How To Hack Your Brain For Better Focus: Sasha Hamdani (Transcript)

Read here the full transcript of Dr. Sasha Hamdani’s talk titled “How To Hack Your Brain For Better Focus” at TEDxKC 2024 conference.

Listen to the audio version here:

TRANSCRIPT:

The Unexpected Benefits of Boredom During Maternity Leave

In 2020, I had a baby. Two days later, COVID shut down the world, and I was as worried and as grocery-wiping as anyone. But truthfully, quarantine worked out pretty well for maternity leave. I was tethered to a very hungry little boy—shockingly hungry—who 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, and 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. 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. It’s highly recommended. I was obsessed.

The Unintended Catalyst: A Broken Streaming Account

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 passwords. I couldn’t get in. I probably could have gotten my own, but that would have required focus—focus and energy. So here I was, six to eight hours a day of nursing or pumping with no “Love Island.”

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.

The Power of Boredom: A Brain Reset

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.

Understanding the Science Behind Focus and Boredom

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.

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Your brain is a very busy place. Parts of it are working even when you think they aren’t. You’ve 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.

The Pitfalls of Multitasking

When you attempt to 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.

The Default Mode Network: Your Brain’s Secret Weapon

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. 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 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 repressed emotions, and problem-solve with tools not usually accessible to you in your toolbox.

The Importance of Default Mode for Focus Issues

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 who have focus issues, the default mode remains active while the executive network is 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.

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Harnessing the Power of Mindlessness

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 to exercise mindlessness as a way to unlock your most creative, most productive self by activating the default mode network.

Einstein’s Approach: The Power of Daydreaming

Einstein was a daydreamer. He 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, 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 sort 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.

Brain Babbling: A Technique for Mindlessness

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, grapple to something you see. I’m going to give you an example. I’m going to give you a phone-related example because 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. Moonwalk.

Can you guys imagine if I had fallen there? I would have had to explain to everybody 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 Graham Bell. 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.

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The point is you can start from anywhere. You can pick anything you want and you just let your associations run free. 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.

The Importance of Boredom in Modern Life

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 that seems designed to prevent boredom at all costs. Endless distraction. Available 24-7. 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. 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.

Conclusion: The Power of Doing Nothing

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. 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, spacey part that restores us, makes us feel alive. And those two parts are really in sync. That’s a beautiful couple. I think they might just win this thing.

Thank you.