Organizing the Body Through Daily Habits — Part 3 of 3
This is the third of three pieces in the series Organizing the Body Through Daily Habits. The series answers a question I am often asked in Rolfing sessions: what can be done in ordinary daily life? The final piece takes up how the body is used through the day.
Focus and metabolism come from the same place
Since June 2015, I have offered Rolfing sessions in Shibuya. In sessions I am often asked how to improve daily habits in order to stay well.
Two things are at issue here. How to sharpen focus. And how to burn body fat.
They look like separate matters. But both start in the nervous system. And the means that work turn out to overlap considerably. Light movement, cold water, talking with people. The same things bear on focus and on metabolism alike.
It is that overlap I want to look at.
The brain changes
One thing to set down first.
Medicine long held that the brain does not change. That shifted between the 1960s and 1970s, when the idea that the brain can alter itself in response to its environment drew attention. Neuroplasticity, it is called — a compound of the word for nerve cell and the word for being able to change.
We now know that the workings and the structure of the brain shift continually in response to input from outside.
Rolfing, too, can be described as one way of conveying a new use of the body to the brain through the hands. And the same property can be used in daily life. How to focus when you want to focus, how to make learning stick. That is what follows.
The ultimate measure is sleep
There is one quickest way to raise focus: getting enough sleep.
Not only focus. Improvements have been reported in cognition, physical performance, hormonal balance, and immune function. And sleep plays a part in consolidating learning, as Part 1 set out.
On the assumption that sleep is adequate, then, here is the rest.
Three neurotransmitters involved in focus
Nerve cells make neurotransmitters. Three of them bear on focus: noradrenaline, acetylcholine, and dopamine.
Andrew Huberman, the neuroscientist at Stanford, offers an “arrow model” as a way of thinking about focus. Let me follow it.
Noradrenaline supplies the energy, the vigilance, the drive that focus requires. In the arrow, it is the shaft.
Acetylcholine stands for attention, focus, the spotlight. It is the head of the arrow, and matters for narrowing to a single point.
Dopamine covers reward, motivation, persistence — the part that holds focus in place.
The three play different parts. How is each raised?
Raising dopamine — holding focus
To raise dopamine, which matters for holding focus: get sunlight early in the morning, take caffeine (both heighten dopamine’s effect), make use of cold baths or a sauna.
Medications for ADHD include some that raise dopamine; what I am taking up here is what can be done within daily life.
Cold baths and saunas do more than raise dopamine — the level is reported to stay stable afterward, which makes them easy to work with.
Raising noradrenaline — the energy of focus
To raise noradrenaline, the energy of focus: light movement, and conversation with other people. Noradrenaline is closely tied to the regions that move the body. As with dopamine, cold baths and saunas work, and breathing practices can raise it too.
As an aside, noradrenaline matters for consolidating learning as well. In memory research, raising noradrenaline five to ten minutes after a bout of study seems to put the brain into a state where learning sticks. Interestingly, during study itself, focus and composure are what count, so raising noradrenaline too far is counterproductive.
There is a place to raise it, and a place not to.
Raising acetylcholine — narrowing
To raise acetylcholine, which narrows attention to a single point, the suggestion is to fix your gaze on one object at a constant distance — anything easy to observe — for thirty to sixty seconds. Narrow the visual field, then start the work.
On the use of the eyes, there is one more thing. From Huberman’s podcast: the brain is connected to the eyes, and gaze is closely tied to alertness. Direct the gaze downward and it calms, and drowsiness comes more easily. Put the gaze above the level of the nose and alertness rises.
Tobacco raises all three at once
Tobacco raises dopamine, noradrenaline, and acetylcholine at once — the strongest of the stimulants, one could say. That is why, despite reports of its effects on health, people find they cannot stop.
Acetylcholine’s presence on that list is no accident, incidentally. Nicotine binds directly to one of the receptors for acetylcholine. The name nicotinic acetylcholine receptor comes from exactly that.
Focus can be raised without tobacco, through the arrangements of daily life. If it interests you, it is worth trying.
Failure and frustration also raise focus
One last thing.
The frustration of not being able to remember something, of learning that did not go well, of failing an exam. These are known to raise the brain’s focus and to move it toward solving the problem.
The state of things not working is itself a signal, as far as the brain is concerned.
Walking in sunlight
From here I move to metabolism. But first, one thing that bears on both.
Walking while getting sunlight has a good effect on the emotions. Swinging the arms, moving the eyes laterally. Watching the scenery pass from front to back. It is said to calm the amygdala, which governs fear.
Walking, which looks like a simple movement, comes together with sunlight to affect not only the body but the mind. And the same walking, as we are about to see, bears on metabolism too.
Body fat is regulated by the brain and hormones
The more the years pass, the more body fat becomes an issue. How is it burned? Does exercise actually burn it?
Burning body fat requires activating the nervous system through movement. Shivering — feeling the cold in a cold bath, for instance. Restless behaviour, standing up and sitting down. These are called fidgeting, or NEAT (Non Exercise Activity Thermogenesis), and they happen unconsciously, apart from exercise.
They occur through a route separate from calorie-burning exercise, by activating the nervous system.
The principle: adrenaline released from the nervous system to the fat cells is thought to bring about the burning of fat. Take in carbohydrate, on the other hand, and the pancreas secretes insulin. Insulin works in the direction of storing body fat.
How large is NEAT?
Let me check a number here.
I once wrote that this “fidgeting” could be expected to yield an additional expenditure of 800 to 1,200 calories compared with someone doing nothing at all.
That number does not match the measurements.
There is a study using triaxial accelerometers worn for seven days, comparing twenty-one well-trained Japanese male collegiate athletes with twelve sedentary students.
NEAT came to 821 ± 185 kilocalories a day in the athletes and 643 ± 164 in the non-athletes.
The difference is about 180 kilocalories. The figure of 800 is close to the total of NEAT itself, not to an additional expenditure.
That NEAT bears on weight management is nonetheless supported. Differences in NEAT account for how readily adults gain or lose weight during over- or underfeeding. And augmenting fidgeting has been shown to increase short-term energy expenditure, in lean and overweight adults alike.
In a study of forty-five Japanese patients with type 2 diabetes, NEAT scores correlated negatively with serum insulin, waist circumference, blood pressure, and pulse wave velocity, and positively with HDL cholesterol.
The order of magnitude was off; the direction was right.
What can be done to burn body fat
Bring in small movements
Besides shivering and getting up and sitting down, moving the knees, jiggling a leg, spinning a pen will do. With cold baths, the point is apparently to go as far as shivering — though overdoing it is not good either. That bears watching.
Cold baths and cold showers
Take a cold bath or shower one to four times a week and brown fat cells, which can burn fat, increase within the fat tissue as the body works to warm itself. That principle makes burning fat possible. The cold stimulus is said to generate succinate in the body, which leads to the burning of fat.
On the focus side, the same thing appeared as a way of raising dopamine and noradrenaline. One thing working on both.
Light movement after eating
Light movement after a meal — a walk — gets the digestive tract moving, so digestion and absorption proceed faster. Insulin comes down sooner as a result.
Part 1 described finishing food two to three hours before bed and walking for about thirty minutes afterward. The same habit bears both on entering the fasted state sooner and on burning fat.
When to take carbohydrate
After carbohydrate, insulin rises to bring blood sugar down. Take too much carbohydrate around exercise and burning carbohydrate takes priority over burning body fat.
Carbohydrate is essential for performance in strength training, but where fat-burning is concerned, reducing it matters. Which means strength training and fat-burning are hard to optimise at the same time.
On supplements
After carbohydrate, insulin rises to bring blood sugar down — and supplements are said to bring insulin down faster.
Berberine is one. It is sometimes said to be similar in effect to metformin, the diabetes medication.
There is a source for this. A randomised trial published in Metabolism in 2008 compared berberine and metformin directly over thirteen weeks in patients newly diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. HbA1c, fasting glucose, and postprandial glucose all improved to a similar degree. The mechanism is shared as well: berberine’s primary action is activating AMPK, a cellular energy sensor, which is the same pathway through which metformin works.
Acetyl-carnitine, which assists the burning of long-chain fatty acids, is also said to promote fat-burning.
GLP-1 and yerba mate
GLP-1, used outside insurance coverage, has drawn attention. It lowers insulin and suppresses appetite at once. Because it is an injection, some people are averse to it — and there is a claim that yerba mate can stand in for it.
Here the ground is less firm than it looks.
I could not find material supporting the claim that yerba mate stands in for GLP-1.
Nor for berberine, for that matter. There is evidence that berberine weakly influences GLP-1 secretion in animal models, but the human evidence for meaningful activity is not strong, by one account. The appetite suppression that makes GLP-1 receptor agonists effective is not a berberine effect.
The magnitudes differ too. GLP-1 receptor agonists reduce body weight by 10 to 15 percent over a year in people with metabolic syndrome. Berberine produced a difference of about 2.3 kilograms over twelve weeks. These are not comparable interventions, which seems the fair conclusion.
Berberine has solid evidence for markers of blood sugar. That is a separate matter from standing in for an injection.
Conclusion
This piece has taken up focus and fat-burning, centred on habits that can be brought into daily life.
Across three pieces, I have looked at daily habits. Part 1 was the body’s clock, Part 2 water and salt, and this one how the day is used.
Looking back, the same things kept appearing. Light. Walking. Cold water. Talking with people. When to eat. None of it unusual, and none of it requiring equipment.
And with the numbers, I have set out each time how firm the ground is. Waiting ninety minutes for caffeine, fixing a window for eating, judging water shortfall at the fingertip, taking so many grams of salt a day, burning so many calories through small movements. All of it gets spoken of plausibly, and all of it stands at a different stage of testing.
That does not mean it is better to do nothing. But rather than applying the numbers as given, it comes down to checking against your own body. As with posture, the answer differs for each person.
Organizing the Body Through Daily Habits (Three Parts)
- Part 1: The Body Has a Clock — Light and Food Set the Day
- Part 2: Water Does Not Stay Without Salt — On Taking Things In
- Part 3: Focus and Fat-Burning Both Start in the Nervous System — Using the Day (this article)
Note, September 2026
The pieces behind this one were written in late July and August of 2023. Focus, and the burning of body fat.
In the body of the piece I wrote about berberine — that it is said to resemble metformin in effect, and that its mechanism lies in activating AMPK. When I wrote that in 2023, I had it there as one supplement among others for bringing insulin down faster.
Two years later, that same AMPK came back in another context. (The piece is in Japanese only.)
AMPK is an enzyme that works like a sensor monitoring how much energy a cell has left. As a fuel warning light comes on in a car, AMPK switches on when it senses fuel is short. The cell shifts into an economy mode: mitochondria are newly made, fat is broken down, the mTOR pathway that drives growth is suppressed, and autophagy gets going.
And this pathway sits at the centre of research on ageing. Why calorie restriction extends lifespan. Why fasting and exercise are held to work. All of it connects to the balance between AMPK and mTOR.
The interest in metformin as a longevity drug comes from the same place. Following patients with diabetes over time, rates of cancer are lower, and in some cases they outlive people without diabetes. A clinical trial targeting ageing itself is now underway.
The 2023 piece treated berberine as a tool for burning fat. The same molecule has been set back down inside a discussion of how a cell senses that fuel is short.
Change the perspective and the same thing shows a different face. From the side of the body it is fat-burning; from the side of the cell it is the sensing of energy.
What this series took up was the former.