This podcast is all about the brain, and specifically how to build a better brain at home starting with sleep. I’m here with the neuroscientist I trust my own brain to, Dr. Andrew Hill, who is a previous guest on this podcast. We spoke in the first episode about neurofeedback and very specific brain training for things like attention issues, TBIs, and much more. And I wanted to have him back today for a different focus on what you can do at home to improve your brain, and your children’s brain. He’s one of the top peak performance coaches in the country. He has a Ph.D. in cognitive neuroscience and he is the one that has done EEGs and guided neurofeedback for my own brain. He goes into an overview of what things like QEEG and neurofeedback are, how meditation changes the brain in a tangible way and he makes a very strong case for why sleep is the most single important factor you can focus on for the sake of your brain. He also gives his top three rules in order of importance for improving sleep. We go in a lot of directions and there are a lot of key takeaways if you want to profoundly improve your sleep and your brain! Episode Highlights With Andrew Hill What QEEG is and ways it can be used to create a picture of the brain The way neurofeedback works and how it can be a helpful tool The way brain maps and neurofeedback are used to help improve things like focus, creativity, trauma response, attention and TBI recovery How meditation changes the brain and why it should be everyone’s minimum viable process each day Ways to get started with mindfulness and meditation and good resources for this The reason sleep is the most important thing you can focus on for the brain Why to ignore the REM metrics on any sleep tracker The reason to look at deep sleep and how to improve it Biohacks for deep sleep Why Dr. Hill pays specific attention to his deep sleep and ketones His top three sleep hacks Why sleeping when insulin is up suppresses growth hormone and ages you faster The reason getting up by sunrise and seeing morning light resets the brain and hormones and why this is the only light cue that matters Why screens might not be as bad as we think but why morning light is much more important that we realize How to partition food based on time, calories and macros to manipulate hormones and the brain Why he thinks the keto world is missing the boat but why it can be useful short term for the brain A reason to keep protein consumption high for the brain and why he keeps carbs between 50-100g a day What a nootropic actually is and why we mislabel a lot of them Why he isn’t a fan of modafinil and doesn’t recommend it The reasons humans are wired to wake up before dawn Why food timing is the most important thing for circadian rhythms The reasons he is a fan of caffeine when used correctly *whew* How to successfully abuse caffeine 🙂 Resources We Mention 252: How to Activate Peak Brain Performance With Neuroscientist Dr. Andrew Hill Peak Brain Peak Brain Mindfulness The Gift by Hafiz More From Wellness Mama 107: Improve Your Brain to Avoid Alzheimer’s, Dementia, & Memory Loss with Dr. Perlmutter 224: How to Use Sound and Music to Optimize Focus and Sleep With Brain.fm 238: Using Neuroplasticity to Rewire Nervous System or Brain Disorders With Carol Garner-Houston 282: An Electric Approach to Fitness, Rehabilitation, and Brain Health With NeuFit 354: How to Upgrade Your Brain and Learn Anything Faster With Limitless Author Jim Kwik 376: How to Use Everyday Activities to Rewire the Brain for Calmer Kids With Brain Harmony 469: Dr. Kenneth Bock on Brain Inflamed & Healing the New Childhood Epidemics 418: Brain Wash: Detox Your Mind for Clearer Thinking, Deeper Relationships, and Lasting Happiness With Dr. Perlmutter Did you enjoy this episode? Please drop a comment below or leave a review on iTunes to let us know. We value knowing what you think and this helps other moms find the
Episode Summary
This piece comes from a conversation I had on the Katie Wells podcast, where I talked through what a brain map actually shows, how neurofeedback works, and the at-home changes that move the needle most. You can watch the original conversation. What follows is my side of that discussion, organized for reading.
What does a QEEG brain map actually show?
A quantitative EEG, or brain map, is a tool you use to assess your brain and your performance. At Peak Brain we never run it alone. We pair the recording with a measurement of how you actually perform, so we put you through a tedious 25-minute attention test first, then a cap on the head with about 19 or 20 channels for an eyes-closed and an eyes-open recording.
The attention test breaks your performance into 14 or 15 granular features: impulsivity, sustained focus, auditory attention, visual attention, fatigue in your attention resources, processing speed. We compare those numbers to people your age. Average is 100, the standard deviation is about 15, so typical range runs roughly 85 to 115. You walk out with a sense of where your resources sit and how stable they are against each other.
Here is what surprises people. I often see something on the test that has nothing to do with the label they walked in carrying. Someone arrives convinced they have an attention problem, and what shows up is an auditory processing issue. So I ask whether their partner gets frustrated about them not listening. The fix is simple: have the partner wave first, because the visual orienting is fine. You can tease apart performance this finely.
The brain map itself gives us the amounts, speeds, and connectivity patterns of your brain waves. If I see a statistically unusual feature, a lot of beta or low theta, I know it is unusual. I do not automatically know what it means for you. I know what tends to show up across people when that feature appears. That is why I do not treat QEEG as a diagnostic, and why we do not train your brain toward the database average. We use it the way a good gym uses a DEXA scan and a battery of fitness assessments: goal-driven, not symptom-driven. You decide what matters, and we build iterative programs to push the brain in that direction.
If you want the full walkthrough of the process and what the data means, I cover it in detail in QEEG Brain Mapping: What It Is, What It Shows, and What to Expect and in the broader QEEG brain mapping topic.
How does neurofeedback work?
Neurofeedback is operant conditioning of implicit learning. Your brain is already making waves, changing their speed and amount, connecting briefly with neighbors and letting go. We watch that activity at a specific site and reward the trends we want.
Say you want to read without your mind drifting. There is a circuit on the left for sustained focus when you are bored. If you can never finish a page without your attention wandering off, you are probably struggling to hold beta tone there. So we place a wire at C3, the left somatosensory cortex, with an ear clip reference and a ground, and we measure your beta against your theta. Theta is the brakes-off, automatic, disorganized mode. Whenever your beta drifts up on its own and your theta drops, the software says "good job, brain," and your game runs better. The Pac-Man eats more dots. The puzzle fills in.
The trick is moving the goalposts every few seconds, so the target stays adaptive. Over a 30-minute session your brain gets applauded for 10, 20, 30 little runs in the right direction. You cannot feel your brain waves, so the brain notices that something it is doing is changing the outside world, and it buys in. The next day it reaches for that mode again, and you get a brief subjective hit of focus that plows you through a chapter, then it fades.
Repeat that enough, especially for the big resources like sleep, stress, and attention, and the brain takes over and practices the new mode on its own. For things like ADHD, severe anxiety, and trauma re-regulation, most people get durable change in about three to five months. For active disease processes, autism, schizophrenia, major brain injury, severe aging, something is fighting back, so it takes longer or you may keep at it.
I unpack the mechanism further in Does Neurofeedback Work for ADHD?, SMR Neurofeedback: Train Sleep, Focus, and Self-Control, and across the neurofeedback topic. One note: IQ scores tend to rise with neurofeedback. IQ is largely three things, processing speed, working memory, and implicit learning, and you can train speed and impulsivity directly, which lets you hold more in working memory.
Why is meditation a focus exercise, not relaxation?
Meditation is the minimal viable daily practice. Brush your teeth, move your body, sit for a few minutes. If you have never done it, here is the part people get wrong: it is not a relaxation exercise. People tell me they cannot still their mind, so they cannot meditate. Stilling the mind is not the task.
You anchor your attention, on purpose, on something in the present moment, a sensation, a color, the breath, and you hold it. Because you have a mind, within a few seconds you get distracted, and you bring your attention back. That return is a rep. If you are highly distractible, you get more reps. Ten to fifteen minutes a day does a great deal over time.
The practice I teach combines two old techniques: five minutes of single-point awareness, shrinking attention to the sensation of air at the nostrils, then ten minutes of present-time awareness, watching something rhythmic like the breath. This is a basic samatha-into-vipassana structure, the insight tradition that the modern MBSR programs grew out of. A timer app like Insight Timer lets you block out the segments. The subjective effects usually show up within a few days. There is a short tutorial on the Peak Brain site.
The neuroscience of why this works is in Biohacking Meditation: The Neuroscience of Mindfulness Training and Mindfulness: Don't Just Do Something, Sit There.
Why is sleep the single most important thing for your brain?
Once meditation is handled, the biggest place to make change is sleep. People do not understand sleep, even with a tracker on their wrist. I wear one too, an Oura ring, and I rely on it. But the map is not the territory, and physiological data is noisy.
First rule of reading a tracker: ignore the REM number. It is never valid on any consumer tracker. Devices that stage sleep from heart rate variability (Whoop, Oura, Fitbit, the Apple Watch) do a decent job on deep sleep and total sleep and a poor job on everything else. You cannot get clean REM without EEG or sophisticated actigraphy.
The good news is your REM barely moves. It is hard to push around, and by the time it is dysregulated you have a much bigger and more obvious problem. Deep sleep is the opposite. It flexes night to night based on the previous day or two: your fasting and exercise signals, your repair signals, how late you ate, hydration, illness, the room you are sleeping in. So watch your deep sleep, because that is the resource you can actually tend. Body temperature on the Oura is a useful tell here. Eat too late, get stressed, or start getting sick, and your temperature spikes, which directly drags down deep sleep and recovery.
More on the targets and metrics in Biohacking Sleep: Optimize Your Rest for Peak Performance and the sleep optimization topic.
What are the top three sleep rules, in order?
These are in order of importance, they are free, and they make a real difference.
Rule one: let insulin drop before bed
Stop eating a few hours before sleep. If you are insulin resistant, that is four to six hours. Healthy and reasonably flexible, still about three hours to clear the blood sugar from dinner. No late-night snacks, no grazing in front of the TV.
The mechanism: if you go to bed with insulin up, you suppress growth hormone, because growth hormone cannot rise while insulin is up. You skim the surface of sleep all night instead of diving into the deep stages. The rule of thumb, go to bed a little hungry and wake up full of energy. Stuff yourself before bed and you wake up hungry and tired.
This matters more with age. North of 30 to 35, the only growth hormone you get in a 24-hour cycle is that one blunted nighttime pulse. Eat snacks before bed at 30 and you age faster, recover poorly, and add fat. Late eating also blunts the morning cortisol spike you want around 5 a.m., the one that wakes you and mobilizes liver glycogen for breakfast. And melatonin suppresses insulin secretion, so eating late leaves insulin unable to do its job while triglycerides climb. Worst of all worlds.
Rule two: get up early, by sunrise, seven days a week
There is a specific color of light in the sky only during the first hour of the day. It hits the suprachiasmatic nucleus, the SCN, sitting just behind the optic chiasm, and that nucleus is your master clock. Morning light is the reset that synchronizes every other circadian clock in the body, which then cascade down and sync everything else.
Here is what the biohacking world gets backwards. Everyone obsesses over blue blockers and screens at night. Screens barely matter for circadian timing. Do not run very bright overhead lights at night, but a kid on a screen all evening, at worst, shifts the clock about an hour, and the brain can absorb and ignore roughly an hour of drift. Morning light is the only light cue that really counts. I cover the morning side in Biohacking Your Morning: The Minimum Viable Practice for Circadian Health.
Rule three: fasted, low-to-moderate exercise a few mornings a week
Get up early and do some easy, conversational-pace movement in a fasted state. The point is to burn off the small amount of circulating cortisol and glycogen without calling for more. Bonk the muscles, strip out the bloodstream glycogen.
This is also why I move weightlifting to between 3 and 7 p.m. Cortisol is naturally lowest then and cardiac output is best. You can train hard and briefly drive cortisol up, but since you are not making much and you are sensitive to it, you mobilize fat and burn it off, then refeed a little carbohydrate at dinner. Hammer the weights in the morning, when cortisol is already high and you are resistant to it, and you mostly weaken the signal.
The pattern here is energy flux. Let the hormonal see-saw swing widely on its circadian schedule and it locks in. The cheapest, most effective intervention is usually doing less: not eating late, not running a maladaptive habit.
How should you partition food for your brain?
Driving down stable glucose and up stable ketones does more for the brain than almost anything. You partition food three ways: in time (intermittent fasting), in calories (eating less), and in macronutrients, which shapes the hormonal environment.
I think the keto world is missing the boat for long-term use. Short-to-medium-term keto or carnivore is great for brain injury, inflammation, mold, and Lyme, as an intervention. As your permanent way of eating, long-term keto looks suboptimal and a little risky to me. For peak muscle, athletic, and cognitive performance, something closer to paleo or primal works better.
When people do run keto, push protein over fat, a protein-focused approach rather than the 90% fat version that gets practiced today. Keep fat above 30 to 50 grams a day or you get hormonal problems, more so for women. Once you have recomped, killed the inflammation and chronic pain, and built metabolic flexibility, humans tend to perform best around 50 to 100 grams of carbs a day while staying in light ketosis. The liver handles roughly 50 to 100 grams of glycogen, and that is the energy-flux organ that matters.
I work through the timing logic in Strategic Fasting: Time-Restricted Eating for Metabolic and Cognitive Health.
Are nootropics, modafinil, and supplements worth it?
Supplements sit far down the list. Sort out sleep, basic nutrition, and meditation first. I even bring neurofeedback in before nootropics, because I want a permanent change in a few months and then fill the gaps.
I am not a fan of modafinil and I do not recommend it. My own experience landed me in the hospital for several days with head-to-toe hives. Modafinil is largely a histamine booster. If you have attention difficulty, anxiety, or allergies, you likely already run high histamine, so adding modafinil can dysregulate that system within a couple of weeks. There is an older review, "approved and investigational uses of modafinil," showing alarmingly high dropout rates in ADHD studies from side effects. The cognitive boost itself is weak. Where it seems impressive, it is usually fixing someone's sleep deprivation, which I would rather solve permanently.
Targeted supplementation, by contrast, can be powerful when it matches your biology:
- Vitamin D. Important for many people. It takes roughly eight months of overdosing to reach toxic levels, so a few months of generous dosing is fine, but get a blood level before going a full year high.
- B vitamins and methylation. If you have MTHFR or related variants, get a methylation analysis with a good functional medicine doctor and dial in the right B-vitamin stack. We do not inherit traits, we inherit metabolic bottlenecks, and in mental health it is often a methylation chain that cannot move fast enough. This is an untapped lever for anxiety, depression, and ADHD.
- Choline. If you avoid eggs or have choline-dependent genes, supplementing can be life-changing. It was for me when I was egg-intolerant.
- DHA for kids. Brains are roughly two-thirds DHA and children are building brain all the time, so a couple of grams of DHA, algae-based, is the one supplement I would lean on by default.
- Phosphatidylserine at night helps drop cortisol and deepen sleep, which is part of my own stack.
How early should humans actually wake up?
I wake around 3:30 to 4 a.m. and almost never need the alarm. As sleep gets more efficient, the hours compress. I see this constantly: someone sleeping eight or nine hours and feeling terrible dials it in and feels great on six and a half. It happens most when people move their wake time much earlier.
I do not buy the lark-versus-owl chronotype framing. We are highly adjustable, and I think humans are at their best in the crepuscular window, an hour or so before sunrise. When people insist they are night owls, I mostly hear an accommodation to the modern world.
For genuine night-shift workers, musicians, and people who travel across time zones, the most powerful lever is food timing. When you eat is the number one driver of circadian rhythm. Peg your meals to the schedule of the life you want to live, even if your shifts run odd, and your clock locks in. There is a NASA app built for crossing time zones that progresses your meal and light timing day by day to shift you into a new zone.
Where does caffeine fit?
Coffee and tea are largely healthy for most people. The phytonutrients are good, and Westerners get more dietary antioxidants from coffee than from nearly all other food sources combined. Get antioxidants from food, not from pills, because megadosed antioxidant supplements blunt the free-radical signaling your body needs to clear out dead cells and mitochondria.
The half-life of caffeine runs three to six hours, about four and a half on average, and a substance affects your brain for roughly five half-lives. That math means a daily coffee drinker basically never has caffeine fully out of their system. So manage the relationship.
A practical approach: do not drink coffee first thing. Ride the morning cortisol and blood sugar, get some movement, wait about an hour, then have it as cortisol starts to drop. You will feel a 1 p.m. cup far more than a 7 a.m. one. Have two to four cups and stop by late morning if you go to bed early. The amount matters less than the cutoff, because your liver needs time to clear it before sleep. Large population studies keep pushing the upper safe limit absurdly high, with benefits that asymptote rather than reverse, and long-term coffee use blunts risk factors for Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, and other dementias.
Treat it like any rewarding substance: take the minimum you enjoy, not the maximum you can tolerate. As for alcohol, the field has settled that there is no real health benefit. The red-wine story is about grapes, not the alcohol, and grape extract or juice shows a comparable resveratrol effect.
Where to start
Build the free foundation first: meditation, then the three sleep rules, then the food-partitioning work. Stop eating a few hours before bed, get up by sunrise seven days a week, and add some fasted morning movement. Get those dialed in and every other intervention you add, including neurofeedback for specific issues like attention, TBI, or trauma, lands on a far better canvas. If you want to work on something specific, the brain map and training resources are at peakbraininstitute.com, and the topics above walk through the mechanisms in depth.