5 Tips to Quickly Improve Focus & Concentration

0:00 the best way to get better at focusing is to use the mechanisms of focus that you were born with and the key principle here is that mental focus follows visual [Music] Focus we are all familiar with the fact that our visual system can be unfocused blurry or jumping around or we can be very laser focused on one location in space what's interesting and vitally important to understanding how to access neuroplastic itic it is that you can use your visual focus and you can increase your visual Focus as a way of increasing your mental focus abilities more broadly so I'm going to explain how to do that plasticity starts with alertness that

0:46 alertness can come from a sense of love a sense of Joy a sense of fear doesn't matter there are pharmacologic ways to access alertness too the most common one is of course caffeine which reduces the molecule that makes us sleepy called adenosine caffeine can be a relatively safe way to increase epinephrine now many people are now also using adero adero chemically looks a lot like amphetamine and basically it is amphetamine it will increase epinephrine release from Locust culus it will wake up the brain and that's why a lot of people rely on it it does have a heavy basis for use in certain clinical syndromes prescribed such as attention deficit however it also has a high

1:33 probability of abuse especially in those who are not prescribed it Aderall will not increase focus it increases alertness it does not touch the acetylcholine system and if those of you that are taking Aderall say well it really increases my focus overall that's probably because your autonomic nervous system is just veering towards what we call parasympathetic you're really just very sleepy and so it's bring your levels of alertness up as I mentioned ader is very problematic for a number of people it has it can be habit forming learning on Aderall does not always translate to high performance off or on Aderall at later times and the Aderall discussion is a broader one that perhaps we should have with a psychiatrist in the room at some point because it is a very widely abused drug at this point in

2:20 time the acetylcholine system and the focus that it brings is available as I mentioned through pharmacology but also through these Behavior practices and the behavioral practices that are anchored in visual Focus are going to be the ones that are going to allow you to develop great depth and duration of focus so let's think about visual Focus for a second when we focus on something visually we have two options we can either look at a very small region of space with a lot of detail and a lot of precision or we can dilate our gaze and we can see big pieces of visual space with very little detail it's a tradeoff off we can't look at everything at high resolution this is why we have these the the pupil more or less relates to the

3:06 phobia of the eye which is the area in which we have the most receptors the highest density of receptors that perceive light and so our Acuity is much better in the center of our visual field than in our periphery and that's because the density the number of pixels in the center of my visual field is much higher than it is in the periphery when we focus our eyes we do a couple things first of all we tend to do that in the center of our visual field and our two eyes tend to align in what's called a virgin eye movement towards a common point the other thing that happens is the lens of our eye moves so that our brain now no longer sees the entire visual world but is seeing a small cone of visual imagery that small cone of visual imagery or soda straw view of the world has much higher Acuity higher resolution than if I were to look at everything now you say of course this

3:53 makes perfect sense but that's about visual attention not mental attention well it turns out that focus in the brain is anchored to our visual system I'll talk about blind people in a moment but assuming that somebody is sighted the key is to learn how to focus better visually not only do we develop a smaller visual window into the world but we activate a set of neurons in our brain stem that trigger the release of both norepinephrine epinephrine and acetylcholine norepinephrine is kind of similar to epinephrine so in other words when our eyes are relaxed in our head when we're just kind of looking at our entire visual environment moving our head around moving through space we're in optic flow things moving past us or we're sitting still we're looking broadly at our space we're relaxed when

4:40 our eyes move slightly inward toward a particular visual Target our visual World shrinks our level of visual focus goes up and we know that this relates to the release of acetylcholine and epinephrine at the relevant sites in the brain for plasticity now what this means is that if you have a hard time Focus focusing your mind for sake of reading or for listening you need to practice and you can practice focusing your visual system now this works best if you practice focusing your visual system at the precise distance from the work that you intend to do for sake of plasticity so how would this look in the real world let's say I am trying to concentrate on something related to I don't know science I'm reading a science paper and

5:25 I'm having a hard time it's not absorbing I might think that I'm only looking at the paper that I'm reading I'm only looking at my screen but actually my eyes are probably darting around a bit experiments have been done on this or I'm gathering information from too many sources in in the visual environment now presumably because it's me I've already had my coffee I'm hydrated I'm well well rested I slept well and I still experience these challenges in focusing spending just 60 to 120 seconds focusing my visual attention on a small window of my screen meaning just on my screen with nothing on it but bringing my eyes to that particular location increases not just my visual Acuity for that location but it brings about an increase in activity in a bunch of other brain areas that are

6:12 associated with gathering information from this location so put simply if you want to improve your ability to focus practice visual Focus now if you wear contacts or you have or you wear uh corrective lenses that's fine you of course would want to use those you don't want to take those off and use a blurry image the finer the visual image and the more that you can hold your gaze to that visual image the higher your levels of attention will be so you absolutely have to focus on the thing that you're trying to learn and you will feel some agitation because of the epinephrine in your system if you're feeling agitation and it's challenging to focus and you're feeling like you're not doing it right chances are you're doing it right and you can practice this ability to stare

6:58 for long periods of time without blinking I know it's a little Eerie for people to watch but if your goal is to learn how to control that visual window for sake of controlling your focus it can be an immensely powerful portal into these mechanisms of plasticity because we know it engages things like nucleus balis and these other brain stem mechanisms I get a lot of questions about attention deficit hyperactivity disorder ADHD and attention deficit disorder some people actually have clinically diagnosed ADD and ADHD and if you do you should certain certainly work with a good psychiatrist to try and figure out the right pharmacology and or behavioral practices for you many people however have given themselves a lowgrade ADHD or add because of the way that they move through their world they are

7:44 looking at their phone a lot of the time it's actually very easy to Anchor your attention to your phone for the following reason first of all it's very restricted in size so it's very easy to limit your visual attention to something about this big it's one of the um design features of the phone the other is that just as you you've probably heard a picture is worth a th000 words well a movie is worth 10,000 pictures anytime we're looking at things that have motion visual motion our attentional system will naturally gravitate towards them towards those movies it's actually much harder to read words on a page than it used to be for many people because we're used to seeing things spelled out for us in YouTube videos or videos where things

8:29 move and are very dramatic it is true that the more that we look at those motion stimuli the more that we're seeing movies of things and things that are very dramatic and very intense the worse we're getting at attending to things like text on a page or to listening to something like a podcast and extracting the information if you think about the areas of life that dictate whether or not we become successful independent healthy individuals most of those involve the kind of boring practices of of digesting information on a page boring because it's not as exciting in the moment perhaps as watching a movie or something being spoonfed to to us but the more attention that we can put to something even if it's fleeting and we feel like we're only getting little bits and pieces shards of the information as

9:16 opposed to the entire thing that has a much more powerful effect in engaging this coleric system for plasticity than does for instance watching a movie and that's because when we watch a movie it can the entire thing can be great can be awesome it can be this overriding experience but I think for all those experiences if you're somebody who's interested in building your brain and expanding your brain and getting better at various things feeling better doing better Etc one has to ask how much of my neurochemical resources am I devoting to the passive experience of letting something just kind of overwhelm me and excite me versus something that I'm really trying to learn and take away and now there's another I enjoy movie content and TV content all the time I scroll Instagram often but we are limited in the extent to which we

10:02 can grab a hold of these acetylcholine release mechanisms or epinephrine and I think that we need to be careful that we don't devote all our acetylcholine and epinephrine all our dopamine for that matter to these passive experiences of things that are not going to enrich us and better us so that's a little bit of an of an editorial on my part but the phone is Rich with movies it's rich with information and the real question is is the inform information rich in for us in ways that grow us and cultivate smarter more emotionally uh you know emotionally evolved or uh people or is it creating how's what's it doing for our physical well-being for that matter so I don't want to tell people what to do or not to

10:48 do but think carefully about how often you're focusing on something and how good you are or poor you are at focusing on something that's challenging so once you get this epinephrine this alertness you get the acetylcholine released and you can focus your attention then the question is for how long and in an earlier podcast I talked about these ultradian cycles that last about 90 minutes the typical learning bout should be about 90 minutes that learning bout will no doubt include 5 to 10 minutes of warm-up period I think everyone should give themselves permission to not be fully focused in the early part of that bout but that in the middle of that bout for the middle hour or so you should be able to maintain Focus for about an hour so so that for me means eliminating distractions that means turning off the

11:33 Wi-Fi I put my phone in the other room if I find myself reflexively getting up to get the phone I will take the phone and lock it in the car outside if I find myself going to get it anyway I am guilty of um giving away the phone um for a period of time or even things more dramatic I've uh thrown it up on my roof before so I can't get to it till the end of the day that thing is pretty compelling and we come up with all sorts of reasons why we need to be in contact with it but I encourage you you to try experiencing what it is to be completely immersed in an activity where you feel the agitation that your attention is drifting but you continually bring it back and that's an important point which is that attention drifts but we have to re-anchor it we have to keep grabbing it back and the way to do that if you're sighted is with your eyes that as your attention drifts and you look away you want to try and literally maintain

12:20 visual focus on the thing that you're trying to learn feel free to Blink of course but you can greatly increase your powers of focus and the rates of learning [Music]