How to hack your brain for better focus | Sasha Hamdani | TEDxKC

[Music] in 2020 I had a baby two days later thank you two days later Co shut down the world and I was as worried and as grocery wiping as anyone but truthfully quarantine worked out pretty well for maternity to leave I was Tethered to a very hungry little boy shockingly hungry ate all the time now I already had one full-time job seeing patients as a psychiatrist in that world I would be hurriedly switching back and forth between medication therapy strategy empathy phone calls admin Supervision in my covid mom life I was a human milk farm

bound to the couch so how did I pass my time thank you so much for asking I watched love Island each season more salacious than the last and for those of you who aren't familiar with this UK dating show it's trash but it will eat up hours of your life because there is backbiting and twists and turns and British slang and it's highly recommend I was obsessed but then something weird happened my Hulu stopped working which is actually not even true the account that i' had been mooching off of reset their password so I couldn't

get in okay and I probably could have gotten my own but that would have required focus focus and energy so here I was 6 to8 hours of a day of nursing or pumping with no love Island okay I was so addicted to the show that I didn't even know where to start replacing that kind of dopamine hit so I didn't I just sat there for hours and I didn't do anything in particular I just remember being profoundly and existentially bored and that continued for days until something weirder happened my brain which had been reduced to

Absolute oatmeal during this period of time seemed to reset I started thinking about creative ways to spend my time I started brainstorming how to get more people better access to good sound information on Mental Health Care I started to research imagine then create educational content around that I put some of those videos online and before I knew it I had over a million followers across platforms because of those videos I was offered a book deal I was able to develop an ADHD management app I was asked by the Vice President and the Surgeon General to

speak about burnout and all of those things happened because my Hulu stopped working all of those things happened because I was stuck to the couch with a dull routine all of that happened because I was bored now most of my content and educational research is about ADHD I have it and I treat it so I spent a lot of my time focusing on focus and I started to wonder why was there such a seismic shift in my focus and I'll tell you it's because I allowed myself to be bored the true secret to dialing in

is being able to space out your brain is a very busy Place parts of it are working even when you think they aren't and you probably heard that myth that you only use 10% of your brain that's not true you actually use all of it even when you're sleeping your brain is always active so when you're awake alert focused on a task you're constantly being ripped in a million different directions by distractions and that's not even an ADHD specific thing that's a human in this modern world thing so when you attempt a multitask you're not

actually doing more than one activity at a time instead you're rapidly shifting your Focus from one thing to another using up oxygenated glucose in the brain which is exactly the fuel you need when you're trying to focus so here you are burning through your resources and it's even harder to stay on task for a prolonged period of time so you jump from task to task even more and you use up more glucose and you keep jumping and it goes on and on and you get stuck on this vicious cycle of brain fatigue and it's exhausting

so how do we exit that Loop when you allow your brain to quiet down you activate lesser known neural Pathways called the default mode Network and I would describe that neurologically but it's a relatively recent concept there's not even a complete consensus on all the brain regions included in the definition of it but what we do know is that these are the areas of the brain that are active when when your brain is at wakeful rest like daydreaming so when you're spacing out in the shower when you're sitting in the car on a long boring

drive when you're fused to a breast pump that's when your default mode engages when your brain has nothing better to do you dip into these emotional and memory centers of the brain and the result is that you get to access forgotten memories tap into repress Notions and problem solve with tools not usually accessible to you in your toolbox and this concept is especially important to those of us who have Focus issues at Baseline in the neurotypical brain the default mode Network and the task positive or executive Network are reciprocal as one works more the other

slows down for people have Focus issues the default mode remains active while the executive network is trying trying to get stuff done which explains why it's so hard to stay on task in order to reclaim our fragmented Focus from an increasingly distracted world we need to be able to tap into the default mode Network because there's magic in there so how do we do that there's a ton of research out there showing how to suppress the default mode Network there's a lot of solid data showing how mindfulness meditation and exercise diminish the default mode Network

mindfulness meditation and exercise influence the way we process thoughts and it does it by diminishing the default mode Network and I know you're probably thinking why are we diminishing it don't we want to use the default mode Network yes but mindfulness meditation and exercise serve to clean up both of our networks reorganizing the mind so when we're focusing we're focusing and when we're not we're not and again this is really important to those of us who have both networks firing at the same time but I'm not here to talk about meditation and I'm not here

to talk about exercise instead I'm here to encourage you you to exercise mindlessness as a way to unlock your most creative most productive self by activating the default mode Network okay so Einstein Einstein was a Daydreamer who recommended it he actively participated in it why because when the default mode network is active creativity and problem solving are optimized when the default mode network is actively firing you naturally demote your executive Network give it some time off between tasks this is when creativity flourishes so when you return to problem solving you've actually reset your executive Network

and sometimes even given it new ideas to sore through and select from and I get it not a lot of people encourage daydreaming usually when we're in it we're trying to snap ourselves out of it because we're busy but clearly there's value in it our brains are literally trying to reset so how do we purposefully be mindless seems like a paradox right we can trigger these mind wandering breaks with a concept that I call Brain babbling brain babbling is the expression of the contents of your Consciousness without censorship as a means of activating and stimulating

your unconscious so the next time you feel stuck I want you to try this look around you grab hold of something you see I'm going to give you an example and I'm going to give you a phone related example cuz I'm always around my phone so phone I'm going to start with the word cell cell genetics DNA Evolution caveman cave painting handprint fingerprint Criminal Smooth Criminal Michael Jackson moon moonwalk Moon can you guys imagine if I had fallen there I would have had to explain every body that I fell while attempting to moonwalk during a

TED Talk moonwalk you can see how far we've come from cell to moonwalk I'll give you another example maybe let's do phone this time phone Alexander granell Graham Cracker s'mores campfire Smokey the Bear Yellowstone Park geysers steam steamy romance love Island because that's just been imprinted in my brain now point is you can start from anywhere you can pick anything you want and you just let your associations Run free and you don't have to stop at a chain of words if a memory comes up Let it play it's this imaginative fluidity that's key because when

you return to whatever it is you were doing before you're likely going to be more focused because you have indulged that default mode Network and restored your executive Network our brains need these breaks it's what moves the needle from surviving to thriving we evolved as creatures with complex Minds alert to Danger constantly predicting and solving problems but we used to get bored also and now we've developed this civilization it seems designed to prevent boredom at all costs endless distraction available 24/7 but what is that doing to us the key idea here is finding a way

to utilize mindlessness as a way of becoming more Mindful and I don't want you to be mindless all the time right nobody wants that we don't want to be spacing out all the time we just want to be able to focus when we want to focus and we do that by using the default mode Network and remember I got interested in this because of the profound effect that being mindless had on me so many new ideas began to Bubble up once I didn't have Adam and Zara's love affair to distract me I think the trick

for me and for all of us is to find space in our schedules to indulge the default mode Network as a way to get our whole brain to work better mindlessness allows us to travel to the past the present the future untethered to what we have to do and connects us simply to being doing nothing is actually doing something thing and it's probably doing something more than what you think because this is generally when we find those breakthrough moments that feel like Strokes of Genius because if we can access those parts of the brain we

have a unique opportunity to connect the two parts of ourselves the focus task performing part that helps us achieve solve problems make a living and the daydreamy space part that restores us makes us feel alive when those two parts are really in sync that's a beautiful couple I think they might just win this thing thank you