Traders Can Get “In The Zone,” Too

This is a transcript of an interview I did recently with Tim Bourquin of Traders Interviews.

My guest today is Dr. Gary Dayton. He’s here to talk to us about “mindfulness” and how that can help us as traders to make better decisions in the market. Dr. Dayton, first of all, what is mindfulness?

Well, Tim, mindfulness is a quality of attention. It’s paying attention on purpose in the present moment without judgment.

We typically are frequent flyers into the past or off to the future, and we tend to evaluate everything that comes into our awareness as either good or bad; “Do I like this, do I not like this?” Those are conditioned ways of thinking, or habitual ways of thinking, that are not necessarily helpful to the trader.

Mindfulness does a number of positive things, and in fact, the recent research is showing that it is actually altering brain structure in ways that can be very useful for the trader.

Practicing mindfulness just 30 minutes a day over a couple of months will affect the centers of memory and learning, the emotional regulation centers of the brain, even things like perspective taking, all of which are important to traders and are positively influenced by mindfulness.

The practice of mindfulness can also help us to increase our focus and our concentration. Athletes often refer to this as being “in the zone.” It’s a quality of consciousness where time seems to slow down, distracting thoughts and feelings fall to the wayside, the complex patterns of the market become clearer, trading cues become clearer, and our entries and our exits become sharper, all by mindful practice.

How do I actually put that into practice on a daily basis? What am I actually doing each day? Is it 30 minutes before the market opens?

That’s a helpful thing to practice mindfulness formally, but you can do it informally as well.

When practicing mindfulness informally, just notice when your mind wanders.  For example, if you are talking with somebody and they are speaking, notice how much your mind gets distracted from what they are saying.  We all have this experience where we’re formulating our answer before the other person is even finished talking. Notice that. Pause, refocus on the task at hand, which is talking to the other person, listening and being attentive to them.

Set aside an hour a day during your normal course of activities and be mindful.  During this hour, your goal is to notice each time your mind wanders, becomes distracted, and you get lost in thought.  If you have never done this before, I guarantee you will be astonished at how easily distracted you become.

More formally, you can sit for five minutes to start in a quiet area.  The task is to watch your breath.  Place your attention fully on the breath as it comes in and as it goes out.  Keep your attention on your breath.  Notice when your mind starts to wander…and it will, frequently. It’s what the mind does, and that’s perfectly normal. The goal of mindfulness is to become aware of when your mind becomes distracted, and then gently bring the mind back to the task at hand, which in watching the breath is the breath.

So it sounds like this is all about staying focused on the charts and the markets while the market is open and trying to keep those thoughts about what’s going to happen after the market closes or what’s been going on in our lives outside of that so that we can actually make better decisions.

Exactly.  You know, trading is stressful. We’re dealing with risk and uncertainty and the fearful feelings that we have and the fearful thoughts that arise cause stress and that’s uncomfortable. So naturally, We want to get rid of those stressful thoughts and feelings.  But it is that desire to escape the feelings that tends to shift our focus away from the market and onto our fearful thoughts and emotions.  It’s a paradox: the more we don’t want fear and stress, the more we have it and the worse it becomes.

Practicing mindfulness helps us step outside of our thoughts and feelings and see them for exactly what they are: temporary thoughts and feelings that soon go away, nothing more.  Having even very fearful thoughts when mindful allows us to have those thoughts and feelings knowing that they are passing mental events and allows us to focus on the market and trade from our core, not from what’s going on in the mind.

And mindfulness is a skill, and so it takes practice.  We can’t just do it once or twice and be expert at it.  Any worthwhile skill requires effort, and this is very true of mental skills like mindfulness.