Andrew Huberman's 3-Minute Visualization Drill Will Help You Achieve All of Your Goals
Visualization drills are popular when it comes to setting goals, often imagining the end result. But your actual vision plays a large role in how efficiently you reach your goals. The science of goal pursuit is really about how your brain perceives space and action, as Andrew Huberman, PhD, explains on a new episode of Huberman Lab Essentials.
Your brain has two visual pathways: one for focusing on finer details and another for taking in the bigger picture. Using your vision intentionally can train your brain and body to move toward your goals in real time.
He referred to one study from NYU, where people exercised with 15-pound ankle weights and were asked to move toward a goal line. One group kept their eyes on the goal line, while the other didn’t. The group that focused on the goal line reached it 23 percent faster and with 17 percent less effort. Simply looking at the target, the work felt easier and they were able to move quicker.
To put this into practice, Huberman shared a tool that goes beyond your usual visualization drills. By focusing your eyes on a wider space around you, your brain shifts how it experiences time, engages goal-focused neural circuits, and boosts dopamine.
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Andrew Huberman's 3-Minute Visualization Drill
- Close your eyes and focus on your breathing, heart rate, and immediate sensations. Take three slow breaths.
- Open your eyes and focus your visual attention on some area on the surface of your body, like your hand.
- Again, take three slow breaths, shifting some attention outward.
- Continue with the breathing pattern. Move your visual attention to outside my body to a location in the room or something about 5 to 15 feet away. Think about shifting 90 percent of your focus here.
- Pick a distant point in the room or a horizon line if outside. Widen your visual field to see as much of the environment as possible for three breaths. Focus the majority of your attention here.
- Return to your internal focus for three more breaths.
- Repeat this cycle two to three times. It'll take about 3 minutes.
Why It Works
"When we focus our visual attention on a very narrow point that's close to our body and immediate experience, we tend to slice up time very finely. We're focused on our breathing. We're focused on our heartbeats," Huberman says. "In fact, our breathing and our internal landscape and our heartbeats become the sort of seconds hand, if you will, on our experience. We are carving up time according to our immediate physiological experience."
When you shift your focus outside of your body, on the other hand, your brain changes how it "batches" or slices time. Our frame rate changes, as Huberman explains. In other words, your perception of time stretches, allowing you to think about the bigger picture, plan for future milestones, and engage the brain’s goal-directed systems like dopamine to support motivation and action.
"Almost all goals involve setting some goal that's off in the future, and then carving up the time between now and the achievement of that goal into milestones that range in duration," he says.
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