Improving Focus and Fixing Your Attention Span
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Hello and welcome to Being Well. I'm Forrest Hansen. If you're new to the show, thanks for listening today. And if you've listened before, welcome back.

Today I'm joined as usual by Dr. Rick Hansen. Rick is a clinical psychologist. He's a best-selling author and he's also my dad. So dad, how are you doing today? I'm doing great, Forrest. Really. And as usual, I just love doing this with you. Thanks for letting me on your show. Oh, I'm so happy to have you on the show, dad. I mean, it's at least, you know, 20% your show as well. I would say maybe even more than that. Jokes aside, today I was really looking forward to talking with you about how we can improve our ability to focus. It's something that I've been

focusing on a lot recently, and also how we can fix our attention spans. And this is a real source of struggle for people these days, in large part because we've created a world that is really not conducive to focusing. We can be paying attention to so many different things out there all of the time, not the least of which is our phone.

And at any moment, your brain kind of knows that it could be watching something that's somewhere between 10 times and 100 times more interesting and engaging than almost anything that your caveman ancestors ever saw in their entire lives. And so funneling ourselves that way, funneling ourselves towards activities that we know are important and meaningful for us but might not be as immediately rewarding is really, really hard. And one of the big tools that we have here

is mindfulness and mindfulness-based practices. And so part of why I wanted to talk with you about this is because those practices have been just a huge part of your life and your work, everything that you've done over the last 40 years or so. I love this topic. And one reason I personally love it is that, as you know, by nature, I'm a pretty self-reliant, determined, independent person. I don't like being bullied. And when I began to learn that what we attend to is the frontline practice

of what we are becoming. It's the beginning of who we are becoming.

It really highlighted for me the importance of gaining control over our attention in a world in which everybody and their brother and sister is trying to grab our attention. They're trying to steal our property, in effect, attention for their own purposes, good or bad. And it's just really important to learn how to regulate attention so you can keep it on what's good for you and you can pull it away from what's not good for you. Kind of as simple as that. And I look forward to exploring how to do all that with you.

So before we get too far here, we're going to go into the material in just one second. But before we go much further, I wanted to give people a quick reminder about an online program of Rick's. It's his five-week course on breaking out of rumination, and it focuses on helping us learn how to let go of repetitive patterns of thought.

This is where we might replay the same difficult memory or the same worry over and over again. And you can learn more about it at rickhansen.com backslash ruminating and use the coupon code beingwell25 to receive a 25% discount. So what are we talking about today?

No one's that interested in improving their attention span for scrolling on TikTok or looking at memes or for doing something that they just find really easy and natural to do, right? Like it's hard to stop doing those things. It's not difficult to keep going. Right. Nobody has ADD while playing pinball. Yeah, sure. Exactly. So what we're trying to do here is we're trying to improve focus or improve our attention span for the things that we feel like we should be doing more of. In other words, like the very shoulds that we have in our lives.

the stuff that you kind of need to accomplish to get what you want to get out of life, right? And there is a lot of generally good advice out there for how to start doing this. We can do some environmental design. You can remove distractions like putting your phone in another room. And those are good interventions and they help. But they're really kind of putting a band-aid on the real problem here. Because most of the time in life, our circumstances are not going to be ideal. And we would like to kind of build ourselves up in a way where we can handle those not ideal circumstances.

And so what we're really trying to do is build the scale of deliberate focus. And this means improving our ability to stick with things generally and things that are less obviously rewarding in particular. So that's how I kind of think about this, dad. How do you think about it? I think there's a difference between developing general presence of mind, which mindfulness is the preeminent training for, so that you're stably present in a kind of global way

that is sustaining attention to what's happening around you and inside you in a general sense. And then alongside that, there is the capacity for focused, sustained attention to a particular kind of thing.

And one of the things that goes to, I appreciated you mentioning the rumination course. One of the things that happens here for many people is that their attention is sucked into things that actually are not productive and promote suffering and get reinforced in the brain because of its negativity bias. And when you, for example, randomly ping people out in the world, roughly half of the time their mind is wandering.

And for most people, most of the time, it's wandering to bad places. And it's not like they're just savoring and marinating in and basking in a really lovely memory from their childhood or a recent event. It's going to self-criticism or a sense of regret and disappointment. That's a great setup. And it takes me to one of the things I really wanted to talk about, which are what are the different things that we might want to focus on, right? And so for me, I think there are kind of three categories here.

And the first is stuff that is inherently difficult for us to stick with.

working out for me. It has an inherent challenge associated with it. For me, not immediately bailing from the workout when my body starts to feel tired or fatigued or it's working hard or whatever it is. Okay, that's a kind of focus maybe. Trying to learn something difficult, sticking with a single important task rather than multitasking and kind of bouncing around. These are different things that we can think of as being kind of inherently challenging for us.

Now, there's a second category, though, that I think is huge for people these days. We've gotten several comments on different episodes along the lines of, well, I really want to learn about this thing. But when I see an hour-long YouTube video pop up on my feed, it kind of stresses me out, actually, because the idea of having to commit to paying attention to this thing for an hour, wow, I would much rather just kind of scroll through the clips of something and just get the bite-sized and kind of keep it moving. There's something about that that I actually find quite stressful.

I think that's a common experience for people. So there are all these things that exist that are theoretically rewarding, like listening to a podcast like ours, or at least we hope it's theoretically rewarding for you, but it might not be quite as rewarding as that other thing you could be doing. Reading a book, engaging your attention when somebody's talking to you during a conversation and not just kind of drifting away, or different kinds of, hey, mindfulness practice might be in this category as well.

And then the third category is maybe experiences that have benefits for us if we start learning how to focus on them. And this is all of the Rick Hansen change your brain neuroplasticity stuff, right? This is fighting the negativity bias. This is applying more attention so we kind of get more deliberate control over the ability of the brain to change. That's all of that stuff. And I think that that second category, the category of things that are

rewarding but not as rewarding as something else is actually a great place for people to start because there is a little bit at the very least of inherent motivation there that a person can start to play with. Yeah, we've talked a bit before this recording about certainly the first category, the capacity to increase so-called distress tolerance, the capacity to stay with something that's uncomfortable, such as frankly sustaining attention to aspects of your own pain.

or what's difficult inside, or even sustaining attention to someone who is upset with you. That's a major area of applying and sustaining attention that has a lot of payoff for a lot of people. And then more generally, we're talking about putting up with delayed gratification. That's in your second category a lot. So you have these sort of emotional factors

that are in play. And I'm used to a lot of science and practice related to attention and temperament and meditation. I've really never heard anybody bring up for us, like you have recently, the importance of addressing or increasing distress tolerance so you can stay with what's uncomfortable and the importance of delaying gratification as they relate to staying focused in your attention.

I do think that focus is really interesting here because it's kind of both a form of distress tolerance and it also demonstrates a person's distress tolerance. So being able to stick with something even when it's difficult suggests that you have some kind of distress tolerance skills.

And then when we can focus, we're able to manage distress better because we get to control where our attention goes, right? So if you're somebody who has a kind of sensitivity to a particular kind of stimuli, this was a great point that you've made in the past, Dad. If somebody is a little bit sensitive about something, if you have the ability to control your attention, you get to choose, okay, I'm gonna kind of move away from that a little bit. And so it helps you deal with this stuff more.

And I think this takes us to kind of a meta question, which is like, why is it that something is easy to focus on or hard to focus on, right? So people struggle to focus because the act of focusing brings them into contact with something that they find distressing or difficult, right? And there are three big ways that that might be the case for somebody, that this might be hard for somebody to focus on. First, again, thing itself is hard. We already kind of talked about that. You're doing a complex task that's beyond your abilities.

Second is the thing isn't something you want to do. Your brain knows it could be eating candy right now, that's scrolling on your phone, and it doesn't like that it's not eating candy. So it's kind of punishing you for the fact that it's not eating candy right now. Third category though, the thing activates uncomfortable thoughts and feelings. I feel like a failure when I engage with this thing that's hard for me. I don't know what I want. Self-criticism comes up to the mind because I'm struggling right now.

Or a whole category of like, this is like that time when this other bad thing happened, and that was really painful, so I want to stay away from this thing because it's kind of bringing up that memory to some extent.

And people tend to focus on the first two categories, but I think that that third category is just such a huge piece of the puzzle because it's essentially the root of procrastination for people. It's like why there's such a swerve away from the act of focusing itself. And I'm wondering what you think about that, Dad? Well, I think it's extremely interesting this third thing you're saying because you're talking about people either habitually, automatically, or even somewhat deliberately preventing

their attention from moving to fraught material or a task they just don't even want to do or it's scary. They're preventing their attention from landing there. I think that's really interesting. And throughout, this is I'm sure a running theme here, particularly given your own interest in agency, it's a huge question about who's in control of your attention.

And I just want to call out that there are times in life when our attention is understandably compelled. There's an intense pain in your body or a sudden pain. You've gotten devastating news. That's really understandable.

What we're talking about here is when basically you do have some choice, if only a few seconds at a time during which you have volitional control over attention. After those first few seconds, yes, it might get sucked back in, but again, you could exercise volitional control in principle.

So this is not about shaming. It's just about making a distinction between can't and won't. The can't territory is you're just compelled. Your attention is locked onto that thing, understandably. But the rest of it is where you do have some influence, and that's what we're exploring here. Yeah. And-

Thinking about the thoughts and feelings that come up for a person that are in that category I mentioned, that kind of swerve away category, I think can really help us with the focus aspect of it. Because once we're able to uncover and process some of that material, we just get so much agency back. We recover so many different kinds of chips.

A lot of the time people fall into this self-belief of like, I don't have willpower or I'm not motivated. When the truth is that they actually have a lot of willpower because they've been expending willpower every single day because they aren't so motivated towards something maybe.

Or they have a lot of willpower and they have a lot of motivation, but there's a lot of emotional content that's kind of getting in the way of that motivation and that willpower being able to kind of express itself out of the person. There are these different blocks that exist inside of them. I'm chuckling because you laid on me a current internet meme before we started talking. And it's a really short version, and you can do it better than I can right now. We're basically, imagine three people, one of whom is

really, really, you know, not very on the ball. One of whom is really, really on the ball and one of whom is kind of in the middle. And the kind of in the middle person is blathering a lot in overcomplicated ways. But the two people on either end of the spectrum are cutting to the chase of the TLDR and they're both saying the same thing. And so in a way...

You know, for me right now, I'm imagining both of those characters, you know, who are saying the same thing, who are basically saying life's about reducing friction. In effect, between us and our circumstances or our goals, our tasks, what we should do, it's helping yourself move increasingly frictionlessly through the world and frictionlessly even inside your own mind.

Yeah. And the more frictionlessness you have, the more motivation you have, the more you're able to answer these big, deep questions, whatever it is. In a funny way, the less you need to apply focus because you find the focus comes from you more naturally. So there's this great kind of whole thing here. Okay. So all that preamble out of the way, I want to ask you a little bit, Dad, about how this works neurologically. I don't want to get too technical here. I love this stuff.

But I am interested again, when we were doing prep for this conversation, you just started kind of going into some of the material related to what tends to disrupt our ability to focus.

Oh, that's great. So pretty solid brain science. There are three factors essentially in how well people can sustain a focus, particularly to something that's not tremendously interesting and engaging, like being in the middle of playing pinball or ping pong or something else like that. Scrolling on TikTok for those of us under the age of 72, yes. Yeah, you're right, Paul. Playing pinball.

Are you at the honky-tonk, Dad? Like, what's going on here, buddy? I thought you young, you know, you young bucks played pinball. Yeah, we get together for our pinball dates. That's what we do. You're right. You nailed it. All right, anyways, please go. Please, please continue. Don't let me derail you over here. No, no. I just couldn't help myself. No, it's really good. It's really good. Yeah, that's good. Or if you're busy making horseshoes or chipping clay tablets, you know, stuff like that. Rosetta Stone, the whole thing, yeah. Okay.

That's good. Okay. All right. And people can imagine where they are themselves. Imagine a spectrum, a distribution of high, middle, and low for whatever reason, whether it's genetic or life experience, the culture you're in, so forth. Number one, stimulation seeking.

If a person is high stimulation seeking to feel good and comfortable, that's going to tend to make them kind of destructible. That's going to disrupt sustaining attention. And there is embedded in the brain in the basal ganglia a kind of stimo stat.

like a thermostat, that has a certain setting to it. And if people feel like they're not getting enough stimulation from the outer or inner world based on their own personal setting, they're going to start looking for stimulation. And one of the theories actually for why amphetamine derivative drugs, psychostimulants,

Actually, how people focus is that they send an ongoing trickle of stimulation to the stymostat that essentially says, it's okay, it's okay, there's enough stim here already, so we can keep paying attention to long division problems in fifth grade, for example. So stimulation seeking. A second major factor is you could say porous filters.

People vary in the degree to which they can be flooded by arising stimuli bubbling up, you know, from the basement inside or stimuli coming from the outside. It's a little bit like living with the blinds or shades open in a bright, bright sunny day or going through life with your pupils dilated because you just saw the eye doctor whoosh.

It's kind of overwhelming. And so the least little thing just penetrates and distracts you from what you're trying to be focused on. The third factor is very interesting. Even with people who are not stimulation seeking or who are not having very porous filters, they can fatigue on concentration, particularly for certain kinds of things.

Like for one person, it might be very easy for them to sustain attention to a visual spatial task like a jigsaw puzzle or some similar kind of task. But for another person, it could be very tiring. Or for that person who, let's say, can stay with a jigsaw puzzle, for them to pay attention to the details on some kind of spreadsheet related to the finances of their business or their personal life. Ugh.

That would be exhausting. Or make a distinction between attending to auditory stimuli or visual stimuli. So those are three different natural factors that have a definite genetic component to them. And also there can be, you know, learning involved.

If you want, I'll say a little detail about stimulation seeking that's kind of interesting. Sure. It's simply, okay, cool. It's simply and briefly that there are, we all have human DNA and so forth, but there are different so-called phenotypes. Speak for yourself, Dad. Come on. Okay. I'm from Atlantis, don't you know? I forgot. That's right. Or this is a term maybe before your time. You are maybe a walk-on.

You know, aliens are walking among us. I'm a shapeshifter, buddy. Oh, good. I'm getting the creeps right here. We're going to keep going. Sorry, just the line, we all have human DNA. It was such a great Rick line. I just couldn't help it. Please go ahead. Okay, okay. But some of us express a lot of receptors for dopamine.

in the brain. Express means make, okay? So people with a lot of receptors for dopamine have a brain that's very efficient at processing dopamine, so it doesn't need that much dopamine to feel sufficiently stimulated.

Other people express fewer receptors in their brain for those little container ships, you know, typically full with about 100 little dopamine molecules each that are released in the synaptic cleft, which you could put several thousand in the width of a human hair, you know, in your brain. So they need an ongoing current of dopamine. In effect, they are dopamine depleters.

So if you're a dopamine depleter, it's not your fault that you tend to, you know, lose interest and or sort of flame out. Maybe you start, you get interested, you start organizing your desk or closet or writing something and just, you kind of grind out. It's not your fault. We'll be back to the show in just a minute, but first a word from our sponsors.

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to unlock all of Headspace free for 60 days. Headspace.com slash beingwell60. Now, back to the show. Another piece of this, it's normal to have a curve to our attention. Attentional fatigue, as you were talking about, but also just like in general. Sometimes things are actually tougher at the beginning of them than they are 20 or 30 minutes into them. But generally speaking, we start with more attention and that attention tends to kind of deplete over time as we spend it. And it's a bit...

challenging for people to change their in the ceiling with this stuff in as much as there is a genetic aspect to it. But what we can do is we can get up to that ceiling, which many people are not at. And we can also do a lot with just accepting the way that we are and trying to work with it more effectively, appreciating the things that tend to help us have things go well versus the kinds of situations that we tend to struggle in, like what can we do to design our environment a little bit more? This can all be helpful.

But I think that there are three targets that almost everybody can pursue here in order to increase focus and attention. And the first is focus motivation. So this is emphasizing the rewards that are associated with doing the things that we feel like we should be doing. That's a huge piece. Second piece, we already mentioned it a little bit, distress tolerance. And I think about this as I think the phrase distress tolerance actually has some problems with it. I like to think about it in terms of more our window of comfort.

Like what's our personal Goldilocks zone here where things can be not too cold and not too hot? And how do we get that space bigger and bigger over time?

And then the third category that we're not going to really talk about very much, but I did want to mention because it's an important category, is physical health-related stuff. There's some non-zero evidence that there could be supplements out there that might help somebody. The evidence on that is really mixed and kind of fuzzy, and I'm not a big supplements guy personally, but okay, people talk about it. And also at a basic level, sleep and a reasonably good level of nutrition are, of course, important here.

Is there anything that I just said that you want to comment on, dad, before I toss your ball into a meditation question? Okay. I love where the ball is going. Yeah. I would add depressed mood has something to really pay attention to. Sure. Huge aspect. Yeah. One of those hallmark so-called symptoms of depression is poor concentration.

And because people are preoccupied, understandably, and it's harder for them to regulate their attention and make the executive function-centered mental efforts that are involved in certain kinds of sustained attention. And also, of course, if you don't feel well, your energy is low, it's harder to pay attention to things. That's certainly true.

For sure. So, okay, I want to focus on... Can I throw my hand for one more little thing? Because I know otherwise we'll get a letter about it. And we love letters. Letters are not a bad thing. I just want to anticipate the obvious letter. Yeah, go ahead. It's understandable if people have recurring emotional preoccupations, grief over the loss of a loved one, issues about your childhood, remorse or guilt.

It's understandable if people are preoccupied. And sometimes what happens, it feels like that preoccupation is sort of running in the background, but still it's sucking up cognitive resources. And maybe, you know, it's only consuming 20% of your consciousness.

consciousness, let's say, but that means that only 80% or less is available to focus your attention. So that's one more thing I just kind of want to name is a natural and understandable factor that reduces our capacity for focused attention.

Yeah, totally. For sure. And I would like to use meditation here as an example, both because it's an intervention and a target. So it's both something that we kind of prescribe to people to help train focus. And it's also something that people might want to do more of that they might struggle to do if they struggle to focus. And also because you're a teacher of meditation and you've done this a lot in your life. So, you know, just kind of leverage your expertise here.

So let's say I'm going to give you kind of a common example here, and this may or may not be a role play, where I'm somebody who I would like to meditate more. That's kind of a goal of mine. But when I move into what I think of as meditation,

which is paying attention to my breathing and maybe paying focused attention to controlling the thoughts that I'm having or looking at a particular point on the wall for an extended period of time, I just have a really hard time doing that. I have a hard time slowing my brain down, all of these thoughts start coming in. I'm just really struggling with it. I get two minutes in and I'm really kind of scratching my own fingernails, if you will, around the whole thing. So

How would you work with somebody about that? How would you kind of break it down and walk them into that process? Yeah, beautiful. Well, first I would create a bit of a frame for the fact that there are many, many, many kinds of meditation, and we could broaden it out to contemplative practice in general. One key distinction is between meditations that are, let's say, secular and those that are done in a more spiritual framework, including

a sense or a presumption of a relationship with something transcendental, divine, and so forth. Let's focus here on strictly inside the secular frame. Inside that frame, the essence of meditation is sustained present moment awareness.

moment after moment after moment, in which, generally speaking, we're allowing things to pass through consciousness. We're just not fighting them or following after them. So it's not that we're trying to control our thoughts per se. We're disengaging from what's moving across the screen and just staying present in the theater of the mind. That's

kind of a central point. There are forms of meditation in which we deliberately focus on one particular thing, like the sensations of breathing, to enter into deep absorption states in which most thoughts just fall away. Certainly verbal activity falls away. So there's an intention there

to encourage the falling away of all that, but we're not specifically trying to control it. And that's kind of an important point because, you know, well, don't think of white elephants, right? Well, it's really hard not to do that. Okay, that said, so how to help a person do it? I think it's incredibly important to adapt your meditative practice to your own temperament and situation and goals.

And a lot of meditative methods are designed for people who I think of them as temperamental turtles.

who are then practicing in turtle pens, like monasteries, to become better turtles. And yet, many, many people are more like jackrabbits, or either by temperament or by just growing up in societies, like our current society is very jackrabbity. We're bombarded endlessly with stimulation. So what do you do then? So it's really important to adapt it, your approach, so that you're successful at it. For one, do it for a very short period of time, one minute.

or half a breath. See what it's like, if it's okay to pay attention to the breath. For some traumatized people, that's challenging, so pay attention to something different, like sensations in your toes or just a candle flickering in front of you. For five seconds, half a breath. See what happens when you pay attention for that whole period of time, or a whole breath, or a minute,

What people tend to really notice is that, wow, their mind is like a cave of bats. They're all flying around. It's like, wow, you know? So that itself is a really useful thing to notice.

And it's really interesting because we think about meditating as this very benign activity. It's in that second group that I talked about at the beginning, things that are not inherently distressing. There's something about them that even is a little rewarding, so they're a good one to practice with. But if you do an exercise where you look at the wall for just 30 seconds and you stare at the wall and you're trying to stare at a point at the wall and you just sit with it and you set a timer, has an alarm, 30-second alarm, okay.

Can you look at the wall? Not having your eyes move away.

not changing your vision, like what happens to a person? Most of the time they find that they're struggling by about the 10th second. This is hard for us. And one of the reasons it can be hard is all of these thoughts start coming in, all of this mental chatter that we're kind of quieting throughout the day a lot of the time through just constant doing. Yeah. Oh, that's completely true. So I think of meditation fundamentally as having two aspects to it.

One aspect is the training aspect. It's a training. Why do we lift weight? Do you particularly enjoy lifting weight that's toward your limit because you're lifting it because that's what you need to do to build muscle? Do you particularly enjoy that, especially the third or fifth or 11th rep?

Probably not that much, but you do it because it's a kind of training. Well, meditation is a preeminent training of attention, and broadly speaking, it's completely foundational really to so many other psychological methods. So there's a training aspect to it. But the training aspect is just a means to the end, to an end. And this gets into the second fundamental purpose, which I think is the preeminent purpose.

The way I put it is this, rest your mind on what draws your heart. Meditation is an incredibly useful way to gradually shift your ground of being into directions that you really appreciate so that you are increasingly settled in that way of being based on lasting neuroplastic change in your whole body.

So the question would be, what would you like to rest your attention on so that it is gradually increasingly established in you? Use that as an object of meditation. Then you get the two for one. You get the training of attention because you're sustaining attention to that particular object.

object. I'll give you examples in a second. Plus you are making it increasingly into your own nature. So for example, you might wish to choose something like gratitude as an object of attention and just remind yourself from time to time during the one minute or five minutes or 10 or 20 or 45 minutes that you're meditating of things that you feel thankful for.

That will be emotionally stimulating. It will be enjoyable. It will be much easier to sustain attention to. Or maybe you want to rest your awareness in a broad sense of well-being.

So you do that. So you cultivate that sense of wellbeing. Or maybe you want to rest your attention in a sense of warmheartedness, lovingness. People who care about you, you care about them. They're two. You get that two for one benefit. So that's definitely something to think about. And then I'll just say last, feel very free to change the form. Walk while you meditate or

Or keep your eyes open or be aware of breathing, not at some tiny spot on your upper lip, but in your body as a whole. Anything that increases the stimulation and novelty and complexity and reward value of what you're meditating on will help you stay with it better.

That's a great example of increasing focus motivation because you're motivated toward improving this aspect of your life, developing this trait that you care about, feeling good feelings inside of you, all of that. There's this really useful distinction, I think, between motivation and willpower. And I was kind of talking about it toward the beginning of when we were recording here. People often think about focus through this really willpower framework.

And if they can't focus, it's because they don't have enough willpower. And they just need to develop more willpower in order to be able to focus.

But that's often actually not the case. What's often the case is that they don't have a lot of motivation and they have plenty of willpower because they've been training their willpower every single day because they've had to use it every single day because they're not actually really motivated toward what it is that they're trying to accomplish. So an example of this, people who have really integrated a habit into their life, they run every day, they go to the gym every day, whatever it is.

If you ask that person, are you applying a lot of willpower to go and run? Most of the time, they'll look at you like you're kind of asking a weird question. They're like, no, I run because I like running or I run because it's a part of my life or because it's a thing that I care about or it's become this great habit for me. They no longer have to apply willpower. They're motivated.

And so some of the question here with how do we improve attention span or increase focus, it's about finding the aspects of something that you know are important for you, that you can be motivated toward. So if you're struggling to focus on your schoolwork, or you're struggling to focus on not your phone, or whatever it is, a big part of that process for a person can be figuring out why is it that I care about this? That I care about this? What's in it for me?

in a deep way. Not because somebody else told me to, not because I got to do this in order to make my mom happy. Okay, what's in it for you?

And as you go through that process, what you'll find over time is you need to apply less and less willpower in order to sustain your focus because you will feel more connected to the activity that you're doing. And you can really tap into your body and feel it as you're doing it. And as you start feeling those good experiences associated with it, as you let yourself feel good, you'll be much more motivated to keep on going with whatever it is that you're doing. You know, first I'm finding myself

- Wanting to ask you what you've seen or learned, including from many, many people you've interviewed, this whole word these days of presence, presence, people developing presence and a greater quality of presence and being present in their own life and the sense of being with some people who seem really present and who therefore have a kind of presence that,

works well for them at work or in their relationships. Part of what we're talking about is developing the capacity to sustain presence, to be continuously present.

Kind of wondered. I mean, this is sort of an angle on everything we've talked about so far. This is a much more classically Rick cosmic big picture application of what I thought we were going to be doing today with the tension span, but I love it. So you can keep going with it here, Dad. I'm very interested in what you're asking. Yeah. Well, it could just be off the wall here, but I'm... No, I get where you're going. I think there's totally a connect the dots here. Yeah. Yeah. Can I try to answer your question maybe and then see if I answered it or not? Yeah. Yeah. Go for it.

Where I go to this is that willpower is a thing that we need when we're not in touch with reward. Whoa, put that on a fortune cookie. Yeah. So if you don't know what the rewards are, you need a lot of willpower to your thing where you were like, do you really want to push the weight if it's the weight that's at the limit? It's like for me, yeah, because I find it incredibly rewarding.

I'm very in touch with the rewards. So I don't need a lot of willpower. I want to. My physical capacity is what dictates whether or not I can lift the weight, not like my want to. Can I ask you a personal question? Yeah, sure. Go ahead. What's wrong with you? Why do you want to have your muscles burning? Why do you want to get the

I blame you for everything that's wrong with me. Why do I... I don't know. There's something about it that's deeply rewarding. Like, because there's... And here's... Well, let's...

Let's explore that as a question. Actually, I think that's a great question. So what am I finding in there to be rewarded by? It hurts. A, deep sense of fulfillment. The feeling of being able to do more tomorrow than I could do today is extremely-- I mean, that's very motivating. Okay. Moving the weight as a manifestation of my will and effort in the world. Wow, that's really motivating. Okay.

Narcissistic gains. Wow, this means I grew some muscles and so I'm going to like kind of like how I look better. Wow, that's nice. Ooh, I love that. Just yeah. So like there are different layers to it and I could probably keep going here. But one of the things that really makes me that has the biggest impact on my personal sense of like well-being and quality of life when my head hits the pillow.

is like, do I feel like I accomplished what I set out to do in a day? And it's just such a big fulfillment indicator for me. And so sometimes lifting the big weight is on the list of the stuff that you do to feel accomplished in a day. So there you go. So anyways, these are all different things that a person can find. And we can think about this, apply to different things, apply to your schoolwork.

you know, okay, what's the reward in doing your schoolwork? Okay, I learned something and that I have a kind of implicit orientation toward learning. Okay, by accomplishing this task, I'm going to do better on my test and then I'm going to feel really, really good when I do a little better on my test. All right, this is going to be part of a broader arc that I see in my life where I'm going in a kind of direction. And so I'm highly motivated

to land in that spot later because that's going to get me out of whatever. It's going to get me out of my neighborhood, my weirdo family system, whatever's going on for you as a person. So anyways, again, finding the things to be motivated toward here I think is a huge piece of this. So you're hunting for that reward. So then you don't need as much willpower because the reward is really present inside of the activity.

That's just really kind of genius because I think so much of the focus on focus, as it were, is about...

a kind of muscular willpower-oriented approach. Yeah. And also sort of training broad attentional capacities and executive functions in which you have a kind of a self-awareness and self-monitoring when your attention wanders, you bring it back, so on. You're really highlighting that people can really help themselves by identifying what is for them meaningful, important,

juicy, luscious, delicious, rewarding. In other words, about X that they're trying to pay attention to, whatever it happens to be, the target. And then very naturally, often attention will follow reward, right? Yeah, that's really good. And what often blocks people from that, by the way, is that third category that I mentioned toward the beginning, the presence of these kinds of uncomfortable thoughts and feelings that pull our attention away.

Right. Again, using the gym as an example, now I'm focused on my body. What if there's stuff in my relationship with my body that is very complicated for me, very painful? So you can see how this stuff gets complicated. It's not just as easy as like, oh, write it down on a nice little list for us. A lot can get in the way here. And I just say that to appreciate that this is not always an easy process for a person. But to maybe loop back to your presence question, Dad,

I wonder if some of what you're experiencing in somebody who has that very stable sense of like

presence, you know, when you're talking to them, they just feel very engaged, is that they've found the reward. You know, they find the reward from that interaction. They feel very present in life in that way because they experience the reward from life, you know, whatever it might be. So that's how I was kind of connecting the dots there. I wonder about that. That's really interesting, right? So maybe that's part of it too. Like you're saying that presence itself becomes its own reward. So people like having presence. Also, they tend to have a quieter mind.

There's a classic meditation instruction from the Buddha, steady the mind, quiet it, and bring it to singleness, and then concentrate it as you kind of move into the deeper waters of contemplative practice. I like that instruction, steady it,

Quiet it, not suppressing things, just help it become quieter. I think about the line from, I believe, Howard Thurman, bless his memory, African-American minister in Los Angeles, I'm getting the name right, who said, it's good to look out at the world with quiet eyes.

The world itself can be noisy and busy, but our own eyes can be quiet. So I think it's a lot easier as well to sustain attention to this or that if our mind has become quieter over time.

Yeah. And the flip side of increasing the reward value of the thing that we want to do more of is a lot of Judd Brewer stuff. We talked to Judd on the podcast a couple of times, which is decreasing the reward value of the stuff that we're trying to move away from, the stuff that's drawing our attention. So one of the things that I've been paying a lot more attention to recently is how I actually feel when I'm on my phone.

So not what's happening in my brain, not the kind of cognitive engagement, not the hamster on the wheel of it all, but the feeling in my body while I'm doing it. And what I typically track is that first five to 15 minutes, I'm doing pretty good. But if I get much past five to 15 minutes, my body starts not feeling so great. I start feeling kind of tired. If I pay attention to it, a little bit of this kind of self-critical voice kind of comes in.

There's sort of this sense of like associated with it. You know, you've probably never had this moment, dad, because you are not in the demographic where this is super relevant. But if you're like scrolling on Instagram or something, it's really easy to move your finger in a way where you accidentally move it over to your camera.

And I don't know if it does this for everybody, but at least for me, for whatever reason, it defaults to the selfie cam. So I'll accidentally get a look of what my face looks like when I'm just scrolling relentlessly through Instagram. And it's not a great looking face. I am slack jawed. I'm not really paying attention. And it's so funny to have that little moment of like, oh, this is what I look like when I'm doing this. And I think that that speaks to the kind of passive engagement.

the sort of zombie-like quality that that activity can really bring out of us. And we can, I think, really deliberately tap in to some extent to that feeling while we're engaged with the activity.

With smoking cessation, one of the big things that they try to do is to get smokers to really pay attention to what a cigarette tasted like. And what they found is that they didn't like it very much once they really started paying attention to it. And so we can kind of do part of that as well. How would we apply this interpersonally? Because it's funny.

Your mom and I sometimes would go out to dinner with friends, really good people. And then we're driving home and we just start musing about how nice it was to be with them. And then we'll just go, you know, that's really interesting. You know, we asked them a lot about themselves and we pursued our questions with follow-on inquiries, you know, not grilling them, just really interested. They did not ask us a single question about our own life, our kids, what we're doing, what it's like on the inside. They just weren't interested.

It kind of speaks to an experience I think a lot of people have that they're with others who are not very present with them. Sure. Flip it around. Think about what it's like for oneself to be really present with another person for three minutes in a row.

Maybe murmuring something a little bit, maybe saying something a little bit, but basically really present. And how much other people appreciate it. And to me, that's one of the key. It's a key relationship skill. Yeah, totally. Totally. This is a huge relationship skill. So if you struggle with this, then it can create some problems in your relationships. Totally. Yeah.

Yeah. If you ask people, gosh, what would have a bigger payoff reward for you in your life? Being able to sustain more attention to what your boss is nattering on about in an afternoon meeting at work or being able to remain present with your partner or a dear friend, particularly if they're upset about something or charged up about something that may or may not involve you. Right? Yeah.

I don't know. I kind of think a lot of people would vote for the second one as more important. Yeah, I go to some of the stuff we've already talked about. What's rewarding about the experience? Do I care about this person? Am I interested in them? Can I deliberately move? Because when I talk about these things, sometimes particularly in a coaching context with people, I'll name things like, oh, am I interested in them? And the person will be like, not really. And I'll say, okay, okay, okay, we've gone a little fast here. What I mean is can I deliberately cultivate a feeling

of being interested in them. Not is that already present, but can I work on that? Can I assume that I can make myself more interested in this interaction, which we actually can do most of the time. So I would wonder about that. How can we increase the reward value? Then I would wonder about something we haven't talked about much yet, but I wanted to talk about, which is the distress tolerance side of it.

So if you are somebody who is conditioned to a lot of stimulation, you spend a lot of time on your phone, you're doing those kinds of rewarding activities, whatever it is, even medium reward activities become not very rewarding over time. Your brain gets kind of oversensitized to what you're getting from the phone or from whatever it is that you're used to focusing on. So how do we broaden that window of comfort? And I think that people need to get a little bit more comfortable with boredom.

And I remember being a kid and being really bored. And I would have these moments where I was intensely bored. It's the most painful feeling. Boredom sucks. I am rarely bored these days. Some of that is because now we have smartphones and all of that kind of thing. So I have lost my practice. I've lost touch with essentially the feeling of being a little bit bored. So I've taken on a deliberate practice of being bored more often. So what that looks like is you can literally train this. You can look at the point on the wall.

And you can just be with the point on the wall for 30 seconds. And then the next day you try it for 35 seconds. And then the next day you try it for 40 seconds. And you go from there. And you see what starts to happen inside of your mind when you're present with that boredom.

Most of the time what you'll find is that all of these thoughts and feelings come up. All of this content, all these thoughts you didn't have, that can be quite disruptive for a person at first. Over time that tends to calm down, both because you're kind of flushing it a little bit, you get better at practicing with it, and sometimes you even find some stuff there that's really interesting. Some stuff where you're like, "Wow, I didn't really realize that this was part of the mix." But it's so real for you when you're just looking at the damn spot on the wall.

This is not an original idea that people have talked about this, but it's just such a good little practice. For me, deliberate, so it's quite cold where we are these days. It's very easy for me to just be inside. Deliberately going for walks when it's cold, when it's a little misty, when it's a little rainy. Do I want to? No. But just the act of making yourself do something that is slightly uncomfortable

is itself quite rewarding over time because you give yourself some reward when you get back, well, I accomplished this difficult thing and so on. So you start to kind of retrain yourself about doing things that are deliberately difficult. And I think that process, if you're willing to engage in it, is a fantastic way to improve your attention span over time, including your ability to be attentive to the person that you're talking to.

This is all really useful and just a detail. You may know it already that William James, the godfather of American psychology, had a line that everybody should do just what you said. Everybody should pick something every day that's a little uncomfortable that they don't really want to do but it's good to do or at least won't be harmful and just practice, keep those muscles strong in that regard.

I'm still with presence for us a little bit, including with other people. And I wonder what your experience of this is and what you've seen with people in that I would advance the notion that people can test in their own experience, that being present with the general quality of being fairly relaxed and open with another person

is the natural state. And I'm talking about situations not in which they're yelling at you or you both have to run out the door for some purpose, but in which you can actually just be with another person. You have the time to do it, the 10, the 30 minutes to do it. And I find that there's an experience in which we allow everything else to fall away except a sense of being with them.

and which then takes on a life of its own in a kind of self-reinforcing positive cycle kind of presence in which attention is naturally available. So how would you apply that toward, I'm trying to study for this test, I'm trying to get off my phone more often, I'm trying to cultivate this habit, I want to increase my overall attention span? How do you think about it?

- Well, I would say that I think that's different. I would say that that's task focused in a way. Both the task of resting attention on X or withdrawing attention from Y. I would say that's kind of more task focused. And meditatively, the task circuitry, task relevant circuitry in the brain is very prefrontal and loaded there.

and gets involved. But what's interesting is that experienced meditators draw on that task-focused, deliberate, top-down regulation less and less over time because they're more able to sustain bottom-up presence.

So that's more what I'm talking about, especially with other people because I think that's a particular place where it's relevant. It's also sweet to be able to just sit in your backyard and be present. Totally, this is a skill. I'm wondering about development and application. How do you develop it? How do you apply it? Okay. How do you develop and apply presence distinct from a task focus? What you're describing. Yeah. Yeah, because you're referring to this as a meta skill that makes it easier to do things like task focus and so on. That's interesting.

- Yeah, that's what you're suggesting at the very least. - I think you're right. - That this is a kind of like thing that buoys everything else. - Yeah, I think as people develop the capacity to rest in presence, woo, woo, woo, woo, they become more able to sustain task focus. I think that's really true. And I think meditation is a pretty good training in being able to rest in presence.

Being aware of when you're in presence, knowing what it's like, and being aware of what feels good about it, going to reward. I think that tends to train it. Great. I think over time, developing a quieter mind in general, which could be a 30-year project, that can help the capacity. I think there are aspects of this that have to do with the courage, if you will, that's involved in receiving other people.

Because when you're present, the filters are lowered. You know, the walls are lowered. You're there with them and you're resonant. You're resonating with them.

And by the way, Dad, I think this is another great example of where the inner material gets in the way. Totally. Because that kind of proximity and closeness to another person is inherently disruptive for people. For 90% of people, it's inherently disruptive. Yeah, anyways, keep going. Yeah, yeah, exactly. There's this dynamic in our relationships between basically distancing and joining, stepping back and stepping in. And people have their own thermostat setting around optimal distance. Yeah.

And the kind of quality of presence I'm describing can feel initially, especially for a lot of people, like too much joining. It's kind of flooding. So paradoxically, continually reestablishing your own sense of being a me while resting in presence as a we

is really useful. And this is something you and I wrote about, you know, in the resilient book, how to ways in which autonomy supports intimacy. So kind of tuning into your own internal states, you know, your chest rising and falling as you breathe can actually help you to sustain that openness of presence with other people. A great list of things. We'll be right back to the show in just a moment.

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But a box fan, happily yes.

Now, back to the show. As we've talked about this...

Are there things that have been popping into your mind, particularly more tactical approaches that people will do when they're trying to develop a mindfulness practice that you think could benefit people who are trying to particularly around tasks? Because that's where a lot of the pain of this is for people.

I know that I should be studying twice as much as I am studying, and I just cannot get myself to focus on it. I know that I would get some value out of that hour-long podcast episode, but man, it is such a heavy lift for me to pay attention to that hour-long podcast episode. What do you think tends to support people in the ability to do that? One method that I've become increasingly interested in, I think is paradoxically relevant, which is to go wide.

which seems paradoxical because you're trying to get yourself to focus on a particular thing. But what enables that at first is when you go wide, just be aware of the room as a whole,

or kind of have a big picture perspective on the task, let's say, or be aware of breathing in your body at a large area, like your torso altogether, or even your body altogether, if only for a few seconds. It's sort of like you're priming, you're prepping, you're warming up the circuitry of focused attention. And neurologically, when you go wide like that, you're tending to reduce interverbal chatter, which

is distracting and a driver of rumination. And you're also tending to reduce so-called self-referential processing. You're getting more of a sense of the more impersonal, bigger picture and less

preoccupation with me, myself, and I, which tends to take people away from something to pay attention to. So that would be one thing I would say, to just kind of go wide. And if you find yourself also fatiguing on sustaining attention, every time you go wide, you're resetting because you've introduced a novel stimulus

the wider view, and the wider view also inherently is kind of refreshing. And then you could go back to what you're focusing on. So that would be one thing I would say. I think that's a great tactic, Dad, particularly because it's counterintuitive for people. Yeah. I think another tactic is to surge some sweetness for yourself.

Again, counterintuitive. There you are trying to make yourself pay attention to something, which tends to enlist a fair amount of self-criticism and inner pressure. And then you start tapping into your introjects of all the people who were pressuring you when you were growing up, you know, violin teacher, whatever. That tends to wear us down more.

flip the other way when you bring that sweetness to yourself and comfort. Like, it's okay. It's okay, babe. Just stick with it. Don't worry. It's natural to have your attention wander. Just bring it back. You'll be okay. You know, it's stimulating. It's emotionally rewarding. It's novel. So you're resetting the attention machinery in your brain. And it's encouraging.

There's kind of a standard meditation instruction. Two of them I'll say. One is that we should be with our mind like the skillful rider of a horse, neither too tight nor too loose a rein.

So that tight rein is like, dummy, why can't you pay attention? Right? And then looser rein is, well, whatever, I'll just flake out forever. And this is a great example of how we do everything we should not do when we're trying to motivate ourselves towards something. True.

You are trying to motivate yourself toward the stick in that example. You're trying to punish yourself toward the... It doesn't make any sense, right? You're punishing yourself for doing the thing you should be doing. It's this weird counterintuitive thing. It's like the line from the Renaissance pleasure fair that the floggings will continue until morale improves. It's totally wild. I was just talking with somebody about this today, how

When I take some time out, you keep on using the gym as an example, might as well go back to it. So when I take some time off from the gym, first day I'm back in the gym, I'm criticizing myself the whole way through. There's so much self-criticism come us up. But it's this funny thing. The self-criticism comes in when I start doing the thing I'm supposed to be doing.

How weird is that, right? I don't know why that happens. Young might have had some thoughts about it or whatever, but like, okay, for whatever reason, this is what happens. But it is so counterintuitive and it's so counterproductive to what we're actually trying to accomplish. So anything you can do to turn up the more nurturing aspect that you're speaking to here, dad, I think is a huge piece of that. That's great. That's great. Another related metaphor is the mind's like a puppy and the puppy naturally is going to wander off and make messes and so forth.

If you're a good puppy parent, you don't hurt the puppy. You don't yell at the puppy. You just guide the puppy back to proper behavior again and again, but in a nurturing, hopefully fairly amused kind of way. And again, we can be that way with our own minds. I think there's a whole topic here we haven't gotten into, which is accommodation. Reasonable accommodations is the language from kids going through school that

It could just simply be that your way of learning is not reading the darn textbook.

Like I have a friend who got straight A's in college and who after the first semester never bought a textbook because they knew they would never read the book. They just took really good notes in classes and would maybe do study sessions with friends and they got straight A's. They had the intelligence to be able to pull that off, but they were making an accommodation for themselves.

Yeah, understanding your temperament here is a huge piece of this. Yeah, I know for myself, if people want to give me a kind of a lengthy rap about something, I'll often just say, you know, could you like put it in a short paragraph in an email? Because I'll remember that. This meeting could have been an email. Is that what you're doing to them, dad? Well, I frame it as, you know, this is my weakness. Could you help me with my weakness here? But it's kind of like accommodating. You're such a generous soul.

It's accommodating. Well, here's the thing. I've done a ton of IQ testing, ton of intelligence testing. Yeah. And did a lot of assessment. Yep. Classic tests have some number of subtests, let's say 13, 11, 13, let's say. If someone comes in and they are across the board at, let's say, the same percentile for each one, plus or minus a few digits, that's really weird.

The normal profile is peak, peak, peak, peak, valley, peak, peak, valley, valley, peak. That's the normal. Strengths and vulnerabilities. Yeah. That's normal. And so to recognize that about yourself, yeah, maybe with heroic effort, stick at your back, you could sustain attention to that. But

It's not- Is there an easier way for you to accomplish the same goal? It's not really your nature. Like myself, compared to my friend Bob, who's a world-class physician. Bob can remember all these formulas for calculating the proper dosage of different medications for people in the ICUs, all that stuff. I could make myself do it. I'd have to really work at it.

On the other hand, I remember every dream I've ever been told because I really remember visual material, visual imagery.

That's easy for me. So as a therapist, it's really easy for me to remember what people tell me because I'm really in their world. That's my strength. So I've kind of deliberately pulled away from memorizing pharmacological formulae and becoming a physician and moving more into the areas where it's easier for me to sustain attention.

So as we get to the end here, and we are unfortunately getting to the end here, is there anything else that has just stood out to you throughout this conversation, Dad, that you want to kind of make sure you get off your chest?

Because I know this is sometimes the case for you where we stop the recording and then you're like, oh, I really wanted to say blah, blah, blah. So I want to start doing this as a practice when we're doing these episodes together where I actually let you do the blah, blah, blah, but on the tape as opposed to me 15 minutes after we're done recording. Well, thank you for doing that and you doing it. And here's a really important point. When you did this, I felt a surge of love for you.

And then the question becomes, what am I going to sustain attention to? Am I going to stay in touch with that feeling, right? Or for various reasons, including the various ones you've come up with here, including distress tolerance, who may be feeling loving is kind of uncomfortable and I want to move on. You know, do I then move on? And for me, one of the huge life lessons has to do with what you pay attention to.

what you're resting in. If you have the choice to rest in something for at least a few seconds in a row, if not a few minutes in a row, that's really fundamental to who you are and to realize that you have the option of doing that.

Most of the time, not always, but most of the time, you have choice about what you stay with. That's what we're really talking about here. And also kind of what you disengage from. That's another thing for me really related to learning about neuroplasticity is to pull out of rumination.

to really appreciate that the mind is like a temple floor. And sometimes the temple dog comes in and leaves a mess on the floor. You don't get angry at the dog. You don't hurt the dog, but you clean up the mess because if it sits there very long, it will start to stain the floor. That's rumination in a nutshell.

Yeah, what are we moving to? What are we disengaging from? Yeah. With a sense that you have the right to do this. You matter. And I think for a lot of people, they feel like their attention has to be compelled. I had a roommate. This is like a kind of a Stone Age technology forest, but you may remember foam machines.

I think they're in the Smithsonian. And I had a friend, Mark, who when the phone rang, he had to answer it. And I was like, no, I don't want to talk to anybody. And I'll listen. If it's the president or my dad, I'll pick up the phone. But otherwise, I don't care.

I think in what you're saying, Dad, there's actually a great point, which is that we have these urges that come along to pull away from focus for whatever reason. Because we're trying to defend against a painful feeling, because an emotion came up that we didn't like, because our attentional curve is wearing down, because we don't have the distress tolerance left. All the stuff we talked about during the episode, right? We feel this urge of like, oh, I grabbed the phone or whatever it is.

And we don't have to do it just because we feel compelled to do it as part of what you're saying. Yeah, exactly. And then this also goes to other people. You know, there's a general principle of polite behavior, knock before entering. But think about how many people just barge into our attentional field with this presumption that they can take something.

right? What we're attending to. They can take our attention to something else. And to feel that you have the right, no, to not answer the phone or not respond to the email or not reply to that text, you know, or somebody at work, something like that. To me, that's a really important kind of statement of your own autonomy. Like, actually, no, I don't want to give you my attention right now.

This was great, Dad. I really appreciate you taking the time to do this today. I thought this was a great topic. Thank you.

I had a great time today talking with Rick about how we can improve focus and increase our attention span. And we started by appreciating the fact that this is a problem in large part because we are living in a really strange world. Your phone is in your pocket all the time, and it will give you an enormous amount of dopamine the moment you flip it open. And particularly once you start scrolling away on apps like TikTok and Instagram.

And so whenever you're doing something, you're doing some kind of other activity that could be commanding your attention or that you need to focus on, there is a part of your brain that knows that the phone is in your pocket. And it's just really difficult for us to sustain our focus onto things that aren't as interesting to us when we know that there's something that we could be doing all the time that would be incredibly interesting. And so that's the hill we're trying to overcome here.

as we engage this topic of how can we improve our attention span. We talked about a lot today, but we focused particularly on two big avenues of intervention that we have. First, increasing the motivation associated with the thing that we're trying to focus on. And there is this important distinction as well between motivation and willpower. Willpower is something that we have to apply when we're not really that motivated, when we can't really find the reward in the thing that we're doing.

Whereas motivation is this broader sense of what's good about this thing or what do I like about this thing? What's inherently rewarding about this activity? How does it get me closer to where I want to go? So that's one big circle. Then the other big circle that we have is working with our distress tolerance and expanding our window of comfort. This means embracing boredom in small ways. It means getting a little bit more comfortable with a slightly lower level of stim and

And particularly, a big aspect of this is getting more comfortable with the thoughts, the feelings, and the emotions that tend to come up for a person when they let their mind be quiet or when we're not distracting ourselves with constant high dopamine activities. When we're just staring at the wall, the single point, for 30 seconds, what comes up? What are you thinking about? What are the emotions? What are the feelings? For many people, these are very distracting.

and they are often quite uncomfortable. And so we search for the soothing behavior. We search for the phone, we search for the video game, we search for whatever it is for you.

And this creates a self-fulfilling prophecy for people where there's some kind of thing they need to do or some big important question for them. What do I really care about? What do I want to pursue in my life? What do I need to accomplish and how can I accomplish it more effectively? Something like that, right? Engaging with a question like that is emotionally loaded and spooky for a person, right? So it's very tough to focus on a lot of the time. And when we feel the pain associated with it, we tack away. We go into the soothing behavior. We pick up the phone.

And this creates a kind of pattern for us. Pain equals move our attention. When things get hard, we do something else. The more that we give into that and move our attention away when we get that negative stimuli, when we experience the pain, we reinforce the behavior. That becomes a habit. And part of that habit is a kind of story that we create about ourselves. I am the kind of person who can't focus. I'm the kind of person who moves away from something when these emotions come up.

That often creates a lot of self-criticism for a person. The self-criticism makes it harder, as we talked about during the episode, to keep on sticking with the things that we want to focus on, which is very counterproductive because we kind of think of self-criticism as something that's very motivational. It's actually not motivational at all. And so that makes things even harder for us. All right, so what can we do about all of this? Well, there were three things that Rick emphasized that tend to make it harder for a person to focus. First, higher stimulation seeking.

Second, porous filters. This means that stimuli, whether it's internal feelings inside of your body or external stuff that's happening out in the world, really influences us. It makes it harder for us to concentrate. We have a harder time kind of filtering it out. And then the third is just attentional fatigue in general.

While it's not always possible for people to increase their innate level of these three things, how stimulation-seeking they are, how porous their internal and external boundaries are, the curve of attentional fatigue for them, but what they can do is get closer to that ceiling. Most people are not maxed out, and there are a bunch of different tactics that we can use to do this.

And most of them come back to the two big circles that I mentioned, improving focus motivation on the one hand, improving distress tolerance on the other. There's a third very important circle, which is about physical health and supporting your physical health and the ways that that can support attention. But we're not experts on that, so we didn't talk about it so much. And some of the points that Rick made about working inside of a meditative framework and improving our ability to apply mindfulness

I think had a lot of application for improving focus and attention span broadly. One of the first things that he said was appreciating how when we're meditating, we're not trying to not think. We're not trying to have disruption never come to us.

Because a lot of people have a model where when they start getting taken or captured by something, he also talked about this relationally with other people, that they have to pay attention to the thing that's pulling their attention. I must pay attention to that thing. It is being demanded of me. But the truth is that a thought can just be a thought. It can just be something that floats through the mind and you just kind of see it as it goes in one ear and out the other, so to speak.

It just flows through. It's okay. We have thoughts that come up. Mind is like a cave of bats. Rick likes to say that sometimes. And we can just kind of appreciate these things as they go in and then out the door. A feeling can come up. Your butt can start to hurt. It can be boring to look at the wall. It's okay. It's just a feeling. You don't need to be so compelled by it. And I think that just that kind of relationship with what's going on inside of our mind can be totally revelatory for people.

He then offered a few other tactics toward the end of the episode where he talked about going wide. When we try to focus on something, there can be this real sense of contraction and narrowing that's associated with it, right? We're just looking at this one thing. For some people, it can be helpful to have a moment where they are still looking at that one thing, but they let their mind just kind of open out.

or they let their awareness take in more things that are around them. They look around the room, they're with the room for a moment, and then they come back to the thing that they're focusing on. Also, he talked about connecting with more nurturant or less self-critical aspects of who we are. Self-criticism can really get in the way of our ability to apply focus because it's very punishing. So we're essentially trying to punish ourselves into doing more of a thing, and that just tends not to work very well.

Finally, he talked about appreciating your unique nature. We all have strengths and vulnerabilities. There might be some things that just are really hard for you to focus on for whatever reason. Maybe you pay attention better when you're watching something visual than when you're reading something or when you're hearing something that's got more stimulation associated with it for you for whatever reason.

Of course, we want to train ourselves to be multimodal. We don't want to be stuck in doing things just one way. We would like to have a little flexibility in life. These are all important things to train.

But then alongside all of those important things, we can appreciate, hey, here are where my strengths are. And my individual strength is probably not watching this two-hour-long deep dive into something. I'm not going to be able to sustain attention to that. But I can do it in 15-minute increments. I can do it 15 minutes today and then 15 minutes tomorrow and 15 minutes the day after that.

And maybe I try to do it as a kind of exposure thing where I increase the amount that I'm doing it each day over a given period of time. And it feels like increasing by a minute each day is really not that much. It's not a big deal. It's like, oh, whatever. It's just a minute. Why not do 15 minutes or something? Okay. But you stick with just a minute. And if you do just a minute for 15 days in a row, all of a sudden you're up to doing 15 minutes a day. And that can make a real difference for a person.

Then there was a whole section of the conversation where Rick was really interested in this idea of cultivating more presence in our relationships with other people. What supports somebody in being able to pay attention to what their friend is saying, not in a cursory way, but in a really fully invested way as that person is talking? Can we cultivate that as a real skill set and a skill set that improves our relationships, has a lot of good benefits for us? And what can we do in order to tap more into that feeling of presence with another person?

And one of the points that came out of this conversation is that willpower is what you need when you're not in touch with the rewards of what you're currently doing. If what you're currently doing does not feel very rewarding to you, then of course you need more willpower in order to do it. What does this mean? It means that we really need to go out of our way to search for the reward inside of the interaction.

So what can we find about this interaction that's a little bit more rewarding for us? Is there a way where we can move the topic a little bit to something that we would be really interested in talking about, assuming that we can do that in kind of a polite way? Is there something about the other person that we find really interesting? Can we tap into the feeling of just talking as an interesting activity in general? Can we explore this and find something about it to be rewarded by?

And then if we can't, then we're in the world of distress tolerance. Then we're in the world of how do I make this as easy as possible? How do I use this as a place of practice? How do I get more comfortable with this thing over time? But for most people, finding more reward is going to be, hey, a lot more rewarding for them, and it's going to make things a lot more enjoyable.

I hope you enjoyed today's conversation. It wasn't quite what I expected it would be. I thought that we would be a little bit more technical during it. And as is often the case, Rick was just really drawn by the kind of bigger picture aspects of this. I'm very curious what people thought about it. If you would like to leave a comment down below, if you're watching on YouTube, you can also send us an email. It's at contact at beingwellpodcast.com. You can leave a rating and a positive review on the podcast platform of your choice if you're listening to us through a podcast feed.

And the best way to support the show is to tell a friend about it or to find and join us on Patreon. It's patreon.com slash beingwellpodcast. And for just a couple of dollars a month, you can support the show and you'll get a bunch of bonuses in return.

Finally, just a quick reminder here at the end about Rick's online program. It's his five-week course on breaking out of rumination, and it focuses on helping us learn how to let go of repetitive patterns of thought. We talked about rumination a little bit during the episode. It's a big challenge for a lot of people. And if it's something that you think you can get some value out of, hey, check out the course. And you can use the code BEINGWELL25 to receive 25% off. Until next time, thanks for listening, and I'll talk to you soon.