All it takes is 12 minutes, daily!
That’s what the data shows as the time required to change the functioning and structure of our brain! To be more aware, attentive, and fully present. But to make the 12 minutes habitual requires our mental models to co-operate.
I touched on it last week but want to dive in a little deeper this week. I finished reading Peak Mind by Amishi Jha and she highlights concepts that are useful and practical. The concepts are not new to me. I knew this through my past work in Neuroscience. What I like about Jha is her practical, data-driven approach to honing our superpower. Attention.
And that, for me, starts with our mental models. Our thinking, stories, and beliefs, govern our actions. But some of these have passed their use-by date. And therefore, are not delivering the results we want. Some of our mental models need an upgrade.
Take for example meditation. Mention it to a variety of people and you get a variety of reactions. For some, it’s something they have been practising for years, and for others, it is an alien concept.
The irony is in Asia, especially India, it is something we grew up with. Passed down from our meditating forefathers in the Himalayas. An old Indian practice whose meaning and purpose were messaged incorrectly. My opinion. The western world embraced it, just as they did Yoga, making it vogue. Meditation feels like it was marketed incorrectly in Asia. Well to me AND Jha anyway.
She had the same perception of meditation as I. I love the way Jha relates her experience of meditation. She was born in India but moved to the States with her parents at a young age. Growing up she had an aversion to meditation as she saw her parents ‘meditating’ every day. She did not understand it.
Yet in her quest to understand the neuroscience of attention all roads led to meditation, or what she calls mindfulness and what I call ‘thought watching’. It took her a while to get around her meditation mental model to appreciate the power of mindfulness. The data made her recalibrate/re-write her meditation mental model.
Her last chapter sums it up. Mindfulness is the core training for the brain. And she calls it “attentional reps” which consist of these steps:
Focus
Maintain
Notice
Redirect
Repeat
That’s it AND her research shows that when we do this for 12 minutes, daily, our brain is better able to hold its attention. Just as exercise strengthens the body, mindfulness practiced consistently over time will change the functioning and structure of our brain. This is my greatest takeaway from her book. Proven with data.
Start slow, say 3 minutes and enjoy the success of completion before increasing the duration. Mindfulness success does not mean that our brain never wanders, that we sit still throughout, or that we experience bliss, peace, or relaxation! Her definition of success is putting in the time and doing the practice. Success is completion!
And a good way to complete a practice is to anchor it in another activity that you do daily., like coffee. ‘After I make my coffee, I sit down and do my mindfulness practice’.
Here’s a bit of trivia. Jha mentions her colleague, an expert-level meditator, in her book and is bewildered when he says that having practiced meditation for over 30 years, the longest he can go without his mind wandering is 7 seconds. 7 seconds!!
We can’t stop our brains from wandering. It is what the brain does. But we can focus, maintain, notice, redirect, repeat. This process is useful when rewriting our mental models too.
We all practice some variation of mindfulness in our own way, but the key is to make it a daily practice and research shows that 12 minutes is the minimum to make change happen. Anything more is a bonus. There will also be days when we are more distracted than usual. Build some slack into your 12 minutes on those days.
12 minutes isn’t much time at all but its impact on our brain is tremendous!
As always, you can reach me at yoga@yoganesadurai.com