Your attention determines:

• what you perceive, learn, and remember;
• how steady or how reactive you feel;
• which decisions you make and actions you take;
• how you int...

• Attention simultaneously highlights what’s important and dims distractions so we can think deeply, problem-solve, plan, prioritize, and innovate
• It threads together the moment-by-momen...

• attention biases brain activity. It gives a competitive advantage to the information it selects. Whatever it is you pay attention to will have more neural activity associated with it. Your att...

The Flashlight

• Where you focus to, that point become clearer. Other than that point, become suppressed. Like a flashlight
• Called orienting system

The Floodlight

• Attention never vanishes, even though it might feel as if it does when you’re struggling to focus and simply can’t
• The amount of attention you have remains constant. It just ge...

Any tasks you do over a period of time:

• Performance declines
• Errors goes up
• Response becomes slower and more variable

1. Get ready, sit in an upright alerted posture, shoulder back chest open and be comfortable.
2. Tune in to the breath related sensation, imagine the air en...

• When we try to do two things at once that both require our attention, it’s really hard to do either of them well
• Think of it this way: You only have one flashlight. Not two. Not three....

To get a sense of what this means for your cognition, imagine a studio apartment. There is only one room. Every time you want to use the room, you have to completely change out the furniture. Want ...

• Working memory is where you hold the micro-intentions and deliberate aim of having a desired outcome for each and every task you engage in
• All the decisions, planning, thinking, action...

Working memory is the essential partner to attention: it’s what allows you to actually do something with the information your flashlight focuses on. But if attention keeps piping i...

The flashlight encodes information and maintains it in working memory, “retracing” it on the whiteboard to keep it there for longer.

— Key vulnerability: Bait and Sw...

The floodlight gains access to the whiteboard to accomplish an urgent goal. Under acute threat or stress, your alerting system temporarily blocks access to working memory to ensure that your brain’...

The juggler keeps your current goals active on the whiteboard, and updates these goals as circumstances change.

— Key vulnerability: Ball Drop

Overload, blanking, and ...

1. Repeat the previous steps. We begin the same way we did with the basic Find Your Flashlight (find where your thoughts focus on), by sitting in a chair, comfortable but upright, resting your hand...

2. Notice where it goes. This is a new step! In the first exercise, I asked you to notice if attention wandered away, and if so to immediately move your flashlight back to your bre...

3. Give it a label. Identify what type of distraction has appeared on your whiteboard. Is it a thought, an emotion, or a

4. Make this a quick process. Notice if you begin going down a rabbit hole of elaborating on the distraction, or asking why you are thinking about this particular topic, or default...

5. Move on. Come back to the present moment, back to your breath, after every instance of labeling. If it’s a strong experience, it might pop up repeatedly—then just label it again...

6. Repeat. Each time you notice yourself mind-wandering, tag the content of your mind-wandering (as thought, emotion, or sensation) and then come back to your breath.

your memory for experiences, involves selective encoding of only those aspects of experience that were most attended to and held in working memory. Translation: you’ll only remembe...

your general world knowledge, for facts, ideas, concepts—is similarly selective. What you remember is based on what else you’ve previously learned.