Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - BITESIZE | Do This Every Day to Reduce Stress and Anxiety and Improve Focus | Dr Andrew Huberman #421

Episode Date: January 26, 2024

Do you regularly feel stressed? Or do you struggle to stay focussed either at work or even when trying to relax? Feel Better Live More Bitesize is my weekly podcast for your mind, body, and heart. Each week I’ll be featuring inspirational stories and practical tips from some of my former guests. Today’s clip is from episode 227 of the podcast with Dr Andrew Huberman, a professor of neuroscience at Stanford University School of Medicine. In this clip, he shares some powerful tools to reduce stress and anxiety and improve our focus and performance. Support the podcast and enjoy Ad-Free episodes. Try FREE for 7 days on Apple Podcasts https://apple.co/feelbetterlivemore. For other podcast platforms go to https://fblm.supercast.com. Show notes and the full podcast are available at drchatterjee.com/227 Follow me on instagram.com/drchatterjee Follow me on facebook.com/DrChatterjee Follow me on twitter.com/drchatterjeeuk   DISCLAIMER: The content in the podcast and on this webpage is not intended to constitute or be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your doctor or other qualified health care provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard on the podcast or on my website.

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packs to 10. And these packs are perfect for keeping in your backpack, office, or car. If you want to take advantage of this limited time offer, all you have to do is go to drinkag1.com forward slash live more. Welcome to Feel Better Live More Bite Size, your weekly dose of positivity and optimism to get you ready for the weekend. Today's clip is from episode 227 of the podcast with Dr. Andrew Huberman, a professor of neuroscience at Stanford University School of Medicine. In this clip, he shares some powerful tools to reduce stress and anxiety and improve our focus and performance. The visual system, I think, really sits at the top of the list in terms of practical tools in order to lay down the bedrock of their foundation of mental and physical health and high performance for those that already feel as if they're doing well and want to level up their mental or physical practices. level up their mental or physical practices. And the reason I say that is for the following reason.

The nervous system's job is to coordinate the activities of all the organs of the body, including our movement and our thought and our emotions, but really coordinate the immune system, coordinate the endocrine system. It's really the conductor of the whole business that is us. The visual system is unique in that it's the only piece of the central nervous system that resides outside the cranial vault. So our eyes, we think of as seeing devices, but they are actually the primary and in some sense, the only way in which the nervous system has knowledge about external circumstances. And so lining the back of our eyes is a three-layered structure called the neural retina. And the neural retina is part of the brain proper.

It's a piece of the brain that got extruded out of the cranial vault during development. So you've got two little bits of brain outside your cranial vault. So we could talk about the practical tools, but I hope that lays the sort of the organizational logic behind why we say the visual system is so important. What you say about panoramic vision, I think is fascinating. And I want to talk, if it's okay,

Andrew, about this sort of bi-directional communication we have between certain behaviors that we have in our brain. So with breathwork, for example, if we're feeling super stressed and we're trying to get through deadlines, that can change the way that we breathe. But at the same time, we can consciously change the way that we breathe to have a calming effect on our brain. And I sort of feel with respect to vision, I think with breathwork, we're sort of getting there. People are starting to understand that, but I don't think with vision they are. So maybe you could talk to how, whether you have this peripheral sort of soft vision or this kind of tightly focused vision, what is that doing? What messages is that sending up to our brain? You're absolutely right. I mean, the breathing system is amazing because it bridges subconscious

and conscious processing, right? All the time we're breathing and we don't have to think about it just like our heartbeat, but at any moment we can grab a hold of our breathing and change our breathing. And that's, that's a unique neural apparatus that allows us to bridge between those two. This, the visual system is, is similar in that we're seeing things all the time, but we can also take control of our vision. I can decide to focus in a very, you know, narrow soda straw view of the world, or I can open up the aperture of my visual field. So let's talk about opening the aperture, so-called panoramic vision.

You don't have to actually be, you know, stone still. You just, what you want to do is just try and see without moving your head or eyes. What you're trying to do is dilate your gaze so that you're seeing more of the space around you, the ceiling, the area in front of you. Ideally, you'll see your own body a little bit in your peripheral vision. And when you do this, when you shift into this mode of vision, we call panoramic vision, a couple of things happen. One is that you release

a connection between the brain and the brainstem that's involved in alertness. And so it's not that you become less alert, but it has a relaxing effect. It's like coming off of the accelerator just a little bit. If ever you are in an argument or you feel like you're getting triggered and you can feel your heart rate increasing, you can feel the, you know, when adrenaline hits our system, it hits it very fast and there's this propensity to move and there's a propensity to say things. And if you want to inhibit those reflexes, cause those can be kind of life damaging depending on what you're going to do and what you're going to say. Also, it's always better to be the calm one in an argument, if you can. Panoramic vision is great because it's completely covert. Whereas a breathing tools

require a kind of overt shift in one's behavior. So you can tell when someone's, you know, or something like that. But with vision, you can, in a very covert way, you can expand your visual field and it will relax you. People have fear of public speaking, people who have challenges in different environments, going to the doctor's office um face-to-face communication for a lot of people is hard panoramic vision is a wonderful way to relax the systems of your brain and body just a bit and what's really fun is that you can start feeling that shift and the more you

do it the more you engage the um the mechanisms by which you decelerate i would say this is less of a break than a deceleration. It's not like slamming on the brake of stress. It's coming off the accelerator a little bit. So it allows you to kind of drive the car that is you. And panoramic vision also has a unique feature, which is that you actually become more alert, aware, and responsive. The neurons that are responsible for panoramic vision the aficionados so-called magnocellular meaning large magno neurons of the eye and brain and big neurons transmit information much faster so when you catch a ball or when you reflexively do something you're

actually using this panoramic system rather than the high acuity fine system and your reaction times go up about fourfold. So you might think, oh, well, I'm kind of tuning out, but you're not tuning out. You're actually far more situationally aware. And I'm fortunate to do a little bit of work with people in US and Canadian special operations. They talk a lot about situational awareness, going into environments where you can monitor large swaths of behavior and activity, but be very responsive to things in different locations. And so actually panoramic vision is a wonderful way, not just for them to do their work, but when you're walking down the hall, for instance,

let's just take an example. You just took a meeting or you get off a zoom, you're headed upstairs. Are you going to look into the narrow box that is your phone and check something, bringing you a soda straw view of the world that's driving those attentional mechanisms up and stress level up? Or are you just going to walk to your car or down the hall or up the stairs and kind of panoramic vision allows your system to relax a little bit so that when you get to your destination, you're able to focus again. Remember, throughout your day, your focus is designed to be a bit of a roller coaster. your day, your focus is designed to be a bit of a roller coaster. You weren't designed to wake up in the morning and go, phone, check Instagram, boom, check email, get kids to school. Okay. Brief trough. What am I going to do? Okay. You know, you think about the way that our attentional system is working and it's, it's absurd what we, what we're demanding of ourselves.

Now we've killed all the micro breaks throughout the day, even little 10 second pauses in high attentional activities. So learning or a pod, like what we're doing now and talking back and forth, even just a little 10 second pauses allow the brain to store a bunch of information much faster about what was just learned. It allows the system to decompress a bit. The really powerful aspect of it is that then when you lean back into activity, you have a heightened level of focus. Many, many people out there are struggling. They think, my memory is bad. I'm in trouble with focus. But a lot of people have trouble focusing because they're basically spending their focus, if you will, throughout the day. It's like dropping small coins all day long. By the end of the day, you've spent out quite a lot of money.

So you have to be judicious in your use of this thing that we call focus and attention. So panoramic vision is one excellent way to do that. Yes, respiration, breathing is very powerful, very powerful, but it requires signals from the body, from the lungs and tissues of the body to the brain, and then the brain will adjust its state. Vision, as you recall, is the brain. So it's the fastest route by which we can change our state of mind. There's one other kind of tool that I think might be useful in the context of vision, which isn't so much about calming down, but about focus. One very effective tool, and this is actually in use in China, pretty widespread now, is if people have a hard time focusing, remember that cognitive or mental focus follows visual

focus. So if you're going to sit down and do some work and you find, oh, I can't concentrate, I'm not getting it, I can't get into the writing or I can't do what I'm doing. Very simple practice, it's been tested. You can take a piece of paper, put a little crosshatch on it, put it at the distance of your computer and force yourself to bring your vision, what we call a vergence eye movement to that location and try and hold that blinking as seldom as possible as you can for about 60 seconds. You've now adjusted the aperture of your visual field, but you've also changed the aperture of your thinking, right? In doing that. And this is very different than if you were just to concentrate also changed the aperture of your thinking, right? In doing that. And this

is very different than if you were just to concentrate on like the feeling of touch on the tips of your fingers, because as you do work, most all work requires vision. And then the work that you do, you'll find exists in this kind of narrow tunnel and you're able to rule out distractions quite a bit better. That's one of the reasons why this device is so terrible. I mean, I fall victim to this too, but if you have your phone every two seconds, you're looking at your phone, your visual attention is darting all over the place. So there's a lot of clinically legitimate, if you will, ADHD that we've brought upon ourselves. And so you can use visual focus as a training tool. I have a simple meditation I do in the morning. I call it a meditation,

but it's really just visual training. I can explain it now. I don't think I've described this anywhere that anchors several of these practices. I actually will close my eyes and just concentrate on my internal state, something that we call interoception. And I'll just breathe three times. Then I'll open my eyes. I'll stare at my hand or something at about a distance of arm's length. And I'll focus my visual attention there and breathe three times just for sake of timekeeping. Then I'll look in the distance and I'll do the same. And then I try and go into panoramic vision, even if I'm indoors and I'll breathe three times. And then I bring myself right back into my internal landscape. I'll focus on a little cross hatch and usually then I get to work.

And so what am I doing? What is this wacky practice? Well, this wacky practice I just described is stepping through each, as we call, it sounds abstract, but space time bin of the visual system. The visual system can orient to now, it can orient to the future, it can orient to the past, mostly to the present and future. And so this stepping through a visual attention systematically, what I'm doing is I'm training my system to adjust to these shifts because throughout the day, life is a

series of shifts between one thing and the next and the next and the ability to transition between these and then lock into them and then transition into the next is what makes us effective. this might seem a little abstract but if you try it what you'll find is that transitions between say work and a conversation or um dropping into work very deeply become much easier and there's there's reason there's neurobiological underpinnings to this um it's this is a forced practice it kind of mimics what we ought to be doing all day long the problem is is that the interference of of mostly of smartphone communications we're constantly being bombarded with new context after new context when you're on social media it's the equivalent of watching 50 movies in two minutes because you're scrolling through and context switch context switch context

the human brain has never been confronted with this. Even if you have 200 channels on the television, it's very rare to just go channel, channel, channel. The whole idea of social media, you're just, you're context switching, context switching, context switching in a very passive way. And so what I've tried to do is create practices that are grounded in the neurobiology of vision and how vision anchors attention and can induce calm. And the practice, that simple practice I described, what it does is it gives you the power and control to shift your visual attention to different things as opposed to some external stimulus shifting your visual attention for you. And I find it, I've been doing this for about eight years now I do it every morning and sometimes in

the afternoon and what I find is that it's allowed me to be far more effective in the activities that I'm engaged in and transitioning between those activities I love it it kind of sounds like training a muscle in the gym is going to allow us to do many things, but lift heavier things, be more strong and robust in our life for whatever we're trying to do. And it sounds like this kind of four part process of, you know, focusing on things at different distances, it kind of feels to me as though this is a process that's helping adapt our visual systems to the way the modern world is now, because the modern world ain't changing any time soon. So it sort of feels like this might have been a practice that maybe wasn't necessary 100 years ago, 50 years ago, but it is now highly necessary because

of the environments in which we find ourselves in. That's right. Very well put. And, you know, the smartphones and internet are delivering experience at rapid speed in ways that the human brain just simply didn't evolve to contend with. Now, the human brain is great at dealing with new technologies, creating new technologies. great at dealing with new technologies, creating new technologies. What I'm describing are very basic practices that are designed to offset some of the damage, but also, you know, it's not just about avoiding problems. It's also about being functional. You know, I think that everybody wants to be mentally healthy, physically healthy, and perform well in their various activities. healthy, physically healthy, and perform well in their various activities. And we do that by engaging the attentional systems and then disengaging the attentional systems. Everything in terms of learning, whether or not you're a child or an adult, is a function of being able

to lean in with intense focus and then lean out and access rest of different kinds. In fact, neuroplasticity, the nervous system's ability to change in response to experience is what, aside from the fact that the nervous system anchors and coordinates all those actions of the body, the nervous system is so unique in that it can change itself. force specific changes onto your nervous system, the passive consequence of living in a particular way will also change your nervous system and not necessarily for the better. So excessive light viewing at night, not getting enough sunlight, not getting enough movement. I mean, the nervous system will atrophy or change in response to whatever you give it. That's the beauty of it for better or for worse. And so what we're talking about here is leveraging this incredible capacity of the nervous system to change and saying, well, what are the simple, zero cost, very low time investment tools that are going to allow me to be very effective as I

transition from one stage of life to the next? Hope you enjoyed that bite-sized clip. I hope you have a wonderful weekend and i'll be back next week with my long-form conversational wednesday and the latest episode of bite science next friday