Flickery thoughts how to#

“Focus on something that is tied to your sensory experience. To do mindful breathing, sit in a comfortable, upright position and focus all your attention on the sensation of breathing - “for example, the coolness of air moving in and out of your nostrils or your abdomen moving in and out,” says Jha. They’re very different, yet complementary, practices.įocused attention exercises cultivate your brain’s ability to focus on one single object, like one’s breath. Mindfulness training can be broken down into two major categories: focused attention and open monitoring. “It doesn’t require any particular worldview or spiritual or religious belief system,” says Jha. What is mindfulness? It’s about paying attention to the present moment with awareness and without emotional reactivity. According to Jha, researchers have started to uncover other benefits associated with mindfulness, including reduced anxiety, protection from depression relapse, and improved working memory. What’s more, in people who regularly do mindfulness exercises, their attention actually gets better over time - even when they’re under stress. Her research has found that the attention of someone who hasn’t had mindfulness training declines when they’re under intense stress, but in people who’ve had training, their attention remains stable.

She describes this training as a “portable brain fitness routine to keep our attention strong.” She has tested the effects of such training on subjects in high-stress groups, like athletes and military personnel. So, how do we gain control of those flickering flashlights and achieve focus? “That’s where mindfulness training comes in,” says Jha. This lack of attention has serious consequences for all of us, but especially for people in high-stakes fields like medicine, the military and criminal justice.

Whether the interruptions are significant or silly, they are “a basic hijacking of our attentional resources away from the task at hand,” she says. Internal distractions - everything from job stress to a craving for alcohol - and external distractions - like a thunderstorm weather alert on our phone screen - easily disrupt our attention. Jha likens our attention to a “a flashlight you can direct to whatever you choose.” Since research indicates our mind wanders 50 percent of our waking hours, it means most of us are walking around with darting, flickering flashlights. Here, she explains how you can get your wandering mind back under control.

Flickery thoughts how to#

Amishi Jha (TED Talk: How to tame your wandering mind), an associate professor of psychology at the University of Miami and the director of contemplative neuroscience for the UMindfulness Initiative, studies the brain’s attention mechanisms, and she’s found there are specific exercises we can do to strengthen our ability to pay attention. It’s not surprising our minds often feel like a jumble.īut it turns out we’re not at the mercy of our runaway minds. We’re living in an age of distraction, battered by our own customized waterfall of notifications, alerts, texts, videos, bingeable TV, and more. If Descartes were writing today, this is what his famous aphorism might have become. Neuroscientist Amishi Jha shows how we can cultivate the ability to focus on what really matters. Mengxin Li Our attention gets hijacked by everything from the stress in our lives to the ding of our phones.