pay attention to my breath and when my mind wandered, to bring it back. The instruction was simple enough

but I was missing something really important. So why is it so hard to pay attention?

It turns out that we're fighting one of the most evolutionarily conserved learning processes

currently known in science. This reward-based learning process is called positive and negative

reinforcement, and basically goes like this: we see some food that looks good. Calories! Survival!

We eat the food, we taste it, it tastes good. Our bodies send a signal to our brain that

says remember what you're eating and where you found it. See food, eat food, feel good, repeat.

Trigger, behaviour, reward. Well after a while our creative brains say: "You know, next time

you feel bad, why don't you try eating something good... So you'll feel better?"

Same process, just a different trigger. Maybe in our teenage years, and we see those rebel kids outside

smoking, we think, "Hey! I wanna be cool!" So we start smoking. See cool, smoke to be cool,

feel good. Now with these same brain processes we have gone from learning to survive to literally

killing ourselves with these habits. In the lab we studied whether mindfulness training

could help people quit smoking. Now with mindfulness training, we focused on being curious. What?

Yeah we said, "go ahead and smoke, just be really curious about what it's like when you do."

and what did they notice? Well here's an example from one of our smokers. She said "Mindful

smoking: smells like stinky cheese, and tastes like chemicals." What she discovered just by

being curiously aware when she smoked was that smoking tastes like shit. She started

to become disenchanted with her behaviour. The prefrontal cortex understands that we

shouldn't smoke. And it tries its hardest to help us change our behaviour. Unfortunately

this is also the first part of our brain that goes offline when we get stressed out. Now,

when the prefrontal cortex goes offline, we fall back into our old habits. Which is why

this disenchantment is so important. Seeing what we get from our habits helps us understand

them in a deeper level. But over time as we learn to see more and more clearly the results

of our actions, we let go of old habits and form new ones. Mindfulness is just about being

really interested and getting close and personal with what's actually happening in our bodies

and minds from moment to moment. And this willingness to turn toward our experience

is supported by curiosity which is naturally rewarding. It feels good. We start to notice

the cravings are simply made up of body sensations. There's tightness, there's tension, there's

restlessness, and that these body sensations come and go. This might sound too simplistic

to affect behaviour but in one study we found that mindfulness training was twice as good as gold standard

therapy at helping people quit smoking. So It actually works. So if you don't smoke or

stress eat, maybe the next time you feel this urge to check your email when you're bored

or you're trying to distract yourself from work, see if you can just be curiously aware

of what's happening in your body and mind in that moment. Notice the urge, get curious,

feel the joy of letting go, and repeat. Thank you.