Huberman Lab - Essentials: Optimizing Workspace for Productivity, Focus & Creativity
Episode Date: January 8, 2026In this Huberman Lab Essentials episode, I discuss how to optimize your workspace to maximize productivity, focus and creativity. I explain how key environmental factors such as lighting, the physica...l layout of your work area and desk setup can influence attention and performance. I also discuss how specific types of sounds can enhance focus and how to adjust your work environment for particular tasks. These practical, flexible protocols can be applied whether you are working from home, in an office or on the road. Thank you to our sponsors AG1: https://drinkag1.com/huberman Eight Sleep: https://eightsleep.com/huberman ROKA: https://roka.com/huberman Timestamps (00:00:00) Workplace Optimization for Performance (00:00:36) Clutter, Variables for Workspace Optimization (00:02:41) Vision & Light, Tool: Mornings & Bright Light; Windows (00:04:45) Afternoon, Evenings & Light; Tool: Dimming Lights (00:07:13) Sponsor: Eight Sleep (00:07:13) Alertness & Visual Focus, Tool: Screen Placement (00:10:23) Vergence Eye Movement & Alertness, Tool: Visual Breaks (00:13:08) Cathedral Effect, Creative vs Analytical Thinking, Tool: Ceiling Height by Task (00:16:08) Sponsor: AG1 (00:16:08) Background Noise to Avoid; White Noise, Pink Noise (00:20:41) Sound Patterns to Improve Concentration (00:24:00) Tool: Binaural Beat Frequency for Focus; Dopamine (00:25:33) Tool: Managing Interruptions (00:25:29) Sponsor: ROKA (00:26:57) Sit or Stand for Work?, Tool: Sit-Stand Desk (00:30:45) Key Takeaways, Flexibility & Changing Locations Disclaimer & Disclosures Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Transcript
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Welcome to Huberman Lab Essentials, where we revisit past episodes for the most potent and actionable science-based tools for mental health, physical health, and performance.
I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine.
Today, we're going to talk all about how to optimize your workspace for maximum productivity.
Indeed, that means to heighten levels of focus, to increase levels of creativity, to improve your ability to task switch.
And this could be for sake of school or for work,
creative endeavors, personal endeavors.
This really extends to everybody.
This is a topic that's intrigued me for a very long time
because my undergraduate advisor,
my graduate advisor, and my postdoc advisor
had many things in common, including being great scientists,
being kind people and terrific mentors,
but they had another thing in common,
which always perplexed me,
which is that their offices were a complete disaster.
They had mountains of books, mountains of,
of papers, mountains of all sorts of stuff,
and yet all of them were extremely productive
and could remain extremely focused
in that incredibly cluttered environment.
Now, I'm somebody who doesn't like clutter.
I find it very hard to focus in cluttered environments.
And indeed, there's tremendous variation among people
as to whether or not they can remain focused
or whether or not they struggle to focus
in physically cluttered environments.
There's no right or wrong to this.
But the question we should ask ourselves
is why were they all able to be so focused?
And it turns out,
that the reason they were able to be so focused
is that they all captured one single
and yet fundamental variable of workspace optimization.
And we'll talk about what that variable is.
In fact, we're going to talk about
what all the variables of optimizing a workspace are,
things like vision, things like light,
things like noise in the room,
whether or not you listen to music or not,
whether or not you use noise canceling headphones or not.
We're going to talk about all of that
and we're going to do that in a way
that you can optimize your workspace
regardless of whether or not you are at home,
whether or not you're on the road, et cetera.
Because the last thing I would ever want to do
is to create a situation where you find the optimal workspace
and then you are a slave to that optimal workspace.
That's just not the way the world works.
What you want to do, or my goal for you, rather,
is that you will have a short checklist of things
that you can look to anytime you sit down to do work
and you can think about the underlying variables
that impact your brain and your body
and allow your brain and body
to get into the optimal state
in order to learn, in order to be productive,
and indeed to move through your work bouts
in a very relaxed and pleasurable way
while maintaining focus
and while pursuing any of the number of things that you're doing.
The first variable we want to think about
in terms of workspace optimization is vision and light.
From the time you wake up in the morning
until about six or seven or eight,
sometimes nine hours later, your brain is in a unique state.
It is in a state of high levels of dopamine,
a neuromodulator,
and high levels of epinephrine,
as well as hormones like cortisol and so forth.
That early part of the day is a time of day
in which for sake of workspace optimization,
being in a brightly lit environment
can lend itself to optimal work throughout the day,
not just during that early phase.
So one of the things that I've done for my workspace
is to make sure that when I wake up in the morning,
I do go get my sunlight.
If the sun isn't out,
I turn on as many bright artificial lights
as I can manage
or tolerate, and then I go get my sunlight exposure.
But once I set out to do some work
that all the overhead lights in that room are on,
as well as lights in front of me,
and that's again to stimulate heightened levels
of focus and further release
of these neuromodular layers that I mentioned before,
dopamine, norapinephrine, and epinephrine.
Now, the way that one could do that
could be a very low cost way of having, for instance,
a desk lamp and those overhead lights.
Ring lights can be pretty cost effective,
and yet they're very bright
and they have the sort of bright blue light
that is going to optimally stimulate
those melanopsin ganglion cells.
I don't use a ring light.
I use a light pad.
The particular light pad I use, I bought on Amazon.
So I place that on the desk in front of me
and I turn it on essentially throughout this phase one of the day.
For those of you that can place your desk near a window
and even better to open the window,
that would be really fantastic.
Why would I say open the window?
Well, it turns out that sunlight is going to be
the best stimulus for waking up your brain and body
through this melanopsin to hypothalamine.
the hypothalamus system.
And by looking at sunlight through a window,
it's 50 five zero times less effective
than if that window were to be open.
Mostly because those windows filter out
a lot of the wavelengths of blue light
that are essential for stimulating the eyes
and this wake up signal.
Now in the afternoon, starting at about nine
and continuing until about 16 hours after waking,
you want to start dimming the lights in that environment.
The idea is that in this so-called phase two
of the 24 hour cycle from about
about nine to 16 hours after waking,
you want to bring the level of lights down a bit.
Having lights that are in front of you is fine,
but overhead lights at that time
are not going to be optimal for the sorts of neurochemical states
that your brain wants to be in.
The states that I'm referring to
are a shift from the dopamine and norophenephrine
that's highest early in the day
to increases in things like serotonin
and other neuromodulators that put your brain
into a state that's better for creative
or for more abstract thinking.
So what I recommend doing and what I personally do
is I will turn off overhead lights in the afternoon.
It's not completely dim, it's not completely dark,
but I will start to reduce the amount of overhead light
and just simply keep the light pad on
and whatever other lamps I happen to be using.
So somewhere around 4 or 5 p.m.,
which for me is about 12 hours after I've been awake
or 14 hours after I've been awake,
I will turn off that light pad
and start to transition the lights in my environment
to more yellows and reds.
And then I'll just mention
because I know there are people
who are working in the middle of the night.
There's phase three,
which is about 17 to 24 hours after waking.
If you're going to be doing work
in that third phase of your circadian cycle,
you really want to limit the amount of bright light
that you're getting in your eyes
to just the amount that allows you to do the work that you're doing.
Because if you get light in your eyes
that's any brighter than that,
you're going to severely deplete your melatonin levels.
You're going to,
you're going to severely shift your circadian clock
and it's effectively like traveling to another time zone.
So if you stay up from 3 a.m. until 6 a.m.
or 2 a.m. until 4 a.m.
working on a term paper or something of that sort
and you're getting bright light in your eyes,
you are effectively flying six hours into a different time zone.
Or at least that's what your body registers it has.
And it can really throw your sleep in your metabolism
and a number of other things out of whack.
Now there's an exception to this,
which is if you really want to be awake,
it can often be bent,
beneficial to flipping on all the lights in the room
and keeping them really bright.
One of the hardest things to do is to stay up all night
studying when you're in a dim environment.
So you have to determine the trade-off between whether or not
you want to shift your clock or whether or not
you want to get the work done.
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Now, that's light, but there's another aspect of vision that has been shown to be
critically important for how alert we are going to be and how well we can maintain that
alertness.
And that has to do with where our visual focus is in a given environment.
There's a very underappreciated and yet incredible aspect of our neurology that has to do
with the relationship between where we look and our level of.
alertness. And it works in a very logical way. We have clusters of neurons in our brain stem.
And those clusters of neurons control our eyelid muscles and they control our eye movements
up and down into the sides. Now, the neurons that control those muscles have a very interesting
feature, which is that when we are looking down toward the ground or anywhere below basically
the central region of our face, the neurons that control that eye movement,
movement are intimately related to areas of the brain stem
that release certain types of neuromodulators
and neurotransmitters.
And they activate areas of the brain
that are associated with calm and indeed even with sleepiness.
Now the opposite is also true.
We have neurons that place our eyes into an upward gaze
above the sort of level of our nose
and up above our forehead,
literally looking up while keeping the head stationary.
Those neurons don't just control the position of the eyes
and cause them to move up.
they also trigger the activation of brain circuits
that are associated with alertness.
Now, this has some obvious implications.
Contrary to what most people do,
which is to look down at their laptop, tablet or phone,
if you want to be alert and you want to maintain
the maximum amount of focus for whatever it is
that you're reading or doing,
you want that screen or whatever it is
that you're looking at to at least be at eye level
and ideally slightly above it.
There's another aspect of our vision
that's absolutely critical
for optimizing our workspace.
And that has to do with this really interesting feature
of our visual pathways in that it has two major channels.
Those two major channels have names,
although you don't have to remember the names.
The first one is the so-called parvo cellular channel,
which is involved in looking at things
at specific points in space and at high resolution or detail.
And then there's the so-called magnocellar channel
that's involved in looking at big swaths of visual space
and at lower resolution.
Now again, you don't have to remember
remember the names, what you do have to remember, however,
is that you're going to create the maximum amount
of alertness in your system,
the maximum amount of ability to focus.
When your system is in that parvocellular mode,
when you're bringing your eyes to a common point,
what we call a vergence eye movement,
V-E-R-G-E-N-C-E.
Bringing your eyes to a single point in space
will create a narrower aperture of a visual window,
meaning your visual world actually shrinks,
at least perceptually.
Now, the caveat to this is that if you are going to look
at a narrow space, a narrow window for any period of time,
whether or not it's a book or a laptop or a tablet or a phone,
those virgin's eye movements not only create alertness,
but they also require energy.
And they also can fatigue the eyes
because there's a process called accommodation
whereby the shape of your eye literally has to change
so that the lens can move so that you can focus at that location.
Accommodation is an incredible process,
but it is a demanding one,
and that's the reason
your eyes get tired when you focus on something for too long.
So here's a principle extracted from the ophthalmology
and neuroscience literature that you can adopt.
For every 45 minutes in which you are focusing on something
like a phone or a tablet or a book page or your computer,
you want to get into magnocellar panoramic vision
for at least five minutes.
And the way that I suggest to do this
is actually to take a walk ideally outside.
So for every 45 minutes or so,
try and get five minutes of relaxing your eyes.
Look off into the distance,
looking at a horizon will automatically trigger
this panoramic gaze,
which is very relaxing to the eyes
and will allow you to go back into a focused workout.
The one thing you absolutely do not want to do
is to go outside and check your phone.
Because if you're outside checking your phone
or you're taking a break and checking your phone,
you're still in that virgin's eye movement.
Okay, so this is very, very important
because virgin's eye movements increase focus and attention,
and you can exploit that to increase focus
and attention when you want to,
but you absolutely need to relax the system.
Again, for every 45 minutes
in which you've been in that focused mode,
you wanna get at least five minutes of panoramic vision.
Next, I'd like to talk about an aspect of workspace optimization
that can actually bias whether or not
our brain and nervous system are better suited
for detailed, analytic work or more abstract work.
What I'm about to describe is called the Cathedral Effect.
The Cathedral Effect,
effect has been discussed, well, really for many, many decades,
maybe even hundreds of years,
but formally has been discussed since the early 2000s,
in which it seemed that people who were in high-ceilinged environments,
hence the phrase cathedral, would shift their thinking
and their ideas to more abstract and creative, lofty type thinking.
So literally higher ceiling, loftier thinking, higher aspirations.
This was observed in terms of the language
that they use, but also the sorts of ideas
that they would generate.
And conversely, that people that were in lower ceilinged environments
would be more oriented toward using language
that was more restricted, literally more detailed,
analytic about things in their immediate space.
So what does this mean for workspace optimization?
Well, most of us have a fixed ceiling level in our home,
but you might have rooms in which the ceiling is higher
and rooms in which the ceiling is lower.
If that were the case,
I recommend if you want to do creative work
during phase two, the nine to 16 hours of your circadian cycle,
nine to 16 hours after waking, that is,
that you do that in the high ceiling room
or maybe even outdoors out on a deck or on a patio
because the highest ceiling of course is the sky.
And again, the lower the ceiling
or the lower your visual environment,
the more that one tends to do,
or I should say performs detailed analytic work accurately.
And the more that one's thinking is oriented towards detailed,
sort of correct answer type work.
Whereas when the ceiling is higher
or there's no ceiling, the more that the brain
and the rest of the processing
that we call cognitive processing
is related to abstract reasoning, brainstorming,
and indeed can pull from broader swaths of memory resources
because really what abstract reasoning is
is it's taking existing elements
and maneuvering them or arranging them into novel ways.
So you can think about like notes on a piano,
playing a particular song,
learning scales, that's very analytic.
There's a, there's a correct answer
that you're trying to arrive at or generate.
Whereas writing music or writing poetry
or generating new material of any kind
involves taking existing elements, right?
You're not gonna use words that you don't have
committed to your memory or that you're not aware of
and arranging them in novel ways.
So I think the cathedral fact can be leveraged.
And again, you don't need to move into a different home
or build a slanted roof and work at one side of the room
at one part of the day
and the other side of the other,
although if that's the way you want to swing it,
that's great.
Most of us don't have that flexibility.
But it's very clear that the height of the ceiling
of the visual environment that we're in
has a profound effect on the types of cognitive processes
that we are able to engage.
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Now I'd like to shift our attention
to the auditory environment or the noise in the room
or the music in the room or the music or noise in the headphones
because it turns out that there is a lot
of quality scientific data out there
that speaks to whether or not listening
to particular sounds can enhance our cognition.
And indeed the answer is yes,
but there are very particular types of things
to listen to under very particular types of conditions
that allow one to do that.
If you look across the literature for studies
that involve complete silence or white noise
or binaural beats or music or classical music
or rock and roll, you can find results
to support any type of environment
as being more beneficial.
However, as we'll talk about in a moment,
there are a few types of environments to really avoid
and a few types of sounds that really can enhance
the cognition and your ability to focus
in your workspace environment across the board
that really seem to work for all people.
Let's talk about background noise to avoid.
And here we're talking about background noise to avoid
because it actually can cause
some pretty severe deficits in cognition.
There's a paper first author, Jordan Love, cool name.
Last author, Alexander Francis.
The title of the paper has to do with psychophysiological responses
to potentially annoying heating ventilation
and air conditioning noise during mentally demanding work,
which is a mouthful.
But basically, what this is,
This paper identifies is a large data set
in which workplace and environmental noise,
mostly the humming of air conditioners that's very loud
or the humming of heaters that's very loud
and ongoing, just incessant, doesn't let up,
can really increase mental fatigue
and can vastly decrease cognitive performance.
I think we've all experienced that when you're in a room
and there's some ongoing background noise
and all of a sudden it stops
and you just feel this enormous relief.
So does that mean that we shouldn't listen to white noise
or pink noise or brown noise while we're working?
Certainly a lot of,
of people do. In fact, if you want to know what white noise, pink noise and brown noise are,
they're just different constellations of auditory frequencies that are played together.
Brown noise has others. It has different frequencies that are that are included at higher
amplitude, et cetera. You can look this stuff up on YouTube if you want, you just put brown noise.
None of it sounds terrific. It doesn't sound like music. It's literally just noise,
mixed frequencies, and no particular arrangement. There is some evidence that playing white noise
in the background or on headphones or pink noise or brown noise can facilitate cognition.
But it's mainly through an increase in this overall alertness
as a consequence of areas like Locus Cirulius
and other brainstream areas that are associated
with autonomic arousal from that noise.
There's really no reason to suspect, however,
that those particular patterns of noise
are going to optimize particular mental functions.
So what I'd like to turn to next
are particular patterns of sounds
that indeed have been shown in peer reviewed studies
to optimize certain types of mental processing,
because you can incorporate these
into your optimized workspace environment
through headphones or through speakers,
whatever mechanism that you want
in order to get more out of your work efforts.
If you were to search for apps or go online
and try and find sounds that can improve thinking
or change your emotions,
you're generally going to find three types.
One are called isochronic tones.
These are tones usually of a common frequency.
So it might be a beep and then a pause
and then beep,
beep of the same frequency and then beep,
forgive my terrible beeping.
I don't know what good beeping would sound like,
but contrast isochronic tones with monaural beats.
Monoral beats would be repetitive,
almost percussive-like beats delivered to just one ear.
Toon, tune, tune, to do-d-d-d-d-d-d-do-d-d-d-d,
this kind of thing, okay?
You can find apps that can deliver monoral beats.
You can find also apps that deliver so-called binoral beats.
You can also find YouTube scripts that or channels
that will deliver binaural beats.
Binaural beats, as the name suggests,
are beats delivered to the two ears.
One pattern of kind of percussive beat to one ear
and a different pattern,
or at least a pattern that's out of phase,
that's not synchronized, delivered to the other ear.
So on one ear you hear, do, do, do, do, do.
And in the other ear, you've got dune, dune, dune.
And what happens is because of the way
that the auditory system converges in the brain stem
and generates what are called intra-oral time differences.
I'll explain what that means in a moment.
intra-oral time differences,
the difference between the two patterns of beats
that are heard by each of the two different ears
leads to a third pattern that the brain entrains to
and kind of maps onto and generates particular types
of brain waves, okay?
So without going into a lot of detail,
inter-oral time differences are the ways in which
if you were to hear something off to your right,
like I just snapped my finger just to the right of my right ear,
that a signal arrived,
in my right ear before that sound signal,
those sound waves arrive in my left ear.
So there's an intra-oral between ears time difference.
And there's a brain stem area in which signals from one ear
and signals from the other ear converge
and there's literally a math done by your nervous system
that says this signal arrived before the other signal.
And the difference between those signals
is the intra-oral time difference.
Binaural beats have been generated in ways
that create a particular pattern of interval time differences
that then cascades up to the rest of the brain
and puts the forebrain and other areas of the brain
that are involved in cognition and action
into a particular rhythm.
And some of the rhythms or waves of brain activity
are ones that you may have heard of, things like alpha waves
or theta waves or gamma waves.
If you look across the board at the studies of binaural beats
and you ask what sorts of binaural beats
appear to be useful for people to,
enhance their brain function
for particular times of tasks,
we arrive at some very interesting answers.
So we'll review what those are now.
The frequency of binaural beats
that appears to bring about improved cognitive functioning
at the level of memory,
improved reaction times,
and improved verbal recall seems to be 40 hertz.
You might try listening to binaural beats
for about 30 minutes while doing something else
and then maybe eating lunch or something of that sort
or taking a walk and then going into the work bout.
Because remember, the moment that you start listening
to these binaural beats,
the brain doesn't immediately switch into
a particular pattern of oscillation or brain waves.
It takes some time.
So again, 40 hertz, binaural beats,
many, many apps, many YouTube scripts out there,
probably other resources for binaural beats.
Hopefully zero costs, you can access those
without any need to shell out any money.
Some of you out there might be craving
a little bit more mechanism by which binaural beats
can influence things like focus or reduce
reduced reaction time.
This has actually been explored.
This 40-hurt spinal beats pattern
seems to have an effect on what's called striatal dopamine.
That dopamine release leads to heightened levels
of motivation and focus.
Why motivation and focus?
Well, dopamine is actually the substrate
by which epinephrine is made.
Dopamine, the molecule is actually converted
into epinephrine, adrenaline.
And they work together like close cousins,
dopamine and epinephrine in order to put us
on a path of movement
or if we are doing work of men,
of mental movement toward a goal.
So that's a little bit of mechanistic meat
to explain at least part of the reason
why 40 hertz, binaural beats can enhance our focus,
reduce our reaction times,
and improve indeed learning and memory.
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Next, I'd like to talk about two aspects of optimizing workspace that will come up at some
point in your work or school life. The first one is interruptions. There's a simple method that I
learned from my graduate advisor that works very, very well. What she would do was if I came by
and asked a question or if anyone came by and asked a question, she would acknowledge their
presence but would not shift her body toward them. So she purposely did not position her computer
are facing the door, which I think is a deadly,
or I should say deadly to focus a way of positioning your workspace.
So her computer was facing the wall.
The door was perpendicular to that.
And I would come by and I say, have a question.
And she would say yes, so she would acknowledge my presence,
but she wouldn't actually orient her body toward me,
which told me that this conversation was not going to last very long.
And no matter how long I stood there or what I asked,
she would never orient toward me,
which generally kept these conversations very, very short.
The other approach, which I confess, colleagues of mine,
used before, not necessarily at Stanford,
but elsewhere is to simply say no to everything
that somebody requests or comes by.
So if someone would knock on the door,
they would just shout no through the door.
Or if someone would say, can I bother you for a second?
They would say no.
Or if someone would say, I have something I wanna tell you,
they would just say no and they would just continue
doing this until the person went away.
That was actually very effective.
These were some of the most productive people I know,
not always the kindest people,
but some of them were very kind.
So is it better to sit, or
is it better to stand when doing work,
at least as it relates to focus and productivity.
And the answer is both.
There have been a number of systematic studies
exploring what are called sit stand desks.
So these are desks that can be set to a height
that makes standing the best practice
and then they can be lowered to a height
that makes sitting the best practice
or the easiest practice I should say.
And it turns out that just sitting
is terrible for us.
Okay, and there's an enormous number of studies out there
that point to the fact that people who sit
for five or six or seven hours a day doing work
have all sorts of issues related to sleep,
neck pain, cognition suffers,
their number of cardiovascular effects, even digestion.
There may even actually be some almost pressure effects
on the pelvic floor and things of that sort,
depending on the chairs that one uses,
but that people who stand are in a slightly better situation
where many of those health men
metrics improve, but that people that do a combination
of sitting and standing at the same desk throughout the day
or move from one desk to another
if they don't have a combination stand desk,
that's going to be best.
Now, what's interesting, if you look at the scientific literature,
is that people who decreased their sitting time
by about half each day showed incredibly significant effects
on reduced neck and shoulder pain,
increase in subjective health, vitality
in work-related environments,
and perhaps most importantly,
for sake of today's discussion,
improvement in cognitive conditioning
and the ability to embrace new tasks
and cognitive performance.
What happens if we just stand?
Well, that can also generate some postural issues
in terms of stabilization and fatigue.
That said, most everybody, at least in the US,
is not getting sufficient cardiovascular exercise
or movement throughout the day.
And standing at one's desk can improve
some of those health metrics and again,
and improve productivity, probably because
of those postural effects that I talked about earlier.
I have to say after now about 10 years
of working at a sit stand desk,
I find I can't sit for too long before I wanna stand.
And my standing ballots can be anywhere
from 30 minutes to two hours,
although two hours would be a little bit long.
And then I catch myself kind of leaning on the desk off to the side.
So again, the idea is to stand,
but not be leaning on the desk.
Obviously, if you're typing or you're writing,
there'll be some leaning involved.
But that's what the literature support.
So we've been discussing works
space optimization with the understanding
that you're not always going to work
in the same place every day.
What I've tried to do is give you a set
of high potency tools that can improve your focus
and cognition and to place that within a framework
for particular kinds of work.
Let's just review some of the basic elements
of what we've covered today.
First of all, in the first part of your day,
that zero to nine hours after waking,
you want bright lights, especially overhead lights,
as bright as you can keep them
without feeling uncomfortable or certainly not
without feeling any pain in your eyes
or elsewhere in your body.
Bright lights will make for the maximum state of alertness.
And if you can, try and place whatever it is
you're focusing on at least at nose level or above.
Try and avoid reclining, try and stand
for at least half of your work day.
That's a good goal and it may take some time
to work up to that goal.
In addition, if you're going to use sound
as a stimulus for increasing focus and alertness,
try and avoid exposure to white noise, pink noise,
noise or brown noise for extended periods of time
for more than an hour or so.
That might actually be damaging to the auditory system
and at the very least is kind of stressful
even though you might not notice it.
It's kind of a background level of anxiety
and stress that is not going to serve you well.
Rather, if you're going to pursue particular types
of sound frequencies, consider using 40 hertz binaural beats,
not monoreal beats, but 40 hertz binoreal beats
done during a particular workout
or for 30 minutes prior to that workbook.
I would not rely on binaural beats all the time every day.
I think that could cause them to lose their potency
just because of the way the auditory system attenuates.
Some other things that you could do in order
to improve your workplace performance
would be to consider the cathedral effect.
If you're going to do analytic work for any part of the day,
phase one or phase two as I described them,
but really in any time of day,
that detailed analytic work for which there is a correct answer,
then try and get into an environment
with a relatively low ceiling.
If you don't have access to a low ceiling environment,
you might consider using a brimmed hat or even a hoodie
or even just facing down
or even putting your hand above your eyes,
as you will at the level of your eyebrows.
In contrast, if you're interested in doing
brainstorming, creative work,
you're writing new things, you're creating new things
of any kind, artwork, consider getting into a high ceiling
or no ceiling environment.
Or if you're wearing a brimmed hat
or you're wearing a hoodie, maybe peel that back.
Now, of course, there are an enormous number
of other things that you can do to,
improve work performance and productivity. And I've talked about those in previous episodes,
in particular in the episode on Focus and the episode on Motivation. There are supplements you can
take that can increase dopamine, for instance. There are tools that you can use to increase
your focus. For instance, focusing your visual attention on one location for 30 to 60 seconds
prior to entering a focused workout. I do want to acknowledge again the fact that I realize
people are showing up to this challenge of workspace optimization with different budgets,
different constraints.
Some people have kids at home.
There are a lot of interruptions.
Some people do not.
Nonetheless, I hope that the information
I was able to provide today will allow you to make subtle
or maybe even drastic rearrangements
in your workspace environment.
There's one other point related to that
that I did not cover and that I'd like to cover just briefly,
which is that there's nothing to say
that you have to always work in the same location all the time.
You can move from house to cafe,
if that works for you, you can move from office to home.
You can also move
from different locations within your home.
Once again, thank you for joining me
for this discussion about the science
and peer review literature on workspace optimization.
I hope some, if not all of the tools,
will be beneficial for you.
And as always, thank you for your interest in science.
