How to Strengthen Your Focus When Demands Never Let Up

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0:20Welcome to HBR on Leadership. These episodes are case studies and conversations with the world's top business and management experts, hand-selected to help you unlock the best in those around you. I'm HBR Senior Editor and Producer, Amanda Kersey. As a leader, noticing where your attention goes is a skill that affects your judgment, learning, listening, basically every aspect of how you think and show up. In this HBR IdeaCast episode from 2021, host Alison Beard speaks with a scientist who spent decades studying how the mind directs attention, why it falters under strain, and mental exercises that rebuild it.

1:06She's Dr. Amishi Jha, professor of psychology at the University of Miami and the author of the book Peak Mind. Here's host Allison Beard. Amishi, thanks so much for being on the show. It's great to be here. So why do so many of us feel so distracted so much of the time? You know, even when we know where our focus should be, why do we have trouble putting it there? Great question. And, you know, I think you are absolutely not alone in that feeling of you can't quite catch your full attention, even if you have every intention to. But it ends up that our brain was actually built for distractibility.

1:48So the fact that we have this wandering mind that kind of roams around everywhere is a designed feature, not a flaw. It's just that unfortunately for us in this particular day and age, the demands are unending. and our attention does get not only yanked around, but actually is the target for many, many different aspects of our social media use and our technology use. So I do think it's a very real thing. Yeah, it certainly feels like a flaw. Sue, you talked about technology. Is it harder than ever to focus right now because of it? Or is that just in our heads? You'd think that this is some modern issue.

2:30In fact, I get asked often, you know, aren't our attention spans so much smaller than they used to be? And the reality is no, our attention is not any shorter than it's ever been. In fact, part of the issue with attention is that it's not just one thing, it's several things. And maybe breaking it down a little bit might help us understand why it is that we're feeling this way. But, you know, in the medieval times, There were monastics, there were monks that actually were complaining that even though they had left all of their sort of worldly goods and their family relationships and were now committed to spending their time connecting with God and in prayer, their minds were thinking about lunch and they were fast forwarding to the next event.

3:19And, you know, to me, that is very humbling because that means that this incessant distractibility that we experience is for sure probably exaggerated by our modern context, but it's not solely the result of our modern context. And many people who put themselves in situations where they really advantaged their ability to not be distracted, still experienced it. So you talked about breaking it down. How do we start to do that? So maybe we begin by just kind of describing what attention is. It is not just simply a brain resource, but it is something that actually allows us and fuels our capacity to do things like thinking and feeling and regulating our mood and our emotions, as well as connecting.

4:02To break it down, there are three main systems of attention. And the first one probably is familiar to everybody. In fact, we've been using the term attention. I think we default to understanding it as meaning focus. So we direct our focus towards something and whatever it is that we focus on, there's privileged access to that information. So, you know, right now, for me, it's whenever you speak, that's the focus of my attention. I'm going to hone in on your voice, not the hum of the air conditioner in my office or anything else that's happening around me. What you're eating for lunch today. Exactly.

4:37Like those monks. But right now, really, it's to hone in on what is most important for me to be able to do the task at hand. This system is formally called the brain's orienting system. And I like to think about it like a flashlight. Wherever it is that you direct that flashlight, you get privileged access to that information. It's crisp, clear. And everything else is really kind of a hazy, you know, it's in the void. We don't really see it. And the really cool thing about this system is that, you know, not only can we direct it toward the external environment, just like a literal flashlight, but we can direct that flashlight internally.

5:13If you have a train of thought, essentially you are taking that flashlight and shining it on that particular conceptual content and then following it. So it stays the center at the center of your mind, of your conscious experience. So we can direct the flashlight toward thoughts, emotions, memories, and even bodily sensations. So if right now, Alison, I say, you know, what are the sensations that you have on the bottoms of your feet, probably you can do it. Yeah, feeling them in my shoes. Right. But I'm positive that before I said that, you were not focused on that. And that aspect of what was present and accessible by you was not in your mind.

5:54But isn't the issue that the flashlight sometimes feels like a searchlight? Like it's not staying in one spot. It's just, you know, jumping to one thing and then jumping to another. Such a good point. So flashlight and surgelight in some sense are the same thing. What I'm talking about is this sort of strong beam. Not only can we direct it externally and internally, but it gets yanked. It gets magnetically pulled. And, you know, something we call clickbait, the kinds of content that draws the flashlight to it is not a mystery. Novel information, threatening information, anything having to do with yourself, bright lights, red, bright colors.

6:36I mean, yes, oftentimes we have every intention of directing that flashlight toward our, the report we're writing or even our conversation partner. And then it gets yanked away, not just by these external, you know, the ping of your phone or whatever text notification, but even that kind of content that, that threatening or, or fear inducing or self-related content that occurs within your own mind. Like a thought may pop up and boom, your attentional flashlight is on that thought and no longer listening to the words from your conversation partner. Right. But now let's talk about the other systems of attention because it doesn't work alone.

7:12And, you know, in some sense, what I'm about to say next will sound like what you described as a searchlight. It actually isn't. The formal term for the system is something we call the alerting system. The metaphor I like to use is like a floodlight. And unlike the orienting system, which is privileging certain kinds of content, the floodlight and the alerting system are advantaging the present moment. What is happening right now? I need to be alert to what is occurring right now. It's broad, receptive, and this is where we call it having a very low signal to noise ratio. Nothing is privileged over anything else.

7:47Everything is potentially something you may need to interact with. So I hope that, I mean, I think that once we describe how we use it, we get a sense. Yeah, of course, when I have to be vigilant and alert of what's happening right now, quite different than the other notion of attention that we talked about with this narrowing and selecting. Yeah. And you said there were three? What's the third? Something called executive control. And we use that term executive in cognitive neuroscience because it really is like the executive of a company. The executive's job is not to go in and do every single task that an organization is supposed to do is to manage and oversee to ensure that our goals and our behavior are aligned moment by moment.

8:27And then to guide course corrections when they're out of sync. We do things like maintain the goal, just hold it in mind. What is the actual goal right now? Or we inhibit distractions that come in, like swat it away. Nope, nope, not right now. Or we update, meaning new information comes in and we say, okay, the goal has been slightly revised. All of these are things I know people know from, you know, we all know from our own experience, we've got to do constantly. And the metaphor that I use for this system is like a juggler. We're really trying to keep all the balls in the air. And we are kind of dealing with the multiplicity of demands.

9:02And not only are we holding goals in mind, but we're using those goals to guide what the floodlight and the flashlight do. And all of these systems sort of work together in this coordinated fashion to allow us to have the full experience of our attention. And really peak mind to me is not only awareness and acknowledging these systems and their existence, but being able to fully engage in these systems as we need them and a better and more fluid coordination between them as we execute tasks in our work life and our personal lives. One of the lines in the book that I highlighted was, the researchers realized that the rest was never actually restful because people were using the time to think about themselves.

9:44And I greatly identified with that. But of course, you have studied people who are very good at focusing when they need to. Doctors, firefighters, judges, military drone operators. So what do they do differently? Or what have they learned to do differently? You know, frankly, they're just as vulnerable as the rest of us. So the skills and the training allow for focus to happen. The number I give, even at the outset of the book, is 50%. And 50 % is the amount of time that our minds, in general, on average, will wander away from the task at hand. So that vulnerability still exists. And it can go up under high stress circumstances.

10:30So what we ask as a society, we rely on first responders, for example, or even judges and lawyers and military service members and emergency professionals to operate at their best under circumstances that really characterize what will cripple attention. So, you know, a shorthand that I like to use that actually is from my colleagues at the U.S. Army War College is VUCA, volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. us, what we did across many, many studies is we said, okay, let's take these periods of time that we know are going to be sort of characterized by VUCA across these various professions like pre-deployment training in military soldiers, or even pre-season training in athletes, the academic semester and students, lawyers preparing for trial.

11:21These are things where it's preparatory in some sense, but it's going to be intensive and demanding. And at the end of that interval, you have to do something big, whether it's being deployed or deal with your competition season or take final exams. When you sample attention at the beginning of some period of time, let's say eight weeks, and then you have people come back into the lab eight weeks later or even four weeks later, and what's been happening in that period of time intervening is high demand and protracted demands, attention significantly gets worse. Your flashlight is not staying where you want it to be.

11:53The floodlight, the alerting system actually tends to be kind of hypervigilant where you might get even more reactive. And unfortunately, the juggler is dropping balls all over the place. Executive control is starting to decline. So this is a really troubling scenario. That's when I really was like, we got to find a solution. There must be some way to train the brain to protect against this. And what is it? We tried lots of different things. we tried, you know, what we might call brain training games where you're doing cognitively intensive tasks over and over again. And surely if you do these for multiple weeks, you get really good at these tasks, these games, your scores go up.

12:33But now if you change the conditions even slightly, your performance is sort of back down to normal. That's not very useful because most of life is not going to be like the brain training games. Then we tried things like positive mood induction. We tried light and sound devices. We tried a lot of different stuff. Nothing really protected against this decline. And then through a very unlikely series of circumstances, as often happens, I came upon learning about this thing called mindfulness meditation. And I actually decided to practice myself because I was myself having a strange crisis of attention at a point in my life when I was a young mom, first baby, really was trying to run the lab at the same time.

13:15My husband was in grad school. Every kind of circumstance that I just described as VUCA was happening to me. And I could not keep hold of my own attention. And it was kind of driving me nuts. I'm like, I studied this stuff. There's got to be a way. And a colleague of mine at a seminar, I ended up talking to him about this thing called mindfulness. This was early 2000s. So now, of course, when I say meditation, nobody's shocked. I mean, we hear about this all the time. Sometimes I get eye rolls like, oh God, I got to do that thing again. It was so hard, right? But here's why it made sense to me to try it and to bring it into the lab.

13:54My broad description of meditation is engaging in certain kinds of mental exercises to cultivate specific mental qualities. The exercises, the specific exercises you do and what mental qualities you are intending to cultivate differ based on various types of meditation traditions. So, for example, you know, Christian contemplative prayer or Sufi prayer or compassion meditation or transcendental meditation. These are all part of sort of the world's wisdom traditions. And there really are, from a cognitive neuroscientist, I'll just say a workout routine for your mind that's going to result in a certain kind of transformative effect.

14:32At least that's the strong hypothesis from the wisdom traditions themselves. When it comes to mindfulness meditation, the intention and the way that mindfulness is described is paying attention to our present moment experience, so being in the here and the now, without editorializing or reacting. And just to connect the dots, one of the biggest culprits of our sense of distractibility and feeling like we're in this kind of mental fog is mental time travel. And so the idea that there was this mental mode you could cultivate with specific practices to show up in the here and the now to keep, you know, I always talk about it as sort of, we're not rewind or fast forward.

15:11We're keeping the button right on play. This helps us actually not wander, but be better at being in the present moment when that's the thing we want to do. We can bring it forward on demand when we need it. So I have always struggled with mindfulness meditation, you know, because my mind does wander away from whatever I'm supposed to be focusing on, which is usually the breath and the body. And then I feel stressed about the fact that I'm doing a really bad job at the whole thing. But it seems like the mind wandering and practice of refocusing the attention where it's supposed to go is actually the exercise.

15:52That's right. You know, the first thing to say is if you are a human being who is conscious, you are going to mind wander. That the baseline is about 50%. That is the nature of the mind. There's nothing wrong with it. In fact, we can talk about all the amazing things that happen because our mind wanders, right? We can scan the environment. We can scan what else might need our attention. We can plan. We can deliberate. We can do all these things that are powerful. And In fact, there's some recent ideas that mind-wandering or just this notion of spontaneous thought that just thoughts pop into our head may be critical for our ability to create long-term memory.

16:29So we know that the brain is doing this for a reason. It's part of the design. And know that there is nothing wrong with mind-wandering. And here's a reframe that I would suggest because you're not alone in feeling frustrated. A very foundational practice would be pay attention to your breath-related sensations. For how long? Well, as you could see, the cover of my book says 12 minutes a day, and we can talk about how we landed on that number. But let's just say you start with one minute. You know, if you were to come to the lab and I was going to guide you in person, I would just ask you to take a seat, you know, comfortable, upright, alert posture.

17:03You really want to make sure you're taking this seriously. Like any other kind of training you would do, we dedicate this time. Like, okay, for the next minute, I'm doing this. The executive control is kicking in and saying, this is my task. Pay attention to breath-related sensations. and you could close or lower your eyes so you really don't have more distraction around you, then they're going to check in with breathing, that their body is breathing. And then pick something that really you can notice is prominent. Use that floodlight and say, what stands out right now? Like, what is it? It's tied to my breath.

17:35So is it the coolness of air moving in and out of my nostrils? Is it maybe my abdomen moving in and out or my chest fluctuating? whatever it is, it's a body sensation tied to breathing that you can commit to as this sort of target for your attentional flashlight for the duration of the practice. And then you're just going to set your flashlight to shine on it. And so focusing is the first step, really. That's all I've described so far. The next part of the instructions is actually we say like this, when you notice your mind has wandered. So notice I'm not saying if you happen to be one of those weirdos whose mind wanders, this is normative.

18:14When you notice your mind has wandered away from breath-related sensations, redirect it back. So essentially it's three steps. It's focusing, noticing, and redirecting and repeat over and over again. And it's funny, my military colleagues who are used to doing all kinds of physical reps call this the pushup. And what we found is that unlike all of those groups that degraded in their attention over that high demand, high stress intervals, people that did this 12 minutes a day under high demand circumstances did not decline in their attention. And they also protected their mood and perceived stress levels.

18:49It wasn't even bouncing back from attentional decline. It was that they didn't decline. They didn't have resilience. They had pre-esilience. They just stayed stable. So let's talk about certain situations. You've done this practicing, but then you're thrust into the real world. So say I have a big project I need to work on, but I find myself checking emails and Slack. What do I do to recenter myself in that moment? Okay, great, great question. So first thing I want to say is that's the whole point of why we do any of this. Nobody wants to be an Olympic level breath follower. Like that's a waste of time.

19:28Nobody cares about the breath that much. What you would do in that moment, the first thing is the fact that you noticed is a win. And I sometimes refer to it as paying attention to your attention. But there's this added dimension of, now I'm going to use a technical term, something called meta-awareness. So we are having an awareness of our awareness. We're becoming aware of the contents and processes at play in this moment. And so the way I would suggest doing it, and I actually call this, it's something called, And many, many meditation people use this, but I like to call it sort of like a hip pocket practice.

20:03Just bring it out whenever you need it. It's very simple. But again, you have to actually do it to benefit. So let's say you're really like caught up in this moment where like, I just can't get myself to get back. I keep getting pulled away. Well, the first thing is really try to monotask, meaning turn off all the notifications, see if you can silence your phone for a few minutes. honor the fact that you only have one flashlight. You don't have three. You have not two, you have one. Then I would say you got to do this, which is what I call that kind of mini practice we just talked through. I call it the find your flashlight practice.

20:40So when you have that moment where you're like, oh, I'm just not where I need to be, stop. It's an acronym. So whatever's going on, stop it mentally, physically, like just you're going to commit to not continuing to engage in that, whatever was going on. So S is for stop. T, take a breath. That's one really conscious, mindful breath. You're observing fully the sensations of breathing. That's where your flashlight is. So that's T. So stop, take a breath. O is observe. Like after you've taken that one breath, just check out what's going on. Internal landscape, external landscape, and then proceed.

21:20And in some sense, that short little practice, and I do it all the time at stoplights, and I do it at elevators. I'll do it anytime I'm stopped. I'll just do that. You've got the flashlight back in your hand now. And that's sort of a neutral point from which you can re-enter the task that you're trying to do. So how does improving focus in this way help not just with, you know, personal performance and frankly sanity, but also relationships at work. You know, how could it help someone be a better boss? Exactly. You know, so that's what I said at the outset is that it's not only important for thinking and feeling, which we would say, okay, we're doing those privately in our own minds, but connecting.

22:02So all three of those systems, the flashlight, the floodlight, the juggler, we use in the interpersonal domain in the social context. And that's why often people say, and this is kind of a famous quote by Ron Heifetz, like attention is the currency of leadership. And I would say more, it's the fuel for leadership. You need this in order to lead and to interact with other people. because we direct that flashlight, not just on what we want, but on other people, but even with the floodlight, right? So when we walk into a room and you kind of read the room, that's really being observant, low signal to noise.

22:39Anything is observed in the here and the now. And then of course the juggler, we're constantly dealing with other people and managing tasks. So all three systems are important in the interpersonal domain and they're important for cognitive functioning, decision-making. In fact, having a joint mental model with somebody else means that we're co-creating. Our attention is sort of aligning. We're sharing it with somebody else to create some kind of framework. And is there a way for leaders to encourage their team members to do all of this without being or seeming overbearing? I mean, I think that's a question for any leader for anything they want to do.

23:22Is there a way to do it without seeming over? The first thing I would say, you know, I get the same question from parents. Like, I want my kids to be more mindful. How do I do that? It's like, we want to bypass a step that is probably the most important step. Begin with yourselves. One thing that I know happens when leaders are embodied in this sort of mindful orientation Is subordinates and coworkers and team members notice? Like, what is going on? And, you know, oftentimes, like some of our military colleagues who are general officers will say things like, yeah, I can pivot much more easily and much more thoroughly.

23:59So my mind is not in the last meeting. I'm actually really here for this meeting. I can actually listen to what's being said and not like just like the emotionally intelligent way, which is of course important, but with the stability of mind to allow even difficult emotions to come up without becoming dysregulated ourselves in the same way we talked about that sort of de-centering and bird's eye view. So I would say the first step is if you think your team members need it, really double down on getting to it yourself. If you get asked questions, what's going on? You can offer like, well, I've actually been trying this thing for 12 minutes a day.

24:35check out these practices that you might do. And it's funny, like as a parent, because I've been studying mindfulness now and attention, you know, for the entirety of my children's lives. We don't, my husband and I actually both kind of practice and we started practicing after really, I started studying it, but we don't say anything to our kids. But what's interesting is if there's a big exam or my daughter's a dancer, there's a big performance, I'll get a request like, hey, can we do a quick body scan? Or what do you do when you're really worried about how you're going to do on this big test?

25:06It's like, okay, let's just try to do this. Let's try to get ourselves right here, right now. So oftentimes it happens quite organically. Now, of course, there's many workplace programs that are also available. In fact, the work we're doing, we just did a project where we offered mindfulness training, the same sort of suite of practices that we've been talking about to HR professionals who then learned how to deliver the program to employees. And we found that as little as 10 weeks of a train-up, about three hours a week, the trainers who didn't know anything about mindfulness before we started were able to learn how to deliver it.