Name: The #1 Habit for Productivity - Dr Andrew Huberman
Uploaded: 2026-02-06T10:28:22.000Z
Duration: 12 min 6 s
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I've been thinking about this a lot this year.

What do we need to know about the neuroscience of making habit setting more easy?

Adverbs of degree

I imagine that there must be some really interesting.

I just had James Clear on the podcast and it's so interesting when you sit down with somebody who's like the habits guy and you compare it against the neuroscience.

And so there's sort of two ways into this.

And James has done a magnificent job of explaining things that people can do to improve their habits and reduce bad habits.

The reason I'm so bullish about people understanding a little bit of mechanism behind the checklist of things to do is that I do think that when people understand mechanism, it gives them flexibility over the so called protocols.

And I think it also allows them to customize those things for themselves.

Let's face it, if you want to go online now and just say, what are the top 10 things I can do to improve my sleep?

And you get a list, you put those on your refrigerator, put them next to your bed.

It's because the way that people go about learning information strongly drives whether or not they apply that information.

Okay, so in fairness to James and the incredible work that he's done, I'm going to just kind of look at this a little bit through the lens of neuroscience, and

I'm really glad that we're talking about this, because one of the things that he said that I think is so true is that the thoughts, and

really the thoughts that you have right now, your ability to focus right now is strongly driven by the inputs you received in the preceding hours and even days.

So one of the things that's really interesting about focus and attention and a lot of habits have to do with, I don't want to procrastinate, I want to do this.

We can talk about exercise, but let's talk about cognitive stuff.

It's very, very clear that if you have a hard time getting into a bout of work or even staying focused, there's a very good chance, I believe, that your breaks between work and what you were doing before work was too stimulating.

I'm a big advocator for boring breaks, and

I'm a big advocator for silence before and after bouts of work for a couple of reasons.

Let's say you're trying to learn something or read a book or just do something that you're not reflexively doing.

It's very clear that neuroplasticity, yes, requires alertness, requires focus.

I've been beating that drum for a number of years.

It's also clear that reflection on what you were doing at some later time, just kind of like post learning reflection, walk into your car, sitting on the plane for a second, thinking about a podcast you did earlier or something you heard or a discussion, strongly reinforces the memories and the ability to work with the memories of new information.

And this is something that we've given up largely because of our smartphones.

You're constantly bringing in new sensory information.

All the data I did an episode on how to best study and learn.

I went to the data to find out because I have my methods, but

that doesn't mean they're the best methods.

Reading, rereading, note taking, highlighting, it's all fine.

But it turns out the biggest lever is to self test at some point away from the material.

So testing is not just something for evaluation of others.

It's a way that we should think, yeah, how much can I remember about that conversation?

And this will sound like a giant duh, but all learning is anti forgetting.

Because if you have people read a passage 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 times versus one time and they self test one time and self testing, significantly better.

Peter was episode, I would guess like 30 on Modern Wisdom.

And the best synopsis that I got from him, learning how to learn was learning is repeated recall, not repeated exposure.

When I say unconscious genius, I mean clearly they put thought into and structure into what they teach.

But the neuroscience supports everything you just said, which is what he just said.

And reflecting on what you were trying to do or learn or solve, even if you don't remember, even if you're still puzzled by it, is so vitally important to the anti forgetting process.

Okay, now in terms of actually being able to focus, actually

being able to do work, it's so clear that thoughts and this is the beautiful statements and work of a woman named Jenny Grow, who's spelled G R O H at Duke University, who's a neuroscientist, been studying sensory integration for a long time.

I've long thought about and I think we now understand as a field what sensations are.

So sensations are the physical stimuli in the environment.

Photons of light, mechanical pressure, volatile odorants in the environment that lead to sight, touch, smell, et cetera.

How that gets converted into chemical and electrical signals in the brain.

We understand as a field, we understand sensation, we understand perception.

Perception is which of those sensations you happen to be paying attention to.

We understand emotions now more as a subset of something that we think of more broadly as states that are set by your autonomic nervous system.

How alert you are, how not alert you are.

And then emotions are kind of layered on top of that.

Lisa Feldman Barrett has beautiful descriptions of these and so on.

And there's some debate about what emotions really are, but we know what they are neurobiologically and psychologically.

And then there's the don't go behaviors, the suppression of behavior.

But for the longest time it's been unclear what are thoughts?

Are they just like spontaneous geysering up of.

Of memories or like what's going on there.

And Jenny grow, I think has the absolute best description of these.

So let's say I say to you, let's not talk about cats because I'm a dog person.

And this isn't a trick question, I promise because it's always weird when people start doing this.