How to Improve Focus & Decrease Anxiety With One Simple Practice | Andy Stumpf & Dr. Andrew Huberman

Personal Agency

00:00One of the practices that you describe in the book is something that I decided to do right away and I've been doing every week since I listened to it. Now granted, I just listened to the book a few weeks ago, so that means twice, but I've found it to be tremendously useful, not just during the exercise, but in the days that follow.

00:15And it's really uh remapped a lot of uh what I would call my unhealthy tendencies and given me much more sense of agency and my days are are just going so much better. In fact, I was on time today for the first time in my life. Influence versus concern.

00:31Yes. So, could you describe this uh simple exercise because I I'll tell you having having done it, it is immensely powerful. I only wish I had learned about it like in junior high school. Story of my life. Yeah. Uh so, first off, not my creation.

00:45This is something I don't remember and I think I said this multiple times in the book because I want to be very clear that of basically taking ownership over nothing in that book because they're not my unique ideas. They were things that were taught to me that I'm trying to pass forward.

01:01So I don't remember exactly where I first saw this but the way it was first uh positioned to me was your circle or sphere of influence which is very small and your sphere of concern which for most people to include myself is very large. So if it was the size of this table that would be your concern.

01:19The influence would be the size of a pin drop on the table. And the exercise is

Influence Vs Concern Exercise

01:26actually really simple. Take a standard piece of paper, draw a line down the middle, concern on one side, influence on the other, and you just take the time to write down the things that are occupying your waking hours. I don't know if you're anything like me, I try not to set an alarm unless I have something really pressing that day, but if I do wake up and my brain does a revolution, I have to get out of bed because otherwise I'm staring at the ceiling in the bedroom.

01:47And if I have really sticky things in the morning, I'll I'll usually do this about once a month or once every six months now. But almost every time that thought will be on the left hand side of the column. It's just a concern. Why is it preventing me from going back to sleep?

02:04Why can't I let go of it? And it's social media, the world that we all live in. It's things you can't control. It's just all the stuff that you spend your energy and effort focusing on. And then you go to the other side of that paper. And I'm still yet to find more than one thing that you can write down.

02:20And that's the direct influence that you have. And all you really can write on that is yourself. Now, you can you can tunch that out and say your thought process, the way you speak to yourself, the way you plan your day, the way you manage your time.

02:32But all that goes back into things you can actually directly control which leads you to the realization or leads me to the realization that I have no control over what happens to me in my life but I have absolute and complete and total control over how I respond to it.

02:47And I think that speaks to the agency piece and it helps me especially when I have those sticky thoughts. It helps me at least take a step back. I'm not going to say I'm perfect and I can put down a lot of the things that I'm concerned with, but it will identify for me a healthy or an unhealthy attachment to those things and it does help me cross back over to okay, I understand that this is scary or concerning, but being scared or concerned about it doesn't impact outcome.

03:15Everything on the right hand side of the paper does. So that's what it does for me. Man, you want to talk about developing some more efficiencies? It's a great tool. It's startling how much is going to be on the left and how little is going to be on the right.

03:28Yeah, it's been a game changer for me because and maybe I misinterpreted the exercise a little bit because on the uh right hand side of the uh the page, I've been listing out the things that I can control and the things that I can do with my time.

03:42That still [clears throat] goes back to you're controlling the management of your time. That's totally fine. And with all these tools, I don't think there is a wrong answer if it has the impact that you're looking for. Again, you could titrate all that back up to you controlling yourself and what you do with your time.

03:55I think it's perfect. Yeah. Again, just an awesome exercise. I really encourage everyone to do it for me once a week has been very helpful and it just pops to mind anytime I'm thinking like I saw something in the news yesterday and and you start going down these rabbit holes.

04:09You're like, "Wait, what am I doing?" They're like, "What am I doing?" And and we can blame the algorithms, we can blame the world, but ultimately Yeah. You know, it's, you know, once you realize that you're being manipulated, I think the obligation is to not follow that that path.

04:23The algorithm is real. I don't know what it means. I've listened to people argue about it at nauseium, but I have the choice as to whether or not I interface with the algorithm. And that's where the power that's what I think the algorithm is trying to do is figure out a way to take that power away from you and put it back into their hands.

04:36But it's optional. You learned this some years ago. Yes. In the teams. Yes. But you still do it now about once a month. Mhm.

Navigating Online Distractions

04:46Mhm. [clears throat] you carry around with you. If you're anything like me, I spend a lot of time on airplanes. It's a really good time to occupy yourself with something that is for me at least productive as opposed to just tuning out and watching YouTube videos of sovereign citizens get arrested, which is one of my favorite pastimes.

04:58I highly recommend people get into it. These are the people that um that say, "You can't arrest me. I'm a sovereign citiz." Are they out there testing the law or are they hoping that they'll get, you know, flagged and and there'll be a video so they can promote the sovereign citizen thing or they are they just really into being sovereign citizens and living their lives?

05:25I think some of them fall into the first category and I think some of them actually just legitimately believe. Okay. And they uh there's amazing things on the internet. You shouldn't believe all of them, right? [laughter] Maybe even most of them.

05:40That's a fair point actually. the vast majority of things you should take I think with a large dose of scrutiny on the internet. We're about the same age so late 40s for you, 50 for me. I was thinking about this in light of this concern versus influence exercise, which is, you know, that they created these like 10 and 20 and 30 year high school reunion things.

05:59I think for the reason that you have the choice to go back and learn about what people are doing and who's still married, who's still alive, who's thriving, or what whatever, whatever the reason is, we have these things called reunions. But with social media, there's this opportunity to be constantly aware of everybody you grew up with, them of you, uh people you knew 5 years ago in a job that you no longer think about.

06:22So I I feel like that left column now has grown tremendously regardless of somebody's age. the opportunity to be aware of so many more things, not just distant in other countries and other other issues entirely, but like our past lives are very much like anchored to us now unless we really literally draw that line and and sever from all that stuff cuz like as much as I wish the best for all my classmates and all these people in graduate school and whether like it it really a lot of it should not occupy one's mind.

06:52Do you

Screen Time and Mental Health

06:56ever wonder whether social media itself is making it harder to do this exercise? I think it could be. Do you know who Chad Wright is? Yes, I know of him and we've corresponded a little bit. He is hilarious. You want to We should probably describe it.

07:09He does the same type of stuff that Gogggins does. He's an endurance athlete, long red beard. I call him the Forest Gump of the Seal teams to his face, so I'm comfortable saying it. He's amazing. I've had him on the show a couple times. Uh knew him when we were in the teams together.

07:20and he came on the show on my show in November and I don't know how we started talking about it but it was this conversation around screen time. It's like all right bud let's pull the phones out. Let's see what we got. It's not awesome. I think it was 4 and 1/2 hours.

07:37So we decided that in January of this year we're going to try to drive our screen time per day to under an hour for total phone usage. I think phone calls we were able to strip out of that. I think the closest he got was about 90 minutes. And then the last week of January for me, I got mine down to 30 minutes.

07:53Now, for clarity, I was still doing a lot of the stuff that I was doing on my phone, but I forced it over to my laptop, which was a really interesting experience because it's way less sticky on that platform. So, Instagram on your laptop sucks.

08:08It's not intuitive. The things that you would normally just do with your thumb, they don't exist. So, you end up closing your laptop up. So, I'd get on there, post what I wanted to, and then just leave. My mental health was better in January than it had been in a long time.

08:20So, I 100% think that social media is not only designed to suck up as much as that left-hand portion of your list as possible, but again, it's it's optional. I mean, you create content, you have a massive platform. I create content. We

Healthy Relationship With Platforms

08:39can easily tell ourselves we have to exist on these platforms, which to a degree we do. The question I ask myself is, is the platform working for me or am I working for it? And that's the healthy relationship. And I think actually that goes right back to that exercise.

08:52Am I targeting what I do with my time and being efficient with it and then moving on? Or am I just getting stuck into this thumb scroll of death, which is right before bed? I've heard you say it's the best time to have electronic device light.

09:04[laughter] Yeah. Real bright in a dark room right before bed. Right. If you really want to maximize, make sure you do it first thing in the morning, too. And don't get outside and look at the sun, you know? [music]