 We are moving toward a culture of constantly asking people to be available in their jobs. 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, leaders have to be completely intentionally aware, emotionally regulated and able to make sound decisions because the rest of their team is going to rely on them. On the other hand, people that aren't the leaders, that are sort of lower in the hierarchy and are receiving these demands, their capacity to pay attention is constantly being challenged. And when we don't have access to our attention, basically everything else starts falling apart. Most recently what we've been trying to do is figure out if we can bolster attention. We've been using a technique called mindfulness meditation. So mindfulness is a mental mode of being in the present moment without emotional reactivity or being judgmental. Mindfulness training can actually change the structure of the brain in very specific ways. The parts of the brain that are very tightly packed or gyrified would be the technical term. They're better connected with other regions of the brain. They're healthier. What we're finding is that long-term mindfulness practitioners have more gyrification in certain spots of the brain. There's a circuit in the brain that we now call the default mode circuit that is more active when people are resting and deactivated or less active when people are doing an attentional demanding task. Why is it that when you tell people to rest, there's an entire circuit of the brain that's more active? They weren't just simply resting. What they were doing is self-related thinking because when you have people simply rest, what they tend to do is planning, ruminating, savoring. All those kind of self-related private thoughts are happening. This mind wandering, this ever-pervasive mind wandering has a lot of bad consequences. When you ask people their mood, it tends to be more negative after they've been mind wandering. So if we could cut the cycle of constant mind wandering, not being present to what you're actually trying to do, we might improve people's baseline levels of happiness and reduce the amount of kind of chronic dysphoria that people experience. The bad news is that the more we mindwander, the more our chromosomes might be negatively impacted, which means our longevity might be impacted negatively. Telomeres are the end caps of our chromosomes and the length of our telomeres determines our longevity. Those telomeres are constantly degrading and there's an enzyme called telomerase that goes in and repairs it. When you bring a group of people in that are stressed out people and you ask them to tell you how often they're mind wandering. Those people that are mind wandering more often have shorter telomeres and less telomerase. And if we sent people on a three month intensive retreat with the amount of telomerase and their blood be impacted by this, what was found is that how much people practiced was related to how much well-being they reported. And that well-being was tied to the amount of telomerase, which means not only is there sort of a problem of mind wandering, but there's a potential solution, which is this type of contemplative training.