Tag Archives: meditation

Pain Invading the Mind

Dealing with physical pain — Thanissaro Bhikkhu, also known as Ajahn Geoff.

This Dhamma talk is worth a listen from time to time since pain is many times our savage enemy that can easily grind you into dust and ruin you life. So, dealing with it takes some skill, which Ajahn Geoff from Thai forest Buddhist tradition talks about all the time. Listen during meditation. Try the technique. It’s all about where you set your awareness. This takes practice. But don’t worry. Since the pain isn’t going away you have plenty of time to learn and get it right.

The Buddha’s core instruction on physical pain is pretty brief. The most important part is to keep the pain from invading your mind and letting it take up residence. The goal is not necessarily to eliminate pain but instead to change your relationship with it.

Ajahn Geoff talks about the famous forest teacher Ajahn Lee who offers a practical guide. When pain arises, first focus on the comfortable parts of the body and breathe into those areas. That comfort can grow into a kind of foundation or a place to stand and eventually into a resource to direct through the pain itself. Rather than walling off the pain, you breathe through it because walls often maintain the very thing they were meant to contain.

The next step is to examine the stories and perceptions we build around pain. We tell ourselves the pain has been here for a long time and will continue, and in doing so we drag past and future suffering into the present moment. Dropping the stories can lighten the pain considerably.

You can also question whether the pain is as solid or permanent as it seems. Move your awareness toward the sharpest point of the pain, rather than away from it. This can sometimes reveal that the pain shifts and dissolves under close attention. The fact that it moves at all is many times revealing. I’ve noticed this many times. It’s obvious. I’ve also questioned whether I’m feeling the pain when my attention is directed entirely out of my body to other matters, such as a phone call, a story from a friend, or a TV program.

The larger point is that while pain may arise from causes beyond our control, what the mind does with it is very much under our control. With practice, that distinction can be seen and understood. Remember, everything in Buddhist mediation is a skill. You get good only with many years of practice.

That’s just one of Ajahn Geoff’s Dhamma talks. Here are hundreds more. It’s an absolutely amazing archive of Pāli Canon content. I visit daily.

Full Transcript

Pain is one of those things the Buddha says we have to learn how to endure. But he gives remarkably little instructions on how to endure it.

It’s not like painful words. We’re supposed to endure painful words, too. And we do get instructions on how to depersonalize the words, how to think about them in such a way that they don’t invade the mind and remain.

As for physical pains, the Buddha says that similarly we should try to keep the pains from invading the mind and remaining there. That should be our intention with regard to them. In other words, we don’t want them to go away necessarily. At least we don’t make that our purpose in dealing with them.

We want to understand what does it mean for them to invade, what does it mean for them to remain. This is something we have to figure out. And how does it happen?

The Buddha gives only a sketch on how we should deal with pain. It comes in as instructions on breath meditation under the section on feelings. Try to breathe in and out in a way that gives rise to rapture. Breathe in and out in a way that gives rise to pleasure. Breathe in and out sensitive to mental fabrication — feelings and perceptions. Perceptions are the labels we put on things, the images we use to tell ourselves what something is, what it means. And finally, calming mental fabrications as we breathe in and breathe out.

That’s about it.

For more detailed instructions in these areas, we have to look to the forest tradition. And Ajahn Lee specializes in those first two steps. Breathing in a way that gives rise to rapture and pleasure.

As he says, when there’s a pain in part of the body, first you focus on other parts of the body that you can make comfortable by the way you breathe. This serves several functions. One, it gives you a foundation to stand on as you deal with the pain. It also gives you a place to retreat. And it gives you some ammunition to use against the pain.

Because as we’ve noted, sometimes the simple fact that there is a pain there is something that you’ve brought into being yourself by the way you’ve worked with the raw material that comes from past karma. And by breathing in a comfortable way, you’ve got some ammunition to use against the physical pain, in that you can imagine whatever that raw material is being permeated by the comfortable breath.

Once the comfortable breath is established in the other part of the body, send it through the pain. See if that undoes some of the subconscious things you’re doing to aggravate the pain or even maintain the pain.

Sometimes we put a wall up around the pain in hopes of confining it, but that actually maintains it. The source of the pain may have gone away, but the wall is still there and it’s still painful. So breathe through the pain as the comfortable breath goes through. Make sure it goes through and doesn’t stay stopped at the wall formed by the pain.

You may sense that as you breathe, you’re using the painful parts of the body to do the breathing. They’re the most obvious parts when there’s pain in different sections. So think of the more comfortable parts doing the breathing. The painful parts get a free ride. Think of the breath permeating them and going out to the other side. See what that does.

At the same time, you’re changing the balance of power. Instead of running away from the pain, you face it, and you’ve got some ammunition to face it with.

Then the next steps are to try to understand what are the perceptions that you have around the pain. This is where Ajahn Maha Bua was good. When he talks about perceptions, that’s mental fabrication. But mental fabrications come together with verbal fabrications. In other words, the way you talk to yourself. It also comes together with the act of attention and the factor of name and form in dependent co-arising. So attention has to do with the questions you ask. Verbal fabrication has to do with the stories you tell yourself.

You start questioning your perceptions, questioning your stories around the pain. One of the big stories you may have is that the pain has been here for such an amount of time and it’s going to continue being here for such an amount of time. All of a sudden you’ve got the present moment weighed down by past and future pain. So that’s a story you’ve got to stop.

The past pain is gone. Tell yourself it’s nowhere to be found. You can’t go rummaging back in the past to find it. It’s gone. It’s no longer there to weigh you down. Future pain hasn’t come yet. Why do you have this story where you stitch things together — the pain was here and it’s going to be there? Why do you do that? Just try to be with the pain as it is right now.

Then you can question your perceptions. Do you see the pain as being the same thing as the body? As I said, sometimes we use the painful parts of the body to do the breathing, as if they were one and the same thing. So can you see that the body is made of the properties of earth, water, wind, fire — solidity, liquidity, energy, warmth? The pain is something else. It may seem to be solid or it may seem to be hot. But those are perceptions that we’ve attached to the pain. Can you separate them out?

Sometimes you try to separate them and they go on their own. So you get at it in a more indirect way. Just ask yourself, where is the sharpest point of the pain right now? Asking that question and following through changes the balance of power again. Instead of running away from the pain, you run at it.

Like the stories of the forest ajahns doing walking meditation at night and getting more and more convinced that there’s a tiger crouching beside the path. Instead of running away from the tiger, they run at it. It turns out there was nothing there.

So maybe there’s nothing to run away from in the pain. And you find that if you start tracing down where the sharpest point of the pain is, it moves. It avoids you. Especially if you learn to make your focus the kind of focus that doesn’t bear down on things. The focus is more open.

That’s when you’ve been working with the breath, you’ve learned that if you want to keep the breath comfortable, you don’t put too much pressure on it. You stay steadily with one spot as your center, but you think of that spot as being wide open, connecting with everything else. The same way you follow the sharpest point of the pain with that soft but steady focus. And it’ll move, because you’re giving it a chance to move.

You find that there will come a point where it suddenly separates out on its own like cream separating out of milk when it hasn’t been homogenized.

You can ask yourself if the pain is a solid block. What’s its shape? What’s its color in your mind? Remind yourself pain has no shape, it has no color. Those are just perceptions. Drop those perceptions. See what happens.

Is it just momentary flashes of pain arising, passing away? If you have that perception, ask yourself when it comes flashing in, does it come at you or does it go away from you? Try to hold in mind the perception that as soon as you sense it, it’s already going away. So you’re not a target.

These are calming perceptions. At the same time you’re asking questions that calm things down. You’re telling yourself stories that calm things down. All based on that intention. Trying to see how to keep the mind from being invaded by the pain. Or if it has invaded, not allowing it to remain in the mind.

That means you allow the pain to stay in the body. You’re not making it your purpose to make it go away. But you want to be aware of it. So you’re not sitting here waiting, when will the pain go away? When will the pain go away? You’re asking yourself now, how can I be right here, next to the pain, but not pained by it? Be with the pain, but not suffer from it.

Sometimes when you separate things out like this, the pain will go away. Again, that’s because what you’ve been doing around the pain has actually been continuing to create the pain. Other times it’ll still be there. That’s the raw material coming in from your past karma right now. But it’s there in the body. It doesn’t have to be in the mind.

Remember the Buddhist comment about wisdom — it’s not seeing the oneness of all things, it’s seeing things as separate. Things that you’ve held together in the past, you begin to realize they are separate things. Because they’re separate, they don’t have to weigh things down.

So remember, you want to maintain that original intention. Not that the pain go away, but simply that it not invade the mind and remain. And you’re here to find perceptions that calm the effect of the pain on the mind. Ways of talking to yourself, questions that you want to ask that calm the effect on the mind.

That puts you in the driver’s seat. Because the pain may come and go based on past karma. But the effect it has on the mind is something you can change right now.

We’ve got these tools. The Buddha points them out to you. The forest ajahns give you some ideas on how you can use them. It’s up to you now to develop these skills.

When you have these skills, it puts you in a much better position. You can treat the pain with a little less fear. And when you don’t have fear of pain, that’s one less thing that the world can use against you.

We see how people are driven, driven, driven by pain. And how people take advantage of other people’s fear of pain. When the mind is not invaded by pain, it’s not only for your well-being right now, but it’s also for your greater independence at large.

My Daily Review

Here’s a meditation exercise I occasionally use to help increase my moment-to-moment awareness. It’s also been remarkably helpful in developing my memory and my ability to visualize. It’s easy to describe — before I go to sleep I just review visually all the activities from my day. That’s it. Sounds simple but it’s actually hard to do.

I didn’t craft the technique myself. But I’ve read about it in meditation books and I’ve been practicing it and refining it for years. Sometimes I do the technique sitting in a chair or lying down in bed. But just like other meditation techniques, it’s not necessarily relaxing. It takes some work. And I realized that right away when I first tried it. It was obvious my body and my mind really fought the process so I had to learn to fight back. It took a bit of time but I finally won.

So, here it is. I close my eyes and picture my day from start to finish in my mind’s eye. Sometimes I scroll through the day pretty quickly or plod along slowly. I go forward or backward or skip around and focus on specific chunks of time. I play with it to see what works on any given attempt. I make it clear to my mind that I’m in control and I’m doing it my way. I try to see the day as a video with sound but also I add anything I’ve touched or smelled or tasted along the way. I try to get all of my senses involved and to spot any emotions I felt during each point of the day. I try to not get involved with the images I’m seeing, though. I just keep going without questioning anything. I found out that the insights and patterns come over time from repeatedly observing without judging. And, very important, I don’t worry that the images may not be very clear initially. This takes practice. The movie becomes visually sharper over time. But this is critical — even the slightest intention with a few cloudy images is good enough for me to get going because sometimes that’s all I get. It took me forever to understand that part.

That’s it. That’s the exercise. It can take just a few minutes or I can drag it out as long as I want. I don’t take notes afterwards. I just observe the scenes and let them go. And I fight my body’s desire to make me quit by dismissing the pain from sitting or the constant thoughts trying to tease me away into sleep. Not yet. I have some work to do first. Sleep can wait.

Now, here’s the catch. When I first started this exercise I couldn’t think of very much. I knew I did lots of things during the day, but during my nightly reviews all the details were gone. However, what I discovered was that if I could not remember much at night that meant I was not especially present during the day. So, to overcome this, during the day I tried to just focus on my activities without thinking very much. And by that I mean I tried to cut the extraneous thinking, the things not directly related to whatever activity I was doing. Basically, I just tried to kill the random thoughts. This helped me stay more involved with whatever present moment I was experiencing. And that made the difference. I was surprised at how much more detail I could effortlessly remember at night by just doing that one technique during the day. It’s clear that the day and the night are directly tied to each other. But I also found out that remaining present during the day is harder than it seems. Thinking is highly addictive.

This little exercise can get pretty amusing too. Many times during a review I remember in great detail a walk home, for instance. Turning right here, passing this building, hearing a conversation between two girls in front of me, feeling a motorcycle idling and vibrating to my left, seeing an interesting car drive by on the right, noticing the expressions of various people walking by, etc. Massive detail. And then a moment later the entire scene would just stop cold. Nothing. It’s like I couldn’t move forward in the scene because there was just no data. There was nothing to recall. Now, intellectually, I knew I kept walking in reality because I got to the train station — but I could not remember a single detail at that point. The movie pictures running through my mind just stopped. Initially, I thought I was getting tired and perhaps I was falling asleep. But over time I came to realize that when the movie review stops abruptly at night then that’s the exact point I lost my awareness during the day. At that point I let my mind wander to some crap thought about work or some meaningless experience in the past I’ve thought a million times before. I lost my awareness of the present moment. My body was obviously still walking (thanks to my hindbrain), but my awareness was stupidly roaming around somewhere else (thanks to my prefrontal cortex). And that’s what was blocking my daily reviews.

When I practiced this technique every night I started seeing holes like these during my day — blocks of time where all the details were lost. And those breaks became blatantly clear. But here’s what’s really cool — not only does this phenomenon become clear at night when I reviewed my day, but over time it started to become clear during the day as well. I literally could see in real time the exact point I lost my awareness of the present moment. Sometimes, I’d be walking and then start daydreaming and when I realized it I’d stop and ask myself, “Ok, how the hell did I get here?” Then I’d turn and look behind me to see what I missed and to see if I had a clue how long I was thinking. Sometimes, just to drag the point out, I’d actually walk back to where I was present, look around at the scene, and then start again. It’s really weird how I could always find the exact point where I lost my awareness. “Oh, ok, right here at this street corner next to this grey house I started thinking about my Maine vacation 35 years ago. Got it. Ok, start on my walk again.” That observation was critical. And it was shocking to realize how much I was missing in each moment. Some people, like me, cruise along all day like this without having any experience of being aware of anything in the present moment. Most people live their lives in their imagination. They day dream. So, we get used to rapidly switching between reality and virtual reality. And that’s what passes for normal. It’s not.

So, why am I doing this? Well, over time this technique is helping me remain present during activity and that’s always helpful for getting through my day more efficiently. I can see my progress on real life tasks more clearly when I’m fully present, which helps reduce the feeling of panic when things pile up. It also helps me become aware of the low-value, nonproductive things I do repeatedly every day — and especially the inane thoughts I think day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year. I now know why I can recall something from 40 years ago in such detail. It’s because I’ve been thinking about it all day, every day for 40 years! It’s insane how much time and energy I’ve been wasting thinking about things decades ago or things years into some mythical future. That’s why I do this exercise. To become aware of this phenomenon and to become skilled at staying present. It’s just one step to my ultimate goal — to be fully aware during all phases of waking and sleeping. More on sleep later. But that’s where I’m going.

Manage your Mind, Deflect Propaganda

If you don’t actively manage your mind then professional propagandists will happily manage your mind for you — and they know exactly what they are doing.

There are many techniques you can use to fight propaganda. Some of them are direct and public, but this one is subtle and private. No one needs to know you’re doing it. It’s meditation. And the more you practice the better because your mind is at stake. There are many types of meditation, but I use a very simple technique. It’s based on Theravada Buddhism, which is my personal favorite, but you can insert any religion into this technique that you want. And if you aren’t especially religious I’ve offered a simple alteration that works just as well.

First, go to this site. You’ll find 25 years of short meditation talks there. Pick one. Put on your headphones and listen to the talk while sitting in a chair in the dark. Close your eyes and listen to the speaker as your single object of focus. Don’t waste time thinking about work or the Internet or anything else. Think only about the talk you are listening to. Try to understand it. That will help train your mind to focus on one thing only without wandering off to the next thing, such as a random or unrelated thought. That little bit right there is critical. Your mind will fight this, by the way. Fight back. Focus. Now, in this part of the exercise you are actually thinking, but you’re thinking in a way that narrowly focuses your mind. It may sound odd but you actually have to use some thinking to eventually transcend thought. Over time, though, that thinking narrows to the point of pretty much nothing. Once you are there, you know you are making real progress. It just takes some time.

Anyway, when the talk ends keep your eyes closed for another 20 minutes and replace the talk as your single object of focus with another single object of focus — maybe a word or a mantra from your religion, or just follow your breath moving in and out. When a random thought comes, recognize it as a thought and gently push it away or just ignore it. You will have to think to do this, but that’s ok. Move back to your tool of focus. Another way to think about random thoughts is to see them as teases. That’s your mind trying to stop the mediation process. But that incoming thought can only live by capturing your attention. It feeds off your attention. Ignore it. It’s a trap. When another one comes, recognize it, ignore it. Repeat. That’s it. That’s the entire process. The skill you are developing using this insanely simply process is the development of sustained concentration. And don’t be fooled by the simplicity here. By actively pushing away thoughts, or just ignoring them until they give up and go away, you are exercising your ability to control your mind and focus your attention. Think of it asa work out at the gym. You get stronger with practice. As a result, over time you will grow less susceptible to getting captured by random thoughts flying by. And that that skill will come in handy when dealing with propagandists, who are also trying to capture your attention. The process is similar.

The purpose of starting with a little audio lecture is to get you motivated to sit and meditate. It also starts the focusing process, which absolutely takes a few minutes and that’s the time when most people quit. Remember that most people can’t meditate even for a few seconds before quitting so cut yourself some slack and just move slowly. Do a few minutes. Then maybe ten. Then more. And keep going. If you’re not that religious and think all this is dumb try it with a physics lecture or whatever you like. Audio only, though. No visuals. Same process. Maybe use the word Einstein as your mantra, I don’t care. I use Hindu and Buddhist words. If you’re not into Buddhism then just use whatever religion you like. Christians may repeat Amen or the Rosary. All religions have short prayers and words you can use as mantras. If you don’t like religion, maybe just use the word Love, I don’t know. Pick one and do it. The words themselves become meaningless after a few hundred iterations so it doesn’t matter much. The point is to use a single point of focus to narrow your attention and then eventually thwart thought itself. Very few people can do this, by the way. That’s why they laugh or roll their eyes when you describe this process and your experience doing this practice.

Meditation will train your mind to focus so that you and your conscious mind are more in control of your life. Do this every day and you may notice after a few months that you are less susceptible to all the noise in life. You may start to question things more as well. The news may start to look ridiculous. You may be able to spot some of our favorite so-called leaders for what they really are — propagandists. All those people shouting at you to do this or to do that may simply seem too shrill to be credible because you have developed a quite state internally. All the madness they create in their wake may seem to move slower so you can process the information better. Some of their messages just won’t make sense any longer. Hopefully you won’t feel so overwhelmed or afraid or terrorized. That’s because meditation is an excellent exercise to thwart propaganda because it teaches you to NOT just accept the next thought that comes along — no matter who it comes from, either yourself or someone outside in the world.

The thing you are looking for here is to get used to experiencing longer and longer periods of silence between thoughts. Really very few people know what this feels like because it doesn’t come naturally. It takes training. That’s why the Buddhists say that meditation is a “practice” because you have to be taught and you have to work at it every day. And by “every day” these guys mean pretty much all day, every day, for as many days as you have. They understand their minds in ways that would surprise most people. That’s beyond most of us who have to work for a living, but take their advice at any level you can and just start. Real progress is possible and noticeable in relatively short periods of time.

Remember, if you don’t control your mind, others will happily do it for you and they are highly skilled at the process. Recognizing these people is important because their propaganda is absolutely everywhere. It’s designed to influence your thoughts in specific ways, which leads to you acting in specific ways. And it will distract you and eventually wreck your life — just like random thoughts darting around your head will distract you and keep you from progressing in mental practices like meditation. Don’t take the bait. Also, remember that you can’t solve this problem of deflecting propaganda by using intellectual processes such as research, discussion, and debate. That just leads to more noise, more stress, and more arguments. Instead, it’s the eventual absence of the intellect that you’re looking to cultivate with exercises like meditation. Some people call this transcendence. Others call it concentration. And the concept is anti-intuitive. It has to be experienced directly to be understood.

Now, your brain is wired to think from birth and that’s a useful tool in this physical world. But it has some dangerous side effects that are easily exploited by our friends on power. The problem is that your brain is ALWAYS thinking and most of those thoughts are just crap repeat teases from yesterday, the day before, and the day before that. Propagandists know this. They know all humans are mostly mindless and easily influenced via language — especially language delivered by powerful authorities intentionally causing conflict to induce fear. It’s also how propagandists hide. They hide under all the distractions and contradictions. This is why you can’t argue with them or their supporters. Those arguments are themselves a distraction and provide cover for the propagandists pulling the strings. Learn to manage your thoughts and over time those invisible actors can gradually be seen as clear as day. It’s a shocking realization, too. Sometimes these people are actually hiding and you cant see them, but other times they are pushing their dark craft right out in the open with the support of millions. It’s all insane.

So, meditation is just a handy and private technique that you can use to help train yourself to thwart the influence of propaganda. It works. It’s one critical step you can use to take ownership of your mind. It’s not enough, though. There are other things you can do to defend yourself from propaganda, such as (1) disconnecting from the propagandists and their disinformation streams in the media and instead finding alternative sources of information, (2) connecting directly with other like-minded people who can see through the madness, and (3) creating parallel systems of support for all resources needed for life. That last one may take some time. I’m doing all three simultaneously. But I’m only choosing to talk about meditation for now because you can implement the technique immediately and privately and it starts at the level of the thought — which is the source of everything that leads to actions.

More on this issue in subsequent posts because this problem isn’t going away. In fact, it’s getting worse. Just look around. See how crazy the world is lately? And how many of your friends and neighbors have gone crazy in recent years? I mean, you have noticed this, right?

Kamakura Daibutsu in Japan
Kamakura Daibutsu in Kamakura, Japan

Mindfulness of Death

Audio: Mindfulness of Death | January 05, 2026 | Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu
Audio: Mindfulness of Death | June 18, 2021 | Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu

I’ve had a few near-death experiences in my life. And they’ve all changed me profoundly. One time I was paralyzed in the hospital while writhing in intractable pain. I thought there was no way I’d survive. I couldn’t move anything, but I could whisper. And I could breathe. I noticed that, too. I thought that was odd. So, I focused on that. Nothing else mattered so what the hell. One: in and out. Two: in and out. Three: in and out. And so on. Nothing else mattered. No memory mattered, good or bad. No one in the world mattered, no matter who. Everything in my life up to that point that I had experienced didn’t matter. Everything was suddenly nothing. The focus that experience forced on me was utterly complete. The breath saved me, though. I still think about that every day even now. In and out.

Death can come to anyone at any time. You need to be ready.

Dhammatalks.org

The Network Switch Cost

Engineering gets it. Marketing misses it.

Awareness of this hidden cost is rare. But engineers get it. Others doing technical or creative work get it too. Most people, though, miss it entirely. So that means there is an opportunity here.

Multitasking is Expensive

It turns out that the cost of multitasking is actually much higher than people previously thought. It’s not only a problem doing disparate tasks at the same time — which efficiently reduces the quality of both — but it’s also a problem when you merely switch contexts in your head.

So, even though you may think you are highly focused on a single task, all it takes is a set of disparate thoughts to sweep you away. And even though you quickly switch back to your main task, you’ve already taken the cognitive hit without even realizing it. Think of it as a deeper form of multitasking.

This context switching in your head can be really subtle. We miss the significance of this because we are already used to flitting from thought to thought all day long. But context switching involves obvious and complex cognitive and neurological networks in your body, and the entire experience takes a toll on your ability to think deeply.

It’s well worth knowing about this phenomenon because it’s a problem that can be solved through practice. And actually, it’s more than a problem to solve. It’s also an opportunity to leverage. But just a heads up that although this stuff may seem easy enough to discuss at a conversational level, I can assure you that the solution is hard to implement — which is exactly why very few people can actually do it.

To get a sense of what I’m saying but from an expert, take a listen to this bit from computer scientist Cal Newport and podcast host Jonathan Levi. From the 20:22 mark of the video below, Newport explores what he calls the “Network Switch Cost” of an unfocused mind. It’s substantial. The section ends at the 23:51 mark. I keyed in the text below if you want to just read. It’s well worth a read and/or listen. More of my commentary below.

Jonathan Levi

People can’t do deep, creative thinking and work in 15 minute stretches.

Cal Newport

This is a crucial point that I think is worth hammering home. In the late 1990s there was a craze for what we can think of as pure multitasking. And that’s where you are literally doing multiple things simultaneously. So, I’m trying to write while my inbox is open and I’m on the phone. And by the early 2000s we all learned that doesn’t work. There’s really good research that came out of Stanford that was popularized a lot in the popular press and everyone realized, oh, if you’re trying to talk on the phone while you write you’re actually not doing either of those things really well. It’s not a badge of honor. And people turned off notifications, people closed down windows, people didn’t talk on the phone while they worked, and we thought, hey, we’ve done it, we’ve solved it, we now single taskers, we’re now really efficient.

But what they were missing is exactly what you said, which is that there is another price, another cognitive price that you have to be wary of if you’re doing cognitive work, which is the network switch cost. So if I switch what I’m paying attention to that unfolds and unspools a complicated series of neurological changes. Our frontal cortex has to start to suppress unrelated attentional networks and amplify related networks, related semantic networks have to get fired up, unrelated semantic need to be inhibited. There’s a very complicated neurological cascade that happens when you turn your attention from one thing to another and it takes a while.

And so what we are doing in the supposed age of single tasking, where we were so proud of ourselves, we say, look, I only have one thing open on my window, it’s Microsoft Word, I’m writing, I’m doing just one thing, I’m giving it attention, but then we quick check the email inbox. And we say, I’m not multitasking, I looked at it for just two minutes and I shut it back down again. I’m not trying to look at my inbox while I’m writing. But here’s the thing, when you switch to that inbox and you see these messages, most of which you can’t answer, some of them are urgent, some are from your boss so it captures you attention — that begins this whole cascade of network switches. But before that can finish, you bring your attention back to that Word document, and then it tries to switch back again. And those switches collide with each other and you have a neurological pile up on this cognitive freeway and the qualitative effect of this is your capacity to think is greatly reduced — and it takes a long time to clear this out.

And so what happened in this era is that people think they are single tasking, they are proud of themselves for it, but what they’re doing is these quick checks every 5 or 10 minutes — look at the inbox, look at Slack, look at my phone, look at the inbox, look at Slack, look at my phone. And they are focusing too much on the duration — I only looked at it for a couple of minutes — and they’re focusing on the fact that they close it after they’re done. But inside their head they have pile up after pile up after pile up. You’re trying to switch context back, switch to here and back, switch over here and back, and your frontal cortex ability to actually sustain concentrated attention on one target goes away. And now you’re working with a significant inhibition.

And this is why when I define Deep Work one of the key elements of it, it’s not that it’s hard and it requires hard thinking, but that you do it without any context shifts. And it’s the removal of those context shifts that gives you the superpower — not because focusing gives you the superpower but it’s because you’re avoiding the dampening effect of all the switches. By not doing the bad thing that everyone else is doing, by comparison, you seem like a Richard Feynman in a room of primary school students.

My Take

Ok, well I really like Cal Newport’s example above of Richard Feynman vs a room of primary school students. I’ll take that distinction any day. Wow.

I’ve worked with scientists, engineers, doctors, veterinarians, and people from a variety of different construction trades — many of them really get these concepts instinctively even if they use different terms to describe their experiences. The reason is obvious — they have to think deeply for sustained periods of time so they can solve difficult problems. Many of them also have to translate deep thinking into precise actions via their own bodies — think about building custom furniture, setting the foundation for a suspension bridge, performing spinal surgery, or coding a navigation system for an aircraft carrier. The people working these tasks really can’t afford to take constant cognitive hits that break their concentration. The consequences of failure are too high.

I’ve also worked with more creative types, such as writers, editors, photographers, and graphic artists. And they, too, tend to understand the importance of focusing attention without context switching because they are creating new realities where nothing existed before. Think of writing that 500 page novel while you sit staring at the first blank page. Or patiently waiting for the scene to develop so you can capture that one perfect moment on film. It gets pretty expensive to be messing around with email or phone calls or the idiocies of social media when what you need is time, patience, and precision. Musicians know this, as well, and I’ve seen them implement concentrated focus very effectively many times. Even children learning music — or any subject — know this and do it perfectly with proper training.

However, I’ve worked in other professions where this concept of task switching is largely unknown. Marketing comes to mind. I’m sure there are exceptions to all these examples, even in marketing, but after more than a dozen years working in marketing I’ve never heard this issue discussed a single time. And when I bring it up in meetings at the office or at group dinners on business trips, the room seems to go quiet. Most times I just let it pass and the conversation moves along. But there have been times when I pressed the topic and tried to get a discussion going only to realize moments later that I was just pushing string. I can’t think of a single exception to this experience. It seems that the consequences — and opportunities — involved with task switching as a topic of conversation really doesn’t go over well in marketing. So, I just gave up trying. It’s not worth my time. And I make no apology for the criticism.

Now, my judgement of marketing in this context doesn’t extend to innovators like, say, Steve Jobs, who for all of his obvious faults certainly understood the process of thinking deeply in an effort to create something entirely new.

And I’m also not saying that every engineer or every scientist gets the significance of task switching costs. On the contrary, I know many engineers who went to school for computer science or some related technical discipline and then moved into product management or marketing or sales relatively quickly after graduation. That’s common in Silicon Valley. In other words, they don’t actually do engineering any longer. Instead, now they do management or marketing. And, as a result, they tend to act like most everyone else in marketing rapidly bouncing along the surface of the daily task treadmill. It’s perfectly normal for these people to attend a dozen meetings a day — all chopped up into half hour or hour long pieces. No one can do real work working this way. Imagine an engineer coding in a kernel between meeting after meeting after meeting discussing unrelated, non-technical issues. It’s not possible. So, it seems to me that the work itself determines whether you are directly confronted with the costs of task switching.

It’s Meditation

What Cal Newport describes as a solution above in the video is pretty much the same as meditation. He’s applying timeless transcendence techniques to work. You’re much more efficient when you can think and work from a perspective relaxed concentration without the constant context switches that disrupt deep thought. In meditation terms, you focus on a single task (mantra, breath, etc) without distraction, and over time you transcend into meditation. Once you are down there you notice that extraneous thoughts (context switches) take you right back out of meditation and push you up to the busy activity at the surface. That’s why you are taught to ignore thoughts in meditation until they just go away — no matter how long that takes. This takes practice.

Sounds simple, right? Ok, try this. Get your breathing down to 1 breath per minute (30 seconds in, 30 seconds out). Measure your heart rate (use a pulse oximeter to track your heart rate and blood oxygen levels). It’ll likely be in the high 60s if you are healthy. Try to get it as low as possible (the 50s would work, nice and slow). Maintain this 1 minute breathing rate for a few minutes and try to keep your heart rate fixed as low as you can so you can get a rough baseline. Don’t move a muscle. Don’t think. Just follow the clock and breathe — 30 in, 30 out. Doing this is hard, btw. If you can’t do 30 in and 30 out, start with maybe 15 in and 15 out or 10 in and 10 out. Play with it.

But the point is that in this highly focused state you’ll learn real fast how some random thoughts or small muscle movements directly affect your breathing, your heart rate, and your concentration. When things get this slow and this intense it all becomes blatantly obvious that you can really only do one thing at a time, you can really only focus on one thing at a time. Focusing on a single task without context switching is what gets you into deep thought or deep meditation. Anything more than one incurs a cost. And it just goes up from there. That’s the “neurological pile up on this cognitive freeway” that Newport talks about and that takes longer and longer to clear out the more you stay up on the surface.

Implementation

I’ve tried to flush out why it’s smart to know about this cognitive network switch cost so you can work to reduce the negative effects. But that’s only part of Newport’s work. He goes into great detail about leveraging deep thinking to solve difficult problems, which is more about leveraging a positive effect. Now, I’m obviously a Cal Newport fan so I’m always looking for bits like this to try. If you are interested you may want to implement some of the things he’s talking about. There’s a lot there. You can’t do it all right away. Just start with one bit. Learn it well. Get some results. Get some feedback. Do some more. And around you go. It’s all very Agile.

If you like Cal’s interviews on the net, that’s cool, but you’ll soon discover that he’s smart enough to not mess with social media. And, yes, that’s a clue. He does his own podcast, though. It’s good.