Welcome to the Very Well Mind podcast. We've interviewed over 100 authors, experts, entrepreneurs, athletes, musicians, and others to help you learn strategies to care for your mental health.

This episode is hosted by psychotherapist and bestselling author Amy Morin. Now let's get into the episode.

Okay. Do you have a hard time focusing?

Do you feel like your attention span is getting worse?

If you answered yes to any of those questions, this episode is for you. My guest today is Dr. Amishi Jha. She's a professor of psychology at the University of Miami. She serves as the

director of contemplative neuroscience for the Mindfulness Research and Practice Initiative, which she

co-founded in 2010. She's also the author of a new book called Peak Mind. In it,

she shares what her research has uncovered about our attention spans, and she explains how you can

improve your focus in just 12 minutes a day. Today, she's talking about why it feels like our

attention spans have gotten so much worse, the steps we can take to improve our attention,

and the benefits that we'll gain when we feel more in control of our minds. Make sure to stick

around until the end of the episode for the therapist's take. This is a part of the show where I'll

break down Dr. Jaws' strategies and share how you can apply them to your own line. So here's Dr. Amishi

Jha on how to approve your attention span so you can apply them to your own line. So here's Dr. Amishi Jha on how to approve your attention

span so you can grow mentally stronger. Dr. Amishi Jha, welcome to the Very Well Mind podcast.

Very excited to be here. So I get a lot of questions from our listeners and from readers.

And recently, one of the most common questions I get from people is,

how do I improve my focus? So I'm excited to talk to you about your new book, Peak Mind,

and to help everybody figure out, how do we pay attention better? One of the things that struck

me in your book is you said that most of us miss out on about 50% of our lives these

days because we're not paying attention. That's correct. And it is kind of a shocking number.

And I would say, you know, it's not necessarily only these days that we have that high percentage.

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