The 12 Week Mind Workout

Focused Training for Mental Strength and Balance

WOUTER DE JONG
MAUD BEUCKER ANDREAE

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For Ava

INTRODUCTION

Isn’t it odd that adverts for watches often feature those ‘timeless’ moments when you wouldn’t dream of checking the time? A man and a woman engaged in a deep and meaningful kiss, each wearing a sparkling watch; a muscular rock climber hanging from a cliff edge by one arm, with an attractive timepiece around his wrist.

Such timeless moments, unfortunately, tend to be an exception to the rule. Our lives are ruled by the clock: we dash from one appointment to the next. And if we’re not eagerly looking forward to the future, we may be melancholically longing for the past. My uncle in The Hague used to say: ‘If you have one foot in the future and the other in the past, you are urinating on the present.’ I am sure we all know that irritating feeling of always wanting to be somewhere else – or be somebody else. Most of us are used to this sense of dissatisfaction lurking at the back of our minds. Maybe you, too, have convinced yourself that this is what life is about. Just imagine how it would be if we could feel a sense of peace instead in our minds. If that were possible, what would it be worth to you?

HEALTHY CONSCIOUSNESS

In today’s world, we are continually looking forward to something, waiting for that magic key, experience, achievement or somebody that will free us from our chronic dissatisfaction. The British writer and Zen practitioner Alan Watts compared this to impatiently listening to music longing to hear the final note, or heading towards a particular spot on the dancefloor. Of course we dance because we like dancing, but don’t we sometimes live in hope to find ‘that special “something”.’

But what is ‘that special “something”’? Is it material things, wealth, sex? I am convinced that it means feeling at home in your own consciousness. After all, your mind is the only home you will occupy permanently.

Are you not convinced? Just imagine you were promised access to a superpower which would allow you to acquire anything you wanted – money, cars, lovers, status, skills and power – but on one condition: you have to give up your consciousness. Would you agree? No, of course you wouldn’t: without consciousness, all these things would be worthless. Ask yourself this, too. Whose life would you prefer – that of Professor Stephen Hawking, the paralysed genius who said he wasn’t afraid of death, but wasn’t in a hurry to die either, because there are so many beautiful things to live for; or that of the extremely healthy Markus Persson, the Swedish multibillionaire and inventor of Minecraft who suffers from bouts of deep depression because he thinks life is pointless?

THE IMPORTANCE OF A HEALTHY MIND

You might easily fill a book with all the goals and ambitions you’d like to achieve in your life, but the main objective – whether you go camping, start a political party, read this sentence, attend a meeting or take some pain relief – is that you feel at ease in your own mind. Even people who commit suicide want only to be free from pain and suffering, to be happy. Of course, material circumstances are important, especially the basic needs that must be met if we are to survive, but in the end true happiness does not depend on possessions or ephemeral emotions, but on your outlook on life, on your mindset.

A healthy, happy mind, then, is invaluable – we wouldn’t want to swap it for anything – and yet we don’t treat it accordingly or give it its dues. Isn’t it amazing that everything we do passes through the filter we call consciousness but we pay so little attention to the actual filter?! In the West, we have never been as affluent as we are today, but if you consider that in the UK, for example, one in four people experience mental health conditions every year¹ and that mental ill health is responsible for 72 million working days lost and costs £34.9 billion each year,² then it looks as if the progress inside our heads is not keeping up.

TRAINING THE MIND

It surprises us that in the Middle Ages food was not yet linked to health. In the 1950s, physical exercise was not yet linked to health: if someone saw a jogger in the park, they’d think: ‘Why is she in such a hurry? She must be late for her train.’

Today it’s quite acceptable for us to pay attention to what we eat and to exercise our bodies. But still we don’t link mental training to health; often, we don’t even think about our brain until something goes wrong (and go to a clinical psychologist for help). Isn’t this rather strange? If you want to join the gym, you don’t need to prove you have physical ailments first.

Fortunately, a third revolution is gaining momentum: mental training. A whole raft of scientific evidence is telling us that mental training can help us lead more meaningful and enjoyable lives (and create a better world). In ten years’ time (we hope), a mind workout will feel just as natural as brushing your teeth. In other words, if you’re not doing any mental training, others may complain of the foul air swirling around your head.

MIND WORKOUT

‘Life is like a camera,’ wrote the financier and activist Ziad K. Abdelnour. ‘Focus on what’s important. Capture the good times. And if things don’t work out, just take another shot’. Perhaps you always take good photos, and if so, you might as well close this book now. But it’s more likely that, just like anybody else, your camera sometimes fails. In theory, most of us will say that we want a meaningful and happy life, but we don’t live accordingly. This book offers you the handles to get to grips with the nature of a ‘meaningful and happy life’ and put it into practice.

The 12 Week Mind Workout offers you the resources to maintain a constant healthy mental condition in all life’s moments – the happy, the sad and the downright dull. If your mind is clear and sharp you know where you can make an impact and what you should accept. You will not learn to be free from certain (inner) experiences, but you will discover freedom within your experience. It will help you maintain inner peace, even when you are sad or angry, or when things aren’t going quite as you like. You will learn to maintain or change your behaviour, which will help your life to be aligned with what really matters to you.

This book isn’t based on blind faith, quackery or waffle. It’s based on a rich, pragmatic bedrock of science on how we can influence our minds. Of course, research is always provisional and debatable, but it’s all, for the moment, that we have. This is why I have tried to cite evidence from multiple scientific studies as well as, of course, my own experiences and those of participants on my training courses.

HOW TO HAVE A HAPPY BRAIN

We have been talking about a healthy mind, but in order to train a healthy mind we first need to understand what this might mean without becoming mired in esoterica. Science can help us. Richard Davidson, a professor in psychology and psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, has investigated what makes our brains clear, effective and happy. Four independent brain circuits are responsible for what he calls ‘the happy brain’:

Attention. Our ability to maintain our focus; a distracted mind is an unhappy mind.

Resilience. Our ability to recover quickly from negative states of mind.

Positivity. Our ability to create positive emotions and thoughts and to nurture them.

Altruism. Our ability to give unconditionally; generosity.

Interestingly, these circuits can operate independently. It means that you have the ability to have really good conversations with a friend, but at the same time be quite poor in patching up the relationship after a disagreement with that same friend. It also means that the quantity of positive and negative emotions are fairly unrelated: you may experience many positive emotions and still find that you are frequently overwhelmed by unpleasant feelings. Research also shows that all these circuits are malleable. In other words, they can be exercised like you train muscles.

HOW TO APPROACH THE MIND WORKOUT

These brain circuits are the foundation of the Mind Workout. The book is divided into three parts: covering attention, power of compassion and happiness skills. Part 1, about attention, provides the foundation for the other two parts: attention training will give you more self-awareness and self-control. You learn to focus your attention where and how you want it. This is how you build up a basic level of readiness to perform the exercises in Parts 2 and 3. In Part 2, about compassion (your resilience circuit), you will learn to deal constructively with the difficult things in life. You will build up the resilience to stand strong in the midst of pain and suffering.

This will give you support for the following part, because you will have learned how to relinquish the behavioural patterns that stop you from living a happier life. Part 3, which is about happiness (the positivity and altruism circuits), will introduce you to the techniques you need to flourish and thrive in life.

Each part consists of four weeks, each with its own training suggestions. Of course, those ‘weeks’ are just guideline time periods. If you want to spend more time practising exercises in a particular week, please do. It’s important you don’t rush through the exercises. They are not quick fixes or miracle remedies; their value will become noticeable only after frequent practice and consolidation.

Each week begins with a warm-up (the theory), followed by training (the practice) and a cooling-down exercise (reflection). It’s good to know why something is beneficial, and if you put it into practice and then reflect on it, you will optimize your efforts. You can choose from three practice levels: light, medium and (for the diehards) intensive. Light training exercises will take up no extra time; you will do these exercises during your daily activities (such as taking a shower, making a phone call, or waiting at traffic lights). If you would like to do some more training, you could choose the medium level where there are plenty of audio tracks and additional exercises. These exercises require you to put in 20–30 minutes per day. If the intensive training is your thing, then expect to put in 30–45 minutes.

YOUR APPROACH

In The 12 Week Mind Workout it’s important that you trust only your own experiences and intuition. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking everything can be looked up in books. Knowledge does not equate with experience. You should absorb your experiences to recognize and get to know the deeper value of the exercises. Just reading a doctor’s prescription is not likely to make you better. If you think you’re short of time, remember that the average British person spends three hours and 23 minutes watching television or using the laptop per day. That’s more than a whole year of staring at screens for every eight years of your life. And what is more important to you: a better quality of life or keeping up to date with your Facebook friends?

It takes courage and discipline to look inside yourself. Taking a step inside and letting go of old habits and ideas that have become ingrained is more exciting than skydiving, climbing Everest or travelling to the moon – especially if you’re prepared to let go of that most dangerous of perspectives on personal growth, ‘It’s just the way I am and I can’t change it.’

IN CONCLUSION

In my opinion, striving for material prosperity isn’t the real problem; in fact, having a bit of money and enough things can actually give us an advantage! The real challenge is how we use our material prosperity to support mental progress and create a more sustainable world.

I fully realize that we can’t always make the world serve our purposes. Mind Workout is based on my belief that we do have the option to adopt an alternative view of our world. And if we introduce more clarity and definition into our consciousness, we should – paradoxically – be more able to shape the world the way we like. A clear and content mind will make you want more from life than just lazing in a hammock. It will make it more likely that we will be more involved in others than in ourselves. We will be more helpful and loving if we feel comfortable in ourselves and in our mind. We will spend more money on others, do more voluntary work, be more prepared to share and help, compared to unhappy people.³ In summary, a better world begins in your mind.

If we were to invest all the often unnecessary effort we put into our appearances, social media presence or binge-watching on training a healthy mind, it would not only make us happier but also create the right conditions for a society in which we pay attention to what matters most – each other.

Wouter de Jong

PART 1

ATTENTION

‘If you try to chase two rabbits, both will escape.’

CHINESE PROVERB

Eight seconds. That’s the length of time you can focus on something or somebody. After that, you lose concentration and your mind turns to something else: a bag of chips, an app, your thoughts, whatever. In 2000, the average individual’s attention span was 12 seconds; since then our smartphone era has shaved another third off this (are you still with me?). Now even goldfish have a longer attention span: this little creature can keep focus for no fewer than nine seconds.

Attention is the foundation of all our activities, from hitting the alarm clock in the morning to setting it in the evening and anything else in between: driving a car, attending work meetings, kissing, cooking… As a child you could spend hours playing with LEGO bricks, but now you’re grown up, it’s much harder to give your undivided attention to one single activity. This is first because, as adults, there are more demands on your attention. Today, attention is like gold dust: brands and adverts vie for our attention, colleagues expect us to keep focus, our children want us to play with them, a friend in distress would like us to listen. Second, it’s because every day our digital age exposes us to a deluge of information that craves your attention. The number of images we need to process (from newspapers, our computer, our smartphone or simply out in the street) has increased a hundredfold compared to a century ago. We are subjected to 300 items of advertising, of various forms, every day.⁴

ATTENTION INJURY

All these ‘attention seekers’ play havoc with your attention. And your own brain is complicit, because it is addicted to information: the more input it gets, the greedier it becomes and the more it devours.⁵ Just as you can injure your body through excessive exercise, you can also overload your ‘attention muscle’. As a consequence, you can switch off during even the simplest of activities. Your mind drifts off into the future (while eating the appetizer, you are already anticipating dessert; during a massage session, you’re already feeling sorry it will soon be over), or alternatively back in time (why was your friend so unkind to you yesterday?). These meanderings of your brain into the past or into the immediate future don’t help you; they merely distract you from your current activity, which means that you can’t fully enjoy it and you are more prone to making mistakes.

How many times have you heard the expression ‘Be more in the now’? It’s so overused, it just sounds hollow, doesn’t it? It stands to reason that everybody is in the now – it’s impossible not to be. What really matters is how you are present in the now. Making plans for the future can only be useful if you can enjoy them when that future presents itself. And it too will require all your attention.

If you ignore a wrist or knee injury, it will lead to other problems, and the same applies to an overloaded attention muscle. To avoid this, we need to find out how we can bring that undivided, LEGO-attention we enjoyed in our childhood back into our lives. It’s this that we‘ll be working on in the coming four weeks.

A LIFESAVING LUNCH

If ever you were to end up in prison and decided to ask for early release, cross your fingers that you will be heard at eight o’clock in the morning or just after lunch. A revealing study into early release showed that judges granted 65 per cent of all requests in the morning, but only 10 per cent at the end of the day. After lunch there was another peak of 65 per cent. Why was this? The researchers concluded that the decision to grant early release demanded a high level of attention. Just before lunch the judges had little battery power left, and the same applied in the late afternoon. This explains why there were significantly fewer early releases at those times.

SIT-UP

Did you notice a typo in the second paragraph? If so, you’re pretty smart! If you didn’t, the mistake was in the sentence ‘This is first because, as adults, there are more demands on your attention’, which should of course have been ‘an adult’. You most likely missed it because mistakes like that just aren’t important to you. It would require more energy if you had to dot the is and cross the ts in addition to paying attention to content. Your attention muscle is trying to save energy. Unless, of course, you are a book editor (and spotting errors is your job).

ATTENTION TRAINING

It is interesting that, when we learn new skills (painting, driving a car, management efficiency), ‘Module 1: Attention Training’ is not on the curriculum.

Yet attention is at the core of everything we do – as well as when we learn (something new) at school. Unfortunately, the only words we were used to hearing about paying attention at school were something like ‘Pay attention, otherwise I’ll have to ask you to leave the classroom!’ or ‘If you don’t stop talking now, I’ll put you in detention!’ Paying attention was just something we had to do if we didn’t want to get punished. Isn’t that weird, because how do you pay attention? And yet attention should be part of the curriculum, as it’s at the very core of constructive learning.

So how can you strengthen your attention muscle? Answer: by practising mindfulness. If the idea of mindfulness doesn’t appeal to you and just hearing the word makes you want to chuck this book into the recycling bin, please hold on! Yes, I know, the whole concept of mindfulness has become tarnished. It might remind you of a bunch of dishevelled hippies in an ashram, or you might be thinking of a bunch of spoiled hipsters on a retreat or trendy midlifers trying to impress with Eckhart Tolle quotes.

It’s great that mindfulness has gained popularity over recent years – we no longer bat an eyelid if our CEO takes time off to go to a ‘retreat’ – but its popularity has led to an indiscriminate and often incorrect usage of the term. A common misconception is that being ‘mindful’ is equal to feeling relaxed or Zen, or that nothing or nobody will ever be able to upset you again. However, the literal meaning of mindfulness is ‘having full awareness [i.e. attention]’ – being attentive and registering what is happening moment by moment without prejudice – everything from pain and joy to anger and that itch on your big toe.

If your lifestyle is mindful, it means that you have consciously decided where and how you want to centre your attention. Your attention muscle will become stronger, you will gradually notice that you are finding it easier to focus and consequently you will not only feel more content, but have a resilient and constructive approach to dealing with unpleasant situations.

Isn’t each of your seconds the most important moment of your life?

There is no later… Later is now.’

DE DIJK

THE BENEFITS OF ATTENTION TRAINING

One of the earliest studies looking at active attention training (the ‘traditional’ eight-week mindfulness programme) and its impact on the workplace even surprised the researchers. The participants, they found, were less stressed and restless, had a more positive mood and worked more efficiently than the control group.

The (unexpected) bonus was the physical impact: at the end of attention training the participants were given a flu injection to test the response of their immune system. Those who had practised their attention control developed significantly more antibodies than the untrained group.⁶

The benefits of attention training are huge. Many studies show that it helps against fear, physical pain, anxiety and depressive feelings, and that it leads to increased happiness, health, concentration, decision-making and self-control, among other things.⁷ And if we consider that attention is the foundation of everything we do, a (more) attentive life must be the first step towards growth in everything we do.

In a ground-breaking study carried out by the neuroscientist Christopher deCharms, patients suffering chronic pain were shown a real-time fMRI (a type of X-ray) of their brain activity. In the image, their pain was visualized as fire: the heavier the pain, the more the activity in their brain, the greater the flames. The patients then practised the type of attention they wanted to pay to the flames (their pain) and they concentrated on making the flames smaller. As a result, their experience of pain decreased, and the flames grew smaller. The patients had consciously and actively changed the structure of their brains; the flames grew smaller or even died out.⁸

INTENT

Daily exercises will burn belly fat and the fat rolls may become a six-pack, but stop exercising and all the fat rolls back. This is how attention works, too: if you regularly exercise your attention muscle, it will help you be more attentively in daily life, but if you live without being attentive – by multitasking, allowing your mind to wander, or constantly picking up that smartphone – the muscle will become as weak as the proverbial kitten. This will lead to a less mindful life (you will forget appointments, increasingly mislay objects, take less notice in traffic, etc.), which in turn will have an even greater negative effect on the muscle. Attention training breaks this vicious circle: paying more attention strengthens your attention muscle, which in turn makes you more attentive. Actually, it is quite straightforward: pay attention to your attention, and your attention will grow.

You will be working on exactly this over the next four weeks. Each week begins with a warmup (theory), followed by training (practice) and a cooling down (reflection).

It’s good to know why something is beneficial: if you put something into practice and then reflect on it, you will optimize your efforts.

‘A poor attempt is better than no attempt at all.’

ANONYMOUS

Do consider beforehand which level of training is feasible for you – and be realistic. If you take up running, you won’t be ready to join a marathon immediately; it probably won’t be possible straightaway. A slow build-up is crucial to attention training: short exercises can really boost your attention muscle. If you discover after a while that the additional exercises are too much for you, don’t worry. Don’t give up – just go back a step. The main thing is to practise. The ‘training lite’ version is also adequate. And if you happen to think you have let the side down, then stop and consider what you have achieved – don’t think about what you should have achieved. This in itself is a good attention exercise.