Optimizing Workspace for Productivity, Focus, & Creativity

00:00:00.000 | - Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast,

00:00:02.280 | where we discuss science and science-based tools

00:00:04.900 | for everyday life.

00:00:05.900 | I'm Andrew Huberman,

00:00:10.140 | and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology

00:00:12.900 | at Stanford School of Medicine.

00:00:14.740 | Today, we're going to talk all about

00:00:16.220 | how to optimize your workspace for maximum productivity.

00:00:19.840 | Indeed, that means to heighten levels of focus,

00:00:22.780 | to increase levels of creativity,

00:00:25.080 | to improve your ability to task switch.

00:00:27.500 | And this could be for, say, go school or for work,

00:00:29.980 | creative endeavors, personal endeavors.

00:00:32.240 | This really extends to everybody.

00:00:34.080 | Most often, when we hear about how to focus

00:00:36.240 | or how to get the most out of our work sessions,

00:00:39.020 | we hear about the biology and the psychology of that.

00:00:42.480 | We hear about dopamine, and we hear about serotonin,

00:00:44.920 | and we hear about caffeine.

00:00:46.380 | And indeed, those are topics that I've covered a lot

00:00:48.420 | on the Huberman Lab Podcast.

00:00:50.100 | Today, we will touch on each of those,

00:00:51.740 | but we are mainly going to focus on

00:00:53.580 | how we arrange our physical environment,

00:00:56.100 | and indeed, how we arrange ourselves

00:00:58.040 | in that physical environment

00:00:59.540 | in order to bring out the best in our neurobiology.

00:01:02.700 | That is, how to put ourselves into a heightened state

00:01:05.300 | of focus by virtue of things as simple as

00:01:07.820 | where we place our screen relative to our eyes

00:01:10.620 | at a given time of day.

00:01:11.900 | Believe it or not, there's excellent research on this,

00:01:14.100 | and there's excellent research, for instance,

00:01:15.900 | on whether or not you should or should not listen to music,

00:01:18.260 | whether or not you should use things like binaural beats,

00:01:21.020 | and if so, what frequency of binaural beats.

00:01:23.300 | We are going to cover all of that.

00:01:24.820 | And by the end, you will have a checklist of things

00:01:27.080 | that you can do to optimize your workspace on any budget.

00:01:31.200 | I will mention various products and apps

00:01:32.980 | that some of you might find useful

00:01:34.420 | for optimizing your workspace,

00:01:36.500 | but I want to emphasize at the outset

00:01:38.100 | that none of those that I mentioned

00:01:40.460 | are any products or apps

00:01:41.940 | that we have a financial relationship to.

00:01:43.900 | And more importantly, you don't need them.

00:01:46.340 | I'm going to explain how, for zero cost,

00:01:49.140 | you can arrange your workspace in ways

00:01:51.060 | that makes you maximally productive, maximally focused,

00:01:54.340 | and allows you to adapt your workspace

00:01:56.620 | to different environments, whether or not you're traveling,

00:01:58.560 | working with others, working alone, et cetera.

00:02:01.140 | Just to give you a little hint of where we are going,

00:02:03.380 | I will mention a zero cost app

00:02:05.980 | that will deliver binaural beats at a particular frequency

00:02:09.340 | that peer-reviewed research has shown

00:02:11.480 | can enhance certain types of learning and memory.

00:02:13.880 | However, peer-reviewed research also shows

00:02:16.420 | that it can diminish performance in other types of tasks.

00:02:19.980 | So stay tuned, we'll go into all the details

00:02:22.060 | so that you can optimize your workspace

00:02:24.220 | for zero cost and get the most out of your efforts

00:02:26.660 | and endeavors.

00:02:27.900 | Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast

00:02:30.480 | is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford.

00:02:33.280 | It is, however, part of my desire and effort

00:02:35.340 | to bring zero cost to consumer information about science

00:02:37.920 | and science-related tools to the general public.

00:02:40.500 | In keeping with that theme,

00:02:41.540 | I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast.

00:02:44.460 | Our first sponsor is Element.

00:02:46.580 | Element is an electrolyte drink

00:02:48.460 | that has everything you need

00:02:50.340 | and none of the things you don't.

00:02:51.700 | And when we say everything you need,

00:02:53.720 | the main one is salt.

00:02:55.940 | Now, salt, AKA sodium, has kind of a bad rap.

00:02:59.760 | We've all heard that too much salt is bad for us.

00:03:02.340 | However, if you look into the research on salt,

00:03:05.080 | and in fact, if you go to one of the highest level

00:03:08.260 | peer-reviewed scientific publications, Science Magazine,

00:03:11.520 | you can find a review article in Science some years ago

00:03:14.780 | that shows that most of what we think and understand

00:03:17.020 | about the science of salt is completely wrong.

00:03:19.400 | And in fact, salt does a number of things

00:03:21.220 | that's extremely important.

00:03:22.400 | For instance, our neurons,

00:03:24.540 | which signal to one another through electricity

00:03:26.820 | and through chemical signaling,

00:03:28.260 | critically rely on having enough sodium

00:03:31.200 | in order to generate what we call action potentials

00:03:33.340 | or electrical firing of neurons.

00:03:34.900 | If your sodium levels are too low,

00:03:36.360 | your neurons simply won't work.

00:03:38.340 | One of the main deficits from being dehydrated

00:03:41.160 | is lack of sodium, not just lack of water.

00:03:44.540 | Getting sufficient sodium does a number of things

00:03:46.360 | that's very important.

00:03:47.380 | It can raise your blood volume.

00:03:48.860 | It can help you retain water in a healthy way,

00:03:50.780 | not excess amounts.

00:03:51.920 | It allows neurons to fire for sake of thinking,

00:03:54.260 | for sake of athletic performance and so on.

00:03:56.540 | Other electrolytes that are in Element

00:03:58.340 | are things like magnesium and potassium,

00:04:00.400 | which are also essential for neuronal function

00:04:02.460 | and indeed all organ function.

00:04:04.920 | Element has a lot of salt, some magnesium and some potassium.

00:04:08.460 | So unless you're somebody

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00:04:11.040 | elevating your level of salt intake can often be beneficial.

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00:04:17.600 | Element contains a science-backed electrolyte ratio

00:04:20.340 | of 1,000 milligrams, that's one gram of sodium,

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00:04:36.760 | So some people will put it in eight ounces of water.

00:04:38.640 | I like mine in about 16 ounces of water

00:04:40.380 | and I'll drink that before and after exercise.

00:04:42.500 | And I usually will have another one throughout the day,

00:04:44.460 | just sip on it as I'm doing work and so forth.

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00:07:55.520 | Let's talk about workspace optimization.

00:07:58.040 | This is a topic that's intrigued me for a very long time

00:08:01.460 | because my undergraduate advisor, my graduate advisor,

00:08:05.640 | and my postdoc advisor had many things in common,

00:08:09.020 | including being great scientists,

00:08:10.760 | being kind people and terrific mentors,

00:08:12.900 | but they had another thing in common

00:08:14.260 | which always perplexed me,

00:08:15.800 | which is that their offices were a complete disaster.

00:08:19.160 | They had mountains of books, mountains of papers,

00:08:22.520 | mountains of all sorts of stuff,

00:08:24.220 | and yet all of them were extremely productive

00:08:27.400 | and could remain extremely focused

00:08:29.240 | in that incredibly cluttered environment.

00:08:31.720 | Now, I'm somebody who doesn't like clutter.

00:08:33.380 | I find it very hard to focus in cluttered environments.

00:08:36.080 | And indeed there's tremendous variation among people

00:08:39.040 | as to whether or not they can remain focused

00:08:40.780 | or whether or not they struggle to focus

00:08:42.160 | in physically cluttered environments.

00:08:44.540 | There's no right or wrong to this,

00:08:46.220 | but the question we should ask ourselves is,

00:08:47.580 | why were they all able to be so focused?

00:08:50.180 | And it turns out that the reason

00:08:52.260 | they were able to be so focused

00:08:53.500 | is that they all captured one single

00:08:56.560 | and yet fundamental variable of workspace optimization.

00:09:00.140 | And we'll talk about what that variable is.

00:09:02.260 | In fact, we're going to talk about

00:09:03.780 | what all the variables of optimizing a workspace are.

00:09:06.620 | Things like vision, things like light,

00:09:09.420 | things like noise in the room,

00:09:10.800 | whether or not you listen to music or not,

00:09:12.380 | whether or not you use noise canceling headphones or not.

00:09:15.860 | We're going to talk about all of that.

00:09:17.880 | And we're going to do that in a way

00:09:20.020 | that you can optimize your workspace

00:09:21.660 | regardless of whether or not you are at home,

00:09:23.680 | whether or not you're on the road, et cetera.

00:09:25.800 | Because the last thing I would ever want to do

00:09:28.220 | is to create a situation where you find

00:09:30.620 | the optimal workspace and then you are a slave

00:09:33.380 | to that optimal workspace.

00:09:34.600 | That's just not the way the world works.

00:09:36.080 | What you want to do, or my goal for you rather,

00:09:38.920 | is that you will have a short checklist of things

00:09:40.820 | that you can look to anytime you sit down to do work.

00:09:43.860 | And you can think about the underlying variables

00:09:46.300 | that impact your brain and your body

00:09:48.460 | and allow your brain and body to get into the optimal state

00:09:51.340 | in order to learn, in order to be productive,

00:09:54.180 | and the need to move through your workouts

00:09:56.220 | in a very relaxed and pleasureful way

00:09:58.320 | while maintaining focus and while pursuing

00:10:00.920 | any of the number of things that you're doing.

00:10:02.700 | The first variable we want to think about

00:10:04.860 | in terms of workspace optimization is vision and light.

00:10:09.240 | Now, on a previous episode of the Huberman Lab Podcast

00:10:11.360 | devoted all to habits, I talked about the importance

00:10:14.560 | of dividing your 24 hour day into three different phases.

00:10:18.120 | And for those of you that haven't heard that episode,

00:10:20.320 | I'm just going to briefly summarize what I described.

00:10:23.380 | From the time you wake up in the morning

00:10:26.300 | until about six or seven or eight,

00:10:28.880 | sometimes nine hours later, your brain is in a unique state.

00:10:32.160 | It is in a state of high levels of dopamine,

00:10:35.220 | a neuromodulator, and high levels of epinephrine,

00:10:38.120 | as well as hormones like cortisol and so forth.

00:10:40.820 | Without going into the biology of those things,

00:10:43.100 | they set your brain into a state of high alertness.

00:10:45.920 | And this is true whether or not you indulge

00:10:48.120 | in caffeine or not.

00:10:49.720 | I know some of you say,

00:10:50.560 | oh, I really don't wake up until the afternoon.

00:10:52.440 | I'm much more alert and focused in the afternoon.

00:10:54.260 | We will talk about that phase of the 24 hour day

00:10:57.400 | in a moment.

00:10:58.360 | But that early part of the day is a time of day

00:11:01.120 | in which for sake of workspace optimization,

00:11:04.040 | being in a brightly lit environment can lend itself

00:11:08.520 | to optimal work throughout the day,

00:11:11.720 | not just during that early phase.

00:11:13.600 | And so while on many episodes of this podcast,

00:11:16.440 | I've also emphasized the importance

00:11:17.900 | of getting morning sunlight in your eyes

00:11:19.620 | within 30 to 60 minutes of waking.

00:11:22.740 | Not as often, but now and again,

00:11:24.560 | I will also mention that it's important

00:11:26.500 | to light your daytime environment

00:11:29.120 | as brightly as you safely can.

00:11:31.520 | So if you are going to be doing work in this early,

00:11:34.240 | what I call phase one portion of your day,

00:11:36.640 | you want to have as much light

00:11:38.200 | and indeed as much overhead light shining on you

00:11:41.200 | as safely possible.

00:11:42.840 | Now, of course, you don't want it so bright

00:11:44.600 | that it's glaring and you have to squint, et cetera,

00:11:47.200 | but you want as much light as is safely possible.

00:11:50.040 | And you can do that a couple of simple ways.

00:11:52.000 | One is if you do own or you're in an environment

00:11:55.520 | where you have overhead lights,

00:11:56.620 | turn on those overhead lights.

00:11:58.520 | What's special about overhead lights for setting alertness

00:12:01.780 | is that the neurons in our eyes,

00:12:03.840 | which are called melanopsin ganglion cells,

00:12:05.820 | that's the fancy name, melanopsin ganglion cells

00:12:09.160 | are mainly enriched in the lower half of our retinas,

00:12:12.780 | in our eyes and view the upper visual field.

00:12:15.740 | Those neurons send little wires

00:12:17.720 | to an area of our hypothalamus

00:12:19.080 | right above the roof of our mouth

00:12:20.680 | that creates a state of alertness.

00:12:23.280 | Now, early in the day, we want to be as alert as possible.

00:12:26.200 | And this phase one of our circadian cycle

00:12:28.400 | is when we are best at doing analytic detail type work.

00:12:32.400 | So we're going to go into other aspects

00:12:33.740 | of workspace optimization that are important for phase one.

00:12:36.840 | But during phase one, again,

00:12:38.960 | within zero to about eight or nine hours after waking,

00:12:41.760 | bright lights in your environment,

00:12:43.480 | in particular overhead lights are going to facilitate focus.

00:12:46.600 | They're going to facilitate further release

00:12:48.740 | of things like dopamine and norepinephrine

00:12:51.160 | and healthy amounts of cortisol.

00:12:52.920 | And we want that to happen early in the day

00:12:55.020 | for a variety of reasons.

00:12:56.420 | For instance, we don't want that cortisol peak

00:12:58.140 | to happen too late in the day.

00:13:00.020 | That's actually associated with depression and insomnia

00:13:02.240 | and a number of things that we just don't want.

00:13:04.340 | So one of the things that I've done for my workspace

00:13:06.940 | is to make sure that when I wake up in the morning,

00:13:09.080 | I do go get my sunlight.

00:13:10.620 | If the sun isn't out,

00:13:11.620 | I turn on as many bright artificial lights

00:13:13.620 | as I can manage or tolerate,

00:13:15.260 | and then I go get my sunlight exposure.

00:13:17.340 | But once I set out to do some work

00:13:19.460 | that all the overhead lights in that room are on,

00:13:21.880 | as well as lights in front of me.

00:13:24.100 | And that's, again, to stimulate heightened levels of focus

00:13:27.180 | and further release of these neuromodulators

00:13:29.260 | that I mentioned before,

00:13:30.100 | dopamine, norepinephrine, and epinephrine.

00:13:32.920 | Now, the way that one could do that

00:13:34.260 | could be a very low cost way of having, for instance,

00:13:36.380 | a desk lamp and those overhead lights.

00:13:38.520 | If you're somebody that wants to take this

00:13:40.500 | to the next level, you can purchase a ring light,

00:13:43.500 | which is, I think those are mainly made

00:13:45.180 | for people doing selfie-type videos,

00:13:47.920 | for Instagram posts and things of that sort.

00:13:49.780 | Ring lights can be pretty cost-effective,

00:13:52.820 | and yet they're very bright,

00:13:53.940 | and they have the sort of bright blue light

00:13:55.840 | that is going to optimally stimulate

00:13:57.960 | those melanopsin ganglion cells.

00:13:59.900 | So some people I know will have a blue light

00:14:02.160 | or a bright LED on their desk in front of them.

00:14:04.700 | And indeed, I have one of these.

00:14:05.780 | I don't use a ring light, I use a light pad.

00:14:08.480 | The particular light pad I use, I bought on Amazon.

00:14:11.420 | I can mention the brand,

00:14:13.260 | but again, I have no financial affiliation to them.

00:14:15.300 | This is the Artograph light pad.

00:14:17.340 | It's designed for drawing, and it says on it, "930 lux."

00:14:22.060 | Lux is just a measure of brightness.

00:14:24.160 | So I place that on the desk in front of me,

00:14:26.060 | and I turn it on essentially

00:14:27.620 | throughout this phase one of the day.

00:14:29.380 | Even if I walk away from the desk, I tend to keep it on.

00:14:31.440 | It doesn't consume that much energy.

00:14:32.940 | And in that way, I'm constantly being bombarded with photons

00:14:36.040 | that keep my levels of alertness up,

00:14:38.020 | because the early part of the day

00:14:39.260 | is when I do the majority of that focused work.

00:14:41.700 | Again, you don't need the light pad.

00:14:43.200 | You can use a ring light,

00:14:44.100 | or you can simply use any kind of other lights

00:14:46.340 | that you might happen to have, artificial lights.

00:14:48.520 | For those of you that can place your desk near a window,

00:14:52.120 | and even better to open the window,

00:14:53.840 | that would be really fantastic.

00:14:55.340 | I don't have access to that.

00:14:57.300 | Why would I say open the window?

00:14:58.860 | Well, it turns out that sunlight

00:15:00.160 | is going to be the best stimulus

00:15:01.900 | for waking up your brain and body

00:15:04.020 | through this melanopsin to hypothalamus system.

00:15:06.600 | And by looking at sunlight through a window,

00:15:09.100 | it's 50, five, zero times less effective

00:15:12.280 | than if that window were to be open,

00:15:13.980 | mostly because those windows filter out

00:15:15.860 | a lot of the wavelengths of blue light

00:15:17.560 | that are essential for stimulating the eyes

00:15:19.980 | and this wake-up signal.

00:15:21.700 | So all of this rests on the premise

00:15:23.460 | that we need to be alert in order to do our work,

00:15:26.160 | in particular, focused work.

00:15:27.360 | And I've talked about before in the habits episode,

00:15:29.300 | and I'm saying again now, that first phase of the day,

00:15:31.880 | that first seven or eight or nine hours of the day

00:15:34.600 | is really the time in which our neurochemistry is primed

00:15:38.580 | for getting the most amount of focused,

00:15:41.560 | kind of challenging work done

00:15:43.100 | where a lot of precision and detail is required.

00:15:45.340 | So you want to brightly light your work environment

00:15:47.820 | during that first phase.

00:15:49.500 | Again, from the time you wake up, try and get sunlight,

00:15:52.400 | but then even if you're going to get exercise

00:15:54.900 | or do other things,

00:15:55.740 | you want to get as much bright light in your eyes

00:15:57.100 | as you safely can,

00:15:58.260 | and then you want to light your work environment.

00:16:00.920 | Now in the afternoon, starting at about nine

00:16:03.580 | and continuing until about 16 hours after waking,

00:16:07.240 | you want to start dimming the lights in that environment.

00:16:10.240 | Now you don't want to make it dark

00:16:11.780 | because you don't want to get sleepy

00:16:12.900 | at two o'clock in the afternoon

00:16:14.140 | unless you're going to take a brief nap,

00:16:15.460 | which I do and is perfectly fine

00:16:16.960 | as long as it doesn't interfere with your nighttime sleep.

00:16:20.660 | But the idea is that in this so-called phase two

00:16:23.860 | of the 24 hour cycle,

00:16:25.520 | from about nine to 16 hours after waking,

00:16:28.960 | you want to bring the level of lights down a bit.

00:16:32.860 | And when I say down, I literally mean down.

00:16:34.900 | Having lights that are in front of you is fine,

00:16:37.660 | but overhead lights at that time are not going to be optimal

00:16:40.840 | for the sorts of neurochemical states

00:16:43.720 | that your brain wants to be in.

00:16:45.120 | The states that I'm referring to

00:16:47.080 | are a shift from the dopamine and norepinephrine

00:16:49.480 | that's highest early in the day,

00:16:51.220 | to increases in things like serotonin

00:16:53.600 | and other neuromodulators that put your brain

00:16:56.120 | into a state that's better for creative endeavors

00:16:59.000 | or for more abstract thinking.

00:17:00.900 | Now, as we'll soon see,

00:17:02.740 | there are other things you can do

00:17:04.040 | to improve creative thinking and abstract thinking.

00:17:06.640 | And in fact, there are things you can do

00:17:07.660 | to improve analytic thinking.

00:17:08.940 | We will talk about those.

00:17:10.080 | Things that are distinct from light,

00:17:11.460 | but right now we're just focusing on light.

00:17:13.260 | So what I recommend doing and what I personally do

00:17:15.980 | is I will turn off overhead lights in the afternoon.

00:17:18.780 | It's not completely dim, it's not completely dark,

00:17:21.200 | but I will start to reduce the amount of overhead light

00:17:24.040 | and just simply keep the light pad on

00:17:25.780 | and whatever other lamps I happen to be using.

00:17:28.420 | Now, one thing we haven't talked about is screen brightness.

00:17:31.340 | This is highly individual.

00:17:32.940 | People have different retinal sensitivities.

00:17:35.280 | What I mean by that is everybody differs

00:17:37.660 | in terms of how bright they can tolerate

00:17:40.200 | their visual environment and their screen.

00:17:42.480 | And whether or not you are sensitive to light or not

00:17:45.160 | will depend on a lot of factors.

00:17:46.420 | Some of it is eye color.

00:17:47.500 | Indeed, people with darker color eyes

00:17:49.540 | generally can tolerate more bright light than others.

00:17:52.940 | I have green eyes.

00:17:54.260 | I am very, very sensitive to light.

00:17:56.500 | If I'm outdoors at a cafe or something

00:17:58.340 | and the table has any kind of reflective properties

00:18:00.400 | and it's a sunny day,

00:18:01.780 | I can barely see the person across the table for me

00:18:04.380 | unless I'm wearing sunglasses.

00:18:06.300 | Some people, other members of my family, for instance,

00:18:09.080 | have dark brown eyes and can just sit there

00:18:11.100 | and have a conversation

00:18:12.260 | without the need for sunglasses at all.

00:18:14.600 | So there's tremendous variation there.

00:18:16.320 | One or the other isn't healthy or advantageous necessarily.

00:18:20.420 | Just understand that you never want to be in an environment

00:18:22.740 | where it's painful to maintain

00:18:25.320 | looking at whatever it is that you're looking at.

00:18:26.920 | If something's painful to look at,

00:18:28.160 | it could be damaging to your eyes.

00:18:29.420 | So you do want to protect your eyes.

00:18:31.420 | Now, in this second phase of the day,

00:18:34.300 | since most of us are working indoors,

00:18:35.900 | but even if you're working outdoors,

00:18:37.740 | you want to try and get the amount of light reduced overall,

00:18:41.580 | but in particular that overhead light.

00:18:43.340 | And you also want to start reducing the amount of blue light

00:18:46.260 | that you're being exposed to.

00:18:47.620 | So somewhere around four or 5 p.m.,

00:18:49.660 | which for me is about 12 hours after I've been awake

00:18:53.620 | or 14 hours after I've been awake,

00:18:55.500 | I will turn off that light pad

00:18:57.420 | and start to transition the lights in my environment

00:19:00.020 | to more yellows and reds.

00:19:02.060 | Now, I can't always do this.

00:19:03.220 | I have friends that actually have converted

00:19:05.060 | their entire homes from blue light early in the day

00:19:07.980 | to red light late in the day.

00:19:09.180 | That's really cool and fantastic.

00:19:10.740 | I haven't done that.

00:19:12.140 | There's a cost to doing that.

00:19:13.780 | And it is optimal in terms of optimizing productivity

00:19:17.140 | and sleep and so forth,

00:19:18.060 | but it's not feasible for a lot of people.

00:19:20.380 | But what I do is I simply switch to using yellow lamps.

00:19:24.060 | I will turn off that LED in the later afternoon again

00:19:26.680 | around four or 5 p.m.

00:19:28.180 | And I tend to wake up around 6 a.m. or so.

00:19:30.880 | I'll turn those off.

00:19:31.900 | And what I'll try and do also

00:19:33.180 | is I'll try and dim the screen that I'm working on

00:19:35.600 | so that I can still manage to see everything

00:19:37.300 | that I need to see,

00:19:38.380 | but it's quite a bit dimmer than it was early in the day.

00:19:41.460 | So that's phase two of the day,

00:19:42.980 | and that's how we want to think about light.

00:19:45.020 | And then I'll just mention,

00:19:46.500 | because I know there are people

00:19:47.980 | who are working in the middle of the night,

00:19:49.660 | there's phase three,

00:19:50.500 | which is about 17 to 24 hours after waking.

00:19:53.820 | And I realized that for shift workers

00:19:55.540 | or for people that are pulling all-nighters

00:19:57.620 | or for students, oftentimes you need to be awake

00:20:00.100 | and studying in the middle of the night.

00:20:01.100 | I myself am somebody who for years

00:20:03.580 | would pull anywhere from five to 10 all-nighters per year.

00:20:06.980 | I still pull an all-nighter now and again

00:20:08.820 | because of deadlines and so forth.

00:20:10.340 | I don't recommend it.

00:20:11.220 | If you can avoid it, great,

00:20:12.280 | but many people just simply have to do this

00:20:13.820 | for sake of shift work

00:20:15.100 | or because of impending deadlines or procrastination

00:20:17.620 | or all of the above.

00:20:19.140 | If you are going to be doing work

00:20:21.220 | in that third phase of your circadian cycle,

00:20:24.020 | you really want to limit the amount of bright light

00:20:26.900 | that you're getting in your eyes

00:20:28.480 | to just the amount that allows you to do the work

00:20:31.080 | that you're doing.

00:20:31.920 | Because if you get light in your eyes

00:20:33.600 | that's any brighter than that,

00:20:35.260 | you're going to severely deplete your melatonin levels.

00:20:37.980 | You're going to severely shift your circadian clock

00:20:40.580 | and it's effectively like traveling to another time zone.

00:20:43.380 | So if you stay up from 3 a.m. until 6 a.m.

00:20:46.540 | or 2 a.m. until 4 a.m. working on a term paper

00:20:49.720 | or something of that sort,

00:20:50.660 | and you're getting bright light in your eyes,

00:20:52.580 | you are effectively flying six hours

00:20:55.440 | to a different time zone

00:20:56.580 | or at least that's what your body registers it as.

00:20:58.540 | And it can really throw your sleep and your metabolism

00:21:00.680 | and a number of other things out of whack.

00:21:03.120 | Now there's an exception to this,

00:21:04.220 | which is if you really want to be awake,

00:21:06.120 | it can often be beneficial

00:21:07.500 | to flipping on all the lights in the room

00:21:09.080 | and keeping them really bright.

00:21:10.480 | One of the hardest things to do

00:21:11.640 | is to stay up all night studying

00:21:13.600 | when you're in a dim environment.

00:21:15.640 | So you have to determine the trade-off

00:21:17.580 | between whether or not you want to shift your clock

00:21:20.020 | or whether or not you want to get the work done.

00:21:21.840 | And I would say the ideal situation is to sleep at night

00:21:25.280 | and to do your work during the day and in the afternoon.

00:21:27.880 | But if you do have to be awake in the middle of the night,

00:21:30.560 | do understand that you want to dim those lights overall.

00:21:32.740 | You would not want to use that LED.

00:21:34.480 | You would not want to have overhead lights on

00:21:36.160 | unless you're really struggling to stay awake,

00:21:38.320 | in which case you want to get

00:21:39.220 | as many bright lights on as possible.

00:21:40.960 | So there are a couple of tricks to all-nighters.

00:21:42.680 | I don't really want people pulling all-nighters

00:21:44.320 | unless they have to,

00:21:45.520 | but there are a few things that you can do

00:21:47.600 | without taking stimulants in order to stay up all night

00:21:50.440 | that can be beneficial that maximize on your biology.

00:21:53.560 | One of them that's a little less commonly known

00:21:56.800 | is you can drink 32 ounces of water

00:21:59.480 | and commit to not going to the bathroom

00:22:01.600 | for 90 minutes at least.

00:22:03.440 | It turns out that there's a circuit

00:22:04.840 | that goes from your bladder,

00:22:06.260 | literally neurons that go from your bladder

00:22:08.000 | to your brainstem.

00:22:09.240 | And when you have to urinate, it makes you very alert,

00:22:11.680 | as many of you have probably experienced.

00:22:13.120 | This is actually what wakes us up

00:22:14.140 | in the middle of the night

00:22:15.180 | when we have to use the bathroom,

00:22:16.400 | is this circuit for alertness that goes from full bladder.

00:22:19.040 | It's signaled by the bladder being full to the brainstem.

00:22:21.760 | And this is the circuit that is disrupted

00:22:23.800 | in kids that have bedwetting issues.

00:22:25.680 | And there are a number of cognitive behavioral approaches

00:22:27.560 | to that, sometimes bedwetting in very young kids

00:22:30.160 | is because the circuit hasn't developed yet.

00:22:32.280 | Most adults fortunately are not bedwetting,

00:22:34.080 | but you can increase the amount of alertness in your system

00:22:37.920 | and remain awake in the middle of the night

00:22:39.360 | by drinking a little bit more water than you normally would,

00:22:43.040 | and then refraining from going to the restroom.

00:22:44.780 | That certainly will lend itself to alertness.

00:22:46.480 | You know how difficult it is to fall asleep

00:22:48.580 | when you have to use the restroom, for instance.

00:22:50.760 | So that's one tool.

00:22:51.640 | The other thing is, again, to flip on

00:22:53.040 | as many bright lights in the environment as possible.

00:22:55.640 | And then of course, people will rely on stimulants

00:22:58.160 | like caffeine or even more aggressive stimulants.

00:23:00.680 | That's not something I necessarily recommend.

00:23:03.080 | You'll each have to determine that for you.

00:23:04.820 | But if you do in fact have to use all nighters

00:23:07.320 | for any reason, you can maximize

00:23:09.240 | this bladder to brain approach and the bright light approach.

00:23:12.380 | Okay, so that more or less covers

00:23:13.920 | how bright to keep your overall environment

00:23:16.360 | and how bright to keep your screen.

00:23:17.740 | If you really want to get nerdy about this,

00:23:19.500 | there is a free app called Light Meter,

00:23:21.580 | where you can start measuring how many lux,

00:23:24.120 | how many photons are in a given environment.

00:23:26.600 | It's actually measuring reflectance of photons and so on.

00:23:29.380 | If you can look up what a lux meter does, if you like.

00:23:32.720 | I don't necessarily recommend doing that.

00:23:34.320 | I don't want to set a critical threshold by which,

00:23:37.800 | for instance, we say once your environment

00:23:39.540 | is more than 1500 lux, then it's too bright

00:23:41.940 | or not bright enough, et cetera.

00:23:43.660 | Everyone has different retinal sensitivities.

00:23:45.560 | Everyone will find that different levels of brightness

00:23:47.680 | will cause them to be alert.

00:23:49.220 | Different levels of dimness, if you will, in the room

00:23:52.520 | will cause them to feel sleepy.

00:23:54.160 | You really want to just modulate across the 24 hour cycle

00:23:56.980 | where it's very bright.

00:23:58.560 | As bright as it safely can be early in the day

00:24:00.360 | so that you are alert, you can do your focus detailed work

00:24:02.960 | in that first phase.

00:24:04.040 | And then in the afternoon, as you move into

00:24:06.800 | more creative type works or abstract thinking

00:24:09.080 | or working with other people in kind of a brainstorming mode

00:24:12.340 | that you would shift to dimmer lights, yellow lights,

00:24:14.840 | eliminate the blue lights as much as possible.

00:24:17.040 | Now that's light, but there's another aspect of vision

00:24:19.740 | that has been shown to be critically important

00:24:21.960 | for how alert we are going to be

00:24:24.400 | and how well we can maintain that alertness.

00:24:27.360 | And that has to do with where our visual focus is

00:24:30.760 | in a given environment.

00:24:32.160 | So I'm not talking about overall brightness.

00:24:33.660 | What I'm referring to now is simply where you place

00:24:36.440 | your phone or your tablet or computer screen or book,

00:24:39.460 | whatever it is that you happen to be looking at.

00:24:41.520 | There's a very underappreciated and yet incredible aspect

00:24:45.100 | of our neurology that has to do with the relationship

00:24:48.580 | between where we look and our level of alertness.

00:24:52.180 | And it works in a very logical way.

00:24:53.840 | We have clusters of neurons in our brainstem

00:24:56.980 | and those clusters of neurons control our eyelid muscles

00:25:00.940 | and they control our eye movements up and down

00:25:03.420 | into the sides.

00:25:04.260 | And indeed, if you were to look at an eyeball,

00:25:06.380 | I've looked at a lot of eyeballs in my lab

00:25:08.440 | and I teach neuroanatomy, so we do this from time to time,

00:25:11.460 | we would see that there are six muscles attached

00:25:14.620 | to your eyeball.

00:25:15.960 | Now, four of them are located at the top, the bottom

00:25:19.800 | and the two sides of your eyeball.

00:25:21.380 | So we're at the 12 o'clock, six o'clock, three o'clock

00:25:24.700 | and nine o'clock of your eyeball.

00:25:26.580 | And those muscles can move your eye in the socket

00:25:29.460 | from side to side and up and down.

00:25:31.140 | And then we also have some muscles that can actually

00:25:33.540 | pull the eyeballs at angles, okay?

00:25:35.580 | So we have different muscles that can move the eyes

00:25:38.620 | at different angles as well.

00:25:39.740 | And that's why we can look up into the side

00:25:41.140 | or down into the side, not just from side to side

00:25:42.940 | or up or down.

00:25:44.180 | Now, the neurons that control those muscles

00:25:46.520 | have a very interesting feature,

00:25:48.660 | which is that when we are looking down toward the ground

00:25:53.500 | or anywhere below basically the central region of our face,

00:25:58.300 | the neurons that control that eye movement

00:26:02.140 | are intimately related to areas of the brainstem

00:26:04.740 | that release certain types of neuromodulators

00:26:06.980 | and neurotransmitters.

00:26:08.340 | And they activate areas of the brain that are associated

00:26:11.600 | with calm and indeed even with sleepiness.

00:26:14.780 | And there's an active inhibition or prevention of neurons

00:26:19.780 | that increase alertness.

00:26:22.660 | Now, the opposite is also true.

00:26:24.360 | We have neurons that place our eyes into an upward gaze

00:26:27.920 | above the sort of level of our nose and up above our forehead

00:26:31.940 | literally looking up while keeping the head stationary.

00:26:35.360 | Or if you tilt your head back and you look up,

00:26:37.140 | these neurons are still active.

00:26:38.980 | Those neurons don't just control the position of the eyes

00:26:41.840 | and cause them to move up.

00:26:43.400 | They also trigger the activation of brain circuits

00:26:46.160 | that are associated with alertness.

00:26:48.560 | Now, this is a fundamental feature

00:26:51.160 | of the way that our eyes and brain are wired together

00:26:54.480 | and how they relate to what we call autonomic arousal.

00:26:57.280 | And there are a bunch of details there.

00:26:58.360 | We will actually have a guest in a few weeks

00:27:00.640 | who has learned to exploit these neurons

00:27:03.440 | and the fact that they control these different states

00:27:05.480 | of calm or alertness in order to generate hypnotic states,

00:27:09.640 | to place people into very atypical states

00:27:11.900 | in which they are both very alert and very calm.

00:27:14.900 | Save that for a future episode.

00:27:17.620 | But the important thing to understand

00:27:19.820 | is when you are looking down below the level of your nose,

00:27:23.140 | you are essentially decelerating your alertness.

00:27:26.100 | You're reducing your amount of alertness.

00:27:27.960 | It might be subtle, but it's happening.

00:27:30.180 | Whereas when you look straight ahead

00:27:31.660 | or in particular when you look up,

00:27:33.860 | you're increasing your level of alertness.

00:27:36.180 | Now, this has some obvious implications.

00:27:38.240 | When we get sleepy, our eyelids tend to close

00:27:40.420 | and we tend to nod down.

00:27:42.020 | When we're wide awake, we tend to be wide-eyed.

00:27:44.860 | We don't tend to blink as often.

00:27:46.500 | And we tend to be chin up

00:27:48.300 | and kind of on vigilance and alertness.

00:27:50.300 | So this has a evolutionary

00:27:52.380 | or at least an adaptive component to it.

00:27:54.940 | This can be exploited and indeed it's been researched

00:27:59.300 | in terms of how it can be used

00:28:01.100 | to optimize work environments.

00:28:03.980 | Contrary to what most people do,

00:28:06.360 | which is to look down at their laptop, tablet, or phone,

00:28:10.180 | if you want to be alert

00:28:11.420 | and you want to maintain the maximum amount of focus

00:28:14.180 | for whatever it is that you're reading or doing,

00:28:16.460 | you want that screen or whatever it is

00:28:19.020 | that you're looking at to at least be at eye level

00:28:21.260 | and ideally slightly above it.

00:28:23.900 | Now, I haven't seen many workspaces

00:28:26.660 | that take advantage of this very hardwired

00:28:29.300 | neurobiological fact.

00:28:30.680 | So what should you do with this information?

00:28:32.240 | Well, if you're somebody who sits down to do work

00:28:34.520 | and start to feel sleepy or simply unfocused,

00:28:37.660 | unable to attend to whatever it is that you're doing,

00:28:40.960 | I highly recommend that you take your laptop or tablet.

00:28:44.340 | I do hope that most people

00:28:45.620 | aren't doing serious work on their phones

00:28:47.500 | because it's such a small visual window

00:28:49.120 | and we can talk about why that's an issue later.

00:28:51.260 | And the idea would be to place that screen of your tablet

00:28:54.820 | or your laptop or other computer

00:28:57.760 | and try and get it elevated at least to nose level,

00:29:00.820 | your nose level, or even higher.

00:29:03.020 | And I realize that can be complicated to do.

00:29:05.060 | I've long just used a stack of books

00:29:07.820 | or I'll sometimes take a box

00:29:09.140 | and turn it upside down and set it there.

00:29:10.840 | I do use a mixed standing seated desk.

00:29:12.840 | I'll talk about that in a few minutes.

00:29:14.980 | There are a number of different ways that you could do this.

00:29:16.300 | You could wall mount a monitor.

00:29:18.820 | I think many people are working with laptops.

00:29:20.560 | It's a little bit harder to do that with a laptop.

00:29:23.420 | Some people though will configure a second screen.

00:29:25.740 | You have to decide what's right for you and your budget.

00:29:28.200 | But again, in addition to having a brightly lit room

00:29:31.000 | to be able to focus and attend

00:29:33.040 | to whatever it is you're working on,

00:29:34.400 | you want to have that screen position high

00:29:36.600 | in your visual environment.

00:29:37.640 | Now you wouldn't want it on the ceiling necessarily.

00:29:39.780 | Oh, that would be pretty cool.

00:29:41.280 | But you do want it above you.

00:29:44.240 | Now there are a couple of solutions to this

00:29:46.160 | that don't involve a wall mount

00:29:48.160 | or stacking books or boxes.

00:29:49.980 | For instance, you could be one of those people

00:29:52.080 | that likes to lie in bed or on the sofa

00:29:54.120 | and get your screen up above you

00:29:55.840 | by putting pillows on your knees.

00:29:57.580 | I used to actually do a lot of my writing and work

00:30:00.420 | in the middle of the night.

00:30:01.260 | I don't do this anymore and I don't recommend it,

00:30:02.940 | but I used to do a lot of work from bed.

00:30:04.600 | Now I no longer bring electronics for work into the bedroom.

00:30:08.760 | I just really try and keep the bedroom for sleeping

00:30:11.440 | or whatever else.

00:30:12.500 | But in terms of lying down on the couch,

00:30:15.340 | it is somewhat easier to get that screen up above you.

00:30:18.140 | You can kind of slide underneath that screen and get typing.

00:30:20.900 | But there's a problem with that.

00:30:22.180 | And we'll talk about this a little bit more in a moment,

00:30:24.440 | but it turns out that your posture,

00:30:26.740 | literally the position of your body relative to gravity

00:30:29.760 | also has important implications for how alert you are.

00:30:32.640 | So ideally you would be standing or seated.

00:30:35.660 | I would say the ideal would be standing,

00:30:37.420 | second best would be seated.

00:30:39.200 | And your screen will be either directly in front of you

00:30:41.800 | or slightly above you.

00:30:43.080 | Or if you wanted to get really fancy,

00:30:44.660 | you could create a situation where it was above you

00:30:47.160 | and slightly tilted toward you

00:30:48.720 | so that you actually had to maintain

00:30:50.340 | kind of proper neck posture.

00:30:51.920 | This accomplishes a number of things.

00:30:53.380 | In addition to making you more alert,

00:30:54.960 | you also get away from the so-called text neck.

00:30:57.300 | People are starting to look more like Cs nowadays,

00:30:59.880 | the shape of the letter C,

00:31:01.840 | because we're constantly looking down.

00:31:03.780 | I do every once in a while see somebody who's texting

00:31:06.640 | in public with it at eye level.

00:31:08.240 | It always looks a little odd that they're doing that,

00:31:10.040 | but I always admire their posture at the same time.

00:31:12.140 | So we shouldn't give them a hard time.

00:31:14.220 | So this is another feature that you can arrange

00:31:16.980 | into your physical workspace.

00:31:18.740 | Again, whether or not you're seated

00:31:19.880 | or you're standing throughout the day,

00:31:22.320 | try and get that screen elevated.

00:31:24.320 | Now, with reference to posture,

00:31:26.240 | there are beautiful data illustrating that

00:31:28.420 | when we are standing up,

00:31:30.560 | those same neurons in our brainstem, locus coeruleus neurons,

00:31:33.920 | which release, I should mention,

00:31:35.520 | things like norepinephrine and epinephrine,

00:31:37.760 | those neurons become active when we are standing.

00:31:40.520 | They become even more active when we are ambulatory,

00:31:43.320 | when we are moving.

00:31:44.160 | And we will talk about treadmilling and cycling at your desk

00:31:46.520 | and so forth in a little bit.

00:31:48.200 | But when you sit, they become a little less active.

00:31:51.200 | And when you lie down and indeed,

00:31:53.220 | anytime that you start to get your feet up above your waist

00:31:57.040 | or your head tilted back,

00:31:59.200 | those neurons fire less and neurons in your brain

00:32:01.880 | that are involved in calming and indeed putting you to sleep

00:32:04.680 | start increasing their level of firing.

00:32:06.980 | It's a really beautiful system.

00:32:08.600 | So beautiful, in fact, that there are studies that show

00:32:10.760 | that as you adjust the angle of the body back,

00:32:14.540 | you actually get a sort of dose dependent increase

00:32:17.500 | in sleepiness and calmness

00:32:19.420 | and a dose dependent decrease in alertness.

00:32:22.860 | And so as we were all told to sit up straight

00:32:26.100 | or even better to stand up straight.

00:32:28.080 | And now I'm also telling you to get that visual thing

00:32:31.080 | that you're attending to screen or otherwise

00:32:32.760 | up in front of you or ideally above you.

00:32:35.760 | Those things combine to generate maximum alertness.

00:32:38.640 | So you can think about how you might work this

00:32:40.080 | into various aspects of your homework environment

00:32:43.280 | or office work environment.

00:32:44.980 | But as I described this,

00:32:46.360 | many of you are probably thinking what I'm thinking,

00:32:48.040 | which is gosh, most of what we do

00:32:49.960 | is in complete opposite direction

00:32:52.300 | to all of this neurobiologically grounded advice.

00:32:55.280 | Most of us are looking down at our laptop while seated

00:32:58.160 | or we are lying down, which is going to make us more sleepy,

00:33:01.080 | or we are positioning our computers in front of us,

00:33:04.200 | but we really aren't in an environment that's bright enough

00:33:07.040 | and so on and so forth.

00:33:08.380 | So as you can tell, we're starting to layer in

00:33:10.380 | the various things that you can do.

00:33:11.860 | First, brightness in the room.

00:33:12.960 | Second, get that screen up

00:33:14.580 | and try and put yourself into a posture for work

00:33:17.980 | that lends itself or promotes alertness.

00:33:21.740 | If indeed you want to be alert for that work.

00:33:23.280 | If your goal is to take a nap,

00:33:24.620 | get your feet elevated about 10 to 15 degrees

00:33:26.780 | above your head,

00:33:27.620 | maybe put a pillow underneath it, lie down and take a nap.

00:33:29.660 | But that's not what we're talking about today.

00:33:30.880 | We're talking about workspace optimization.

00:33:32.840 | And I suppose you could also exploit that all-nighter trick

00:33:36.600 | that I talked about earlier.

00:33:37.980 | I actually did this when I was an undergraduate.

00:33:40.240 | I was a little bit masochistic in this way.

00:33:42.440 | I would drink coffee and water at fairly high volume.

00:33:46.980 | I wasn't, you know, forced drinking or anything like that,

00:33:49.980 | but I actually wouldn't allow myself to get up

00:33:52.060 | and use the bathroom except on a timer.

00:33:53.800 | So I think the longest I ever went was three and a half

00:33:56.360 | hours. It was kind of excruciating.

00:33:58.460 | I actually don't think that's necessarily a healthy advice,

00:34:01.140 | but again, you can use slight,

00:34:03.520 | I mentioned slight over consumption of fluids

00:34:05.900 | in order to generate alertness.

00:34:07.560 | That was just me really trying to get as much work done

00:34:09.580 | as I could.

00:34:10.420 | It was a very demanding class schedule.

00:34:13.040 | And it was just the only way that I could get work done.

00:34:15.260 | If I was getting up every few minutes to use the restroom,

00:34:17.080 | I found it hard to re-engage in that work and maintain

00:34:19.760 | focus, which is what I just want to briefly mention now,

00:34:22.380 | I talked about this in the episode on focus,

00:34:24.960 | but one thing that is completely unreasonable and that you

00:34:27.320 | should never ask yourself to do is to sit down or stand up

00:34:31.380 | and immediately focus on something,

00:34:33.140 | unless you're stressed about what you're looking at,

00:34:35.720 | or you're very, very excited by it.

00:34:37.280 | If you're very stressed about some sort of information or a

00:34:39.780 | deadline, or you're very, very excited about something,

00:34:42.480 | you'll find that you can focus instantly just within a

00:34:45.040 | moment.

00:34:45.880 | And that's because of the deployment of neurochemicals like

00:34:47.840 | dopamine and norepinephrine that bring about our levels of

00:34:49.960 | alertness. However, most of us,

00:34:52.040 | including myself will go to begin a workout and we'll find

00:34:55.500 | that our mind doesn't quite engage at the level of depth and

00:34:58.640 | focus that we would like right off the bat.

00:35:01.000 | I've timed this and other studies have timed this in a more

00:35:04.360 | rigorous way. Mine is just what we call anec data,

00:35:06.780 | but so I've timed it for myself,

00:35:08.040 | but there are studies that have looked at this and the data

00:35:10.340 | point to the fact that even at our most heightened levels of

00:35:14.160 | focus,

00:35:15.200 | most people can only maintain focus before switching tasks

00:35:18.220 | for about three minutes,

00:35:19.900 | which is depressingly short period of time. However,

00:35:23.500 | you can extend that period of time.

00:35:24.940 | And I've talked about that in the episode on focus,

00:35:27.100 | but more importantly,

00:35:27.940 | when you sit down to start a workout of any kind,

00:35:30.900 | any kind expect that it would take about six minutes for

00:35:35.180 | you to engage these neural circuits.

00:35:37.440 | You wouldn't expect yourself to walk into the gym and do a PR

00:35:40.380 | lift or start running and do your best sprint,

00:35:42.900 | or just head out the door without warming up at all.

00:35:45.700 | You know, a little walk, jog at first, or, you know,

00:35:48.500 | a few warmups sets. I mean, that's, we expect that.

00:35:51.200 | We are not surprised that we need that.

00:35:53.460 | And yet we sort of expect that our brain should be able to

00:35:55.360 | lock on and do work in a very focused way immediately.

00:35:58.200 | And that's just a ridiculous assumption.

00:35:59.520 | It's an unfair assumption, I should say.

00:36:01.620 | So assume that it will take about six minutes to engage in

00:36:05.660 | your workout and that those neurochemical systems will take

00:36:08.420 | some time to rev up and engage.

00:36:10.720 | The other things that I'm describing about lighting and

00:36:12.600 | screen positioning and posture,

00:36:13.800 | those will also help maximize your focus and will limit that

00:36:18.080 | ramp up time into a focus state.

00:36:20.000 | And I think what you'll find is that as you maximize your

00:36:22.700 | workspace, the time, the latency, as we say,

00:36:25.360 | to get into that focus will start to shorten.

00:36:28.520 | It'll especially start to shorten if you use tools to limit

00:36:31.340 | distraction, we will talk about distraction,

00:36:33.580 | but things like freedom, which is an app,

00:36:36.040 | a free app that allows you to lock yourself out of the

00:36:38.320 | internet or turning off your phone, for instance,

00:36:41.000 | but even if you're doing work on your phone or that involves

00:36:43.440 | your phone or the internet, as many of us,

00:36:45.320 | including myself do expect there to be a ramp up time for

00:36:49.640 | you to focus.

00:36:50.720 | There's another aspect of our vision.

00:36:52.100 | That's absolutely critical for optimizing our workspace.

00:36:54.800 | And that has to do with this really interesting feature of

00:36:57.760 | our visual pathways in that it has two major channels.

00:37:01.520 | Those two major channels have names,

00:37:03.040 | although you don't have to remember the names.

00:37:04.400 | The first one is the so-called parvo cellular channel,

00:37:07.600 | which is involved in looking at things at specific points in

00:37:10.840 | space and at high resolution or detail.

00:37:14.080 | And then there's the so-called magna cellular channel that's

00:37:17.140 | involved in looking at big swaths of visual space and at

00:37:21.400 | lower resolution.

00:37:22.360 | So you can think of the parvo cellular system as kind of a

00:37:25.200 | high pixel density.

00:37:26.840 | Think about your most modern smartphone,

00:37:29.080 | the recent smartphone with the best, best camera,

00:37:31.480 | and think about the magna cellular system as being lower

00:37:34.640 | resolution, kind of an older smartphone, lower pixels,

00:37:37.240 | et cetera.

00:37:38.080 | You might ask,

00:37:38.920 | why would you want a system that's low resolution?

00:37:41.040 | Well, the low resolution system is better at things like

00:37:43.160 | detecting motion and not so much at detail and vice versa.

00:37:46.600 | Now, again, you don't have to remember the names.

00:37:48.080 | What you do have to remember however,

00:37:50.400 | is that you're going to create the maximum amount of

00:37:53.200 | alertness in your system.

00:37:55.260 | The maximum amount of ability to focus when your system is in

00:37:59.420 | that parvo cellular mode,

00:38:01.120 | when you're bringing your eyes to a common point,

00:38:03.960 | what we call a vergence eye movement, V E R G E N C E.

00:38:07.840 | I've said this before on the podcast and people said,

00:38:09.560 | virgin eye movement, no, vergence eye movement,

00:38:12.560 | as in convergence,

00:38:13.800 | bringing your eyes to a single point in space will create a

00:38:17.520 | narrower aperture of a visual window, meaning your,

00:38:20.200 | your visual world actually shrinks, at least perceptually.

00:38:23.360 | Whereas when you relax your eyes and dilate your gaze,

00:38:26.940 | you can do this now by whatever environment you're in,

00:38:29.320 | trying to see without moving your head off to the side,

00:38:32.140 | above, below you, as broadly as possible.

00:38:34.820 | Maybe you can dilate your gaze so much that you can see

00:38:36.760 | yourself, your body in that visual environment.

00:38:39.280 | And you'll notice that your resolution of vision isn't

00:38:41.000 | nearly as high as when you do that vergence eye movement,

00:38:44.000 | vergence eye movements are incredibly powerful for creating

00:38:47.080 | heightened states of alertness and focus.

00:38:48.960 | And indeed they create heightened states of cognition of

00:38:52.260 | thinking.

00:38:53.100 | And that's because your brain follows your vision in terms

00:38:55.600 | of focus.

00:38:56.760 | When we say I can't focus what we often are experiencing is

00:39:00.560 | an ability and inability, excuse me, to not focus visually.

00:39:05.560 | Whereas when we are in a very focused state,

00:39:07.680 | we are in a state often where we can focus visually.

00:39:10.640 | Now we can also do this with our auditory system or to

00:39:12.840 | touch, et cetera.

00:39:13.680 | But right now we're just talking about the visual system.

00:39:15.720 | Now, in terms of workspace optimization,

00:39:17.380 | what this means is we never really want to be looking at a

00:39:20.960 | square or rectangle or target area for our work.

00:39:24.400 | That is too far beyond our ears.

00:39:26.720 | How far is too far?

00:39:28.060 | Really you want to try and keep the blinders on,

00:39:31.600 | or I should say the invisible blinders.

00:39:33.240 | So that whatever you're looking at falls within the region of

00:39:36.080 | visual space in front of you,

00:39:37.560 | that is present if you were to cup your hands and put them

00:39:40.000 | right next to your eyes.

00:39:41.160 | Now, this is a rough estimation, but I'm doing this now,

00:39:43.600 | for those of you that are watching on YouTube,

00:39:44.840 | I'm doing this now,

00:39:45.800 | I'm trying to simulate like a horse with blinders on.

00:39:48.020 | For those of you that are listening,

00:39:48.880 | just imagine me looking silly with my hands cup near my

00:39:51.520 | eyes, but if we are to, for instance,

00:39:54.880 | look at a screen that's very, very big,

00:39:57.880 | and we're too close to it,

00:39:58.960 | or even if we're standing back from it,

00:40:00.440 | it's going to be hard for us to attend to everything within

00:40:03.920 | that screen space.

00:40:05.320 | So this is actually support for the idea of using a phone or

00:40:09.720 | a tablet or a laptop.

00:40:11.520 | Some, my laptop is about 15 inches in diameter.

00:40:13.880 | I think is the one that I have some are 13, some are 17.

00:40:17.400 | Some of you like to use big monitors,

00:40:19.040 | make sure that whatever it is that you're looking at,

00:40:20.920 | if you want to remain focused,

00:40:22.480 | it doesn't extend too far beyond where your eyes are.

00:40:26.360 | There's the size of your head that is.

00:40:28.320 | So just think blinders on a horse.

00:40:29.880 | And actually that's the reason they put blinders on a horse

00:40:31.960 | so that they're not looking off into the periphery.

00:40:33.960 | Horses, unlike humans, don't have the same shaped pupil.

00:40:37.440 | They don't have a visual system that's organized in quite

00:40:39.360 | the same way.

00:40:40.180 | They mostly see in panorama in Magnocellular vision.

00:40:44.040 | And so those blinders are designed to keep their visual

00:40:46.160 | focus straight ahead.

00:40:47.200 | So they physically restrict it.

00:40:49.020 | Now, some people will actually go to lengths to further

00:40:53.900 | restrict their visual focus.

00:40:55.700 | They will do things like putting on a hoodie or wearing a

00:40:59.040 | hat, for instance, to restrict their visual window.

00:41:01.940 | And indeed that works quite well.

00:41:03.540 | But as we'll talk about in a moment,

00:41:05.280 | when you really restrict your visual window down to a very,

00:41:08.580 | very narrow portion of visual space,

00:41:12.060 | that actually changes the types of information that you are

00:41:14.940 | best at processing.

00:41:16.460 | And we'll talk about that in terms of something that's

00:41:18.300 | called the cathedral effect in a few moments.

00:41:20.780 | But for now, here's the principle.

00:41:23.320 | Make sure that whatever you're looking at is directly in

00:41:25.580 | front of you and doesn't extend too far out to the side.

00:41:28.580 | Once you get out to say six or 12 or certainly 18 inches on

00:41:32.940 | either side of your eyes, you are dilating your gaze.

00:41:36.120 | By definition, you're dilating your gaze.

00:41:37.780 | It's completely subconscious and it becomes very hard to

00:41:40.380 | maintain attention.

00:41:41.700 | Now, the caveat to this is that if you are going to look at

00:41:45.120 | a narrow space, a narrow window for any period of time,

00:41:48.020 | whether or not it's a book or a laptop or a tablet or a

00:41:51.460 | phone,

00:41:52.780 | those virgins eye movements not only create alertness,

00:41:55.940 | but they also require energy and they also can fatigue the

00:41:59.440 | eyes because there's a process called accommodation whereby

00:42:01.900 | the shape of your eye literally has to change so that the

00:42:04.820 | lens can move so that you can focus at that location.

00:42:07.300 | Accommodation is an incredible process,

00:42:09.100 | but it is a demanding one.

00:42:10.380 | And that's the reason that your eyes get tired when you

00:42:12.860 | focus on something for too long.

00:42:14.620 | So here's a principle extracted from the ophthalmology and

00:42:17.460 | neuroscience literature that you can adopt for every 45

00:42:21.940 | minutes in which you are focusing on something like a phone

00:42:25.720 | or a tablet or a book page or your computer,

00:42:29.400 | you want to get into Magneseller panoramic vision for at

00:42:33.780 | least five minutes.

00:42:35.260 | And the way that I suggest to do this is actually to take a

00:42:37.640 | walk. Ideally outside,

00:42:39.060 | we're going to talk about ambulation about movement and

00:42:41.340 | about how that can maintain alertness throughout the day.

00:42:43.760 | So for every 45 minutes or so try and get five minutes of

00:42:46.940 | relaxing your eyes.

00:42:48.260 | This is something that's not often done,

00:42:49.980 | especially in today's homeschooling and where people are

00:42:53.340 | where kids are going to school by zoom and adults are

00:42:55.700 | working by zoom. This is a serious problem.

00:42:58.060 | People are getting eye fatigue, they're getting headaches.

00:43:01.160 | Indeed. Some people are getting migraines.

00:43:02.620 | They're having all sorts of issues, neck pain,

00:43:05.420 | much of that, if not all of that,

00:43:08.220 | in some cases can be alleviated by this 45 to five rule for

00:43:12.360 | every 45 minutes of focused work that you do get five

00:43:15.300 | minutes where you get outside.

00:43:17.200 | Or if you have to be indoors where you can dilate your gaze.

00:43:20.220 | Now, some of you may be saying, well,

00:43:21.900 | that spits in the face of your 90 minute rule.

00:43:24.360 | You're trying to,

00:43:25.200 | you've told us before that we should focus for 90 minutes.

00:43:27.100 | I would still want you to take breaks within those 90

00:43:29.440 | minutes.

00:43:30.280 | If you're looking at a narrow piece of visual world,

00:43:33.740 | meaning at a phone or a laptop or so forth.

00:43:36.380 | And again, the best way to do this would be to go outside,

00:43:38.260 | just relax your eyes, look off into the distance,

00:43:40.700 | looking at a horizon will automatically trigger this

00:43:43.280 | panoramic gaze, which is very relaxing to the eyes,

00:43:46.780 | and will allow you to go back into a focused work bout.

00:43:49.900 | The one thing you absolutely do not want to do is to go

00:43:53.180 | outside and check your phone,

00:43:54.940 | because if you're outside checking your phone or you're

00:43:56.720 | taking a break and checking your phone,

00:43:57.800 | you're still in that vergence eye movement. Okay?

00:44:00.320 | So this is very,

00:44:01.560 | very important because vergence eye movements increase focus

00:44:05.920 | and attention,

00:44:06.880 | and you can exploit that to increase focus and attention

00:44:09.400 | when you want to,

00:44:10.300 | but you absolutely need to relax the system again for every

00:44:14.020 | 45 minutes in which you've been in that focused mode,

00:44:16.520 | you want to get at least five minutes of panoramic vision.

00:44:20.240 | If you can take a 15 minute walk, even better.

00:44:22.980 | Next I'd like to talk about an aspect of workspace

00:44:25.160 | optimization that can actually bias whether or not our brain

00:44:28.840 | and nervous system are better suited for detailed analytic

00:44:33.160 | work or more abstract work.

00:44:36.040 | In fact,

00:44:36.880 | there's a way that you can arrange your work environment,

00:44:39.560 | or I should say there's a way that you can place yourself

00:44:42.820 | into certain environments that will allow abstract thinking,

00:44:46.760 | creative thinking, and indeed expansive thinking to emerge.

00:44:51.100 | There are other environments that you can put yourself in

00:44:53.620 | that will make your brain shift towards more analytic work

00:44:56.960 | toward more detailed and precise types of work.

00:45:00.080 | Now, I just briefly want to mention something that was

00:45:02.320 | covered again on the habits episode that I did a few weeks

00:45:05.360 | ago, but again,

00:45:06.340 | you don't need to see that episode in order to digest this

00:45:08.640 | information.

00:45:09.800 | It goes back to this issue of three phases within the

00:45:12.840 | circadian 24 hour cycle phase one,

00:45:15.900 | which as I mentioned is about zero to eight hours after

00:45:18.600 | waking phase two, nine to 16 hours after waking in phase

00:45:21.800 | three, 17 to 24 hours after waking phase one,

00:45:25.600 | being ideal for analytic precise detailed types of work

00:45:30.600 | phase two,

00:45:31.760 | better suited for most people for creative kind of abstract

00:45:35.320 | thinking, expansive thinking, brainstorming, et cetera.

00:45:39.040 | There are some exceptions to that,

00:45:40.880 | but most people follow that pattern because of the different

00:45:44.300 | neuromodulators and hormones and so forth that are released

00:45:47.380 | into the brain and body at those different phases.

00:45:49.880 | What I'm about to tell you is a way in which you can use

00:45:54.560 | your physical environment to further shift your brain and

00:45:58.320 | nervous system into a mode that's either prime for analytic

00:46:01.800 | or abstract and creative thinking.

00:46:04.020 | What I'm about to describe is called the cathedral effect.

00:46:07.020 | The cathedral effect has been discussed well, really,

00:46:10.800 | for many, many decades, maybe even hundreds of years,

00:46:13.320 | but formally has been discussed since the early 2000s in

00:46:16.740 | which it seemed that people who were in high ceilinged

00:46:20.440 | environments, hence the phrase cathedral,

00:46:23.680 | would shift their thinking and their ideas to more abstract

00:46:28.320 | and creative lofty type thinking.

00:46:30.360 | So literally higher ceiling, loftier thinking,

00:46:32.860 | higher aspirations that this was observed in terms of the

00:46:36.860 | language that they use,

00:46:37.900 | but also the sorts of ideas that they would generate.

00:46:40.600 | And conversely that people that were in lower ceilinged

00:46:45.380 | environments would be more oriented toward using language

00:46:50.380 | that was more restricted, literally more detailed,

00:46:53.760 | analytic about things in their immediate space.

00:46:56.600 | Now, this seems kind of wild on the one hand,

00:46:59.160 | but actually if we go back to our understanding of the

00:47:02.020 | neurobiology of the visual system and the way that our

00:47:05.680 | brains and bodies evolved in different environments,

00:47:08.360 | it actually makes a lot of sense.

00:47:10.000 | We don't have time to go into a long lecture about

00:47:11.780 | evolutionary neurobiology,

00:47:13.320 | but we have to remember that our nervous system has a number

00:47:15.940 | of features that are adapted to different environments.

00:47:18.040 | And indeed we are able to go from big open prairies or

00:47:21.940 | mountain tops or large cathedrals or concert halls into small

00:47:26.520 | environments and everything scales with it, right?

00:47:29.360 | When we're outdoors in a big expansive space,

00:47:31.320 | our vision tends to go long.

00:47:32.760 | We tend to be in panoramic, magnocellular vision.

00:47:35.520 | Our hearing tends to extend long.

00:47:37.280 | Even if we're having a conversation with somebody,

00:47:39.200 | we tend to also be attending somewhat to the, you know,

00:47:42.400 | the screech of hawks off in the distance or to the rush of a

00:47:45.960 | river. Whereas when we were in small spaces, everything,

00:47:48.440 | our vision, our hearing, and indeed,

00:47:50.880 | even our physical movements become more restrained.

00:47:52.920 | Even if we can still extend our hands out as far as we want.

00:47:56.160 | What do I mean by that?

00:47:57.120 | Let's say you're in an elevator.

00:47:59.080 | That's a small space compared to outside on a field.

00:48:02.440 | This has been measured over and over again.

00:48:04.040 | People's the size or the amplitude of people's spontaneous

00:48:07.920 | movements actually scales down in smaller environments,

00:48:10.680 | even if they aren't completely restricted from extending

00:48:12.600 | their limbs all the way. Whereas when we were outdoors,

00:48:14.960 | we feel a natural impulse to move further away from our,

00:48:19.840 | our body, our torso with our limbs.

00:48:22.400 | This is just feels like more appropriate behavior.

00:48:25.220 | And when I say appropriate,

00:48:26.120 | I don't mean in any kind of social context necessarily.

00:48:30.740 | There's actually a reason for this,

00:48:32.080 | the visual system and the so-called vestibular motor system

00:48:35.560 | are intimately linked.

00:48:37.200 | And I can just tell you briefly one way in which you can test

00:48:39.960 | this and observe this and even use this.

00:48:41.600 | It's a little off topic from today's episode,

00:48:43.400 | but let's say you have a certain amount of flexibility.

00:48:46.400 | You can extend your arms off like wings is what I'm doing

00:48:49.520 | for those either listening, not watching,

00:48:50.920 | off to your sides with arms straight.

00:48:52.560 | And you have, you reach a maximum positioning of

00:48:56.200 | flexibility.

00:48:58.160 | You can do a quick experiment where you sit still,

00:49:03.160 | you would bring your arms in for a moment.

00:49:04.720 | You can put them on your knees if you like,

00:49:06.040 | or in front of you.

00:49:07.240 | And you can move your eyes very far off into the periphery

00:49:11.200 | of your visual field.

00:49:12.040 | So you actually, I'm going to do this now.

00:49:13.480 | It looks kind of silly,

00:49:14.320 | but moving my eyes without moving my head off into the

00:49:17.000 | periphery, all the way to the right,

00:49:19.320 | then all the way to the left, all the way up,

00:49:21.440 | all the way down, but especially all the way to the left,

00:49:23.480 | almost looking over my shoulder without turning my head all

00:49:27.360 | the way to my right.

00:49:28.600 | And you will find that you actually can extend your arms

00:49:32.320 | further back subsequent to that.

00:49:34.080 | And that's not magic,

00:49:35.360 | but it has to do with the ways in which your cerebellum,

00:49:38.160 | which actually means mini brain and your eyes,

00:49:40.680 | your visual system are connected and the way in which your

00:49:43.000 | cerebellum controls some of the spindles and other aspects

00:49:45.740 | of the neuromuscular architecture of your nervous system,

00:49:48.680 | 'cause your nerves control your muscles and allow those

00:49:51.040 | muscles to move further out.

00:49:52.540 | So for those of you that lack flexibility,

00:49:54.280 | you can actually exploit your visual system for this.

00:49:56.480 | Now that's again, a bit of a tangent,

00:49:58.280 | but it's a fun one that relates back to this so-called

00:50:00.560 | cathedral effect.

00:50:02.200 | The cathedral effect is a way in which our thinking becomes

00:50:06.340 | more restricted and restrained in tighter, smaller,

00:50:09.460 | more confined visual environments.

00:50:11.640 | Or if the ceiling is higher,

00:50:14.420 | we are in expansive space with a lot of distance above us or

00:50:19.040 | space above us and out to the sides,

00:50:20.900 | maybe even out on a field,

00:50:21.880 | our thinking goes into these more broad,

00:50:24.960 | abstract and loftier future thinking in particular.

00:50:29.920 | This has actually been measured.

00:50:31.480 | There's a really nice paper.

00:50:32.600 | I will post a link to this.

00:50:33.840 | The authors are Joan Myers Levy and Rui,

00:50:37.280 | and then in parentheses, Juliet Zoo.

00:50:39.040 | I'm going to assume that they go by Juliet.

00:50:41.080 | The title of the paper is the influence of ceiling height,

00:50:43.480 | the effect of priming on the type of processing that people

00:50:45.800 | use.

00:50:46.640 | And I won't go into all the details of this paper,

00:50:48.220 | but what's really cool about this paper is they looked with

00:50:51.640 | very rigorous statistics and they have a fair number of

00:50:54.460 | subjects.

00:50:55.300 | And everything about this paper looks solid to me at the

00:50:57.640 | difference in cognitive processing and abstract thinking and

00:51:02.600 | detailed analytic work that people are able to perform in

00:51:06.680 | environments that have a 10 foot ceiling versus an eight

00:51:09.780 | foot ceiling, which is not that much of a difference.

00:51:12.400 | It's just two, two foot difference there.

00:51:14.960 | And what they found were significant effects whereby high

00:51:18.220 | ceilings activate concepts related to abstraction.

00:51:22.160 | Whereas low ceilings prime confinement related concepts,

00:51:25.560 | but are promote the kind of detailed thinking that,

00:51:28.740 | that lends itself well to sort of spreadsheet type work or

00:51:31.720 | accounting type work.

00:51:33.180 | Whereas abstract creative work was supported by these higher

00:51:36.020 | ceilings and the way they analyze this was really

00:51:38.380 | interesting.

00:51:39.220 | Again, we don't have time to go into all the details,

00:51:40.760 | but they ask people to sort of generate word sets related to

00:51:45.640 | particular topics like sports.

00:51:47.920 | And, you know,

00:51:48.760 | so people will talk about soccer, football, baseball, golf,

00:51:51.020 | et cetera, and talk about some of the equipment and other

00:51:52.680 | things.

00:51:53.520 | And then they had a kind of a challenge,

00:51:56.680 | a cognitive challenge whereby people had to link different

00:51:58.960 | concepts along different dimensions so that you depart from

00:52:02.120 | the dimension of sport and you start thinking about sports

00:52:04.800 | that involve teams or sports that involve a ball, et cetera.

00:52:07.640 | And so in the same conditions you can accept for the fact

00:52:11.300 | that the ceiling height is different eight feet or 10 feet.

00:52:14.040 | What one finds is that the kinds of language and the kinds

00:52:16.980 | of associations that people start to create are vastly

00:52:19.600 | different and they they're actually two experiments in this

00:52:22.240 | study. You're welcome to go look at it.

00:52:23.920 | So it wasn't just about sports.

00:52:25.180 | There were some other things that were analyzed as well.

00:52:27.640 | And in the references of this paper,

00:52:29.740 | it also points to other examples now of the cathedral effect,

00:52:33.040 | which I find very interesting because as a vision scientist

00:52:36.520 | and someone who spends his life thinking about,

00:52:38.340 | and indeed talking about the nervous system,

00:52:40.960 | we know that our cognition follows our vision for low vision

00:52:44.600 | or blind people that will follow their,

00:52:46.860 | mostly their hearing and to some extent their touch.

00:52:49.080 | But for most people who are sighted as most people are

00:52:52.040 | sighted, our cognition follows our visual environment.

00:52:56.600 | So what does this mean for workspace optimization?

00:52:58.640 | Well, most of us have a fixed ceiling level in our,

00:53:02.100 | in our home,

00:53:03.040 | but you might have rooms in which the ceiling is higher and

00:53:05.440 | rooms in which the ceiling is lower.

00:53:06.720 | If that were the case,

00:53:07.560 | I recommend if you want to do creative work during phase two,

00:53:09.980 | the nine to 16 hours of your circadian cycle,

00:53:13.840 | nine to 16 hours after waking,

00:53:15.160 | that is that you do that in the high ceiling room,

00:53:17.200 | or maybe even outdoors out on a deck or on a patio,

00:53:19.960 | because the highest ceiling of course is the sky.

00:53:22.400 | Whereas if you're going to do detailed analytic work in,

00:53:26.560 | I would suggest doing that during phase one of the day.

00:53:28.680 | But even if you're going to do it during phase two of the

00:53:30.680 | day, for whatever reason,

00:53:32.060 | scheduling or other sorts of constraints that you do that in

00:53:35.100 | the lower ceiling environment.

00:53:36.620 | Now, if you are interested in controlling your,

00:53:39.220 | the height of your visual world,

00:53:40.520 | but you don't have control over your,

00:53:42.480 | the ceiling height of the environment that you're in,

00:53:44.720 | there is another way to do that.

00:53:46.080 | And I used to observe this in the cafes and around Stanford

00:53:48.720 | in the Bay area, where you would see somebody who,

00:53:51.480 | despite the weather would be in a hoodie,

00:53:53.240 | maybe with a baseball cap or other form of hat,

00:53:55.960 | or some sort of blinder above their eyebrows,

00:53:59.700 | which is actually another way of just lowering the ceiling

00:54:02.160 | height very, very low and restricting your visual field.

00:54:04.760 | Not unlike blinders that we talked about before,

00:54:06.840 | that one would put on a horse or one would put on them

00:54:09.080 | themselves by restricting their visual angle of focus to

00:54:12.560 | directly in front of them,

00:54:13.440 | but not too far out beyond the sides of their head.

00:54:15.960 | So these cathedral effects I think can be leveraged toward

00:54:19.120 | doing particular types of work best.

00:54:21.360 | And again, the lower the ceiling or the lower your visual

00:54:24.380 | environment, the more that one tends to do,

00:54:27.120 | or I should say, performs detailed analytic work accurately.

00:54:32.120 | And the more that one's thinking is oriented towards

00:54:35.520 | detailed sort of correct answer type work.

00:54:38.480 | Whereas when the ceiling is higher or there's no ceiling,

00:54:42.560 | the more that the brain and the rest of the processing that

00:54:46.120 | we call cognitive processing is related to abstract

00:54:49.520 | reasoning, brainstorming,

00:54:51.160 | and indeed can pull from broader swaths of memory resources,

00:54:55.240 | because really what abstract reasoning is,

00:54:57.420 | is it's taking existing elements and maneuvering them or

00:55:00.680 | arranging them into novel ways.

00:55:02.520 | So you can think about like notes on a piano playing a

00:55:05.320 | particular song, learning scales, that's very analytic.

00:55:07.800 | There's a,

00:55:08.640 | there's a correct answer that you're trying to arrive at or

00:55:10.680 | generate, whereas writing music or writing poetry or

00:55:14.440 | generating new material of any kind involves taking existing

00:55:19.120 | elements, right?

00:55:19.960 | You're not going to use words that you don't have committed

00:55:22.080 | to your memory or that you're not aware of and arranging

00:55:24.920 | them in novel ways.

00:55:26.080 | So I think the cathedral effect can be leveraged.

00:55:28.440 | And again,

00:55:29.280 | you don't need to move into a different home or build a

00:55:30.960 | slanted roof and work at one side of the room at one part of

00:55:33.800 | the day and the other side of the room at the other.

00:55:35.160 | Although, Hey, if that's the way you,

00:55:37.600 | you want to swing it, that's great.

00:55:39.160 | Most of us don't have that flexibility,

00:55:41.020 | but it's very clear that the height of the ceiling of the

00:55:44.520 | visual environment that we're in has a profound effect on the

00:55:47.120 | types of cognitive processes that we are able to engage.

00:55:50.400 | Now I'd like to shift our attention to the auditory

00:55:53.220 | environment or the noise in the room or the music in the

00:55:56.120 | room or the music or noise in the headphones,

00:55:58.240 | because it turns out that there is a lot of quality

00:56:01.660 | scientific data out there that speaks to whether or not

00:56:05.920 | listening to particular sounds can enhance our cognition.

00:56:10.280 | And indeed the answer is yes,

00:56:11.800 | but there are very particular types of things to listen to

00:56:14.840 | under very particular types of conditions that allow one to

00:56:17.860 | do that.

00:56:19.120 | First off,

00:56:19.960 | I want to say that people vary tremendously in the extent to

00:56:23.480 | which they can tolerate background noise for work.

00:56:26.800 | In fact,

00:56:28.040 | individuals will vary tremendously from one day to the next,

00:56:31.180 | or even within the same day and the extent to which they can

00:56:33.740 | tolerate background noise.

00:56:35.680 | I've experienced this myself.

00:56:37.040 | There've been times in which I've been working at home and I

00:56:39.220 | felt like for whatever reason,

00:56:40.940 | I just could not engage in focus.

00:56:42.800 | And what worked to generate more focus for me was to go to a

00:56:47.720 | cafe or to a library or someplace where there's actually

00:56:50.240 | more commotion, more people moving about,

00:56:52.480 | maybe even more noise, maybe even music in the room.

00:56:55.120 | And we have to all be in touch with when we want more

00:56:58.400 | background noise or when we want less background noise,

00:57:00.880 | there is no hard and fast rule.

00:57:02.760 | If you look across the literature for studies that involve

00:57:07.760 | complete silence or white noise or binaural beats or music or

00:57:12.260 | classical music or rock and roll,

00:57:13.960 | you can find results to support any type of environment as

00:57:17.880 | being more beneficial.

00:57:19.600 | However, as we'll talk about in a moment,

00:57:21.320 | there are a few types of environments to really avoid and a

00:57:23.960 | few types of sounds that really can enhance the cognition

00:57:27.720 | and your ability to focus in your workspace environment

00:57:30.720 | across the board that really seemed to work for all people.

00:57:33.540 | Let's talk about background noise to avoid.

00:57:36.040 | And here we're talking about background noise to avoid

00:57:37.960 | because it actually can cause some pretty severe deficits in

00:57:41.600 | cognition.

00:57:42.780 | There's a paper, first author, Jordan Love, cool name.

00:57:46.680 | Last author, Alexander Francis.

00:57:48.320 | The title of the paper has to do with psychophysiological

00:57:53.060 | responses to potentially annoying heating ventilation and

00:57:55.920 | air conditioning noise during mentally demanding work,

00:57:58.580 | which is a mouthful, but basically what this paper identifies

00:58:02.700 | is a large data set in which workplace and environmental

00:58:06.380 | noise, mostly the humming of air conditioners,

00:58:08.460 | that's very loud or the humming of heaters.

00:58:10.100 | That's very loud and ongoing,

00:58:11.500 | just incessant doesn't let up can really increase mental

00:58:15.380 | fatigue and can vastly decrease cognitive performance.

00:58:18.940 | And if you're interested in looking at the cognitive

00:58:20.300 | performance data that authors are Banbury and Berry 2005,

00:58:25.140 | that paper is the one that supports the fact that cognitive

00:58:27.760 | performance is worse when there's just the hum of an air

00:58:30.720 | conditioner in the background or the hum of a heater and

00:58:33.080 | otherwise complete silence.

00:58:35.800 | There's also evidence,

00:58:37.140 | which I discussed on the episode about hearing,

00:58:39.340 | which is that in young children,

00:58:41.280 | white noise can cause some impairments in the development of

00:58:45.000 | the auditory system.

00:58:46.600 | Now I don't want parents to freak out.

00:58:48.080 | And if you were exposed to white noise as a,

00:58:49.840 | as a sleep aid as a child, which I know many of you were,

00:58:54.220 | don't freak out, but it turns out that white noise,

00:58:56.840 | especially if it's loud,

00:58:57.840 | white noise can cause some disruption in the auditory maps,

00:59:00.720 | the representation of different frequencies of sound in the

00:59:04.020 | brain that can lead to some deficits in auditory and even

00:59:07.040 | language processing.

00:59:08.280 | So we really have to be careful about long-term exposure,

00:59:11.760 | extended exposure to white noise or an air conditioning

00:59:15.800 | noise. That's really at a high level.

00:59:17.240 | I wouldn't worry if it's in the background and it's shutting

00:59:19.160 | off and turning on again as the thermostat kicks off and on,

00:59:23.720 | but really trying to avoid work in loud fan-filled or

00:59:28.680 | ventilation generating or heat generating environments,

00:59:32.420 | because it really can cause damage to the auditory system

00:59:35.360 | long-term.

00:59:36.200 | And as we described,

00:59:38.280 | it can impair cognitive performance and overall increased

00:59:40.800 | fatigue. I think we've all experienced that when you're in a

00:59:42.960 | room and there's some ongoing background noise and all of a

00:59:45.120 | sudden it stops and you just feel this enormous relief.

00:59:48.320 | And the reason for this is that our auditory system has a

00:59:52.520 | parallel to our visual system in our visual system,

00:59:55.120 | that light entering the eyes,

00:59:56.200 | triggers the activation of those melanopsin cells,

00:59:58.280 | which triggers activation of the hypothalamus,

01:00:00.280 | a particular area of the hypothalamus,

01:00:01.920 | which generates alertness generates the release,

01:00:04.280 | even of cortisol, a stress hormone in the auditory system,

01:00:08.360 | when there's ongoing sound,

01:00:09.960 | your auditory system hears that even if you're not paying

01:00:12.900 | attention to it,

01:00:13.740 | if you're paying attention to something else,

01:00:14.840 | it still registers those little hair cells,

01:00:17.000 | as they're called in your inner ear are fluttering.

01:00:19.040 | The eardrum is beating and in concert to that sound

01:00:22.600 | frequency.

01:00:23.520 | And there's a brainstem mechanism that generates alertness

01:00:27.380 | and a kind of vigilance.

01:00:28.320 | So when you have a sound that's ongoing in the background,

01:00:30.720 | it shuts off all of a sudden you experience that piece,

01:00:33.600 | which is the turning off of those brainstem circuits that

01:00:35.840 | are associated with vigilance, the locus coeruleus,

01:00:38.520 | which we talked about earlier,

01:00:39.620 | which release epinephrine and norepinephrine and generate

01:00:42.960 | that heightened state of alertness in your brain and body.

01:00:45.180 | Those neurons then can turn off and you experience that as

01:00:47.760 | relaxation.

01:00:48.620 | So does that mean that we shouldn't listen to white noise or

01:00:51.220 | pink noise or brown noise while we're working?

01:00:53.480 | Certainly a lot of people do.

01:00:54.660 | In fact, if you want to know what white noise,

01:00:56.760 | pink noise and brown noise are,

01:00:58.380 | they're just different constellations of auditory frequencies

01:01:02.560 | that are played together.

01:01:03.400 | Most of us think of white noise as the shh on a screen,

01:01:06.920 | you know, all the black and white pixels going all around,

01:01:09.680 | like they call it visual snow,

01:01:11.140 | but pink noise has certain sound frequencies notched out,

01:01:17.760 | taken out, brown noise has others.

01:01:19.580 | It has different frequencies that are,

01:01:21.040 | that are included at higher amplitude, et cetera.

01:01:23.600 | You can look this stuff up on YouTube.

01:01:24.900 | If you want, you just put brown noise.

01:01:26.340 | None of it sounds terrific.

01:01:27.560 | It doesn't sound like music.

01:01:28.460 | It's literally just noise,

01:01:29.560 | mixed frequencies and no particular arrangement.

01:01:32.140 | There is some evidence that playing white noise in the

01:01:34.900 | background or on headphones or pink noise or brown noise can

01:01:37.840 | facilitate cognition,

01:01:39.520 | but it's mainly through an increase in this overall

01:01:42.840 | alertness as a consequence of areas like locus coeruleus and

01:01:47.360 | other brainstem areas that are associated with autonomic

01:01:49.720 | arousal from that noise.

01:01:51.360 | So it's a lot like the air conditioner effect.

01:01:53.280 | And I think done in a restricted way,

01:01:55.560 | meaning not for hours and hours,

01:01:57.280 | but maybe if your focus is waning and you're having a hard

01:02:00.440 | time engaging in work,

01:02:01.800 | you might put on some brown noise or white noise or pink

01:02:04.040 | noise and work that way for 45 minutes or so before you go to

01:02:07.200 | your panoramic vision walk and get some sunlight,

01:02:09.740 | that should be fine.

01:02:11.360 | There's really no reason to suspect, however,

01:02:13.480 | that those particular patterns of noise are going to

01:02:16.240 | optimize particular mental functions.

01:02:19.520 | So what I'd like to turn to next are particular patterns of

01:02:23.360 | sounds that indeed have been shown in peer reviewed studies

01:02:26.200 | to optimize certain types of mental processing,

01:02:29.080 | because you can incorporate these into your optimized

01:02:31.700 | workspace environment through headphones or through

01:02:34.560 | speakers, whatever mechanism that you want in order to get

01:02:37.600 | more out of your work efforts.

01:02:39.600 | If you were to search for apps or go online and try and find

01:02:43.600 | sounds that can improve thinking or change your emotions,

01:02:47.600 | you're generally going to find three types.

01:02:49.800 | One are called isochronic tones.

01:02:51.880 | These are tones usually of a common frequency.

01:02:55.020 | So it might be a beep and then a pause and then beep of the

01:02:59.620 | same frequency and then beep forgive my terrible beeping.

01:03:04.000 | I don't know what good beeping would sound like,

01:03:05.640 | but contrast isochronic tones with monaural beats.

01:03:10.320 | Monaural beats would be repetitive,

01:03:12.400 | almost percussive like beats delivered to just one ear,

01:03:15.920 | tune tune tune tune, this kind of thing, okay?

01:03:19.480 | You can find apps that can deliver monaural beats.

01:03:21.760 | You can find also apps that deliver so-called binaural beats.

01:03:26.200 | You can also find YouTube scripts that or channels that will

01:03:28.880 | deliver binaural beats, binaural beats as the name suggests,

01:03:31.660 | are beats delivered to the two ears.

01:03:34.080 | One pattern of kind of percussive beat to one ear and a

01:03:36.880 | different pattern that's,

01:03:38.400 | or at least a pattern that's out of phase,

01:03:40.560 | that's not synchronized delivered to the other ear.

01:03:43.200 | So on one ear, you hear, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo.

01:03:45.160 | And then the other ear, you've got, tune tune tune.

01:03:48.080 | And what happens is because of the way that the auditory

01:03:51.540 | system converges in the brainstem and generates what are

01:03:54.720 | called intraoral time differences.

01:03:57.240 | I'll explain what that means in a moment.

01:03:58.400 | Intraoral time differences,

01:04:00.320 | the difference between the two patterns of beats that are

01:04:03.480 | heard by the each of the two different ears leads to a third

01:04:08.240 | pattern that the brain and trains to and kind of maps onto

01:04:12.280 | and generates particular types of brain waves, okay?

01:04:15.360 | So without going into a lot of detail,

01:04:17.560 | intro all time differences are the ways in which if you were

01:04:21.040 | to hear something off to your right,

01:04:22.380 | like I just snapped my finger just to the right of my right

01:04:25.200 | ear, that a signal arrives in my right ear before that's

01:04:30.200 | sound signal, those sound waves arrive in my left ear.

01:04:33.440 | So there's an intraoral between ears time difference,

01:04:36.680 | and there's a brainstem area in which signals from one ear

01:04:41.540 | and signals from the other ear converge.

01:04:43.320 | And there's literally a math done by your nervous system

01:04:46.280 | that says this signal arrived before the other signal.

01:04:50.000 | And the difference between those signals is the intraoral

01:04:52.420 | time difference.

01:04:53.260 | So if I were to snap my fingers on both sides,

01:04:55.520 | on my left end, on my right side at the exact same time,

01:04:58.560 | and they arrive at the same time,

01:05:00.120 | the intro all time difference is zero.

01:05:01.600 | Whereas if one goes first on the right and then the left,

01:05:04.660 | I'm terrible at snapping on the left.

01:05:05.860 | It's a weak snap, but it was there.

01:05:07.700 | Then there's a delay in the intro all time difference

01:05:09.860 | has a particular value.

01:05:11.140 | Okay, you get it.

01:05:11.980 | It's almost ridiculously simple.

01:05:13.800 | Binaural beats have been generated in ways that create a

01:05:18.800 | particular pattern of intro all time differences that then

01:05:22.380 | cascades up to the rest of the brain and puts the forebrain

01:05:26.620 | and other areas of the brain that are involved in cognition

01:05:28.740 | and action into a particular rhythm.

01:05:30.880 | And some of the rhythms were waves of brain activity are

01:05:34.300 | ones that you may have heard of things like alpha waves or

01:05:37.120 | theta waves or gamma waves.

01:05:39.280 | Now I don't like to get too attached to particular brain

01:05:42.580 | waves as excellent for particular kinds of thinking.

01:05:45.720 | This is something that was really popular in the nineties

01:05:47.780 | and two thousands when ways of measuring brain activity

01:05:51.120 | noninvasively with electrodes on the outside enabled people

01:05:55.920 | to identify the indeed alpha brain waves are associated with

01:05:58.920 | alertness states and some are other brain waves that are

01:06:01.800 | kind of larger amplitude, slow waves, like, you know,

01:06:05.220 | delta waves are associated with kind of sleepiness or

01:06:07.760 | relaxation.

01:06:08.920 | But in general,

01:06:09.760 | the way that the brain works is that different brain waves

01:06:11.960 | are generated in different structures at different times.

01:06:13.880 | And those combine to give us a sense of happiness or give us

01:06:18.120 | a sense of focus or give us a sense of creativity.

01:06:21.340 | Nonetheless,

01:06:22.260 | if you look across the board at the studies of binaural

01:06:25.680 | beats and you ask what sorts of binaural beats appear to be

01:06:29.860 | useful for people to enhance their brain function for

01:06:33.440 | particular kinds of tasks,

01:06:34.960 | we arrive at some very interesting answers.

01:06:37.720 | So we'll review what those are now.

01:06:39.640 | The frequency of binaural beats that appears to bring about

01:06:43.040 | improved cognitive functioning at the level of memory,

01:06:47.520 | improved reaction times and improved verbal recall

01:06:51.660 | seems to be 40 Hertz.

01:06:55.380 | Now, is it exactly 40 Hertz?

01:06:57.480 | We don't know,

01:06:58.420 | but if one wants to look up a great reference on this,

01:07:01.880 | they reference Colzato, C-O-L-Z-A-T-O et al, 2017,

01:07:06.880 | describes in here, I'm quoting.

01:07:09.160 | So this is a direct quote.

01:07:10.000 | "The present findings are in line with those of a recent

01:07:11.720 | study, which also found faster reaction times and

01:07:14.100 | participants that listen to binaural beats of 40 Hertz."

01:07:16.320 | And you can find many examples of this in the literature

01:07:20.240 | where binaural beats of about 40 Hertz or exactly 40 Hertz

01:07:24.640 | in some cases, somehow brought the brain into a state that

01:07:29.200 | made it optimal for learning, for memory,

01:07:31.460 | and for certain types of recall,

01:07:32.780 | including verbal recall, math, learning, et cetera.

01:07:35.380 | So for those of you that are interested in binaural beats,

01:07:38.340 | there are a number of free apps out there.

01:07:40.320 | I'm not going to recommend any in particular,

01:07:41.660 | just have to search for one that you happen to like.

01:07:45.020 | One thing that you will find is that many of those apps

01:07:48.760 | super impose binaural beats onto raindrops or ocean sounds,

01:07:53.960 | or that rather they superimpose ocean sounds and raindrops

01:07:56.660 | onto the binaural beats.

01:07:57.980 | That does not appear to be as effective as pure binaural

01:08:01.100 | beats.

01:08:02.500 | There has been an exploration of lower frequency binaural

01:08:05.620 | beats. So for instance, seven Hertz,

01:08:08.140 | which is theta binaural beats done for 30 minutes with an

01:08:11.260 | overlay of rain sound or rain sounds only that's been

01:08:14.480 | analyzed and believe it or not,

01:08:16.580 | that showed immediate recall memory was significantly

01:08:19.460 | decreased. Okay?

01:08:20.740 | So that's a negative effect of binaural beats on memory.

01:08:23.520 | So the idea that binaural beats are just great for us across

01:08:26.060 | the board, I think is wrong.

01:08:28.500 | It does appear that the higher frequency binaural beats as

01:08:31.700 | one moves up toward 40 Hertz are going to be the most

01:08:34.140 | beneficial.

01:08:35.600 | There are instances in which for instance,

01:08:38.180 | 15 Hertz binaural beats increased response accuracy on a

01:08:41.660 | spatial verbal memory task.

01:08:44.460 | This is a complicated working memory task.

01:08:46.380 | Working memory is the kind of memory of remembering a phone

01:08:48.860 | number. So if I say for instance,

01:08:51.780 | 4932931 and you have to remember that number,

01:08:55.540 | keeping it online is what we call your working memory.

01:08:58.380 | It's likely that you would forget that two or three days

01:09:00.260 | later,

01:09:01.100 | you can get improvements in working memory with 15 Hertz

01:09:03.680 | binaural beats.

01:09:05.220 | Whereas the other control conditions,

01:09:07.260 | five Hertz and 10 Hertz binaural beats,

01:09:09.020 | all decreased accuracy of working memory.

01:09:12.260 | However,

01:09:13.100 | when I look at the literature and I examined a number of

01:09:15.420 | different studies,

01:09:16.980 | what I always seem to come back to was that 40 Hertz or so

01:09:21.500 | plus or minus five Hertz seem to be optimal for generating

01:09:25.980 | improvements in cognition and math performance.

01:09:28.780 | And even in various types of memory recall and even in

01:09:32.380 | musical performance, you might wonder, well,

01:09:33.860 | how can people do musical performance?

01:09:35.340 | They're listening to binaural beats.

01:09:36.980 | Here's another surprise.

01:09:38.820 | Many of the studies that I looked at didn't have people

01:09:41.700 | listening to binaural beats while they were doing the tasks,

01:09:44.260 | the memory task or the music learning, et cetera.

01:09:46.420 | They would do it beforehand for 30 minutes.

01:09:48.820 | There were instances in which people were listening to

01:09:51.340 | binaural beats during the task.

01:09:53.100 | But if you decide to employ binaural beats,

01:09:54.860 | I recommend this 40 Hertz as a great place to start.

01:09:58.100 | I don't recommend doing it for all of your work bouts.

01:10:00.740 | I think there's a good reason to believe that you could

01:10:03.340 | attenuate to it, but if you are going to try it,

01:10:05.780 | you might try it both ways.

01:10:06.780 | You might try listening to binaural beats for about 30

01:10:09.060 | minutes while doing something else,

01:10:10.700 | and then maybe eating lunch or something of that sort or

01:10:12.900 | taking a walk and then going into the work bout.

01:10:15.660 | Because remember the moment that you start listening to

01:10:18.620 | these binaural beats,

01:10:19.460 | the brain doesn't immediately switch into a particular

01:10:21.980 | pattern of oscillation or brainwaves.

01:10:23.580 | It takes some time.

01:10:24.420 | Neural circuits, again, take time to engage.

01:10:26.740 | The only neural circuits that are going to engage instantly

01:10:29.320 | are going to the ones that are of a sort of reflexive sort,

01:10:32.040 | like you step on a sharp object and you have to retract

01:10:34.920 | your limb,

01:10:35.760 | or you suddenly are stressed by a distressing text message,

01:10:38.920 | or you're suddenly delighted about a delightful text message.

01:10:42.280 | But when it comes to shifting your whole brain state toward

01:10:44.880 | optimizing work, it takes a little bit of time.

01:10:47.760 | So again, 40 Hertz binaural beats, many, many apps,

01:10:51.340 | many YouTube scripts out there,

01:10:53.220 | probably other resources for binaural beats,

01:10:55.260 | hopefully zero costs.

01:10:56.220 | So you can access those without any need to shell out any

01:10:59.620 | money.

01:11:00.460 | If you find one that you particularly like,

01:11:01.580 | maybe put it in the comment section so other people can find

01:11:03.780 | it at YouTube would be the best place to do that.

01:11:06.100 | Feel free to put a link or just a description that will be

01:11:08.740 | wonderful.

01:11:10.020 | And again,

01:11:11.760 | you don't need to listen to binaural beats at the exact same

01:11:13.960 | time that you're doing the work.

01:11:14.920 | Although that could also enhance your productivity.

01:11:17.920 | Some of you out there might be craving a little bit more

01:11:20.040 | mechanism by which binaural beats can influence things like

01:11:23.140 | focus or reduced reaction time.

01:11:25.360 | This has actually been explored.

01:11:27.380 | This 40 Hertz binaural beats pattern seems to have an effect

01:11:32.000 | on what's called striatal dopamine.

01:11:34.340 | We have dopamine as a neuromodulator, of course,

01:11:36.560 | involved in many things in motivation.

01:11:38.520 | It's actually involved in adaptation to light in the retina,

01:11:40.960 | something that most people don't know,

01:11:42.800 | but it's involved in movement, which is why people with

01:11:45.480 | Parkinson's who have a depletion of dopamine neurons

01:11:48.020 | actually have movement deficits and so on.

01:11:50.080 | But striatal dopamine is closely related to motivation and

01:11:54.120 | focus and 40 Hertz binaural beats appears to increase

01:11:59.120 | striatal dopamine release.

01:12:01.360 | And this has actually been measured indirectly by what we

01:12:03.780 | call spontaneous blink rate.

01:12:05.760 | Now I've been accused on various Instagram posts and even on

01:12:08.360 | this podcast of being a non blinker, let's call it,

01:12:12.620 | or a minimal blinker.

01:12:14.140 | And as an important aside, there is no evidence whatsoever

01:12:18.680 | that people that don't blink very much are sociopaths or lie.

01:12:21.800 | Also, you will hear that people who blink a lot are

01:12:25.400 | sociopaths and are lying.

01:12:27.220 | There is absolutely no evidence that blink frequency

01:12:29.660 | correlates with anything except alertness.

01:12:32.680 | Now, longer blinks are associated with less alertness.

01:12:35.840 | As we get tired,

01:12:36.680 | we tend to blink longer and longer until we take the long

01:12:38.880 | blink that is sleep.

01:12:41.180 | I guess the long blink would be death,

01:12:42.760 | but the long ish blink would be sleep.

01:12:46.320 | But it turns out that the more firing of striatal dopamine

01:12:49.800 | neurons that's occurring, the more frequently we blink.

01:12:54.200 | And so it is associated with a resetting of our visual

01:12:57.840 | window. That's what happens when we blink.

01:12:59.320 | And there's a whole relationship between blinking and time

01:13:01.740 | perception that we covered in the episode on time

01:13:03.460 | perception.

01:13:04.440 | But here's the bottom line for sake of this discussion.

01:13:07.280 | 40 Hertz binaural beats appears to increase spontaneous

01:13:10.220 | blink rates because it increases dopamine transmission in

01:13:13.800 | the brainstem and in the striatum in several locations,

01:13:17.280 | in fact.

01:13:18.120 | And so the way in which these binaural beats set a rhythm in

01:13:21.680 | the brain recruits dopamine release,

01:13:24.080 | that dopamine release leads to heightened levels of

01:13:26.680 | motivation and focus. Why motivation and focus?

01:13:29.720 | Well,

01:13:30.560 | dopamine is actually the substrate by which epinephrine is

01:13:33.040 | made dopamine.

01:13:33.880 | The molecule is actually converted into epinephrine

01:13:36.280 | adrenaline, and they work together like close cousins,

01:13:38.960 | dopamine and epinephrine in order to put us on a path of

01:13:41.860 | movement,

01:13:42.700 | or if we are doing work of mental movement toward a goal.

01:13:45.680 | So that's a little bit of mechanistic meat to explain at

01:13:49.020 | least part of the reason why 40 Hertz binaural beats can

01:13:52.420 | enhance our focus,

01:13:53.740 | reduce our reaction times and improve indeed learning and

01:13:56.120 | memory.

01:13:56.960 | Next I'd like to talk about the role of movement in

01:13:59.220 | optimizing our workspace and whether or not standing,

01:14:02.960 | sitting, lying down, treadmilling, or even believe it or not,

01:14:06.500 | cycling can enhance our work output and performance.

01:14:10.520 | Before we do that,

01:14:11.360 | I want to touch on two aspects of optimizing workspace that

01:14:15.160 | will come up at some point in your work or school life.

01:14:19.040 | Alas, there isn't a lot of science around this,

01:14:21.660 | but I think they are worth mentioning.

01:14:23.800 | And I think I can offer a little bit of advice in terms of

01:14:26.240 | how to navigate these in a way that would be beneficial to

01:14:28.520 | you. The first one is interruptions. You know,

01:14:32.000 | if you go online and you ask about, you know,

01:14:34.160 | how to avoid interruptions, people will say, okay, well,

01:14:36.320 | if you have kids at home, or even if you don't or at work,

01:14:38.720 | you'll have a light, like a recording,

01:14:40.320 | like with recording is on we're we're busy now,

01:14:42.860 | or have a sign on the door that says bother only in the case

01:14:45.640 | of emergency or fine to knock or don't knock at all.

01:14:49.380 | I've used a different policy throughout the years.

01:14:51.220 | I am somebody who works pretty hard to control my time and

01:14:55.060 | focus. But of course, as a laboratory director,

01:14:58.500 | I have people coming by and who want to talk about things.

01:15:01.620 | And of course we have phones and we have computers and

01:15:04.120 | people's opportunity to reach us.

01:15:06.080 | Interruptions really are deadly to our ability to generate

01:15:10.720 | focus.

01:15:11.560 | And it's not just about the distraction that occurs of say a

01:15:14.880 | minute or two minutes or five minutes when we were

01:15:16.860 | interrupted.

01:15:17.700 | It's also about the additional time to get those brain

01:15:20.400 | circuits re-engaged to a mode of focus.

01:15:22.720 | So it's really kind of a double whammy.

01:15:24.520 | Now, none of us,

01:15:25.980 | including myself want to be harsh or cruel or shut off from

01:15:29.680 | the world.

01:15:30.520 | And oftentimes interruptions bring incredible insights and

01:15:32.900 | people are providing support and very useful things that are

01:15:36.060 | essential to my workday and presumably to your workday and

01:15:38.800 | school day as well.

01:15:40.420 | But there's a simple method that I learned from my graduate

01:15:44.020 | advisor that works very, very well.

01:15:45.900 | Again, no peer review data support it.

01:15:47.580 | This is just my experience,

01:15:49.400 | but this is somebody who had immense powers of focus,

01:15:52.500 | had a very, very demanding life, a long commute to children,

01:15:55.540 | extensive laboratory, et cetera.

01:15:58.380 | And what she would do was if I came by and asked a question,

01:16:01.680 | or if anyone came by and asked a question,

01:16:03.860 | she would acknowledge their presence but would not shift her

01:16:06.340 | body toward them.

01:16:07.460 | So she purposely did not position her computer facing the

01:16:10.480 | door, which I think is a deadly,

01:16:13.220 | or I should say deadly to focus a way of positioning your

01:16:16.660 | workspace.

01:16:17.500 | So her computer was facing the wall.

01:16:18.900 | The door was perpendicular to that.

01:16:21.340 | And I would come by and I say, I have a question.

01:16:22.980 | And she would say, yes.

01:16:24.000 | So she would acknowledge my presence,

01:16:25.200 | but she wouldn't actually orient her body toward me,

01:16:27.680 | which told me that this conversation was not going to last

01:16:30.120 | very long.

01:16:30.960 | And no matter how long I stood there, what I asked,

01:16:32.660 | she would never orient toward me,

01:16:34.000 | which generally kept these conversations very, very short.

01:16:36.700 | We had other designated meetings where we would be face to

01:16:39.060 | face the other approach, which I confess colleagues of mine

01:16:42.600 | have used before, not necessarily at Stanford,

01:16:45.460 | but elsewhere is to simply say no to everything that's

01:16:49.660 | somebody requests or comes by.

01:16:51.420 | So if someone would knock on the door,

01:16:52.880 | they would just shout no through the door.

01:16:55.080 | Or if someone would say, can I bother you for a second?

01:16:56.980 | They would say no, or someone say,

01:16:58.540 | I have something I want to tell you.

01:16:59.500 | They would just say no.

01:17:00.420 | And they would just continue doing this until the person

01:17:02.140 | went away.

01:17:02.980 | That was actually very effective.

01:17:04.060 | These were some of the most productive people I know,

01:17:06.940 | not always the kindest people,

01:17:09.680 | but some of them were very kind.

01:17:11.300 | The other approach that I've seen, and actually,

01:17:13.180 | this is an approach that was used by someone who has been a

01:17:17.260 | guest on the Huberman Lab Podcast,

01:17:18.740 | someone who's immensely productive, was that he,

01:17:22.320 | so I'm constraining who this might be by saying he,

01:17:26.140 | he actually,

01:17:27.620 | despite having the option to have a very large office,

01:17:30.220 | would place himself in a workspace that was literally a coat

01:17:35.060 | closet cleared out with a desk, small lamp, completely dark.

01:17:39.260 | So this violates everything that I've talked about before,

01:17:42.660 | or prior to this, everything about high ceilings,

01:17:45.020 | bright light, et cetera, and would work,

01:17:46.980 | still works underneath a desk lamp in a completely dark

01:17:51.000 | closet, minimal ventilation.

01:17:53.020 | This is my definition of hell and yet is one of the most

01:17:56.460 | productive people on the planet.

01:17:58.100 | Also very, very hard to find.

01:17:59.740 | I actually know where his closet is.

01:18:01.260 | It turns out he has several of them that he migrates from

01:18:03.380 | in order to avoid distractions.

01:18:05.380 | So I mentioned these as kind of extremes.

01:18:07.020 | I think that most of us exist on the other extreme.

01:18:09.660 | And that's why I mention it,

01:18:10.500 | which is that most of us like some social engagement and

01:18:14.500 | kind of welcome, or at least set our work environment

01:18:17.420 | in a way that welcomes interruption.

01:18:19.140 | And we have to be very, very careful about this.

01:18:21.180 | Now in the digital realm,

01:18:22.900 | I already mentioned a few of the things that we can do

01:18:25.900 | as practical tools to limit interruptions.

01:18:28.740 | One is to use the program freedom.

01:18:30.300 | The other would be to simply turn off the wifi.

01:18:32.620 | If you do need to be online and navigating,

01:18:34.740 | you're doing research of any kind,

01:18:36.260 | that's not going to be possible.

01:18:37.660 | Turning off one's phone.

01:18:39.060 | I've at times put my phone on airplane mode.

01:18:41.900 | If that didn't work, I've locked it in a safe.

01:18:43.700 | I've done that. I've left it in the car outside.

01:18:45.420 | It all depends on one's levels of self-discipline,

01:18:47.340 | which as you probably know from your own experience,

01:18:49.940 | tends to kind of wax and wane.

01:18:51.340 | Sometimes we are better at avoiding these distractions

01:18:54.200 | than others.

01:18:55.040 | So if you find yourself in a place where it's very hard to

01:18:57.740 | reduce those distractions,

01:18:59.220 | you may need to go to more elaborate lengths.

01:19:01.620 | I will say that a graduate student in my lab

01:19:04.780 | who was immensely productive and focused

01:19:06.860 | had the habit of coming in each day.

01:19:09.160 | She would take her phone.

01:19:11.020 | I don't know if she turned it on, off or not.

01:19:12.980 | And she would just place it in a door, excuse me,

01:19:14.860 | in a drawer and would then go start doing experiments.

01:19:18.720 | We do experiments all day at 10 courses,

01:19:20.740 | engage in discussions avidly with the rest of us,

01:19:22.980 | and then would take her phone out

01:19:24.220 | at the end of the day and leave.

01:19:26.020 | And I don't think that behavior was not correlated

01:19:29.820 | with her immense productivity.

01:19:31.660 | I think the ability to untether ourselves from the phone

01:19:35.820 | is going to be the way in which many of us

01:19:38.300 | are either going to succeed or fail in our various pursuits.

01:19:41.380 | I'm somebody who engages with the phone on a regular basis

01:19:44.440 | throughout the day for various reasons,

01:19:46.340 | but I do try and have large swaths of the day

01:19:48.460 | in which it's either on airplane mode

01:19:50.080 | or it's completely physically separated from me.

01:19:52.260 | And when I mean large swaths,

01:19:53.860 | I might do every other hour with the phone on airplane mode

01:19:56.780 | or even a two or three hour bout

01:19:58.720 | where I just am simply not engaged with the phone at all.

01:20:01.620 | So is it better to sit or is it better to stand

01:20:04.360 | when doing work,

01:20:05.320 | at least as it relates to focus and productivity?

01:20:07.820 | And the answer is both.

01:20:10.060 | There've been a number of systematic studies exploring

01:20:13.540 | what are called sit-stand desks.

01:20:15.620 | So these are desks that can be set to a height

01:20:18.760 | that makes standing the best practice,

01:20:22.220 | and then they can be lowered to a height

01:20:24.300 | that makes sitting the best practice

01:20:26.480 | or the easiest practice, I should say.

01:20:28.500 | And it turns out that just sitting is terrible for us, okay?

01:20:33.460 | And there's an enormous number of studies out there

01:20:36.080 | that point to the fact that people who sit for five or six

01:20:39.860 | or seven hours a day doing work have all sorts of issues

01:20:43.340 | related to sleep, neck pain, cognition suffers,

01:20:46.640 | the number of cardiovascular effects, even digestion.

01:20:49.220 | There may even actually be some almost pressure effects

01:20:52.460 | on the pelvic floor and things of that sort,

01:20:54.380 | depending on the chairs that one uses,

01:20:56.780 | but that people who stand are in a slightly better situation

01:21:01.180 | where many of those health metrics improve,

01:21:04.140 | but that people that do a combination of sitting

01:21:06.140 | and standing at the same desk throughout the day

01:21:07.940 | or move from one desk to another,

01:21:09.800 | if they don't have a combination sit-stand desk,

01:21:11.600 | that's going to be best.

01:21:13.660 | The good news is it's very easy to convert a sit desk

01:21:16.100 | into a stand desk.

01:21:16.940 | You can just stack some boxes.

01:21:17.980 | I've done this at times or stack books.

01:21:19.900 | There are also some pedestals and things

01:21:21.400 | that you can purchase if that's your preference

01:21:24.020 | in order to set your computer at a particular height.

01:21:25.780 | And of course, there are desks that have motors

01:21:28.280 | and there are ones that have cranks

01:21:29.420 | and there are all sorts of variations,

01:21:31.020 | both in terms of the types and whether or not

01:21:33.420 | they have motors, as well as the cost to these things.

01:21:36.180 | So they can go from very low cost,

01:21:37.580 | like placing boxes or books to create a standing desk

01:21:41.440 | to very high cost in some cases.

01:21:43.660 | Now, what's interesting,

01:21:45.980 | if you look at the scientific literature,

01:21:47.780 | is that people who decreased their sitting time

01:21:51.620 | by about half each day.

01:21:53.540 | So they took, let's say they were working

01:21:55.700 | for seven hours a day,

01:21:57.360 | three and a half hours of that day, they decide to stand.

01:22:00.600 | And it's not even clear that it matters

01:22:02.100 | that they do all those three hours in one bout

01:22:04.160 | or they divide that up into shorter bouts of a half an hour

01:22:06.960 | and then sit for half an hour, et cetera,

01:22:08.220 | alternating back and forth,

01:22:09.700 | showed incredibly significant effects

01:22:12.580 | on reduced neck and shoulder pain,

01:22:14.860 | increase in subjective health,

01:22:16.260 | vitality in work-related environments,

01:22:18.780 | and perhaps most importantly,

01:22:20.100 | for sake of today's discussion,

01:22:21.660 | improvement in cognitive conditioning

01:22:25.380 | and the ability to embrace new tasks

01:22:27.940 | and cognitive performance.

01:22:29.840 | There are several studies that if one wanted to explore,

01:22:32.000 | they could explore this in more detail.

01:22:34.180 | I'll put a link to this as well.

01:22:36.520 | The article that I'm referring to is called

01:22:38.700 | Effect of Workplace Sit-Stand Desk Intervention

01:22:41.760 | on Health and Productivity.

01:22:43.420 | And I like this paper because many of the papers out there

01:22:46.140 | focus on the effects of sit-stand desks on health

01:22:49.660 | in trying to get people to burn more calories,

01:22:52.420 | improve their posture, relieve neck pain,

01:22:54.100 | slumped over, et cetera, but not on productivity.

01:22:56.940 | And this particular paper

01:22:57.900 | focuses also on the metrics of productivity.

01:23:00.460 | It has its own study

01:23:01.460 | and also references a number of important studies.

01:23:03.660 | What does this mean for you and me?

01:23:04.860 | Well, I've long used a standing desk

01:23:06.900 | or some variation thereof.

01:23:08.540 | What this means is that we should probably spend

01:23:10.220 | about half of our work time standing

01:23:12.380 | and about half of it sitting,

01:23:14.420 | but not all sitting or not all standing.

01:23:16.800 | If you had to do all one or the other,

01:23:18.980 | standing is going to be better than sitting.

01:23:21.220 | What happens if we just stand?

01:23:23.060 | Well, that can also generate some postural issues

01:23:26.380 | in terms of stabilization and fatigue.

01:23:28.780 | I have a good friend who's in the movement

01:23:31.840 | and physical rehabilitation and physiology space.

01:23:34.780 | His name is Kelly Starrett.

01:23:36.580 | He's very impressive in all those domains.

01:23:39.220 | And he always says, we weren't designed to sit all day,

01:23:41.840 | but we also weren't designed to stand all day.

01:23:43.660 | And I think that's true.

01:23:44.500 | If we were to look back at our species

01:23:46.060 | over tens or hundreds or thousands of years,

01:23:48.980 | we would find that indeed we did sit down.

01:23:51.140 | We did lie down.

01:23:52.020 | It wasn't that we were standing all day long.

01:23:54.100 | That said, most everybody, at least in the US,

01:23:57.420 | is not getting sufficient cardiovascular exercise

01:24:01.340 | or movement throughout the day.

01:24:02.660 | And standing at one's desk can improve

01:24:05.200 | some of those health metrics

01:24:06.580 | and again can improve productivity,

01:24:08.580 | probably because of those postural effects

01:24:10.940 | that I talked about earlier,

01:24:12.340 | that when we lie down,

01:24:13.620 | there tends to be less alertness in our brainstem,

01:24:16.880 | if you will.

01:24:17.720 | There's less activation of those brainstem circuits

01:24:19.380 | involved in alertness.

01:24:20.440 | And indeed that circuits that involve

01:24:22.620 | a kind of a calming effect on the body get activated.

01:24:26.100 | And as we become upright, standing or sitting,

01:24:30.220 | but especially standing,

01:24:31.740 | then those brainstem circuits for alertness kick on,

01:24:34.500 | which are going to make it easier to remain focused.

01:24:37.480 | If you are going to start standing

01:24:39.220 | for half of your work time,

01:24:40.420 | you will notice that it takes a few days to adapt.

01:24:42.420 | You'll notice a lot of shifting from side to side.

01:24:44.880 | Definitely want to wear comfortable shoes.

01:24:46.300 | Some people will do this on a wooden floor.

01:24:48.060 | Other people feel uncomfortable unless they're on carpet.

01:24:50.240 | You have to figure out what works for you,

01:24:51.660 | but it can take a little bit of time to adapt.

01:24:53.700 | I have to say after now,

01:24:54.740 | about 10 years of working at a sit-stand desk,

01:24:58.500 | I find I can't sit for too long before I want to stand.

01:25:00.740 | And my standing bouts can be anywhere

01:25:02.440 | from 30 minutes to two hours,

01:25:04.620 | although two hours would be a little bit long.

01:25:06.000 | And then I catch myself kind of leaning

01:25:07.420 | on the desk off to the side.

01:25:08.920 | So again, the idea is to stand,

01:25:10.580 | but not be leaning on the desk.

01:25:13.040 | Obviously, if you're typing or you're writing,

01:25:14.460 | there'll be some leaning involved,

01:25:15.700 | but that's what the literature support.

01:25:17.760 | There is also a literature on whether or not

01:25:20.920 | physical movement under your desk, meaning treadmilling,

01:25:23.740 | or in fact, there are now bicycles

01:25:26.680 | that allow people to pedal.

01:25:28.260 | It's kind of a unicycle like thing,

01:25:30.020 | although not a unicycle under the desk,

01:25:32.300 | can be beneficial for workplace performance.

01:25:34.840 | So let's take a look at what those data say.

01:25:36.920 | The study that I'm referring to has a first author,

01:25:39.260 | Frodsham, F-R-O-D-S-H-A-M, Frodsham et al.

01:25:44.040 | This is a research article published in PLOS One.

01:25:48.300 | And the title of the article is,

01:25:50.060 | "Does type of active workstation matter?

01:25:52.500 | A randomized comparison of cognitive

01:25:54.500 | and typing performance between rest, cycling,

01:25:57.060 | and treadmill active workstations."

01:25:59.100 | It's amazing that people do this science.

01:26:00.380 | I think it's great.

01:26:01.720 | Where else would we get peer reviewed data

01:26:04.060 | on these types of questions?

01:26:05.920 | First things first, there were no significant differences

01:26:08.980 | between cycling or treadmill workstations

01:26:11.140 | on any cognitive or typing outcomes.

01:26:13.380 | So it does not seem to matter

01:26:15.780 | whether or not people are treadmilling under the desk.

01:26:18.260 | So these would be stationary treadmills.

01:26:20.180 | It's like a little conveyor that people are walking on,

01:26:22.800 | sometimes very slowly.

01:26:24.060 | I'm guessing some people walk more quickly.

01:26:25.540 | The New Yorker's probably treadmill quicker.

01:26:27.560 | The Californian's probably treadmill a little slower.

01:26:30.140 | I'm a Californian, so I can make that quote unquote joke.

01:26:33.220 | But nonetheless, there were no significant differences

01:26:35.860 | between that and a cycling station

01:26:37.460 | where people are sitting and pedaling as they type away

01:26:40.740 | or as they work or as they're on phone calls, et cetera.

01:26:43.260 | So it really doesn't seem to matter.

01:26:44.380 | So if you're going to embrace these active workstations,

01:26:47.380 | as they're called, just decide what you would prefer to use.

01:26:51.240 | It doesn't seem to matter in terms of outcomes.

01:26:53.280 | Now, this study involved looking at 137 young adults.

01:26:58.280 | They had multiple sessions where they,

01:27:03.480 | at first, completed cognitive and typing tests.

01:27:06.340 | These tests have different names,

01:27:07.540 | and you're welcome to look those up if you like,

01:27:09.700 | as well as flanker tasks.

01:27:11.160 | So these are tasks of attention and things of that sort.

01:27:13.840 | And then they either engaged in treadmill or cycling,

01:27:17.280 | and then there was a comparison.

01:27:19.020 | And the statistics were run.

01:27:21.040 | And basically what they found was

01:27:22.600 | there was a statistically significant improvement

01:27:25.360 | in attention and cognitive control scores

01:27:27.840 | during any kind of active session

01:27:29.560 | as opposed to just a mere seated session.

01:27:32.400 | Okay, so they compared seated to cycling to treadmilling.

01:27:36.280 | However, verbal memory scores actually got worse

01:27:40.600 | during active sessions.

01:27:41.680 | So I'll repeat that.

01:27:43.280 | Treadmilling or the cycling workstations

01:27:46.000 | improved attention and cognitive control scores

01:27:49.600 | as compared to people that were just seated and working.

01:27:52.600 | However, verbal memory scores got worse

01:27:55.520 | during the active sessions.

01:27:56.600 | And again, just to repeat,

01:27:57.780 | there was no difference between cycling

01:27:59.240 | and treadmill workstations.

01:28:00.800 | So this is interesting.

01:28:01.720 | It suggests that, as the authors say,

01:28:03.380 | that active workstations, whether walking or cycling,

01:28:06.920 | are not only useful to improve caloric output

01:28:09.060 | and physical activity, circulation, and so on,

01:28:12.160 | but particularly when completing tasks like cognitive tasks

01:28:15.400 | or tasks that require focus

01:28:16.520 | that do not require verbal memory recall.

01:28:18.800 | Now, why verbal memory recall was negatively impacted,

01:28:23.040 | we don't know.

01:28:24.040 | Could be because people were breathing a little bit harder.

01:28:25.920 | Could be that there's something about walking and talking

01:28:28.280 | that seems incompatible in the nervous system,

01:28:30.860 | although I'm not aware of that.

01:28:32.000 | I know a number of people who can walk and talk

01:28:33.760 | at the same time.

01:28:34.960 | But if you are going to explore these treadmills

01:28:38.720 | or you're going to explore these cycling stations,

01:28:40.480 | you probably wouldn't want to do that

01:28:41.740 | for highly verbal work,

01:28:43.640 | maybe more for mathematical work or for analytic work

01:28:46.400 | or even creative work,

01:28:47.680 | but anything that involves very precise

01:28:49.800 | or detailed verbal recall,

01:28:51.860 | sitting or standing seems to be the better option.

01:28:56.120 | And if you're wondering why cycling or treadmilling

01:28:59.740 | would enhance various aspects of cognition,

01:29:02.920 | we can speculate.

01:29:04.560 | I've talked before about this,

01:29:06.000 | but anytime we are generating forward movement

01:29:09.040 | through our own actions, our own efforts,

01:29:11.760 | typically if we are outside, we're not on a treadmill

01:29:15.120 | or we're on a bicycle or we're running

01:29:17.120 | or even on a motorcycle or in a car,

01:29:19.360 | we have what's called optic flow.

01:29:20.960 | And that optic flow is known to quiet certain areas

01:29:25.120 | of the brain that are associated with vigilance

01:29:27.080 | and indeed fear.

01:29:27.920 | This is the basis of things like EMDR,

01:29:30.660 | eye movement to sensitization reprocessing.

01:29:33.320 | However, the mere act of engaging what are called

01:29:37.220 | our central pattern generators,

01:29:38.640 | the neurons in our brainstem and in our spinal cord

01:29:41.400 | that engage repetitive movements

01:29:43.760 | also can reduce some of the areas of the brain

01:29:46.060 | that are associated with anxiety and vigilance.

01:29:47.820 | So one pure speculation,

01:29:49.560 | but nonetheless grounded speculation

01:29:51.600 | would be that treadmilling or cycling at a desk

01:29:54.680 | would reduce anxiety that would allow performance

01:29:56.800 | to improve.

01:29:57.740 | The other, what I think is more likely explanation

01:30:00.740 | is that anytime we are in ambulation,

01:30:02.880 | we recruit the release of neuromodulators

01:30:05.460 | like epinephrine, dopamine, and things of that sort

01:30:08.120 | that further increase overall levels of alertness.

01:30:10.660 | I think that's the more likely explanation

01:30:12.280 | because it's hard to imagine how just a reduction

01:30:14.620 | in anxiety could lead to these improvements

01:30:17.680 | in cognition in a direct way.

01:30:19.540 | Whereas the subjects in the study I just mentioned

01:30:22.300 | on average experienced an increase in cognitive performance

01:30:26.360 | merely by movement, okay?

01:30:27.920 | And this does not include any optic flow

01:30:30.380 | because it's stationary,

01:30:31.360 | the treadmill or the cycle is stationary.

01:30:33.280 | And so we can rule out that optic flow.

01:30:35.320 | And that points to the idea that when we are in movement,

01:30:39.200 | we recruit neuromodulators associated

01:30:41.260 | with the so-called reticular activating system,

01:30:43.160 | the striatal system and so forth

01:30:45.000 | that would place the brain into some pattern.

01:30:47.820 | We don't know, we only can speculate some pattern,

01:30:50.120 | perhaps it's gamma waves or some other wave pattern

01:30:52.760 | that would engage heightened levels of focus and attention.

01:30:55.560 | Nonetheless, treadmilling, cycling at a desk

01:30:59.500 | does improve cognition.

01:31:00.960 | So we've been discussing workspace optimization

01:31:03.580 | with the understanding that you're not always going to work

01:31:06.460 | in the same place every day.

01:31:09.060 | What I've tried to do is give you a set

01:31:11.060 | of high potency tools that can improve your focus

01:31:13.700 | in cognition and to place that within a framework

01:31:16.680 | for particular kinds of work.

01:31:18.200 | Let's just review some of the basic elements

01:31:20.300 | of what we've covered today.

01:31:21.640 | First of all, in the first part of your day,

01:31:24.240 | that zero to nine hours after waking,

01:31:26.320 | you want bright lights, especially overhead lights,

01:31:28.440 | as bright as you can keep them

01:31:29.800 | without feeling uncomfortable

01:31:31.300 | or certainly not without feeling any pain in your eyes

01:31:33.760 | or elsewhere in your body.

01:31:35.280 | Bright lights make for the maximum state of alertness.

01:31:39.880 | In addition, try and place whatever it is

01:31:42.480 | that you're focusing on directly in front of you,

01:31:44.440 | but not have it extend too far out

01:31:45.920 | to either side of your eyes.

01:31:47.640 | Try and generate a fairly restricted visual window

01:31:50.320 | as we call it.

01:31:51.460 | And if you can try and place whatever it is

01:31:54.860 | you're focusing on, at least at nose level or above.

01:31:57.540 | That might take some engineering

01:31:59.560 | or some ingenuity and creativity

01:32:01.640 | in order to figure out how to do that,

01:32:02.860 | but that's going to be most beneficial.

01:32:04.980 | Try and avoid reclining, try and avoid sitting,

01:32:07.620 | try and stand for at least half of your workday.

01:32:11.020 | That's a good goal.

01:32:11.940 | And it may take some time to work up to that goal.

01:32:14.480 | In addition, if you're going to use sound

01:32:16.940 | as a stimulus for increasing focus and alertness,

01:32:19.980 | try and avoid exposure to white noise, pink noise,

01:32:22.720 | or brown noise for extended periods of time

01:32:25.360 | for more than an hour or so.

01:32:26.920 | That might actually be damaging to the auditory system.

01:32:29.880 | And at the very least is kind of stressful,

01:32:32.360 | even though you might not notice it,

01:32:33.480 | it's kind of a background level of anxiety and stress

01:32:35.540 | that is not going to serve you well.

01:32:37.160 | Rather, if you're going to pursue

01:32:39.120 | particular types of sound frequencies,

01:32:41.200 | consider using 40 Hertz binaural beats,

01:32:43.760 | not monaural beats, but 40 Hertz binaural beats

01:32:47.560 | done during a particular work bout

01:32:49.860 | or for 30 minutes prior to that work bout.

01:32:53.180 | I would not rely on binaural beats all the time every day.

01:32:55.980 | I think that could cause them to lose their potency

01:32:58.460 | just because of the way the auditory system attenuates.

01:33:00.800 | And actually you've experienced that attenuation.

01:33:02.500 | The mere fact that you can go into an environment

01:33:04.240 | where there's an air conditioner blowing,

01:33:05.800 | blowing, blowing, and then it stops

01:33:07.000 | and you feel that relaxation,

01:33:08.100 | but you weren't thinking about the air conditioner before,

01:33:10.440 | tells you that your auditory system

01:33:11.760 | had kind of attenuated to it,

01:33:13.180 | and yet it was still impacting your system.

01:33:15.320 | You were sensing it, we would say, but not perceiving it.

01:33:19.540 | There are other things that you can do

01:33:20.600 | to improve your workspace optimization,

01:33:23.480 | such as standing for half the day, as I mentioned before,

01:33:26.880 | but if you're interested in this

01:33:28.760 | or you feel like it suits you to treadmill,

01:33:31.040 | find a stationary treadmill that you can walk on.

01:33:33.520 | I've never tried this before, maybe after this episode,

01:33:36.240 | given what I've read in the peer-reviewed research,

01:33:38.280 | and it's pretty compelling,

01:33:39.840 | that treadmilling seems like an interesting way

01:33:42.200 | to increase alertness and cognitive performance.

01:33:44.780 | I'm not sure that I would do the cycling method

01:33:47.720 | 'cause I can't imagine just cycling and typing

01:33:49.580 | at the same time, that sort of feels like,

01:33:51.500 | I actually can do the rub your tummy pat,

01:33:53.880 | top of your head kind of thing,

01:33:54.900 | but it still feels like a little bit

01:33:56.700 | of a sort of a cognitive motor collision for me,

01:34:01.040 | for whatever reason, but that's just my bias.

01:34:03.120 | I do know how to ride a bicycle,

01:34:04.420 | but anyway, you pick your preference.

01:34:06.500 | Some other things that you could do

01:34:07.780 | in order to improve your workplace performance

01:34:10.600 | would be to consider the cathedral effect.

01:34:13.060 | If you're going to do analytic work

01:34:15.220 | for any part of the day, phase one or phase two,

01:34:17.180 | as I described them, but really in any time of day,

01:34:20.080 | that detailed analytic work

01:34:21.400 | for which there is a correct answer,

01:34:23.260 | learning scales of music, learning mathematics,

01:34:25.340 | trying to figure out the solution to a problem

01:34:27.180 | where there is indeed a solution.

01:34:28.680 | It could be an interpersonal problem as well.

01:34:31.060 | Then try and get into an environment

01:34:32.580 | with a relatively low ceiling.

01:34:34.100 | If you don't have access to a low ceiling environment,

01:34:36.060 | you might consider using a brimmed hat or even a hoodie,

01:34:39.020 | or even just facing down,

01:34:41.000 | or even putting your hand above your eyes, as you will,

01:34:44.460 | at the level of your eyebrows.

01:34:46.420 | In other words, lower the ceiling.

01:34:47.620 | That's the basis of the cathedral effects

01:34:49.620 | on analytic performance.

01:34:52.400 | In contrast, if you're interested in doing brainstorming,

01:34:55.820 | creative work, you're writing new things,

01:34:59.100 | you're creating new things of any kind, artwork,

01:35:01.300 | consider getting into a high ceiling

01:35:02.820 | or no ceiling environment.

01:35:04.900 | Or if you're wearing a brimmed hat

01:35:06.440 | or you're wearing a hoodie, maybe peel that back.

01:35:08.920 | Again, the data within the peer-reviewed literature

01:35:12.020 | are there to support these sorts of practices.

01:35:14.900 | And if you'd like to start layering these protocols,

01:35:16.700 | by all means, please do that.

01:35:18.420 | There's no reason why you couldn't do one

01:35:20.900 | or just two of these protocols.

01:35:22.940 | There's no reason why, for instance,

01:35:24.340 | you couldn't use binaural beats

01:35:25.860 | and try and get into a low ceiling environment

01:35:28.200 | to do detailed work a couple of times a week,

01:35:30.740 | but you could also employ all of these.

01:35:32.980 | Now, of course, there are an enormous number of other things

01:35:35.320 | that you can do to improve work performance and productivity.

01:35:38.580 | And I've talked about those in previous episodes,

01:35:40.560 | in particular, in the episode on focus

01:35:42.740 | and the episode on motivation.

01:35:44.580 | There are supplements you can take

01:35:46.540 | that can increase dopamine, for instance.

01:35:48.220 | There are tools that you can use to increase your focus.

01:35:51.620 | For instance, focusing your visual attention

01:35:53.940 | on one location for 30 to 60 seconds

01:35:56.700 | prior to entering a focused work bout.

01:35:58.740 | This has been shown again and again

01:36:00.560 | through work from Emily Belcetis at NYU.

01:36:03.200 | In the episode on focus, I cited a number of studies

01:36:05.660 | where this has actually been tested

01:36:06.900 | and deployed in various schools,

01:36:08.820 | having kids do a focus task

01:36:11.060 | where they look at a particular visual target

01:36:12.660 | for 30 to 60 seconds, then doing some mathematics

01:36:15.180 | and seeing pretty impressive improvement

01:36:17.180 | in focus and attention,

01:36:18.380 | even in people that have attention deficit

01:36:20.460 | hyperactivity disorder and so on.

01:36:22.820 | So there's no reason why you can't and shouldn't combine

01:36:26.300 | the sort of practical workspace optimization solutions

01:36:29.500 | that we talked about today

01:36:30.740 | with the kind of neural optimization solutions

01:36:33.560 | that we talked about in the episode on focus

01:36:35.540 | and the episode on ADHD and the episode on motivation.

01:36:38.720 | By all means, layer those together.

01:36:40.380 | That's how you're going to achieve the optimal focus bouts.

01:36:43.380 | That's how you're going to achieve

01:36:44.620 | the optimal creativity bouts.

01:36:47.540 | I do want to acknowledge again,

01:36:48.940 | the fact that I realize people are showing up

01:36:51.520 | to this challenge of workspace optimization

01:36:54.020 | with different budgets, with different constraints.

01:36:55.900 | Some people have kids at homes.

01:36:57.080 | There are a lot of interruptions.

01:36:58.500 | Some people do not.

01:36:59.600 | Nonetheless, I hope that the information

01:37:02.380 | I was able to provide today will allow you to make subtle

01:37:05.500 | or maybe even drastic rearrangements

01:37:07.620 | in your workspace environment.

01:37:09.200 | There's one other point related to that

01:37:11.320 | that I did not cover and that I'd like to cover

01:37:13.440 | just briefly, which is that there's nothing to say

01:37:16.120 | that you have to always work

01:37:17.520 | in the same location all the time.

01:37:19.860 | You can move from house to cafe, if that works for you.

01:37:22.720 | You can move from office to home.

01:37:24.400 | You can also move from different locations within your home.

01:37:27.360 | I have a brief anecdote about this.

01:37:29.020 | I used to attend a lot of scientific meetings

01:37:31.200 | when a lot of scientific meetings were in person,

01:37:33.560 | and there were always a few individuals

01:37:35.660 | that seemed to stay engaged

01:37:36.980 | throughout these very long meetings.

01:37:39.180 | We're talking seven, eight-hour days,

01:37:40.780 | sometimes evening sessions,

01:37:41.980 | and sometimes these meetings would go on

01:37:44.860 | for four or five or even six days.

01:37:47.500 | These were long meetings.

01:37:48.500 | And the quality of talks varied tremendously.

01:37:50.820 | And I always noticed the individuals

01:37:52.560 | that managed to stay engaged and awake

01:37:54.920 | for the entire meeting.

01:37:57.380 | And I noticed that people that could maintain

01:38:00.520 | high levels of alertness in this one conference room

01:38:03.720 | had a habit of moving to a different seat

01:38:06.540 | after each session, sometimes even between talks.

01:38:09.180 | And I actually discussed this

01:38:10.540 | with one of my colleagues who was doing this.

01:38:11.860 | I said, "Is this conscious?

01:38:12.840 | Are you always moving from place to place?"

01:38:14.700 | And they said, "Yeah, if I just stay in one place

01:38:16.420 | and I just look from this one particular visual angle

01:38:18.420 | at the screen, I find after one or two talks,

01:38:20.620 | regardless of how interesting the talks are,

01:38:23.140 | that I start to kind of drift.

01:38:24.680 | My mind isn't as engaged and indeed,

01:38:26.280 | sometimes can fall asleep."

01:38:27.420 | And so I started this practice of moving from space to space

01:38:30.540 | or I should say seat to seat within an auditorium,

01:38:32.500 | and it works quite well.

01:38:33.580 | And I think it works quite well because, again,

01:38:35.880 | of the relationship between our visual system

01:38:38.580 | driving the majority of our cognition,

01:38:41.300 | our visual system drives our thinking,

01:38:42.780 | and that novel visual environments

01:38:45.920 | are going to lend themselves

01:38:47.020 | to heightened levels of alertness.

01:38:49.300 | You don't want things to be so novel and scary

01:38:51.540 | or threatening or anxiety provoking or loud

01:38:53.740 | that they draw your attention away from your work.

01:38:55.740 | But I think this is part of the reason why

01:38:57.620 | turning on music or moving to an office or a cafe

01:39:01.420 | or an outdoor environment from an indoor environment

01:39:03.360 | or vice versa, maybe even within a single day,

01:39:06.180 | can bring about more heightened levels of productivity.

01:39:08.980 | I'd also like to acknowledge that what I covered today

01:39:11.340 | is most certainly not exhaustive

01:39:14.180 | for all the types of workspace optimization tools

01:39:16.740 | that one could create.

01:39:18.300 | For that reason, I'd love for you to suggest

01:39:21.580 | any of your workspace optimization tools

01:39:23.340 | that you found useful.

01:39:24.480 | Please put those in the comment section on YouTube.

01:39:26.540 | That would be the best place,

01:39:27.360 | then other people can see them.

01:39:28.940 | Also read through those and perhaps in a future episode,

01:39:32.180 | I'll call about some of the ones that I've tried

01:39:34.000 | on the basis of your suggestions.

01:39:35.840 | If you're learning from and/or enjoying this podcast,

01:39:38.100 | please subscribe to our YouTube channel.

01:39:39.920 | That's a terrific zero cost way to support us.

01:39:42.440 | Also on YouTube, you can put comments

01:39:44.520 | in the comment section, so give us feedback.

01:39:46.840 | You can make suggestions for future guests

01:39:48.420 | that you'd like us to host on the "Huberman Lab Podcast."

01:39:50.860 | And in general, you can ask questions.

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01:39:57.160 | Please also subscribe on Apple and/or Spotify.

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01:40:01.220 | to leave us up to a five-star review.

01:40:03.540 | Please also check out the sponsors mentioned

01:40:05.240 | at the beginning of this podcast episode.

01:40:07.180 | That's the best way to support the podcast.

01:40:09.520 | We also have a Patreon.

01:40:10.600 | It's patreon.com/andrewhuberman.

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01:40:14.760 | at any level that you like.

01:40:16.480 | We also have an Instagram and a Twitter account.

01:40:18.760 | It's Huberman Lab, and there I teach neuroscience

01:40:21.400 | and neuroscience-related tools.

01:40:23.280 | Oftentimes that information and those tools overlap

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01:40:29.380 | from themes and topics covered on the podcast.

01:40:31.520 | So please follow us on Instagram and Twitter.

01:40:34.240 | This episode, we didn't talk too much about supplements,

01:40:36.360 | but on many previous episodes of the "Huberman Lab Podcast,"

01:40:39.160 | we talk about supplementation.

01:40:41.040 | And while supplementation isn't required

01:40:43.100 | or great for everybody,

01:40:44.180 | some people do derive tremendous benefit from supplements.

01:40:47.640 | We talk about supplements for focus, for sleep,

01:40:50.160 | for creativity, all sorts of things.

01:40:52.620 | If you'd like to see the supplements that I take,

01:40:54.200 | you can go to Thorne,

01:40:55.400 | that's t-h-o-r-n-e.com/u/huberman.

01:40:59.420 | There you can see the supplements that I take.

01:41:01.060 | You can get 20% off those supplements.

01:41:03.140 | And if you navigate deeper into the Thorne site

01:41:05.340 | through that portal, Thorne,

01:41:06.660 | t-h-o-r-n-e.com/u/huberman,

01:41:10.300 | you can also get 20% off any of the other supplements

01:41:13.140 | that Thorne makes.

01:41:14.300 | The reason we partner with Thorne

01:41:15.960 | is because one of the major issues

01:41:17.580 | in the supplement industry

01:41:18.780 | is that many of the supplements out there

01:41:20.620 | don't contain sufficient quantity,

01:41:23.500 | or they contain too much of a given supplement

01:41:25.680 | and the quality of the ingredients can vary tremendously.

01:41:29.000 | With Thorne supplements,

01:41:30.320 | there is immense stringency

01:41:31.520 | in terms of the quality of the ingredients

01:41:33.440 | and the precision of the amounts of those ingredients

01:41:35.820 | that they include in each product.

01:41:37.780 | Once again, thank you for joining me for this discussion

01:41:40.440 | about the science and peer-reviewed literature

01:41:42.600 | on workspace optimization.

01:41:44.240 | I hope some, if not all, of the tools

01:41:46.520 | will be beneficial for you.

01:41:47.960 | And as always, thank you for your interest in science.

01:41:50.680 | (upbeat music)

01:41:53.260 | (upbeat music)

Optimizing Workspace for Productivity, Focus, & Creativity | Huberman Lab Podcast #57

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