Tools to Improve Your Focus & Concentration | Huberman Lab Essentials – Transcript

00:00Welcome to Huberman Lab Essentials, where we revisit past episodes for the most potent and actionable science-based tools for mental health, physical health, and performance. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and opthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Today we are discussing focus and concentration and tools for improving your focus and concentration. And those tools will allow you to tap into the neurochemistry and the neural circuits within your

00:28brain and body that peer-reviewed science has reliably shown can significantly improve your focus and concentration abilities. Just to give you a little teaser of the kinds of tools that I'm going to provide you on today's episode, a previous guest on the Hubberman Lab podcast was Dr. Wendy Suzuki. Dr. Suzuki is a professor of psychology and neuroscience at New York University or NYU as it's commonly referred to. her laboratory made a very important discovery which was that a

00:52very brief just 12 actually 13 if you really count the the intro but 13 minute daily meditation performed for a period of about 8 weeks significantly increased people's focus and concentration abilities and the great news is you didn't need all eight weeks it was just that's how long that you ran the study so during today's episode I will describe that protocol in detail I'll also provide you an even briefer alternative to that protocol that you can use if for instance you find

01:19yourself with only 3 minutes or 4 minutes or 5 minutes a day to meditate because today's episode is mainly focused on tools and not so much the underlying mechanisms. I'm mainly going to focus on what to do and when and how to do it. But I just want to take about 3 minutes and briefly describe a model that is a visual image that you can put in your mind that will help you incorporate the tools that I'll provide and that generally will help you understand at a mechanistic level how

01:45focus and concentration work. What I want you to imagine is an arrow. And an arrow of course has an arrow head and it has the shaft of that arrow. The neurochemical system that really represents the shaft of that arrow, right? The straight line is epinephrine, also called adrenaline. Turns out that epinephrine/adrenaline are released within your brain from a little location, a little cluster of neurons called locus ceruius, but you do

02:10not need to remember that name. and from your body from the adrenal glands. And the release of epinephrine from those two locations overall increases energy. It increases alertness. It does not alone increase focus. Okay? So things whether or not they're behavioral or psychological or supplements or drugs that increase epinephrine allow focus to

02:36occur. They are necessary for focus but they are not sufficient for focus. that is they are required but they are not enough to create focus. So we're going to need epinephrine in the equation. Now the arrow head on this metaphorical arrow head that represents focus and concentration is going to be represented or related to the mechanisms of acetylcholine. And the best way to think about it is it's like a spotlight. It highlights specific neurons nerve cells

03:04that should be active or more active I should say than the other neurons in the environment. If you have an arrow with a very big arrow head that's really broad, really blunt. Imagine a mile wide arrow head that's not very focused on any one location. It's not really pointing to any one location, is it? But with a narrow, really tightly focused arrow head, well, that's focused on one location. So, we have alertness, epinephrine, and then we have the actual

03:30direction in which our concentration and focus is placed. And that's in at least in this mental model I'm creating acetylcholine. And then in order to have ongoing focus, we need another neurochemical. And it turns out that that third neurochemical is dopamine. A molecule often associated with pleasure and reward. But it's really the molecule of motivation. These three neurochemicals together, acetyloline,

03:55epinephrine, and dopamine, really allow you to get focused, to focus very precisely, and in fact increasingly precisely over time, to really narrow and narrow and narrow your focus progressively within a single bout of focus, and to continue to do that and to be able to do that repeatedly whenever you want. Let's jump into the tools for concentration and focus. One of the most important things to build and maintain

04:21your focus and concentration is to optimize your sleeping behavior. That is to get enough quality sleep I would say 80% of the nights of your life. Not everyone can get optimal sleep 100% of the nights of their life. Nobody truly nobody achieves that. However, sleep has been shown to relate to cognitive performance, physical performance, hormone output and so many other things.

04:46What we can reliably say is that sleep modulates just about every process in your brain and body. So assuming that you are sleeping well 80% of the nights of your life or at least working on the various protocols and tools to sleep well and sufficiently long 80% of the nights of your life and you are interested in additional tools that are soundbased in order to improve your ability to concentrate and focus. There

05:13are quality peer-reviewed studies supporting the idea that white noise or pink noise have been shown to not improve concentration per se, but to improve people's ability to transition into concentrated states. There is indeed some data to support the fact that white noise and to some extent pink noise and brown noise can amplify the activity of neurons in the so-called prefrontal cortex. this front area, sort

05:38of the bumper behind your forehead, uh that is directly related to your ability to direct your own focus and remain focused on certain things. These are tools that really have been shown over and over in humans to decrease the transition time into focus. This is a really key point. A lot of people are challenged with getting into a mode of focus. None of us, however, should be expected to just sit down and drop directly into a state of focus. I think

06:05that's completely an unfair request of ourselves. I mean, for instance, you wouldn't expect yourself to go out on the track or go out for a run and not warm up. You might jog for a few minutes or even walk before you would jog and then jog before you would run, right? I would hope you would do that. And if you're doing resistance training, I doubt that you go over and load up the bar or the machine with the maximum amount of weight that you can move and then just drop right into that. You always do a warm-up. And I think it's very important to understand mental work, focus, and concentration as requiring that warm-up. There's a

06:32gradual dropping into any state whether or not that state is sleep, right? You go from shallow sleep to deep sleep and then out eventually. Focus two, you go from shallow focus to increasingly deep focus. That is in our metaphor of the arrow, it's very broad. It's pointed at a lot of things and over time as we drop into focus that arrow is narrowing and narrowing and narrowing. It is not what we call a step function. It's not like you go from unfocused to focus and then

06:58you drop into your maximum focus. By understanding that it's dynamic, by understanding that you are going to be continually going in and out of progressively but varying levels of focus, you will greatly release the pressure on yourself to feel focused all the time when you want to be. So be patient with yourself and also understand that focus is an ability that you can improve your ability to focus by engaging the neural circuits responsible

07:25for focus repeatedly over time through so-called neuroplasticity. the ability of your nervous system to change in response to experience. And that has a couple of different components. But put very simply, what we repeat gets etched into our nervous system and becomes easier over time. A question I often get is, "How long should I try to focus?"

07:42Well, the research literature point to the key importance of so-called altradian cycles. You've all probably heard of circadian cycles or circadian biology. Circa the day, circadian is about 24-hour cycle. Well, our brain and body operate within that day or within each and every day I should say with 90inute altradian cycles. So my suggestion would be anytime you're going to sit down and try and focus, you're going to try and do a focused bout of physical exercise or skill learning or

08:10musical learning or maybe you're even just having a conversation, maybe you're a therapist or you're attending therapy or a class. How long should it be? And the ideal duration is about 90 minutes. Everything from our sleep states or the different stages of sleep and our waking states is divided into these 90minute cycles or so-called ultradian cycles. I acknowledge and accept the fact that the first 5 to 10 minutes of that 90 minutes are a transition time. It's like the warm-up for focus, but I do include it

08:36in that 90 minutes. I'm often asked how many altradian cycles one can perform throughout the day. That depends on how well you slept, how well you are nourished, which we'll talk about in a moment, and how well trained up your focus capacity is. Again, this is not to say that you should go to your teacher or your um PhD adviser or your parent or your friends and say, "Listen, I I can't really concentrate or think about anything for more than 90 minutes per day." That's not what I'm saying. These are deep focus bouts. These are bouts of mental work or physical work where

09:03you're really forcing yourself to focus and refocus to sharpen the head of that arrowhead to redirect it to what you're trying to concentrate on. And it is indeed hard work. I would even think about it more or less like a workout of any [snorts] kind. Your ability to focus and in fact your ability of neurons to encode specific information in your environment that is to represent what's out there in the world is actually related to your blood glucose level.

09:27There's a beautiful study that was published in neuron not long ago that showed that the tuning that is the precision with which neurons in the brain represent things in our environment is actually much greater when there is sufficient glucose in the brain. Translated into English, this means that when we are fasted or when our blood glucose is very low, we aren't able to perceive and think about things as clearly. Now, there's a twist to this, however. One of the things that you hear very often is that some people

09:53like being fasted because they like the clarity of mind that it provides. Here's the situation. Neurons, unless you're in a ketogenic diet, really thrive on glucose. They love glucose. So, why would it be that some people experience a heightened state of mental clarity when they are fasted? I've certainly experienced that before. Well, I should say that provided you're well hydrated enough and you have enough electrolytes in your system. What tends to happen is that when you ingest food, there's a shift in your nervous system towards so-called parasympathetic modes. You've

10:21probably heard it as rest and digest, although it does other things. A more relaxed mode that can indeed make us very sleepy. If we have too many carbohydrates, it actually can make us quite sleepy. However, if we have any food, if we have enough of it, that is if our gut is full, it diverts blood to our gut and we become sleepy and we can't focus as well. Imagine a Ushaped function, right? Where if you're very fasted, you're going to have high degree of focus and concentration. But then if you ingest some food and your belly is

10:49full, your focus and concentration is reduced. But having enough blood glucose and maybe even elevated blood glucose will increase cognitive function. So, you sort of have to pick your condition. What do you want for your bouts of focus and concentration? I actually do both.

11:04So, what I do is, as I mentioned before, I eat my meals sometime around 11:00 a.m. my first meal typically, unless I'm very hungry when I wake up. And so, I will do my workout and one bout of focused work. I always think of this as my hard work early in the day. And I do that fasted. I'll be consuming water with electrolytes. That's my first focus bout of 90 minutes or less. And then I'll eat. And then I do notice after I eat I actually have a diminished capacity to focus. But then again in the

11:30afternoon I will do another 90-minute bout of focus. So to make this very simple or as simple as I can for you being fasted is great for focus and concentration provided you're not thinking about food the entire time and being fed is terrific for focus and concentration. Actually can improve neuronal function provided that you didn't eat too much food. So, one way to manage this is if you're going to have a lunch to make sure that you don't stuff yourself at lunch that you're not

11:57overeating and to not get quite so full that you push your nervous system into this parasympathetic mode and make it hard to focus in the afternoon. But if you're eating large meals, you are going to diminish your concentration and focus period. I know many people are curious as to whether or not caffeine can improve focus and concentration. And indeed, it can. There is a kind of general range in which we can talk about caffeine as being useful for focus and

12:23concentration and the range is basically from 100 milligrams to 400 milligrams. I want to caution everybody out there if you're somebody who suffers from anxiety or panic attacks and you're not used to ingesting caffeine and you run out and ingest 400 milligrams of caffeine in the form of espresso or yerba mate or an energy drink or in pill form that is going to be very uncomfortable for you.