Optimizing Workspace for Productivity, Focus, & Creativity

**Andrew D. Huberman** (0:00)
Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life.
I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Today, we're going to talk all about how to optimize your workspace for maximum productivity. Indeed, that means to heighten levels of focus, to increase levels of creativity, to improve your ability to task switch. And this could be for the sake of school or for work, creative endeavors, personal endeavors. This really extends to everybody. Most often, when we hear about how to focus or how to get the most out of our work sessions, we hear about the biology and the psychology of that. We hear about dopamine and we hear about serotonin and we hear about caffeine. And indeed, those are topics that I've covered a lot on the Huberman Lab podcast. Today, we will touch on each of those, but we are mainly going to focus on how we arrange our physical environment and indeed how we arrange ourselves in that physical environment in order to bring out the best in our neurobiology. That is how to put ourselves into a heightened state of focus by virtue of things as simple as where we place our screen relative to our eyes at a given time of day. Believe it or not, there's excellent research on this and there's excellent research, for instance, on whether or not you should or should not listen to music, whether or not you should use things like binaural beats and if so, what frequency of binaural beats? We are going to cover all of that. And by the end, you will have a checklist of things that you can do to optimize your workspace on any budget. I will mention various products and apps that some of you might find useful for optimizing your workspace. But I want to emphasize at the outset that none of those that I mentioned are any products or apps that we have a financial relationship to. And more importantly, you don't need them. I'm going to explain how for zero cost, you can arrange your workspace in ways that makes you maximally productive, maximally focused, and allows you to adapt your workspace to different environments, whether or not you're traveling, working with others, working alone, et cetera. Just to give you a little hint of where we are going, I will mention a zero cost app that will deliver binaural beats at a particular frequency that peer-reviewed research has shown can enhance certain types of learning and memory. However, peer-reviewed research also shows that it can diminish performance in other types of tasks. So stay tuned, we'll go into all the details so that you can optimize your workspace for zero cost and get the most out of your efforts and endeavors. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is Athletic Greens. Athletic Greens is an all-in-one vitamin mineral probiotic drink.
I've been taking Athletic Greens since 2012, so I'm delighted that they're sponsoring the podcast. The reason I started taking Athletic Greens and the reason I still take Athletic Greens once or twice a day is that it helps me cover all of my basic nutritional needs. It makes up for any deficiencies that I might have. In addition, it has probiotics, which are vital for microbiome health. I've done a couple of episodes now on the so-called gut microbiome and the ways in which the microbiome interacts with your immune system, with your brain to regulate mood, and essentially with every biological system relevant to health throughout your brain and body. With Athletic Greens, I get the vitamins I need, the minerals I need, and the probiotics to support my microbiome. If you'd like to try Athletic Greens, you can go to athleticgreens.com/huberman and claim a special offer. They'll give you five free travel packs plus a year's supply of vitamin D3K2. There are a ton of data now showing that vitamin D3 is essential for various aspects of our brain and body health. Even if we're getting a lot of sunshine, many of us are still deficient in vitamin D3. And K2 is also important because it regulates things like cardiovascular function, calcium in the body, and so on. Again, go to athleticgreens.com/huberman to claim the special offer of the five free travel packs and the year's supply of vitamin D3K2. Today's episode is also brought to us by Element. Element is an electrolyte drink that has everything you need and nothing you don't. That means the exact ratios of electrolytes are in Element, and those are sodium, magnesium and potassium, but it has no sugar. I've talked many times before on this podcast about the key role of hydration and electrolytes for nerve cell function, neuron function, as well as the function of all the cells and all the tissues and organ systems of the body. If we have sodium, magnesium and potassium present in the proper ratios, all of those cells function properly and all our bodily systems can be optimized. If the electrolytes are not present and if hydration is low, we simply can't think as well as we would otherwise. Our mood is off, hormone systems go off, our ability to get into physical action, to engage in endurance and strength and all sorts of other things is diminished. So with element, you can make sure that you're staying on top of your hydration and that you're getting the proper ratios of electrolytes. If you'd like to try element, you can go to drink element, that's lmnt.com/huberman, and you'll get a free element sample pack with your purchase. They're all delicious. So again, if you want to try element, you can go to element, lmnt.com/huberman.