 So this is not a modern conundrum, it's got more modern challenges, but this is a very long-term set of challenges. So I think that that gives me a little bit more real, you know, I've obviously shifted and I'm gone from being a skeptic to now really a curious investigator of these topics. But it gives me a lot of respect for what these wisdom traditions, 5,000 years old plus, we're trying to do, they were trying to help us with a really fundamental problem. What's up everybody and welcome to the show today. We drop great content each and every week and we want to make sure that you guys get notified and in order to do that you're gonna have to smash that subscribe button and hit that notification bell and if you've gotten a lot of value out of this make sure you give us a like and share our videos with your friends. And if we look at the science of late, it certainly feels to us that we've had this discussion that attention spans and distractibility is getting higher, attention spans are getting shorter, much of the content we consume, the things that we choose to spend our time engaging with, shorter and shorter bite-size nuggets. Is that what you are seeing in the lab and what science is showing as we introduce technology into our lives to overwhelm these systems? No. That's kind of a surprising answer but our attention spans are not shorter. They're not. That's not the scale at which evolution works by the way. 15 years of having a smartphone, your brain's not going to completely be different. The reason it feels like our attention spans are shorter is because, again, attention is working totally normally as it should be. So let's think about why we even say that, right? So going back to that flashlight, we're on that darkened path, we're walking, we're guiding ourselves, all of a sudden you hear rustling behind you. What are you going to do? You're going to flip that flashlight back there and you're going to point to figure out what the heck's going on, right? You're alarmed, you might be a threat. So the capacity of this brain-orienting system to be directed is, we've already talked about. Yes, you can pull that flashlight and point it, but it also gets pulled and yanked around. And what are the kinds of things that yank it around? Threatening things, fear inducing things, novelty. You might even say in the broad category of like sex, drugs and rock and roll, like everything alluring that might have something to do with our survival advantage, we are going to want to pay attention to that. In an unending, unceasing fashion, that's what our social media content actually is. And by the way, who's the number one person we like to pay attention to? Ourselves. So you know, if you now look at your social media feed, look at the kinds of things you click on. And when you're in your doom scrolling mode or just your zombie scrolling mode, think what is it that TikTok is showing me video after video after video? It's going to be something in this category. So it's not that there's anything wrong with our attention. The bigger issue is we're not in control anymore. We are allowing that automatic system, the one that gets pulled by certain content to drive our actions. That means we've got to approach this differently. We can't battle against it. It's our biology, but we can use these two other systems to actually better serve ourselves because the flashlight is just getting yanked all over the place. Well, there's a lot of good and a lot of bad. And that answer. Yeah, exactly. We were hoping that we would say yes. Science is showing that our attention spans are getting shorter, so we could all breathe a collective sigh of relief. But of course, if you think about the way that these systems work, it makes complete sense that technology is just harnessing more distraction, but it's not having a biological impact on us. That's a convenient excuse for you just being distracted by these devices. So how can we marshal those other two systems? Because now that we know our attention is valued by Facebook, it's valued by these companies and made them unicorns and billionaires, how can we start to take it back and create and use that flashlight and that attention in a meaningful way for ourselves instead of being overly distracted? And this is exactly why one of this definition in these three pieces to be brought out for everyone that understand, because it plays along with us feeling that our attention spans have gotten shorter because the floodlight is picking up so much that is going on around us, which that becomes our conclusion. Oh, I guess my attention span's gotten shorter. So perfect. So now let's talk about what we can do about it, right? Because that's what Asia, you were asking me a moment ago. And the first thing is to realize, I don't know where my attention is often, right? As I said, the starting point number was 50% of the time, our attention is not on the task at hand. And that means not just external distractibility. Let's say we do figure out a way to hide out in some forest retreat where we have no technology. That number is not going to go down much. We're still going to be about 50% distracted. And it's really funny when you actually look back, because I was getting very curious, like how long has people felt this way, that their mind is just all over the place? You know, is this a modern problem really? But it's not. You know, there's these funny stories about like medieval monks talking about, you know, they're wanting to be good monastics, but they're just, they keep thinking about lunch when they're supposed to be praying. And they break their relationships with their families. And just like they're just trying to figure out a way to get the mind to just stay put. And it can't. And even when you think back to sort of the ancient roots of, from the wisdom traditions of things like mindfulness meditation, they came out of that sense of the human mind suffering. So this is not a modern conundrum. It's a, it's got more modern challenges, but this is a very long-term set of challenges. So I think that that gives me a little bit more real, you know, my, my, I've obviously shifted, and I'm, I'm gone from being a skeptic to now really a curious investigator of these topics. But it gives me a lot of respect for what these wisdom traditions, 5000 years old plus, we're trying to do. They were trying to help us with a really fundamental problem. And now if we go to some of the practices, I think it, for me as a neuroscientist, it's like thrilling because in some ways they figured out, oh my gosh, they kind of knew all this stuff. You know, they didn't have the brain science, but they kind of knew what they were doing because it fits perfectly into this three system view. So let's think of one of the practices I describe in the book, I call the finder flashlight practice. And again, I'm borrowing from the framework I laid out from modern neuroscience, but it actually is something that more fundamentally is part of every mindfulness program that's probably been around for thousands of years, mindfulness of breathing. And so maybe I'll just describe what the practice is. And in the book, I'll describe how we want to work up to about 12 minutes a day. And that's based on our work with soldiers and elite athletes and special operations forces, etc. But let's not even go there. Let's just say we're going to do this for like, I don't know, 30 seconds right now and just get the basics down of what the practice and what the exercise is. So does that sound good? Yeah, yes. So the first request when you want to sit down to do this practice, and I do recommend that as you're starting out, just find a quiet place so that you're not challenging yourself unnecessarily. Don't probably do it with all your technology surrounding you and blurring at you. So try to find a quiet place undistracted from external factors. And the task here is to sit comfortably in this kind of alert, almost dignified posture. Like you're doing something serious here, but not really uptight. So I'd say upright, not uptight. Take it seriously. It's a task of waking up, not falling asleep. You don't want to be slouchy and grouchy. And pay attention to the sensations of breathing. Now, what I mean by that is take the flashlight and get granular. Like, what is most prominent in your sensory experience tied to breathing? Is it the coolness of air moving in and out of your nostrils? Is it your chest moving up and down? Maybe you feel something in your back? Doesn't matter what it is for you. You just figure out what that is, kind of check it out, and then think about this sort of just image of you pointing that flashlight of your attention to those prominent, breath-related sensations. And kind of hold it there. Just keep it focused there. Soon enough, if we did this for, let dead air for 10 seconds, and we just did this. So just let's try it right now. Just focus your flashlight of attention on those breath-related sensations. If your eyes closed, if you feel comfortable doing that, just breathing, focusing. And if it hasn't happened yet, it surely will. Your mind has wandered away from those breath-related sensations. It's off to another thought or another sensation or memory. It doesn't matter what, but it's not pointing to the breath anymore. What do you do in that moment? Well, first of all, it's a win. You just realized, oh my gosh, I'm not paying attention to breath-related sensations. All you got to do now is take that flashlight, redirect it back. So all we're doing for the short practice is focusing, noticing, and redirecting. And a lot of my wonderful military colleagues just call that the push-up for the mind, that we are just doing a quick mental workout. And we repeat that over and over again and work up to about 12 minutes a day. And it can be very beneficial. So I hope that was helpful just to kind of get a sense of this quick practice. And I hope that it kind of connects the dots between what we talked about with these three systems because obviously the flashlight's important. We just pointed it where we wanted it to go. The floodlight's important because it gave us insight into where the heck the flashlight was pointed. It's like, what's going on right now? What is happening in this moment? And then the juggler executive system kicked in and said, get back on track. Come on, get back on track. And when we think about this as supporting all three of these systems and exercising them over and over again, it can feel less like a burden or something we can't achieve and something just much more like we're just doing it. We don't argue with ourselves when we're doing reps with some kind of weight. We're not like, oh, why is this weight so heavy? It's like, we understand the challenge and we're going to do what feels comfortable and maybe push ourselves a little bit. Same idea with the mind. Exactly that, you start to beat yourself up and get down on yourself. Like, why does this seem easier for others? Am I doing it right? But that's part of the practice. That's part of the challenge and that's normal. And a lot of what I hope we're doing today for our audience is just normalizing these things. You're not alone. This is biological processes in our brain doing what it needs to do to keep us alive. And we need to be more mindful and more present of these processes to harness them for what we want out of life, to direct our focus and attention to the tasks that really matter to us. Exactly. You said it so beautifully that, you know, we're doing this for a reason. We're not doing it to be awesome breath followers. Nobody cares if you can follow the sensations of your breath is so that we can take that capacity into the rest of our lives. But yes, we want to just reframe. If the moment you notice your mind has wandered, you feel like you lost something and you use that phrase. I think it's really telling phrase. You actually found something. You found that you don't, you know where your attention is right now and it's not where it needs to be. So reframe that moment of realizing your mind has wandered away as a tiny little win. Because if you didn't have that win, you could be off planning your next vacation or thinking about the taxes you've got to pay. You could be off for a very long time. So for me as I was practicing, you know, in those early days, I remember thinking, oh, wow, it's not that I'm staying steady for longer periods of time. It's that I'm earlier to notice when I'm off task. It's like I'm getting more, I don't have to have a full blown fantasy about something. It's just more like, oh, my mind feels a little unsteady. I can get it back fast. So we'll start establishing in ourselves and oftentimes we might even feel like, man, I'm so distracted. We might feel more distracted than hopefully you'll realize, nope, you're just checking in with what's actually already happening. It's creating those guardrails so you don't go so far off track that an hour has passed and you haven't completed your task. It's recognizing it sooner. It doesn't mean it's going to go away. It doesn't mean that struggle will no longer be there. But paying closer attention to those signs can allow you to redirect it in a meaningful way. And I know what comes up for a lot of people in our audience who have children is the struggle that they are now seeing their children go through around focus and attention. And again, use of devices. And it's a common question that a lot of parents in our X Factor Accelerator Program ask, what can we do to help our kids maintain better focus and attention? They feel that their kids are not present or tuning out and it can be difficult for them to communicate. And we know that attention plays an important role in establishing great relationships in our lives. As parents, and I know you have kids, what are your strategies, not only for your own attention, but to help them build these tools at a younger age? Oh my gosh, that's a big one. The first thing I'd say, and it's such a natural impulse, right? As parents, we love our children. We do anything for them. And it's like help them. I would say, in the spirit of loving them, work on yourself. And it sounds like I'm copping out in an answer, but I'm really serious because what I realized, even with my children, and they were quite young when I was really getting the sense that I'm super out of it. I'm not here. If I can show up, if I can model what it means to fully pay attention to them and they experience what that feels like, there's just a natural inclination to want to do that back. So I would just say, we can definitely talk about strategies for children, but really don't bypass the effort, and not even effort, I want to say, the commitment to support yourself being better at doing this. And I would say my children are probably way better at at dealing with technology challenges than I am. I mean, they both had, at some point, I asked them the same question, like, what do you do when you find yourself on Instagram? They're like, oh, well, they both had said, they deleted all the apps that were distracting them. And then they put timers on things that they knew that they would have to use for school, like YouTube or whatever, to go see a class video. And I was like, what, you know, so they're using external ways to really control which I don't think is a bad approach, but really the key here is going to be having more internal awareness of where your attention is moment by moment. And like just to unpack that, you know, oftentimes, it's definitely happening to me. I mean, less and less as I've been becoming more aware and practicing more, but you're just sitting there. The next minute, you have the phone in your hand and you've been scrolling for 10 minutes. And you might even get that kind of icky feeling like, I can't get off of this thing, right? But did you notice when you picked up the phone? Did you notice when the facial recognition software allowed you in to access all your apps? Did you notice clicking on the app? Did you notice what happened next? No, it's all a blank because it becomes this sort of ballistic, mindless, automatic thing that we do. And when we start applying these same things, these same principles of focus, notice, redirect, to our more granular moment by moment nature, we can intervene a lot more easily.