Struggle With Maintaining Attention? The Fix Could Be Easier Than You Think

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Today’s Health Upgrade

• Can breathwork change your brain like psychedelics?

• The stealthy reason you struggle with attention and focus

• Adam’s Corner: Write your ending (it could change your life)

On Our Radar 
Can Breathwork Change Your Brain Like Psychedelics?

If you've ever done a serious breathwork session, you know the experience is difficult to explain afterward. Depending on the method used, it either feels like relaxation or a chaotic trance. Scientists examined people’s brains during breathwork to find out why.

Researchers found that high-intensity breathwork reduced blood flow to a region of the brain comparable to what’s found in studies using psychedelics.

The study examined those with extensive experience with intense breathwork practices (such as Holotropic Breathwork and Conscious Connected Breathing). Cerebral blood flow dropped by about 42 percent during the breathwork sessions.

And it dropped in a region connected to stronger feelings of bliss and connectedness. At the same time, blood flow increased in regions associated with emotional memory.

The subjective scores were comparable to levels reported in psilocybin and LSD studies, not because the mechanisms are identical, but because brain pathways appear to overlap. 

It’s worth noting that this isn’t exactly your relaxing breathwork. It's a specific technique where you breathe in a continuous loop, with very little or no pause between the inhale and exhale, and no pause between the exhale and the next inhale. You're essentially removing the natural "rest points" your breathing normally has. That combination — speed, continuity, and duration — is what makes it distinct and drives its effects. And that’s why it typically needs to be done with a practitioner to ensure its safety. 

While the study above used an intense technique best practiced under guidance, research shows that slower, gentler breathing delivers many of the same downstream benefits (reduced stress, lower anxiety, improved mood) through a safer, more accessible route.

The most studied home-friendly version is sometimes called coherent or resonance breathing: inhale for 4-5 seconds, exhale for 4-5 seconds, and repeat continuously for 5 to 10 minutes. That rhythm lands at roughly 5-6 breaths per minute, which research consistently associates with increased heart rate variability and parasympathetic activation, the physiological signature of a calmer nervous system.

Together With LMNT 
Dehydration Hits Before You Feel Thirsty. Your Focus Pays the Price

By the time thirst hits, most people assume they've caught it early enough. Grab some water, problem solved. That assumption is worth revisiting because the research suggests the timing doesn't work the way most of us think.

A meta-analysis of 33 studies found that dehydration impairs attention more than any other cognitive skill, with effects appearing before most people notice they're thirsty.

Researchers measured various aspects of cognitive performance — attention, executive function, reaction time, motor coordination — under different levels of fluid loss. And dehydration meaningfully affected performance. 

Not drinking enough water caused the biggest disruption to attention and focus, followed by motor coordination and executive function. Reaction time, notably, was not significantly affected. The impairment also scaled with the level of dehydration. The more you needed to drink something, the greater the cognitive effects.

The study suggests that even modest dehydration may increase physiological strain and reduce your brain's ability to allocate resources toward demanding tasks. Sustained attention — the kind required for focused work, decision-making, or anything requiring more than passive engagement — appears to be the first thing to go.

What you need to remember is that your body will likely need water before you feel thirsty. The lowest-friction fix isn't about tracking ounces; it's about building a few automatic prompts into your day. A glass before coffee. One with every meal. Small moments where you can attach drinking to something that happens every day. That's the whole strategy.

There's one variable the water-timing strategy doesn't address: what you're drinking.

When dehydration precedes thirst, as the research above suggests, the simple answer is plain water. And that works great. But if there’s one thing we’ve heard from the 1.2 million readers of this newsletter: many people just don’t like drinking water. So they don’t. 

That’s why we recommend LMNT. It’s a flavored approach to help you hydrate more, without any extra sugar, artificial colors, or ingredients that give you second thoughts. 

Each stick pack contains sodium, potassium, and magnesium in ratios built on a growing body of research to help you stay hydrated. And if you sweat a lot, it will replace the electrolytes you lose during exercise. 

If water is a struggle, add LMNT to make it enjoyable and more likely that you’ll stay hydrated. If you sweat a lot or exercise for more than 1-2 hours, electrolytes can make a difference in performance and recovery. 

APC readers get a free sample pack of every flavor with their first order. Click here to claim yours. No code needed. It applies automatically at checkout.

Adam’s Corner 
The Marble

The box had been sitting in the corner of my office for years. But when I think about it, it’s much longer. 

Some version of that box has followed me through every move, every desk, every chapter for the last 30 years of my life. It’s hard to explain what’s inside it, only that it contains the kind of things you can’t throw away but also can’t justify keeping.

I was cleaning out my office when I took a look inside the box. Near the top was a folded piece of paper. Considering the mileage, it was holding up well. 

The paper was from a high school English class. The assignment was to rewrite a poem called “George Gray” by Edgar Lee Masters. In the poem, a man long dead is studying his own gravestone. The marble. 

Gray had lived cautiously. So cautiously that he missed everything.

He stood at the shore for his whole life and watched.

The assignment was to write your own version. Your own reflection on the life you’d lived. As I remember it, everyone wrote something very optimistic and hopeful.

Me? I wrote something about the life I feared I might live.

What The Marble Showed Me

High school was not good to me. Or, more precisely, I was not good to high school.

I don’t remember it as a time of being lost. I remember it as a time of being angry. Hurt. Alone. Which, looking back, feels like the same thing, wearing different clothes. 

There were things I could point to rationalize my emotions at the time.

Doctors discovered a rare autoimmune disorder that, for more than thirty years now, has given me fevers that last sixty to eighty days. I’ve spent much of my life learning to function inside a body that stops cooperating without asking permission.

That probably would’ve been enough. But during high school, I broke my back. And then a year later, I broke it again. The rehab the second time through changed me forever. 

As a result, I spent long stretches in and out of school. In pain. Trying to fit into a world that had no language for what I was carrying. 

You don’t meet many people — in high school or anywhere — who have broken their back twice and are living with a disease so rare that doctors around the world have studied it and still haven’t solved the puzzle.

So I put up walls. Only I didn’t know I was the one building them.

I blamed everything around me.
Saw every moment of being unseen as an attack.
Felt the world was conspiring against me because no one would meet me where I was. 

Every hard thing that happened became evidence for a story I was already telling myself: that life was going to be this way. That I was someone things happened — permanently, predictably — to.

And then I wrote that poem. What came out on the page wasn’t the angry kid. It was something more honest. It was the part of me that could still see clearly — that knew, even at seventeen, even beneath all the noise and the hurt — exactly what I was doing.

I was standing at the bottom of the mountain. And the only thing keeping me there was me. The poem turned on a light in a room I’d been sitting in the dark.

After I wrote it, I started writing every day. It’s a habit I’ve maintained for nearly thirty years. Not because I had some grand plan, but because what happened on the page felt like talking to the most honest version of myself. The clarity was cathartic in a way nothing else had been. I could sort through my thoughts with a kind of accountability you’d want from a best friend, except the best friend was me.

I started therapy, too. And after breaking my back twice — discovering stenosis and arthritis to round out the list — I became obsessed with the human body. I needed to understand what was still possible. 

That obsession, that refusal to let the diagnosis write my future, became the foundation of everything I’ve built since. This newsletter you read each day, the 10 books I’ve written, the years as a magazine editor, and the tens of thousands of people I’ve helped with their fitness, nutrition, and mindset. All of that work came from a place of pain and rebirth. And I’m a better person because of it all. 

The Climb Is Not A Straight Line

That shift — that marble — was not an instant fix. 

I want to be honest about that because if I skip over it, I’m doing the same thing every self-improvement story does: showing you the summit without showing you the mountain.

You don’t summit by having a realization. The realization is just the trailhead. The climbing is different. Slower. And you might make it halfway up, lose your footing, slide back down, and have to start again. That happened more than once.

But here’s what the poem gave me that nothing else had: questions I couldn’t walk away from.

What if I never realized the only thing keeping me at the bottom was me?
What if I kept waiting for the world to understand me — to finally give me the fair shot I felt I deserved?
What if I let the bad things that happened become proof that things would never go my way?

The answer was a version of my life I didn’t want.

So I kept climbing. Not gracefully. Not on any kind of schedule. But consistently enough that, over years — not weeks, not a quarter, but years — I started to become someone different.

I didn’t just evolve. I replaced the complacent, victimized version of me.

The dreamer was still in there. The bright-eyed kid who believed things could be different. But now he had something to stand on: Grit. Determination. Vision. Passion. Gratitude.

Piece by piece, the slow accumulation of evidence gave me the belief that the mountain could be climbed, because I was actually climbing it.

I kept dreaming, but I stopped holding myself back and thinking the world was against me. I started being more accountable to the version of me I was trying to become. 

I found peace in who I was, rather than wishing I were someone else. I saw my weaknesses clearly. Not as faults. But as information.

And when things didn’t go my way — the girl who had no interest, the opportunity that fell apart, the injury that kept trying to push me down — I stopped letting it define me. I started asking what I could learn from it and then kept moving.

Bad things that happen are not a punishment. They’re not proof that things will never go your way. They are just a part of life. But you have to decide that. No one can decide it for you.

That’s what the marble showed me. Not a formula. Not a timeline. Just a choice, made over and over, to take ownership of everything, including the parts of the story I didn’t love or hadn’t written yet.

The Mountain Is Always There (Waiting For You To Climb It)

I don’t know what stands in your way right now.

But for most, something inside holds you back. Fear, uncertainty, imposter syndrome, pain, a lack of support, doubt, disbelief, trauma. There are too many scenarios to cover, and they manifest in different ways.

We take things personally. We don’t feel seen. We think people don’t understand what we’re carrying. And sometimes that’s all true, and it’s real, and it’s painful. 

You’re allowed to feel that. The hurt, the frustration, the sense that you’ve been handed something unfair. 

But the safety we’re searching for, the sense of finally being understood and given a fair shot, will not arrive from outside us. No matter how long we wait for it.

Change is an inside game. We have seen it in countless inspiring and amazing stories. It takes you saying, “Enough!” and doing something about it, without looking for a finish line.

For me, it was writing that poem and seeing those words. It was pressing fast forward on my life, seeing the end, and not liking what I saw. 

But here’s what most won’t admit: I was not ready to change my life.

And it would be years before I could see and feel the difference.

But in that moment, I couldn’t pretend I hadn’t written those words. And I knew the best way to give myself a chance at a different outcome would be to change who I was.

That’s the thing about seeing your marble clearly. You can’t unsee it.

And if you lean into that pain (it will hurt) and take accountability for your life and your outcomes, that’s the moment you can start the climb.

The marble isn’t chiseled until all is said and done. So if you’re reading this, that means there’s still time. And the best news is, you’re the one holding the tools. -AB

The Positive Corner of The Internet
About Arnold’s Pump Club Editorial Standards

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Publisher: Arnold Schwarzenegger​

Editors-in-chief: Adam Bornstein and Daniel Ketchell