This 5-Second Trick Instantly Calms Anxiety & Boosts Focus (Backed by Science) | Andrew Huberman

1. AHDr. Andrew Huberman0:00

   Improper, uh, viewing of light, meaning at the wrong times, um, is going... We're gonna look back and, uh, and realize that this is the, um, snack and junk food of the '80s and '90s, you know, that, that's led to so many issues, metabolic issues and-

2. SPSpeaker0:17

   Yeah

3. AHDr. Andrew Huberman0:17

   ... um, obesity crisis and, um, and things of that sort. Um, mostly because it fits a lot of the same, um... It has sort of the same contour, right? Easily accessible. Everybody's doing it. It's kind of, um, meshed itself into the way that we work and behave and, um, in ways that, you know, that... I, I have a friend, he's a psychiatrist, so he uses this as kind of language, uh, um, which is, you know, the subtle informs the gross. You know, it's these little, these little behaviors that we accumulate over time that lead us down the path of either health or, um, disease of various kinds. So, you know, a couple things. Um, those kids, just from a practical standpoint, could dim their screens. Uh, it would not be a bad idea for them to, um, dim the room lights as well. Um, keep phones and tablets out of their rooms at night. It's that bright light relative to, to dark background that really, um, can amplify the signal to the clock in the evening. Um, there are a couple other things that are, uh, I should mention about kids and just, and adults too. So when we view things up close, there are changes in the optics of the eye. The lens of the eye is this beautiful structure. It, it actually can move. Your eye is a very dynamic structure. It's got little muscles, and the lens moves. It's in- incredible. But one of the consequences of viewing things up close too much is that the eyeball lengthens and, um, children and adults develop myopia, uh, which is, um, nearsightedness, and they need corrective lenses. One of, um, the more exciting things to happen in the last couple of years are a couple of large scale clinical trials, thousands of patients, and, um, th- where they looked at if kids and adults, but mostly kids, if they spend two hours a day outside, even if they're doing their homework outside on a computer, but if they spend two hours a day outside, two things happen. One is they greatly reduce the incidence of myopia through a different eye to, uh, excuse me, light-to-eye mechanism that, uh, uh, we won't go into the details, but these are very solid findings. And the other thing that's very, very powerful for kids and for adults, but especially for kids because their brain is still plastic, as we say, can change very easily in response to experience, is to view things at a distance. When you go outside in the morning and get that sunlight, or what throughout the day, periodically, you want to try and view things that are beyond, certainly beyond the extent of your phone or your computer or the walls of a house, but also off into the distance. If you can view a horizon, even better, but if you can't, try and look across the street, down the street as far as you can. There's a number of reasons for doing this. First of all, viewing things up close all day, um, is a very active process of, um, keeping that lens in your eye a particular shape and the muscles of your eye, and it can lead to headaches. It can lead to eye strain. Many people who have migraines have migraines because they're just not looking far enough into the distance very much. The other thing is that getting that sunlight outside during the day through t- mechanisms separate from the clock mechanisms is known to improve mood and improve metabolic function, and this is because of the linkage between the eye and a structure wr- has a weird name, called the habenula. Um, the habenula is a little, um, structure in the thalamus, um, kind of middle of the thalamus for those of you that wanna know, that is associated with the dopamine system and with feeding and regulation of mood and feeding rhythms. This is the beautiful work of Samer Hattar, who's the head of the chronobiology unit at the National Institutes of Mental Health and others, so there's real science to back up what I'm saying here. And the... So get outside during the day as much as possible. Take a walk. View things in the distance. Don't be looking at your phone like this as you walk. Um, getting your o- the optics of your eyes into what we call panoramic vision, where you're, you're not necessarily moving your head or eyes around a lot, but you're just kind of opening up that, that aperture of your visual field. Very important, and especially in kids. So we're talking now about improving sleep, improving wakefulness, improving concentration through morning light viewing, improving sleep, uh, improving, uh, or I should say offsetting the development of myopia, nearsightedness, possibly even reversing myopia or some of that myopia in, uh, in adults. We're talking about, um, also anxiety relief. One of the things that's really exciting in the last few years, um, is that, and we've known this for a long time, but that when we move through what we call, um... The scientists are so geeky. When we say, when we am- when we self-generate motion, whether or not on a bicycle or running or jogging or just even walking, doesn't matter what speed, the visual world is slipping by us, right? But we don't actually see blurry s- blur going by like we would if we took a picture on our phone and moved our phone, and that's because we have what are called slip compensating eye movements, where we're constantly making adjustments for the, uh, the slip of the visual image on, on our retina. And those slip compensating eye movements and forward movement in particular, as long as it's self-generated, is known to directly inhibit and powerfully inhibit the activity of the, of the threat reflex that involves brain areas like the amygdala, which is associated with fear and anxiety. In other words, walking forward or biking forward or jogging forward, provided that your visual system isn't staring at your phone the whole time, and no, unfortunately, this won't work on a treadmill, um, when you do that, you're actually creating an anxiety relief, and this is, you know, get... So we're talking about very basic things. Get outside and take a walk. Don't look at your phone while you're doing it. Run outside as opposed to on a treadmill if you can safely do that. Some people might say, "Well, on the Peloton, I see all this stuff streaming by." But ah, it's not actually streaming by. It's a slightly different situation. Probably better than not having any visual imagery there. But get outside, take a walk, view things at a distance.Even if you're just doing this ten, fifteen minutes a day, you're doing tremendous things for your health. And kids who aren't doing this, who are locked to screens all day and all night, um, I mean, I don't wanna be hyperbolic, but they're messing themselves up, and their brain is very plastic. They're, they're going to have issues. Uh, vision issues, anxiety issues. Um, i- i- it's, it's really serious and, um, sadly there isn't enough attention on this at the kind of national and international level. But there is a lot of science to support the practices that, that we're talking about here.

4. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee6:34

   Yeah. And again, all these practices that you've mentioned so far are completely free of charge, right? [laughs] There's, there's nothing... A- a- and you know, like me, I know you're, you're super passionate about that. So it's-- I, I think it's one of the, one of the many reasons why I'm drawn to your work, is I always see that with you, this kinda desire to make sure that the things that you recommend, where possible, are accessible to everyone. And I feel if teachers, if head teachers around the globe could hear that and really think about how they can implement those things within their schools, again, it's a top-down effect that would [laughs] have just multiple downstream consequences straight away. Um, what you said about panoramic vision I think is fascinating. And I wanna talk, if, if it's okay, Andrew, about this sort of bi-directional communication we have between certain behaviors that we have in our brain. So, you know, we could talk about vision or breathing, and hopefully we'll get to that. But, you know, let's take with breathwork, for example. If we're feeling super stressed and we're trying to get through deadlines, you know, 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, that's-- I think with breathwork, we're sort of getting there. Like, 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?

5. AHDr. Andrew Huberman8:15

   Yeah, and I'd be happy to talk about respiration. That's one of the things that my lab works on, but you're absolutely right. I mean, the, the breathing system is, is amazing because it bridges subconscious and conscious processing, right?

6. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee8:25

   Yeah.

7. AHDr. Andrew Huberman8:25

   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 [inhales] and change our breathing, and that's, that's a unique, um, neural apparatus that allows us to bridge between those two. Um, this i- 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. Um, you don't have to, uh, to try this. You can do this anywhere. You don't have to actually be, um, you know, stone still. You just-- What you want to do is just, um, 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, um, the, 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, a connection between the brain and the brain stem that's involved in alertness. And so it's not that you become less alert, but it has a, a relaxing effect. It's like coming off of the accelerator just a little bit. If ever you are in an argument where you feel like you're getting triggered, um, and you are-- 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. Um, and if you want to inhibit those reflexes, 'cause those can be [laughs] kind of life-damaging depending on what you're gonna do and what you're gonna say. It's, uh, also, it's always better to be the calm one in an argument, if you can. Um, panoramic vision is great because it's completely covert. Whereas a br- I'll-- Uh, we'll talk about breathing tools in a moment to, to calm down, but breathing tools require a kind of overt shift in one's behavior to-- you can tell when someone's [inhales] you know, [exhales] 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, um, in different environments, going to the doctor's office. Um, face-to-face communication for a lot of people is hard, especially if they don't spend much time doing it, and nowadays people, many people are more isolated than before. Um, you-- 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 kinda drive the car that is you. Um, and panoramic vision also has a unique feature, which is that you're m- you actually become more alert, aware, and responsive. The neurons that, that are responsible for panoramic vision, for the aficionados, the so-called magnocellular, meaning large, magno neurons of the eye and brain, and big neurons transmit information much faster. So when you, uh, catch a ball or when you reflexively do something, you're actually using this panoramic system, uh, rather than the high acuity fine system, and your reaction times go up about fourfold. So, um, you know, 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, um, I'm fortunate to do a little bit of work with people in US and Canadian special operations. You know, we-- They talk a lot about situational awareness, going into environments where you can monitor large swaths of, of behavior and activity, but be, be very responsive to things in different locations. And so actually, panoramic vision is a wonderful way not just, uh, 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 upstairsAre you gonna look into the narrow box that is your phone and check something, bringing you a so distraught view of the world that's driving those attentional mechanisms up, uh, and stress level up? Or are you just gonna walk to your car or down the hall or up the stairs in 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 rollercoaster. You weren't designed to wake up in the morning and go, "Ah, phone, check Instagram. Boom, check email. Get kids to school. Okay, brief trough. What am I gonna 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, and maybe later if we have time, we can talk about neuro- learning and the power of micro breaks, um, even ten-second breaks. Uh, but I'll just, uh, put out a little teaser that even little ten-second pauses in high attentional activity, so learning or a pod- like what we're doing now, talking back and forth, even just little ten-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, and here's the real, um, [lips smack] 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, "I, my memory is bad. I have trouble with focus." A lot of people are taking ADHD meds who don't need them. A lot of people need them and are taking them. Let's, you know, let's be honest, uh, there's a lot of ADHD out there. 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, you know, 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, uh, panoramic vision is one excellent way to do that. Um, ambulating through space, getting that optic flow to shut down the anxiety system, um, and then-

8. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee14:19

   Yeah

9. AHDr. Andrew Huberman14:19

   ... of course, the sunlight.

10. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee14:19

    The, the key point there for me is, for people, is that we n- as I said before, many of us sort of know that if we're feeling stressed, we can apply, you know, a selection of breathwork techniques potentially in the moment to change things, change our physiology. But you're sort of really making a very powerful case that we can actually also do that with our peripheral vision, you know? So this could be potentially a regular practice for people. In between Zoom calls, get outside, and I guess this is one of the reasons why nature is so calming for us. It... Maybe it's not just the fractals in the trees [chuckles] and in the, and in the, and the coastlines. Maybe it's also the fact that we are by default presumably going into that peripheral vision?

11. AHDr. Andrew Huberman15:04

    Yeah. You, uh, you know, walking through nature, you... or outdoors of any kind, you're grabbing all of these mechanisms. You're getting sunlight even on a cloudy day, you're getting peripheral or panoramic vision, and you're getting o- what we call self-generated optic flow, as I mentioned, which shuts down the, the, uh, or quiets these threat, uh, reflex centers, including the amygdala. So it's, uh, you know, um, what we see obviously has a powerful effect on how we feel. Um, you know, the brain represents visual images, uh, mostly in symbols. Uh, we could play a little m-m-mini experiment right now where imagine, um, viewing a particular politician's face. It's gonna make you feel a certain way and bring about a whole library of ideas, uh, associated with that. Um, you know, we, uh, we store things in visual object symbols, and those visual object symbols are the gateway into a whole set of ideas about what we're looking at. However, the mechanisms that we're talking about up until now, sunlight viewing, et cetera, ev- evolved long before the mechanisms for high acuity vision, object recognition, face recognition, or color vision. And so we tend to think that, oh, color is so powerful, or what we see is so powerful, but far more powerful in terms of our mood and our physiology is when we see, AKA light, um, and the, our mode of physical action as we see, and so this would be self-generated forward optic flow and, uh, and so forth. So the point I wanted to make was that, yes, respiration, vis- uh, 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, and we can talk about those. Vision, as you recall, is the brain, so it's the m- fastest route by which we can change our state of mind. There's, uh, one other kind of tool that I think might be useful in the, 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 vis- that cognitive or mental focus follows visual focus. So if you're gonna sit down and do some work and you find, "Ah, like, I can't concentrate. I'm not, I'm not, like, 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, um, 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 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, of c- clinically legitimate, if you will, ADHD that we've brought upon, on ourselves.Um, and so you can use visual focus as a, as a training tool.

12. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee18:29

    Yeah.

13. AHDr. Andrew Huberman18:29

    Um, I, 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 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, of arm's length, and I'll focus my visual attention there and breathe three times just for, um, sake of timekeeping. Then I'll look at 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 crosshatch, and usually then I get to work. And so what am I doing? What is this wacky practice? Well, this wacky, [laughs] uh, practice I just described is stepping through each, as we call, it sounds, uh, 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 of 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, the ability to transition between these and then lock into them and then transition into the next is what makes us effective. And, uh, 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 is that we're constantly being bombarded with cont- new context after new context. That's what's really... I don't think there's a- as much problem with the content on social media, although that's a debate, you know, there's, uh, there too. Obviously you want to protect kids and so forth. Except that 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 switch. [laughs] The, the human brain has never been confronted with this. Even if you have 200 channels on the television, it's very rare to s- just go channel, channel, channel.

14. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee20:47

    Yeah.

15. AHDr. Andrew Huberman20:48

    The whole idea of social media, and by the way, I pr- I obviously I t- participate. I teach on social media and I consume social media, but you're just, you're context switching, context switching, context switching in a, 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 c- and can induce calm. And that, the practice, that simple, uh, practice I described, what it does is it, 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 it, um... 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. And my lab's looking at this as, uh, uh, from the, you know, experimental, um, perspective, but I just thought I'd put the tool out there 'cause again, it's zero cost.

16. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee21:47

    If you enjoyed that short clip, I think you are really going to enjoy the full conversation, which you can check out here. [outro music]

Episode duration: 22:08