186 Neurofeedback: The Gym for Your Brain with Dr. Andrew Hill

[Music] hello everyone welcome to another podcast of the addicted mind my name is Dwayne australind and I'm your host we have a great episode today today our guest is Dr Andrew Hill and he is the founding director of peak brain and what's really interesting about this story is that Dr Hill and I were introduced by a mutual colleague and I was always interested in neurofeedback and how that impacted the brain and Andrew invited me in to do a brain scan to check out my brain so I did and from there I started actually doing the neurofeedback and I have to say it has had a pretty profound effect on me especially around Focus attention and sleep I was a little bit skeptical at first of how you could sit in front of a screen and watch what is kind of attuned to a video game and tune your brain and influence how your brain functions and operates so I asked Dr Hill to come onto the podcast and and talk about it and talk about what's going on and what's happening in the brain as this process is unfolding so I think you'll enjoy this episode it definitely was super interesting to me and I think it'll be super interesting to you as well especially since I can bring my own experience to this and attest to how this works so I hope you enjoy this episode I hope you get a lot out of it this is definitely an option for you to help with your brain so if you're enjoying the addicted mind podcast please rate and review Us in iTunes that really does help it gets the podcast a lot of exposure and think about joining our Facebook group just go to Facebook and type in the addicted mind podcast and click join and continue the conversation online all right let's go ahead and start this episode all right everybody Welcome to the addicted mind podcast my guest today is Andrew Hill he's the founder of peak brain and today we are going to talk about all things neurofeedback and what that means and how that can help somebody Andrew please introduce yourself oh thanks for having me Dwayne so I'm Andrew Hill I am again as you said the founder of peak brain Institute which is a sort of gym for the brain we are neuroscientists that help people basically take control of their own Neuroscience the same way your favorite personal trainer at your gym helps you learn how to you know move through transformation goals uh to both assess and transform your body so I have a long experience working in neurofeedback this thing we call Brain Training and I also have a long addiction experience which is useful I think for this podcast absolutely and I taught a lot of UCLA for about about a dozen years mostly in things like gerontology and the Neuroscience of aging and development and Peak aging and things like that which sort of dovetails a little bit with the work I do it now Peak brain because we're sort of a brain optimization company across life stages for some people so we have childhood focused things with regards to perhaps childhood seizures or Autism or ADHD we got Elder stuff with regards to you know cognitive aging and brain fog and work uh word finding issues ironically right and then we have everyone in the middle who has all kinds of optimization challenges which include both high performance goals as well as a lot of suffering sometimes for us but yeah Peak is a network of gyms essentially for the brain yeah so what I want to talk about is what neurofeedback is but I also before we get into that I want to say you know we got connected through a colleague and I'm always interested in this stuff that's one of the reasons I do this podcast I'm always investigating this stuff and we talked briefly and you said well come on in why don't you just come on in and do a brain scan and I'm like all right I'll do that so we did that which was very very fascinating and interesting to see that and then we tried some of the neurofeedback and you said well keep going so I've been doing it and so it's been pretty profound actually and I'd love to hear not to make this change so you know we're gonna yeah we'll talk about that a little bit and get into that but before we do that let's just first go what is neurofeedback what does that even mean and what's going on there sure so nerve feedback is biofeedback or a form of a controller shaping or exercise of stuff in your brain or something nervous system specifically so all neurofeedback is a form of biofeedback but not all forms of biofeedback are done in the brain so they're not all neurofeedback like you can do hand warming or skin conductance or heart rate variability is a really powerful tool that's used a lot these days for biofeedback as well as for things like assessing sleep looking right heart rate changes and things will give you sleep staging sometimes pretty well so we're essentially taking something you're not usually aware of like in this case brain waves or blood flow and we're raising that information up to a level the brain can interact with it and I say the brain not the mind because one of the big differences between classic biofeedback relaxation therapy et cetera and neurofeedback is that most forms of neurofeedback are largely involuntary because you can't feel your brain waves you can't really feel your blood flow the brain has no sensory nerve endings can't fill your brain so if you're having a headache it's not your brain honestly it's the stuff just outside it's the muscles the meninges the scalp the skull Etc so in the case of neurofeedback we measure some measurement some some little circuit in the brain it's electrical pattern it's the amount of activation it has the amount of idle it has the amount of lubrication it has in different sort of modules and modes and we'll say essentially most forms of nerve feedback are a passive form of conditioning called Opera conditioning but it's this involuntary form where we watch like for instance the first thing you did the first 20 minute session you did we trained a frequency in the brain called SMR which was how the field of neurofeedback was discovered actually 50 plus years ago and I'll give you that story if you want but we start there and we we measure a circuit on the right hand side of the brain that is involved in supervisory attention essentially knowing if you're paying attention and we measure the amount of theta and the amount of beta you're making a low frequency specific beta wave called SMR and we measure it moment to moment and whenever your brain happens to make a little bit less Theta a little bit more beta for half a second the computer goes oh good job brain and applauds by making auditory and visual stuff and the environment start to happen the brain's like whoa stuff's happening hey wait huh interesting stuff and then a couple seconds later the brain moves in the other direction so to speak for the workout the Theta goes back up the beta might dip and the software slows down the car slows down the puzzle pieces stop filling in the Pac-Man stalls the brain's like hey I I like stuff where's the stuff couple seconds later happens to move in the right direction computer resumes the Applause the big trick here is we move the goal posts so every few seconds we adjust what we're asking for so when you were sitting there for your first 20 minutes and your brain made some little moments where it reduced the Theta and raised the beta the computer applauded that and then after a few minutes we asked for an even lower amount of theta and an even higher amount of beta and your brain had to Trend across that direction to make the game Run and it's mostly involuntary you can't feel your beta waves your theta waves right so my guess is you didn't feel too much initially people usually don't but after about three or four sessions you get this lingering effect that tends to show up for a couple hours to about a day and it tends to impact the resources you have trained like your sleep stress and attention so you get noticeable changes like you worked out oh wait I'm feeling something huh right that's exactly my experience it's like my focus is just stronger without as much effort I don't know how to explain that it's very it's just different but it feels easier so that's part of the experience but first let's kind of go in to the first part which is where we map the brain because that's the first thing you did so let's talk about that and kind of paint this picture because as you're talking I have the picture of my brain map in my head but I know maybe the audience listening doesn't know what we're talking about so let's talk about that first and set that frame and then we'll keep going sure the field of neurofeedback was discovered in about 1966 or seven the way it's done now the field of brain mapping called Q EEG or quantitative EEG is probably older than that and to some extent qeeg comes out of sleep studies sleep research sleep history and EEG is among the oldest forms of neuroimaging we used it even before we had electricity believe it or not they were able to balance reflected light waves off of a rabbit cortex and make a bit of water Shimmer in response to a brain wave and create reflection on the wall like 100 years ago well we had electricity down but you know this is a very primitive Tech in some ways we've been seeing as a phenomena for a long time brain waves and not really understanding it and somewhere around the middle of the last century we started to get a handle on what big gross features the brain looked like and we started understanding seizures and sleep and big gross changes of the brain as indicated by electricity so your brain's mostly an electrical and mechanical Believe It or Not machine it does like actual mechanical stuff sometimes and your brain is roughly the same your resources of your brain roughly the same the dwindness of it all is the same roughly kind of day to day you mentioned a lot compared to yourself a little bit a bad day a good day but you compared to the average guy your age roughly the same at a high level from 20 000 feet away in the data so because of this because Fingerprints of the the amounts of brain waves the connectivity patterns throughout your brain based on how it's built the speeds of your brain waves these things change across the life course with development and with injuries with learning you know year to year they're a pretty stable metric so we can't understand them perfectly because brains are weird but we can look at them and say ah Dwayne you've got this amount of theta compared to the average person oh this amount of alpha or your Alpha Speed is doing this all your beta speed is doing that and we end up tripping across what I call plausibles or hypotheses so brain mapping hasn't moved into the medical and psychological and clinical space all that well it's remain in the research space because there's been dozens and dozens of people trying to start companies write papers Etc trying to find discriminants the thing in the brain that if you measure it means this diagnostically right and most things don't rise that level across people there's Trends there's interesting phenomena people are weird so trying to judge something as problematic by how weird you are Falls over once you try to make it you know discrete diagnostic so there are some things that emerge um in the EEG that are almost diagnostic or that are at least useful like for a while in the 80s and 90s the research was supporting the idea that you could do the ratio of theta to Beta on the vertex of the head and you could you could sort blindly ADHD and non-adhd kids 94 accurately add and intensive flavor and regular kids from each other 81 accuracy pretty good accuracy just on a pure data screen and then people kept trying to replicate that study in the 90s and later in every study the statistics cut weaker and weaker it was this bizarre phenomenon in the field and so over about eight years the effect which went from like 94 specificity and super you know tight almost diagnostic screening into being this really weak effect and what we discovered or what the hypothesis is is that over that 10 or 15 years total the Sleep status of America's youth fell over and you can't distinguish ADHD markers from classic sleep deprivation markers don't the same so wow you know looking at one's brain I don't know what I'm why the brain is how it is I don't know if it's an acquired pattern always or a built-in pattern or something works fine for you or a problem but yeah so we kind of start to see these these generalized themes but they're still really common phenotypes Endo phenotypes things that don't mean diagnostic stuff but it's like having you know blue eyes or being bald or not it's like it's a thing and it tends to cross stuff and like you know I'm bald I probably have higher scalp testosterone probably than you do maybe not but on a trend most bald guys would compared to not non-ball guys because that's affecting DHT in the hair follicles so I can go huh I was trying to affect my hair I might go after DHT it's a plausible thing I wouldn't know if it was true until I looked until I tried something until I you know did some microbiology in this case we're looking at the amounts of brain waves and saying aha you've got a lot of theta on this circuit involved with Focus oh that gets in the way sometimes is that a goal for you and I also do attention testing which gives me a nice discrete set of metrics so I cheat a little bit and I get the big gross features of attention in performance measure against the average person very easy to interpret very valid very straightforward and then I get a brain map that says here's Eight Features nine features 12 features of your brain that are really unusual let's see if they get in the way like they can let's see if they're interesting strengths the way they often are let's try to figure out if these things make sense let's model who you are based on some data together develop some hypotheses you will validate which ones of those are the valid ones you'll prioritize any goals and needs and bottlenecks I will then build your workout plan and iterate so it's very personal training the way we work essentially right so we we do this brain map that's what we did right we kind of see these overall arching kind of themes thematics the phenotypes that you you looked at and then with a little bit of personal history you're able to start to craft a treatment protocol I guess or a exercise protocol to optimize those things and based on that self-report me going oh yeah that's working like this is I'm actually feeling different like I was saying earlier like yeah that's actually my focus seems easier for some reason well obviously there's a reason but you know it just feels easier and I want to do more of that that gives me more function in my life I can now focus on my tasks that I wanted to focus on get those things done accomplish those things instead of feeling those roadblocks that kind of get in the way of that purpose of what I'm trying to accomplish I think something that really struck me when you we talked about my brain scan you said one thing is like you mentioned that it's like you have this Focus but you've got to apply the gas pedal all the time to get the focus and that was exactly like now that analogy makes even more sense as I've done this brain training because I've been able to I can see that I'm not pushing on that gas pedal that's how you described it I'm like wow this is pretty fascinating and what's really interesting is like you said earlier it's very passive like I'm not really doing anything when I'm doing these brain trainings I'm showing up I'm sitting down in a chair and I'm watching it almost like a it's a video game and yet something's going on well the video game only runs when your brain happens to do the right thing for that day's exercise right right and the Brain figures out hey wait when I do this today stuff's happening oh okay and then it walks around trying to reach for stuff later on that day and you as the person as the mind go wait wait a minute that feels a tiny bit different hey uh coach I noticed this to your guys in OC for instance and you know I have a sense of what your goals are in that first conversation the brain mapping review a lot of my job there is to teach people to think about their brain to understand the Neuroscience to go through it Peak also has this policy if we don't charge for the repeat Maps kind of Club fiop way we work so the map the secondary Maps tertiary Maps during a program of course we do but if you want to map your brain on caffeine or cannabis or alcohol and see how you're really you know it takes you out for instance in performance or those sorts of things you can learn something from medication statuses caffeine Etc so we really try to educate you broadly about your brain but then I don't understand your brain after the brain mapping I have some ideas but I do understand your goals better your perspective on yourself what you think is important to know about and that lets me build a set of like longer term goals and some ways to get there some work out essentially and then everything everyone do neurofeedback it's a transient effect it doesn't create permanent change it's like a workout doesn't you feel the activation of resource and go oh wait huh you know after a workout right and in this case we're gently iterating up trying to create shifts and often sleep stress and attention because those are the obvious Foundation features that support other higher level things and if we get the right effect and we ask you as you know to fill out surveys couple times a day and check in with us and you know let us know how you're varying costs the what your goals are but as you notice stuff we think we understand you more as you say stuff we expect for instance and then we build it up and we go back and map the brain every other month again so I think we skipped the description but we put a cap on your head squirt it full of gel it's kind of messy it's kind of annoying yeah uncaffeinated in the morning it's kind of annoying yeah and then we also make you bored to tears do a 20-minute attention test it just bores you to tears and looks at how you know basic resources fall over yeah when you're mapping that that brain you put this cap on it's all over your head and so it's looking at all these brain waves in different regions of your brain and putting all that data down which was also very interesting to me is that when you did that brain map you did one where my eyes were open staring at a spot on the wall just for five minutes just stare at that spot and then you did another one with your eyes closed for five minutes collected all that data and to see my brain in these two different states yeah the some of that is interesting and it illuminates things across people other times it doesn't in fact the brain's much more readable on a brain map eyes closed because the forehead relax is it's a cleaner data set without the noise of the muscles in the front of the face and the visual system the back of the head in theory is unloaded with the eyes closed so it's a cleaner data set but less expensive tissue if you will all woken up and activated but right if when your eyes were closed if I saw lots of activation the back of the head if instead of producing nice relaxed Alpha Waves as a neutral or an idol you kept lots of beta waves going just ready to process Vision just in case I would have guessed that somebody with that pattern of eyes closed visual system activated was kind of hyper Vigilant couldn't disengage Was preparing to scan and that might be true two-thirds of the time if I saw that back there you know so I would ask that question for instance or the other option you Open the Eyes instead of taking the alpha and replacing it with beta if when the Eyes Are Open you're still making tons of alpha back there and it's kind of drifty and you also have a visual attention score that's crappy I would go oh your visual attention isn't shifting out of neutral very rapidly you're a little bit inattentive perhaps and so by watching if the system's reacting how I expect it we get some big gross features and I get some you know course check on inattentiveness maybe fatigue showing you know from that or maybe some anxiety on the other end of the spectrum so we can kind of get some big coarse features and I outline essentially outline my ideas about what could be true for you and then I try to build those models with more data and I walk through them with you and you tell me which ones are wrong which is you know 10 20 of them right I mean that it sounds like that feedback is so important to this process because well like you said you're kind of having a broad brush but you need that personal experience of like yeah that's working I'm feeling this I'm I'm sleeping better I'm doing this let's do more of it yes the the validation is important of both the brain mapping and the Brain Training phases because I my job is not to make you average or be concerned that you aren't at all like my when losing the brain map I wasn't like whoa you're a weird dude oh that's a problem it was more like oh interesting let's see if some of this stuff we're seeing here that's unusual has meaning for you and then once you outline what meaning it was if it was valid then I figured out if it was important to work on or a goal for you Etc and the same thing of the neurofeedback I have a sense of what will work for you probably 70 80 percent of people kind of respond to I expect and I can build a plan it's pretty straightforward we can adjust and they iterate it's great last 20 of people their brains are really weird and a brain that comes in looking like other brains with similar complaints similar goals doesn't respond the same way when you start doing neurofeedback they just don't and so you have to be very aware of the actual person's experience and so I try not to make the decisions I don't diagnose off of brain Maps I don't say here's the answer I walk through it with you and teach you to actually look at pretty low level data it's not high level paragraphs I'm giving you it's like heat maps of here's how much beta you got and here's how much Delta you got and stuff like that so it's right and that that in a way mirrors my experience in mental health because as I've worked with people in recovery and and done this work you know what I realize is what works for one person just doesn't work for the other person and you have to be really willing if you want to get in in recovery or or improve your life you have to be willing to try different things because what works for one person doesn't necessarily work for another anything that goes to that statement of what you were saying we're so all unique the way in which we operate in this world the way our brains develop the way we the experiences we have that it's it's hard to I mean there are some things we can say but when it comes to this kind of more Soft Stuff which is how we feel in the world and how we our meaning and our purpose it's a little more nuanced and a little more indirect so to speak a lot of my goal is to help people demystify the stuff we can you know leave leave the beautiful Mysteries where they are and how people have their experience but if someone's suffering from anxiety or secondary things from addiction like you know seizures or sleep onset issues from alcohol or something or there's drivers for dysregulated behavior that are gross features of sleep stress and attention those are things we can actually address kind of like we can go to the gym and improve our posture or our back pain or whatever else there's the brain is actually more changeable dramatically more than the body right dramatically more I can get you an amazing brain way faster than ABS generally you know um yeah you know I can help you it's funny top down if you help the brain it seems to help physical fitness and believe it or not training the brain helps my athlete clients make faster progress in their athleticism in their muscle building in their recovery from injuries it's a bizarre thing that it tends to really impact everything but you know your experience just one comment you notice things were oddly easier the metaphor here is if I meant made you do curls in the gym for a few months or a few weeks and then you were driving around there was a thing in the middle of the road to move you wouldn't be wondering about which arms which muscles to activate in the arms to lift the rock out of the way be like oh crap there's a rock in the room I mean stop and get that out of the way and then you'd be heading back to your car going huh that was easy to move right because the resources were a bit more robust or you go for a walk to get a cup of coffee a month after starting your brand new gym and you're like oh my balance oh yeah my butt oh yeah I can feel where I'm going yeah so when that affects sleep stress and attention be able to control what you're thinking about to shift gears to think faster or slower to turn your sleep off and on it tends to bleed out into all aspects of your life which is a fun you know benefit so to speak of neuro feedback books come in half the time for you know symptoms and and suffering at half time for Peak Performance but you don't get either of those things generally when working on your brain you get everything which is nice so right it starts to it starts to flow out into all the different aspects of your life because if you can have more attention then you can complete those tasks that you wanted to complete or you can relax or you can get that sleep or that you need to do all that other stuff right yeah or you can just get better efficiency from the sleep you are getting right yeah so so let's talk about someone maybe who comes in and they're struggling with addiction or alcoholism right and they're what are some of the common things you see with someone who comes in struggling with that and wants to help themselves or help their brain yeah alcohol is got a very very long history with regards to neurofeedback and the the field uh addiction work for years substance use disorders for years have had really good effects with specifically alcohol because of what it does anyone who knows somebody who's been drinking for a long time knows that sort of wrung out person whose brittle shaky over activated and can't settle down can't relax can't turn their mind off can't fall asleep if they're actively using alcohol you withdraw that person they often have seizures or cardiovascular crises because there's this phenomena where the brain after years of receiving alcohol well even weeks of it stops producing Gaba Gaba which is a neurotransmitter most neurotransmitters do specific things based on specific specific circuits but after we're finished developing Gaba is only inhibitory it only makes things not fire in the brain and glutamate is only excitatory these look very similar molecules and they bond to each other's receptors it looks like but they're they're balanced very very tightly and you can't push them around too much and if you drive your Gaba up too much if you have a little bit of teeth Gaba will be released or be encouraged and you feel calm kind of a nice smooth feeling good that's the difference in coffee and tea for instance coffee contains some caffeine dry cell glutamate dries dopamine a little bit but without any Gaba increase so you're a little jittery but tea has both l-theanine which is a Gaba release or and caffeine so you get a Gaba hit as well as the caffeine and you've got a smooth Focus as opposed to a jittery focus with regards to interesting yeah so in the same context alcohol is a very powerful Gaba enhancer so that's that's the calmness the sedation taking the edge off so to speak that's what you're feeling you're feeling the Gaba but the body it tries to balance Gap and glutamate very very tightly and if you raise the Gaba too much you pass out this is why alcohol makes you pass out if you raise the glutamate too much you have seizures this is why if you've been drinking alcohol for many years and the body's trying to fight and raise the glutamate to balance the Gaba you've been ingesting essentially and then you withdraw that source of Gaba all you got left is glutamate and you have seizures you can't suppress them wow okay okay so gluta it's glutamatergic or excitatory state that can't be inhibited can't be shut down can't be stopped and the inhibitory thing that helps the brain relax and not have seizures as well as do things like not be fidgety as well as do things like sit still is a brain wave called SMR sensori motor rhythm so if you've seen a cat in a window cell sitting still watching birds that still body and laser-like focus that's SMR if you train up SMR and somebody who's really shaky the body starts to sleep again starts to generate the Gaba again and starts to turn its mind off and on again starts to become comfortable with internal environments being a little bit erratic again and you have inhibitory tone so in alcohol specifically we do SMR training and then what's called Alpha Theta which brings up the Gaba deeply it brings to the Hypno Gothic Edge that edge of sleep where the conscious mind drops away and creativity shows up and you kind of have the best ideas ever and then you fall asleep we do alpha Theta neural feedback for that and that the combination SMR to mediate the overactivity the disinhibition of the brain and the alpha Theta to re-educate the Deep flow the Deep softness the ability to downshift without the alcohol to summon your own Gaba those two things together dramatically improve people's relationships with alcohol if they're moderate or if they're not or they're trying to be abstinent it dramatically improves the consequences so to speak long term of having had issues of alcohol so in a way you're you're training the brain system to be able to more balance itself and pull on its own resources so to speak to make this more balanced if it's become unbalanced from alcohol use from from this so you can you're able to kind of train pull the brain to do this on its own you do and and this of course has has impact on Behavior right some of the first addiction work with alcohol some of the first studies showed that the one-year relapse rate with and without neurofeedback is reversed so the one year relapse rate without neurofeedback is 75 roughly with it it's 25 wow that's a huge increase you know same thing with actually violent offenders basically in some research in Canada same thing 75 readmission rate after release from from incarceration unless you add Alpha Theta neurofeedback for creativity and Flow State Nexus Consciousness and help me be comfortable with uncomfortable emotions and then you reverse the the reinvention the reoffence rate so it's a huge impact Alpha Theta and all my creative clients all my actors and athletes and things love it because it gets you that deep juicy Flow State access like it's a doorknob you can open and turn it on so or step three which is so interesting you're saying that because I'm reflecting on myself and and as you say Flow State it really feels when I can access that state easier as I've been doing this brain training oh that's good to hear that's that makes some sense the brain training tends to unfold differently for people especially when there's an active substance thing going on or some history you know people have different relationships and it's really kind of an interesting thing if they're using cannabis for instance all the time or large amounts neurofeedback cuts the tolerance down without your you know without fail basically so that yeah you probably know but I'm very deep in this area but moderate use of a substance or even a non-habit-forming non-addictions like television food sex you know we need we need sort of moderation for things that are stimulating to have a good relationship with them if we have extremes tolerance goes up and our relationship with them is very very slippery and stimulus driven but if we have low you know use amounts we can have a glass of wine whatever tolerance is is required essentially for moderate having low tolerance required for moderate moderate use if you do a few weeks of neurofeedback you abolish the tolerance for cannabis abolish it that's interesting in like people who've been using it for decades I've had like old rostody to be like shut up dude I've been smoking weed longer than you've been alive and they come back oh you weren't kidding my girlfriend's mad at me now I couldn't order food at the restaurant you know so so it changes in alcohol too when I used to work in addiction centers we would do 30-day abstinence for the alcohol folks that wanted to become moderate we would still insist on a 30-day abstinence window at the beginning just to reset that I did find the neurofeedback has some impact on refreshing that aspect much much faster than the pure addiction colleagues expected so to speak when they saw stuff I worked a lot with doctors Mark Kern and ADI jaffee who uh Dr Mark Kern found it smart recovery and also moderation management like 35 40 years ago now yeah and so that's my you know those are my experts in in the addiction world but I came in and helped found a company and did all the brain side of of the of that work with a large addiction population for several years with those those docs and I had some addiction experience before that but after that I was a strong believer in the one-two punch of SMR and Alpha Theta especially with alcohol because alcohol does so much damage and when I have clients I coach on their brain performance I'm much less concerned about almost anything except for alcohol in terms of it getting in the way you know if someone's using too much of a recreational substance you know I want to figure out how it's impacting them it's not impact them too too much then I'm more concerned about them you know being impulsive or anxious or whatever else not sleeping well and why they're using the damn thing but alcohol I'm very very concerned about almost always because there's just no safe level for health and it's so rewarding and it changes the brain so so much so rapidly that it's a very slippery slope into disregulated relationships with it wow that's fascinating and the yeah so the damage it does to the brain is is uh and I see it pretty container yeah yeah I see it decades later even when you're sober you know for for years I still see the damage I don't see that people that you know were burnt out Stoners or people that abuse stimulants and you know I don't see the same kind of damage with chronic substance abusers even poly substance abuse there's major stuff if alcohol is not a piece of it I don't see the long-term damage generally right and what about if someone has been using alcohol and maybe they're sober now or they're struggling they're struggling to be sober maybe they're they're having you know or they're working on moderation whatever whatever whatever they're trying to do do you see the ability for the brain to repair that damage or I guess adapt to that oh there's very large changes I'll show you next time we're in front of a zoom together I'll show you some pre-post slides but yeah um generally in chronic alcoholics not binge drinkers who drink occasionally large amounts but people that drink even moderate amounts routinely or which is usually higher amounts routinely eventually right those brains are the ones that I tend to see classic stuff in and you look at their brains even sometimes decades after becoming sober and you see huge amounts of beta waves everywhere just it's an activated State you see huge amounts of hyper coherence or over connected beta between regions but you can't let go and you see low amounts of things like deltas and Alphas low amounts of downshift or sleep or relaxation and this come people come in like this it's very very classic it's a very robust phenomenon the literature I see it all the time when whenever someone comes in that way I I'm you know kind of guessing I'll see that before I see it and generally about three months of neurofeedback about 40 to 50 sessions can make two standard deviations of change dramatically in their data permanently get the person sleeping very very well that's eliminate seizures it's a huge amount of change the seizure literature says the seizure reduction in seizures in general is 50 in neurofeedback I've never seen a result that poor in seizures of any sort and an alcohol-driven seizure stuff it's much much better result than that because the brain stabilizes the drivers of the seizure phenomena but no I see amazing results in you know three months roughly now depending on what's going on with the substances nerve feedback's not the only thing you should be doing because substances are Insidious and they tend to be you know learning reinforces themselves so what I would suggest is someone figure out what their path is and if your path is moderation you know join moderation management grab the workbook your path is abstinence join smart join a whatever works for you find the the alignment for you I'm not a huge fan of AA because I've seen it you know it to me it feels a little culty and it's a little religious which I'm not super big you know fan of but I've seen it help people profoundly I'm more of a fan of smart but that's just a personal little perspective like having options to recommend folks to I ask them a huge fan of mbrp mindfulness-based relapse prevention as a mindfulness way of doing almost a CBT thing and working with a therapist and a mindfulness coach to help you you know remove the triggers and automatic behaviors around this stuff which is sort of the smart recovery way anyways right and I would say all these things you know when I look at them they're all tools that a person can use to better their life optimize their life bring more happiness to their life more fulfillment more satisfaction it's like find what works go for it try it if it doesn't work try something else absolutely yeah and and that's sort of key to not just an addiction but in many things I'm a big fan of oh your brain isn't doing what you want okay let's figure out why let's let's try some stuff let's iterate so I I joke that I don't sell neurofeedback I sell agency I sell demystification I'll help you understand your brain and I'll you know maybe I'll suggest some neurofeedback but I will also just generally help you understand what's going on a little more than in a different role than maybe your doctor did or your psychologist did because I'm not either of those things I'm I call what we do functional Neuroscience but essentially it's a coaching thing it just happens to have aspects of Science in it where you know like your coach at the gym might help you learn about your your Nutrition a little bit and they're not a dietitian but they know about how to help you intermittent fast or cut carbs and raise protein because you know to improve your performance or something you know they they know some of the tricks that's that's our team we kind of have the best practices we keep an eye on the research we keep an eye on what works for clients and we we advise in the Sleep stress attention hacking stuff which for us neurophyback's a heavy lifter but if you came in with other needs I might send you off to someone who's Hyperbaric medicine or who's a therapist you know just because I we're not everything for all people but we are the the place to demystify your brain a little bit so there's my there's myself there you go that's awesome Andrew so there's one question before we wrap up I always like to ask every every person one question if someone out there is struggling and you could tell them one thing right what would you want to tell them what would you want to say to them depending on how they're struggling I would say that one of the most Insidious things about brain and mind stuff is that we feel like things are not going to change and that is just not true the brain you know shift happens get yours like it's Gonna Change it's not a question of if it's how so while things can be difficult resources can be pinched you know things iterate things shift things move and you will always have an opportunity to increment to lean in to make small changes might help with it you might need other tools but very very little of our Human Experience they rigid fix static phenomena and our suffering is definitely stuff that tends to change because we attach to negativity our brain is the cost of missing danger so high you miss a tiger once that's it game over but you can Miss Lovely sexy yummy things all day long there's more tomorrow so we tend to when we're in the direct when we're in the crisis in the thing we identify the moment as being those things because it's so important to do so but the human creative human mind is sometimes not so good at then dropping that perspective because the cost of missing it next time is high so we latch on to it we have this negativity bias that means means that when we're depressed when we're in crisis when we're traumatized when we're six beers in when we didn't want to drink that day you know we have to remember this is not how things necessarily will be even though it feels like this is how things are so shift happens is my my watchword for the brain I love it I love that I love that that's that's awesome how can people find you find more information about you if they want to connect with you or ask you questions or learn more yeah so Peak brain Institute is our main website and we have an Instagram and other social medias are all at Peak brain La just because that was our first office although we're we have a New York City office of St Louis we have a couple in Orange County one that you go to we have uh Los Angeles we also do most of our work fully virtually so a lot of our clients never see our offices and just get equipment sent to them and work from home and have live coaches supporting them and all your listeners can get a discount on our remote programs as well we'll include that but uh yeah just look us up if you want to see lots of like pictures of me making food that's my Instagram but that's not super exciting so uh okay now lay has good brain stuff on there and awesome you can hit us up on the website and the chat box and stuff so yeah great I will put all of that information in the show notes at the addictedmind.com Andrew thank you so much for coming on and and sharing your wisdom and your experience it just really my pleasure sir my pleasure nice talking to you Dwayne I will talk to you soon you take care of that brain all right see ya all right everyone thank you for listening to the addicted mind podcast as usual all the show notes will be at the addictedmind.com there you can find all the contact information for Dr Andrew Hill and the peak brain Institute don't forget if you're enjoying this podcast share with a friend or write a review wherever you get your podcast I do read them actually on Apple I think we're at almost 400 reviews I can't believe it that is pretty amazing to me and so all the people that have left a review I really appreciate it thank you so much for doing that and join our Facebook group just go to Facebook and type in The Addictive mind podcast click join and continue the conversation online alright everyone have a wonderful day and I'll talk to you on the next episode [Music]