If I could give only one piece of advice, it would be thisâthe level of focus you can attain is limited by your physical state.
Please read these lessons carefully and apply them. Be patientâit's a lifestyle. If you've struggled with any of the below topics, try breaking them down into skills and taking the time to learn those skills.
In a weird way, I hope you will learn nothing new from this post! We will be covering the fundamentals. They are timeless and inescapable.
I do hope, though, that you will see how these fundamentals stretch beyond your health and aesthetics and into the realm of elite cognitive performance.
Master the fundamentals. You can get an afternoon's worth of focus out of a meditation session or 20 mg of adderall. But what we are doing here is building a well of focus that you can draw from, day in and day out.
Finally, I'll do a lot of linking here. I don't get any credit for these ideas. They were ironed out years before I came around.
Sleep
The topic of sleep has been a passion of mine for years now. My PhD work focused on the contributions of sleep to the motor system.
In recent years, sleep research has exploded into the mainstream. Andrew Huberman has a big podcast on the subject. Matthew Walker wrote a hit book on the subject (it's highly suspectâsee guzey's merciless review of it).
It's a mixed bag. People are now caring deeply about the greatest tool in our focus arsenal. People have also become neurotic about tracking and maximizing their sleep.
We are not so fragile and I will remind you that my biggest gains in focus came when my son was a newborn.
Enough rambling. Here are the most important aspects of good sleep.
Sleep Hygiene
Sleep hygiene is a fancy term which describes your pre-bed rituals and your sleep environment.
Pre-bed ritual. Avoid screens and blue light. Do something that unwinds your brain (for me, that's reading). Optionally, take a warm shower. In a wordârelax.
Sleep environment. Your room must be darkâblackout curtains are worth every penny. Your room must be comfortably cold. Your brain temperature rises 1Âş C during REM sleep (yes, really) and you are less likely to enter REM sleep (or fall asleep at all) in an over-warm environment. Finally, consider white noise from a fan or a noise machine.
Bonus: If you cannot fall asleep in 10â15 minutes (including after waking in the night), leave your bed. Go to another room and do something low-key (like reading) until you are relaxed. Then return to your bed. Repeat this as many times as needed. The goal is to associate your bed with being tired, not with being restless.
Sleep Length
Partially due to sleep being in vogue (and partially due to Matt Walker committing data fraud in his bookâseriously, read the guzey review), everyone thinks you must maximize sleep to maximize health.
This isn't true.
Your body needs a certain amount of sleep. For most, it is 7â8 hours. For a small number of others, it is 5â6 or 9â10.
Anything more than this and you're just sleeping your life away (again, I was a sleep researcher for many years, if anything, you should expect me to extol the virtues of more sleep).
How do you know if you're getting enough sleep? Easyâyou should wake up without an alarm most days, and you should make it through your day without needing a nap. (A lot of people get drowsy around 2â4 PM, but then get over itâthat's not what I'm talking about.)
Short Sleep
For many years, I believed my body needed exactly 8 hours of sleep. That always seemed to be the number.
A couple years ago, I was paying closer attention to my body and recognized that when a few pieces were in place, I was regularly waking up one hour before my alarm went off. I still had the same amount of energy throughout the day, indicating that my body was just fine with 7 hours of sleep!
What were those pieces?
They were exercise (lifting weights and some easy cardio), good nutrition (~90%+ eating clean), and zero alcohol (or any other drug). I was waking up at 4:00â4:30 bursting with energy. It was thrilling.
As it turns out, my body actually needed 7 hours of sleep, but I had artificially extended it by not treating my body optimally.
I plan to write more extensively on short sleep when I can get some more case studies. I've only ever heard Jocko Willink talk about it in this book. For others, the magnitude of the decrease may be greater than 1 hour, and the pieces that need to be in place may be different as well.
Diet and Exercise
Unlike the sleep section, I'll be taking the Charles Munger approach to discussing diet and exercise:
One of the first things people notice when they start eating well and exercising is how much their cognitive abilities improve. Enhanced focus and sharpness. A month or so ago I took an entire week off of exercise. My cognitive performance dropped to ~75-80% of its baseline.
How well is eating well? In my experience, if ~90%+ of my calories are from whole foods, my focus is at its peak. This equates to eating home-cooked food and maybe a less-nutritious snack during the day. Don't overthink this.
gives great diet advice in his substack. For a more unconventional take, follow Alex Feinberg on Twitter. He's got a great framework for intuitive eating if you don't want to worry about tracking macros.As far as training goes, I find that 3 days/week of lifting weights is all I need to maintain focus. I've tried a lot of different lifting programsâBowTiedOx and Alexander Cortes have written my favorites. I'm actually doing a slightly modified version of Cortes' PPL right now. Zone 2 cardio can take things to next level. If that's too much right now, just start with the lifting and go for some walks.
There. Those are some of the best resources you can find on diet and exercise right now. None of those are affiliate linksâI've personally followed and benefitted from each of these people.
If you attend to your sleep, nutrition, and exercise, you will have a stable reservoir of focus at your fingertips every day. From there, it's just a matter of learning to dip into and maintain a flow state, which I will cover a future post.
BonusâFasting and Caffeine
So you've mastered the above principles, but you want that extra edge on certain days. Here's the protocol:
Fast for 18+ hours. That probably means skipping dinner the night before. Do some Zone 2 or HIIT in the morning. Then, right around the 18â20 hour mark, have a little caffeine. You won't need as much as you do on a full stomach.
This will give you an intense level of focus. Maybe too intense.
A warningâthis isn't sustainable to do every day, but 2-3 days/week would work. Also, consult with a doctor if you've never fasted before and you have concerns.
Fasting is pretty simple (just don't eat!), but the hunger can be a little off-putting the first few times you try it. Eventually, you'll look forward to your fast days more than your feeding days.
If you want to deep dive on fasting, here's a great book. Or just start with this podcast.