Essentials: Tools to Improve Your Focus & Concentration

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 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 brain 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 Huberman 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 very brief, just 12, actually 13, if you really count the intro, but 13-minute daily meditation performed for a period of about eight 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 yourself with only three minutes or four minutes or five 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 three 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 focus 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. It turns out that epinephrine slash adrenaline are released within your brain from a little location, a little cluster of neurons called locus coeruleus, but you do not 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 occur. 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 arrowhead on this metaphorical arrowhead 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, that 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 arrowhead that's really broad, really blunt, imagine a mile wide arrowhead. 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 arrowhead, well, that's focused on one location. So we have alertness, epinephrine, and then we have the actual direction in which our concentration and focus is placed. And that's, 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, acetylcholine, epinephrine, 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 your 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. What 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 sound based in order to improve your ability to concentrate and focus. There are 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, this sort of the bumper behind your forehead 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.