back to indexOptimizing Workspace for Productivity, Focus, & Creativity | Huberman Lab Podcast #57
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Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast,
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where we discuss science and science-based tools
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for everyday life.
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I'm Andrew Huberman,
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and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology
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at Stanford School of Medicine.
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Today, we're going to talk all about
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how to optimize your workspace for maximum productivity.
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Indeed, that means to heighten levels of focus,
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to increase levels of creativity,
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to improve your ability to task switch.
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And this could be for say, go school or for work,
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creative endeavors, personal endeavors.
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This really extends to everybody.
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Most often when we hear about how to focus
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or how to get the most out of our work sessions,
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we hear about the biology and the psychology of that.
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We hear about dopamine and we hear about serotonin
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and we hear about caffeine.
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And indeed, those are topics that I've covered a lot
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on the Huberman Lab Podcast.
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Today, we will touch on each of those,
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but we are mainly going to focus on
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how we arrange our physical environment
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and indeed how we arrange ourselves
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in that physical environment
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in order to bring out the best in our neurobiology.
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That is how to put ourselves into a heightened state
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of focus by virtue of things
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as simple as where we place our screen relative to our eyes
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at a given time of day.
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Believe it or not, there's excellent research on this
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and there's excellent research, for instance,
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on whether or not you should or should not listen to music,
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whether or not you should use things like binaural beats,
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and if so, what frequency of binaural beats.
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We are going to cover all of that.
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And by the end, you will have a checklist of things
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that you can do to optimize your workspace on any budget.
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I will mention various products and apps
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that some of you might find useful
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for optimizing your workspace,
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but I want to emphasize at the outset
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that none of those that I mentioned
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are any products or apps
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that we have a financial relationship to.
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And more importantly, you don't need them.
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I'm going to explain how for zero cost,
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you can arrange your workspace in ways
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that makes you maximally productive, maximally focused,
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and allows you to adapt your workspace
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to different environments, whether or not you're traveling,
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working with others, working alone, et cetera.
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Just to give you a little hint of where we are going,
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I will mention a zero cost app
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that will deliver binaural beats at a particular frequency
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that peer-reviewed research has shown
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can enhance certain types of learning and memory.
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However, peer-reviewed research also shows
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that it can diminish performance in other types of tasks.
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So stay tuned, we'll go into all the details
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so that you can optimize your workspace
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for zero cost and get the most out
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of your efforts and endeavors.
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Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize
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that this podcast is separate
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from my teaching and research roles at Stanford.
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It is, however, part of my desire and effort
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to bring zero cost to consumer information about science
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and science-related tools to the general public.
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In keeping with that theme,
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I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast.
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Our first sponsor is Element.
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Element is an electrolyte drink
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that has everything you need
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and none of the things you don't.
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And when we say everything you need,
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the main one is salt.
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Now, salt, AKA sodium, has kind of a bad rap.
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We've all heard that too much salt is bad for us.
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However, if you look into the research on salt,
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and in fact, if you go to one of the highest-level
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peer-reviewed scientific publications, Science Magazine,
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you can find a review article in Science some years ago
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that shows that most of what we think and understand
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about the science of salt is completely wrong.
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And in fact, salt does a number of things
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that's extremely important.
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For instance, our neurons,
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which signal to one another through electricity
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and through chemical signaling,
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critically rely on having enough sodium
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in order to generate what we call action potentials
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or electrical firing of neurons.
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If your sodium levels are too low,
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your neurons simply won't work.
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One of the main deficits from being dehydrated
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is lack of sodium, not just lack of water.
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Getting sufficient sodium does a number of things
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that's very important.
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It can raise your blood volume.
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It can help you retain water in a healthy way,
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not excess amounts.
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It allows neurons to fire for sake of thinking,
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for sake of athletic performance, and so on.
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Other electrolytes that are in Element
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are things like magnesium and potassium,
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which are also essential for neuronal function
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and indeed all organ function.
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Element has a lot of salt, some magnesium,
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and some potassium.
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So unless you're somebody
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who really has chronic hypertension,
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elevating your level of salt intake can often be beneficial.
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You should check with your doctor,
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but indeed it can often be beneficial.
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Element contains a science-backed electrolyte ratio
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of 1000 milligrams, that's one gram of sodium,
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200 milligrams of potassium,
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and 60 milligrams of magnesium.
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It tastes delicious.
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I happen to like the raspberry or citrus flavors.
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In fact, I like all of the flavors.
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Put in some water.
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You can make it as dense,
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meaning as high concentration as you like.
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So some people will put it in eight ounces of water.
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I like mine in about 16 ounces of water
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and I'll drink that before and after exercise.
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And I usually will have another one throughout the day,
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just sip on it as I'm doing work and so forth.
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If you'd like to try Element,
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you can go to drinkelement.com slash Huberman,
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spelled drinklmnt.com slash Huberman
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to claim a free Element sample pack.
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You only cover the cost of shipping.
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Again, that's drink element, drinklmnt.com slash Huberman
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to claim a free sample pack.
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Today's episode is also brought to us by Athletic Greens,
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now referred to as AG1.
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I started taking AG1 way back in 2012.
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And so I'm delighted that they're sponsoring the podcast.
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The reason I started taking AG1
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and the reason I still take AG1 once or twice a day
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is that it helps me meet all of my foundational
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vitamin, mineral and probiotic needs.
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And when people ask me,
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what's the one supplement I should take?
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If they were to only take one supplement,
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I always recommend AG1 for the simple reason that vitamins,
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the minerals and the probiotics support metabolic health,
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they support endocrine health, they support brain health
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and the probiotics and prebiotics in there in particular
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support the so-called gut brain axis.
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There is now a plethora of data supporting the fact
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that when we have a healthy gut microbiome,
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that is little microbes that live in our gut
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that are good for us, our gut signals to our brain
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and our brain signals back to our gut
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in ways that support our immune system,
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our digestion, even our mood.
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They can even support healthy levels of dopamine signaling,
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an important molecule for motivation
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and high levels of mood or positive mood.
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If you'd like to try Athletic Greens,
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you can go to athleticgreens.com slash Huberman
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to claim a special offer.
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They'll give you five free travel packs
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plus a year supply of vitamin D3K2.
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Vitamin D3K2 has been shown to be important
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and K2 in particular for heart health
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and regulating appropriate amounts of calcium in your bones.
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Again, go to athleticgreens.com slash Huberman
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to claim the special offer.
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Today's episode is also brought to us by Theragun.
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Theragun is a handheld percussive device
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that releases deep muscle tension.
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I was first introduced to Theragun on a shark diving trip,
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we were way out in the Pacific filming great white sharks
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for my laboratory where we study fear.
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And everyone was diving all day
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carrying what are called pelican cases,
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which aren't actual pelicans with wings,
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but cases for these cameras, they're very heavy.
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We're moving things all day, we're working really hard.
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We got really sore.
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I got particularly sore from all that physical labor.
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Someone brought a Theragun along,
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I'd never seen one of these things before or tried one.
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And I spent the rest of the trip
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trying to get as much time with the Theragun as I could,
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at least when I was on board the boat.
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With Theragun, you can get what is effectively
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If you have someone else there who's willing to use
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from working out, an injury,
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there's really no substitute for the Theragun.
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You know, professional massage is wonderful,
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It's quite expensive often, et cetera.
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If you're interested in getting a Theragun,
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they start at only $199.
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You have a 30 day money back guarantee.
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That's theragun.com slash Huberman.
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Let's talk about workspace optimization.
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This is a topic that's intrigued me for a very long time
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because my undergraduate advisor, my graduate advisor,
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and my postdoc advisor had many things in common,
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including being great scientists,
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being kind people and terrific mentors,
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but they had another thing in common
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which always perplexed me,
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which is that their offices were a complete disaster.
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They had mountains of books, mountains of papers,
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mountains of all sorts of stuff,
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and yet all of them were extremely productive
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and could remain extremely focused
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in that incredibly cluttered environment.
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Now I'm somebody who doesn't like clutter.
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I find it very hard to focus in cluttered environments.
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And indeed there's tremendous variation among people
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as to whether or not they can remain focused
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or whether or not they struggle to focus
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in physically cluttered environments.
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There's no right or wrong to this,
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but the question we should ask ourselves is
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why were they all able to be so focused?
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And it turns out that the reason
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they were able to be so focused
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is that they all captured one single
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and yet fundamental variable of workspace optimization.
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And we'll talk about what that variable is.
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In fact, we're going to talk about
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what all the variables of optimizing a workspace are.
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Things like vision, things like light,
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things like noise in the room,
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whether or not you listen to music or not,
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whether or not you use noise canceling headphones or not.
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We're going to talk about all of that.
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And we're going to do that in a way
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that you can optimize your workspace
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regardless of whether or not you are at home,
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whether or not you're on the road, et cetera.
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Because the last thing I would ever want to do
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is to create a situation
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where you find the optimal workspace
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and then you are a slave to that optimal workspace.
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That's just not the way the world works.
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What you want to do, or my goal for you rather,
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is that you will have a short checklist of things
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that you can look to anytime you sit down to do work.
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And you can think about the underlying variables
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that impact your brain and your body
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and allow your brain and body to get into the optimal state
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in order to learn, in order to be productive,
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and the need to move through your work bouts
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in a very relaxed and pleasureful way
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while maintaining focus
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and while pursuing any of the number of things
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that you're doing.
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The first variable we want to think about
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in terms of workspace optimization is vision and light.
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Now, on a previous episode of the Huberman Lab Podcast
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devoted all to habits,
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I talked about the importance of dividing your 24-hour day
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into three different phases.
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And for those of you that haven't heard that episode,
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I'm just going to briefly summarize what I described.
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From the time you wake up in the morning
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until about six or seven or eight,
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sometimes nine hours later,
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your brain is in a unique state.
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It is in a state of high levels of dopamine,
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a neuromodulator, and high levels of epinephrine,
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as well as hormones like cortisol and so forth.
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Without going into the biology of those things,
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they set your brain into a state of high alertness.
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And this is true whether or not
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you indulge in caffeine or not.
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I know some of you say,
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oh, I really don't wake up until the afternoon.
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I'm much more alert and focused in the afternoon.
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We will talk about that phase of the 24-hour day
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But that early part of the day is a time of day
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in which for sake of workspace optimization,
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being in a brightly lit environment
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can lend itself to optimal work throughout the day,
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not just during that early phase.
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And so while on many episodes of this podcast,
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I've also emphasized the importance
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of getting morning sunlight in your eyes
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within 30 to 60 minutes of waking.
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Not as often, but now and again,
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I will also mention that it's important
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to light your daytime environment
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as brightly as you safely can.
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So if you are going to be doing work in this early,
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what I call phase one portion of your day,
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you want to have as much light
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and indeed as much overhead light
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shining on you as safely possible.
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Now, of course, you don't want it so bright
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that it's glaring and you have to squint, et cetera,
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but you want as much light as is safely possible.
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And you can do that a couple of simple ways.
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One is if you do own,
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or you're in an environment where you have overhead lights,
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turn on those overhead lights.
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What's special about overhead lights for setting alertness
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is that the neurons in our eyes,
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which are called melanopsin ganglion cells,
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that's the fancy name,
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melanopsin ganglion cells are mainly enriched
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in the lower half of our retinas, in our eyes,
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and view the upper visual field.
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Those neurons send little wires
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to an area of our hypothalamus
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right above the roof of our mouth
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that creates a state of alertness.
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Now, early in the day, we want to be as alert as possible.
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And this phase one of our circadian cycle
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is when we are best at doing analytic detail type work.
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So we're going to go into other aspects
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of workspace optimization that are important for phase one.
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But during phase one, again,
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within zero to about eight or nine hours after waking,
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bright lights in your environment,
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in particular overhead lights,
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are going to facilitate focus.
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They're going to facilitate further release
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of things like dopamine and norepinephrine
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and healthy amounts of cortisol.
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And we want that to happen early in the day
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for a variety of reasons.
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For instance, we don't want that cortisol peak
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to happen too late in the day.
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That's actually associated with depression and insomnia
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and a number of things that we just don't want.
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So one of the things that I've done for my workspace
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is to make sure that when I wake up in the morning,
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I do go get my sunlight.
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If the sun isn't out,
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I turn on as many bright artificial lights
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as I can manage or tolerate,
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and then I go get my sunlight exposure.
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But once I set out to do some work
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that all the overhead lights in that room are on,
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as well as lights in front of me.
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And that's, again, to stimulate heightened levels of focus
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and further release of these neuromodulators
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that I mentioned before,
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dopamine, norepinephrine, and epinephrine.
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Now, the way that one could do that
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could be a very low cost way of having, for instance,
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a desk lamp and those overhead lights.
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If you're somebody that wants to take this
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to the next level, you can purchase a ring light,
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which is, I think those are mainly made
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for people doing selfie-type videos,
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for Instagram posts and things of that sort.
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Ring lights can be pretty cost-effective,
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and yet they're very bright,
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and they have the sort of bright blue light
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that is going to optimally stimulate
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those melanopsin ganglion cells.
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So some people I know will have a blue light
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or a bright LED on their desk in front of them.
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And indeed, I have one of these.
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I don't use a ring light.
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I use a light pad.
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The particular light pad I use, I bought on Amazon.
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I can mention the brand,
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but again, I have no financial affiliation to them.
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This is the Artograph light pad.
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It's designed for drawing,
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and it says on it, 930 lux.
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Lux is just a measure of brightness.
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So I placed that on the desk in front of me,
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and I turn it on essentially
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throughout this phase one of the day.
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Even if I walk away from the desk, I tend to keep it on.
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It doesn't consume that much energy.
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And in that way, I'm constantly being bombarded with photons
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that keep my levels of alertness up,
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because the early part of the day
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is when I do the majority of that focused work.
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Again, you don't need the light pad.
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You can use a ring light,
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or you can simply use any kind of other lights
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that you might happen to have, artificial lights.
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For those of you that can place your desk near a window,
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and even better to open the window,
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that would be really fantastic.
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I don't have access to that.
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Why would I say open the window?
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Well, it turns out that sunlight
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is going to be the best stimulus
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for waking up your brain and body
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through this melanopsin to hypothalamus system.
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And by looking at sunlight through a window,
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it's 50, five, zero times less effective
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than if that window were to be open,
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mostly because those windows filter out
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a lot of the wavelengths of blue light
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that are essential for stimulating the eyes
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and this wake-up signal.
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So all of this rests on the premise
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that we need to be alert in order to do our work,
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in particular, focused work.
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And I've talked about before in the habits episode,
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and I'm saying again now, that first phase of the day,
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that first seven or eight or nine hours of the day
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is really the time in which our neurochemistry
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is primed for getting the most amount of focused,
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kind of challenging work done
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where a lot of precision and detail is required.
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So you want to brightly light your work environment
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during that first phase.
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Again, from the time you wake up, try and get sunlight,
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but then even if you're going to get exercise
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or do other things,
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you want to get as much bright light in your eyes
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as you safely can,
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and then you want to light your work environment.
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Now in the afternoon, starting at about nine
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and continuing until about 16 hours after waking,
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you want to start dimming the lights in that environment.
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Now you don't want to make it dark
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because you don't want to get sleepy
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at two o'clock in the afternoon
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unless you're going to take a brief nap,
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which I do and is perfectly fine
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as long as it doesn't interfere with your nighttime sleep.
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But the idea is that in this so-called phase two
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of the 24 hour cycle,
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from about nine to 16 hours after waking,
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you want to bring the level of lights down a bit.
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And when I say down, I literally mean down.
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Having lights that are in front of you is fine,
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but overhead lights at that time are not going to be optimal
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for the sorts of neurochemical states
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that your brain wants to be in.
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The states that I'm referring to are a shift
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from the dopamine and norepinephrine
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that's highest early in the day
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to increases in things like serotonin
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and other neuromodulators that put your brain
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into a state that's better for creative endeavors
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or for more abstract thinking.
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Now, as we'll soon see,
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there are other things you can do
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to improve creative thinking and abstract thinking.
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And in fact, there are things you can do
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to improve analytic thinking.
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We will talk about those,
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things that are distinct from light,
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but right now we're just focusing on light.
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So what I recommend doing and what I personally do
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is I will turn off overhead lights in the afternoon.
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It's not completely dim, it's not completely dark,
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but I will start to reduce the amount of overhead light
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and just simply keep the light pad on
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and whatever other lamps I happen to be using.
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Now, one thing we haven't talked about is screen brightness.
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This is highly individual.
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People have different retinal sensitivities.
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What I mean by that is everybody differs
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in terms of how bright they can tolerate
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their visual environment and their screen.
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And whether or not you are sensitive to light or not
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will depend on a lot of factors.
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Some of it is eye color.
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Indeed, people with darker color eyes
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generally can tolerate more bright light than others.
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I have green eyes.
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I am very, very sensitive to light.
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If I'm outdoors at a cafe or something
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and the table has any kind of reflective properties
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and it's a sunny day,
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I can barely see the person across the table from me
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unless I'm wearing sunglasses.
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Some people, other members of my family, for instance,
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have dark brown eyes and can just sit there
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and have a conversation without the need
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for sunglasses at all.
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So there's tremendous variation there.
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One or the other isn't healthy or advantageous necessarily.
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Just understand that you never want to be in an environment
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where it's painful to maintain looking at whatever it is
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that you're looking at.
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If something's painful to look at,
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it could be damaging to your eyes.
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So you do want to protect your eyes.
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Now, in this second phase of the day,
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since most of us are working indoors,
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but even if you're working outdoors,
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you want to try and get the amount of light
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reduced overall, but in particular that overhead light.
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And you also want to start reducing the amount of blue light
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that you're being exposed to.
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So somewhere around four or 5 p.m.,
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which for me is about 12 hours after I've been awake
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or 14 hours after I've been awake,
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I will turn off that light pad
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and start to transition the lights in my environment
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to more yellows and reds.
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Now, I can't always do this.
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I have friends that actually have converted
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their entire homes from blue light early in the day
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to red light late in the day.
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That's really cool and fantastic.
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I haven't done that.
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It's, you know, there's a cost to doing that,
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and it is optimal in terms of optimizing productivity
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and sleep and so forth,
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but it's not feasible for a lot of people.
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But what I do is I simply switch to using yellow lamps.
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I will turn off that LED in the later afternoon,
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again, around four or 5 p.m.,
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and I tend to wake up around 6 a.m. or so.
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I'll turn those off.
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And what I'll try and do also
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is I'll try and dim the screen that I'm working on
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so that I can still manage to see everything
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that I need to see, but it's quite a bit dimmer
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than it was early in the day.
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So that's phase two of the day,
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and that's how we want to think about light.
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And then I'll just mention,
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because I know there are people
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who are working in the middle of the night,
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there's phase three,
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which is about 17 to 24 hours after waking.
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And I realized that for shift workers
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or for people that are pulling all-nighters
link |
or for students, oftentimes you need to be awake
link |
and studying in the middle of the night.
link |
I myself am somebody who for years would pull
link |
anywhere from five to 10 all-nighters per year.
link |
I still pull an all-nighter now and again
link |
because of deadlines and so forth.
link |
I don't recommend it.
link |
If you can avoid it, great,
link |
but many people just simply have to do this
link |
for sake of shift work or because of impending deadlines
link |
or procrastination or all of the above.
link |
If you are going to be doing work
link |
in that third phase of your circadian cycle,
link |
you really want to limit the amount of bright light
link |
that you're getting in your eyes
link |
to just the amount that allows you
link |
to do the work that you're doing.
link |
Because if you get light in your eyes
link |
that's any brighter than that,
link |
you're going to severely deplete your melatonin levels.
link |
You're going to severely shift your circadian clock
link |
and it's effectively like traveling to another time zone.
link |
So if you stay up from 3 a.m. until 6 a.m.
link |
or 2 a.m. until 4 a.m. working on a term paper
link |
or something of that sort
link |
and you're getting bright light in your eyes,
link |
you are effectively flying six hours
link |
to a different time zone
link |
or at least that's what your body registers it as.
link |
And it can really throw your sleep and your metabolism
link |
and a number of other things out of whack.
link |
Now there's an exception to this,
link |
which is if you really want to be awake,
link |
it can often be beneficial
link |
to flipping on all the lights in the room
link |
and keeping them really bright.
link |
One of the hardest things to do
link |
is to stay up all night studying
link |
when you're in a dim environment.
link |
So you have to determine the trade-off
link |
between whether or not you want to shift your clock
link |
or whether or not you want to get the work done.
link |
And I would say the ideal situation is to sleep at night
link |
and to do your work during the day and in the afternoon.
link |
But if you do have to be awake in the middle of the night,
link |
do understand that you want to dim those lights overall.
link |
You would not want to use that LED.
link |
You would not want to have overhead lights on
link |
unless you're really struggling to stay awake,
link |
in which case you want to get
link |
as many bright lights on as possible.
link |
So there are a couple of tricks to all-nighters.
link |
I don't really want people pulling all-nighters
link |
unless they have to,
link |
but there are a few things that you can do
link |
without taking stimulants in order to stay up all night
link |
that can be beneficial that maximize on your biology.
link |
One of them that's a little less commonly known
link |
is you can drink 32 ounces of water
link |
and commit to not going to the bathroom for 90 minutes
link |
It turns out that there's a circuit
link |
that goes from your bladder,
link |
literally neurons that go from your bladder
link |
to your brainstem.
link |
And when you have to urinate, it makes you very alert,
link |
as many of you have probably experienced.
link |
This is actually what wakes us up
link |
in the middle of the night
link |
when we have to use the bathroom
link |
is this circuit for alertness that goes from full bladder.
link |
It's signaled by the bladder being full to the brainstem.
link |
And this is the circuit that is disrupted
link |
in kids that have bedwetting issues.
link |
And there are a number of cognitive behavioral approaches
link |
Sometimes bedwetting in very young kids
link |
is because the circuit hasn't developed yet.
link |
Most adults, fortunately, are not bedwetting,
link |
but you can increase the amount of alertness in your system
link |
and remain awake in the middle of the night
link |
by drinking a little bit more water than you normally would
link |
and then refraining from going to the restroom.
link |
That certainly will lend itself to alertness.
link |
You know how difficult it is to fall asleep
link |
when you have to use the restroom, for instance.
link |
So that's one tool.
link |
The other thing is, again,
link |
to flip on as many bright lights
link |
in the environment as possible.
link |
And then, of course, people will rely on stimulants
link |
like caffeine or even more aggressive stimulants.
link |
That's not something I necessarily recommend.
link |
You'll each have to determine that for you.
link |
But if you do, in fact, have to use all nighters
link |
for any reason, you can maximize this bladder
link |
to brain approach and the bright light approach.
link |
Okay, so that more or less covers how bright
link |
to keep your overall environment
link |
and how bright to keep your screen.
link |
If you really want to get nerdy about this,
link |
there is a free app called Light Meter
link |
where you can start measuring how many lux,
link |
how many photons are in a given environment.
link |
It's actually measuring reflectance of photons and so on.
link |
Maybe you can look up what a lux meter does if you like.
link |
I don't necessarily recommend doing that.
link |
I don't want to set a critical threshold by which,
link |
for instance, we say once your environment
link |
is more than 1500 lux, then it's too bright
link |
or not bright enough, et cetera.
link |
Everyone has different retinal sensitivities.
link |
Everyone will find that different levels of brightness
link |
will cause them to be alert.
link |
Different levels of dimness, if you will, in the room
link |
will cause them to feel sleepy.
link |
You really want to just modulate across the 24 hour cycle
link |
where it's very bright.
link |
As bright as it safely can be early in the day
link |
so that you are alert,
link |
you can do your focus detailed work in that first phase.
link |
And then in the afternoon,
link |
as you move into more creative type works
link |
or abstract thinking or working with other people
link |
in kind of a brainstorming mode
link |
that you would shift to dimmer lights, yellow lights,
link |
eliminate the blue lights as much as possible.
link |
Now that's light, but there's another aspect of vision
link |
that has been shown to be critically important
link |
for how alert we are going to be
link |
and how well we can maintain that alertness.
link |
And that has to do with where our visual focus is
link |
in a given environment.
link |
So I'm not talking about overall brightness.
link |
What I'm referring to now is simply
link |
where you place your phone or your tablet
link |
or computer screen or book,
link |
whatever it is that you happen to be looking at.
link |
There's a very underappreciated
link |
and yet incredible aspect of our neurology
link |
that has to do with the relationship
link |
between where we look and our level of alertness.
link |
And it works in a very logical way.
link |
We have clusters of neurons in our brainstem
link |
and those clusters of neurons control our eyelid muscles
link |
and they control our eye movements up and down
link |
And indeed, if you were to look at an eyeball,
link |
I've looked at a lot of eyeballs in my lab
link |
and I teach neuroanatomy, so we do this from time to time,
link |
we would see that there are six muscles
link |
attached to your eyeball.
link |
Now, four of them are located at the top, the bottom,
link |
and the two sides of your eyeball,
link |
sort of at the 12 o'clock, six o'clock, three o'clock,
link |
and nine o'clock of your eyeball.
link |
And those muscles can move your eye in the socket
link |
from side to side and up and down.
link |
And then we also have some muscles
link |
that can actually pull the eyeballs at angles, okay?
link |
So we have different muscles that can move the eyes
link |
at different angles as well.
link |
And that's why we can look up into the side
link |
or down into the side,
link |
not just from side to side or up or down.
link |
Now, the neurons that control those muscles
link |
have a very interesting feature,
link |
which is that when we are looking down toward the ground
link |
or anywhere below basically the central region of our face,
link |
the neurons that control that eye movement
link |
are intimately related to areas of the brainstem
link |
that release certain types of neuromodulators
link |
and neurotransmitters.
link |
And they activate areas of the brain
link |
that are associated with calm
link |
and indeed even with sleepiness.
link |
And there's an active inhibition
link |
or prevention of neurons that increase alertness.
link |
Now, the opposite is also true.
link |
We have neurons that place our eyes into an upward gaze
link |
above the sort of level of our nose
link |
and up above our forehead,
link |
literally looking up while keeping the head stationary.
link |
Or if you tilt your head back and you look up,
link |
these neurons are still active.
link |
Those neurons don't just control the position of the eyes
link |
and cause them to move up.
link |
They also trigger the activation of brain circuits
link |
that are associated with alertness.
link |
Now, this is a fundamental feature
link |
of the way that our eyes and brain are wired together
link |
and how they relate to what we call autonomic arousal.
link |
And there are a bunch of details there.
link |
We will actually have a guest in a few weeks
link |
who has learned to exploit these neurons
link |
and the fact that they control these different states
link |
of calm or alertness in order to generate hypnotic states,
link |
to place people into very atypical states
link |
in which they are both very alert and very calm.
link |
Save that for a future episode.
link |
But the important thing to understand
link |
is when you are looking down below the level of your nose,
link |
you are essentially decelerating your alertness.
link |
You're reducing your amount of alertness.
link |
It might be subtle, but it's happening.
link |
Whereas when you look straight ahead
link |
or in particular when you look up,
link |
you're increasing your level of alertness.
link |
Now, this has some obvious implications.
link |
When we get sleepy, our eyelids tend to close
link |
and we tend to nod down.
link |
When we're wide awake, we tend to be wide-eyed.
link |
We don't tend to blink as often.
link |
And we tend to be chin up
link |
and kind of on vigilance and alertness.
link |
So this has a evolutionary
link |
or at least an adaptive component to it.
link |
This can be exploited and indeed it's been researched
link |
in terms of how it can be used
link |
to optimize work environments.
link |
Contrary to what most people do,
link |
which is to look down at their laptop, tablet, or phone,
link |
if you want to be alert
link |
and you want to maintain the maximum amount of focus
link |
for whatever it is that you're reading or doing,
link |
you want that screen or whatever it is
link |
that you're looking at to at least be at eye level
link |
and ideally slightly above it.
link |
Now, I haven't seen many workspaces
link |
that take advantage of this
link |
very hardwired neurobiological fact.
link |
So what should you do with this information?
link |
Well, if you're somebody who sits down to do work
link |
and starts to feel sleepy or simply unfocused,
link |
unable to attend to whatever it is that you're doing,
link |
I highly recommend that you take your laptop or tablet.
link |
I do hope that most people aren't doing serious work
link |
on their phones because it's such a small visual window
link |
and we can talk about why that's an issue later.
link |
And the idea would be to place that screen of your tablet
link |
or your laptop or other computer
link |
and try and get it elevated at least to nose level,
link |
your nose level, or even higher.
link |
I realize that can be complicated to do.
link |
I've long just used a stack of books
link |
or I'll sometimes take a box and turn it upside down
link |
I do use a mixed standing seated desk.
link |
I'll talk about that in a few minutes.
link |
There are a number of different ways that you could do this.
link |
You could wall mount a monitor.
link |
I think many people are working with laptops.
link |
It's a little bit harder to do that with a laptop.
link |
Some people though will configure a second screen.
link |
You have to decide what's right for you and your budget.
link |
But again, in addition to having a brightly lit room
link |
to be able to focus and attend
link |
to whatever it is you're working on,
link |
you want to have that screen position
link |
high in your visual environment.
link |
Now you wouldn't want it on the ceiling necessarily.
link |
Oh, that would be pretty cool.
link |
But you do want it above you.
link |
Now there are a couple of solutions to this
link |
that don't involve a wall mount or stacking books or boxes.
link |
For instance, you could be one of those people
link |
that likes to lie in bed or on the sofa
link |
and get your screen up above you
link |
by putting pillows on your knees.
link |
I used to actually do a lot of my writing and work
link |
in the middle of the night.
link |
I don't do this anymore and I don't recommend it,
link |
but I used to do a lot of work from bed.
link |
Now I no longer bring electronics for work into the bedroom.
link |
I just really try and keep the bedroom for sleeping
link |
But in terms of lying down on the couch,
link |
it is somewhat easier to get that screen up above you.
link |
You can kind of slide underneath that screen and get typing.
link |
But there's a problem with that.
link |
And we'll talk about this a little bit more in a moment,
link |
but it turns out that your posture,
link |
literally the position of your body relative to gravity
link |
also has important implications for how alert you are.
link |
So ideally you would be standing or seated.
link |
I would say the ideal would be standing,
link |
second best would be seated.
link |
And your screen will be either directly in front of you
link |
or slightly above you.
link |
Or if you wanted to get really fancy,
link |
you could create a situation where it was above you
link |
and slightly tilted toward you
link |
so that you actually had to maintain
link |
kind of proper neck posture.
link |
This accomplishes a number of things.
link |
In addition to making you more alert,
link |
you also get away from the so-called text neck.
link |
People are starting to look more like Cs nowadays,
link |
the shape of the letter C,
link |
because we're constantly looking down.
link |
I do every once in a while see somebody
link |
who's texting in public with it at eye level.
link |
It always looks a little odd that they're doing that,
link |
but I always admire their posture at the same time.
link |
So we shouldn't give them a hard time.
link |
So this is another feature that you can arrange
link |
into your physical workspace.
link |
Again, whether or not you're seated
link |
or you're standing throughout the day,
link |
try and get that screen elevated.
link |
Now with reference to posture,
link |
there are beautiful data illustrating
link |
that when we are standing up,
link |
those same neurons in our brainstem,
link |
locus coeruleus neurons, which release,
link |
I should mention things like norepinephrine and epinephrine,
link |
those neurons become active when we are standing.
link |
They become even more active when we are ambulatory,
link |
when we are moving.
link |
And we will talk about treadmilling and cycling at your desk
link |
and so forth in a little bit.
link |
But when you sit, they become a little less active.
link |
And when you lie down,
link |
and indeed anytime that you start to get your feet
link |
up above your waist or your head tilted back,
link |
those neurons fire less and neurons in your brain
link |
that are involved in calming
link |
and indeed putting you to sleep start increasing
link |
their level of firing.
link |
It's a really beautiful system.
link |
So beautiful in fact,
link |
that there are studies that show
link |
that as you adjust the angle of the body back,
link |
you actually get a sort of dose dependent increase
link |
in sleepiness and calmness
link |
and a dose dependent decrease in alertness.
link |
And so as we were all told to sit up straight
link |
or even better to stand up straight.
link |
And now I'm also telling you to get that visual thing
link |
that you're attending to screen or otherwise
link |
up in front of you or ideally above you.
link |
Those things combine to generate maximum alertness.
link |
So you can think about how you might work this
link |
into various aspects of your homework environment
link |
or office work environment.
link |
But as I described this,
link |
many of you are probably thinking what I'm thinking,
link |
which is gosh, most of what we do
link |
is in complete opposite direction
link |
to all of this neurobiologically grounded advice.
link |
Most of us are looking down at our laptop while seated,
link |
or we are lying down,
link |
which is going to make us more sleepy,
link |
or we are positioning our computers in front of us,
link |
but we really aren't in an environment that's bright enough
link |
and so on and so forth.
link |
So as you can tell,
link |
we're starting to layer in the various things
link |
First, brightness in the room.
link |
Second, get that screen up
link |
and try and put yourself into a posture for work
link |
that lends itself or promotes alertness.
link |
If indeed you want to be alert for that work.
link |
If your goal is to take a nap,
link |
get your feet elevated about 10 to 15 degrees
link |
maybe put a pillow underneath it, lie down and take a nap.
link |
But that's not what we're talking about today.
link |
We're talking about workspace optimization.
link |
And I suppose you could also exploit that all-nighter trick
link |
that I talked about earlier.
link |
I actually did this when I was an undergraduate.
link |
I was a little bit masochistic in this way.
link |
I would drink coffee and water at fairly high volume.
link |
I wasn't forced drinking or anything like that,
link |
but I actually wouldn't allow myself to get up
link |
and use the bathroom except on a timer.
link |
So I think the longest I ever went was three and a half
link |
It was kind of excruciating.
link |
I actually don't think that's necessarily a healthy advice,
link |
but again, you can use slight, I mentioned,
link |
slight over-consumption of fluids
link |
in order to generate alertness.
link |
That was just me really trying to get as much work done
link |
I had a very, very demanding class schedule,
link |
and it was just the only way that I could get work done.
link |
If I was getting up every few minutes to use the restroom,
link |
I found it hard to re-engage in that work
link |
and maintain focus,
link |
which is what I just want to briefly mention now.
link |
I talked about this in the episode on focus,
link |
but one thing that is completely unreasonable
link |
and that you should never ask yourself to do
link |
is to sit down or stand up
link |
and immediately focus on something,
link |
unless you're stressed about what you're looking at,
link |
or you're very, very excited by it.
link |
If you're very stressed about some sort of information
link |
or you're very, very excited about something,
link |
you'll find that you can focus instantly
link |
just within a moment.
link |
And that's because of the deployment of neurochemicals
link |
like dopamine and norepinephrine
link |
that bring about our levels of alertness.
link |
However, most of us, including myself,
link |
will go to begin a workout and we'll find that our mind
link |
doesn't quite engage at the level of depth and focus
link |
that we would like right off the bat.
link |
I've timed this and other studies have timed this
link |
in a more rigorous way.
link |
Mine is just what we call anic data.
link |
So I've timed it for myself,
link |
but there are studies that have looked at this.
link |
And the data point to the fact that
link |
even at our most heightened levels of focus,
link |
most people can only maintain focus before switching tasks
link |
for about three minutes,
link |
which is depressingly short period of time.
link |
However, you can extend that period of time,
link |
and I've talked about that in the episode on focus,
link |
but more importantly,
link |
when you sit down to start a workout of any kind,
link |
any kind, expect that it would take about six minutes
link |
for you to engage these neural circuits.
link |
You wouldn't expect yourself to walk into the gym
link |
and do a PR lift or start running and do your best sprint
link |
or just head out the door without warming up at all.
link |
You know, a little walk jog at first,
link |
or, you know, a few warmup sets.
link |
I mean, that's, we expect that.
link |
We are not surprised that we need that.
link |
And yet we sort of expect that our brain should be able
link |
to lock on and do work in a very focused way immediately.
link |
And that's just a ridiculous assumption.
link |
It's an unfair assumption, I should say.
link |
So assume that it will take about six minutes
link |
to engage in your workout and that those neurochemical
link |
systems will take some time to rev up and engage.
link |
The other things that I'm describing about lighting
link |
and screen positioning and posture,
link |
those will also help maximize your focus
link |
and will limit that ramp up time into a focused state.
link |
And I think what you'll find is that
link |
as you maximize your workspace,
link |
the time, the latency, as we say,
link |
to get into that focus will start to shorten.
link |
It'll especially start to shorten if you use tools
link |
to limit distraction, we will talk about distraction,
link |
but things like Freedom, which is an app,
link |
a free app that allows you to lock yourself
link |
out of the internet or turning off your phone, for instance.
link |
But even if you're doing work on your phone
link |
or that involves your phone or the internet,
link |
as many of us, including myself do,
link |
expect there to be a ramp up time for you to focus.
link |
There's another aspect of our vision
link |
that's absolutely critical for optimizing our workspace.
link |
And that has to do with this really interesting feature
link |
of our visual pathways in that it has two major channels.
link |
Those two major channels have names,
link |
although you don't have to remember the names.
link |
The first one is the so-called parvocellular channel,
link |
which is involved in looking at things at specific points
link |
in space and at high resolution or detail.
link |
And then there's the so-called magnocellular channel
link |
that's involved in looking at big swaths of visual space
link |
and at lower resolution.
link |
So you can think of the parvocellular system
link |
as kind of a high pixel density.
link |
Think about your most modern smartphone,
link |
the recent smartphone with the best, best camera,
link |
and think about the magnocellular system
link |
as being lower resolution, kind of an older smartphone,
link |
lower pixels, et cetera.
link |
You might ask, why would you want a system
link |
that's low resolution?
link |
Well, the low resolution system is better
link |
at things like detecting motion
link |
and not so much at detail and vice versa.
link |
Now, again, you don't have to remember the names.
link |
What you do have to remember, however,
link |
is that you're going to create the maximum amount
link |
of alertness in your system,
link |
the maximum amount of ability to focus
link |
when your system is in that parvocellular mode,
link |
when you're bringing your eyes to a common point,
link |
what we call a vergence eye movement, V-E-R-G-E-N-C-E.
link |
I've said this before on the podcast
link |
and people said virgin eye movement.
link |
No, vergence eye movement, as in convergence,
link |
bringing your eyes to a single point in space
link |
will create a narrower aperture of a visual window,
link |
meaning your visual world actually shrinks,
link |
at least perceptually.
link |
Whereas when you relax your eyes and dilate your gaze,
link |
you can do this now by whatever environment you're in,
link |
trying to see without moving your head off to the side,
link |
above, below you, as broadly as possible.
link |
Maybe you can dilate your gaze so much
link |
that you can see yourself, your body,
link |
in that visual environment.
link |
You'll notice that your resolution of vision
link |
isn't nearly as high as when you do
link |
that vergence eye movement.
link |
Vergence eye movements are incredibly powerful
link |
for creating heightened states of alertness and focus.
link |
And indeed, they create heightened states
link |
of cognition, of thinking.
link |
And that's because your brain follows your vision
link |
in terms of focus.
link |
When we say, I can't focus,
link |
what we often are experiencing is an inability,
link |
excuse me, to not focus visually.
link |
Whereas when we are in a very focused state,
link |
we are in a state often where we can focus visually.
link |
Now, we can also do this with our auditory system
link |
or to touch, et cetera.
link |
But right now we're just talking about the visual system.
link |
Now, in terms of workspace optimization,
link |
what this means is we never really want to be looking
link |
at a square or rectangle or target area for our work
link |
that is too far beyond our ears.
link |
How far is too far?
link |
Really, you want to try and keep the blinders on,
link |
or I should say the invisible blinders,
link |
so that whatever you're looking at falls
link |
within the region of visual space in front of you
link |
that is present if you were to cup your hands
link |
and put them right next to your eyes.
link |
Now, this is a rough estimation, but I'm doing this now.
link |
For those of you that are watching on YouTube,
link |
I'm doing this now.
link |
I'm trying to simulate like a horse with blinders on.
link |
For those of you that are listening,
link |
just imagine me looking silly
link |
with my hands cupped near my eyes.
link |
But if we are to, for instance,
link |
look at a screen that's very, very big
link |
and we're too close to it,
link |
or even if we're standing back from it,
link |
it's going to be hard for us to attend to everything
link |
within that screen space.
link |
So this is actually support for the idea
link |
of using a phone or a tablet or a laptop.
link |
My laptop is about 15 inches in diameter,
link |
I think is the one that I have.
link |
Some are 13, some are 17.
link |
Some of you like to use big monitors.
link |
Make sure that whatever it is that you're looking at,
link |
if you want to remain focused,
link |
it doesn't extend too far beyond where your eyes are,
link |
the size of your head that is.
link |
So just think blinders on a horse.
link |
And actually that's the reason they put blinders on a horse
link |
so that they're not looking off into the periphery.
link |
Horses, unlike humans, don't have the same shaped pupil.
link |
They don't have a visual system
link |
that's organized in quite the same way.
link |
They mostly see in panorama, in magnocellular vision.
link |
And so those blinders are designed
link |
to keep their visual focus straight ahead.
link |
So they physically restrict it.
link |
Now, some people will actually go to lengths
link |
to further restrict their visual focus.
link |
They will do things like putting on a hoodie
link |
or wearing a hat, for instance,
link |
to restrict their visual window.
link |
And indeed that works quite well.
link |
But as we'll talk about in a moment,
link |
when you really restrict your visual window
link |
down to a very, very narrow portion of visual space,
link |
that actually changes the types of information
link |
that you are best at processing.
link |
And we'll talk about that in terms of something
link |
that's called the cathedral effect in a few moments.
link |
But for now, here's the principle.
link |
Make sure that whatever you're looking at
link |
is directly in front of you
link |
and doesn't extend too far out to the side.
link |
Once you get out to say six or 12 or certainly 18 inches
link |
on either side of your eyes,
link |
you are dilating your gaze.
link |
By definition, you're dilating your gaze.
link |
It's completely subconscious,
link |
and it becomes very hard to maintain attention.
link |
Now, the caveat to this is that
link |
if you are going to look at a narrow space,
link |
a narrow window for any period of time,
link |
whether or not it's a book or a laptop
link |
or a tablet or a phone,
link |
those virgins eye movements not only create alertness,
link |
but they also require energy.
link |
And they also can fatigue the eyes
link |
because there's a process called accommodation
link |
whereby the shape of your eye literally has to change
link |
so that the lens can move
link |
so that you can focus at that location.
link |
Accommodation is an incredible process,
link |
but it is a demanding one.
link |
And that's the reason that your eyes get tired
link |
when you focus on something for too long.
link |
So here's a principle extracted
link |
from the ophthalmology and neuroscience literature
link |
that you can adopt.
link |
For every 45 minutes in which you are focusing on something
link |
like a phone or a tablet or a book page or your computer,
link |
you want to get into magnocellular panoramic vision
link |
for at least five minutes.
link |
And the way that I suggest to do this
link |
is actually to take a walk ideally outside.
link |
We're going to talk about ambulation, about movement,
link |
and about how that can maintain alertness
link |
throughout the day.
link |
So for every 45 minutes or so,
link |
try and get five minutes of relaxing your eyes.
link |
This is something that's not often done,
link |
especially in today's homeschooling
link |
and where people are,
link |
where kids are going to school by Zoom
link |
and adults are working by Zoom.
link |
This is a serious problem.
link |
People are getting eye fatigue.
link |
They're getting headaches.
link |
Indeed, some people are getting migraines.
link |
They're having all sorts of issues, neck pain.
link |
Much of that, if not all of that in some cases,
link |
can be alleviated by this 45 to five rule.
link |
For every 45 minutes of focused work that you do,
link |
get five minutes where you get outside
link |
or if you have to be indoors,
link |
where you can dilate your gaze.
link |
Now, some of you may be saying,
link |
well, that spits in the face of your 90 minute rule.
link |
You've told us before that we should focus for 90 minutes.
link |
I would still want you to take breaks
link |
within those 90 minutes
link |
if you're looking at a narrow piece of visual world,
link |
meaning at a phone or a laptop or so forth.
link |
And again, the best way to do this would be to go outside,
link |
just relax your eyes, look off into the distance.
link |
Looking at a horizon will automatically trigger
link |
this panoramic gaze, which is very relaxing to the eyes
link |
and will allow you to go back into a focused work bout.
link |
The one thing you absolutely do not want to do
link |
is to go outside and check your phone
link |
because if you're outside checking your phone
link |
or you're taking a break and checking your phone,
link |
you're still in that vergence eye movement, okay?
link |
So this is very, very important
link |
because vergence eye movements increase focus and attention,
link |
and you can exploit that to increase focus and attention
link |
but you absolutely need to relax the system.
link |
Again, for every 45 minutes
link |
in which you've been in that focused mode,
link |
you want to get at least five minutes of panoramic vision.
link |
If you can take a 15 minute walk, even better.
link |
Next, I'd like to talk about
link |
an aspect of workspace optimization
link |
that can actually bias whether or not
link |
our brain and nervous system are better suited
link |
for detailed analytic work or more abstract work.
link |
In fact, there's a way
link |
that you can arrange your work environment,
link |
or I should say there's a way that you can place yourself
link |
into certain environments that will allow abstract thinking,
link |
creative thinking, and indeed expansive thinking to emerge.
link |
There are other environments that you can put yourself in
link |
that will make your brain shift
link |
towards more analytic work,
link |
toward more detailed and precise types of work.
link |
Now, I just briefly want to mention
link |
something that was covered again on the habits episode
link |
that I did a few weeks ago,
link |
but again, you don't need to see that episode
link |
in order to digest this information.
link |
It goes back to this issue of three phases
link |
within the circadian 24 hour cycle.
link |
Phase one, which as I mentioned,
link |
is about zero to eight hours after waking.
link |
Phase two, nine to 16 hours after waking.
link |
And phase three, 17 to 24 hours after waking.
link |
Phase one, being ideal for analytic,
link |
precise, detailed types of work.
link |
Phase two, better suited for most people
link |
for creative kind of abstract thinking,
link |
expansive thinking, brainstorming, et cetera.
link |
There are some exceptions to that,
link |
but most people follow that pattern
link |
because of the different neuromodulators
link |
and hormones and so forth
link |
that are released into the brain and body
link |
at those different phases.
link |
What I'm about to tell you is a way
link |
in which you can use your physical environment
link |
to further shift your brain and nervous system
link |
into a mode that's either primed for analytic
link |
or abstract and creative thinking.
link |
What I'm about to describe is called the cathedral effect.
link |
The cathedral effect has been discussed,
link |
well, really for many, many decades,
link |
maybe even hundreds of years,
link |
but formally has been discussed since the early 2000s
link |
in which it seemed that people
link |
who were in high ceilinged environments,
link |
hence the phrase cathedral,
link |
would shift their thinking and their ideas
link |
to more abstract and creative lofty type thinking.
link |
So literally higher ceiling, loftier thinking,
link |
higher aspirations.
link |
This was observed in terms of the language that they use,
link |
but also the sorts of ideas that they would generate.
link |
And conversely, that people
link |
that were in lower ceilinged environments
link |
would be more oriented toward using language
link |
that was more restricted, literally more detailed,
link |
analytic about things in their immediate space.
link |
Now, this seems kind of wild on the one hand,
link |
but actually if we go back to our understanding
link |
of the neurobiology of the visual system
link |
and the way that our brains and bodies evolved
link |
in different environments, it actually makes a lot of sense.
link |
We don't have time to go into a long lecture
link |
about evolutionary neurobiology,
link |
but we have to remember that our nervous system
link |
has a number of features
link |
that are adapted to different environments.
link |
And indeed we are able to go from big open prairies
link |
or mountain tops or large cathedrals or concert halls
link |
into small environments and everything scales with it.
link |
When we're outdoors in a big expansive space,
link |
our vision tends to go long.
link |
We tend to be in panoramic, magnocellular vision.
link |
Our hearing tends to extend long.
link |
Even if we're having a conversation with somebody,
link |
we tend to also be attending somewhat
link |
to the screech of hawks off in the distance
link |
or to the rush of a river.
link |
Whereas when we were in small spaces,
link |
everything, our vision, our hearing,
link |
and indeed even our physical movements
link |
become more restrained,
link |
even if we can still extend our hands out
link |
as far as we want.
link |
What do I mean by that?
link |
Let's say you're in an elevator.
link |
That's a small space compared to outside on a field.
link |
This has been measured over and over again.
link |
People's, the size or the amplitude
link |
of people's spontaneous movements
link |
actually scales down in smaller environments
link |
even if they aren't completely restricted
link |
from extending their limbs all the way.
link |
Whereas when we were outdoors,
link |
we feel a natural impulse to move further
link |
away from our body, our torso with our limbs.
link |
This is just feels like more appropriate behavior.
link |
And when I say appropriate,
link |
I don't mean in any kind of social context necessarily.
link |
There's actually a reason for this.
link |
The visual system and the so-called vestibular motor system
link |
are intimately linked.
link |
And I can just tell you briefly one way
link |
in which you can test this and observe this
link |
and even use this.
link |
It's a little off topic from today's episode,
link |
but let's say you have a certain amount of flexibility.
link |
You can extend your arms off like wings
link |
is what I'm doing for those either listening,
link |
not watching, off to your sides with arms straight.
link |
And you reach a maximum positioning of flexibility.
link |
You can do a quick experiment where you sit still.
link |
You would bring your arms in for a moment.
link |
You can put them on your knees if you like
link |
or in front of you.
link |
And you can move your eyes very far off
link |
into the periphery of your visual field.
link |
So you actually, I'm going to do this now.
link |
It looks kind of silly,
link |
but moving my eyes without moving my head
link |
off into the periphery all the way to the right,
link |
then all the way to the left,
link |
all the way up, all the way down,
link |
but especially all the way to the left,
link |
almost looking over my shoulder
link |
without turning my head all the way to my right.
link |
And you will find that you actually can extend
link |
your arms further back subsequent to that.
link |
And that's not magic.
link |
It has to do with the ways in which your cerebellum,
link |
which actually means mini brain,
link |
and your eyes, your visual system are connected,
link |
and the way in which your cerebellum controls
link |
some of the spindles and other aspects
link |
of the neuromuscular architecture of your nervous system,
link |
because your nerves control your muscles,
link |
and allow those muscles to move further out.
link |
So for those of you that lack flexibility,
link |
you can actually exploit your visual system for this.
link |
Now that's, again, a bit of a tangent,
link |
but it's a fun one that relates back
link |
to this so-called cathedral effect.
link |
The cathedral effect is a way in which our thinking
link |
becomes more restricted and restrained
link |
in tighter, smaller, more confined visual environments.
link |
Or if the ceiling is higher, we are in expansive space
link |
with a lot of distance above us or space above us
link |
and out to the sides, maybe even out on a field,
link |
our thinking goes into these more broad,
link |
abstract, and loftier future thinking in particular.
link |
This has actually been measured.
link |
There's a really nice paper.
link |
I will post a link to this.
link |
The authors are Joan Myers Levy and Rui,
link |
and then in parentheses, Juliet Zou.
link |
I'm going to assume that they go by Juliet.
link |
The title of the paper is the influence of ceiling height,
link |
the effect of priming on the type of processing
link |
And I won't go into all the details of this paper,
link |
but what's really cool about this paper
link |
is they looked with very rigorous statistics,
link |
and they have a fair number of subjects,
link |
and everything about this paper looks solid to me,
link |
at the difference in cognitive processing
link |
and abstract thinking and detailed analytic work
link |
that people are able to perform in environments
link |
that have a 10-foot ceiling versus an eight-foot ceiling,
link |
which is not that much of a difference.
link |
It's just two-foot difference there.
link |
And what they found were significant effects
link |
whereby high ceilings activate concepts
link |
related to abstraction,
link |
whereas low ceilings prime confinement-related concepts
link |
but promote the kind of detailed thinking
link |
that lends itself well to sort of spreadsheet-type work
link |
or accounting-type work,
link |
whereas abstract creative work was supported
link |
by these higher ceilings.
link |
And the way they analyze this was really interesting.
link |
Again, we don't have time to go into all the details,
link |
but they asked people to sort of generate word sets
link |
related to particular topics like sports.
link |
And so people would talk about soccer, football,
link |
baseball, golf, et cetera,
link |
and talk about some of the equipment and other things.
link |
And then they had a kind of a challenge,
link |
a cognitive challenge,
link |
whereby people had to link different concepts
link |
along different dimensions
link |
so that you depart from the dimension of sport
link |
and you start thinking about sports that involve teams
link |
or sports that involve a ball, et cetera.
link |
And so in the same conditions,
link |
you can, except for the fact
link |
that the ceiling height is different, eight feet or 10 feet,
link |
what one finds is that the kinds of language
link |
and the kinds of associations
link |
that people start to create are vastly different.
link |
And there are actually two experiments in this study.
link |
You're welcome to go look at it.
link |
So it wasn't just about sports.
link |
There were some other things that were analyzed as well.
link |
And in the references of this paper,
link |
it also points to other examples now
link |
of the cathedral effect,
link |
which I find very interesting
link |
because as a vision scientist
link |
and someone who spends his life thinking about
link |
and indeed talking about the nervous system,
link |
we know that our cognition follows our vision.
link |
For low vision or blind people,
link |
it will follow mostly their hearing
link |
and to some extent their touch.
link |
But for most people who are sighted,
link |
as most people are sighted,
link |
our cognition follows our visual environment.
link |
So what does this mean for workspace optimization?
link |
Well, most of us have a fixed ceiling level
link |
but you might have rooms in which the ceiling is higher
link |
and rooms in which the ceiling is lower.
link |
If that were the case,
link |
I recommend if you want to do creative work
link |
the nine to 16 hours of your circadian cycle,
link |
nine to 16 hours after waking, that is,
link |
that you do that in the high ceiling room
link |
or maybe even outdoors out on a deck or on a patio
link |
because the highest ceiling of course is the sky.
link |
Whereas if you're going to do detailed analytic work in,
link |
I would suggest doing that during phase one of the day.
link |
But even if you're going to do it
link |
during phase two of the day,
link |
for whatever reason,
link |
scheduling or other sorts of constraints,
link |
that you do that in the lower ceiling environment.
link |
Now, if you are interested in controlling your,
link |
the height of your visual world,
link |
but you don't have control over your,
link |
the ceiling height of the environment that you're in,
link |
there is another way to do that.
link |
And I used to observe this in the cafes
link |
and around Stanford in the Bay area
link |
where you would see somebody who,
link |
despite the weather would be in a hoodie,
link |
maybe with a baseball cap or other form of hat
link |
or some sort of blinder above their eyebrows,
link |
which is actually another way of just lowering
link |
the ceiling height very, very low
link |
and restricting your visual field.
link |
Not unlike blinders that we talked about before
link |
that one would put on a horse
link |
or one would put on them themselves
link |
by restricting their visual angle of focus
link |
to directly in front of them,
link |
but not too far out beyond the sides of their head.
link |
So these cathedral effects,
link |
I think can be leveraged
link |
toward doing particular types of work best.
link |
And again, the lower the ceiling
link |
or the lower your visual environment,
link |
the more that one tends to do,
link |
or I should say, performs detailed analytic work accurately.
link |
And the more that one's thinking is oriented
link |
towards detailed sort of correct answer type work.
link |
Whereas when the ceiling is higher or there's no ceiling,
link |
the more that the brain and the rest of the processing
link |
that we call cognitive processing
link |
is related to abstract reasoning, brainstorming,
link |
and indeed can pull from broader swaths of memory resources.
link |
Because really what abstract reasoning is,
link |
is it's taking existing elements
link |
and maneuvering them or arranging them into novel ways.
link |
So you can think about like notes on a piano,
link |
playing a particular song, learning scales,
link |
that's very analytic.
link |
There's a correct answer
link |
that you're trying to arrive at or generate.
link |
Whereas writing music or writing poetry
link |
or generating new material of any kind
link |
involves taking existing elements, right?
link |
You're not going to use words
link |
that you don't have committed to your memory
link |
or that you're not aware of,
link |
and arranging them in novel ways.
link |
So I think the cathedral effect can be leveraged.
link |
And again, you don't need to move into a different home
link |
or build a slanted roof and work at one side of the room
link |
at one part of the day
link |
and the other side of the room at the other.
link |
Although, hey, if that's the way you want to swing it,
link |
Most of us don't have that flexibility,
link |
but it's very clear that the height of the ceiling
link |
of the visual environment that we're in
link |
has a profound effect on the types of cognitive processes
link |
that we are able to engage.
link |
Now I'd like to shift our attention
link |
to the auditory environment
link |
or the noise in the room or the music in the room
link |
or the music or noise in the headphones,
link |
because it turns out that there is a lot
link |
of quality scientific data out there
link |
that speaks to whether or not listening to particular sounds
link |
can enhance our cognition.
link |
And indeed the answer is yes,
link |
but there are very particular types of things to listen to
link |
under very particular types of conditions
link |
that allow one to do that.
link |
First off, I want to say that people vary tremendously
link |
in the extent to which they can tolerate
link |
background noise for work.
link |
In fact, individuals will vary tremendously
link |
from one day to the next, or even within the same day
link |
in the extent to which they can tolerate background noise.
link |
I've experienced this myself.
link |
There've been times in which I've been working at home
link |
and I felt like for whatever reason,
link |
I just could not engage in focus.
link |
And what worked to generate more focus for me
link |
was to go to a cafe or to a library
link |
or someplace where there's actually more commotion,
link |
more people moving about, maybe even more noise,
link |
maybe even music in the room.
link |
And we have to all be in touch
link |
with when we want more background noise
link |
or when we want less background noise.
link |
There is no hard and fast rule.
link |
If you look across the literature
link |
for studies that involve complete silence or white noise
link |
or binaural beats or music or classical music
link |
you can find results to support any type of environment
link |
as being more beneficial.
link |
However, as we'll talk about in a moment,
link |
there are a few types of environments to really avoid
link |
and a few types of sounds that really can enhance
link |
the cognition and your ability to focus
link |
in your workspace environment across the board
link |
that really seem to work for all people.
link |
Let's talk about background noise to avoid.
link |
And here we're talking about background noise to avoid
link |
because it actually can cause
link |
some pretty severe deficits in cognition.
link |
There's a paper, first author, Jordan Love, cool name.
link |
Last author, Alexander Francis.
link |
The title of the paper has to do with
link |
psychophysiological responses to potentially annoying
link |
heating ventilation and air conditioning noise
link |
during mentally demanding work, which is a mouthful.
link |
But basically what this paper identifies is a large dataset
link |
in which workplace and environmental noise,
link |
mostly the humming of air conditioners that's very loud
link |
or the humming of heaters that's very loud and ongoing,
link |
just incessant, doesn't let up,
link |
can really increase mental fatigue
link |
and can vastly decrease cognitive performance.
link |
And if you're interested in looking at the cognitive
link |
performance data, the authors are Banbury and Berry, 2005.
link |
That paper is the one that supports the fact
link |
that cognitive performance is worse
link |
when there's just the hum of an air conditioner
link |
in the background or the hum of a heater
link |
and otherwise complete silence.
link |
There's also evidence, which I discussed on the episode
link |
about hearing, which is that in young children,
link |
white noise can cause some impairments in the development
link |
of the auditory system.
link |
Now, I don't want parents to freak out.
link |
And if you're exposed to white noise as a sleep aid,
link |
as a child, which I know many of you were, don't freak out.
link |
But it turns out that white noise,
link |
especially if it's loud white noise,
link |
can cause some disruption in the auditory maps,
link |
the representation of different frequencies of sound
link |
in the brain that can lead to some deficits in auditory
link |
and even language processing.
link |
So we really have to be careful about long-term exposure,
link |
extended exposure to white noise or air conditioning noise
link |
that's really at a high level.
link |
I wouldn't worry if it's in the background
link |
and it's shutting off and turning on again
link |
as the thermostat kicks off and on,
link |
but really trying to avoid work in loud fan-filled
link |
or ventilation generating or heat generating environments,
link |
because it really can cause damage
link |
to the auditory system long-term.
link |
And as we described, it can impair cognitive performance
link |
and overall increase fatigue.
link |
I think we've all experienced that when you're in a room
link |
and there's some ongoing background noise
link |
and all of a sudden it stops
link |
and you just feel this enormous relief.
link |
And the reason for this is that our auditory system
link |
has a parallel to our visual system.
link |
In our visual system, that light entering the eyes
link |
triggers the activation of those melanopsin cells,
link |
which triggers activation of the hypothalamus,
link |
a particular area of the hypothalamus,
link |
which generates alertness, generates the release
link |
even of cortisol, a stress hormone.
link |
In the auditory system, when there's ongoing sound,
link |
your auditory system hears that,
link |
even if you're not paying attention to it,
link |
if you're paying attention to something else,
link |
it still registers those little hair cells,
link |
as they're called in your inner ear,
link |
are fluttering, the eardrum is beating
link |
and in concert to that sound frequency.
link |
And there's a brainstem mechanism that generates alertness
link |
and a kind of vigilance.
link |
So when you have a sound that's ongoing in the background,
link |
it shuts off, all of a sudden you experience that piece,
link |
which is the turning off of those brainstem circuits
link |
that are associated with vigilance.
link |
The locus coeruleus, which we talked about earlier,
link |
which release epinephrine and norepinephrine
link |
and generate that heightened state of alertness
link |
in your brain and body, those neurons then can turn off
link |
and you experience that as relaxation.
link |
So does that mean that we shouldn't listen to white noise
link |
or pink noise or brown noise while we're working?
link |
Certainly a lot of people do.
link |
In fact, if you want to know what white noise,
link |
pink noise and brown noise are,
link |
they're just different constellations
link |
of auditory frequencies that are played together.
link |
Most of us think of white noise as the shh on a screen,
link |
all the black and white pixels going all around,
link |
like they call it visual snow.
link |
But pink noise has certain sound frequencies
link |
notched out, taken out.
link |
Brown noise has others.
link |
It has different frequencies that are included
link |
at higher amplitude, et cetera.
link |
You can look this stuff up on YouTube if you want.
link |
You just put brown noise.
link |
None of it sounds terrific.
link |
It doesn't sound like music.
link |
It's literally just noise,
link |
mixed frequencies and no particular arrangement.
link |
There is some evidence that playing white noise
link |
in the background or on headphones or pink noise
link |
or brown noise can facilitate cognition,
link |
but it's mainly through an increase
link |
in this overall alertness as a consequence
link |
of areas like locus coeruleus and other brainstem areas
link |
that are associated with autonomic arousal from that noise.
link |
So it's a lot like the air conditioner effect.
link |
And I think done in a restricted way,
link |
meaning not for hours and hours,
link |
but maybe if your focus is waning
link |
and you're having a hard time engaging in work,
link |
you might put on some brown noise or white noise
link |
or pink noise and work that way for 45 minutes or so
link |
before you go to your panoramic vision walk
link |
and get some sunlight.
link |
That should be fine.
link |
There's really no reason to suspect, however,
link |
that those particular patterns of noise
link |
are going to optimize particular mental functions.
link |
So what I'd like to turn to next
link |
are particular patterns of sounds
link |
that indeed have been shown in peer-reviewed studies
link |
to optimize certain types of mental processing,
link |
because you can incorporate these
link |
into your optimized workspace environment
link |
through headphones or through speakers,
link |
whatever mechanism that you want
link |
in order to get more out of your work efforts.
link |
If you were to search for apps or go online
link |
and try and find sounds that can improve thinking
link |
or change your emotions,
link |
you're generally going to find three types.
link |
One are called isochronic tones.
link |
These are tones usually of a common frequency.
link |
So it might be a beep and then a pause
link |
and then beep of the same frequency and then beep.
link |
Forgive my terrible beeping.
link |
I don't know what good beeping would sound like,
link |
but contrast isochronic tones with monaural beats.
link |
Monaural beats would be repetitive,
link |
almost percussive-like beats delivered to just one ear.
link |
Doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo,
link |
this kind of thing.
link |
Okay, you can find apps that can deliver monaural beats.
link |
You can find also apps that deliver so-called binaural beats.
link |
You can also find YouTube scripts or channels
link |
that will deliver binaural beats.
link |
Binaural beats, as the name suggests,
link |
are beats delivered to the two ears.
link |
One pattern of kind of percussive beat to one ear
link |
and a different pattern,
link |
or at least a pattern that's out of phase,
link |
that's not synchronized, delivered to the other ear.
link |
So on one ear, you hear doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo,
link |
and then the other ear, you've got doo, doo, doo.
link |
And what happens is because of the way
link |
that the auditory system converges in the brainstem
link |
and generates what are called intraoral time differences,
link |
I'll explain what that means in a moment,
link |
intraoral time differences,
link |
the difference between the two patterns of beats
link |
that are heard by each of the two different ears
link |
leads to a third pattern that the brain entrains to
link |
and kind of maps onto
link |
and generates particular types of brain waves, okay?
link |
So without going into a lot of detail,
link |
intraoral time differences are the ways
link |
in which if you were to hear something off to your right,
link |
like I just snapped my finger
link |
just to the right of my right ear,
link |
that a signal arrives in my right ear
link |
before that sound signal,
link |
those sound waves arrive in my left ear.
link |
So there's an intraoral between ears time difference.
link |
And there's a brainstem area in which signals from one ear
link |
and signals from the other ear converge,
link |
and there's literally a math done by your nervous system
link |
that says this signal arrived before the other signal.
link |
And the difference between those signals
link |
is the intraoral time difference.
link |
So if I were to snap my fingers on both sides,
link |
on my left and on my right side at the exact same time,
link |
and they arrive at the same time,
link |
the intraoral time difference is zero.
link |
Whereas if one goes first on the right and then the left,
link |
I'm terrible at snapping on the left.
link |
It's a weak snap, but it was there.
link |
Then there's a delay in the intraoral time difference
link |
has a particular value.
link |
It's almost ridiculously simple.
link |
Binaural beats have been generated
link |
in ways that create a particular pattern
link |
of intraoral time differences
link |
that then cascades up to the rest of the brain
link |
and puts the forebrain and other areas of the brain
link |
that are involved in cognition and action
link |
into a particular rhythm.
link |
And some of the rhythms or waves of brain activity
link |
are ones that you may have heard of.
link |
Things like alpha waves or theta waves or gamma waves.
link |
Now, I don't like to get too attached
link |
to particular brain waves
link |
as excellent for particular kinds of thinking.
link |
This is something that was really popular
link |
in the 90s and 2000s
link |
when ways of measuring brain activity noninvasively
link |
with electrodes on the outside
link |
enabled people to identify
link |
that indeed alpha brain waves
link |
are associated with alertness states
link |
and some are other brain waves
link |
that are kind of larger amplitude, slow waves,
link |
like delta waves are associated
link |
with kind of sleepiness or relaxation.
link |
But in general, the way that the brain works
link |
is that different brain waves
link |
are generated in different structures at different times
link |
and those combine to give us a sense of happiness
link |
or give us a sense of focus
link |
or give us a sense of creativity.
link |
Nonetheless, if you look across the board
link |
at the studies of binaural beats
link |
and you ask what sorts of binaural beats
link |
appear to be useful for people to enhance
link |
their brain function for particular kinds of tasks,
link |
we arrive at some very interesting answers.
link |
So we'll review what those are now.
link |
The frequency of binaural beats
link |
that appears to bring about
link |
improved cognitive functioning at the level of memory,
link |
improved reaction times,
link |
and improved verbal recall seems to be 40 Hertz.
link |
Now, is it exactly 40 Hertz?
link |
but if one wants to look up a great reference on this,
link |
the reference Colzato, C-O-L-Z-A-T-O et al, 2017,
link |
describes in here, I'm quoting,
link |
so this is a direct quote,
link |
the present findings are in line
link |
with those of a recent study,
link |
which also found faster reaction times
link |
in participants that listen to binaural beats of 40 Hertz.
link |
And you can find many examples of this in the literature
link |
where binaural beats of about 40 Hertz
link |
were exactly 40 Hertz in some cases,
link |
somehow brought the brain into a state
link |
that made it optimal for learning, for memory,
link |
and for certain types of recall,
link |
including verbal recall, math learning, et cetera.
link |
So for those of you that are interested in binaural beats,
link |
there are a number of free apps out there.
link |
I'm not going to recommend any in particular.
link |
You just have to search for one that you happen to like.
link |
One thing that you will find
link |
is that many of those apps super impose binaural beats
link |
onto raindrops or ocean sounds,
link |
or rather they superimpose ocean sounds
link |
and raindrops onto the binaural beats.
link |
That does not appear to be as effective
link |
as pure binaural beats.
link |
There has been an exploration
link |
of lower frequency binaural beats.
link |
So for instance, seven Hertz,
link |
which is theta binaural beats done for 30 minutes
link |
with an overlay of rain sound or rain sounds only,
link |
that's been analyzed.
link |
And believe it or not,
link |
that showed immediate recall memory
link |
was significantly decreased, okay?
link |
So that's a negative effect of binaural beats on memory.
link |
So the idea that binaural beats
link |
are just great for us across the board, I think is wrong.
link |
It does appear that the higher frequency binaural beats
link |
as one moves up toward 40 Hertz
link |
are going to be the most beneficial.
link |
There are instances in which,
link |
for instance, 15 Hertz binaural beats
link |
increased response accuracy
link |
on a spatial verbal memory task.
link |
This is a complicated working memory task.
link |
Working memory is the kind of memory
link |
of remembering a phone number.
link |
So if I say, for instance, 4932931,
link |
and you have to remember that number,
link |
keeping it online is what we call your working memory.
link |
It's likely that you would forget
link |
that two or three days later.
link |
You can get improvements in working memory
link |
with 15 Hertz binaural beats.
link |
Whereas the other control conditions,
link |
five Hertz and 10 Hertz binaural beats
link |
all decreased accuracy of working memory.
link |
However, when I look at the literature
link |
and I examined a number of different studies,
link |
what I always seem to come back to
link |
was that 40 Hertz or so plus or minus five Hertz
link |
seem to be optimal for generating improvements
link |
in cognition, in math performance,
link |
and even in various types of memory recall
link |
and even in musical performance.
link |
You might wonder, well, how can people do
link |
musical performance that are listening to binaural beats?
link |
Here's another surprise.
link |
Many of the studies that I looked at
link |
didn't have people listening to binaural beats
link |
while they were doing the tasks,
link |
the memory task or the music learning, et cetera.
link |
They would do it beforehand for 30 minutes.
link |
There were instances in which people were listening
link |
to binaural beats during the task.
link |
But if you decide to employ binaural beats,
link |
I recommend this 40 Hertz as a great place to start.
link |
I don't recommend doing it for all of your work bouts.
link |
I think there's a good reason to believe
link |
that you could attenuate to it.
link |
But if you are going to try it, you might try it both ways.
link |
You might try listening to binaural beats
link |
for about 30 minutes while doing something else,
link |
and then maybe eating lunch or something of that sort
link |
or taking a walk and then going into the work bout.
link |
Because remember, the moment that you start listening
link |
to these binaural beats,
link |
the brain doesn't immediately switch
link |
into a particular pattern of oscillation or brainwaves.
link |
It takes some time.
link |
Neural circuits, again, take time to engage.
link |
The only neural circuits that are going to engage instantly
link |
are going to be the ones that are of a sort of reflexive
link |
sort, like you step on a sharp object
link |
and you have to retract your limb,
link |
or you suddenly are stressed by a distressing text message,
link |
or you're suddenly delighted about a delightful text message.
link |
But when it comes to shifting your whole brain state
link |
toward optimizing work, it takes a little bit of time.
link |
So again, 40 hertz binaural beats, many, many apps,
link |
many YouTube scripts out there,
link |
probably other resources for binaural beats,
link |
hopefully zero cost so you can access those
link |
without any need to shell out any money.
link |
If you find one that you particularly like,
link |
maybe put it in the comment section
link |
so other people can find it,
link |
YouTube would be the best place to do that.
link |
Feel free to put a link or just a description.
link |
That would be wonderful.
link |
And again, you don't need to listen to binaural beats
link |
at the exact same time that you're doing the work,
link |
although that could also enhance your productivity.
link |
Some of you out there might be craving
link |
a little bit more mechanism by which binaural beats
link |
can influence things like focus or reduced reaction time.
link |
This has actually been explored.
link |
This 40 hertz binaural beats pattern
link |
seems to have an effect on what's called striatal dopamine.
link |
We have dopamine as a neuromodulator,
link |
of course, involved in many things in motivation.
link |
It's actually involved in adaptation to light in the retina,
link |
something that most people don't know,
link |
but it's involved in movement,
link |
which is why people with Parkinson's
link |
who have a depletion of dopamine neurons
link |
actually have movement deficits and so on.
link |
But striatal dopamine is closely related
link |
to motivation and focus.
link |
And 40 hertz binaural beats
link |
appears to increase striatal dopamine release.
link |
And this has actually been measured indirectly
link |
by what we call spontaneous blink rate.
link |
I've been accused on various Instagram posts
link |
and even on this podcast of being a non-blinker,
link |
let's call it, or a minimal blinker.
link |
And as an important aside,
link |
there is no evidence whatsoever
link |
that people that don't blink very much
link |
are sociopaths or lie.
link |
Also, you will hear that people who blink a lot
link |
are sociopaths and are lying.
link |
There is absolutely no evidence
link |
that blink frequency correlates
link |
with anything except alertness.
link |
Now, longer blinks are associated with less alertness.
link |
As we get tired, we tend to blink longer and longer
link |
until we take the long blink that is sleep.
link |
I guess the long blink would be death,
link |
but the long-ish blink would be sleep.
link |
But it turns out that the more firing
link |
of striatal dopamine neurons that's occurring,
link |
the more frequently we blink.
link |
And so it is associated with a resetting
link |
of our visual window.
link |
That's what happens when we blink.
link |
And there's a whole relationship
link |
between blinking and time perception
link |
that we covered in the episode on time perception.
link |
But here's the bottom line for sake of this discussion.
link |
40 hertz binaural beats
link |
appears to increase spontaneous blink rates
link |
because it increases dopamine transmission
link |
in the brainstem and in the striatum,
link |
in several locations, in fact.
link |
And so the way in which these binaural beats
link |
set a rhythm in the brain,
link |
recruits dopamine release,
link |
that dopamine release leads to heightened levels
link |
of motivation and focus.
link |
Why motivation and focus?
link |
Well, dopamine is actually the substrate
link |
by which epinephrine is made.
link |
Dopamine, the molecule,
link |
is actually converted into epinephrine, adrenaline.
link |
And they work together like close cousins,
link |
dopamine and epinephrine,
link |
in order to put us on a path of movement,
link |
or if we are doing work of mental movement toward a goal.
link |
So that's a little bit of mechanistic meat
link |
to explain at least part of the reason
link |
why 40 hertz binaural beats can enhance our focus,
link |
reduce our reaction times,
link |
and improve indeed learning and memory.
link |
Next, I'd like to talk about the role of movement
link |
in optimizing our workspace.
link |
And whether or not standing, sitting, lying down,
link |
treadmilling, or even, believe it or not, cycling,
link |
can enhance our work output and performance.
link |
Before we do that,
link |
I want to touch on two aspects of optimizing workspace
link |
that will come up at some point
link |
in your work or school life.
link |
Alas, there isn't a lot of science around this,
link |
but I think they are worth mentioning.
link |
And I think I can offer a little bit of advice
link |
in terms of how to navigate these
link |
in a way that would be beneficial to you.
link |
The first one is interruptions.
link |
You know, if you go online and you ask about, you know,
link |
how to avoid interruptions, people will say,
link |
okay, well, if you have kids at home, or even if you don't,
link |
or at work, you'll have a light, like a recording,
link |
like recording is on, we're busy now,
link |
or have a sign on the door that says,
link |
bother only in the case of emergency,
link |
or fine to knock, or don't knock at all.
link |
I've used a different policy throughout the years.
link |
I am somebody who works pretty hard
link |
to control my time and focus.
link |
But of course, as a laboratory director,
link |
I have people coming by and who want to talk about things.
link |
And of course, we have phones and we have computers
link |
and people's opportunity to reach us.
link |
Interruptions really are deadly
link |
to our ability to generate focus.
link |
And it's not just about the distraction that occurs
link |
of say a minute or two minutes or five minutes
link |
when we were interrupted.
link |
It's also about the additional time
link |
to get those brain circuits re-engaged to a mode of focus.
link |
So it's really kind of a double whammy.
link |
Now, none of us, including myself,
link |
want to be harsh or cruel or shut off from the world.
link |
And oftentimes interruptions bring incredible insights
link |
and people are providing support
link |
and very useful things that are essential to my workday
link |
and presumably to your workday and school day as well.
link |
But there's a simple method that I learned
link |
from my graduate advisor that works very, very well.
link |
Again, no peer-reviewed data to support it.
link |
This is just my experience.
link |
But this is somebody who had immense powers of focus,
link |
had a very, very demanding life, a long commute,
link |
two children, extensive laboratory, et cetera.
link |
And what she would do was if I came by and asked a question
link |
or if anyone came by and asked a question,
link |
she would acknowledge their presence
link |
but would not shift her body toward them.
link |
So she purposely did not position her computer
link |
facing the door, which I think is a deadly,
link |
or I should say deadly to focus way
link |
of positioning your workspace.
link |
So her computer was facing the wall.
link |
The door was perpendicular to that.
link |
And I would come by and I say, I have a question.
link |
And she would say, yes.
link |
So she would acknowledge my presence,
link |
but she wouldn't actually orient her body toward me,
link |
which told me that this conversation
link |
was not going to last very long.
link |
And no matter how long I stood there or what I asked,
link |
she would never orient toward me,
link |
which generally kept these conversations very, very short.
link |
We had other designated meetings
link |
where we would be face-to-face.
link |
The other approach, which I confess colleagues of mine
link |
have used before, not necessarily at Stanford,
link |
but elsewhere is to simply say no
link |
to everything that somebody requests or comes by.
link |
So if someone would knock on the door,
link |
they would just shout no through the door.
link |
Or if someone would say, can I bother you for a second?
link |
They would say no.
link |
Or if someone would say, I have something I want to tell you,
link |
they would just say no, and they would just continue
link |
doing this until the person went away.
link |
That was actually very effective.
link |
These were some of the most productive people I know,
link |
not always the kindest people,
link |
but some of them were very kind.
link |
The other approach that I've seen,
link |
and actually this is an approach that was used
link |
by someone who has been a guest on the Huberman Lab Podcast,
link |
someone who's immensely productive, was that he,
link |
so I'm constraining who this might be by saying he,
link |
he actually, despite having the option
link |
to have a very large office,
link |
would place himself in a workspace
link |
that was literally a coat closet,
link |
cleared out with a desk, small lamp, completely dark.
link |
So this violates everything that I've talked about before
link |
or prior to this, everything about high ceilings,
link |
bright light, et cetera, and would work, still works,
link |
underneath a desk lamp in a completely dark closet,
link |
minimal ventilation.
link |
This is my definition of hell,
link |
and yet is one of the most productive people on the planet.
link |
Also very, very hard to find.
link |
I actually know where his closet is.
link |
It turns out he has several of them that he migrates from
link |
in order to avoid distractions.
link |
So I mentioned these as kind of extremes.
link |
I think that most of us exist on the other extreme,
link |
and that's why I mention it,
link |
which is that most of us like some social engagement
link |
and kind of welcome or at least set our work environment
link |
in a way that welcomes interruption,
link |
and we have to be very, very careful about this.
link |
Now in the digital realm,
link |
I already mentioned a few of the things that we can do
link |
as practical tools to limit interruptions.
link |
One is to use the program freedom.
link |
The other would be to simply turn off the wifi.
link |
If you do need to be online and navigating,
link |
you're doing research of any kind,
link |
that's not going to be possible.
link |
Turning off one's phone.
link |
I've at times put my phone on airplane mode.
link |
If that didn't work, I've locked it in a safe.
link |
I've done that. I've left it in the car outside.
link |
It all depends on one's levels of self-discipline,
link |
which as you probably know from your own experience
link |
tends to kind of wax and wane.
link |
Sometimes we are better at avoiding these distractions
link |
If you find yourself in a place where it's very hard
link |
to reduce those distractions,
link |
you may need to go to more elaborate lengths.
link |
I will say that a graduate student in my lab
link |
who was immensely productive and focused
link |
had the habit of coming in each day.
link |
She would take her phone,
link |
I don't know if she turned it on, off or not,
link |
and she would just place it in a door, excuse me,
link |
in a drawer, and would then go start doing experiments.
link |
We do experiments all day, attend courses,
link |
engage in discussions avidly with the rest of us,
link |
and then would take her phone out at the end of the day
link |
And I don't think that behavior was not correlated
link |
with her immense productivity.
link |
I think the ability to untether ourselves from the phone
link |
is going to be the way in which many of us
link |
are either going to succeed or fail in our various pursuits.
link |
I'm somebody who engages with the phone on a regular basis
link |
throughout the day for various reasons,
link |
but I do try and have large swaths of the day
link |
in which it's either on airplane mode
link |
or it's completely physically separated from me.
link |
And when I mean large swaths,
link |
I might do every other hour with the phone on airplane mode
link |
or even a two or three hour bout
link |
where I just am simply not engaged with the phone at all.
link |
So is it better to sit
link |
or is it better to stand when doing work,
link |
at least as it relates to focus and productivity?
link |
And the answer is both.
link |
There've been a number of systematic studies
link |
exploring what are called sit-stand desks.
link |
So these are desks that can be set to a height
link |
that makes standing the best practice,
link |
and then they can be lowered to a height
link |
that makes sitting the best practice
link |
or the easiest practice, I should say.
link |
And it turns out that just sitting is terrible for us, okay?
link |
And there's an enormous number of studies out there
link |
that point to the fact that people who sit for five or six
link |
or seven hours a day doing work have all sorts of issues
link |
related to sleep, neck pain, cognition suffers,
link |
the number of cardiovascular effects, even digestion.
link |
There may even actually be some almost pressure effects
link |
on the pelvic floor and things of that sort,
link |
depending on the chairs that one uses,
link |
but that people who stand are in a slightly better situation
link |
where many of those health metrics improve,
link |
but that people that do a combination of sitting
link |
and standing at the same desk throughout the day
link |
or move from one desk to another
link |
if they don't have a combination sit-stand desk,
link |
that that's going to be best.
link |
The good news is it's very easy to convert a sit desk
link |
into a stand desk.
link |
You can just stack some boxes.
link |
I've done this at times or stack books.
link |
There are also some pedestals and things
link |
that you can purchase if that's your preference
link |
in order to set your computer at a particular height.
link |
And of course there are desks that have motors
link |
and there are ones that have cranks
link |
and there are all sorts of variations,
link |
both in terms of the types and whether or not
link |
they have motors, as well as the cost to these things.
link |
So they can go from very low costs like placing boxes
link |
or books to create a standing desk
link |
to very high cost in some cases.
link |
Now, what's interesting if you look
link |
at the scientific literature is that people
link |
who decreased their sitting time by about half each day.
link |
So they took, let's say they were working
link |
for seven hours a day, three and a half hours of that day,
link |
they decide to stand.
link |
And it's not even clear that it matters
link |
that they do all those three hours in one bout
link |
or they divide that up into shorter bouts of a half an hour
link |
and then sit for half an hour, et cetera,
link |
alternating back and forth,
link |
showed incredibly significant effects
link |
on reduced neck and shoulder pain,
link |
increase in subjective health,
link |
vitality in work-related environments,
link |
and perhaps most importantly,
link |
for sake of today's discussion,
link |
improvement in cognitive conditioning
link |
and the ability to embrace new tasks
link |
and cognitive performance.
link |
There are several studies that if one wanted to explore,
link |
they could explore this in more detail.
link |
I'll put a link to this as well.
link |
The article that I'm referring to is called
link |
Effect of Workplace Sit-Stand Desk Intervention
link |
on Health and Productivity.
link |
And I like this paper because many of the papers out there
link |
focus on the effects of sit-stand desks on health
link |
in trying to get people to burn more calories,
link |
improve their posture, relieve neck pain,
link |
slumped over, et cetera, but not on productivity.
link |
And this particular paper focuses
link |
also on the metrics of productivity.
link |
It has its own study
link |
and also references a number of important studies.
link |
What does this mean for you and me?
link |
Well, I've long used a standing desk
link |
or some variation thereof.
link |
What this means is that we should probably spend
link |
about half of our work time standing
link |
and about half of it sitting,
link |
but not all sitting or not all standing.
link |
If you had to do all one or the other,
link |
standing is going to be better than sitting.
link |
What happens if we just stand?
link |
Well, that can also generate some postural issues
link |
in terms of stabilization and fatigue.
link |
I have a good friend who's in the movement
link |
and physical rehabilitation and physiology space.
link |
His name is Kelly Starrett.
link |
He's very impressive in all those domains.
link |
And he always says, you know,
link |
we weren't designed to sit all day,
link |
but we also weren't designed to stand all day.
link |
And I think that's true.
link |
If we were to look back at our species
link |
over tens or hundreds or thousands of years,
link |
we would find that indeed we did sit down.
link |
It wasn't that we were standing all day long.
link |
That said, most everybody, at least in the US,
link |
is not getting sufficient cardiovascular exercise
link |
or movement throughout the day.
link |
And standing at one's desk
link |
can improve some of those health metrics
link |
and again can improve productivity,
link |
probably because of those postural effects
link |
that I talked about earlier,
link |
that when we lie down,
link |
there tends to be less alertness in our brainstem,
link |
if you will, there's less activation
link |
of those brainstem circuits involved in alertness.
link |
And indeed the circuits that involve
link |
kind of a calming effect on the body get activated.
link |
And as we become upright, standing or sitting,
link |
but especially standing,
link |
then those brainstem circuits for alertness kick on,
link |
which are going to make it easier to remain focused.
link |
If you are going to start standing for half of your work
link |
time, you will notice that it takes a few days to adapt.
link |
You'll notice a lot of shifting from side to side.
link |
Definitely want to wear comfortable shoes.
link |
Some people do this on a wooden floor.
link |
Other people feel uncomfortable unless they're on carpet.
link |
You have to figure out what works for you,
link |
but it can take a little bit of time to adapt.
link |
I have to say after now about 10 years of working
link |
at a sit-stand desk,
link |
I find I can't sit for too long before I want to stand.
link |
And my standing bouts can be anywhere
link |
from 30 minutes to two hours,
link |
although two hours would be a little bit long.
link |
And then I catch myself kind of leaning on the desk
link |
So again, the idea is to stand,
link |
but not be leaning on the desk.
link |
Obviously, if you're typing or you're writing,
link |
there'll be some leaning involved,
link |
but that's what the literature support.
link |
There is also a literature on whether or not
link |
physical movement under your desk, meaning treadmilling,
link |
or in fact, there are now bicycles
link |
that allow people to pedal.
link |
It's kind of a unicycle like thing,
link |
although not a unicycle under the desk,
link |
can be beneficial for workplace performance.
link |
So let's take a look at what those data say.
link |
The study that I'm referring to has a first author,
link |
Frodsham, F-R-O-D-S-H-A-M, Frodsham et al.
link |
This is a research article published in PLOS One.
link |
And the title of the article is,
link |
Does Type of Active Workstation Matter?
link |
A Randomized Comparison of Cognitive
link |
and Typing Performance Between Rest, Cycling,
link |
and Treadmill Active Workstations.
link |
It's amazing that people do this science.
link |
I think it's great.
link |
Where else would we get peer reviewed data
link |
on these types of questions?
link |
First things first, there were no significant differences
link |
between cycling or treadmill workstations
link |
on any cognitive or typing outcomes.
link |
So it does not seem to matter whether or not
link |
people are treadmilling under the desk.
link |
So these would be stationary treadmills.
link |
It's like a little conveyor that people are walking on,
link |
sometimes very slowly.
link |
I'm guessing some people walk more quickly.
link |
The New Yorkers probably treadmill quicker.
link |
The Californians probably treadmill a little slower.
link |
I'm a Californian, so I can make that quote unquote joke.
link |
But nonetheless, there were no significant differences
link |
between that and a cycling station where people are sitting
link |
and pedaling as they type away or as they work
link |
or as they're on phone calls, et cetera.
link |
So it really doesn't seem to matter.
link |
So if you're going to embrace these active workstations,
link |
as they're called, just decide what you would prefer to use.
link |
It doesn't seem to matter in terms of outcomes.
link |
Now, this study involved looking at 137 young adults.
link |
They had multiple sessions where they at first completed
link |
cognitive and typing tests.
link |
These tests have different names and you're welcome
link |
to look those up if you like, as well as flanker tasks.
link |
So these are tasks of attention and things of that sort.
link |
And then they either engaged in treadmill or cycling.
link |
And then there was a comparison and the statistics were run.
link |
And basically what they found was there was a statistically
link |
significant improvement in attention and cognitive control
link |
scores during any kind of active session,
link |
as opposed to just a mere seated session.
link |
Okay, so they compared seated to cycling to treadmilling.
link |
However, verbal memory scores actually got worse
link |
during active sessions.
link |
So I'll repeat that.
link |
Treadmilling or the cycling workstations improved attention
link |
and cognitive control scores as compared to people
link |
that were just seated and working.
link |
However, verbal memory scores got worse
link |
during the active sessions.
link |
And again, just to repeat, there was no difference
link |
between cycling and treadmill workstations.
link |
So this is interesting.
link |
I suggest that as the authors say that active workstations,
link |
whether walking or cycling are not only useful
link |
to improve caloric output and physical activity,
link |
circulation, and so on, but particularly when completing
link |
tasks like cognitive tasks or tasks that require focus
link |
that do not require verbal memory recall.
link |
Now, why verbal memory recall was negatively impacted,
link |
Could be because people were breathing a little bit harder.
link |
It could be that there's something about walking
link |
and talking that seems incompatible in the nervous system,
link |
although I'm not aware of that.
link |
I know a number of people who can walk
link |
and talk at the same time.
link |
But if you are going to explore these treadmills
link |
or you're going to explore these cycling stations,
link |
you probably wouldn't want to do that for highly verbal
link |
work, maybe more for mathematical work or for analytic work
link |
or even creative work, but anything that involves
link |
very precise or detailed verbal recall,
link |
sitting or standing seems to be the better option.
link |
And if you're wondering why cycling or treadmilling
link |
would enhance various aspects of cognition,
link |
I've talked before about this,
link |
but anytime we are generating forward movement
link |
through our own actions, our own efforts,
link |
typically if we are outside, we're not on a treadmill
link |
or we're on a bicycle or we're running
link |
or even on a motorcycle or in a car,
link |
we have what's called optic flow.
link |
And that optic flow is known to quiet certain areas
link |
of the brain that are associated with vigilance
link |
This is the basis of things like EMDR,
link |
eye movement to sensitization reprocessing.
link |
However, the mere act of engaging what are called
link |
our central pattern generators,
link |
the neurons in our brainstem and in our spinal cord
link |
that engage repetitive movements also can reduce
link |
some of the areas of the brain that are associated
link |
with anxiety and vigilance.
link |
So one, pure speculation,
link |
but nonetheless grounded speculation would be that
link |
treadmilling or cycling at a desk would reduce anxiety
link |
that would allow performance to improve.
link |
The other, what I think is more likely explanation
link |
is that anytime we are in ambulation,
link |
we recruit the release of neuromodulators
link |
like epinephrine, dopamine, and things of that sort
link |
that further increase overall levels of alertness.
link |
I think that's the more likely explanation
link |
because it's hard to imagine how just a reduction
link |
in anxiety could lead to these improvements in cognition
link |
Whereas the subjects in the study I just mentioned
link |
on average experienced an increase in cognitive performance
link |
merely by movement, okay?
link |
And this does not include any optic flow
link |
because it's stationary, the treadmill
link |
or the cycle is stationary.
link |
And so we can rule out that optic flow.
link |
And that points to the idea that when we are in movement,
link |
we recruit neuromodulators associated
link |
with the so-called reticular activating system,
link |
the striatal system and so forth that would place the brain
link |
into some pattern, we don't know,
link |
we only can speculate some pattern,
link |
perhaps it's gamma waves or some other wave pattern
link |
that would engage heightened levels of focus and attention.
link |
Nonetheless, treadmilling, cycling at a desk
link |
does improve cognition.
link |
So we've been discussing workspace optimization
link |
with the understanding that you're not always going to work
link |
in the same place every day.
link |
What I've tried to do is give you a set
link |
of high potency tools that can improve your focus
link |
and cognition and to place that within a framework
link |
for particular kinds of work.
link |
Let's just review some of the basic elements
link |
of what we've covered today.
link |
First of all, in the first part of your day,
link |
that zero to nine hours after waking,
link |
you want bright lights, especially overhead lights,
link |
as bright as you can keep them
link |
without feeling uncomfortable
link |
or certainly not without feeling any pain in your eyes
link |
or elsewhere in your body.
link |
Bright lights make for the maximum state of alertness.
link |
In addition, try and place whatever it is
link |
that you're focusing on directly in front of you,
link |
but not have it extend too far out
link |
to either side of your eyes.
link |
Try and generate a fairly restricted visual window,
link |
And if you can, try and place whatever it is
link |
you're focusing on at least at nose level or above.
link |
It might take some engineering or some ingenuity
link |
and creativity in order to figure out how to do that,
link |
but that's going to be most beneficial.
link |
Try and avoid reclining, try and avoid sitting,
link |
try and stand for at least half of your workday.
link |
That's a good goal.
link |
And it may take some time to work up to that goal.
link |
In addition, if you're going to use sound as a stimulus
link |
for increasing focus and alertness,
link |
try and avoid exposure to white noise,
link |
pink noise or brown noise for extended periods of time
link |
for more than an hour or so.
link |
That might actually be damaging to the auditory system.
link |
And at the very least is kind of stressful,
link |
even though you might not notice it,
link |
it's kind of a background level of anxiety and stress
link |
that is not going to serve you well.
link |
Rather, if you're going to pursue
link |
particular types of sound frequencies,
link |
consider using 40 Hertz binaural beats, not monaural beats,
link |
but 40 Hertz binaural beats
link |
done during a particular work bout
link |
or for 30 minutes prior to that work bout.
link |
I would not rely on binaural beats all the time.
link |
Every day I think that could cause them
link |
to lose their potency
link |
just because of the way the auditory system attenuates.
link |
And actually you've experienced that attenuation.
link |
The mere fact that you can go into an environment
link |
where there's an air conditioner blowing,
link |
blowing, blowing, and then it stops
link |
and you feel that relaxation,
link |
but you weren't thinking about the air conditioner before,
link |
tells you that your auditory system
link |
had kind of attenuated to it
link |
and yet it was still impacting your system.
link |
You were sensing it, we would say, but not perceiving it.
link |
There are other things that you can do
link |
to improve your workspace optimization,
link |
such as standing for half the day, as I mentioned before,
link |
but if you're interested in this
link |
or you feel like it suits you,
link |
to treadmill, find a stationary treadmill
link |
that you can walk on.
link |
I've never tried this before.
link |
Maybe after this episode,
link |
given what I've read in the peer-reviewed research,
link |
and it's pretty compelling,
link |
that treadmilling seems like an interesting way
link |
to increase alertness and cognitive performance.
link |
I'm not sure that I would do the cycling method
link |
because I can't imagine just cycling and typing
link |
That sort of feels like I actually can do
link |
the rub your tummy, top of your head kind of thing,
link |
but it still feels like a little bit
link |
of a sort of a cognitive motor collision for me
link |
for whatever reason, but that's just my bias.
link |
I do know how to ride a bicycle,
link |
but anyway, you pick your preference.
link |
Some other things that you could do
link |
in order to improve your workplace performance
link |
would be to consider the cathedral effect.
link |
If you're going to do analytic work
link |
for any part of the day, phase one or phase two,
link |
as I described them, but really in any time of day,
link |
that detailed analytic work
link |
for which there is a correct answer,
link |
learning scales of music, learning mathematics,
link |
trying to figure out the solution to a problem
link |
where there is indeed a solution.
link |
It could be an interpersonal problem as well.
link |
Then try and get into an environment
link |
with a relatively low ceiling.
link |
If you don't have access to a low ceiling environment,
link |
you might consider using a brimmed hat or even a hoodie,
link |
or even just facing down,
link |
or even putting your hand above your eyes,
link |
as you will, at the level of your eyebrows.
link |
In other words, lower the ceiling.
link |
That's the basis of the cathedral effects
link |
on analytic performance.
link |
In contrast, if you're interested in doing brainstorming,
link |
creative work, you're writing new things,
link |
you're creating new things of any kind, artwork,
link |
consider getting into a high ceiling
link |
or no ceiling environment,
link |
or if you're wearing a brimmed hat
link |
or you're wearing a hoodie, maybe peel that back.
link |
Again, the data within the peer-reviewed literature
link |
are there to support these sorts of practices.
link |
And if you'd like to start layering these protocols,
link |
by all means, please do that.
link |
There's no reason why you couldn't do one
link |
or just two of these protocols.
link |
There's no reason why, for instance,
link |
you couldn't use binaural beats
link |
and try and get into a low ceiling environment
link |
to do detailed work a couple of times a week,
link |
but you could also employ all of these.
link |
Now, of course, there are an enormous number
link |
of other things that you can do
link |
to improve work performance and productivity.
link |
And I've talked about those in previous episodes,
link |
in particular, in the episode on focus
link |
and the episode on motivation.
link |
There are supplements you can take
link |
that can increase dopamine, for instance.
link |
There are tools that you can use to increase your focus.
link |
For instance, focusing your visual attention
link |
on one location for 30 to 60 seconds
link |
prior to entering a focused work bout.
link |
This has been shown again and again
link |
through work from Emily Balsettis at NYU.
link |
In the episode on focus, I cited a number of studies
link |
where this has actually been tested and deployed
link |
in various schools, having kids do a focus task
link |
where they look at a particular visual target
link |
for 30 to 60 seconds, then doing some mathematics
link |
and seeing pretty impressive improvement
link |
in focus and attention,
link |
even in people that have attention deficit
link |
hyperactivity disorder and so on.
link |
So there's no reason why you can't and shouldn't combine
link |
the sort of practical workspace optimization solutions
link |
that we talked about today
link |
with the kind of neural optimization solutions
link |
that we talked about in the episode on focus
link |
and the episode on ADHD and the episode on motivation.
link |
By all means, layer those together.
link |
That's how you're going to achieve the optimal focus bouts.
link |
That's how you're going to achieve
link |
the optimal creativity bouts.
link |
I do want to acknowledge again,
link |
the fact that I realize people are showing up
link |
to this challenge of workspace optimization
link |
with different budgets, with different constraints.
link |
Some people have kids at homes.
link |
There are a lot of interruptions.
link |
Some people do not, nonetheless,
link |
I hope that the information I was able to provide today
link |
will allow you to make subtle
link |
or maybe even drastic rearrangements
link |
in your workspace environment.
link |
There's one other point related to that
link |
that I did not cover and that I'd like to cover just briefly
link |
which is that there's nothing to say
link |
that you have to always work
link |
in the same location all the time.
link |
You can move from house to cafe.
link |
If that works for you, you can move from office to home.
link |
You can also move from different locations within your home.
link |
I have a brief anecdote about this.
link |
I used to attend a lot of scientific meetings
link |
when a lot of scientific meetings were in person
link |
and there were always a few individuals
link |
that seemed to stay engaged
link |
throughout these very long meetings.
link |
We're talking seven, eight hour days,
link |
sometimes evening sessions,
link |
and sometimes these meetings would go on
link |
for four or five or even six days.
link |
These were long meetings
link |
and the quality of talks varied tremendously.
link |
And I always noticed the individuals
link |
that managed to stay engaged and awake
link |
for the entire meeting.
link |
And I noticed that people
link |
that could maintain high levels of alertness
link |
in this one conference room had a habit
link |
of moving to a different seat after each session,
link |
sometimes even between talks.
link |
And I actually discussed this
link |
with one of my colleagues who was doing this.
link |
I said, is this conscious?
link |
Are you always moving from place to place?
link |
And they said, yeah, if I just stay in one place
link |
and I just look from this one particular visual angle
link |
at the screen, I find after one or two talks,
link |
regardless of how interesting the talks are,
link |
that I start to kind of drift, my mind isn't as engaged
link |
and indeed sometimes can fall asleep.
link |
And so I started this practice of moving from space to space
link |
or I should say seat to seat within an auditorium
link |
and it works quite well.
link |
And I think it works quite well because again,
link |
of the relationship between our visual system driving
link |
the majority of our cognition, right?
link |
Our visual system drives our thinking
link |
and that novel visual environments
link |
are going to lend themselves
link |
to heightened levels of alertness.
link |
You don't want things to be so novel and scary
link |
or threatening or anxiety provoking or loud
link |
that they draw your attention away from your work.
link |
But I think this is part of the reason why turning on music
link |
or moving to an office or a cafe or an outdoor environment
link |
from an indoor environment or vice versa,
link |
maybe even within a single day,
link |
can bring about more heightened levels of productivity.
link |
I'd also like to acknowledge that what I covered today
link |
is most certainly not exhaustive for all the types
link |
of workspace optimization tools that one could create.
link |
For that reason, I'd love for you to suggest
link |
any of your workspace optimization tools
link |
that you found useful.
link |
Please put those in the comment section on YouTube.
link |
That would be the best place
link |
then other people can see them.
link |
Also read through those and perhaps in a future episode,
link |
I'll call about some of the ones that I've tried
link |
on the basis of your suggestions.
link |
If you're learning from and or enjoying this podcast,
link |
please subscribe to our YouTube channel.
link |
That's a terrific zero cost way to support us.
link |
you can put comments in the comment section.
link |
So give us feedback.
link |
You can make suggestions for future guests
link |
that you'd like us to host on the Huberman Lab Podcast.
link |
And in general, you can ask questions.
link |
We do eventually read all the comments
link |
and they do influence our future content.
link |
Please also subscribe on Apple and or Spotify.
link |
And on Apple, you have the opportunity
link |
to leave us up to a five star review.
link |
Please also check out the sponsors mentioned
link |
at the beginning of this podcast episode.
link |
That's the best way to support the podcast.
link |
We also have a Patreon, it's patreon.com slash Andrew Huberman
link |
and there you can support the podcast
link |
at any level that you like.
link |
We also have an Instagram and a Twitter account.
link |
It's Huberman Lab and there I teach neuroscience
link |
and neuroscience related tools.
link |
Oftentimes that information and those tools overlap
link |
with themes on the podcast,
link |
but sometimes they are distinct from themes
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and topics covered on the podcast.
link |
So please follow us on Instagram and Twitter.
link |
This episode, we didn't talk too much about supplements,
link |
but on many previous episodes of the Huberman Lab Podcast,
link |
we talk about supplementation.
link |
And while supplementation isn't required
link |
or great for everybody,
link |
some people do derive tremendous benefit from supplements.
link |
We talk about supplements for focus, for sleep,
link |
for creativity, all sorts of things.
link |
If you'd like to see the supplements that I take,
link |
you can go to Thorne, that's thorne.com
link |
slash the letter U slash Huberman.
link |
There you can see the supplements that I take,
link |
you can get 20% off those supplements.
link |
And if you navigate deeper into the Thorne site
link |
through that portal, Thorne, thorne.com
link |
slash the letter U slash Huberman,
link |
you can also get 20% off any of the other supplements
link |
that Thorne makes.
link |
The reason we partnered with Thorne
link |
is because one of the major issues
link |
in the supplement industry
link |
is that many of the supplements out there
link |
don't contain sufficient quantity
link |
or they contain too much of a given supplement
link |
and the quality of the ingredients can vary tremendously.
link |
With Thorne supplements, there's immense stringency
link |
in terms of the quality of the ingredients
link |
and the precision of the amounts of those ingredients
link |
that they include in each product.
link |
Once again, thank you for joining me for this discussion
link |
about the science and peer-reviewed literature
link |
on workspace optimization.
link |
I hope some, if not all of the tools
link |
will be beneficial for you.
link |
And as always, thank you for your interest in science.
link |
And as always, thank you for your interest in science.