095: Dr. Andrew Hill, Neuroscience Expert: Brain Mapping Neurofeedback Technology= Better Sleep!

foreign [Music] to the sleep is a skill podcast my name is Molly McLaughlin and I own a company that optimizes sleep through technology accountability and behavioral change each week I'll be interviewing world-class experts ranging from doctors innovators and thought leaders to give actionable tips and strategies that you can Implement to become a more skillful sleeper let's jump into your dose of practical sleep training foreign [Music] podcast my guest today is Dr Andrew Hill he has a background in cognitive Neuroscience out of UCLA and is the founder of peak brain Institute a leading neurofeedback practitioner and biohacking coach for clients worldwide now at Peak brain Dr Hill provides individualized training programs to help you optimize your brain across many goals such as stress sleep attention brain fog creativity and athletic performance now for some background context I had the opportunity to use Peak brain institute's remote qeeg to test my brain in a sleep deprived State a well-rested state and in a well-rested state while caffeinated now I was really Blown Away by the results The Experience gave me a greater sense of agency over my brain's response to its environments and my own behaviors so for instance I've significantly reduced my coffee intake after seeing just how much it was not serving my particular brain makeup the kind of call out from Dr Andrew Hill as we reviewed my results was that I seem to have a bit of a paradoxical response to caffeine and it was making me almost ADHD like so I made some changes accordingly now overall I would highly recommend the peak brain institute's remote qeg to anyone looking to improve their sleep and gain greater control over their brain's response to their environment and daily habits it's been a game changer for me and I am confident can be helpful for others as well and one of the things that I like about this is I get a lot of questions about neurofeedback training and yet it's not quite attainable for the average person quite often due to the price Peak brain has made it more accessible it's still going to be an investment but it's still more accessible than a lot of the options that I've seen out there so I really encourage you to take a look and also the sort of innovative approach in that it can be sent straight to your home so you don't necessarily have to go you know anywhere it can come straight to you and thankfully Peak brain Institute has for further made this accessible for our listeners anyone who mentions sleep as a skill will receive 200 off all qeg brain mapping Services now without further Ado let's jump into the podcast so I get a lot of questions around sleep supplements and I'm very hesitant to just throw out a whole laundry list of possibilities one I don't think it's the most responsible thing to do I really do believe in testing to see what types of supplements make sense for you and two because I really truly believe that most of the things that you can do to improve your sleep are behavioral psychological environmental in nature and often don't cost a dime however there is one supplement that I personally take every day and that I do feel quite comfortable with suggesting for most individuals to experiment with because of a couple of reasons it's high safety profile and high rates of deficiencies in our modern society some put the numbers as somewhere around 80 percent of the population being deficient in this one area and that is magnesium so magnesium has been called the calming mineral and some report that magnesium can increase Gaba which encourages relaxation on a cellular level which is critical for Sleep magnesium also plays a key role in regulating our body's stress response system those with magnesium deficiency usually have higher anxiety and stress levels which negatively impacts sleep as well now before you go out and buy a magnesium supplement it's important to understand that most magnesium products out there are either synthetic or they only have one to two forms of magnesium when in reality your body needs all seven forms of this essential sleep mineral so that's why I recommend a product from my friends over at bio optimizers they have created something called the Magnesium breakthrough and taking this magnesium before bed helps you relax and wake up refreshed and energized and while we don't recommend that you go two nuts on looking at all the sleep stage classifications on all your wearables I will share anecdotally that many clients have reported improvements in their deep sleep Trend numbers again I don't want you going nuts on the Sleep stage classification numbers on your wearables but I do want to let you know about that because I know that many of you do reach out on questions of how to improve your deep sleep so I also love that bio optimizers offers free shipping on select orders and they offer a 365 day money back guarantee on all their products plus they have a customer satisfaction rating of 99.3 percent very impressive and you can get 10 off magnesium breakthrough again this is the same magnesium that I use every single night and finally you can get 10 off magnesium breakthrough again that's the magnesium supplement that I use every single night by going to www.magmag so madbreakthrough.com forward slash sleep is a skill and be sure to use the code sleep as a skill for 10 off and welcome to the sleep is a skill podcast Dr Andrew Hill thank you so much for taking the time to be here today is such an honor thank you for having me Molly nice to be here yes absolutely uh before we hit record I was sharing that I just have to be mindful of your time because I know that one there's so much that we can discuss two I know that we already had a fantastic certainly was fantastic for me conversation where we went deep on the readouts of um a set of brain scans that I had the opportunity to do thankfully with your team remotely so fascinating through Peak brain Institute and the findings were really transformative we did this a while ago what we did was we looked at a kind of Baseline of a fairly well-rested brain we looked at a jet lag and sleep deprived brain and then we looked at a caffeinated brain and some of the results that I discovered through what you shared kind of your sherpaing of going through this information was so so helpful and as a result I've changed some of my behavior one of the things that we discovered was looking at kind of this paradoxical effect for myself in when I'm having caffeine it's really not doing me any favors seemingly from a productivity perspective so now I've drastically lowered the amount of caffeine that I'm in taking so that's just one example of the practical application so cannot wait for you to share all of your wisdom again thank you thank you well thanks for that uh introduction how can I you know fail to drop some wisdom I'll do my best [Music] I also share that you can test for many different things but we on purpose looked at this kind of experience of what happens to a resting brain as it relates to the amount of sleep that it had gotten the night before so I want to just hand things over to you to share one how did you even get into this how does this relate to sleep and what can we kind of learn from what it is that you've created over here at Peak brain yeah thanks for the question so I didn't start thinking about my brain work as sleep Focus work necessarily yeah but every single thing you do with regards to the brain either has an impact on sleep or as sleep is changing you get a sense of how the brain itself is changing sleep is a fairly fundamental resource I really think of sleep stress and attention as three aspects of Human Experience of the body of the Mind regulation that sort of sit just underneath the stuff we call the mind and they each actually overlap each other and resources shared one level below that so sleep and attention there's something called SMR waves or sensory motor waves which you may have seen a calm cat in a windowsill holding very still it's an SMR State humans use SMR so we don't wake up when a car goes by it's called sleep spindles you you resist the rousing of sleep but if you make SMR poorly then your sleep architecture tends to be wonky and really poorly tend to have ADHD so sleep spindle stabilization is actually one of the theories about how ADHD works I wonder if you can kind of share a bit more about that in particular I've just was at the Sleep 2022 conference and there was a number of talks discussing the correlations between poor sleep and experiences for people of ADHD and particularly in children and what I'm curious if you can share a bit more about what you've seen sure so a lot of the field of neurofeedback is very experiential and phenomenological we don't always understand what we're doing but we create experiences for people and we're looking at real data and we sort of move people through arcs of of transformation The Field's been around since the 60s at least and since about the 60s at least half of The Field's been built around this particular frequency that I mentioned a moment ago called SMR sensory motor Rhythm it's about 12 to 15 Hertz or 12 to 15 cycles per second in humans adult humans and it is sort of central to the regulation of sleep as I was saying or attention but through a mechanism of creating inhibitory tone so we have a cortex a bark that surfs the brain you know bumpy and Groovy Little bark wrapping the brain and then we have deep in the brain a switchboard called the thalamus and there's lots and lots of neurons going from the cortex down to the thalamus and there's lots and lots of neurons going from the sensory tissue like the retina or the cochlea into the thalamus or from the body into the those places then up into the brain and there's a big strip of tissue that runs ear to ear that regulates a lot of our sensory system and our motor system and it uses this frequency called sensory motor rhythm and it was maybe 20 years ago to the first papers on this started coming out that showed that this thing that neurofeedback people like me think of as an attention resource I can explain why we think of that in a moment we discovered the the field of nerfect discovered SMR sort of by mistake as a core regulatory frequency because it also helps you resist seizures so the same inhibitory tone preventing things from running away the brain is a machine that's that's on the edge of chaos it's balanced at the edge of criticality it can't be too organized or life stops it can be too chaotic or information stops so somewhere between those two things the brain's always balancing between falling over into chaos and falling over into too much order essentially and unlike the heart the heart wants to be ordered you see a heart EKG looking like a brain wave that's a heart attack you see a brain wave looking like a heartbeat that's a seizure a coherent wave that's too organized not doesn't have enough differentiation seizure so SMR became this thing that crept out and the field of neurofeedback thinks of it as a thing you can train up and reduce seizures and improve executive function improve sleep neurologists called it Sigma or sleep spindles and maybe 20 plus years ago in the field a researcher in Utrecht named Dr Martin arens Arns started discovering that there was a very high correlation of disruption of sleep spindles in the ADHD population that he was working with in the Netherlands very very high correlation at the same time or maybe the year before at the big trade shows the organizations that were in all the providers getting together every year there's one called aapb and one called isnr so at one of these organizations for a couple of years one of the more exciting bits of research that had been published and that we're all talking about was the ratio of theta brain waves to this SMR brain waves as a diagnostic in the brain maps for ADHD and for about a decade there was this really interesting diagnostic of the Theta beta ratio and the first work was done by Dr Vince monastra and which is 25 30 years ago now probably but it's very highly correlated a high ratio of theta which is lubrication to Beta which is activation would produce a brain that was disinhibited that couldn't troll swirl you know kind of stuff ADHD so Dr monaster found this stuff as a very high correlator could blindly sort thousands of cases into buckets of ADHD and non-adhd and there's a similar feature of extra Alpha for inattentiveness which is a alpha is a neutral frequency so too much lubrication ADHD too much neutral add so to speak and these are pretty strong factors in the brain mapping literature and because of it lots of grad students and postdocs were like ooh replication and everyone kept replicating it for their posters their little papers and the statistics kept getting weaker monaster's first work was 94 accurate and for ADHD and every year the signature in the literature kept getting weaker and weaker by a few points and then Dr orange published a thing showing that sleep disruption and ADHD look the same so somebody that metadata study and discovered that the reason we had sort of lost sensitivity in the Theta beta ratio is because the population of adolescents being examined over the decade the cohort as you know time slid was getting more and more sleep deprived so the Adolescent population was too deprived to see ADHD anymore because they all look the same now both sleep dap and ADHD was everywhere and you couldn't tell it apart wow so interesting okay and if you exercise the SMR you get the inhibitory tone back between the cortex and the thalamus which produces someone who can sit still not be distracted who can sit on a coherent waves or Spike waves ictal events or seizures and this the storm of of overly coherent waves burst through it's called a seizure or an epilepsy essentially or a discharge a spike discharge SMR prevents that SMR prevents you from waking up throughout the night so for humans it's producing this a dampening effect between the cortex and the thalamus so as signals bounce back and forth there's signals going down it's a Thalamus and signals coming up from the thalamus all the time and there's a net of tissue that sits around the thalamus and wraps everything coming in and out of it called the the nrt the nuclear reticularis dilemma it's the reticular nucleus of the thalamus we have one in the brain stem for waking us up and making us alert and then an extension of it wraps the thalamus as a gain knob on experience and excitation of the entire system and that uses SMR so as you exercise up the SMR through meditation or deep pressure on the body the way that Temple Grandin talks about building cow Crushers that make you feel deeply calm if you're autistic it's the same SMR deep capsule pressure creates Stillness in the body that's also SMR so SMR is a core feature of sleep and as I get into the neurofeedback stuff everywhere I look we were seeing sleep effects so every single client I worked with we tracked their sleep day to day because when you work on the brain you create sleep change whether or not that's a goal so you have to navigate it as part of the whole system so somewhat long-winded answer but well I appreciate it I know I gave you quite a big series of questions so thank you for I'll tied it all together you did a great job with that and so actually you've painted that picture so well maybe we should also share for people just learning about Peak brain Institute and what this all looks like like how could this work for them to be able to have access like how is it just about going into a lab is it virtual how does this all look in the Practical applications sure so Peak brain a company is sort of like your gym for the brain so while most people there's about 10 1000 I would guess in North America practitioners that do neurofeedback so not a huge amount but there's certainly some in most areas most big big cities Peak brain has a few offices in New York City and LA and St Louis and other places in Southern California but most of our clients never see our offices because over the past several years we developed this completely virtual uh business and we send you brain mapping gear like we did for you and we had you map your you know put a cap on your head and the coaches were watching you stick gel in the holes and you know and we have people mapping their brain all over the world and you know as long as you've got internet we can help you set yourself up and get good signals and get a good Q EEG or EEG done we then analyze and most of our clients who are doing remote work will do neurofeedback which is where they're exercising brain waves to create some change and for those clients we give you a Live support on slack using a chat application that's private your own private Channel and it's always open seven days a week so we spend some time for a couple of weeks teaching you everything how to stick some wire because the brain mapping that you did is a giant cap and it's kind of involved and it takes a minute it's a little unwieldy for brain training we actually just use a couple of ear clips and one or two wires at a time okay we teach you how to do basic neurofeedback where we okay we're going to SMR training today that's done at C4 let's say the spot on the right hand side of the head or maybe you have sleep onset issues you might train it more at the vertex called CZ so okay Molly's today you got a you know third session in we're gonna do a C4 and then a CZ SMR for you you're like great SMR and you would do two 15-minute protocols and we'll teach you to put a wire in that spot and look at some signals on the screen and make sure your frequencies are set up right and then the way neurofeedback works is the way you enhance or train up your SMR is you would just measure it stick a wire this a circuit on the right involved with executive function and with knowing if you're paying attention and also knowing if you should be asleep so to speak so it helps with General sleep architecture and it's a big generator of this frequency called SMR it lets you sit still especially and the way you would change it is stick a wire there plus some ear clips and measure your SMR your low beta waves moment to moment and measure your theta waves moment to moment and whenever your brain happens to make little more of that beta that SMR for half a second and a bit less of the Theta for half a second the computer is going to applaud your brain and make a little game start moving on the screen or some audio start playing and so the brain's like ooh stuff cool why is changing my SMR and my Theta why stuff happening all right I like stuff and it watches the stuff and a couple seconds later your brain moves in the wrong direction and the game slows down or stops the brain's like Hey where's my stuff and a couple seconds later the brain happens to move in the right direction again and the Applause resumes and then the big trick here is we move the goal posts every few seconds we adjust so the brain's getting Applause for little Trends it engages in over half an hour 10 15 20 seconds in a row of raising that low power beta or dropping the Theta and it's mostly involuntary you can't feel your brain waves so after two or three sessions your brain goes oh I was getting information when I dropped my Theta and rows my Beta I'm going to do that and you feel that and you're like oh huh I feel kind of clear I feel kind of focused interesting nah I must be imagining it and then you go to sleep that night and you have great sleep and extra dreams and you wake up and you're like that was a little different guys I might have felt something try it again try more SMR do it again get a stronger effect so it rapidly ceases to become blind because you're pushing on your brain and getting effects and as you work on these basic resources of stress sleep and attention you get changes in stress of sleep and intentions that you get to sort of grade and evaluate and each little half an hour push or exercise you do is transient so I'm not a permanent effect right away so you can gently stretch something see how it feels grade it tweak it evaluate it do it again and start moving your brain so we looked at your brain map into three sort of rest conditions one was just sorted by Sleep dap and time zone stuff and almost distorted by caffeine but typically I would look at a brain map and even with your distortions even with those you know three very different conditions and some time between them your Maps didn't look all that different in fact they were similar enough that we could tell where the distortions were showing up from caffeine or from sleep dap now with neurofeedback you use a brain map every six or seven or eight weeks and you're picking up the change you're making now on the resources of beta or the structures involved with anxiety or sleep or stress or whatever so you develop this relationship with your brain that's much closer to like changing your lipid panel or going after some you know back pain in the gym with a trainer or something where you have goals and some data to iterate towards better data and better experience without relying on somebody else to sort of be the magical holder of knowledge and to treat you if you will this is why Peak does this as personal trainers we teach you to read your your brain Maps more than sort of say you know here's the answer about what it necessarily means you know sure it says we offer effective training protocols for stress creativity sleep migraines brain injuries anxiety mood Focus presumably Beyond I know you've also mentioned things like covid and other things that might show up for people with their brain and then some people might say oh well why can't I just do this on my own why can't I just meditate on my own I'm like can I just do some deep breathing all of these sort of things I'm curious if you can help us walk through just the the whole different world that this is yeah the real reason why you can't just do the things neurofeedback does voluntarily is because you can't feel most of what neurofeedback is training yeah so while you can do voluntary things with the frontal areas of your brain for meditation and things you know different styles of executive function can activate sort of the frontal lobe areas you can't get at lots of other areas and you also can't get precise so while meditation and other mindfulness practices will actually accelerate the gains you get from neurofeedback and vice versa I have six month meditators experiencing the genres often which are these absorption experiences six months into meditating because they're also doing neurofeedback and the plasticity boost is just out of control so everything's changing across their lives and these things synergize meditation and neurofeedback so it's not one of the other from both but you're not going to like help some seizure Focus or the little PTSD structure you know the threat sensitivity for the posterior cingulate meditation directed attention stuff isn't necessarily a tool for anxiety or for trauma for brain injury in the same way that it might be for like ADHD now ADHD mindfulness meditation could be a primary first line intervention for it but it's a bit of a chicken and egg problem with regards to meditation practice if you're really ADHD you're going to sit down for 20 minutes every morning and meditate that's all it'll take yeah you know you gotta go to the gym three times a week and drop all the carbs that's all I'll take for abs you're gonna do it like there's a difficulty with execution perhaps when this executive function challenges or stress or fatigue or overwhelm and this is why we have the live coaches when doing remote training what we don't just say here's some gear have fun one size fits it's also heavily tailored so when we're working with your brain we don't just build you a plan based on the brain Maps we looked at build a starting Place based on your maps and your goals but then every day or two we're like oh how'd you sleep how's your stress how's your day how's your mood how's your drinking whatever yeah and we give you new things to try you exercise your brain you feel a little different you check back in so it starts becoming this iterative approach where you're getting guidance as you try different things so it's a much more it's like working out in a really really high-end gym with complicated equipment but coaches are there to run around oh set this one up yeah here's how you do it and they help you troubleshoot so you can then just worry about if you're sore in the right way after the gym and in this case with neurofeedback you don't feel too much afterwards but you feel a little clear or a little focused or a little calm or a little tired after the session and then for about 24 hours you have a little bit of a lingering effect usually of subtle background stuff sure wow so when people come your way and one of their primary concerns is sleep for various capacities whether difficulty falling asleep staying asleep or they're just tired throughout the course of the day what are some of the steps that we might expect that we might go through on that Journey yeah so of course all of our clients do brain map so if you're near one of our offices people will map frequently because we have a sort of unlimited open-ended mapping and teach people how to use their data you'll see things related to sleep as you look into a brain you'll see for instance the speed of your Alpha Waves Alpha is your idle speed that's the resting mode of the car the driveway just kind of ready to go and the alpha spreads out across circuits and slows down when you're not getting enough deep sleep and the experience of that and somebody north of 30 is like word finding and tip of the tongue and delayed recall kind of phenomena and someone south of 30 might be difficulty absorbing information so you've got to read a book and it's just sliding off here your friend always talks to you about stuff after dinner and it never quite gets in the next day you've forgotten it all that's a speed of processing lag people often think it's their memory especially in their 40s and 50s oh Dr Hill is it aging is it aging you look at their brain and there's no issue at all except for Alpha draggy and and the delta waves will often respond as well and this is a sign they're not getting their resources restored they're not getting enough in enough deep sleep so you see the alpha waves as a drag you don't know why so somebody has word finding or delayed recall or other sort of like draggy internal States but it's plausible they do from the maps usually it's a pretty you know pretty good read and if you see their delta waves which is the rest you know slow wave sleep wave the dreamless Sleep wave that you make when you're awake but to do all the involuntary stuff you kind of live in Delta so it keeps the heart and lungs moving the cell metabolism moving and when you're in slow wave sleep it becomes a dominant wave it does this like metabolic reset thing where it causes delta waves or about two times per second and they cause this SMR signature then causes a ripple in the hippocampus which causes memories to move from short term to long-term encoding throughout the brain at 0.9 Hertz this little Ripple that responds to the SMR stabilization as you hit deep sleep so these are all involved and as you move up through the brain waves you will see different aspects of your sleep so the slowest formula is Delta will often push up faster when you're chronically sleeping deprived kind of like the cleaning crew in your office that usually Sparkles the place for you every morning and has your water and coffee waiting has been cut in half so it's like 10 people instead of 20 and they're still there midday rushing around spilling trash everywhere trying to clean up that's what sleep depth feels like it's that under resource but rushed kind of mode and Delta shows that it shows fast delta waves and often slightly excessive Delta as your brain tries to sleep a little bit to make up for some metabolism you're getting restored the alpha drags down spreads out consequence and the thinking brain waves called beta brain waves will often also drag down or you can see where people stand in the gas to make up for it sometimes anxiety features little circuits involve the selecting or focusing or deciding what's going on will cramp up into high gear in response to being tired especially chronically or for some of us when we have caffeine the brain goes from looking chill a little bit tired to stressed your brain actually cramped up and had a paradoxical got a little bit like stressed and didn't get more performant and didn't look more relaxed at all or more awake actually it looked almost like a caffeine like you had too much even a moderate amounts appeared to like like leave you tired in the brain maps and all the anxiety marks all the beta waves actually got jacked up to like 11 for you so it didn't leave you more performant or more smooth inside to sort of briefly woke you up and then it wore off absolutely that did not serve me from the looks of it so for you we did a you know a contrast map condition look at different conditions we did some science we learned some things about your yeah sensitivity to sleep depth when disrupted by jet lag and fatigue to your sensitivity to regulation disrupted by stimulants like caffeine you would see the same thing though if you looked at someone's brain at rest usually a barring distorted conditions if you look at someone's brain every day it's roughly the same brain map so while the performance test the ones and twos tests we had to do will fluctuate based on how you're feeling the amount of alpha the speedier Delta that kind of stuff is generally pretty stable at a 10 000 foot level so if you see that and you can paint a picture for someone around their architecture of sleep and stress and attention and even before we think about doing neurofeedback I'm often suggesting some different sleep hacks or circadian stuff or they're realizing for the first time that the Sleep problem they kind of know they have or they kind of know they're suboptimal or you can show them just how much it's in the way so that has two consequences one is it makes it real so if you're kind of like ah I sleep fine I sleep fine asleep oh my goodness look at that I don't sleep fine that's right okay okay I'm really tired you know you can kind of get a real clear like okay here's some data what do you think and well I'm never going to tell you what the data means if I tell you what's plausible and you already know it's true that can become somewhat bracing same token though if you look at your brain it doesn't become this perspective of ah my gosh something's wrong because when you understand the circuits you can see at the EEG level those become things you can change if you see them so if you see you have weak bait or slow alpha or Delta that's running high and your SMR tone is iffy you can exercise your SMR up and change your sleep architecture so it changes the relationship from oh my God I'm so bad at sleeping I'm doing something wrong I'm staying up too late I'm eating too much whatever into a realm of like oh my brains will have a little bit of difficulty you can be annoyed with it without feeling like you're ashamed or something's wrong with you and sleep stuff is very very stressful yeah many folks that have sleep issues the initial sleep issue they have is not the current problem they have the current problem they have is massive stress around the Sleep issue absolutely and is that part of what you see often than part of the protocol that you're creating is to deal with that kind of stress response and performance illness anxiety and how that all kind of shows up for them yeah I never know chicken or egg you know what yeah right what started it but you'll see a signature of a high elevated beta waves broadly across the head and what's called hypercoherence or stuck together brain waves and beta waves broadly across the head and you'll often see on the left side of the head part of the brain involved with sustaining your focus this is kind of weak and that usually means folks are experiencing a generalized anxiety state with poor sleep maintenance so they're staying deeply asleep skimming the surface waking up tired never diving all the way down and that's a tired but kind of anxious kind of like activated white knuckling brain and you see it fairly clearly it can be compensatory yeah coveted brain fog that may be there because you have the stress with which to cut through the fog and you're using it or it may be that the stress in your life or the chronic stress developmentally or whatever has caused the Sleep dysregulation perhaps because nighttime isn't a safe time for you or because chronic stress is regulated your insulin or who knows a thousand ways that sleep is just regulated but you can go after the phenomena of your sleep dysregulation your executive function your SMR your Alpha your Theta your Delta and it changes it into more of a mechanical okay let me work it out and see what happens and less about like oh my God my brain's not behaving why once you shut up and let me sleep right now brain so it gives you agency even if it's not perfect clarity it does flip the relationship as you look at your brain Maps into one of like oh okay I wonder how I can get you to behave piece of Machinery I carry around and less about why is this happening to me so that's a lot of our personal trainer perspective love that amazing and what are some of the things that you've seen for people that come your way and they're really struggling with their sleeper they've got certain experiences of oh no I'm a bad sleeper oh I can't sleep all this kind of construction of how they think about their sleep and what is kind of the timeline for someone like some of those people what can we expect of a length of time before they might bust through some of that yeah great question I would say that regardless of which flavored sleep disruption it is and I would say I could probably pick out three or four or five different categories of neurological signatures or brain stuff sure and one is that sort of ADHD slash sleep issue at a right regulatory level that I mentioned earlier one might be more of a brain fog kind of metabolic hit signature where the brain's always sleeping a little bit trying to deal with a concussion or covet or whatever and it's more like stuck in that deep metabolic mode and the other is more of anxiety almost or an over arousal where you can't down regulate reliably and there can be complicated inflections on top of those like the over arouse person can also be an alcoholic yeah for instance which can complicate some of the the state change stuff quite dramatically so people are not as simple as any one particular feature we might guess about their map obviously but if you see somebody with classic brain fog from apnea that was never treated now is treated so the cause is gone but the sleep still is regulated or major ADHD or atheist or to throw their sleep off or covid throwing their sleeping brain fog or trauma PTSD stuff throwing their sleep off dramatically you'll see change in the presenting symptom of attention or anxiety or trauma or Cravings or whatever as well as the Sleep architecture I mean by self-report and the goal landscape you'll also see the change in executive function and in the resting EEG all about the same magnitude it all coheres or converges for things like ADHD I test the attention frequently so I can tell you exact statistics it's something like a standard deviation of change against the average person every other month so we tend to do about three months for like ADHD with sleep issues where someone has chronic anxiety and heavily medicated 20 years on sleep stuff it might take three to four months and somewhere around three to four sessions five sessions six sessions in there's a subjective experience they're like hey wait a minute do I feel different nah we're like okay try it again oh wait a minute this feels like something and then we're off the races because then we can provoke a subjective a subtle but a subjective effect that you're like this feels a little different and you get or don't get a sleep effect and we evaluate you know it's very iterative in that way we get about that one much change someone comes with major sleep issues with anxiety and generalized stuff or drinking or ADHD and sleep issues or always foggy because of concussions are covered three to four months 50 sessions roughly will make usually more than two standard deviations of improvement in brain maps and performance testing which for folks who aren't statisticians couple standard deviations is moving from Fairly problematic executive function stress sleep really in the way plus or minus one standard deviation is normal variance plus your mind and where stuff gets in the way stuff pinches up more than about a standard deviation away from typical in Stress Management and sleep management and executive function that's where we've defined societally as weird oh okay that guy's acting weird it's usually more than a standard deviation out on the bell curve and when someone comes in with complaints of ADHD or sleep issues or fatigue or burnout they're often running two standard deviations three standard deviations out on the bell curve in unusual feature so when you look at that and you measure it in their performance and their brain yeah you'll see sleep stuff and executive function Etc but you know that you can generally make a nice solid change of about one color shade in our data sets which is one standard deviation every 20 25 sessions so people train three times a week for half an hour just a couple ear clips and a couple wires in the head unless it's passive subtle gentle effects afterwards and you make notes afterwards about what you notice that that's nothing great if it's something great and we then adjust what we do and he'll try this and it feels a little different as you adjust it so it rapidly becomes this thing where you're like oh okay that left side protocol that feels like this oh this right side protocol that feels like this and you end up with these like menu of the Molly specials that we slowly iterate and figure out okay Molly likes C3 left side for Sleep maintenance and c and CZ the vertex for Sleep onset and a little bit of you know midline structures to help her unclench a ruminating mind as she tries to fall asleep and worries about her sleep anxiety or whatever so we would build a customized plan and then evaluate if you get the effects you're looking for after a few sessions and then rinse and repeat essentially but it certainly takes about three to four months for a permanent change and get people where they want to be if nothing's in the way keeping it going and if you don't have a huge amount of like major catastrophic needs so to speak you've got major autism or lots and lots of brain injuries or 17 different needs including major anxiety 80 and development of trauma and you're using substances and you're you're probably doing six months of neurofeedback you're regulating more and more and more the whole time and and some people do more because Peak performers you can also do things around creativity and Flow State and I bet you'll love to know that a lot an awful lot of the Peak Performance neurofeedback that's done in the field like 90 of it is done exploiting the hypnagogic state shift where you bring people to the edge of sleep and hold them there and the monthly mind drops away in sight and awareness and stuff starts to Bubble Up you do it by manipulating an aspect of sleep without putting them to sleep I love that so that's a big portion of the work that you're doing day to day of Peak Performance work and of alcohol work it's called Alpha Theta and it's the basis of most Peak Performance work in the neurofeedback world so most sports performance most cognitive performance work most creativity and Flow State work is around Alpha Theta and Alpha Theta is the hypnagogic state access training it brings you the moment that you fall asleep when you're having the best idea in the world you solve world hunger you plot the next book you solve the next business idea and then you fall asleep and you're like wait oh I had the best idea last night ah what was it yeah well Alpha Theta neurofeedback does the roadrunner thing where it paints a little door on the Cliff's side and open the knob and behind that is all your juicy creativity cool so as your sleep gets regulated and as your stress gets regulated now your next opportunity is often to start you know prying open the juiciness and developing things that aren't about fixing problems yeah that are about stretching the resources in a different way so I love that not to focus on this being only about fixing you know difficulties for you yeah I appreciate that too because that's one of our commitments with sleep as a skill is making this argument that sleep has become a skill set in our modern society and we're also arguing that there can be a bit of this Trojan Horse effect by virtue of going to work on improving your sleep your are actually addressing many areas of your life that might not be working in the way that you would like them to and bi-directionally by improving those you improve your sleep and you improve your life as a whole so absolutely yeah yeah I love that and one of the things I wanted to point to too you mentioned this whole world of neurofeedback and what a lot of people are doing out there one of the things that I really like and respect about the work that you're doing is I have the experience that it's kind of this democratization of access for people to be able to have an opportunity to utilize this where you know I grew up with no money like was not an option at least in my vantage point for a lot of access points to things like this and yet it feels like you're looking to do as much as possible to make this accessible to the masses so I'm wondering if you can share about some of the kind of out of the box ways you know I'm not trying to make this like a infomercial or anything but I think it's important because we want people to have access to resources and people hear about oh this neurofeedback but that's sounds expensive can't do that yeah and it often is unfortunately it's often done in a therapy model by very skilled individuals and not to ding that model there's there's massive value in a therapists with domain expertise in Eating Disorders sleep autism trauma addiction doing neurofeedback alongside their new deeply nuanced skill I sort of view neuro feedback like the coach in the weight room helping you build the resource and therapy or your Guru or your mindfulness person or your trauma coach whatever like the person in the field helping you learn to lift your elbow more and be more voluntary with your resources and integrate them more so there's definitely a role for both pieces of it but unfortunately even though the technology in the past 20 years has really come down in cost I mean when I got involved in the field you needed to hook two computers together yeah with a parallel Cable in two separate dos based computers running those you don't know dos was something before Windows yeah and you had to connect with a parallel cable because one computer wasn't powerful enough to run both the game and the signal processing so you need to and now the computer's power is there the amplifiers are cheaper the software is cheaper and yet the skill sets to do this work are still somewhat expensive if you will so you have sort of rarified individuals doing it to some extent just when they're really really good and a lot of the one size fits-all systems that are out there don't really fit people that well it either cause weak effects or can cause some side effects so when we were starting Peak brain we changed a little bit how we do it again we're more personal trainers and coaches for you than doctors and we have a few physical offices and one example of our sort of different approach to this is for the brain mapping the qeeg and the attention assessment which is usually fairly expensive at competitors so to speak or therapist model offices it's usually a grander more for a brain map in an office our normal undiscounted sort of annual membership which gets you free brain Maps throughout the year and mindfulness groups and other coaching is normally 500 bucks we're going to give it to sleep as a skill folks for half price so 250 for in office thank you you know one fee once a year free brain maps in LA or New York or St Louis best deal in the world if you want to do a bunch of valuation you happen to meet into the cities Great yeah most of our clients never visit our offices and we do remote programs we send you equipment we do maps like we did with you remotely those programs a little more expensive but folks can still use the same discount and we're still in the ballpark of competitive against a like therapy model in that I think our three-month program is about 5k or just over right now which gets you a couple remote brain maps and 40 to 50 sessions of neurofeedback which are initially guided and instructed and then have real-time seven-day a week support as you need so 50 sessions of neurofeedback and a couple rain maps for a south of 5K is in this landscape in the field we're between half and a quarter like in LA or New York City we're a quarter and in St Louis we're you know half or sometimes we're getting close to competitive for some of the smaller operations but the point isn't to sort of say here let me sell you neurofeedback yeah because we offer the brain mapping almost as a loss leader it's not really a loss leader for us I mean yeah we don't make any money on the brain Maps but the point is to provide a tool set for you to develop agency I don't want to be an expert for you I want to I'm happy to be an expert but I don't want you to have to rely on any expert I don't want you to have to find the next Guru the next Doctor when I'm teaching sleep hacks I give Dr Hills three or four circadian rules and then I say these are experiments talk to your kid play with them see how they feel their guidelines if they work for you great if they don't that's real yeah evaluate explore have fun with it play with it track it and the same becomes true of your brain once you can look at data so we started off thinking okay we'll just do this more you know personal training style made sense for us but rapidly we found that the brain mapping tool set for people that have difficulties for biohackers for folks that are aging nowadays for that postcode sort of brain fog signature that we see so clearly in maps is a tool that even before we start doing neurofeedback becomes something you can often go oh okay my sleep is very bad yeah I really should get a better fitting CPAP mask yeah switch to BiPAP oh yeah I probably should like so okay my wife will have him up snoring anymore but Dr Health says my Delta's crappy and oh my God I'm feeling that yeah and now you can check it out get a new mask do some interventions come on back a few months later get another map and you have agency you don't have to rely on the next polysomnographer or doc to you know the next sleep specialist the next pain doc to say yeah here's the answer here's the here's the right thing and get some support a lot of my sleep client or sleep goal clients will come in initially saying something like I don't sleep very well I never have or for a very very long time and every single thing someone gives me to help me sleep works for about two weeks and then it stops working and then I'll sleep again and those folks generally respond to neurofeedback it's great not always but almost all the time so okay so this is really fascinating I'm sure people listening then are curious of for someone like yourself who've seen all these brain States and then what's possible for people as they really go to work in this people often want to know okay well what are those people doing so we do ask four questions and just to try to understand a bit of what or some of the things that you might have pulled out for yourself in your life that are helping to support your sleep so we always these four questions the first one is really about your nightly routine and what could we learn from your nightly sleep routine that's kind of noteworthy yeah I mean I have a couple of sort of just guidelines for myself around the evening I'm not too strict about it I pay an awful lot more attention for Sleep support for circadian to what I do in the morning but in the evening I tend to have a couple of guidelines the most important of which I find is to not eat within a few hours before bed I am huge a big piece of that is that as melatonin Rises it completely suppresses insulin release from pancreatic islet cells you can't release insulin as you get tired can't do it so if you eat food what you do is you create a high blood sugar State and that means once you're asleep you can't release growth hormone so if you go to bed full and tired you wake up hungry and tired if you go to bed hungry and tired you wake up full of energy so fast before bed at least three hours is my role I don't worry too much about screens I'm not one of those biohackers that thinks light is all that important with the exception of Morning Light which I really care about great but first rule I try not to eat several hours before bed I I usually do what's called etrf early time or certain feeding I try to stop eating after two or three in the afternoon and have a nice long window but I also go to bed at like 8 30 at night yeah so that's another piece of it I like to go to bed fairly early I one of my rules is the time to sleep in the beginning of the Night Never the end of the night I like it okay and you've always done that for a long period of time and now you're just you've layered in the the meal timing piece over the years and you're cognizant of that and not too crazy but the lighting piece in the evening yeah and I really find that I'm dependent on locking in my wake time as a core circadian cue so my bedtime and not even before bed and eagling to bed early enough is actually about facilitating the proper wake time yeah what is your morning arguably sleep routine look like and I love the anchoring of that consistent wake up time we find that to be so so important and I hold the wake up time consistent no matter when I go to bed late partying or working or stressing or whatever it doesn't matter at the same time in fact I've been doing it you know when I was just younger I was a baker and I used to get up super super early so I used to think it was because of that but then I throughout college and grad school would sleep you know poorly like everyone else and maybe 10 years ago I started getting earlier and earlier and started noticing that when I got up very very early it creates this this strong circadian response such that I can get a lot less sleep yeah sleep that I do get is dramatically better like I can get six hours sleep night after night after night and feel great if I'm up at 4am but if I'm up at 7 30 a.m I need like eight hours sleep or more so why would I want to be up at 8am you know so so I have this these days past several years I'm usually waking up before four going oh yeah it's probably not quite four yet Ash pie stay in bed for another 20 10 minutes oh that's nice lingerously full of energy gently waking up yeah at like 350 because my brain knows that it's getting close to four wild and you said the Morning Light piece is really important for you what does that look like well the only light that really has circadian signal entrainment that is strong is the light that's there in the first hour or so uh well it's gone by an hour after Sunrise it shows up Before Sunrise when on comes up this certain golden color or blue color really and then once the sun is about an hour up into the sky there's too much reflection and there's no more circadian light that the blue light's not in the air anymore so don't ever get up later than an hour after Sunrise if you want the Circadian benefits of light and what does that look like for you as far as the amount of you know people always ask about these questions of the specifics of viewing behavior in the morning what do you do there I don't think it matters too much honestly I have I have Windows around my you know first story La apartment it's really sunny but I don't bother too too much about direct access I just get that exposure I find that if you're fairly well entrained a little bit of signals are fine if you're poorly entrained I might what I recommend for folks that are poorly in train is when I get up in the morning as they go for a walk yeah because the motion creates Plastics through the side to side eye thing creates uh EMDR like extra plasticity response that drops thread improves HRV expending energy before you receive energies extremely strong circadian cue so when you first get up I don't want you moving from the bed to the couch or the desk The Breakfast Table I want you to move the bed to the yoga mat or the Tai Chi mat or do some breathing or do some walking or bring your friend cough in the place of three blocks away or something where you're expending you're burning off a tiny bit of fuel now I do think a light matters in the evening but the color of it does not matter and a lot about hackers get this wrong and I'm I'm sorry for any of my friends that own companies that have glasses with Shades in them and stuff but the color of lights are relevant the research has shown for circadian Distortion it's the intensity of light not the color of it that matters so all you have to do to minimize the impact of building a modern world with screams after dusk is have your screens at moderate brightness instead of full brightness another hack suggested by Andrew huberman is to move your lights after dust from overhead to only eye level or lower because it's a positional effect that's somewhat impactful as well I think the intensity is the primary effect literature shows of light brightness but the blue versus yellow versus whatever does not seem to matter in terms of melatonin suppression really at all it's intensity well and I think it's important call out too for the people that have the the big bright even red lights and panels and you know you know that's a good move when that can be concerning to have that yeah brightness is kind of a big deal after dusk so I recommend no overhead lights drilling dust lights and use moderate intensity you know soft warm colors after Dusk to avoid suppression but honestly evening melatonin suppression through bright light is like so far down the list of things that people usually do to screw it themselves it's like they're looking for oh I can't I gotta get some glasses can't get exposed to blue light after a dusk yeah how about you don't eat crap how about you put the ice cream away after 5 p.m how about you like don't sit there and have you know 300 grams of carbohydrates eight minutes before you crawl into bed maybe that'll have more of an impact wow the timing is number one number one and then wake timing I think is number two in low intensity exercise first thing in the morning and moving high intensity the kind of spikes cortisol to afternoon because then you're not going to create cortisol resistance insulin resistance Etc by working out too hard first thing in the morning and precessing your circadian rhythm by causing cortisol spikes when The receptors have already been full by waking you up sure so good and what might we physically or visually see in your environment whether on your nightstand or proverbial nights and if you're traveling apps gadgets any noteworthy things yeah I really keep my my sleeping environment fairly simple I don't do anything in my bedroom except for sleeping well that isn't exactly true it there's a bed and there's stacks of guitar cases because I have a slight guitar collecting problems but but that's just that's just because I don't use the bedroom for anything else with our cases you know at the foot of the bed I can see some guitars in the corner too very nice yeah you gotta have them joint stacking but yeah I don't go in the bedroom basically unless I'm trying to find my cats or I'm sleeping it's fairly bare fairly austere nothing really to distract me I don't I don't read in bed if I can avoid it I want to create uh State dependent reflex where I'm like oh oh bad and like yeah five minutes later I can be asleep and that's harder to do if I I mean when I was growing up and for years I was habit of reading in bed for hours and it's a once again that habit your brain isn't always sure when you're done reading and when it's time to sleep you know so you can be like lying there for two hours thinking about the thing you read or the next day because you developed an activation thing and these days reading on Kindles and other you know screens crazy secondary problems because of the intensity has to be managed of light again so sure okay so good and then the last one would be what has made the biggest change to your sleep game or maybe the biggest aha moment in managing your sleep yeah I probably have already mentioned it in that I figured out when I started to really try to well I guess I realized how important it was to get up at 4am essentially okay I was like oh isn't that important and then I'd be getting you know time zones would change Rod travel or the clock would shift or something I'd keep it five or five thirty and I just wouldn't feel the same during the day I just feels resourced even with enough sleep even when my aura ring told me that oh a little Crown I didn't believe it didn't feel it so I started really realizing you know maybe only five years ago a couple of different times throughout a year when it got thrown off that if I made an effort to get up early getting up earlier than you want re-entrating circadian rhythms here's a nice Insight I was I was applying something I already knew I wasn't really an Insight but oscillation all life all natural system be it weather or the planets or our bodies require delay and feedback to create oscillation and oscillation is where life lives essentially or dynamic information lives so if you shut off oscillation you die and variability and signals be it circadian stuff or blood sugar whatever else are involved with healthy life essentially healthy healthy regulatory range well the fastest way to reset a system that's oscillating to reentrain it is to create a signal that's slightly in advance slightly negative in timing which means getting up really works sleeping in doesn't that's interesting and no one said it quite like that on any of our episodes today it's I appreciate that there you go I knew what happens when you get a different Neuroscience fantastic that is I love that kind of approach and the Simplicity of that but then having that in our background of that idea of almost like resetting the system day in and day out that's beautiful and for anyone listening then is saying wow okay I'm blown away I need to know more how can people learn more about what you're up to and what you're creating over here at Peak brain Institute yeah so please check out our socials most of which are Peak brain la because that was our first location the website is Peak brain Institute again we can work fully virtually around the world we have rental everything in the US you can just give us a call or send us an email and stuff get shipped out to you and if you happen to have the luxury of living in LA or St Louis or New York or Orange County California then you have a local office and a very good deal for essentially unlimited brain maps for a reasonable fee to learn to get into this Tech and take some control of your brain so fantastic well thank you so much I feel so aligned with what you all are up to and the fact your use of the word agency is just music to my ears because that's really Our intention with the work that we do and I feel like there's such camaraderie here because it's just so so important that people are not feeling at the effect of or dependent on finding you know the guru the this that and the other it's the having the inspiration and experimentation to be able to dive in and play and find what works for them and gamify this in a us to a certain extent so thank you so much for the work you're doing it's so so important thank you I appreciate it thanks the kiddos and thanks for having me ah thank you [Music] physic skill podcast number one podcast for people who want to take their sleep skills to the next level every Monday I send out something that I call Molly's Monday obsessions containing everything that I'm obsessing over in the world of sleep head on over to sleep as a skill.com to sign up [Music]