Okay, I love where the ball is going. I would add depressed mood as something to really pay attention to. 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 it's only consuming 20% of your 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 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 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 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's it. 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, right? 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. 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 you, 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? You know, 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 rip? 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. 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 wellbeing. So you do that, so you cultivate that sense of wellbeing. Or maybe you want to rest your attention in a sense of warm-heartedness, lovingness. People who care about you, you care about them. They're two. You get that two-for 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 keep your eyes open, or be aware of breathing, 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, 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, no, 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 or in their relationships. Part of what we're talking about is developing the capacity to sustain presence, to be continuously present. I 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, big picture application of what I thought we were going to be doing today with attention 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 like if you don't know what the rewards are, you need a lot of willpower to your thing where you were like, you know, 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 reward, 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-ness. 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? It's all your fault to get the burn. 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, cause there's, and here's, well, 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? 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. The moving the weight as a manifestation of my will and effort in the world. Wow, that's really motivating. Narcissistic gains. Wow, this means I grew some muscles and so I'm going to kind of like how I look better. Wow, that's nice. Ooh, I love that. Yeah, so 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 well-being and quality of life when my head hits the pillow is 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. 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, my 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 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 a third category that I mentioned toward the beginning, the presence of these kinds of uncomfortable thoughts and feelings that pull our attention away. 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 presence, when you're talking to them, they just feel very engaged, is that they've found the reward. They find the reward from that interaction. They feel very present in life in that way because they experience the reward from life, 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, if 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, uh, 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 like 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 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 and 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- 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. 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? I don't know.