This article is an excerpt from the Shortform book guide to "Peak Mind" by Amishi P. Jha. Shortform has the world's best summaries and analyses of books you should be reading.
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Do you have trouble paying attention? How can mindfulness help you build connections and overcome challenges?
In her book Peak Mind, neuroscientist Amishi Jha walks through the science of attention and why humans struggle with it so often. As a remedy to poor focus, she suggests mindfulness, a practice that’s used in training programs for the military, first responders, corporate leaders, and elite athletes.
Read more in our overview of Peak Mind.
Overview of Peak Mind by Amishi Jha
Your ability to pay attention impacts every aspect of your life—from how well you perform at work to how deeply you connect with others. Yet it’s often difficult to focus on what matters.
In her book Peak Mind, neuroscientist Amishi Jha suggests that this struggle to pay attention prevents your mind from functioning at its peak, resulting in poorer decisions, forgotten information, and emotional instability. She argues that practicing mindfulness can help you overcome these challenges, improve your ability to pay attention, and enhance your overall mental functioning.
Jha is a professor of psychology and Director of Contemplative Neuroscience at the University of Miami, where she leads research on attention, mindfulness, and resilience. Her research has been funded by the US Department of Defense and has led to mindfulness training programs for the military, first responders, corporate leaders, and elite athletes. She’s published extensively in peer-reviewed journals, and her research has been featured in The New York Times, Scientific American, and TIME.
Part 1: What Is Attention?
Jha describes attention as your brain’s manager, controlling how you perceive, interpret, and respond in every moment of your life. It does this by determining what information your brain notices, processes, and remembers—which in turn, influences your thoughts, feelings, decisions, and behaviors. According to Jha, attention controls what information your brain notices and processes through three interconnected subsystems:
1) The orienting system narrows in on specific information and suppresses distractions, helping you focus on a single subject. For example, while cooking dinner, this system helps you concentrate on chopping vegetables rather than your buzzing phone.
2) The alerting system maintains broad awareness of your environment, helping you scan for new stimuli and stay vigilant. For example, this system helps you stay mindful of the water boiling on the stove to avoid spillover.
3) The executive system juggles your goals and priorities, helping you plan, prioritize tasks, and solve problems. For example, this system helps you coordinate multiple steps—sautéing vegetables, preparing side dishes, and setting the table—to get dinner prepared on time.
Jha explains that these three subsystems share a single pool of mental resources, so they can’t all run at peak capacity simultaneously—when one ramps up, another steps back. For example, if your orienting system locks onto finely chopping onions, you might not notice that the water is about to boil over (alerting), or you might forget to season your vegetables (executive).
Part 2: How Attention Impacts You
Now that you know what attention is and how it controls what information you notice, let’s look at how attention interacts with working memory to help you function in all aspects of your life. Then, we’ll explain how scattered attention disrupts this interaction and creates a variety of problems in your life.
Attention Interacts With Working Memory to Help You Function
Jha defines your working memory as a temporary mental space where your mind manipulates the information it’s actively processing, which allows you to learn, plan, and solve problems in short bursts. She explains that working memory and attention are interlinked—they interact to help you process tasks, form long-term memories, and regulate emotions. Let’s explore each of these functions in detail.
Function 1: Processing Tasks
Jha explains that when you focus your attention on something—whether it’s a fact you’re learning, a sensory experience, or a conversation—information relevant to that task enters your working memory. It must remain in your working memory for you to manipulate and process it, and thus to complete your task. It can be difficult to keep this information in your working memory, though, because working memory can only hold about three or four pieces of information at a time, and only for as long as you keep your attention on them. Thus, it’s crucial that you can control your attention and keep it focused on the information in your working memory, because if your attention strays, other information will enter your working memory and replace the information related to your task. You’ll then struggle to process the task.
For example, to calculate a sum in your head, you first need to focus your attention on the relevant numbers to get them into your working memory. Then, you need to keep focusing on those numbers so that they stay in your working memory long enough to do the math. If you switch your attention to something else—for example, to a conversation near you—the math numbers will get knocked out of your working memory, replaced by information from the conversation before you can complete the calculation.
Function 2: Forming Long-Term Memories
In addition to helping process tasks, attention interacts with working memory to form long-term memories. According to Jha, working memory is a portal through which information must first pass to be stored as a long-term memory. The process works like this:
- As previously explained, focusing on something allows information to enter your working memory. Then, maintaining focus on that information keeps it active in your working memory.
- During this active time, your brain processes the information, forming new neural pathways to store it as a long-term memory. The longer the information remains in your working memory, the more time your brain has to complete this process.
Jha argues that your brain can only convert information into a long-term memory if you hold it long enough—by maintaining focus on it—in your working memory. Otherwise, information passes through your working memory too quickly to leave any lasting trace. This explains why you might not remember things that you were physically—but not mentally—present for: You can’t memorize something you never fully focused on in the first place.
Function 3: Regulating Emotions
According to Jha, attention also interacts with working memory to regulate emotions. She explains that working memory is where you experience and process moment-by-moment emotions. As already established, attention determines which information enters working memory—this information includes any emotional stimuli you choose to focus on. And as with other stimuli, sustaining attention on an emotional stimulus keeps it active in working memory.
Jha explains that when you maintain focus on an emotion, it increases the emotion’s intensity and prolongs its duration, raising the likelihood that it will drive your behavior or reactions—which then makes you feel that emotion even more. For example, imagine you feel frustrated by a harsh email from your boss. If you re-read the email and dwell on your boss’s words, your feeling of frustration will stay active in your working memory and thus intensify. As a result, you’ll be more likely to fire off an impulsive response or carry that irritation into your next interaction—which will further magnify your frustration.
On the other hand, if you shift your attention elsewhere, the emotion fades from your working memory. This reduces how strongly you feel it, lowering the chance that it will dictate your actions or continue to affect you. For example, if you turn your attention to another email or task, your frustration loses its hold on your working memory. As a result, you feel less aggravated and gain the clarity to respond in a more measured, constructive way.
Scattered Attention Creates Six Negative Effects
As we just discussed, when attention and working memory interact appropriately, they help you function well. But what happens when your attention is scattered—that is, when you can’t maintain focus as needed? According to Jha, scattered attention negatively impacts your life in six ways—let’s explore each.
Negative Effect 1: Distorted Perceptions
The first way scattered attention negatively impacts you is by distorting your perceptions. Jha explains that whatever information occupies your working memory shapes both what you notice in your environment and how you interpret that information. Because your attention subsystems determine which details reach working memory, letting attention slip means you collect only fragments of what’s happening. Taken out of the full context of your situation, these fragments can lead you to misinterpret new information.
Further, since working memory can only hold three or four pieces of information at a time, scattered attention may allow irrelevant information to take up this limited space, preventing working memory from fully processing the most important details for understanding your environment. This can lead you to piece together incomplete data, arriving at skewed conclusions that distort your view of reality. For example, while checking emails during a meeting, you might miss key parts of what’s being said but catch fragments about project delays, leading you to incorrectly conclude the discussion was mostly negative.
Negative Effect 2: Diminished Present-Moment Awareness
In addition to leading you to gather and interpret incomplete details—thus distorting how you see things—scattered attention prevents you from fully experiencing each moment. Jha explains that your attention subsystems feed real-time input into your working memory to create a complete picture of the present moment. When your mind drifts, these subsystems fail to deliver that ongoing stream of information. As a result, large portions of the present slip by without ever being processed, weakening your sense of connection to what’s unfolding. Over time, these gaps accumulate, leaving you feeling as though life is passing you by.
Negative Effect 3: Impaired Learning and Memory Formation
Jha argues that, in addition to leading you to misinterpret or miss information, scattered attention impairs both learning and memory formation. As previously explained, your brain can only convert information into stored knowledge or memories if you hold it long enough in your working memory. When your attention is scattered, working memory cycles through bits of information quickly, preventing important details from getting the sustained attention they need. As a result, you don’t fully grasp or retain new information, and instead of storing clear facts or forming vivid memories, you’re left with fragments that are harder to recall when you need them.
For example, trying to memorize a phone number while simultaneously scrolling through social media prevents you from focusing on the whole number long enough to commit it to memory. As a result, you might only remember a few disorganized digits.
Negative Effect 4: Weakened Executive Functioning
Jha explains that distorted perceptions, missed moments, and fragmented learning can leave you with irrelevant information in working memory, impeding your ability to make decisions and coordinate tasks. This is because your executive subsystem depends on clear input from your orienting and alerting systems to weigh choices and plan action steps—an ability known as executive functioning.
When your attention is scattered, working memory becomes clogged with details that don’t matter, leaving minimal space for the facts you need to assess options or juggle multiple tasks. This lack of relevant input disrupts your ability to logically plan and carry out the sequential steps involved in complex tasks—resulting in uninformed decisions and ineffective task management. In other words, your overall executive functioning suffers.
For example, suppose you’re planning a trip, which involves comparing flight times, coordinating hotel check-ins, and managing visa requirements, but you keep getting distracted by text messages. As irrelevant details occupy your working memory, you might forget to account for a layover, overlook time zone differences, or double-book accommodations—ultimately derailing the entire itinerary.
Negative Effect 5: Emotional Imbalance
The fifth way scattered attention negatively impacts you is by creating emotional imbalance. It does this by disrupting how you process uncomfortable feelings in working memory. As previously explained, Jha says that attention determines which emotions enter working memory and how long they stay there. Keeping attention on an uncomfortable emotion re-feeds that feeling into your limited-capacity working memory, intensifying it and crowding out other information you might want or need to focus on.
On the other hand, withdrawing attention from an uncomfortable emotion prevents you from fully registering and resolving it, allowing it to linger dormant and potentially erupt later. By swinging between these extremes—over-focusing on or denying uncomfortable emotions—you destabilize your emotional balance, making it harder to stay composed, think clearly, and respond thoughtfully in everyday interactions.
Negative Effect 6: Ineffective Communication
The sixth way scattered attention negatively impacts you is by hindering your ability to communicate effectively. Jha explains that to interact and relate well with others, your orienting system needs to pick up on specific social signals—like words, tone, and body language—while your alerting system remains aware of a conversation’s broader context. When you don’t pay attention, these subsystems can’t supply working memory with the complete picture, causing you to overlook important nuances, misread people’s intentions, and respond based on inaccurate impressions. These lapses make it difficult to truly understand and empathize with others’ perspectives, preventing you from connecting meaningfully with them.
Part 3: Why Common Attention-Management Strategies Don’t Work
We’ve now explained how attention interacts with working memory and why scattered attention creates problems in your life. You may have tried to solve these problems by implementing three common attention-management strategies: blocking out distractions, forcing yourself to focus, and trying to think positively. Jha argues that these attention-management strategies often fall short because they don’t address the three root causes of scattered attention: evolution, stress, and multitasking. In this section, we’ll walk through these root causes, examining why common strategies fail to produce lasting improvements.
Cause 1: Evolution
According to Jha, your attention system evolved to help you survive in environments filled with immediate threats (such as predators) and sudden opportunities (such as food sources or potential mates). For our ancestors, failing to notice these threats and opportunities could be fatal, so our attention systems evolved to automatically scan for changes in the environment and treat every unexpected stimulus as potentially significant. This instinct can make it difficult to sustain focus on a single task. For example, while trying to write your novel, you may find you’re continually distracted by background noises that don’t signal a threat to your survival (like traffic sounds or barking dogs in your neighborhood).
Why Evolution Undermines Common Attention-Management Strategies
Jha explains that people often try to subdue this evolutionary tendency for environmental vigilance by forcing themselves to focus. But she explains that it’s hard to override millions of years of evolutionary programming with sheer willpower. The vigilance system is deeply ingrained in the brain’s architecture and operates automatically unconsciously, which makes it resistant to conscious attempts to overpower it.
Another way people try to override this tendency is by blocking out environmental distractions. For example, while writing, you might turn off phone notifications and close your email. But Jha explains that blocking out distractions makes you even more aware of potential environmental changes. So, your attention still wavers—you check the time, notice coworkers walking past, or wonder if you’ve missed any messages.
Cause 2: Stress
The second cause of scattered attention is stress. Jha explains that when you feel stressed, your brain activates primitive survival circuits that evolved to help you detect and escape dangers. These circuits narrow your attention scope, automatically shifting resources away from your current task and toward monitoring potential dangers. While this response helped our ancestors survive immediate physical threats, it disrupts the ability to maintain focus in modern environments where stress often comes from non-life-threatening sources like work deadlines or relationship challenges.
Why You Can’t Counter Stress-Related Inattention With Positive Thinking
Common advice suggests using positive thinking to reduce stress and restore focus. However, according to Jha, this strategy often backfires because suppressing worried thoughts and maintaining artificial positivity requires significant mental effort—effort that draws on the same limited attention resources your brain is already diverting toward monitoring threats. As a result, each attempt to think positively leaves you with even fewer resources—and less space in your working memory—to focus on your task.
For example, say you feel anxious about messing up a big project. If you force yourself to think, “Everything will go perfectly,” you’ll use up mental energy trying to suppress your doubts. This will make it even harder to focus on what you need to do to make it a success.
Cause 3: Multitasking
The third cause of scattered attention is multitasking. Jha explains that your brain can only effectively process one task at a time. When you attempt to handle multiple attention-demanding tasks simultaneously, your brain must switch between them—and to achieve this, it must completely clear out information about the current task before engaging with another. Each switch drains your attention resources and delays your progress, making you increasingly prone to errors and mental fatigue.
Why Attention Management Strategies Don’t Help You Multitask Better
According to Jha, you might try to multitask more effectively by blocking out environmental distractions or commanding yourself to concentrate harder. However, these approaches fail because they can’t change this fundamental limitation: Your brain cannot focus on multiple tasks at once, no matter what. Instead, these strategies only add more strain to the attention resources that are already depleted by your constant task switching.
For example, while preparing client documents, you might block chat notifications and try to focus intensely as you switch between analyzing data and writing summaries. Despite these efforts, each switch between analyzing and writing forces your brain to reset, so you work more slowly and make more mistakes than you would if you’d complete one task before starting another.
Part 4: How to Pay Better Attention
We’ve now clarified why common attention-management strategies fail to address the three main causes of scattered attention: It’s difficult to override evolutionary programming, eliminate stress, or effectively multitask. However, Jha argues that despite these challenges, you can train yourself to pay better attention by developing a single skill: mindfulness.
In this final part of the overview, we’ll explain what mindfulness is, why it improves attention, and how often you should practice it to see results.
What Is Mindfulness?
Jha defines mindfulness as a mental training practice that helps you maintain awareness of your experiences as they unfold, moment by moment. It involves deliberately paying attention to your thoughts, emotions, bodily sensations, and surrounding environment without judgment or reactivity.
Jha explains that practicing mindfulness requires three steps:
- Choose a single point of focus, such as your breath, and maintain your attention on it.
- If you notice your mind wandering, briefly acknowledge what captured your attention—whether it’s a thought, sound, or physical sensation—then gently redirect your attention back to your chosen focus point.
- Repeat this process of noticing and redirecting. Each time your mind wanders, recognize that this is normal, then return to your chosen focus point.
Why Mindfulness Improves Your Attention
Mindfulness improves attention by directly addressing the three root causes of scattered attention—evolution, stress, and multitasking. According to Jha, it does this by training you to notice and deliberately guide your attention system’s automatic reactions, rather than trying to suppress them.
Let’s explore how practicing mindfulness addresses each of the three causes of scattered attention.
1) Mindfulness Helps Refocus Automatic Attention Shifts
Recall that your brain evolved to be vigilant, making you susceptible to environmental distractions. Mindfulness works with this tendency rather than against it. As we explained above, it teaches you to acknowledge rather than suppress distractions, whether they’re internal or external, and to quickly redirect your attention back to the object of your focus. According to Jha, this allows you to maintain awareness of both what you want to focus on and your environment, without being derailed by every new stimulus.
2) Mindfulness Preserves Attention Resources Under Stress
Rather than attempting to suppress stress through positive thinking, mindfulness helps you observe worrisome thoughts and emotions without immediately reacting to them. This non-reactive stance benefits you in two ways.
First, it helps you thrive under stress because it trains you to notice signs of stress, like racing thoughts or physical tension, without judgment. This lack of judgment creates mental space between these sensations and your response. As a result, instead of letting the sensations overwhelm you, you’re able to pause and react consciously. This deactivates the primitive survival circuits that narrow attention, preserving mental resources for your chosen tasks.
Second, with consistent practice, your brain gradually learns to not interpret every challenge as a threat, which lowers your overall stress levels. Each time you observe stressful stimuli without judging or reacting to them, you train your survival circuit to stop perceiving (and responding to) those stimuli as threats.
3) Mindfulness Strengthens Single-Task Focus
Jha argues that mindfulness reduces your tendency to multitask and thereby minimizes the attention drain and errors that come from constant task-switching. Since mindfulness trains you to notice when your attention wavers and to gently redirect your focus, it helps you recognize the urge to switch tasks in daily life. Noticing this urge before you automatically act on it gives you a chance to consciously choose to focus on one task at a time.
Consistent Practice Improves Attention
Jha argues that making mindfulness a daily habit is the key to improving attention because it repeatedly exercises your attention system’s abilities. However, you don’t need lengthy sessions to see results. She writes that practicing mindfulness for just 12 minutes a day, five days a week, over four weeks can improve attention. She emphasizes that consistency matters more than duration—practicing regularly builds stronger attention skills than longer, sporadic sessions.
Jha suggests that you can integrate 12 minutes of mindfulness into your daily routine through both formal and informal practices. Formal practices involve setting aside time each day for mindfulness meditation. Jha recommends beginning with a manageable commitment, such as five minutes a day, and gradually increasing this duration until you can comfortably practice for 12 minutes a day.
Informal practices involve weaving mindfulness into your daily life by paying full attention to routine activities. The key is to maintain the three key steps: focusing on what you’re doing, noticing if your attention wanders, and redirecting your attention back to what you’re doing. For example, if you’re washing dishes, feel the warmth of the water, see the soap bubbles, and notice each dish’s texture. When your attention inevitably drifts to other thoughts, simply notice this and bring your attention back to washing.
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Like what you just read? Read the rest of the world's best book summary and analysis of Amishi P. Jha's "Peak Mind" at Shortform.
Here's what you'll find in our full Peak Mind summary:
- How your ability to pay attention impacts every aspect of your life
- The six negative ways in which scattered attention affects your life
- Why common attention-management strategies don't work (and what does work)
