LIVE EVENT Q&A: Dr. Andrew Huberman Question & Answer in Los Angeles, CA

KEYPOINTS

• 01

  ADHD involves a higher threshold for engaging dopamine, not an inability to focus

  Huberman, who stresses that he isn't a clinician, notes that children and adults with ADHD can focus intensely on what they enjoy, such as a favorite video game. He doesn't tell anyone to stop prescribed Vyvanse, Adderall or Ritalin. His order is behavior first, with sleep and nutrition as prerequisites, then supplements such as L-tyrosine (a dopamine precursor, to be approached carefully), then prescription medication.

• 02

  Mental focus follows visual focus

  He describes visual focus exercises used in schools in China, now being studied elsewhere: hold your gaze on a target for 1 to 3 minutes, blinking as needed. He also cites Wendy Suzuki's NYU work showing that about 13 minutes a day of breath-focused meditation improved focus significantly, though few people stick with it. Focusing always involves refocusing.

• 03

  Space-time bridging is a perceptual exercise, not mysticism

  With eyes closed, place your attention just behind your forehead. The brain has no sensory neurons there, so you're attending only to thought. Then, keeping some attention on your breathing, focus at about hand's distance, then farther and farther, until you picture yourself as a speck in a vast landscape. Near focus slices time finely, while far, panoramic focus changes time perception and tends to calm. Huberman says people under stress, or with attention problems, tend to get stuck at or jump between these distances. His team is still collecting data on it.

• 04

  Under high stress, the body starts leading the thinking brain

  Citing his colleague David Spiegel, Huberman explains that normally the prefrontal cortex leads the insula and other areas that track internal sensations. Past a certain level of stress that relationship flips, and creativity and options shrink. In his analogy, the coach starts getting dragged by the players. Confidence comes from learning to modulate stress in real time and raising your stress threshold.

• 05

  The dopamine system responds to how you interpret events

  You have one reward system for money, mates, food and work, and it is highly contextual. Honestly reframing a failure as a win in some real sense can produce an internal chemical win that sets up real ones. He points to Nelson Mandela and Viktor Frankl, who found what they could control while imprisoned.

• 06

  EMDR pairs a calm state with recalling trauma

  EMDR is one of four approved behavioral treatments for trauma, and Huberman says it works best for single-event trauma. Side-to-side eye movements, which also happen naturally when walking without fixing on a target, strongly reduce amygdala activity. Pairing that calm with recounting the trauma is a form of reverse conditioning, and some researchers think it may involve clinical hypnosis. He predicts combination therapies, possibly with drugs that boost plasticity, rather than one-or-the-other choices.

• 07

  Separate what modulates health from what mediates it

  A physiological sigh directly mediates calming. Sleep, sunlight, exercise, nutrition, social connection and a healthy gut microbiome modulate many systems. Fixing a disrupted microbiome won't cure depression, but it can lift mood, because gut bacteria produce chemicals that become serotonin or dopamine in the brain. He recommends low-sugar fermented foods such as natto, kimchi, sauerkraut, kombucha and some yogurts.

• 08

  Sustained motivation runs better on delight than on grit

  Working from anger, fear or competitiveness works but depletes you and requires long recovery. A more renewable fuel comes from the dopamine and serotonin of genuinely loving what you do. In college, faced with a subject he hated, Huberman would try to fall in love with it by finding the gems in it. Sometimes it worked.