The Mel Robbins Podcast
12 Minutes to a Better Brain: Neuroscientist Reveals the #1 Habit for Clarity & Focus
27 Oct 2025
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hey, it's your friend Mel, and welcome to the Mel Robbins Podcast. I'm just going to be real with you. I have been feeling so tired lately. Maybe you have too. It's like your focus is just shot. Thoughts all over the place. You need to tame your wandering mind or you find yourself opening up your phone, right? You got to check just one thing.
And then an hour later, you've been deep in some social media rabbit hole. I hate that. Or how about this one? You ever walk into a room and then you're like, wait, Why am I in this room? I feel like I want to knock, knock, knock, get my brain. If you're feeling like your mind is constantly hijacked, You're not alone. And the fact is, it is.
The world you and I live in, it is designed to steal your focus. Your focus, it is under attack. Every scroll, every mindless click, these aren't just distractions. They rewire your brain. They reshape your priorities. And this isn't just about losing time. You're losing clarity, joy, peace, connection. If your mind is always somewhere else, How can you hear your own thoughts?
How can you be present with the people you love? How can you make important decisions about what matters? The truth? You can't. But here's what you can do. You can learn how to train your brain with a scientifically proven habit that takes just 12 minutes that's going to make you smarter, calmer. It's going to put you in a better mood. It's going to make you more focused.
So if you're constantly feeling like your attention span is being hijacked, congratulations. You are in exactly the right place right now. By the end of this conversation, you're going to feel empowered, your brain is going to feel better, and you're going to understand what's actually going on when you feel distracted or unfocused.
And better yet, you're going to know exactly what to do about it because your attention is power. So let's get into it. Hey, it's your friend Mel, and welcome to the Mel Robbins Podcast. It is always such an honor to be together and to get to spend this time with you, so thank you for being here.
And if you're a new listener or you're here because someone shared this with you, I wanted to personally welcome you to the Mel Robbins Podcast family. Today, you're gonna learn how to train your brain from one of the world's top neuroscientists.
Dr. Amishi Jha is a cognitive neuroscientist and a professor of psychology at the University of Miami, where she also serves as the director of contemplative neuroscience. At Miami, she leads her own lab, the Jha Lab, and co-founded the university's mindfulness research and practice initiative.
She received her PhD in cognitive neuroscience from the University of California, Davis, and did her postdoctoral training in brain imaging at Duke University. Dr. Jha has spent the last 25 years studying attention in people under extreme stress, like military service members, ER teams, pro athletes, and world leaders. And she's figured out that it only takes 12 minutes
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Chapter 2: How does distraction impact our brain and priorities?
minutes to create a better brain. And today, she is teaching you this science-backed ritual for mental clarity. And her best-selling book, Peak Mind, has some of the most eye-opening research that I've ever read about how to rewire your brain and take it back from all the chaos in the world today. After listening to this, your brain will not be the same.
Please help me welcome Dr. Amishi Jha to the Mel Robbins Podcast. Thank you. It's so great to be here. I am so excited because I got to be honest with you. Is it common when people interview you for them to feel like they are unfocused? You know, as I was preparing for this, I was like, wait a minute. Why am I suddenly feeling all scattered before Dr. Amishi walks in here?
that happens with people?
I certainly don't want it to feel like some kind of like test of your attentional capabilities at all. Because frankly, all of the work that I do comes from my own journey with attention. It doesn't matter how much expertise I have. It doesn't matter how much I study this. The notion of having a crisis of attention or feeling scattered every now and then is part of the human experience.
So please don't feel that.
Thank you for saying that. Because I think when you think about attention and focus and training- your mind to be a peak mind, you all of a sudden sit up and lean in and you're like, okay, we've got stuff to do. And so there was something very, I think, optimistic and accessible to this idea that you are going to have a scattered mind at times.
Oh yeah, absolutely.
And I take it, you're going to teach us how to recognize that and pull your attention back to what's important when you do.
Yeah. With no promise that you're going to necessarily be less scattered, but through the journey of what we'll talk about, hopefully come to an understanding that as we become more intimately familiar and friendlier with our own mind, we treat that scatter differently.
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Chapter 3: What are the three types of attention and how can we strengthen them?
Not like the buzzword, but this is what you research as a neuroscientist in your life. What exactly is attention in your brain?
Right. So attention is an incredibly powerful brain system. That's the first thing. We already know that. It's a brain system. It is. And it doesn't actually fully develop until we're about 25 years old. Wait, what? Yes. And that age, 25, is because attention relies on a very important part of the brain that's quite slow to develop, the prefrontal cortex. Okay.
So we need our attention for everything that we do and things like thinking, things like feelings, things like connecting with other people, all of those require our attention. Before we talk about in more detail what attention is and all of the different ways that it functions, I think it might be useful to mention something about why we even have an attention system. Great.
Through the course of human evolution, we are benefited by the fact that we hold this thing called attention in our own brain. Okay. The idea that we consider is that this system developed because of a very big problem that the brain had. And this is even before we were human beings, which is that there's far more information in the environment than the brain can fully process.
So already you have an overloaded system. Uh-huh. If you cannot fully understand and process everything happening, you've got to come up with a solution.
So the solution of attention is to prioritize a subset of information that's available to us and use the full computational power of our brain to interrogate it, to understand it, and then sort of sample it bit by bit to put together everything that we understand. might be surrounded by. And frankly, as we developed as organisms, even to understand fully what's going on within us.
So we use our attention to prioritize some information over other information and use that to benefit our understanding of what's happening in our environment, internal and external.
So you could think about your attention system as this supercomputer function that is sorting through information and prioritizing it and helping us make sense of it.
Yes, but it prioritizes it in multiple ways. In fact, attention isn't one thing. Yep. It's actually three things. It's a trio of functions that are probably going to be important to think about because it helps us understand that to do this prioritizing, we need to orient our experience in multiple ways.
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Chapter 4: How can just 12 minutes a day improve mental performance?
Is that kind of how this works? Absolutely. Right.
So the auditory input is... going to be increased, and then everything else that follows from that. So because you're honing in on certain words, your comprehension of those words is going to be better. The thoughts that you have based on those words is going to be more fine-grained.
The memories that might get elicited by those words, everything else follows from the fact that you're getting this better input from what it is that you're paying attention to.
That's so helpful because I, you know, just as a normal person, when you hear the word attention, I always have just thought about the act of looking at something, paying attention, like just sitting still. And it didn't even dawn on me that there is a much larger system and mechanism that has massive issues to deal with to keep you alive and to be
crunching the data to determine everything that's happening at any given time. And kind of starting from that point is very helpful because it's so easy to get down on yourself if you can't pay attention or if you're scatterbrained. And if you start with this bigger understanding, like, whoa, whoa, whoa, your attention system has big ass jobs.
So let's not just keep trashing yourself right now and let's hold it a little more gently and let's learn how to work with it. You know, Dr. Amishi, in Peak Mind and all your research, you break attention into three systems. What are they?
The flashlight, which is selective attention. The floodlight, the alerting system. And the juggler, which is executive functioning. Okay. This trio of functions. The first one we already talked about. This flashlight metaphor describes it. We might sometimes, we might call that focus. Okay. We say we focus. We're really talking about the flashlight, which is we hone in. We're narrow.
We're restricted. We have this sense of agency. We can direct the flashlight. Okay. Wherever it is that that flashlight is pointing, we get prioritized information from there. Everything else is dulled out.
The important thing to think about with that is that it is not only important for the external environment so that we're, you know, like you said, we think about our eyes as attending, but we can use that same resource for the internal environment. What do you mean? Yeah. So if I... ask you right now to think about what you had for dinner last night.
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Chapter 5: Why is multitasking considered a myth?
Is this the right thing? Or does my action have to be corrected? And when we are successful, everything feels fluid. The balls are up in the air and everything's great. And when it's not functioning well, we feel that too. Like I failed at meeting this goal or ensuring that my actions align with that goal.
It's interesting that you said that the attention system doesn't fully develop until 25. And so is it really common, especially for somebody that is younger or a young adult or a child to have a delayed development in the attention system because it takes time for these things to develop? Absolutely.
And oftentimes what somebody may be characterized as having attentional problems, but then by early adulthood, they're totally fine. Yeah. Because in some sense, whatever that path was, whatever that timeframe was, full maturation happened and then they were fine.
Yes.
But the other thing to keep in mind about this aging-related aspect is not only does it slow to develop, but it's also fast to decline. What do you mean?
Yeah.
So in general, all three of these systems of attention, flashlight, floodlight, juggler, this kind of category of attention doesn't fully develop toward 25. Then we've got a good, solid 10-year run, 25 to 35, where our attention, all three systems are functioning quite well. Okay, peak, peak attention. But if you're older than 35... then we're on sort of a normal, healthy aging downward slog.
Why at 35? That sucks. Like we got a lot of life to live, Dr. Amisha. Why is it declining at 35?
That's just the nature of the brain. So partly we think this is because of the kind of habits people start engaging in. And this is actually the kind of point of everything that I've been up to in my lab, which is that if we know our attention is vulnerable, how can we train it? What are the best ways that we can spend a little bit of time every day so we can keep our attention in peak shape?
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Chapter 6: What is the significance of training your brain for better focus?
In my lab, we studied attention. That's literally if anybody at the university got a call from any media that said, we want to learn about attention, they'd call me. And while he was a young child and my husband was in grad school, we bought a hundred-year-old fixer-upper. I was in such a state that I felt I could not pay attention. And it was like annoying. I'm like, I know about this system.
Like, just come on, get it together, pay attention. And then I'm like, okay, fine. I got to go beyond myself. There's got to be solutions in the literature. Going into the literature, what I realized is there really is no advice. There was no solid advice on what you do when it's not a clinical disorder. It really is, I don't feel like I have hold of my own flashlight. So what do I do?
And I kept coming up empty. What I also knew is that this was just not acceptable. I mean, I... had made a commitment that even though I was going to be a busy professional, what was really important to me was going to stay central to my life. And in that moment, it was making sure no matter what my day looked like, at the end of the day, I was going to sit down with my baby and read him a book.
And I started noticing that I couldn't even be there for those moments where I was doing this thing that I had promised myself and I knew was the most important thing I was going to do all day. And it got me super panicked. Like, ugh, not only do I study this and not know what to do, but this is consequential. If I can't show up now, what's it going to be like when he actually really needs me?
Yeah.
And so I kind of became interested in figuring out what to do about it. What is it that I can do? do to bring some tools into my life. And I was very, very fortunate that by chance, a colleague of mine suggested something I might try. Not so much to make my attention better, but really just to feel better because it was obviously cascading into, I can't pay attention.
I don't feel good about that. And then it was turning into a mood problem. So all that stuff can start happening. And it was really the one word that got me like, what?
this is what i should try and that word was meditation okay and at that moment as a again a up-and-coming neuroscientist a serious person who devoted her life to science i was like yeah i'm not doing that i was i'd written it off entirely um not only because it was not something that I thought a serious scientist would study at that point. This is the early 2000s. Okay.
But I had this whole cultural background where I had known about meditation. In fact, my earliest memories are seeing my parents meditating. And I thought it was great for them, but not something I would do. But I did give it a try.
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Chapter 7: How can mindfulness practices help with attention?
It's a cross between a Yerke and a Dodson. It's not a new breed of dog. But basically think about it like this. Think of a graph. And the graph has an inverted U shape, like just a U upside down. An upside down U, yep. So on the x-axis is the level of stress. low stress to high stress. Got it. And on the Y-axis is your performance. Not performing well, excellent performance. Okay.
So what we know is that when stress is low, so something like you need to get your taxes done, but not till next April. Stress is low, performance is low. We're not going to engage when there's no demand.
The flashlight's off. Yeah, of course. I'm thinking about something else right now. So I've got no stress about my taxes.
As we get higher and higher in terms of the amount of demand, performance will start Peaking up is a week or two before taxes are due. Yeah, you're on it, and you're going to get it done.
Now, this analogy may fall apart, but if you maintain that level of stress over a longer period of time, past just that peak to allow you to get it done, you're going to now go from the peak performance to dipping back down.
And isn't that what happened to you? Because you were under a period of chronic stress as a new mom running a lab, a husband who's in graduate school. And that is so relatable because I think so many of us have a lot of pressure and we feel like we can't drop a ball. But then all of a sudden, all the balls in your brain are starting to drop and you feel like you just are losing it.
And I never thought about it as a overload on the attention system that's controlling everything about you because of the way that the stress is impacting you and now me. Yeah.
The way that the system operates. But now after his fourth, fifth, sixth deployment, it's not going to function the same, even if the level of challenge and demand is the same. And that's what I really wanted to get across, is that you actually are more vulnerable. Your performance is dipping.
And unfortunately, one thing that goes in addition to your performance dipping is your awareness of your own performance is going to be less and less. So you become less and less aware that you're falling apart. And you know, that can be very catastrophic for people in those kinds of positions because it's not a child that's telling them, mommy, you're not paying attention.
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Chapter 8: What actionable steps can listeners take to implement these insights?
You work in a hospital as a nurse. Exactly, exactly. You know, a teacher going through the end of the school year. If you don't do that and we track your attention, your attention is going to be worse, objectively. Your stress levels are going to be higher, negatively. And your mood is going to be worse. You're going to have higher negative mood and less positive mood.
Everything is going in the direction of bad news. If you do this 12 minutes, and now this is not just me guessing. We've now confirmed this after study after study. You don't show that pattern. Attention is stable over time. It doesn't decline. The comparison group that didn't do it, same exact circumstances decline.
If people do more than 12 minutes, they actually look a little bit better than where they started. Same thing with mood. Mood doesn't tank. It actually stays stable. You know, positive mood actually looks not impacted. Negative mood, not worse. Again, more they do, they can even improve beyond that. Same thing with stress levels.
So everything is starting to look like you're protected and strengthening if you achieve that number.
If you're not in a period of stress, but you just want to do better. Yeah. What happens if you do this 12 minutes a day, four days a week for four weeks?
Really good news. You're going to get better than where you started. And what does that look like?
Happier, more focused, more energy?
Exactly. You're going to feel, in general, I don't want to promise happiness, okay, because that is a slippery slope. Yeah, of course. You will be more aware of what you're experiencing moment by moment. you'll be more capable of holding that attentional flashlight and directing it willfully.
Negativity may arise, but you notice it for what it is and you relate to it differently so that you're not ruminating and stuck or catastrophizing, but you see it and respond responsibly toward yourself.
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