487: Dr. Andrew Hill on How to Build a Better Brain at Home (Starting With Sleep)

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them and feel and see the difference for yourself by going to wellness.com that's w-e-l-l-n-e-s-s-e dot com this episode is brought to you by organifi they make delicious superfood drinks that are beyond easy to incorporate into your routine let me tell you about my two personal favorites their green juice contains a clinical dose of ashwagandha which supports healthy cortisol levels to aid in weight management it also contains 11 superfoods for resetting the body and takes just 30 seconds with no chopping chopping or juicing or blending it's organic it tastes delicious and no blender needed you just add water and drink it up and let your body soak up the benefits i also love their gold drink at night it's like a turmeric tea they even have a chocolate version that contains nine superfoods for rest and relaxation it tastes delicious in warm weather and can be mixed in milk water or milk alternatives it's low sugar so you can enjoy this dessert-like tea guilt-free and wake up refreshed without drowsiness my kids love the chocolate one you can check out these and all of their products including protein powder and red antioxidant drink by going to organifi dot com forward slash wellness mama and using the code wellness mama to save 20 on your order so that's o r g a n i f i dot com slash wellness mama and the code wellness mama to save 20 hello and welcome to the wellness mama podcast i'm katie from wellnessmama.com and wellness.com that's wellness with an e on the end and 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 has been on this podcast before we talked in the first episode a lot about neurofeedback and very specific brain training for things like attention issues tbis and much more and i wanted to have him back today he's one of the top peak performance coaches in the country he has a phd in cognitive neuroscience and he has been the one that's done q eegs and guided neurofeedback for my own brain and rehabbing some tbis and early childhood stuff but i wanted to have him on today to talk about more of the at-home stuff you can do to improve your brain to improve your children's brain so he goes into an overview of what things like qeeg and neurofeedback are and how they're used as tools in neuroscience but he also really goes deep on things like how meditation changes the brain in a tangible way and why meditation is a focus exercise and not a relaxation exercise 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 gives his top three rules in order of importance for improving sleep and you may not like some of them but i can say from tracking everything very carefully they make a tremendous impact and i've seen drastic changes in my brain by implementing his protocol he also talks about some dietary strategies why he isn't a fan of certain supplements and nootropics but how some can work complementary with brain training we go in a lot of directions with this one there's a lot of key takeaways and if you really want to profoundly improve your sleep and by doing so your brain function definitely listen about halfway in when he starts talking about his top three sleep packs without further ado let's join dr hill dr hill welcome back thanks katie thanks for having me back nice to be here well i'm excited to chat with you again because it's always such a pleasure and because i'm in the middle of a bunch of neurofeedback training myself right now but before we jump into that i have a note in my show notes you were attacked by an ape while traveling as a teenager in gibraltar and i would love to hear a little bit of that okay so yeah um i guess in terms of curious and interesting things that have happened in my life when i was i don't know 1415 something like that i traveled a lot with my grandparents in my teen years actually and we were in gibraltar having visited from spain and there are these apes that run wild called barbary apes taylor taylor's apes that are about three four feet tall when they're fully grown and the little ones are jumping on people and swinging on car antennas and stealing hats and looking in pockets and are really adorable and the big old grumpy ones are sitting on like stone walls looking at you and i walked too close to one and my cousin and i walked one he was eating something some peanuts or something and he kind of grunted at my cousin when he passed and then i smiled at the ape and i was young and foolish and didn't know that showing your teeth wasn't a good thing you should do to a primate years before my neuroscience you know experience would have told me that was a bad idea i was like oh hi old ape and he grabbed my arm and sunk his teeth in and started yelling at me and swinging his arms and i yelled and he ran away so but that that was my experience my grandpa's like oh we should probably clean that up they were very non-plussed about it like okay whatever get a little ape attack so i thought that was kind of funny so not a not a gorilla nothing big not a chimp you know nothing massive but probably as strong as i was at age 14 15. so i was a little bit mildly uh taken aback so wow that is quite the story people who have listened to our first interview know that you are an expert in all things related to the brain and i'll make sure that first episode is linked for some foundational stuff if people haven't heard about it there's several directions i want to go today but i think to start i'd love to start broad and just have you give an overview of when you're looking at someone's brain and you do a qeg explain kind of what that is and what you're looking for in the brain and then we'll go a different a few different directions with what the results of that can help with sure so brain mapping or quantitative eeg is a tool you can use to assess your brain and your performance we don't do just a recording of the brain generally at peak brain we always combine it with also a measurement of the performance so we have you do as you know a boring tedious attention test and then we put a cap on your head squirt it full of gel and have you do two recordings an eyes closed resting baseline and an eyes open resting baseline these three things the performance and the resting brain activity these averages will be compared to averages of people your age so we get this sort of bell curve distribution of oh hey here's all your individual performance aspects so we get things like impulsivity and sustained focus auditory tension and visual attention and uh fatigue in the attention resources speed and detention resources nice and granular so we're not sort of looking for like an adhd diagnosis or that kind of performance you know confirmation we're kind of trying to unpack for you what you kind of already experienced and understand but give you a sense about where it's acting where it's active and i often see in an attention test things that are much different than the labels people walk in with which is kind of interesting and it often almost immediately informs things in their life they can do especially in some adults when they they had one perspective on their brain like they had a perspective on it being you know inattentive or something kind of spacey and then you look at their brain you see just an auditory processing issue or so you look at their performance and it's just an auditory processing issue you're like oh well does your partner yell at you for not listening to them oh well just have them wave at you first and since you have no visual you know processing issue you'll orient and be right there so you can sometimes tease apart your performance in a very granular way we've got 14 15 different little features that are much more nuanced than simply attention and they're really valid in a bell curve you know you have a hundred as the average and an age match sample with a 15 point sort of standard deviation so typical range is about 85 to 115 and people come in with various resources in that range and then we can sort of look at the stability of the resources against each other you know are you relying on your speed or your stamina to plow through a test because it's harder to be focused or harder to be alert or something so that's the attention test it takes about 25 minutes but it feels like it's forever and then we do a brain map or a cap on the head and it takes 10 minutes or so 15 minutes set up us more if you're slow or new at it and all of our home trainers like i think you probably did your own at home i would guess right recently yeah so did you the first the first round a couple years ago was in the office is that right yeah i think 2019 or 2018 i was in your office in la and then did a home one so you've done it in the office a brain map and you've also done it yourself with live coaches uh supporting you so yes this is your podcast but let me ask you was your experience different doing it you to yourself with live people helping you or doing it in the office like what was the difference in terms of you know were you a little concerned about doing it yourself is it scary did you feel okay doing it i'm curious you know just to dive in a tiny second there yeah i was a little bit apprehensive at first if i was going to be able to figure out how to do it on my own but in some ways i actually really liked it because i felt like i had a better understanding because i was having to be involved in the process it was cool to learn that side of it and they were so good about talking me through not just what i was doing but why and so that's great i learned a lot through that that's great that's good to hear i i'll just get some referral uh some some good perspective on how my staff's working now thank you and you know one little aside for home people doing mapping you have the freedom to map a couple of times so you can do things like look at your brain on caffeine or other lifestyle things you sort of rely on or enjoy and you'll pick up really quick perspective so if you're wondering about your adhd or something you can look at your adderall or whatever in terms of how it's actually operating on your performance and again people are often surprised just like their life you know when they see their performance it teases apart some differences looking at your caffeine or your cannabis throughout all whatever sometimes it's a mixed bag people i rely on the adderall and then you look at their performance on it and their brain on it and they're faster and they're not drifting their focus but they're much more error prone or you know they burn out faster and have stamina issues even on the caffeine so this is paradoxical things our brain because it's nuanced the meal experience kind of the sum of all this experiences it's kind of interesting to kind of look at how the sub resources are working and use that to start informing models for yourself about where you want to perform and now we're getting into the perspective i have on qeg brain mapping in general which is not a diagnostic process but you want to paint some neuroscience for yourself and say oh hey my neuroscience is like this i think maybe and again not to be a hundred percent because the brain's mysterious your brain's mysterious even with a brain map and i'll explain what what the qeg part is in a second it's still mysterious so instead of saying here's what's true and here's what's wrong and let me be the expert like a doctor might we treat this like personal training so even from the view of brain mapping we're sort of saying oh hey athlete where's your performance stuff here we care about here's some differences from typical here's some things that might get in the way for some people what do you think what do you care about what's valid and what's important and then the client you know like like you get to sort of select and prioritize their goals give me some additional perspective on what's going on and then like personal trainers we just create you know iterative programs to push the brain around in this case so brain mapping itself for quantitative eeg is a cap on the head and it's got a couple ear clips and about 19 or 20 channels or wires in the head and the version we use mostly is a cap where you squirt gel through little holes and takes about 15-20 minutes to set up and you sit still for eyes closed and eyes open recordings as i was saying now out of that we get the amounts of brain waves the speeds of brain waves and connectivity patterns of brain waves for you and those will start to look possibly useful so on an eyes closed or eyes open recording of your brain we expect to see certain things and if for one person's brain we saw a statistically unusual phenomena so i can talk to you i don't remember what your brain looks like i didn't i intentionally not prepped myself to avoid giving any secrets before for you for this call but let's say i saw an unusual feature in someone's brain i would know it's an unusual feature statistically i would know they had a lot of beta or a lot of alpha or not a lot of theta or something i wouldn't necessarily know what it means for you or for any one individual person i would kind of know what's plausible across people oh in general when this thing shows up sometimes we get this particular you know complaint or resource hitch or bottleneck and other times we don't and so does this thing sound like it's operating or relevant for you and then we end up getting the place of action not the place of like reality necessarily we know what's probable or plausible or important we can then test things so that's why brain mapping qeg is not a diagnostic because it doesn't really tell me what's true for one person and it's also not we don't use it to train your brain to the average it's not a tool that's used to train you towards the middle of a database let's say we at peak brain use the brain mapping like your sophisticated coach at a nice gym who has a dexa scan and has a bunch of you know individual fitness assessments and some body composition charts and some you know sits down with you and goes through all the different data it helps you figure out what you may want to intervene with but it's goal driven not symptom-driven even with suffering oh my low back hurts it's still goal driven oh you want to have nice abs and a nice low not a non sore low back great and it doesn't have to be about oh your back's broken i'm going to fix you you know i mean if a trainer set in the gym and they're going to take the agency i you know why that wouldn't make sense and i think with the brain we have to do that perspective often i think the the difficult thing that most neurofeedback people do the difficult aspect of doing it is not sticking wires to heads or even sort of like you know setting up frequencies and and moving through a training session the hard part is knowing for one individual how to tune and adjust and get effects you're looking for and the way historically it feels more than 50 years old the way that historically this has been accomplished is with a therapist in the mix so it's a therapy kind of model where your person your trainer works with you two three times a week they sit with you they interact with you and they often there's probably six seven thousand practitioners maybe five in the u.s only who do this stuff professionally and of them almost all are therapists or in the therapy model and sort of have a tight one-on-one relationship with their clients because they need to do that transference and and perspective things they're understanding with the client what's shifting their mood their stress their trauma their eating disorder their brain injury their seizure whatever it is they have to kind of be part of that informed process because the the transference if you will a container of a therapy environment gives the neurofeedback therapist enough perspective to guide the client's brain changes even if they're not especially good at owning the process and that's always been a problem in terms of scalability and the amount people can work with and even in understanding what's happening because it conflates the physiology and psychology so thoroughly so when i started peak brain especially uh years ago i did a little different model with addiction that was sort of this direction but peak brain's been around for about six years now and when we started peak brain we made the conscious decision to really do personal training focus stuff and the brain map is a oh hey here's your brain here's what's unusual what do you think what's important and then of course we move into the the neurofeedback and i can unpack that if you like but the point is your brain maps your qegs don't change by themselves we're looking at this 10 000 foot view of your averages you compared to the average person your age and while you might fluctuate a lot day-to-day you don't fluctuate much compared to the mean of the average person your age so we kind of get this 10 000 foot view of these resource traits and some general ideas and then we get to explore it and decide what you want to do kind of like you're starting i want abs and i want you know a nicer i don't know but or something you can just go to the gym and build those things and you can kind of build your executive function uh rebuild things like a trauma response it's gotten a bit pinched or seizures or migraines that are just regulated or just to peak performance work like creativity or you know flow state and that switch of things are pretty accessible so that's the elevator pitch long long as it is for for why brain mapping is so amazing and yeah like i mentioned this is the thing i've been doing for several years i took a break in the middle and i want to make sure we definitely at the end of this get to a lot of things people can do at home that i'm doing as a complimentary with neurofeedback but for people who have a more direct focus they want to work on with neurofeedback can you just kind of give us a high level overview of what's happening during neurofeedback so for context right now three times a week i'm hooking up wires to my brain and playing games basically with my brain but can you explain kind of what's actually happening in my brain during that process sure yeah um let me assume your listeners are deeply sophisticated and then i'll break it down for there might be one or two kids listening who want to want me to break the big words down but what we're doing is involuntary operant conditioning of implicit learning and using implicit learning to get the results done so to unpack that your brain's already doing stuff lots of stuff it's making brain waves they're changing speed they're changing amounts they're connecting briefly with neighbors letting go of circuits briefly and we can watch that at a couple specific phase so if you wanted to work on your focus there's a circuit the right for sustained attention for not being distracted the circle in the left for sustained focus when you're bored so if you can never read a book without your mind drifting and you're off doing something else in your head you can't absorb the information then probably you're having trouble maintaining nice beta tone the muscles if you will is kind of weak on the left and you might decide to exercise that resource or you would say i have a goal of sustained attention sustained focus i want to read i'm having trouble or something okay great let's train the beta up on the left and so we'd have you stick a wire here you know kd it's called c3 but that's the left somatosensory cortex and we would measure that compared to one of the ears left ear put a right ear clip on as a ground so three wires total and measure your beta waves under that circuit involved with sustained focus and would also measure your theta which is a kind of the breaks are off the circuit's doing stuff automatically not a very organized mode and the brain tissue is going to make these these uh brain waves these little gears if you will at the same time so as you're making more or less of theta and more or less of beta whenever the beta happens to go up on its own and the theta happens to go down the software goes ooh good job brain and your little game starts to run better your pac-man eats more dots your puzzle pieces fill in your zombie gets hit more by you know this little car racing zombie killing game we have if you've seen that one or not but the idea is that your brain is doing tons of things this is uh operant conditioning think skinner's pigeons not pavlov's dog i've never made somebody drool i promise from a bell ringing or a light going off never not once and um we're shaping we're taking little things that are already fluctuating like your beta waves or your theta waves whenever they happen to trend for half a second in the quote unquote right direction for the workout the computer goes oh good job brian good job brent good job brian nope ah good job good job good job nope again and again and the big trick here is removing the goal posts every few seconds so this is adaptive and the brain essentially gets applauded for little runs little trends it's engaging in so in 30 minutes if you're doing one protocol you may have a handful 10 20 30 little runs of your beta going up on its own and the theta going down as you feel more focused or try to focus or your brain just happily naturally gets a focus little boost somehow because the brain's always changing a little bit and the brain will notice that whenever it does some things stuff in the outside world was happening and the brain can't tell that apart from you like picking up a random musical instrument or driving your first car i mean like wait what does all this stuff do it's looking for that loop and it figured out you can't feel your brain waves i mean you can feel your muscles so you know when you're moving a car wheel or whatever you know you're you're you're touching it you know it's part of the loop but you can't feel your brain waves so the brain's like whoa why is my theta dropping causing stuff to happen in the outside world the mind doesn't know the mind can't really tell the first few sessions at least but the brain's like that was interesting i'm gonna i'm gonna buy into that i'm gonna get you know use that information and so the next day typically your brain will reach for the same mode and your beta will rise your theta will drop and you'll have a little brief subjective experience of whoa i'm kind of focused i just plowed through that 30 page chapter of my textbook they can get distracted took me half an hour oh yeah look at me go that's weird kind of weird i'm feeling really focused and then it wears off and you have this experience with neurofeedback of like trying to go after different resources and they burst in a little bit for you know a few hours to 24 hours and then we're off again the little exercise the training we call it the operant conditioning and what happens eventually is you can build up the same effect and once you've built it up enough if it's something the brain's already doing especially the big resources sleep stress attention that kind of stuff then the brain takes over and it's now practicing those new modes all the time and you have a good permanent long-term change generally for those kinds of things like adhd or even big things like trauma and you know severe anxiety get re-regulated pretty thoroughly for most people in about a few months like three four months five months that's some of the time frame for a lot of big change for people typically and then big things like autism and schizophrenia and major brain injuries and you know major aging problems there's there's an active disease process fighting back in some ways you know keeping things a bit dysregulated so it takes longer and or you may want to do it ongoing but for most things most things that most brains do even things that are really problematic you can train the new mode the brain's happy to hang out there with good resilience and stability from that up so yeah it's been interesting in my experience having done now qegs a few years apart it was interesting to see the change in my attention because i think the first time i met with you you asked me if my attention issues had ever gotten in my way before and i was like what no because that's the first i've heard of them but i had like not as optimal results on the attention test and then there was a big improvement by this next time we did it i also i don't put a lot of stock in them but i also noticed a big jump in iq which i thought was an interesting metric as well not that i think that those are that necessarily relevant especially at my age but i just did it for fun but i think like like you mentioned a couple very specific conditions i know you guys work with people on attention and also like tbis and trauma recovery and i've been curious too i know the brain training helps but i think also i did a lot of trauma processing in the last few years and started meditating in the past few years which is kind of a segue into the next question i wanted to delve into you with which is what are some of the ways we can improve the brain at home because i think even if people are doing neurofeedback this is very much a both and equation and it seems to make the neurofeedback better and vice versa absolutely um neurofeedback added to other things lubricates them and before i move on we actually um there's good research that and i've heard anecdotally tons of times iq scores typically go up a lot with neural feedback for some reason we don't know why exactly because iq is not a very valid concept itself as you were alluding to but i'll tell you i can't stop lecturing sorry there's three things that iq is really one is speed of processing one is working memory ability and the third is implicit learning and speed of processing can be trained up in neurofeedback so can impulsivity which means you can hold things in working memory better so i think that's why anyways meditation as you were saying does huge things and synergizes with all kinds of stuff and is a i consider it sort of like a minimal viable practice you've got to do something day-to-day to like just like you brush your teeth in the morning you probably should do some movement and some meditation that kind of stuff and build some nice viable basics but everyone you know for the past 30 years anyways i've been talking about mindfulness and bsr meditation and you know it's even in places that aren't california people are doing mindfulness in the schools now so that's a that's a good one and there's a billion resources there um the only thing i'll say about mindfulness or meditation if you haven't done it folks you might not understand what it is it's not a relaxation exercise people think i can't relax i can't distill my mind i can't meditate come on well then no that's that's not what meditation is meditation is a focus exercise you anchor your attention in a specific way on purpose the present moment to something and then you just kind of hold that anchor hold that attention style it can be a single point of you know awareness of a sensation or color or a light or a breath or whatever did you hold your attention a single thing and since you have a mind within a few seconds you're distracted and you bring your mind back to the focus that's a rep so if you're really distractible great lots of opportunities to keep re-anchoring and it doesn't take much to make a big change 10 15 minutes a day we'll do a huge amount for a lot of people over time i would say what is your practice like uh well do you have any favorite resources to point i can point people toward if they're totally new to mine sure on peak brain's website and i'll make sure it's a little more visible and i can we can link it in the show there's a little mini how to meditate practice because i like to use basic techniques that are somewhat old and combine a couple basic ones in a short little 15 minute or even seven and a half minute practices if you're new where i have folks do a five minute single point awareness practice and then a 10 minute present time awareness practice so you're shrinking your attention down to the sensation of air right here for five minutes and then you're moving to a 10 minute watching something more rhythmic like your breath or the car is going by on the road or something and there's a tool you can use called insight timer but you can set up little chunk blocks to hear audio to help you transition your modes but it's a very simple practice very basic for those of you who are not new to meditation what i'm doing this is a basic samatha into vipassana kind of style where you anchor and settle and then you go to awareness vapasana is kind of what's behind the western style if you will in some ways of uh meditation or mindfulness the mbsr stuff kind of came out of that the terabyte of apostolic stuff and it's really the insight tradition if you folks have heard the word insight attached to meditation it kind of means that into the pool where you're watching you're aware and you're at you're anchoring a sense of awareness on a focus on a sensation on a feeling tone so you end up getting things like meta which is loving kindness progressive ways of feeling loving kindness actually first you you think about someone you love and then you pick up someone you don't care about that much and someone you kind of like and something you really hate and you practice feeling love for them and that helps break up the sort of perspective but it's type of attention it's a type of intentional feeling that you're you're reaching for just like the focus for mindfulness can really build so again not to be your meditation teacher for all the folks who are brand new but um you can grab our tutorial off the website it's pretty useful it's real short one and it's a great place to start and the effects will accrue subjectively usually within a few days so you don't have to do very much of it to you know figure it out beyond meditation because that's kind of you know old hat for most americans now most westerners i would say the biggest thing people are not doing properly or the biggest place you can make change is in sleep sleep hacking specifically and people don't really understand sleep even though sleep trackers are all the rage these days heck i'm wearing one i have an orange right here and i love it i rely on it there you go but sleep trackers are a little misleading the map isn't the territory the data's not the person and data isn't perfect physio physiological data is noisy and imperfect so first of all if you have a sleep tracker ignore the ram measurement it's never valid on any tracker any sleep tracker in the market has bad misleading and potentially completely nonsensical numbers in the rem look at the deep sleep if it uses their heart rate as a as a mac as a tracker the whoop the aura fitbits the huawei i think the apple watch they all use the heart rate variability the changes of heartbeat rhythm as a way to stage sleep pretty decent for deep sleep and for the total sleep not really valid otherwise you can't get rem or other things like doing an eeg or you need like really sophisticated what's called actigraphy which is like really sensitive movement devices on your limbs so you have to uh look at your deep sleep but the good thing is or the good news on sleep is your ram doesn't change that much it's really hard to push your rem around it's really easy to push your deep sleep around if your ram digga pushed around uh you'd be full-blown psychotic or hallucinating or having major mental illness that was really disorganized disruptive so by the time your rem is just regulated you get bigger problems and you know it so don't worry about your rem do pay attention to your deep sleep because that will flex night to night as a function of your previous day day and a half of behavior you know your autophagy signals of fasting or exercise your repair signals your feeding how late you eat if you're ill if you're hydrated aspects of the environment the place you're sleeping in it's all impact how we sleep and how much of that is deep sleep and so we should be aiming for getting you know husbanding tending that resource of deep sleep i have a few biohacks i like to do and they they're about watching a resource and making sure i'm tending it appropriately one of them is watching my deep sleep that's watching my ketones but but in the breath not in the in the blood i think that's a very useful measure in the blood actually so watching these things you know gives you a two three day window of sense if you're really stressed out working out hard changing your habits you'll get a sense on your ordering about your deep sleep what's nice in the aura too is you get body temperature so if you eat too late at night or if you're getting sick or too stressed your vitamins will be spiked and that will directly contribute to poor deep sleep and poor recovery but let me give you my top three sleep packs and these are in order of importance and i sort of think they can make no pun intended night and day difference for a lot of people's performance and the first one that i think many of us do poorly is we have to let our insulin drop really thoroughly before bed which means you gotta fast no calories for a few hours if you're insulin resistant that could be four or five hours six hours if you're not super insulin resistant relatively healthy it's still like three hours to clear all the food if you will all the blood sugar you ate at dinner so we should not be having late night snacks and evening meals and before bed and and you know snacking in front of the tv between dinner and bedtime all that stuff is really going to screw us up and i never like to tell you just a rule but here's the why i mean essentially if you go to bed with any insulin you'll suppress growth hormone release it can't come up when insulin is up and so you'll end up skimming the surface of sleep uh you kind of look like you're on a pond all night long a little skimming the surface never diving down and you know sort of rule of thumb here to to encapsulate it is go to bed a little hungry and you look up full of energy and full so if you're a bit full you wake up hungry and tired if you stuff yourself a full food before bed you'll wake up hungry and tired but if you go to bed fast did you wake up full of energy so really important because what you're letting happen is not just the growth hormone pulse that drags into deeper sleep and if you're north of 30 35 the only growth hormone you're getting every 24 hours is that somewhat blunted pulse and so if you're like 30 years old and eating snacks before bed you're getting old fast and not recovering and getting fat so the other thing it does is it suppresses the sort of cycling of all the other regulatory hormones like cortisol you want cortisol to spike 5 am or something and that brings up everything wakes you up squeezes your liver to feed your breakfast all the glycogen jumps out from cortisol responses essentially that's why if you have a little iffy blood sugar you'll have a dawn effect and a spike in blood sugar but if you don't if you have healthy glycogen insulin metabolism you can kind of have a stable period in the morning of also fasting so first rule fast before bed for a few hours second rule get up early seven days a week i don't care roughly what it is as long as it's working for you but it probably should be by sunrise if not before there's a certain frequency of light a color of light that's in the sky only for the first hour of the day and it goes in and hits a nucleus behind the optic crossing the optic chiasm of the optic nerves across and it's called the suprachiasmatic nucleus the scn and it watches for the color of light in the sky it's only sensitive that morning light and it's a big reset for all the other clocks throughout the entire body so it synchronizes all the brain circadian and then they cascade down and synchronize everything so without good morning light somewhat routinely you're not getting the only actual light cue that really matters people who always in the biohacking world are focused on blue blockers and you know other things at night and stuff like that and as a mom you're gonna hate to hear this too but screens don't matter that much in terms of circadian stuff they just don't you shouldn't have bright lights on at night super bright and you shouldn't have things that are super overhead uh check out dr andrew huberman's talk on that but in terms of circadian suppression or progression of of light that's concerning the morning is where it's at you want to get the morning and later in the day it doesn't really matter that much if you're you know if your kids on a screen after dinner and it's really really bad all all evening long the worst they're going to do is progress their circadian rhythm by about one hour and the brain can handle about one hour every night and ignore it so it's not a huge risk so to speak in modern society to be on screens late at night i don't think unless they're really bright which then can mimic some of the morning impact so fast before bed get up super early seven days a week even if you didn't get much sleep and get some fasted exercise in a few days a week and low intensity to moderate intensity like you can talk over it the reason being you want to burn off that low amount of cortisol and moderate amount of glycogen you have circulating you don't want to create more you don't want to call for more by hitting the gym and hitting the weights and make more cortisol go up you want to bonk your muscles and strip out all the glycogen in your bloodstream so muscles are shaking and demanding more you'll cause a secondary hormonal cascade it'll it'll cause a call for more cortisol insulin everything else and you have high cortisol ish in the morning so you're resistant to it if you drive it up when you're resistant to it's going to weaken the signaling anyways so you move your weightlifting to between three and seven pm when cortisol is naturally its lowest and your cardiac output is at its best the most relaxed in the highest volume so you can hit the gym hard and briefly drive up cortisol you aren't making very much so you burn it off you're very sensitive to it so it mobilizes lots of fat and then you end up burning it off and having your dinner or whatever and refeeding a little carbohydrate a little insulin and you're good to go oh and last reason not to eat before bed is because melatonin secretion suppresses insulin secretion so you can have a hard time getting insulin even up if you're eating late at night and you have this weird thing about the insulin not doing its job well enough so triglycerides and everything else is going to go up really have really high as you fall asleep so worst of all worlds if you eat before bed so those are those are the big three rules fast before bed get up early and exercise or get up early and exercise in a fasted state a few times a week and those are all not even they're free and or better than or avoiding doing something sometimes that cost money that's right it's like i always joke that the most cost effective thing to do is often nothing like just don't eat or don't don't engage in that slightly maladaptive habit you have or whatever it is it's often easy pruning to get better uh performance and health so yeah and just to highlight what you said i want to make sure everybody understands you are a neuroscientist who looks at thousands and thousands of brains and while there are these amazing high-tech interventions we can use and they're so helpful especially for very specific cases your advice that you're giving to everyone is free advice and it all centers around yeah and we've all heard that sleep is the number one thing uh blood sugar is important but that's in the dis that's in the pathology often realm or you know most americans are but i would say for sleep is the number one general thing biohacking your ketone glucose kind of management understanding metabolism is another big thing and that's really important and does more for the brain than almost anything else in the world driving down your stable glucose and up your stable ketones that's a very complicated discussion takes large amounts of you know figuring out because i'll basically give people the nutshell of a system i've developed where you can essentially partition food in three different ways through axes you partition it in time people call it intermittent fasting or time restricted feeding or whatever you know but you've heard about this stuff it's time restriction you partition the food and time you can also position calories people call that dieting where you just drop the calories you eat less and then the third thing is you can partition your macronutrients and that will create different hormonal internal environments for signaling and accelerate or at least make the behavior easier about controlling environments not being driven by the hormonal spikes and that ends up being things like going to higher protein ratios you might expect people i think the keto world is kind of missing the boat in terms of the most optimal way to eat i think long-term keto is a little dangerous i love long-term i love short-ish to medium-ish term keto or carnivore for brain injuries for inflammation for mold lyme for so many reasons as an intervention as a good thing to make change i don't like it as a 15 20 30 you're optimal if it works you're great if you like it great but if you're trying to get the optimal performance the most muscle mass the most athletic performance the most cognitive performance i think it's sub-optimal i think close to a paleo or primal kind of thing is better but i think many of us are trying to manipulate the internal environments metabolically and in terms of the macronutrients a lot of the way we can do this is kind of like a a protein focus keto not a fat focus keto where you try to keep your protein the energy coming in from your protein higher than the energy coming in from your fat so you know yesterday i had i struggled yesterday to eat 1550 calories struggled and that's probably a good thousand or more calories under maintenance for me it's a huge deficit but i struggled that much because i had four steaks you know i had they were they were small ish but i had four steaks and something else but like that was over 500 calories and i was stuffed after having two meals and i'm doing to cut down some body fat and play with a really high protein to fat ratio but a lot of the keto people will discover their performance will improve if they have to keep fat above 30 40 grams 50 grams a day otherwise you get hormonal issues especially for women who are doing keto maybe even higher but keto as its practice today is 90 you know fat for most people it's ridiculous so i think people should be more like 50 or above protein and 40 you know fat or something the rest is carbs and i think once you're well adapted once you've recompt sufficiently once you've got the abs you want to get once your chronic pain is gone inflammation's gone you've done the elimination stuff to fix your gut once you've moved beyond the more acute intervention i think humans are really really good at best at performing at around 50 to 100 grams of carbs a day actually relatively high in the keto or you know or obviously world but you know i think you can figure out how to wait ways to get metabolically flexible to stay in light ketosis often and still eat 50 plus to 100 maybe even grams of carbs a day i sort of worked on a system to do this to stay in like ketosis every morning i wake up about one or above but some days i eat 100 grams of carbs before and i'm able to like cycle in and out now years after sort of rebuilding some metabolic flex um i couldn't do it you know two years ago i was just fat and slow and tired would have no ketones if i eat sugar but now i can do it but but i think it's important to get in that mode um only because we're designed that way we've got a liver that can handle between 50 80 90 100 grams of glycogen carbs and muscles which aren't really a storage mechanism per se but they can handle it more you know a couple hundred three hundred four times more but the liver is that is it energy flux so getting back into saying about sleep hacking part of that was about the energy flux allowing it to happen hormonal fluxes at the end of the day the energy fluxes allowing them to happen as they're designed so to speak that lets the see-saw swing more widely in the circadian rhythm and locks in so much each other well i think the same is true of carbs brought from many people if you're having 50 60 70 grams of carbs a day and you're active you're burning off more than that in terms of energy and you're providing sort of the most optimal you know flexible environment i do think that we should still go low carb i do think we should just still go zero calorie or fasting here and there to create the environment where we can switch but beyond that um i'm i'm not these days super huge fan of like long-term years of keto basically so another intervention mindfulness sleep and then this diet hacking thing which is got this sort of tri-part taped partitioning uh thing that i'm sort of outlining for focusing yeah and i mean to recap that i think it's really valuable that the things we're seeing are best for the brain are things that also have benefits in every other area of health and that are inexpensive or free granted i know for a lot of moms the sleep part is a tough thing to hack when you're when you have young kids and i totally can sympathize with that but i think it makes sense start with those keys and then add brain training and if you need it or add in other interventions but i feel like every expert agrees sleep is super important i've never had anyone come on this podcast and say like oh sleep really doesn't matter with the free basics first get those really dialed in and then anything else you manipulate will become much more effective because you've got that solid foundation this podcast is sponsored by wellness that is my new line of natural and good for you personal care products that's wellness with an e on the end when i realized years ago that there weren't any great natural personal care products that worked as well as the conventional options i set out to create ones that weren't just comparable 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i also am right now getting a lot of questions nootropics are such a hot topic people are wanting to supplements to improve the brain there's a lot of different supplements and stacks of supplements that people are trying and i see people using more and more things like adderall modafinil off label so i'd love to have your perspective on those things especially for people listening who maybe have teenagers who are experimenting with those are there safe ways to supplement and improve the brain and what should we be wary of i mean there are um but it's a it's got you should have a nutritive perspective on this in general and for teenagers you know food is the way to go for elders with reduced absorption there may be ways to there may be need to supplement and for the rest of us you can spot target things but just like you were saying that there's foundational stuff that's relatively accessible that makes a huge change like sleep hacking i think supplements are pretty far down the list in terms of when you bring them on board or other or nootropics once your sleep is sorted out you know your other basic practice is your basic nutrition um i even bring neurofeedback in before nootropics because i want to make a permanent change in a few months and then let's figure out what needs gap filling use nootropics for that um i don't like most nootropics or most things called nootropics in spite of having founded company i helped found truebrain years ago but i like some nootropics but the the definition is pretty narrow and the marketing has blown up in terms of what people call it i'm not a fan of edaphanel i think madaphil is dangerous my personal experiences with benefiting put me in the hospital for several days with head to toe hives modafinil is mostly a histamine booster most head does its job and if you have any attention difficulty you already have high histamine probably for distractible or if you're anxious you might have some or allergies and you add modafinil after a couple of weeks you're just regulating your histamine system and really potentially causing risky issues and there's a great early not early 10 20 years ago now paper on modafinil called um i forget who the author is the title is approved and investigational uses a modafine you can find it easily and it's a metadata study showing a bunch of other studies and how they sorted out in all the adhd studies people dropped out at an alarmingly high rate because they had massive side effects so that trope of the geek who's got allergies there's a reason for it histamine it's a neurotransmitter and it sits ahead of all the other ones essentially earlier so if you boost it you get vigilant you get alertness you get it's on but i don't think most people should be getting it's not a very large boost it's a very sexy one in the business world in silicon valley world and the father of biohacking talks about it or used to talk about it a lot but um i don't think it's i think it's a very weak t in terms of cognitive impact an attention impact almost nothing and it's only really really useful and so impactful for many people because they have sleep issues and disregulated attention because it's regulated sleep so i'd rather they sort this stuff out permanently without bringing the stuff on board if at all possible and then layer in additional strategies now i do think based on developmental bracket there's different supplemental strategies that are fairly important as you get older north of 40 50 60 you may have to supplement with protein because it's hard to absorb the vitamin d becomes super important for many many people certainly right now in a pandemic i would encourage folks to go up in vitamin d levels as much as possible don't go crazy with it if you are dosing for months and months it takes about eight months if you're overdoing vitamin d to get into toxic levels it's a very slow uh overdue so you know don't megadose vitamin d for a year without getting a blood level but you can do it for a few months with impunity pretty much and then i tend to uh go after specific things for people based on their needs with supplements like i'm a middle-aged dude who you know is stressed so i have at night phosphatidylserine and what else do i have not much else right now at night actually but that helps drop cortisol which helped my sleep be deeper i'm pretty dialed into my hackstyle my sleep's pretty amazing to be honest i get like six seven hours of just the best sleep you could possibly imagine routinely awake and now i wake up you know today i woke up at 3 30. i usually have my alarm set for four i almost never wake up with the alarm almost always just before it and i was like waking up fresh at like 3 30 in the morning today which is a bit light for me usually it's only six hours of sleep last night so i was just feeling great because i'm locked in i've noticed this for clients whether i fix their sleep or help them fix their sleep with neurofeedback or behavioral hacking whatever it is as it gets more efficient the hours will compress dramatically someone's getting eight hours and eight and a half nine feeling like crap and you dial it in suddenly getting six and a half feeling amazing or something and that's really quite common and i find it's much more common in people who move their wake time much earlier i think humans are really actually quite good at getting up in the crepuscular times you know well before nautical dawn so an hour hour and a half before sunrise basically hour before sunrise is not hold on i think that's kind of humans are or are creatures of that time because we're flexible and i think that's when we're often the best in terms of dialing stuff in i don't really believe in the sort of larks versus owls morning people versus night people i think we're imminently adjustable and what i'm hearing is an accommodation of the modern world and a bunch of excuses when people say that honestly i don't think that there's anything that was a true chronotype in people essentially anyways those are all straightforward interventions i would start there and then in terms of supplements i would say it becomes critical if you have specific genetic stuff going on mthfr you know issues with clearing comps et cetera et cetera you should dial in the right b vitamin stack but that's somewhat sophisticated and very individualized and you should have a methylation analysis with a good functional medicine doctor that your b vitamin needs based on your genes and that can make massive differences in performance as well as symptoms anxiety and depression and adhd all kinds of stuff can be really really swashed with the right nutritional stat because we don't inherit it turns out if you look at all the genetics and mental illness and performance and everything else we don't inherit traits the endpoint of traits we inherit like some metabolic you know slow pathway or some potential and a bunch of stuff will sum but it's usually some metabolic chain and mental illness mental health it's usually methylation we can't move stuff down the methylation chain rapidly enough so it's useful we can't take the food and methylate the b vitamins rapidly enough to then use them in energy just or or cognition and so i think that that's a unu it's it's an untapped resource for a lot of people this methylation analysis going to be vitamins i would again put that before i would put in random supplementation it's just targeted supplementation or if you're an elder having you know cognitive issues there's some specific things you can bring in or fatty acids cytocholine that's an amazing you know uh sort of acetylcholine toner if you will as well as things like phosphatidylcholine phosphatidylserine but you know and then for kids other than the spectrum i would say dha probably from algae forms becomes the only really thing i would probably be very uh encouraging of supplementation in by default because kids you know a brains are made up of dha in general mostly two thirds of brains are dha and kids are making brains all the time so they need a lot of fat so i would give them a lot of dha something or at least a couple grams probably you know if i had a kid but beyond that i wouldn't supplement just because i would i would do it after everything else is built in to sort of spackle over the gaps you know yeah i think it's important like you said to also realize how individualized that is and to work with someone who understands maybe the functional medicine side like for me an example would be i was intolerant to eggs for a long time i've since resolved that but i was eating almost no dietary choline because i wasn't eating it i had a number of genes that are highly dependent on choline so supplementing with that was life-changing but that wouldn't be the case for most people and so it's learning those things about yourself i also want to circle back that's so interesting how early you wake up for wine but i've heard this from numerous guests who when they get really good at meditation find that they are sleeping less and less or that they like sleep in a shorter window and wake up earlier and i actually when i started intensifying brain training and really dialed in my deep sleep and then added meditation regularly for a while i was like what's wrong with my sleep i'm waking up at 4 30 or 5 every morning and can't fall back asleep and then i finally realized oh my body's just waking up now i'm ready to be awake it's not a middle of the night this is what my brain is now considering morning so i just go to sleep a little earlier and make sure i get enough sleep but that is interesting that you said that's probably the natural state of the human brain is to wake up i think it might be people people are i'm sure there's neuroscientists listening who are like what what he's not right but i'm i'm convinced both experientially as well as working with people and i work people that have weird schedules and weird shifts and actors and athletes and musicians and everyone else and i i find that there's things you can do if you're a night shift person or a musician to ameliorate it um and i would actually be more interested in supplementing like circadian chronotype stuff finding way supplement d at certain times of day or you know giving uh food timing is the number one impact on circadian rhythm so i i would actually encourage someone's eating or sorry who's living a night shift or an evening shift you know second shift at a hospital a musician whatever i would still encourage that person if they're if it's not gonna be their life all the time to eat in a time schedule that is like a normal if you will sunrise sunset because then you'll still get all the circadian benefits you won't progress your your clock deeply uh basically but there's there's ways of like pegging your food timing to lock your brain into a certain time of day it's a great app i use on the phone called um oh i'm like the name of the app now but it's used to cross time zones i haven't traveled now in a year and a half so i'm blanking in the name of it but it's a it's an app by nasa which is about um if you're crossing time zones it tells you sort of when to eat and you can pick the number of days and it progresses your meal times earlier and earlier and you're when you're sleeping when you're light to get you into a circadian rhythm for the zone you're in but a lot of the um the benefit or a lot of the the weight the most powerful level you have to pull is when you eat so just don't eat at random times and you do eat that same meal times for the life you want to live in and you'll lock in pretty easily for most people and i would guess the advice to get up before sunrise is going to be the toughest one for a lot of people listening that was not fun advice for me for a while i think the other kind of controversial topic i want to touch on with you a little bit is caffeine and if like what place it has in brain health and sleep and what you recommend from a neuroscience perspective yeah i think caffeine uh well coffee uh is largely uh healthy for most humans i think individual humans have issues with cardiac or gut stuff you know heart sensitive to it or there can be some gut acidity stuff going on but coffee or tea i think that the phytonutrients are generally healthy i also think that you know they're habit forming slightly and like anything else that is stimulus and enjoyable we have to kind of manage our relationship with it be that television or food or sex or shopping or a drug or whatever else and i mean i think westerners can consume more antioxidants through caffeine through coffee beans than all other dietary sources combined pretty much in terms of dietary antioxidants and antioxidants are a thing you should get from your food not from not from supplements you should never take supplemental antioxidants it'll shut down your body's ability to hear the free radical signals it needs to hear to clean out dead cells and dead mitochondria and things so you never should supplement like large amounts of vitamin e or large antioxidants or something you know but the body has good redox and antioxidant capacity coffees actually and tea are both really quite helpful in those in those ways um and so other foods that have large things that help with antioxidant ability i think that the average human's clearance time the half-life of caffeine specifically is between three and six hours depending who you are so it's four and a half hours on average as you may know because i've probably told you privately things affect your brain for five half-lives it's why make you have no caffeine before a brain map from some time the day before but actually if you take four and a half hours is the mean times five you're at a full day that sort of means that most people if they're having coffee daily never have coffee out of their system not ever so it becomes somewhat important to look at your use of it because again cortisol is high in the morning and caffeine will crank it up so you got to kind of man i would recommend not going here's how i recommend this sort of practical way to handle coffee if you love it don't have it first thing in the morning ride the cortisol ride the blood sugar let it wear off get some exercising give it an hour then have your coffee once cortisol is dropping you'll feel it more you may notice you feel your cup of coffee at 1 pm way more than it's 7 a.m because cortisol is low at 1 pm probably so i would recommend having a limiting coffee a little bit i used to sort of say and the research suggests does support this has been papers out every few years showing the upper limit of coffee is ridiculously high like the this metadata study out of finland i think showed that across countries across thousands of people and some absurdly high you know uses of coffee like the swedes and the fins the health benefits seem to keep increasing and it asymptotes doesn't go away but it stops increasing the health benefits it was like 56 cups a day it was absurd amounts most of us would have cardiac issues or gut issues at that level but in general it seems to be incredibly tolerable substance for humans to abuse just like cannabis a lot of people abuse cannabis successfully and or there's some benefits for it i think the benefit ratio for coffee is a little more clear potentially in in terms of just general cognitive benefit there's plenty of other benefits of course in cannabis that are anti-tumor into cancer and tea whatever anti-pain but coffee has i think some good cognitive benefits it reduces long-term aging stuff too in terms of the brain you get parkinson's alzheimer's and other forms of dementia that can creep in there's dramatically uh blunted the rest factors are blunted from multiple when you have lots of coffee on board so i think we should have you know if you like it don't have it right away have a couple of cups two to four and stop before noon or so you know especially going to bed at 8 30 or 9 30 like i am you know then stop stop a couple of half-lives if you're a fast metabolizer maybe you'll get away with having coffee at 1 pm or 2 p.m if you're not a fast metabolizer you should probably have your last cup of coffee late morning you know and have a cup at seven or a pot at seven the amount doesn't matter so much what matters is the cutoff times your liver can clear it out of your system and have enough time to fall asleep so i don't care if you really really rely on coffee from you know seven a.m until noon if you cut yourself off it was three pots that's okay you know you'll you'll end up becoming you'll you'll notice the absence of it especially what i'm suggesting and giving yourself a gap in the morning but like any other drug i think we need to manage our relationship with it and not take the amount we can handle and tolerate but engage with the amount we enjoy the minimal amount we enjoy in some ways and need to experience what we want out of it be that coffee or cannabis i think you know many stoners i know especially here in california they smoke as much weed as possible not as much as they enjoy as much as possible and george carlin had an old uh skit on this he would say don't smoke more weed when you're high you just get less weed not more high so i think with alcoholics there's just like you know one drink is uh is too much and you know 10 isn't enough kind of thing the slippery slope of continued imbibing i think with sugar if you're eating sugar you've got an insulin spike and the falling insulin triggers more feeding behavior it's hard to stop eating once you're eating sugar relationships with rewarding substance isn't repetitive enjoyable substances of the high reward value are tough and it's up to us to manage that relationship you like coffee like i like coffee but beyond that i think it's a pro healthy thing within reason you know and more so than things like alcohol i don't think there's really any i think we've firmly established as neuroscience neuroscience field is finally established there really isn't any health benefits of alcohol and and all the res all the red wine stuff is about grapes not about the alcohol there's a recent study showing um grape extract has as big effect it looked like in the population so a grape juice does so it seems to be a grape skin resveratrol effect in that so get up before dawn but we get to keep our coffee and stop eating a few hours before bed it really does make a big difference i think we often underestimate how big of a difference some of those small changes can make and i've seen it now in my sleep data with which i track really regularly and now also my brain mapping and i think that advice is so sound across the board and starting with those factors and then if you like i did know you have past brain injuries or past trauma or attention issues and want to work on specifics then you have a great foundation for neurofeedback and i think that's then you're coming to you with a good canvas to help paint a picture and reign as you say as we get close to the end of our time a question i love to ask is if there is a book or a number of books that have had a profound impact on your life and if so what they are and why yeah i was thinking about uh i got this question before and the last time i was asked this question i didn't have a good answer i probably still don't it's a short answer i i i've read so many books i was one of those kids who like just until i like hit my late teen years and i emerged blinking from a dark addict somewhere i just read i got up in the morning i read i read all day long and i went on after fifth grade i went to the library for four hours and read all the books i could and check out the maximum amount you could take home read them all bought them back the next morning like i books are are an amazing thing but there's just been so many in my life i couldn't ever i could never pick just one to having a favorite child you don't have a fairy child do you katie come on um no uh that being said i don't want to give it a cop out so um i'm really a big fan of uh ludinsky's um hafiz translation there's a there's a collection called the gift that i'm a huge fan of um hafiz is a sufi poet and just like uh uh rumi basically but less a little bit less well-known one of the dervishes you know the sort of same the ecstatic uh end of islam essentially and uh hafiz's poetry is all about that sort of being present and enjoying and finding celebration and love in the moments it has a very resonant with me so i found that very for for a book anyways i'll i'll give you that answer i love it that's a new one i'll make sure that's linked in the show notes as well and along with i know you have resources on your website about a lot of the things that we've talked about i'll make sure all of those are linked and i know i see in reading studies just how profoundly things like meditation and certainly sleep impact the brain and the aging of the brain and you see this playing out in the data that you look at in people's brains daily and so it's so helpful to have your perspective and explanation i love that you gave us so many practical free at home tips to build a better brain and also hopefully to help our children build better brains from a young age and that you also have these resources available for people who have more specific focus or questions related to their brain i'll make sure for you guys listening all of those resources are at wellnessmama.fm so you can find the links and dr hill as always it is such an honor to chat with you thank you so much for your time oh my pleasure thanks for having me look forward to talking to you again and thanks as always to all of you for listening for sharing your most valuable resources your time energy and attention with us today we're both so grateful that you did and i hope that you will join me again on the next episode of the wellness mama podcast if you're enjoying these interviews would you please take two minutes to leave a rating or review on itunes for me doing this helps more people to find the podcast which means even more moms and families can benefit from the information i really appreciate your time and thanks as always for listening