Essentials: ADHD & How Anyone Can Improve Their Focus

**Andrew Huberman** (0:00)
Welcome 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 ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Today, we are going to talk all about Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, or ADHD. Now, just a quick reminder that anytime we discuss a psychiatric disorder, it's important that we remember that all of us have the temptation to self-diagnose or to diagnose others. The clear and real diagnosis of ADHD really should be carried out by a psychiatrist, a physician or a very well-trained clinical psychologist. So right now, the current estimates are that about one in 10 children and probably more have ADHD. Now, fortunately, about half of those will resolve with proper treatment, but the other half typically don't. The other thing that we are seeing a lot nowadays is increased levels of ADHD in adults. For sake of today's discussion, attention, focus and concentration are essentially the same thing. So people with ADHD have trouble holding their attention. What is attention? Well, attention is perception. It's how we are perceiving the sensory world. For instance, right now, you're hearing sound waves. You are seeing things. You are sensing things against your skin, but you are only paying attention to some of those. And the ones that you're paying attention to are your perceptions. So if you hear my voice, you are perceiving my voice. You are not paying attention to your other senses at the moment, okay? You might even be outside in a breeze. And until I said that, you might not be perceiving that breeze, but your body was sensing it all along. So attention and focus are more or less the same thing, but impulse control is something separate. Because impulse control requires pushing out or putting the blinders on to sensory events in our environment. It means lack of perception. Impulse control is about limiting our perception. People with ADHD have poor attention and they have high levels of impulsivity. Yes, they are distractible. Yes, they are impulsive. Yes, they are easily annoyed by things happening in the room. They sometimes have a high level of emotionality as well. However, people with ADHD can have a hyper focus, an incredible ability to focus on things that they really enjoy or are intrigued by. Now, this is a very important point because people with ADHD have the capacity to attend, but they can't engage that attention for things that they don't really, really want to do. There are a couple of other things that people with ADHD display quite often. One is challenges with time perception. People with ADHD often run late. They often procrastinate. But what's interesting and surprising is that if they are given a deadline, they actually can perceive time very well. And they often can focus very well if the consequences of not completing a task or not attending are severe enough. If they're not really concerned about a deadline or a consequence, well, then they tend to lose track of time and they tend to underestimate how long things will take. The other thing that people with ADHD have real trouble with is so-called working memory. Now, you might think that people with ADHD would have really poor memories, but in fact, that's not the case. People with ADHD often can have a terrific memory for past events. They can remember upcoming events quite well. Their memory is clearly working. However, one aspect of memory in particular that we call working memory is often disrupted. Working memory is the ability to keep specific information online, to recycle it in your brain over and over again so that you can use it in the immediate or short term. A good example of this would be you meet somebody, they tell you their name, they give you their phone number verbally, and you have to walk back to your phone and enter it into your phone. People without ADHD might have to put some effort into it. It might feel like a bit of a struggle, but typically they would be able to recite that phone number in their mind over and over and then put it into their phone. People with ADHD tend to lose the ability or lack the ability to remember things that they just need to keep online for anywhere from 10 seconds to a minute or two. Okay, so we've more or less established the kind of menu of items that people with ADHD tend to have. Some have all of them. Some have just a subset of them. Their severity can range from very intense to mild, but in general, it's challenges with attention and focus, challenges with impulse control. They get annoyed easily. They have kind of an impulsivity. They can't stay on task.