 What we're doing is mental time travel, most of us. So back to that MP3 analogy, we're in fast forward. So we're planning, we're thinking about the next thing or we're in reverse, reflecting on past experiences. And under high stress situations, which often we're in, it's not just the productive fast forward and rewind, but now when we're fast forward, we're catastrophizing, we're worrying, we're making up doomscapes that just not only haven't happened yet, but they just never happen, right? What's up everybody and welcome to the show today. We drop great content each and every week and we wanna 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. You know, like I remember the first time I started really thinking about how to use this as it relates to Instagram. It was like, what am I needing right now? Like before I even press it, what do I want? I don't know, what's the engagement? I want something, maybe I wanna see what Emmy outfits people are wearing. Like, okay, fine, do that. That's your goal, get that input, and then stop. Right, it's like make micro goals for even what you want, but that provides some limits and barriers. But I actually wanted to connect it back to, if you don't mind what you asked me a few moments ago regarding ADHD and real attentional disorders and challenges people have. It ends up children, they have less developed frontal lobes than adults, and the frontal lobes are key part of the network that allows all three of these attention networks to actually function well. So realize that attention is developmentally slow to mature, and for those of us over the age of 35, maybe not neither of you are, but it's on the fastest decline as well. So our frontal lobes are, they don't fully develop to our 25, and they're on 35, they start kind of dwindling. So we've got a good 10 year window where we're kind of at our peak of attentional functioning, but thankfully there are things that we can do, and actually some of the really interesting research regarding mindfulness is that it has sort of this youth inducing properties of keeping frontal lobes kind of cordically thick and more healthy looking, but in people that have ADD, actually the clinical diagnosis of ADD, it is the case that they tend to have attentional dysregulation, and it's really important to understand what that means. It doesn't mean that they're always distracted. It means that each of these systems and potentially multiple systems are not functioning normally. So sometimes it can actually look like the flashlight is just stuck on things for too long. It can't have its normal buoyancy. And when we did a project with adults with ADD, I mean it was specifically on mindfulness training for adults with ADD, because I was very curious how it might help and how we might have to change the way that they practice to support them. The first thing we learned is that, first of all, to say we didn't tell them to do anything differently with their medication. If they were taking it, take it, do whatever you normally do. Participate in this class was about eight weeks long, and I gave that number earlier of 12 minutes a day of practice. We didn't even have them start practicing 12 minutes till the eighth week. So it was a very slow ramp up, right? And all the practices were very active. I would never actually have an ADD group have them sit quietly and not move and keep their eyes closed. It's like, we're gonna walk, we're gonna move, and we're gonna pay attention to the sensations as we're walking, very active things. But here's what was kind of interesting. It is the case that adults, and this is just known separate from mindfulness, that adults with ADD tend to have higher reported mind wandering. But if they also have another feature, which is actually tied to that floodlight function, something called meta-awareness so that they have more capacity to check in with their mind moment by moment, they don't suffer as much from the mind wandering. So we already know from the kind of studies on not mindfulness, just ADD, that meta-awareness is something that is really, really beneficial even if you have a clinical diagnosis. And that's the function that these adults that were going through our eight week program reported back. And they said some of the most amazing things, like, I still take my medication, but now I don't take my medication and play video games for eight hours. I actually think to myself, what do I want to be doing right now with this focus that I have? And just the most creative gifts I ever received as a researcher too, by the way. So I just think it's important to realize that these same things that we talked about for all of us apply for people that might have sort of the extremes of challenge based on any of the brain systems that we reviewed. This brings up two points that I wanted to get at. Number one, I don't know how much research you had done into hallucinogenics and how they take over attention and being able to check out something for hours on end and it becomes your whole world. So there is that. But also something that was in the book that goes along with that because when you're in that state, it's usually you're in play and you're making something out of the situation and out of this attention and your mind is taken over. And you talked in your book about staying in play and finding those moments where you lose yourself in what you're doing. Yeah, yeah. Gosh, Jenny, you really read the book well. That makes me really happy. A plus, no, always a professor. No, absolutely. So maybe unpack what I mean by stay in play because it actually, it's not about play like you're playing an instrument or something like that. It's really regarding the model of the brain as an MP3 player. So typically when we have mind wandering, which is again this 50% off task thoughts during an ongoing task or activity, what we're doing is mental time travel, most of us. So back to that MP3 analogy, we're in fast forward. So we're planning, we're thinking about the next thing or we're in reverse, reflecting on past experiences. And under high stress situations, which often we're in, it's not just the productive fast forward and rewind, but now when we're fast forward, we're catastrophizing, we're worrying, we're making up doomscapes that just not only haven't happened yet, but they just never happen, right? And when we're winding, we're sometimes looping on bad experiences and we're kind of stuck in this kind of like a tsunami of our own making. So when I say stay on play, what I'm talking about is essentially what I see mindfulness as, this capacity to pay attention to our present moment experience without a story about it, without reacting to it. And that's what we're cultivating through these kinds of practices like the short one that we did. It's your breath, you cannot be saved for later. The breath is only happening right now. So it's really helpful for in the now. You know, it's like, it's a true, I'm breathing right now. And when we find ourselves yanked away in time, we can bring ourselves back to the here and the now very, very quickly and efficiently. And being in that mode allows us to get more of the raw data of our moment to moment life so we can intervene when we need to. Well, you mentioned stress. And we've touched on this a little bit. And I think going through the pandemic, you call it VUCA in the book. We've all experienced this period of high demand. And many of us have fallen into these doomscapes where we are scrolling and catastrophizing and compounding the stress with our dysregulation of our attention. So what is VUCA? And how can we actually start to work through this when we are in a stressful situation? Because I totally understand mindfulness when things are going well and it seems like you're just getting your focus and attention back. But many of us are in a place where we don't even feel that things are going well. And it's hard for us to get out of that stress mode to even start building this resilience and get our focus back. 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 going to 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 friend. Oh, that's so interesting. Because actually the reason that I started working in this whole area with the kind of populations that we work with in my lab, like I mentioned, you know, military service members or first responders, medical and nursing professionals is because they have to operate when things are not going great. In fact, we rely on them as a society to be at their best when by any stretch of the imagination, these are some of the worst circumstances human beings have to suffer through, right? War, fire, you know, emergency surgeries, et cetera. So I actually was always thinking of mindfulness as being more useful in the context of real world, real life challenge. But I can understand what you're saying is that, you know, in some sense, it feels like it's easier to do when there's not like a catastrophe happening. And that's certainly the case, but sort of the hardest test is being able to show up even when things are difficult. So the first thing is that we're not trying to disabuse ourselves. We're not trying to put on rose-colored glasses and see the world any differently. In fact, we're doing the opposite. We're cultivating the capacity to see what is happening in the moment, really see not exaggerated stories of uncertainty, not, oh, it woes me, it used to be so much better, but what is actually happening right now? And you know, I describe mindfulness as not just present-centered attention, but non-judgmental, non-editorializing and non-reactive. So it's got these very clear qualities of how we're paying attention. I think that's really important because we don't do that. Usually we have a director's cut of our lives, right? It's like we're watching a movie and it's like, oh, in this scene, I'm blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's like, we've got the reality and then we've got the story about the reality. And they're so fused together that we don't really know if it's the story that's driving the reality or if it's really there. So part of what mindfulness is allowing us to do is to start watching our mind in that way. Is this the raw data or is this an overlay of my expectation? And doing that can help dial down these extremes that in our wonderful capacity to simulate reality and worlds in our own mind can sometimes drive us to really exaggerating the amount of stress hormones our body has to deal with. So just living with the circumstances more clearly. So let's just, maybe I'll say one more thing and then I'm gonna go back to kind of talking through what you asked me about, which is vuka. So what is vuka? You know, that's the, maybe the first thing, I'll just break it down. The term actually we think comes from the US Army War College and it comes from a really key description of most combat situations. So v, volatile, u, uncertain, c, complex and a, ambiguous. And you gotta be able to perform in vuka circumstances. What you need to do is have your full capacity and you don't wanna drain your batteries by thinking about all the bad stuff that could happen cause you gotta deal with bad stuff right now. People may actually be shooting at you. You don't have to imagine it, it's happening. So I think partly it is to build this, what I would probably call mental toughness of I'm here for it, no matter what. There's no part of me that's trying to slip away because if I don't fully have myself here, there's no way I'm gonna be able to maneuver through the complexity and, you know, all these other circumstances that I'm dealing with. Well, I definitely feel that many of us have gone through this pandemic experience feeling that, in large part, for maybe even the first time in our lives. You know, many of us don't go into combat. We're not in such a long period of uncertainty ambiguity. And of course, with the way media is portraying what's going on and the way we're seeing the numbers and the data, there are these narratives that are developing that are taking hold that, of course, make things seem a lot worse than they may be in our experience of it. And that catastrophizing creates a higher stress for us to look for the distraction, right? It's easier to doom scroll or to go on social media and look for the fun dance videos to not deal with the here and now and be present necessarily in what's going on around us. So if someone in our audience is feeling that, that need to sort of remove themselves from the present, and what we're seeing is actually that is not helpful for us developing the focus and the attention we need, how can we overcome those challenges in this higher stress environment? Yeah, no, just to say, I never, you know, all the work that I've been doing really over in the context of mindfulness has been with these very extreme in subsense groups that are experiencing things like pre-deployment training, deployment itself, hurricane season, you know, whatever it is, and even undergrads that are going through the academic semester. I never thought the whole world would be experiencing that. And that is essentially the reality of what we're experiencing. It's true that we are in a VUCA circumstance. So I want to kind of lean on the learnings and the insights we got from working with those populations. The first thing is that our tendencies to want to escape. And by the way, a lot of military service members said the same thing to me too. I don't want to be in this moment. This moment sucks. You know, I just did, I do a, I just had to do a really long hike and my boots are digging into my feet. And I don't want, I want to escape. And then of course we have the conversation regarding, well, is it actually going to help you to ignore the fact that your feet are not doing well? You know, when you start feeling that they're cutting and maybe change the way your socks are or whatever. Like really taking it granular to say, it may seem like it's a good idea to escape, but actually it's not going to serve you. Same thing goes with frankly in the pandemic. Like you don't want to have to think about the fact that anybody you encounter, you know, especially with the Delta variant raging at these moments, anybody you encounter may be unvaccinated and you may be getting exposed to a deadly virus. That is the truth. If that is the reality, you could ignore it and pretend everything's great. Or you could actually say, you know what, I'm going to take some extra care, maybe keep my social distance, wear a mask, whatever the responsible approaches are so that the reality isn't met with my disregard for it.