This content provides science-based strategies for optimizing one's workspace to enhance focus, creativity, and productivity, emphasizing the impact of environmental factors like light, vision, and sound on cognitive function.
Mind Map
クリックして展開
クリックしてインタラクティブなマインドマップを確認
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 opthalmology 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
adviser, my graduate adviser, and my
posttock adviser 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 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 cancelling 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,
etc. 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 workouts in a very relaxed and
pleasureful 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 6 or 7 or 8,
sometimes 9 hours later, your brain is
in a unique state. It is in a state of
high levels of dopamine, a neurom
modulator, 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 neurom modulators that I mentioned
before dopamine, norepinephrine and
epinephrine. Now the way that one could
do that could be a very lowcost 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 melanops and
ganglen 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 melanops into
hypothalamus system. And by looking at
sunlight through a window, it's 5050
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 wakeup signal. Now, in the
afternoon, starting at about 9 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 9 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 norepinephrine that's
highest early in the day to increases in
things like serotonin and other neurom
modulators that put your brain into a
state that's better for creative
endeavors 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 5:00 p.m., which
for me is, you know, 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 severely shift
your circadian clock and it's
effectively like traveling to another
time zone. So, if you stay up from 3:00
a.m. until 6:00 a.m. or 2:00 a.m. until
4:00 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 6 hours in to a
different time zone or at least that's
what your body registers it as. And it
can really throw your sleep and 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 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 tradeoff between whether or not you
want to shift your clock or whether or
not you want to get the work done. 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 and to 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 the central
region of our face. The neurons that
control that eye movement are intimately
related to areas of the brain stem that
release certain types of neurom
modulators 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 magnosellar
channel that's involved in looking at
big swaths of visual space and at lower
resolution. Now again, you don't have to
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 avergence eye
movement, v e r g- n ce. Bringing your
eyes to a single point in space will
create a narrower aperture of a visual
window, meaning your 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 that your eyes get tired when
you focus on something for too long. So,
here's a principle extracted from the
opthalmology 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 Magnusellar
