Huberman Tip of the Day!

How To Optimize Your Workspace

Hey, here's a list of workspace tips to enhance focus. These are exact quotes with some edits for clarity. Let's start.

1. Limit Your Visual Window

We never really want to be looking at a square or rectangle or target area for our work that is too far beyond our ears. How far is too far? Really, you want to try and keep the blinders on, or I should say the invisible blinders so that whatever you're looking at falls within the region of visual space in front of you, that is present if you were to cup your hands and put them right next to your eyes. Now, some people will actually go to lengths to further restrict their visual focus. They will do things like putting on a hoodie or wearing a hat, for instance, to restrict their visual window.

If there's a wide and high visual view, your brain draws attention from your work and puts it there. So you notice the person walking by. Even if you don't actively focus there, you consume energy.

2. Elevate The Screen / Keep Your Eyes Straight

There’s a relationship between where we look and our level of alertness. When looking down toward the ground, neurons related to calm and sleepiness are activated. Looking up does the opposite. This might seem wild, but it makes sense based on the neural circuits that control looking up or down. Standing and sitting up straight while looking at a screen or book that is elevated to slightly above eye level will generate maximal levels of alertness. The idea would be to place that screen of your tablet or your laptop or other computer, and try and get it elevated at least to nose level, your nose level, or even higher. Now I realize that can be complicated to do, I've long, just used a stack of books, or I'll sometimes take a box and turn it upside down and set it there.

When you look down, your eyelids go down. What's that like? it's like when you sleep. Looking down makes you sleepy. So raise your screen.

3. Keep Your Back Straight

When you lie down and indeed, any time that you start to get your feet up above your waist or your head tilted back, those activation neurons fire less, and neurons in your brain that are involved in calming, and indeed putting you to sleep, start increasing their level of firing. It's a really beautiful system. So beautiful, in fact, that there are studies that show that as you adjust the angle of the body back, you actually get a sort of dose-dependent increase in sleepiness and calmness and a dose-dependent decrease in alertness.

When you slouch or tilt your back, it promotes sleepiness. When your back is straight, it promotes alertness. So keep it straight. You can use a pillow and stick to the desk to get more support.

4. Stand up Sometimes

If you look at the scientific literature, people who decreased their sitting time by about half each day. So they took, let's say they were working for seven hours a day, three and a half hours of that day, they decide to stand. It's unclear if they switched every 30 minutes or hours but alternating back and forth showed incredibly significant effects on reduced neck and shoulder pain, increase in subjective health, vitality in work-related environments. And most importantly, for the sake of this discussion improvement in cognitive conditioning and the ability to embrace new tasks and cognitive performance

Neither sitting nor standing while working is better. Combining both is best. So alternate between them when you can.

5. Listen To Binaural beats

Binaural beats are a neat science-supported tool to place the brain into a better state for learning. As the name suggests, binaural beats consist of one sound (frequency) being played in one ear and a different sound frequency in the other ear. It only works with headphones. Binaural beats (around 40 Hz) have been shown to increase certain aspects of cognition, including creativity, and may reduce anxiety. The exact mechanisms are still under investigation, but the effects are impressive.

I think you can play them with music at the same time.

Speaking of music...

Acc. to the podcast, It depends on what you like, the time of day, and how alert you are. There's no right or wrong. If you're too calm and can't focus, you can put on loud music and go to a coffee shop for activation. If you're too anxious, you can put on calmer music and sit in a quiet environment.

How to approach this?

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. 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 be productive.

And that's all for workspace optimization!

TL;DR small visual window, look straight, keep your back straight back, do some work standing up, relax your eyes, and try out binaural beats.

honestly I only use a few of the tools. I can get by with good music and a tough task. If needed, I'll limit my visual field, stand up, or layer something else.

How will you change your workspace after reading this?

Have a great day Reader! Let me know if you like this format.

Your 90-minute block

Day 1: Time sessions to 90 minutes ✅
Day 2: Start with a short warm-up ✅
Day 3: Narrow eyes to a visual target ✅
Day 4: Strengthen the lights ✅
Day 5: Push to work on harder things ✅
Day 6: Eliminate your phone ✅
Day 7: To refocus, do exteroception ✅
Day 8: Leverage food/supplements ✅
Day 9: Optimize Your Workspace ✅

You're on the right track. Great job!
Goal: 90 minutes of deep work.

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