Essentials: Tools to Improve Your Focus & Concentration
Full transcript · Read the full conversation in order, with its original context.
§01Transcript — part 1
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
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
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, 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.
None of us, however, should be expected to just sit down
and drop directly into a state of focus.
I think that'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 warmup.
And I think it's very important to understand mental work,
focus and concentration as requiring that warmup.
There's a gradual 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 you drop into your maximal 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 for 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.
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§02Transcript — part 2
It's also important that you get adequate electrolytes.
The electrolytes, sodium, magnesium, and potassium,
are vital for functioning of all the cells in your body,
especially your neurons or your nerve cells.
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To make sure that I'm getting proper amounts
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I dissolve one packet of LMNT
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during any kind of physical exercise that I'm doing,
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A question I often get is how long should I try to focus?
Well, the research literature point to the key importance
of so-called ultradian 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 90-minute ultradian 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 musical 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 90-minute cycles or so-called ultradian cycles.
I acknowledge and accept the fact that the first five to 10 minutes of that 90 minutes are a
transition time. It's like the warmup for focus, but I do include it in that 90 minutes. I'm often
asked how many ultradian cycles one can perform throughout the day. That depends on how well
you've 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
PhD advisor or your parent or your friends and say, listen, 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 you'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 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.
There'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
will 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 like 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 probably 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 U-shaped function, right?
Where if you're very fasted,
you're going to have a high degree of focus and concentration.
But then if you ingest some food and your belly is full,
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.
So what I do is, as I mentioned before,
I eat my meal sometime around 11 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 afternoon,
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 overeating 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 concentration.
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.
You're going to be sweating profusely.
Your heart rate is going to increase.
You're going to be quite panicked, in fact,
or at least anxious.
But most people do quite well
to ingest 100 to 200 milligrams of caffeine
prior to doing some focused work.
I will caution those of you that think
that you can drink caffeine in the evening or nighttime
and still fall asleep.
All of the research points to the fact
that the architecture of your sleep
and the depth of your sleep is disrupted.
Even if you're able to fall and stay asleep,
the sleep you're getting is simply not as good
as the sleep you would get
if you were to shut off your caffeine intake
at least eight hours before bedtime,
and ideally more like 10 or even 12 hours before bedtime.
But of course, there are practical constraints as well.
There's an excellent study that was carried out
not that long ago on how stress itself
can increase our ability to focus and concentrate.
You know, most people think of stress
as impairing our ability to focus,
but that's actually not true.
When we are stressed, it involves the deployment,
the release of adrenaline, epinephrine,
and that adrenaline both changes our visual field.
In other words, it narrows our vision
to a more tunnel-like focus.
§03Transcript — part 3
That is, it makes the arrow in our metaphor of the arrow
more sharp, and it improves our concentration.
So the study that really shows quite definitively
that acute stress, meaning stress
that comes on fairly suddenly,
improves concentration performance.
It's a paper published in the journal
Experimental Psychology in 2020.
The title of the paper is, not surprisingly,
Acute Stress Improves Concentration Performance.
First author, DeGroot, D-E-G-R-O-O-T-E.
And this study involved taking a number of subjects
and stressing them out or not
prior to a cognitive or concentration task.
And there are a lot of data in this paper,
but I'm just going to home in on one specific set of data.
And I should mention as I go there
that they measured things like cortisol, a stress hormone,
they measured anxiety.
It was a quite thorough study.
And what they found was that concentration performance
improved many fold, I should say,
from there was a greater than doubling of concentration
and performance in the stress group.
And stress in this context was provided
using a standard way of inducing stress.
What they basically do is they bring subjects
into the laboratory and they have to do
a simulated job interview, an arithmetic task,
and they're being evaluated as they're doing this.
So this isn't intense psychosocial stress.
They're not watching anything disturbing.
They're not being traumatized in any kind of way.
This is fairly low levels of stress
that raise their levels of epinephrine,
and we know this from this study,
and their levels of cortisol, another stress hormone,
modestly within their brain and blood.
But that even modest increase in these stress hormones
and their reported psychological levels of stress
really enhance their focus and concentration.
Now, of course, there are other ways
to increase stress levels and to do that in healthy ways
to improve concentration and performance.
And one of the best ways to do that,
because it's so sure fire and it's generally safe,
provided you do it safely, is deliberate cold exposure.
This is something I've talked about on the podcast before,
but deliberate cold exposure can be achieved
by getting into a cold shower for one to five minutes.
We know that getting into cold water or under cold water
greatly increases epinephrine levels and dopamine levels.
There's a beautiful study that was published
in the European Journal of Physiology
that showed that the increases in dopamine are massive,
you know, near doubling or more of dopamine levels
that are very long lasting for hours.
And epinephrine, and in ways that support
not just immune system function because they do that
and mood because it does that,
but it can really improve concentration and focus.
This is not a biohack.
I don't like the word hack.
I know it's commonly used,
but a hack is something where you're using one thing
for a different purpose than it was originally intended for.
And here, I'm not referring to the shower
or the cold bath, I'm referring to epinephrine.
Epinephrine is a neurochemical
that will place your vision into more of a tunnel mode,
which will allow you to focus on cognitive work
or physical work in a more specific way.
You're not going to be as distractible.
And it's very easy to achieve
by getting into a cold shower or a cold body of water
for a brief period of time.
People always ask how long to get under or into cold water
and how cold to make it.
Here's the thing.
It should be uncomfortably cold,
but safe to stay in for one to five minutes.
Cold water exposure,
I should say deliberate cold water
or non-deliberate cold water exposure,
reliably increases epinephrine levels.
It is incredibly useful as a tool for this.
Some of you might think this is a little bit silly
as a tool for focus and concentration,
but if you look at the data on epinephrine
and how powerfully it can increase focus,
I think you'd be very impressed.
I mean, it certainly can increase one's ability
to attend to specific visual stimuli,
so for reading or math work, et cetera,
it's going to be very useful.
The point here is that a lot of people would love to,
and I think ought to leverage the health-promoting
and powerful effects of increasing epinephrine
on focusing concentration.
And running out and getting stressed by a life event
or getting into an argument or something like that
simply as a way to increase focus and concentration
doesn't seem that adaptive to me.
So deliberate cold exposure
is a straightforward way to do that.
It doesn't involve anyone else.
I suppose you could do it with somebody else,
but it doesn't require anyone else.
And again, there are zero, low,
and even negative cost ways to approach that.
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Now I'd like to discuss some of the purely behavioral tools
that quality peer-reviewed science say
can improve focus and concentration significantly.
At the beginning of today's episode,
I talked about the study from Dr. Wendy Suzuki's lab,
where they explored a 13-minute meditation
done every day for a period of eight weeks.
That meditation led to significant improvements
in focus and concentration ability,
as well as other aspects of cognitive performance.
It also improved mood and reduced stress.
So you might be wondering, what exactly is this meditation?
The meditation is very simple,
and it's one that anyone can perform.
What you would want to do is set a timer
for about 13 minutes.
I don't think it has to be exactly 13 minutes,
but since that's what they included in the study,
you would set a timer for 13 minutes,
you would sit or lie down, close your eyes,
and you would simply focus on your breathing.
Ideally, you would do just nasal breathing
for a period of 13 minutes,
concentrating on that breathing,
and concentrating, meaning bringing your awareness
to a point just about an inch inside of your forehead
while also concentrating on your breathing.
Now, here's the thing about meditation
that all studies of meditation show,
which is that unless you are a very experienced meditator,
your concentration, your focus will drift
away from your breathing and away from that location
about an inch inside your head, inside your brain.
That will happen maybe every 10 seconds, every 20 seconds,
maybe even every five seconds.
But an important part of such a meditation practice
to improve concentration and focus
is that you are continually refocusing
back to that specific location
and refocusing back on your breath.
This is something that, again, is not often discussed.
People think that if you do a meditation
and you're supposed to concentrate on your breath,
that if your mind drifts,
that somehow you failed in that meditation,
but actually that's not the case.
A huge component of improving your ability
to focus and concentrate by way of neuroplasticity,
rewiring of the circuits for focus and concentration
is the repeated return to a state of focus
from a state of non-focus or diminished focus.
So think about it like trying to drive down the freeway
and staying between the lane lines, excuse me.
And every once in a while,
because there's a bit of drift on the vehicle,
maybe the wheels aren't aligned correctly
or there's something else wrong with the chassis
or the steering device,
it starts to drift right a little bit.
§04Transcript — part 4
Then you hit the rumble strip to go,
and then you pull back to the center.
That's really what a focused meditation practice is about,
as opposed to expecting yourself
to stay between the mental lane lines, so to speak.
By doing that repeatedly over and over,
what you're really training up
is the network within your brain
that indeed includes that prefrontal cortex
that you're focusing on,
as well as some other structures,
the inferotemporal cortex,
indeed the hippocampus,
a structure associated with memory,
and other components of the neural circuit
that are involved in directing
our mental focus and concentration.
The point here isn't how long you focus
or somehow trying to achieve total focus
for the entire 13 minute or 17 minute
or 60 minute bout of meditation.
While that would be wonderful,
and I think many people aspire to do that,
that's a lot of hard mental work.
I think for most people out there, including myself,
a relatively short meditation practice
of about 13 minutes in which you fully expect
your focus and concentration to drift,
but that you are continually refocusing
is going to be the most effective.
Yes, indeed, the most effective at teaching yourself
to focus and stay concentrated.
In fact, I invite you to interpret every time
that you focus off that location
about one inch behind your forehead
as an opportunity to refocus
and think about the refocusing as the trigger
for teaching your neural circuits
how to focus for extended periods of time.
And as a bonus to that sort of meditation practice,
the study from Wendy Suzuki's lab also showed
that people experience improvements in sleep
and improvements in memory.
So not just improvements in mood and reduction in stress
and improvements in focus and concentration,
but all these other positive benefits
from just doing that 13 minute a day meditation practice.
It's one that I've started to adopt
and have felt tremendous benefit from,
and that I encourage many of you to try as well.
Now there's another set of behavioral tools
that can really help enhance one's ability to focus.
And those are visual-based tools.
In fact, the tools I'm about to describe
are actually being employed in a number of schools
in China and elsewhere in order to teach children
to focus better and for longer periods of time.
The key principle here is that much of our cognitive focus,
our ability to think about something
in a very specific way and stay focused on it to read
or to follow a line of conversation
or math or music, et cetera,
is going to be directed by our visual system.
That's also why they put blinders on horses.
That's also why sometimes wearing a hoodie or a hat
or limiting your visual field in some way
can help you enhance your cognitive focus.
It can help limit distraction.
You're just not seeing as much.
So what is a practice that has been studied
in various laboratories
and that's being employed in various schools
is to have children or adults visually focus
on one location for a given period of time.
How long?
Anywhere from 30 seconds to three minutes.
And believe it or not, three minutes is a long time
to maintain visual focus at one location.
If you were to try that right now,
you'd probably find it to be a bit of a strain,
but if you want to try it, you can.
Also keep in mind that the refocusing
is the key component of teaching yourself
or your brain how to focus better.
So if you're going to incorporate this practice,
what you would want to do is pick a location.
It could be on a wall.
It could be on your computer in front of you,
although I would encourage it
to not be the contents of your computer screen.
You might just want to blank your screen.
You might want to put a piece of paper
with a crosshatch there, any sort of visual target,
or you can imagine a visual target,
and then focus your visual attention on that target
and try to breathe normally, try and stay relaxed,
and certainly allow yourself to blink
so that your eyes don't dry out.
By focusing on that particular location
and by forcing yourself to refocus on that location,
anytime your gaze, your vision drifts from that location,
you are encouraging the circuits for focus
to get better at focusing for longer and longer
at refocusing when your focus drifts off of that location.
This practice is recruiting certain elements
of your so-called prefrontal cortex,
also the frontal eye fields,
which are locations not far from the prefrontal cortex
that are involved in deliberately directing your gaze
to particular locations in space.
Here's what I recommend.
Set yourself a low bar at first and set a timer
and try to focus on one location for 30 seconds,
and that's it for that day.
The next day you might add five seconds,
and then the next day, five seconds after that.
If you miss a day, no big deal.
Simply do the practice for the same amount of time
that you did the last time that you did the practice,
and then gradually try and increase the amount of time
that you can focus on one visual location overtly
by looking directly at that location.
So what I recommend is having a 30 second
to three minute period at the beginning of a bout of focus
where you're going to do work or physical work,
and anchoring your vision to one location,
somewhere in the room,
or if you want to do it covertly, you can do that.
Setting a timer and trying to do that
for anywhere from 30 seconds to three minutes.
What you're doing when you exercise that practice
is you are ramping up neural activity
within the neural circuits
that create focus and concentration.
And then I would move to the work that you're trying to do,
either mental work or physical work.
And if about halfway through your 90-minute bout
or at some point in your 90-minute bout of work or exercise,
you feel that your concentration is drifting,
rather than look at your phone
and scroll through the thousands of contexts
that exist within social media or your phone,
try just picking a location again on the wall,
focusing back on that location,
using that as a ramp up
to then direct your focus back towards
if your weight training sets and reps
that you might be performing,
if you're running, you might do this,
or cycling, you might do this
by focusing on a particular location
and really homing in on that location physically.
And this is a practice that a lot of athletes use, in fact.
And if you're, say, doing musical practice or math,
well, then you'd want to focus on something
other than the task that you're trying to perform.
But again, using visual focus as a way to ramp up
and increase your overall ability to focus and concentrate,
and then applying that to whatever it is
that you're trying to learn or perform.
I'd like to take a quick break
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Next, I'd like to talk about compounds
that can improve concentration and focus.
And these are most often consumed as supplements,
although some of them I should mention
can also be derived from food.
One of the key compounds that supports concentration
and focus because it generally supports mood,
concentration and focus and brain function in general
are the omega-3 essential fatty acids.
§05Transcript — part 5
And it's really clear that getting somewhere between one
and three grams of EPA essential fatty acid per day
can improve outcomes, that is can improve mood
and can improve cognitive function.
Again, in the context of focus and concentration,
It's in modulating the neural circuits and brain function
that are going to support focus and concentration.
It's not as if taking one to three grams
of EPA essential fatty acids per day
is going to tap directly into only the circuits
for focus and concentration.
The other thing that can positively modulate brain function
and that actually works as a fuel for neurons to function
and can improve cognitive performance
in particular within the brain circuits,
such as the prefrontal cortex
that are involved in concentration and focus is creatine.
I know many people are familiar with creatine monohydrate
for its effects on muscle growth
and strength and performance,
but it's quite clear that the bulk of scientific studies
have examined the role of creatine in the clinical context
and as its role in improving cognitive performance.
So my read of the literature has led to a practice
in which I ingest five grams per day
of creatine monohydrate,
the sort of standard form that's available,
really isn't geared towards muscle growth
or strength or performance,
as much as geared toward tapping
into the creatine phosphate system within the brain,
and specifically the benefits of creatine
for prefrontal cortical networks.
Again, modulating, not directly mediating,
but modulating and generally supporting
the brain networks that are going to allow me
to generate focus and concentration.
Now, in terms of compounds
that more specifically mediate concentration and focus,
we have to go back to that arrow metaphor model
that we talked about at the beginning of the episode,
that included epinephrine, adrenaline, acetylcholine,
which acts as this attentional spotlight.
In fact, acetylcholine and elevated levels
of acetylcholine have been shown over and over again
to improve or even directly gate neuroplasticity
by increasing focus directly.
As I mentioned earlier, there are a number of different foods
which contain choline.
You can look those up online.
Choline acting as an amino acid precursor to acetylcholine,
but of course there are compounds,
there are supplements that can further
and more acutely increase acetylcholine.
And indeed, I use these myself.
The most effective one I've found is alpha-GPC.
Alpha-GPC consumed at dosages of 300 milligrams
to 600 milligrams prior to a work bout
or prior to a workout,
greatly increase one's ability to focus and concentrate.
At least that's been my experience.
And there are some good data in humans.
Now, a number of people have contacted me
about a recent study suggesting that alpha-GPC,
when taken chronically over many years
could increase one's vulnerability to stroke.
I've looked at those data,
and my read of the data is that they're not very conclusive,
although anytime you see something like that,
you obviously want to be concerned.
And it seems to be related to increases in TMAO,
which is a marker related to the cardiovascular system,
and one known way to offset increases in TMAO
that are associated either with alpha-GPC
or increases due to other things,
so ingestion of particular food compounds
actually can increase TMAO,
is to offset that by taking 600 milligrams of garlic.
Now, I've been taking Alpha-GPC pretty consistently
for a number of years.
I do not take it every day.
I would say I take it about four days per week,
again, prior to workouts or bouts of cognitive work.
I have not seen my TMAO spike,
and I've evaluated that by way of blood tests,
But based on this recent study and the concerns about TMAO,
I make it a point to always ingest
a 600 milligram capsule of garlic anytime I take alpha GPC,
which again, for me is about four days per week.
So if one wants to increase the amount
of dopamine transmission in the brain and body
for sake of increasing concentration and focus,
one of the most efficient ways to do that
is by ingestion of the amino acid L-tyrosine.
I use L-tyrosine in capsule form.
I will take 500 milligrams of L-tyrosine,
300 milligrams of alpha-GPC, and a cup of coffee.
Do this early in the day before a workout
or before a bout of concentrated mental work.
I don't want to give the impression
that I combine every tool that I've talked about today
for a given work bout.
That, to me, seems like a very inefficient way
to go about life.
In fact, I make it a point to try and use tools
to increase my ability to concentrate and focus,
but not to combine more than two or three of them
at any one time.
Other days, I confess, I've slept very well
or my enthusiasm about what I'm about to work on
is such that I don't require any of these tools.
Again, there's no requirement.
There's no pressure to use any of these tools,
behavioral supplement based or otherwise.
It's simply a matter of using the tools
that are going to allow you to achieve the states
you want to achieve and to improve your ability
to go into those states without any help at all.
I prefer to look at supplements of the sort
that I just described as a route
into a deeper trench of focus and concentration
that I use as a tool to teach myself
to focus and concentrate more deeply
such that I don't need those tools every single time
I try and focus and concentrate.
I think this is an important point
because I think that many people think of supplements
as a crutch or a way of simply getting into a state
for which no other tool will suffice or replace.
But in that context, I want to remind you
of the larger context of pharmacology,
which is the vast landscape of prescription pharmacology
for ADHD, for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.
Now, I covered that landscape in intense detail
on the episode on ADHD and focus.
And just to summarize, there is, of course,
Adderall, Ritalin, Vyvanse, Modafinil, R-Modafinil,
a number of different compounds,
all of which generally increase dopamine transmission
in the brain, so increasing dopamine,
and all of which generally increase epinephrine,
adrenaline transmission in the brain and body.
And many of those compounds have been of tremendous benefit
to children and even some adults who suffer from ADHD.
So properly prescribed at the appropriate dosage,
those compounds can really help people
with clinically diagnosed ADHD.
The way they help those people is a bit surprising.
However, you might think, well,
they turn on the brain chemicals that allow those people
to concentrate and focus.
That's true, but they also have the benefit
of teaching those brain circuits how to engage.
And that's one of the reasons why,
somewhat paradoxically, giving a stimulant
like Ritalin or Adderall to a kid
that legitimately needs it.
Obviously, you don't want to do this
without the oversight and careful evaluation
of a psychiatrist,
but giving that to a kid who has severe ADHD,
you would think would make them more rambunctious,
less able to focus and more distractible overall.
After all, Ritalin, Modafinil, R-Modafinil,
all these things are stimulants.
So you take a kid who has attention deficit
hyperactivity disorder and give them these drugs
that increase transmission of dopamine and epinephrine,
and you think, wow, it's going to make them
even more distractible and hyperactive.
And indeed it has the opposite effect.
It doesn't necessarily make them feel calm,
but it makes them feel that they can focus.
They really can anchor their attention.
And the idea is that it's teaching those neural circuits,
or those neural circuits rather are teaching themselves
to engage and to focus and concentrate.
And the ideal situation is one in which
the total dosage of those compounds,
those drugs can be reduced over time
as those circuits learn to come online
through purely behavioral tools.
but I strongly discourage the use of powerful prescription
drugs that have not been prescribed to you.
First of all, it's illegal.
Second of all, it's quite dangerous to hit the accelerator
of those neural circuits with such vigor
because it can increase dependency
and they can have a number of other side effects
outside the context of clinically diagnosed
and prescribed ADHD medication.
I always believe that behavioral tools should come first,
then focus on nutrition.
In fact, I would say behavioral and nutrition tools,
and of course, get excellent sleep.
Then focus on supplementation.
And then, and only if those are failing
to bring your brain and body to the state you need to be in
to perform well in school and work and life, et cetera,
do I recommend that people lean on prescription drugs.
§06Transcript — part 6
So today we've talked about a number of different tools
and to some extent, some mechanisms
involved in concentration and focus.
And really the goal has been to provide you
an understanding of the neurochemical systems
and a little bit about the neural circuits
that can allow you to achieve states
of attention and focus.
My hope in giving you all this information
in one single location is that you will be able to pick
and choose which of these protocols
you would like to incorporate into your attempts
to improve your focus and concentration.
Once again, the goal is to teach your brain,
that is, to increase neuroplasticity
in the neural circuits that allow you not just to focus,
but to refocus your attention.
And I'd be remiss if I didn't mention
that it's also critical to be able to defocus.
I highly encourage people to take a period of time each day
to daydream, to walk down the hall
without looking at your phone,
to not have to incorporate more sensory information,
to not place increasing demands on yourself to focus,
and see and realize how having a period
of deliberate decompression and defocusing
can allow your brain to focus so much better
when you do decide to return to a bout
of focused, concentrated work or physical work.
So thank you once again for joining me
for today's discussion, all about the mechanisms
and especially the tools for enhancing concentration
and focus.
And last but certainly not least,
thank you for your interest in science.