How To Improve Focus And Attention

Coming up on this episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy.

I think from a very practical low or no cost perspective, one of the things that one can do is ask, okay, if attention and focus are required for neuroplasticity throughout the lifespan, what can I do to increase my levels of attention and focus?

Hey everyone, it's Dr. Mark. My main goal with diet is to use food as medicine. But even when we eat super well, most of us are missing out on certain essential nutrients. Our soils have become depleted and our digestive tracts just aren't working so great. They're compromised by stress and toxins and they just can't absorb nutrients as efficiently as they should. And that's why I always use, and I recommend to my patients, a multivitamin mineral as nutritional insurance. It covers the basics for all our day-to-day body functions, all the things that we need that our food might be missing. But there are so many products out there I wouldn't go near because they contain artificial fillers or inactive ingredients, and you have to be pretty picky. The one I trust and take myself is Athletic Greens. They use high quality, highly absorbable forms of vitamins and nutrients from real whole foods. Athletic Greens comes in a powder that tastes great and mixes easily with water or smoothies, and specifically supports my gut health, immunity, energy, and recovery. And it's not just vitamins and minerals, it has phytonutrient-rich superfoods and adaptogens and pre and probiotics, and even digestive enzymes. I love that they add the digestive support in their powder, since so much of our immune strength and overall wellness starts in the gut. It's really one supplement that covers so many bases, and you'd be hard-pressed to find something else in this comprehensive form in any single other product. I use Athletic Greens in the morning as part of my daily routine, and I love having it with me whenever I travel. I also love that it's diet friendly, whether you're vegan, paleo, keto, dairy free, or gluten free. Right now, Athletic Greens is offering my audience a full year supply of their Vitamin D3K2 liquid formula free with your first purchase. These two nutrients are also so vital for a strong immune system and strong bones, and many of us are not getting enough of them. I use the Athletic Greens powder and their D3K2 formula to make sure I get extra nutrients that complement my diet. They're also going to give you five free travel packs as well. Just go to athleticgreens.com/hymen to get your free year supply of vitamin D3 and K2 and five free travel packs with your first purchase. You'll get it delivered straight to your door and I promise you'll feel the difference Athletic Greens can make in your daily wellness routine. Again, that's athleticgreens.com/hymen. Now let's get back to this week's episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy.

Hi, I'm Kaya Perowich, one of the producers of the Doctor's Pharmacy Podcast. Our brains have the ability to change structure and function all throughout our lives. This is called neuroplasticity. And there are multiple ways to encourage the plasticity of the brain at any age to enhance everything from sleep to learning. Dr. Hyman spoke about this with neuroscientist Dr. Andrew Huberman.

So if we want to improve our brain function, improve our learning, our memory, our alertness, attention, that's what people care about. and we want to enhance the neuroplasticity, what are the top things that we should be doing?

Okay, so get the foundational stuff right. Sleep, sleep, sleep. Sleep, get your nutrition right. And there are many things and you speak to this in much more detail and sophistication than I ever could, but I think the Omega, the what, what do you say? Follow the Pegan diet, I jokingly say. Pegan, not vegan. Not Pegan, yeah. Not a vegan.

Yeah.

Get sleep right, get your nutrition right, get your relationship to stress right. We can talk about that maybe at the end. You have to engage in those focused learning bouts. You have to decide what it is that you want to learn, what you want to change and do that. Now for some people, they'd say, well, I don't want to learn another language, I just want to feel happier. But that's actually, as we know, a process as well. That's going to be a process of leaning into some gratitude practice, or some, maybe if what makes you happy is a physical activity, it's going to be bringing the greatest amount of attention and alertness to that practice as you possibly can. And then there's a second step. And the second step is the one that in recent years we've learned the most about, which is that just having this heightened level of focus and attention to what you're trying to learn or change is just the first step. The second thing is to actually turn off focus and put the brain into a state where it can rewire more rapidly. When you start looking at your life, whatever that life happens to be from what's gonna optimize my performance, which includes relationships of course as well, then the whole game changes because it really becomes an issue of how good are any one of us, each of us at regulating the seesaw. And if you are spending too much time at one end of the seesaw, you're headed for trouble. That's just the way it is. Now, sleep, most of us probably don't get enough sleep, but I think that can be overdone too. I think that many people feel exhausted because these systems for engagement of the mind and engagement of the body are also a bit atrophied.

Yeah, and that's the thing. We don't learn those skills and tools. So, how do people start to begin to learn those tools to enhance their neuroplasticity? to do the things. We talked a few of the practical suggestions about sleep, but is there a way? Because one of the things that terrifies me is the effect of technology on the brain. And I just came back from a week vacation in Mexico and we were off grid, like phone, cell phone, computer, nothing works. And we were in nature. Didn't even know what time it was. Didn't even watch. and my sense of well-being, my happiness, my focus was so different. And you talk about this, this phenomena of a digital concussion from phones, computers, social media. And I felt that, like, you literally, your brain hurts.

Add, like, we, the incidence of diagnosable eight add ADHD is going up in adults and in kids, I think. Well, there's ideal, and then there's, there's. reasonable and practical, right? I mean, I do think vacations and resets are great. I think just like going camping can reset your circadian clocks and melatonin and cortisol. I think from a very practical low or no cost perspective, one of the things that one can do is ask, okay, if attention and focus are required for neuroplasticity throughout the lifespan, what can I do to increase my levels of attention and focus? And there's some interesting data on this. First of all, Learn to read one chapter of a book without your phone in the room. Just a physical book, not an audio book necessarily. Learn to read one chapter of a book per day. Can it be a Kindle book or an audiobook? It could be a Kindle book. Sure. Written word and handwriting and reading are baked into our DNA. There's no question. I mean, sure, we were drawing on cave walls a long time ago, but we were drawing on cave walls and when we evolved language, They're areas of the brain responsible for speech and language and for digesting speech and language and producing speech and language, of course. So this is something I struggle with and as much as anybody, but if you're not a reader, still do it. Learning to read one chapter of a book and your mind will drift. People will go, wait, this isn't engaging or my mind drifted or something, and that's revealing to you your powers of attention, of deliberate attention. It's revealing your ability to engage nucleus basalis. So if you wanna take a test of, how well or poorly you can pay attention, well, read one chapter of a book per day. So that's a wonderful practice that will improve the circuits for attention. So this is one of the cool things about neuroplasticity is it's not just about learning the information, it's about learning and teaching the circuits for attention to get better at attention. So you can get better at attention as an action step. and that will allow you to learn more things. So it's a- you- want to lift.

Weights, you have to start a little bit and keep going.

So you want to read one chapter, then you can read a book. That's right. And pretty soon what's really interesting about the relationship between acetylcholine and an epinephrine is pretty soon it starts to recruit the dopamine system. It starts feeling good to move through that agitation. You start realizing, okay, I'm doing this, I'm doing this.

And then your mind will flip off.

And you'll go back to reading and this sort of thing.

What really works for me is when.

I have a deadline. Deadlines, so deadlines are great. Like, I can write a book in three weeks. Right, and the reason deadlines are so effective is because they deploy epinephrine. When it's baked into your psyche that there are some social pressures of being, you wanna perform well, you wanna know the material, you don't wanna make mistakes, et cetera. So adrenaline is released. And once adrenaline is released, then acetylcholine naturally will follow, you tighten your focus. So reading one chapter of a book, whatever that happens to be, per day, is absolutely critical to maintaining one's ability to focus and therefore one's ability to engage neuroplasticity.

You'll also read a chapter.

Read a chapter. We talked about all the foundational stuff of sleep and microbiome and all that earlier. Yeah, the other one is to really respect these 90-minute learning cycles. Don't try and throw yourself into a deep immersion of four hours of learning of something. Ratchet up to being able to do 90 minutes of focused work. So, an ideal goal would be two 90-minute blocks of learning per day, but that's a lot. So, if you're somebody who wants to keep your brain sharp, read a chapter a day and then decide what it is that you want to learn. Curiosity, what's that old saying? I think it was, is it Dorothy Parker? You know, the anecdote for boredom is curiosity. there's no anecdote for curiosity or something like that. Right, right. The best way to engage the mind is to actually be curious about some things.

Dr. Hyman also spoke to world expert in speed reading, memory improvement, brain performance, and accelerated learning, Jim Quick.

I started studying adult learning theory. I wanted to study, you know, what intelligence is, multiple intelligence theory. How does my brain work so I could work my brain? I started studying ancient mnemonics. I wanted to know what did ancient cultures do before there were printing presses and where we have external storage devices for our memory before there were smart devices.

And I used to remember so many telephone numbers.

Yeah, and we talk about this in this book, where technology is driving amazing innovation, amazing evolution and progress, communication, and also it's also amplifying some of the challenges that we've always had, like information overload. Now we carry, we have access to the world's information. We have more information on tap than Clinton did when he was in office. We have so much information but it feels like it's taking a sip of water out of a fire hose. So one of the supervillains is digital deluge. It's like we're drowning information, but we're starving for practical wisdom on how to keep up with it all. Besides that, technology also is creating this digital distraction. Think about all the app notifications, social media alerts, we're getting all these dopamine fixes that goes along the nervous, the learning motivation centers of our nervous system. It's hard to have a conversation nowadays without us being distracted. It's hard to, I'm sure a lot of people can identify. You read a page in a book, you get to the end, and then you forgot what you just read. We can't have the focus and the concentration, so that's digital distraction. And again, technology is not good or bad, and in a lot of ways it serves us. It helps us to be able to connect. It helps us to be able to learn, to be able to inspire, to be able to educate ourselves. We're not born with the ability to read. We learned it. But the last time we took a class called reading, What, how old were you? Yeah, exactly. You were seven years old and so everything has changed since then but we're still reading the same way. Right, so that's the challenge. So this is the education part. The second reason why is lack of focus. Some people will not read faster because they lack the focus. They'll read a page in a book, get to the end and then just forget what they just read. And then go back and reread it. Now, but if when reading is done well, it doesn't take time, it actually makes you time. Because if I could double everyone's reading speed, and I'll show you how right now, if I could double your reading speed, that means what takes an hour only takes 30 minutes. The average person has about four hours of reading a day. Think about it. Think about the text messages, the emails, the magazines, the journals, everything you need to process information. When you're reading a word, your eyes fixate on the word and then the next word and the next word. And there are about 10 words per line in the average book. So it's making 10 stops. Now, the equivalent would be for kids when they're reading, they're very slow readers first learning how to read, they don't see words, they see letters and they're looking at each individual letter sounding them out. So they're making like 40 stops going through the line. That's why it takes them so long to read. Now, the equivalent of how kids read that make 40 stops to adults reading, you know, 10 stops, speed readers actually make three, maybe two or three or four stops, right? because they see groups of words like adults, normal readers see groups of letters. So they're only seeing three chunks at a time, so their eyes only have to stop two or three times. And that's the equivalent of driving in traffic, having to make 10 stops instead of just two or three that other persons get there a lot faster. So the goal here to read faster, one of the ways of teaching yourself to read in groups and to subvocalize less Now, this is the method part, is by using a visual pacer. Now, this is so simple. When people read using a visual pacer, it could be like a pointer. A pen, a highlighter, a mouse on a computer, your finger, a pencil. When you underline the words, not skip anything, because I bet in your traditional speed reading class, you skip words, or you go down the page, or you make fancy S or Z forms, but you miss big gaps. That's why you get the gist of what you read. So, traditional speed reading, people, not for comprehension, it's skimming. Yeah, yeah, that's what I learned. Yeah, exactly. But you don't want your doctor to get the gist of what he's reading, right? That wouldn't make any sense. And so for me, what we've tested is if you just underline the words, don't skip anything and test yourself. Don't, not with an actual pen, but just with, like, yeah, you don't under, you're not actually inking it up or anything. If you're reading on a screen, you're not touching the screen or touching the paper, you're just underlining the words and then test yourself. Read for 60 seconds without using a visual pacer. Count the number of lines you just read. Then set your timer to read 60 seconds using your finger while you read and count the number of lines you just read. That second number will be a 25-50% lift across the board.

We are able to more readily and effectively access all of the gifts life has to offer when we maximize our ability to learn. By harnessing the power of our brains, we can intentionally create a pathway to reach our goals and optimize our lives. If you'd like to learn more about any of the topics you heard in today's episode, I encourage you to check out Dr. Hyman's full-length conversations with Dr. Andrew Huberman and Jim Quick. If you have people in your life who could benefit from this information, please consider sharing this episode with your community. We need each other to create a healthier us. Until next time, thanks for tuning in. Hi everyone. I hope you enjoyed this week's episode. Just a reminder that this podcast is for educational purposes only. This podcast is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical professional. This podcast is provided on the understanding that it does not constitute medical or other professional advice or services. If you're looking for help in your journey, seek out a qualified medical practitioner. If you're looking for a functional medicine practitioner, you can visit ifm.org and search their find a practitioner database. It's important that you have someone in your corner who's trained, who's a licensed healthcare practitioner, and can help you make changes, especially when it comes to your health.

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