TL;DR Summary

• Motivation is a feeling, and a feeling is a brain state.

• Chemicals & Hormones determine brain states.

• Your Visual system has near-instant control of your brain state.

• Focal Vision activates your Sympathetic Nervous System (Motivation).

• 4 Step Process to Hack Your Focal Vision for Motivation

Motivation

What does it mean to be motivated? Most would describe it as a feeling.

Alright, so what is a feeling? Some might say a subjective experience, others might say it’s their mindset/belief.

To me, feelings are chemical states of your brain.

Understanding this is one of the most freeing realizations you’ll ever learn.

This means you have so much more control over your motivation/drive than you realize.

One of my favorite sayings highlights this superpower-

Action Creates Motivation.

Notice it’s not Motivation Creates Action. You won’t “feel” motivated without acting first.

Luckily, for the most part, our actions are under our control.

Vision & Motivation

The action we are talking about today relates to our eyes & Visual System.

Most people don’t realize how connected our eyes are to our brain, and how quickly our vision has massive effects on our brain state.

This is because our eyes ARE our brain. They’re not just connected to our brain, our eyes are literally the only part of our brain that’s outside of our skull.

In development, two pieces of our brain push forward into our eye sockets, and become our eyes!

Crazy right? As you can see above, our Optice Nerve connects right in the very center of our brain, which is massively important for our survival!

For example, our eyes telling our brain that a tiger is running towards us needed to get us running (or into ACTION) pretty quickly, otherwise, there would be a lot more tigers and a lot fewer humans.

This means our vision can have a near-instant effect on our brain state, specifically, where our eyes are focused.

Mental focus follows Visual focus.

This is great news considering you have control over your Visual focus, you can choose to look up, look down, look far away from you, or closer to you.

Visual Focus & Motivation

Great, so now we know where our focus goes, energy flows, but how do we USE this information to find motivation?!

For that, we need to look at the two branches of the Visual System.

I will spare you the Neuroanatomy terms today, and simplify these branches into Focal (Portrait) Vision & Panoramic Vision.

Focal Vision is the key to “feeling” motivation, and where we will spend the rest of our time!

Focal Vision

This is the zoomed-in type of vision. Think about a portrait mode picture on an iPhone. The subject is clear, but the background is blurry, like the owl below.

If you’re reading this on your phone, your screen is clear/focused, but what about the things around your phone/screen? They’re blurry, aren’t they?

This type of vision engages our Sympathetic Nervous System or our Flight/Flight/Freeze System.

That means Norepinephrine (Adrenaline), among other things, is released into our brains which changes our state!

NorEp “agitates” us, sending a GO signal to our brain.

This agitation is caused by the release of chemicals, which was triggered by our Visual Focus.

Those chemicals change our brain state and allow us to zone in, stay focused, motivated, and take action.

That being said, a technique from Dr. Andrew Huberman, a Standford Neuroscientist, hones in on this phenomenon, allowing you to hack your motivation with your eyes.

4 Step Brain Hack

1. Put the goal/task you need to achieve into your mind

2. Find 1 Focal point around you.

3. Focus your vision on this singular point for 60sec.

4. Move into action on the next task that will bring your goal closer to you.

What’s Happening?

By doing this, your Visual System is causing that “agitation” we talked about earlier.

Norepinephrine is being released, your blood pressure is rising, your breathing changes and your body is ready to ACT!

Try It Out!

This little hack can be used anywhere you can see anything.

I use the palm of my hand sometimes or put an “X” on a whiteboard.

Email me back, or comment on this post with your feedback & questions, I would love to hear how this works out for you!

Until next time… Live Heroically!