The Fastest Way to Boost Your Focus (Science-Based)

Focus in the brain is anchored to our visual system. If you want to improve your ability to focus, you need to practice focusing your visual system. Spending just 60 to 120 seconds focusing my visual attention on a small window of my screen. You can greatly increase your powers of focus and the higher your levels of attention will be. It will wake up the brain. Mental focus follows visual focus. So let's think about visual focus for a second. When we focus on something visually, we have two options. We can either look at a very small region of space with a lot of detail and a lot of precision, or we can dilate our gaze and we can see big pieces of visual space with very little detail. It's a trade-off. We can't look at everything at high resolution. The pupil more or less relates to the phobia of the eye, which is the area in which we have the most receptors, the highest density of receptors that perceive light. And so our acuity is much better in the center of our visual field than in our periphery. And that's because the density, the number of pixels in the center of my visual field is much higher than it is in the periphery. When we focus our eyes, we do a couple things. First of all, we tend to do that in the center of our visual field. And our two eyes tend to align in what's called a virgin eye movement towards a common point. The other thing that happens is the lens of our eye moves so that our brain now no longer sees the entire visual world, but is seeing a small cone of visual imagery. that small cone of visual imagery or soda straw view of the world has much higher acuity, higher resolution than if I were to look at everything. Now you say, of course, this makes perfect sense, but that's about visual attention, not mental attention. Well, it turns out that focus in the brain is anchored to our visual system. The key is to learn how to focus better visually. Not only do we develop a smaller visual window into the world, but we activate a set of neurons in our brain stem that trigger the release of both norepinephrine, epinephrine, and acetyloline. Norepinephrine is kind of similar to epinephrine. So, in other words, when our eyes are relaxed in our head, when we're just kind of looking at our entire visual environment, moving our head around, moving through space, we're in optic flow, things moving past us or we're sitting still, we're looking broadly at our space, we're relaxed. When our eyes move slightly inward toward a particular visual target, our visual world shrinks, our level of visual focus goes up. And we know that this relates to the release of acetylcholine and epinephrine at the relevant sites in the brain for plasticity. Now, what this means is that if you have a hard time focusing your mind for sake of reading or for listening, you need to practice and you can practice focusing your visual system. Now this works best if you practice focusing your visual system at the precise distance from the work that you intend to do for sake of plasticity. So how would this look in the real world? Let's say I am trying to concentrate on something related to I don't know science. I'm reading a science paper and I'm having a hard time. It's not absorbing. I might think that I'm only looking at the paper that I'm reading. I'm only looking at my screen. But actually my eyes are probably darting around a bit. experiments have been done on this or I'm gathering information from too many sources in in the visual environment. Now, presumably because it's me, I've already had my coffee. I'm hydrated. I'm well well rested. I slept well. And I still experience these challenges in focusing. spending just 60 to 120 seconds focusing my visual attention on a small window of my screen, meaning just on my screen with nothing on it, but bringing my eyes to that particular location increases not just my visual acuity for that location, but it brings about an increase in activity in a bunch of other brain areas that are associated with gathering information from this location. So, put simply, if you want to improve your ability to focus, practice visual focus. The finer the visual image and the more that you can hold your gaze to that visual image, the higher your levels of attention will be. So, you absolutely have to focus on the thing that you're trying to learn. And you will feel some agitation because of the epinephrine in your system. If you're feeling agitation and it's challenging to focus and you're feeling like you're not doing it right, chances are you're doing it right. And you can practice this ability to stare for long periods of time without blinking. I know it's a little eerie for people to watch, but if your goal is to learn how to control that visual window for sake of controlling your focus, it can be an immensely powerful portal into these mechanisms of plasticity because we know it engages things like nucleus basalis and these other brain stem mechanisms. I get a lot of questions about attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, ADHD, and attention deficit disorder. Some people actually have clinically diagnosed ADD and ADHD. And if you do, you should certainly work with a good psychiatrist to try and figure out the right pharmarmacology and/or behavioral practices for you. Many people, however, have given themselves a low-grade ADHD or ADD because of the way that they move through their world. They are looking at their phone a lot of the time. It's actually very easy to anchor your attention to your phone for the following reason. First of all, it's very restricted in size. So, it's very easy to limit your visual attention to something about this big. It's one of the design features of the phone. The other is that just as you you've probably heard a picture is worth a thousand words, well, a movie is worth 10,000 pictures. Anytime we're looking at things that have motion, visual motion, our attentional system will naturally gravitate towards them. It's actually much harder to read words on a page than it used to be for many people because we're used to seeing things spelled out for us in YouTube videos or videos where things move and are very dramatic. It is true that the more that we look at those motion stimula, the more that we're seeing movies of things and things that are very dramatic and very intense, the worse we're getting at attending to things like text on a page or to listening to something like a podcast and extracting the information. If you think about the areas of life that dictate whether or not we become successful, independent, healthy individuals, most of those involve the kind of boring practices of digesting information on a page. Boring because it's not as exciting in the moment perhaps as watching a movie or something being spoonfed to us. But the more attention that we can put to something, even if it's fleeting and we feel like we're only getting little bits and pieces, shards of the information as opposed to the entire thing, that has a much more powerful effect in engaging this coneric system for plasticity than does for instance watching a movie. And that's because when we watch a movie, the entire thing can be great. It can be awesome. It can be this overriding experience. But I think for all those experiences, if you're somebody who's interested in building your brain and expanding your brain and getting better at various things, feeling better, doing better, etc., one has to ask, how much of my neurochemical resources am I devoting to the passive experience of letting something just kind of overwhelm me and excite me versus something that I'm really trying to learn and take away? And I think that we need to be careful that we don't devote all our acetyloline and epinephrine, all our dopamine for that matter to these passive experiences of things that are not going to enrich us and better us. So I don't want to tell people what to do or not to do, but think carefully about how often you're focusing on something and how good you are or poor you are at focusing on something that's challenging. So once you get this epinephrine, this alertness, you get the acetylcholine released and you can focus your attention, then the question is for how long? And the typical learning bout should be about 90 minutes. That learning bout will no doubt include 5 to 10 minutes of warm-up period. I think everyone should give themselves permission to not be fully focused in the early part of that bout. But that in the middle of that bout, for the middle hour or so, you should be able to maintain focus for about an hour or so. So that for me means eliminating distractions. That means turning off the Wi-Fi. I put my phone in the other room. But I encourage you to try experiencing what it is to be completely immersed in an activity where you feel the agitation that your attention is drifting but you continually bring it back. And that's an important point which is that attention drifts but we have to reanchor it. We have to keep grabbing it back. And the way to do that is with your eyes. As your attention drifts and you look away, you want to try and literally maintain visual focus on the thing that you're trying to learn.

Reset your focus in 60 seconds using a simple, science-backed visual technique. This video shows how to flip your attention “on” fast—without willpower, apps, or motivation. Subscribe to RESPIRE for more science-based health tips: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCyNaCRf6Aaljcm9ZWARawXw re·spire (verb) – (1) to breathe (2) to recover hope, courage, or strength 🌟🌟🌟 NEW VIDEOS EVERY WEEK 🌟🌟🌟 00:00 Intro 00:27 Visual Focus 02:30 60 Second Focus Exercise 04:35 Dealing With Distractions This video is a condensed and highly edited version of the full 111 minute podcast from @HubermanLab. For more information, watch the full episode (link below) and follow the podcast. Andrew Huberman is an American neuroscientist and tenured associate professor in the department of neurobiology and psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford University School of Medicine. Podcast Host: Andrew Huberman YouTube: @HubermanLab Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yb5zpo5WDG4&pp=ygUOaHViZXJtYW4gZm9jdXPYBsoc Fair Use Disclaimer 1. Under section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for "fair use" for purposes such as criticism, commenting, news reporting, teaching, scholarship and research. Fair use is a use permitted by copyright statute that might otherwise be infringing. Non-profit, educational or personal use tips the balance in favor of fair use. 2. We do not own the rights to all content. They have, in accordance with fair use, been repurposed with the intent of educating and inspiring others. We must state that in no way, shape or form are we intending to infringe rights of the copyright holder. 3. Content used is strictly for research and education, all under the Fair Use law. #focus #productivity #focusmode #neuroscience #deepwork #attention #studytips #selfimprovement #focushack