processes of consciousness, such as thinking, feeling, and perceiving.
Doing these practices consistently over time will change the functioning and structures of your brain. In fact, even the very first twelve minutes you spend will immediately change how your brain operates—but only for those twelve minutes. After, it will “default” back to its typical mode of processing. But over time, as you establish a consistent practice of five or more days per week, week after week, these new ways of paying attention increasingly become the default. While this adds up to better brain functionality, how do concentrative and receptive practices support us in the real world? How do they help support a peak mind?
William James, the philosopher and psychologist who long ago pointed out that training a wandering mind would be the best kind of education we could offer, also observed: “Like a bird’s life, [the stream of consciousness] seems to be made [up] of an alternation of flights and perchings.” A peak mind balances and values the flights and perchings, the doing and being, the directing and receiving.
You learned a third type of practice as well, which emphasized connection and built on your strengthening of concentrative and receptive attention. But unlike the prior practices that emphasize observing the unfolding of whatever is occurring in the here and now, the connection practice is prescriptive: We are directing attention in a concentrative manner to the concept of well-wishes toward ourselves and others. During this practice, attention is utilized for reappraising and perspective-taking. This type of practice is designed to help us move out of a limited but accustomed way of paying attention and to experiment with using a different angle: we look at ourselves as worthy of receiving well-wishes for our happiness, safety, health, and ease. For example, you may be used to thinking of yourself as “too busy” for this kind of activity; you may even find it uncomfortable to accept these wishes. This practice is experimenting with allowing ourselves to receive them. We also do this for others as we progress through the practice. This is another key aspect of a peak mind—the capacity to be connected and caring toward ourselves and others.
Here, I’ve laid out a recommended weekly schedule, based on our most current data from the lab and the field, for training your attention. The instructions are informed by current science on behavior change: Start with extremely small goals, achieve them, don’t miss out on the feel-good sense of success (this is key!), and repeat. Slowly increase the size of the goal and keep achieving it, and you’ll continue the rewarding feeling of accomplishing it. This is how to best support yourself in creating a habit—go small, feel the success of completion.
Success here does not mean that your mind never wandered, or that you didn’t move at all, or that you experienced bliss, peace, or relaxation. Rather, success means you put in the time and did the practice. Success is completion. To ensure that you complete the practice, tie it to some other activity that you successfully complete each day. It could be brushing your teeth, exercising, making yourself a cup of coffee. Researchers on the science of behavior change and habit creation recommend choosing an “anchor activity” for any new thing you want to add to your day. When you do the “anchor,” you perform the new habit you want to build. So, for example, your anchor could be coffee: “When I turn on the coffee maker to brew, I sit down and do my practice.”
Throughout this book, I asked you to do three minutes per practice when I introduced you to each of the practices. As you embark on habit formation of daily practice, I encourage you to keep the time demands to 50 percent of what you feel is comfortable. Then once you are consistent, slowly expand the time. In the formal program, I recommend twelve minutes of daily practice. Remember: it’s not a race. Do what’s manageable. Straining doesn’t make for faster progress.
The schedule runs for four weeks. My hope is that, once you hit the end of week four, you’ll begin to experience practice-driven shifts in your daily life and that those results will keep you inspired to keep going. But here is the key: for mindfulness training to work for you, you’ve got to work it. This means a commitment to practice. Practice equals progress.