If you’re feeling distracted, mentally fogged, and unable to pay attention to the task at hand, you’re not alone. The human brain is highly susceptible to often unproductive mind-wandering, and modern technology has only made the problem worse. But we all know that the best work comes when you’re able to really zero in on an idea or problem for a sustained period of time. So, we need better strategies for blocking out the external and internal noise. Dr. Amishi Jha, a neuroscientist and professor of psychology at the University of Miami and the author of Peak Mind, offers recommendations based on studies of people in some of the most high-pressure jobs in the world.
Key episode topics include: Leadership, psychology, neuroscience, managing yourself
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As a leader, noticing where your attention goes is a skill that affects your judgment, learning, listening—basically every aspect of how you think and show up.
In this HBR IdeaCast episode from 2021, host Alison Beard speaks with a scientist who’s spent decades studying how the mind directs attention, why it falters under strain, and mental exercises that rebuild it.
She’s Dr. Amishi Jha, professor of psychology at the University of Miami and the author of the book Peak Mind.
Here’s host Alison Beard.
ALISON BEARD: Amishi, thank you so much for being on the show today.
AMISHI JHA: It’s great to be here.
ALISON BEARD: So, why do so many of us feel so distracted so much of the time? You know, even when we know where our focus should be, why do we have trouble putting it there?
AMISHI JHA: Great question. And I think you are absolutely not alone in that feeling of, you can’t quite catch your full attention, even if you have every intention to. But it ends up that our brain was actually built for distractibility. So, the fact that we have this wandering mind that kind of roams around everywhere is a design, not a flaw. It’s just that unfortunately for us in this particular day and age, the demands are unending, and our attention does get not only yanked around, but actually is the target for many, many different aspects of our social media use and our tech use.
ALISON BEARD: Yeah. It certainly feels like a flaw. So, you talked about technology. Is it harder than ever to focus right now because of it, or is that just in our heads?
AMISHI JHA: You’d think that this is some modern issue. In fact, I had asked often, aren’t our attention spans so much smaller than they used to be? And the reality is, no. Our attention is not any shorter than it’s ever been. In fact, part of the issue with attention is that it’s not just one thing; it’s several things, and maybe breaking it down a little bit might help us understand why it is that we’re feeling this way.
But in the Medieval times, there were monastics, there were monks, that actually were complaining that even though they had left all of their, sort of, worldly goods, and their family relationships and were now committed to spending their time connecting with God and in prayer, their minds were thinking about lunch, and they were fast-forwarding to the next event.
And to me, that is very humbling because that means that this incessant distractibility that we experience is, for sure, probably exaggerated by our modern context, but it’s not solely the result of our modern context, and many people who put themselves in situations where they’ve really advantaged their ability to not be distracted still experienced it.
ALISON BEARD: So, you talked about breaking it down. How do we start you that?
AMISHI JHA: So, maybe we begin by just kind of describing what attention is. It is not just simply a brain resource, but it is something that actually allows us and fuels our capacity to do things, like thinking and feeling and regulating our mood and our emotions, as well as connecting. And so, part of the reason for breaking it down into these subsist is that we want to understand how it’s able to do all of those complex things.
To break it down, there are three main systems of attention, and the first one probably is familiar to everybody. In fact, we’ve been using the term, “attention,” I think we default to understanding it as meaning, “focus.” So, we direct our, our focus towards something, and whatever it is that we focus on, there’s privileged access to that information. So, right now for me, it’s whenever you speak, that’s the focus of my attention. I’m going to home in on your voice, not the hum of the air conditioner in my office, or anything else that’s happening around me—
ALISON BEARD: What you’re doing for lunch today.
AMISHI JHA: Exactly.
ALISON BEARD: Like those monks.
AMISHI JHA: But right now, really, it’s to home in on what is most important for me to be able to do the task at hand. This system is formally called the brain’s orienting system. And I like to think about it like a flashlight; wherever it is that you direct that flashlight, you get privileged access to that information; it’s crisp clear, and everything else is really kind of a hazy; it’s in the void. We don’t really see it. And the really cool thing about this system is that, not only can we direct it toward the external environment, just like a literal flashlight, but we can direct that flashlight internally.
If you have a train of thought, essentially, you are taking that flashlight and shining it on that particular conceptual content, and then following it. So, it stays at the center of your mind of your conscious experience. So, we can direct the flashlight toward thoughts, emotions, memories, and even bodily sensations. So, if right now, Alison, I say, “What are the sensations that you have on the bottoms of your feet?” you’d kind of, probably you can do it.
ALISON BEARD: Yeah, I’m feeling them in my shoes.
AMISHI JHA: Right. But I’m positive that before I said that, you were not focused on that. And that aspect of what was present and accessible by you was not in your mind.
ALISON BEARD: But isn’t the issue that the flashlight sometimes feels like a searchlight? Like it’s not staying in one spot, it’s just jumping to one thing and then jumping to another?
AMISHI JHA: Such a good point. So, flashlight and searchlight in some sense are the same thing. What I’m talking about is this sort of strong beam. Not only can we direct it externally and internally, but it gets yanked. It gets magnetically pulled, and something we call “click bait,” the kinds of content that draws the flashlight to it, is not a mystery: novel information, threatening information, anything having to do with yourself. Bright lights, red, bright colors. I mean, yes, oftentimes we have every intention of directing that flashlight toward the report we’re writing, or even our conversation partner.
And then it gets yanked away, not just by these external—the ping of your phone or whatever, text notification—but even that kind of content, that threatening, or fear inducing, or self-related content that occurs within your own mind. A thought may pop up, and boom, your attention flashlight is on that thought and no longer listening to the words from your conversation partner.
ALISON BEARD: Right.
AMISHI JHA: But now let’s talk about the other systems of attention, because it doesn’t work alone. And in some sense what I’m about to say next will sound like what you described as a searchlight. It actually isn’t. The formal term for the system is something we call the “alerting system.” The metaphor I like to use is like a floodlight. And unlike the orienting system, which is privileging certain kinds of content, the floodlight and the alerting system are advantaging the present moment; what is happening right now? I need to be alert to what is occurring right now. It’s broad, receptive, and this is where we call it having a very low signal to noise ratio. Nothing is privileged over anything else; everything is potentially something you might need to interact with. So, I mean, I think that once we describe how we use it, we get a sense, yeah, of course, when I have to be vigilant and alert of what’s happening right now, quite different than the other notion of attention that we talked about with this narrowing and selecting.
ALISON BEARD: Yeah. And you said there were three? What’s the third?
AMISHI JHA: It’s something called executive control. And we use that term “executive” in cognitive neuroscience because it really is like the executive of a company. The executive’s job is not to go in and do every single task that an organization is supposed to do; it’s to manage and oversee, to ensure that our goals and our behavior are aligned, moment by moment. And then to guide course corrections when they’re out of sync. We do things like maintain the goal, just hold it in mind: What is the actual goal now? Or we inhibit distractions that come in, like swat it away: Nope, not right now. Or we update, meaning new information comes in and we say, Okay, the goal has been slightly revised.
All of these are things, I know we all know from our own experience, we’ve got to do constantly. And the metaphor that I use for this system is like a juggler. We’re really trying to keep all the balls in the air, and we are kind of dealing with the multiplicity of demands. And not only are we holding goals in mind, but we’re using those goals to guide what the floodlight and the flashlight do. And all of these systems that work together in this core coordinated fashion to allow us to have the full experience of our attention. And really, peak mind to me is not only awareness and acknowledging these systems and their existence, but being able to fully engage in these systems, as we need them and a better and more fluid coordination between them as we execute task in our work life, and our personal lives.
ALISON BEARD: One of the lines in the book that I highlighted was, “The researchers realized that the rest was never actually restful, because people were using the time to think about themselves.” And I greatly identified with that. But of course, you have studied people who are very good at focusing when they need to: doctors, firefighters, judges, military drone operators. So, what do they do differently, or what have they learned to do differently?
AMISHI JHA: Frankly, they’re just as vulnerable as the rest of us. So, the skills and the training allow for focus to happen. There’s an exquisite precision of being able to be on task. But the number I give, even at the outset of the book, is 50%. And 50% is the amount of time that our minds, in general, on average will wander away from the task at hand. So, that vulnerability still exists, and it can go up under high-stress circumstances. So, I think that the main thing to realize, and first, I realized it sort of at the conceptual level: Oh, my goodness. These same people that you just described, right? These very high demand, high stress individuals, well, we ask as a society, we rely on first responders, for example, or even judges and lawyers and military service members, and emergency professionals to operate at their best under circumstances that really characterize what will cripple attention. A shorthand that I like to use, that actually, it’s from my colleagues at the U.S. Army War College, is VUCA. This is now, I think, entering management circles now: volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous.
What we did, across many, many studies, is we said, Okay, let’s take these periods of time that we know are going to be sort of characterized by VUCA, across these various professions like pre-deployment training in soldiers, or even pre-season training in athletes, the academic semester in students, lawyers preparing for a trial. You know, these are things where it’s preparatory in some sense, but it’s going to be intensive and demanding.
At the end of that interval, you have to do something big, whether it’s being deployed, or deal with your competition season, or take final exams. When you sample attention at the beginning of some period of time, let’s say eight weeks, and then you have people come back into lab eight weeks later, or even four weeks later, and what’s been happening in that period of time intervening is high demand and protracted demands, attention significantly gets worse.
Your flashlight is not staying where you want it to be. The floodlights, the alerting system, a