Why You Can’t Pay Attention—And How to Get It Back with Dr. Amishi Jha

We Can Do Hard Things

Treat Media and Glennon Doyle

Society & Culture, Relationships, Education, Self-improvement

4.8 • 41.1K Ratings

🗓️ 10 June 2025

⏱️ 57 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

418. Why You Can’t Pay Attention—And How to Get It Back with Dr. Amishi Jha Director of Contemplative Neuroscience and Professor of Psychology at the University of Miami, Dr. Amishi Jha joins us to discuss how we can cultivate and develop our attention in a way that allows us to maximize the meaning, fulfillment, and joy in our lives. -The three types of attentional systems –and how we use them in our daily lives; -Why attention is a limited resource – and how to make the most of it; -Why multitasking is a myth; and -A mindfulness practice to fuel your attentional capacity in just 12-minutes. Dr. Amishi Jha, PhD is Director of Contemplative Neuroscience and Professor of Psychology at the University of Miami. She leads research on the neural bases of attention and the effects of mindfulness-based training programs on cognition, emotion, resilience, and performance in education, corporate, elite sports, first-responder, and military contexts. In her national bestseller, Peak Mind she shares her discoveries on how attention can be trained for optimal performance and well-being. For the Peak Mind book, go to: https://amishi.com/books/peak-mind For the Peak Mind Interactive app, go to: https://peakmind.media/ To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, Dr. Jha, how are you?
0:13.3	Hi. Good. Thank you. It's great to be here. Same. So excited. Well, here's how I thought
0:18.9	we could start. I sent Dr. Jha an email last night about our talk today.
0:24.8	And I just want to read it to the pod squad so they can know where we're going with this attention situation. Okay.
0:32.6	So here was the email. I said, I've been looking so forward to spending this hour with you learning about how to
0:38.7	tune our attention because when you said that we lose 50% of our lives due to distraction,
0:44.2	that felt true to me. But I have to tell you off the bat, I am at this stage in my life where I do
0:50.3	not want to attune my attention in order to optimize or crush it or be more productive
0:57.8	or whatever.
0:59.0	I do.
0:59.6	Okay, Abby does.
1:00.6	So great.
1:02.2	I feel Amishi that at almost 50, I'm pretty much as optimized as I'm going to be.
1:08.7	Okay?
1:09.1	That's not sure.
1:09.8	I'm at my peak optimization. I want to learn
1:14.2	to hone my attention because as I head into my 50s, I want to learn how to be so present with my
1:20.7	people that they feel seen and heard and known by me. Okay. I want to have that kind of presence that you see in some people that
1:29.4	feels like this kind of like calming invitation for people to reveal themselves. And I want to be so
1:38.3	present and regulated that I actually am always revealing my true self to them because I think my highest goal as I head
1:48.3	into this next phase of my life is just to love my people in a way that makes them feel known
1:53.2	and I want to be deeply known. And to me, attention, this thing you've been studying forever, it's like the tool in our human toolbox
	...

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