Your Mind Has A Mind of Its Own, Unless You Mind It With Meta-Awareness

I have had both of my shoulders replaced. One ten months ago, the other 7 months ago. After each replacement, there was a regimen of stretching exercises that were crucial for me to gain full mobility so I could resume a normal lifestyle. Though I felt like shit in general after each operation (especially the second one), I did my stretching exercises religiously, no matter what. My motivation was high despite my pain and misery because I had a near-term vision of wanting to be able to move my arms freely without pain or stiffness. It worked! I have great function now and am lifting weights again (very light). But this morning, after I finished my elliptical session, when it was time to do my stretches, my own personal defense lawyer, my Perry Mason, who was retained by my brain to keep me comfy, shot up from his chair in the courtroom of my mind to make the case that I didn’t need to do my pullover stretch right now. Perry rattled off all of his arguments against my discipline as I sat on the mental witness stand: “Dr. Maddaus, you hardly have any pain now, you are back lifting again, you have a ton of shit to do today and need to get activated,” and on and on and on.” But Perry is good, and he pulled out the argument that he knows works best on me personally: “Why don’t you just do it this afternoon when ______?” — feel free to fill in the blank with your own special BS excuses. Hats off to the judge overseeing the whole scene — my Meta-Awareness judge, who oversees the courtroom of my mind and who called BS to my excuses. So, I did the stretches. Then I got up with a little smile and a tiny mental skip in my step!

Time To Read:

Key Takeaways

1. Situational Awareness: the monitoring of your external landscape through your ability to perceive information about what is happening, to understand the meaning of what is happening, and then accurately predict the future to prevent bad outcomes. Picture the conduct of an operation, or flying a plane, or fighting a fire.
2. Meta-Awareness: becoming aware of your situational awareness by making your awareness of your situation conscious. Meta Awareness is Situational Awareness of our internal landscape. It is paying attention to your attention. Picture a sudden tension in your jaw during a difficult part of an operation. Time to relax, take some deep breaths, and regroup.
3. Goal Neglect: the mental grip or enchantment of being so sucked into a goal, like a flashlight, that we neglect the larger goal for the smaller one that has hijacked our attention. Think of your life being on a treadmill of distractions and unnecessary activities, overwhelmed with smaller goals that take us away from our larger life goals.
4. Meta-Moments: when you realize your attention is hyperfocused, on autopilot, and has a life of its own. Think going way down the rabbit hole of searching the web and YouTube for the best note-taking app (guilty and a repeat offender!) and 20 min later, you suddenly wake up (MetaMoment) from the trance.
5. Mind wandering is not the problem. The problem is mind wandering without meta-awareness.
6. Meta-Awareness Gym: meditation is the gym we go to train our Meta-Awareness muscle (especially with the Waking Up app) to strengthen our Meta-Awareness by helping us to notice and create more Meta-Moments out in the wild terrain of our lives.
7. All Your Excuses Are Lies: most of them anyway, and Meta-Awareness proves it.

Resources/References

A Wandering Mind Is an Unhappy Mind

A Wandering Mind Is an Unhappy Mind.pdf

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King Internet and all of its foot soldiers (Email, Facebook, Youtube, Instagram, Google search, ads, to name a few) have overrun the few defenses our poor prefrontal cortex has to manage the daily onslaught, and the devastation is ubiquitous, as demonstrated by Gloria Mark, a professor of informatics and author of Attention Span: A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness, and Productivity

King Internet also plants many tiny seeds inside our brains that get triggered later to grow by associations. For example, I am writing this newsletter (larger life goal of helping others). I see an ad for a nice hoody on the side of an internet page (seed planted). I have been wanting a new hoody (association). I click it (new microgoal diverts me from larger life goal). I am off to the Attention Switching races.

Gloria studied Attention Shifting in the real world, in living laboratories where people work, using software to track clicks and computer use and heart rate monitors to measure heart rate variability (HRV), a measure of stress.

(HRV is the fluctuation of the length of heartbeat intervals, and since the autonomic nervous system profoundly influences our heart rate, HRV reflects the ability of your autonomic nervous system to respond to stimuli. A low HRV, or very regular heartbeat interval, can mean your autonomic nervous system is a mess and not responding as it should.)

Gloria found that the average time between attention shifts = 3 minutes, 5 seconds. The impact of all this constant Attention Shifting?:

• work becomes fragmented
• lowered productivity
• drains cognitive resources (i.e. you feel mentally fatigued)
• creates stress — literally — HRV becomes regular and not as responsive

It all adds up to feeling drained and stressed at the end of a work day.

A crucial concept highlighted by Dr. Mark is that our attention is always goal-directed. Even when my mind hijacks my attention with the hoody seed previously planted by an internet ad. The seed grows unbidden, triggered by something, and now I am off to the races toward my new goal of getting a hoody and staying warm.

The problem? The Big Problem? King Internet and all the interruptions, internal or external, by constantly fertilizing and watering the tenacious weeds of distraction, can suffocate the growth of our larger life goals garden. If we are not careful, our garden will be overrun with these weeds in a slow downward spiral.

What to do? In the new world of knowledge, we can no longer escape to a cave as someone who is writing a book might. We must learn to interface with the beast while putting up mental guardrails to keep us on the right path, and Meta-Awareness is the most important first step. Because we absolutely cannot tame it with the force of discipline. We must learn to gently redirect our attention in the service of our larger life goals, day in and day out.

So, what exactly is Meta-Awareness? In the book Peak Mind, Dr. Amishi Jha defines it as the ability to take explicit note of and monitor the current contents or processes of your conscious experience (huh?).

Or, more simply, it is being aware of your awareness or “paying attention to your attention.”

Or how about this: the mind has a mind of its own, unless you mind it.

Back to the courtroom of my mind. A judge has to keep her Meta-Awareness running, or else. When a lawyer is questioning a witness, she needs to pay attention to the lawyer’s questions while also (to name a few):

• pay attention to the testimony of the witness
• consider the laws that apply to the case
• keep in mind the rules and standards governing what the lawyer is saying to the witness
• be ready to respond to objections
• all of this while monitoring other people’s attention — are the jurors sleepy, is the court reporter keeping up?

There is so much to attend to! But it gets worse. You have to attend to your mind on top of all that:

• she can’t be thinking about her argument with her kid last night
• or what she wants for lunch
• or whether she is doing a good job

This is why Meta-Awareness is such a crucial skill, not just for tending the garden of your bigger life goals but for anyone in a high-stakes profession, like surgeons, pilots, and judges. When we fall into the grip of our attention being hijacked by a problem, we narrow our attention to a smaller goal, and then we can miss the forest for the trees.

Meta-Awareness is a superpower that allows us to monitor consciously:

1. Our attention to our attention (am I aware of what is happening in the courtroom (or operating room or airplane).
2. Our attention to our attention of what is happening in our internal courtroom. In other words, am I aware of my thoughts and emotions, and my implicit biases.

Paraphrased from Peak Mind: A judge has to be aware of how things show up in her body — frustration, anxiety, worry, and to integrate this information into the whole landscape of everything going on in the courtroom. Not only that, but a top-flight judge must consider their implicit biases in every case by asking themselves what their personal assumptions are, and what is in their drop-down menu of biases around gender, race, profession, and class. Much of the practice of Meta-Awareness is simply trying to notice our assumptions in life, and to challenge them consciously.

As I used to tell the surgical residents — assumptions are the mother of all f***ups. To be able to pay attention to anything without judgment, of the other person, of a circumstance, or of ourselves, is a superpower that fosters a clear mind that can see and better interpret reality.

Picture this. You are in a ballroom listening to a talk that is riveting. Then you notice the hum of an air conditioner to your right. Your attention shifts to the noise. There is nothing you can do about the noise. It is reality, like gravity. It ain’t going to change, at least not now. Here is what happens inside the dark silent vault of your skull:

1. The sensation is picked up — the air conditioner noise.
2. A thought surfaces — damn, I can’t hear the speaker well now.
3. An emotion bubbles up — irritation
4. An action shoots out like the bullet from a gun — you get up, walk down the side of the isle, find a hotel employee, and bitch about the noise.

Now you have missed some of the talk, you have activated your nervous system, you are stressed and distracted, you march back to your chair, sit down, and struggle to recover and listen, now with the air conditioner noise bugging you even more. This is the internal sequence of events that transpire below the level of conscious awareness that causes all of us to not only do and say things we may later regret, but also divert us from our larger goals by getting sucked into trying to deal with a smaller, and most often, irrelevant and distracting goal.

Meta-Awareness gives us what Dr. Jai calls Choice Points along the cascade of the unfolding events in our minds that can prevent what she calls Ballistic Reactions. It allows us to “see” what is going on — i.e. you see that the noise is bugging you, that you have become irritated, and now you have a Choice Point: you can choose not to be irritated and to let it go.

This may sound ridiculous at first blush, but it is true. You can choose not to hang onto the sound and let it fade from awareness. It is the old clinging and aversion issues we all struggle with — clinging to something we want or avoiding something we don’t want, and the more locked in you are to either, the greater the suffering. This is why the Let Them Theory highlighted in my previous post is a real-life example of Meta-Awareness in action. Drop the damn struggle.

It is the Second Arrow parable in Buddhism. A student is asked: If an arrow strikes you, does it hurt? Yes, says the student. If a second arrow strikes you, does it hurt? Yes, says the student. But it doesn’t have to hurt. In life, we cannot control whether the first arrow hits us, but we can control our response to the second arrow. Our response to these second arrows can either make life hard for us (and for others in our orbit) or it can lead to calm in a sea of arrows. This is why Meta-Awareness is also so good for others and our relationships.

This is freedom at its finest. No longer must one be a slave to the external world or our internal world, reacting ad-lib to every stimulus that comes along. By practicing Meta-Awareness, we can free ourselves from this bondage. And meditation, especially the type of meditation taught by Sam Harris in the Waking Up app, in my opinion, is the best training camp.

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