Ep. 266 – Anxiety Series: Amishi Jha

Metta Hour with Sharon Salzberg

Be Here Now Network

Society & Culture, Sharonsalzberg, Metta, Salzberg, Meditation, Beherenownetwork, Buddhism, Religion & Spirituality, Beherenow, Compassion

4.6 • 682 Ratings

🗓️ 24 June 2025

⏱️ 70 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

For episode 266, Amishi Jha returns to the Metta Hour for our ongoing Anxiety Series.

In this series, Sharon is speaking with Mental Health experts, providers and different researchers for tools to work with anxiety in increasingly challenging times. This is the sixth episode in the series.

Amishi is Director of Contemplative Neuroscience and Professor of Psychology at the University of Miami. She studies the brain’s attention system and the effects of mindfulness training on resilience and performance in high-demand professions, including the military, emergency services, and medicine. Her research has been supported by the Dept. of Defense and featured by TED, NATO, the World Economic Forum, The New York Times, and NPR. She led the first large-scale study of mindfulness training with active-duty service members. She is the author of the national bestseller Peak Mind and creator of the Pushups for the Mind app.

In this episode, Amishi and Sharon speak about:

• Mindfulness in mental health

• Cognitive resilience

• Eustress and how it serves us

• Mismatch between capacity and challenge

• Attention as resilience

• Flashlight attention for clarification & focus

• Floodlight attention for situation awareness

• Executive Functioning

• How to begin attention training

• Myths about stress and anxiety

• The participatory nature of the brain

• The attentional decline of burnout

• Compassion Fatigue

• Cognitive versus emotional empathy

• Amishi’s new app, Pushups for the Mind

• The minimum effective dose of meditation

To learn more about Amishi’s work, you can visit her website right here and download her new app right here. Please note that the Pushups for the Mind app is free for all U.S. active service military members.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Transcript

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1:16.3	Even when my mind wanders, sometimes I'll even put my hand on my heart and be like,
1:22.6	oh, look at that, your mind is doing what minds do. Minds wander. And that just changes our whole way of kind of relating to the nature of our mind. It gives us more of a sense of a self-supportive approach to this.
1:30.7	And it, like, dials down this sort of feeling that we have
1:34.9	that there's an immediate action, a mental action we may need to take.
1:54.3	Yeah. Hello and welcome to the Meta Hour podcast with Sharon Salzberg.
1:57.6	I'm Lily Kushman. I produce this podcast.
2:04.4	And we're back today with another episode of our ongoing anxiety series. Today is episode 266 with the return of Amishi Jha. This is the sixth episode in this series where we're
2:14.1	speaking with different mental health experts, providers, researchers,
2:19.5	all looking at different tools to work with anxiety in increasingly challenging times.
2:27.4	So we're delighted to have Amishi back on the podcast.
2:30.7	Amishi is a real powerhouse.
2:32.5	She's the director of contemplative neuroscience and professor of psychology, the University of Miami.
	...

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