Brain Hacks To Be Productive & Focused w/ Neuroscientist Andrew Hill (TPS430)

[Music] welcome to the productivity Show podcast where we believe that you can get the important things done without having to sacrifice your health family and things that matter to you my name is Han I'm the founders CEO of Asian efficiency where we help people become more productive at work and in life and today I'm joined by a very special guest his name is Dr Andrew Hill he's the founder of the peak brain Institute he holds a PhD in cognitive Neuroscience from UCLA's Department of psychology and continues to do research on attention and cognition he also has a podcast called the hit first podcast with Dr Hill welcome to the show thanks for having me nice to be back yeah we had you on uh four or five years ago so a lot of things have changed obviously that's right in the before times yeah yeah and that's also around the time we started your company one of the things that has changed on the podcast as well is we introduce Our Guest top three favorite resources so I would love to ask you what are some of the favorite things you've recently consumed or purchased that you would like to share with the audience I would say in terms of like things that I rely on to structure and keep me engaged and productive I spend a fair amount of time tracking metabolic features on an app called chronometer it's one of these Acro like MyFitnessPal et cetera something in that neighborhood I find super useful because humans are really bad at estimating like how many calories or what amount of fat or that kind of stuff just as an educational tool to check I do a lot of metabolic biohacking to support the brain and one of the tools that I use a lot is that one chronometer I also tend to do a lot of similar for similar reasons you use a tool a little piece of Hardware called asense which I actually have Within Reach so biosense is a little Ketone meter for the breath and since it's the breath not the blood your a it's easier to measure a lot and B it's getting Downstream measurements not the effect of what you just ate but it's more about the effect of all the lifestyle factors that will shift your body in and out of metabolic modes so I use it as this indirect Downstream measurement of several days of behavior if you will trending in the right direction then I really rely on other biohacking devices like an aura ring and things and I tend to integrate all that information back into chronometer so chronometer Aggregates not just my diet and stuff and as I make notes of exercise but my sleep information gets pulled in and my acetone from my breath from the biosense if it's pulled in so I end up with a nice little dashboard there so I guess that's really a three for one depending how you count so amazing yeah I will make sure it's a link to all of these things here in the show notes I want to go over some real interesting stuff with you here speaking of biohacking I want to go over that with you and talk about how we can improve the health of our brain and optimize our brain and performance at work since you kick things off here with your tools here as someone who is very interested in biohacking what got it what got you into buy hacking as you were just mentioning how you're using your metabolic data to improve your brain health as well yeah I guess professionally I can there's a jumping off point where I moved into the academic I just moved from the academic into the entrepreneurial world and started doing things in biohacking that would probably be when I helped found a true brain with Chris Thompson which is a nootropic company that produced a sort of nice entry point for folks and then has a nice at this point they have a nice product that is a liquid nootropic people enjoy for productivity boost has caffeine and some other stuff in it but those of us that are significant biohackers may have always been such a little kid trying to figure out how things work take things apart when we're growing up the kind of person has to understand how things are constructed in terms of the brain in a brain focused biohacking you know I spent a good solid 10 11 12 years working in inpatient psych and in acute psych acute developmental disability residential facilities and things before grad school and just saw a huge amount of human variability across different aspects of development injury suffering everything from Psychiatric to drug abuse to aging to childhood development stuff but just across the board and was pretty impressed by the variability and was pretty non-plussed by how much change we were able to support people weren't able to do very much for instance in autism centers or even in drug abuse center places dual diagnosis well they had a lot of anxiety and depression and drug abuse they weren't very effective at doing a lot so I saw a lot of human suffering and a lot of people at the edge of their resources and Edge of their stability their resilience their crises Etc and I was working at a psychiatric hospital in Massachusetts which was probably among the most violent places in the country that did inpatient lock facility kind of stuff and I was working there for about a year or two and I got injured pretty significantly and could not do the work I'd been doing which is a Hands-On kind of role and spent a couple years instead working with more of a case management working more on the younger and older populations there and over that time so because of the injuries wasn't able to keep engaged in the same way and this was a while ago and there was a health care sort of contraction broadly the economy was Contracting anyways at that point but the cost I worked for went out of business and I could not just take the experience I had and go lateral because I had been promoted above my degree ability a mix of being injured and having good skills with children I was doing case management work I wasn't in a degree for essentially unless I was supervised by somebody who had the right licensure so couldn't just transfer my job to the next psych hospital or whatever and ended up going to high tech and leading Human Services for a few years and get back to that to that geekery and doing some data work and a bunch of like high level integration stuff that was around when the tech bubble was correcting as well and that combined with missing working for Human Services I went and found a place that did autism where work not too far from where I was living and they did neurofeedback I was looking for that particular technology as in this thing I'd heard about this bio feedback on the brain stuff and I walked in there hoping to get like an observational internship for a few months and walked out with a part-time job and before I knew it I was working there full time and learning all this stuff and a couple years later I basically decided I had to go back to grad school because of all the stuff I was seeing my prior experience told me that things like autism and ADHD and developmental challenges and seizures and migraines and major drug abuse and all that stuff was just non-tractable at least with our tools that we had accessible for folks but working here I was seeing change I was seeing a lot of change a lot of improvements and things like attention resources and sensory integration and huge changes in seizures and migraines and brain fog and just Global features of brain that I had been working with for a long time and seeing lots of suffering and a lot of movement and here I've seen a lot of movement so after working there for a couple years it forced me to go back to grad school and figure out what the heck was happening because at this stage of the game in the field of neurofeedback this was in the around 2000 2001 or two or something 20 years ago the field was not new it was at that point 30 40 years old it was discovered in the mid 60s or early 60s or even earlier potentially based on what definition you use but uh at that time there's three or four different major schools of thought about what we were doing to the brain when we created these change what the best way was to go after assessing a brain making the chain Etc and the schools of thought were in pretty significant opposition that were not reconcilable and there was a lot of vitriol people fighting in their little tiny Niche area of the marketplace around mental health really fighting with each other about how this stuff works and nasty diatribes on news groups and things back this thing we used to have called news groups on the internet and so after years of that I was like wait a minute we have lion men and elephants here people have a piece of it no people describing it they're sure they know the answer no one has any clue what they're doing and yet all three or four of these schools of thought that all claim they have the right answer they're all getting better results on brains than traditional mental health Psychiatry medicine what's going on how can they not write they're not reconcilable and yet they're all able to help ADHD or trauma or anxiety or sleep issues or seizures or whatever what's going on here so that put me on a path of trying to figure out the mechanisms of neurofeedback how the brain can be pushed around essentially or trained or encouraged to move using an outside stimulus using the using Loop a computerized feedback loop so in the case of just to break down the operational if you wanted to train the brain using biofeedback you might train a resource or a circuit that was represented by a couple different brain waves or little modules the brain can activate there's a part of the brain for instance on the right hand side it helps us know for paying attention so it's a great one to go after for executive function which scaffolds productivity because you're not being disinhibited or distracted you can stay on task and know what is Task appropriate and select your attention in the right direction and resist things that would distract you call that inhibitory tone basically so you aren't like squirrel you can you know move in One Direction that's really scaffolded by a part of the brain the right motor cortex and it does its job using beta waves this mid frequency beta wave called SMR or sensory motor Rhythm if you've seen a cat in a windowsill you've seen SMR it's that like will still body but laser-like Focus motorically or physically inhibited but mentally very poised very ready is the SMR the sensory motor Rhythm State and cats do a lot of this humans do it moment to moment when we need to pump the brakes or stay asleep or not go squirrel or something there's a bunch of things we use it for so if you stuck a wire on that part of the head and then a couple ear Clips to measure in comparison to and measure the amount of that SMR wave that beta wave moment to moment and the amount of theta which is like a lubrication frequency lets things happen measure it moment to moment and whenever your brain happen to make a little more SMR a little less Theta the computer would go oh good job brain and make something happen so a little car starts to move or your puzzle pieces fill in or your Pac-Man starts to eat some dots the brain says oh hey wait stop cool I like stuff and a few seconds later it happens to move in the wrong direction the Theta goes back up and the SMR goes down and the car slows down and the Pac-Man stalls the puzzle pieces stop filling in the brain goes Hey where's my stuff and a few seconds later it happens to move in the right direction and the Applause resume so this is basically operant conditioning we move the goal posts every few seconds so we're encouraging a trend to be rewarded not just an event but you can't control your brain waves you can't actually feel them pretty much so you're like why is this stupid animation the screen stopping this is boring I'm like okay yeah but after two or three sessions of it your brain says huh I was getting more information from the outside world when I dropped my Theta and brought my Beta up I'm gonna do that and if you like decide to wash your dishes you'll suddenly discover they're done or you ask your kid take the trash out they get up and do it and you're like whoa that was weird because suddenly the mind is more organized and it can execute and move to the next task without the Theta getting in the way so you can go after these resources and you can create essentially a scaffolding for productivity and from the context of this audience the show productivity is not so much about what is being done yes having vision for having structure to get there breaking things into tasks all that classic stuff is really important I look at productivity it wants to be productive no one wants to be lazy laziness is not a thing by itself necessarily there's always reasons for stuff getting in the way is it are you distractible is it anxiety are you poorly rested is there some like resistance because of the relationships you have to the task because of who's assigned it there's a thousand reasons we can have crappy execution on something and I look at most things in the brain most things that I used to think about years ago inpatient Etc thinking in a psychiatric sense now I think about his resources and you can see a lot of them when you look at a brain map which is the tool we use for neurofeedback and you can help people go after the resources so if they're distractible if they have ADHD or they're a squirrel all the time can't stand task you can measure that in the brain you can measure that in their performance you can train that frequency up for a while might take 20 30 40 sessions might take a two three months but along that time you're feeling changes happen you're getting executive function sleep stress changes and generally in a three-month course of neurofeedback about 40 sessions people will make about two standard deviations on a bell curve of executive function measurements and performance and on the corresponding brain activity so to he and then they also feel it so there's a huge sort of convergence of all the data towards whoa things are different and brain Maps don't change on their owns when you get a change of that magnitude and a performance change of that magnitude across a few months I'm seeing it go in a linear way it's a pretty robust phenomena so you can think of the whole field of neurofeedback like this personal training thing but to give you a long-winded answer I got very excited by seeing people being able to take control of stuff so I had to dig in and decompose and unpack the field a little bit and create a different version of it yeah I love it I want to unpack some things that you said there so I spend about maybe 10 15 hours a week talking to customers clients people that we work with just to get an idea of what people are dealing with and some of the things I've heard over the years that's I think has been an interesting trend is stuff like I have brain fog or I can't focus or I can't concentrate or I'm now diagnosed with ADHD which is something that maybe 10 15 years ago was not that common what is your take on all of these things is that like a real thing that's happening to people's brains what's causing it what's the trend you're seeing there yeah people are definitely experiencing increased performance difficulties these days I think especially with a pandemic there's an awful lot of increased stress dysregulation of sleep and other habits whether things are actual diagnostic labels and whether there's more ADHD or more autism or whatever around these days that's an open question that's a bit of a nuanced discussion what I would say is it doesn't matter a whole lot what you call stuff what matters is what you're experiencing and what you want to experience so you don't have to approach the brain and that's really why I use tools like brain mapping is I don't approach the brains my diagnostic perspective of oh here's what's wrong with you I'll be like hey here's how different you are than the average person your age and your performance ah here's some opportunities to these things you care about okay great let's go after them when it comes to your brain it's more like hey here's how weird you are people are weird good job be weird but now let's walk through all the things in all the ways in which are most unusual the resources the circuits let's figure out if some of these things are actually in the way if they are okay let's change it it's not hard to change your brain believe it or not it's only hard to understand brains so if someone comes in with an icy I would say every month I probably see about 30 or 40 people who come in with ADHD diagnoses for their first brain map let's just say get one one person a day just on average who is uh I have a ADHD diagnosis someone just gave it to me my kid just got it I've had it for 10 years whatever half the time maybe more when you look at the brain you don't see ADHD anxiety you might see trauma you often see a mix of crappy sleep speed of processing issues and stress response stuff all fighting so what you're getting is a brittle reactive person being labeled as hyperactive because there are sports car driving with the e-brake engage and their foot on the floor and every little thing they have to dodge around makes them scoot across the highway all at once because they're running at one speed grinding through fatigue you see a lot of that and ADHD itself the which is actually a poor management of that SMR frequency I mentioned earlier that column cat like literally a column cat in a windowsill like literally is exhibiting the opposite of ADHD ADHD is a high good beta tone and reduce and pumping the brakes on Theta resisting Theta suppressing it when you want to that's what cats are doing in that mode and humans have ADHD and can't sit still that rhetorically disinhibited state it's a high Theta State usually in smr's Weak relative to it we also call SMR sleep spindles and humans it's the thing that fires to keep you asleep when you hear a car go by don't need to wake up so ADHD almost always comes along with a sleep problem so you tend to get a mix of these features of executive function sleep regulation stress response both because of life being difficult and because of compensatory strategies because you're pushing your brain through fatigue and because you're gifted and a little on edge et cetera et cetera et cetera so very rapidly the labeling of a problem starts to drop away from being meaningful unless you're trying to treat it a certain way but I'm trying to give people an understanding of their brain by showing them performance by showing them physiology and then modeling what's going on with them and then agency to go after it and iteratively change so typically I'm taking the label if they have one dropping below it to find the mechanisms and resources they care about ways to measure them ways to understand how they operate for them people generally prioritize what they want to change at that point and I build some neurofeedback plans mostly in other life hacks biohacking stuff to create change and then rinse and repeats that's personal training as a metaphor is the stuff we do basically but brains are weirder than bodies a lot weirder so a lot more different across people so it's a lot more of a mysterious space and trying to mostly get out of that landscape of we have to go to the expert to get the right answer and that's what a diagnosis is if you go to your psychologist psychiatrist whatever and get a diagnosis or any doctor for any problem or difficulty or symptom or goal you have you could diagnosis or a prescription part and parcel of that relationship is the assumption that there's value in them being right accurate they have the right Med the right diagnosis the right they have the right answer for you so if you want answers you go see doctors if you want questions come see scientists we are here to unpack stuff so that so personal trainers in the gym same thing look over your bone density scan and your strength assessment and maybe look at your goals and try to find ways to build resources to get you to your goals case the brain sometimes goals are suffering driven a lot a lot more perhaps maybe PT is a suffering or OT in the gym is a suffering focused or alleviation version but you can also Peak Performance stuff in the gym just like you can do for the brain so anyways yeah that's really fascinating because I know one thing that a lot of people do here in Austin Austin's a hub of health and wellness and I'm surrounded by people all the time who are interested in improving their health and wellness and one of the things that people do here is they do have brain skin where they measure the different brain waves and then they can see if it's like overheated or it's stressed out or if it's inflamed can you describe to a person what that process is like and why people do it and how it's useful yeah so there's there's a couple different ways to do this and some are better than others honestly and in the space of biohacking just a as an aside there's a certain amount of bunkery quackery nonsense and snake oil and some of the assessment tools out there especially if they have the word brain attached to them can become such rapidly so I would encourage folks to make sure things pass a sniff test make sure the people you're working with can explain what they're doing be legitimate that kind of stuff and one big flag if the word Quantum is attached to something just walk away generally there are some things in the neuropathic world that are not really neurofeedback that are like farcical devices they're versions of What's called the Rife machine and Quantum biofeedback and stuff like that just horrible predatory practitioners and very expensive and they do absolutely nothing basically work to the wise unless you're in a physics lab the word Quantum means someone's trying to take your money basically it's a big red flag but the more legit version of brain mapping or assessments is called quantitative EEG or qeeg there's many ways you can do a brain scan Dr Ayman the amen centers does spect scanning which is near infrared spectroscopy it's also quite interesting quite useful for some reasons you can do MRIs you can do x-rays you can do a three-dimensional x-rays we call CT scans essentially they'll get slices it's all kinds of pet scans and positron emission tomography where you tag oxygen or glucose with radioactivity and measure stuff it's all different reasons you might measure and different types of neuroimaging are good at picking up different things different difficulties different types of tissue Etc what we use at Peak brain and what we mostly use in the field of neurofeedback for Imaging is something called EEG or electricity and it's a passive way of measuring you don't have to get into the brain at all so in the case of doing a brain map we'll put a cap on your head and squirt it full of gel at about 20 different points and measure the electricity your brain is making moment to moment so we always do two things we always first do an attention test that is ridiculously boring you'll hate me just a little bit sometimes after the attention test is done because you boreated tears for 20 minutes and have you click on the mouse for some things that pop up and resist other things and see how you fall over in your performance so a little 25 minute bore you to tears attention test and then we put a cap on your head squirt it full of gel have you sit still for about 10 minutes size closed and 10 minutes eyes open and that's the assessment the physiology measurements and the one performance measurement those things are then compared to a normative database that is age matched heavily clean to be some arbitrarily average and you look for things that stick up against that on a bell curve and in the performance you end up with about 14 or 15 different features so not just ADHD but inattention impulsivity auditory versus visual short little transient errors versus long-term trends reaction times error proneness repetitiveness all kinds of stuff gets teased apart so much more granular than anything you would call ADHD and in fact if you have ADHD you'll trip the flag on this test that says you have difficulty with your attention but you'll also trip it with lots of mold exposure or coveted brain fog or concussion or major anxiety and sleep issues making so you can't focus and worry about stuff that's happening whenever you get distracted so you don't know why someone has executive function issues and the labeling as such historically in the manual as used by psychologists is a symptom driven label not a mechanism or a physiology driven label and yet you can look at the physiology for classic phenomena like ADHD and spot what's going on in classic populations of idiotic and kids with ADHD you can see it by looking at the brain it's really obvious G mapping or qeeg grabs a baseline from you and then does population level analysis of these averages these amounts distribution connectivity patterns speeds Etc of brain waves and then does a sort of it's called a phenotype exploration but you look at the different unusual features people are weird and so you can see the Big Rich clubs the rich hubs of the cortex the top of the brains called the cortex the bark and it's mostly where a lot of the thinking happens a lot of the information processing that we're aware of happens is in the top of the brain huge sheet of tissue that's all folded up and squished into the top of the brain and there's big Network within the cortex to connect Parts the cortex and other parts of the brain that are essentially major networks and they're called the rich clubs or Rich hubs and they include things that are people are often aware of these days called the default mode Network which is like your awareness of the self what you're thinking about in the outside world or the salience network which is what's important to pay attention to the executive function Network controlling your attention in real time and selecting from among competing different things you might want to do in the moment like you step out into traffic across the street from a stop a walk sign flashes at the same time a car comes around the turn the corner it's an executive conflict to select from two different things for instance versus salience knowing you should pay attention to the car versus default mode Network playing the song in your head and replaying the argument with your friend at the same time you're having some Shame about it at the same time you're remembering that you might want to evaluate the environment around you for safety so you can see these networks to some extent these big giant clubs you can also see the frontal lobe areas you can see some Association and sensory areas you don't always know what they mean but I can look at your brain and go oh you're unusual hey this part of the brain might be this so those clubs those Rich hubs as big networks are somewhat representative across people for example a lot of the high performers and I bet this show has people who fit this category a lot of high performers have a touch of anxiety there's a certain flavor of Brilliance that produces both the CEO and the guy with OCD or features of it the mind when you have sub acute or non-problematic versions of OCD then you perseverate your songs in your head you bite your nails your little particular a little obsessive when that cramps up into super high gear it becomes actual features of OCD or Tourette's or ticks they're all the same circuit there's a circuit in the front midline of the head called the anterior cingulate and its job is to switch your focus around and help you remember what you're thinking about so if it's doing its job you walk into the store and go yeah I'm here for eggs grab the eggs didn't forget your wallet because you were thinking about it like you you operate in terms of focusing on what you have to focus on then you move on if the anterior cingulate gets stuck in beta waves and can't produce Alpha a neutral frequency then it selects the same thing to think about it again and again that's the experience of ocd's preservative or stock thoughts or maybe if a Time onto Theta there you can't stop behavior from doing the same thing again and again and now you find yourself biting your nails every two seconds or some are picking a thread or something not a pathological thing per se it's the same circuit that gets cramped up we all have one and the we have one on the back middle these are parts of the default mode Network the cingulates but we have one in the back middle called the posterior cingulate whose job it is to watch the world around you so if I saw your posterior was hot I might be like oh my friend your posterior cingula it's kind of making a lot of beta that might mean your brain's kind of caught in this watch the road kind of evaluation mode and we call that rumination where you have learned the world is not especially safe or predictable and your brain's always looking for the possibility of danger so I wouldn't know if that was true for you but I would know it's plausible for you and if you're like oh yeah I experienced some activation I have some trouble we'll activate it can't stop worrying ah I mean oh that's unfortunate let's go after it let's exercise that beta down bring the alpha up and give you an actual experience of going ah I'm gonna put down that threat sensitivity right now I'd rather not worry right now and have a voluntary control over putting down intrusive worried thoughts for instance for the cingulants or behind the right ear the sensory world coming in or a thousand other things you could decide to tune because they were important to you so how would the process look like if you wanted to let's say rewire your brain in that sense is it a combination of sleeping more eating differently doing brain exercises I think everyone has heard that if you want to keep your brain healthy do Sudoku puzzles or something every day right like how does that process actually work in terms of if you do a scan you go yeah these things are off like how do we retrain this yeah for me for Peak brain um neurofeedback is the heavy lifter and we'll make rapid and dramatic change in a lot of things but there's an awful lot of stuff you can and probably should do that isn't neurofeedback to optimize brain health and to encourage more rapid transformation when you're trying to make some to that end we do a fair amount of coaching with clients around aspects of sleep especially because sleep regulation in the Circadian cues that throw off sleep regulation which we're often pretty bad at screening out so to speak in the Western World those cues will really support lots of me so I'm a big fan basically of circadian support from a base basic life support to be sleeping but also at the right time with right cues just like nutrition stuff just like exercise stuff exercise as well as meditation we encourage a lot of meditation and mindfulness practices for all of these things what we do is we meet every individual client where they are and talk about a the big points of suffering and stuff that might make sense to try in terms of the different interventions that are outside the scope of neural feedback perhaps also clients generally have things they are interested in in manipulating they're interested in going certain ways with diet or body training or fasting or meditation or certain nootropics or supplements or how can there be vitamins off their methylation status or are they they're really into Hyperbaric medicine and they're really into saunas and ice bath so they're really into red light therapy or whatever so I'm not going to tell like a lifelong vegan they have to go carnivore when they ask what to do nutritionally if they're trying to do pro-health anti-aging anti-brain injury stuff I might have them do narrow feeding windows and try to drop some of the calories they can generate ketones but somebody who's got a different lifestyle set of tools they want to work with there are no gurus in this space it's personal training this is why I use things like the biosense for my acetone is because I don't want to listen to the keto gurus say I did that for decades reading this book and that book and going wait how many carbs can I have oh my God I had one more gram of carb I must be out of ketosis no just teach your body learn your body and manage your body it's like learning to drive the car with all the buttons and all the levers and get all the extra power mode when you can this morning I woke up and I had acetone levels of 0.5 which sorry five which is equivalent to blood levels of butyrate of five millimoles that's decent ketosis and I had a pint of ice cream and at 7 30 last night for dessert after having a sandwich that included sourdough bread for dinner I had carbs like I had a significant amount of carbs yesterday and a pound of red cherries actually yesterday I had a higher protein earlier meal but I had a lot of carbs a couple hundred grams of carb yesterday and I woke up in ketosis and I'm being I'll be in deeper ketosis later on today and even deeper tomorrow because tomorrow I'm doing all basically no carb but you learn to manipulate these things not listen to keto gurus who would never believe you can have 200 grams of carbs and be in ketosis the next morning because you generally can't unless you are able to maintain the edge of flexibility normally if you eat carbs routinely you get blunted to that effect and you just stay some Ketone generation and eventually High insulin high blood sugar that way lies metabolic ruin aging death all kinds of stuff definitely drops in performance but you can hack that system you can learn the tools and so when someone comes to me it's like oh I'm really into I gotta hit the stage for a bodybuilding show or I gotta hit a fastball I can't react fast enough to anything already miles an hour or God I'm freezing up trying to give my red carpet speeches now when the paparazzi is in front of me I'm having anxiety attacks or oh my kids having too many seizures now the seizures went way up after they got covered what's happening or my nonverbal kid is stimming again oh my gosh what can we help them the answer is always let's get in there and look at it and iterate and find tools and every person's needs are so different most neurofeedback practices and most biohacking wellness centers tend to focus on narrow populations I know a lot of your issuance in Austin who have Wellness practices an awful lot of my friends or have moved from LA to Austin and have centers that have Fitness and red light and kettlebells and all kinds of Awesome biohacks and every individual comes in there ideally does an individualized approach and there's really no difference when it comes to brain training but for me the high level is map the brain and then do neurofeedback roughly half an hour or three times a week map the brain again every other month and you can see changes and then we have them report every day what they're noticing uh twice a day in surveys and tracking and there's a whole dashboard we created for clients to help basically helping them biohack it's like a personal trainer log they're keeping track of but for each client there may be additional stuff for someone it's not drinking is the big deal if someone else is producing seizure or someone else it's I'm moving out of executive mode and into receptive attention mode when they're at home so their wife doesn't think there's much of a jerk anymore because they're just being a jerk when they got home and keep being the boss or whatever these a thousand goals so I would say that uh there's a lot we can do sleep is almost always something we should be managing for circadian reasons and general brain health reasons metabolic biohacking stuff is almost always something to think about maybe acutely in the short term for brain injuries or performance or postcode brain maybe the long term for anti-aging because all the diseases of Aging are metabolic diseases essentially most forms of dementia most forms of cancer diabetes Etc are metabolically kerosene tossed on a fire causing the systems to fall over that really truly infectious or disease processes that you fight against the same way as you do other external things it's the system falling over its regulatory stability and just like you can take someone who's now we know some is type 2 diabetic and fast them from a high protein and get people with no insulin to start regenerating beta islet cells in the pancreas and producing micro amounts of insulin you can do some of the same stuff with someone who's got a brain that's really thrown off and the brain is more flexible it brings weirder than bodies but it's also way more flexible than bodies think about how much change you can get in the gym in three months with a trainer you can do more with regards to transforming your brain generally so if there's a way to zoom out um what would you say are some best practices if people want to improve their overall brain health because I get that everyone is going to be different obviously right sure but are there like maybe three four five things you would recommend that everyone should be doing yeah I have a handful of things I like to recommend that are a mix of a circadian hacks will basically reinforce the signaling in a couple of different ways now there's many things many exogenous or outside world cues that the brain uses for timing for knowing what time of day it is and it integrates those things and tends to create a paltip within the brain that then Cascades down and resets a bunch of clocks that aren't really running alongside each other in any time locked way and the better you are getting into good circadian entrainment in some ways the better you are at a lot of things the most efficient sleep the most efficient stress the most efficient body comp all kinds of stuff so I focus on a bunch of activities adjunctively to neurofeedback that will often get people enough of the tools they need to get that stability back in play for the Circadian systems and they include the big three are don't eat before bed that's the biggest one actually because the Circadian system the biggest exogenous Q is not white it's when you eat not light at all lights are very weak for Katie and trainer and evening light and stuff is just not that interesting in terms of color and blue boxing classes I think are mostly nonsense bright lights in the evening do something but evening light is not a big deal for circadian so eating huge cue for the body so don't eat for a few hours before bed second rule get up early the time to sleep in is the beginning of the night not the end of the night so morning rise time is way more important for circadian support and for Sleep regulation than when you go to bed third rule before you eat in the morning get up and do something move for 15-20 minutes low intensity exercise don't go weight lifting don't go hit your kettlebells first thing in the morning don't drive up cortisol don't drive up glycogen with hardcore exercise or steady state exercise because that's what woke you up circadian signals release cortisol cortisol squeezes your liver the liver feeds you breakfast so suddenly cortisol glycogen are high you're Wide Awake you've got a good hour or two of energy to burn off do some yoga go for a walk bring your partner a cup of coffee from the place a block away burn off some energy don't move from the bed to the couch or the bed to the desk or The Breakfast Table and start taking energy working that energy flux cause a signal so in order of importance fast before bed get up early and move and when I say early I mean within one hour of Sunrise there is a light cue that matters the only like you that's very strong there's a nucleus behind the optic crossing of the optic nerve called the optic chiasm there's a nuclei just above it called the suprachiasmatic nucleus the scn and mostly what it does is it watches the retina and it helps understand the color of light coming in but it's really only tripped by the color of light in the first one hour when the sun's higher in the sky the temperature the color of the light changes and too much of that color is reflected back out into the void of space and it's very weak entrainment for light after that so fast for bed get up early go outside get a walk get some Morning Light um get that little energy flux going when you're first moving then bonus tip move your hardcore stuff to the afternoon your resistance training your kettlebells your whatever to the afternoon or early evening because your cortisol is at its lowest in a circadian sense and your cardiac output is at its highest in a true sense so then every pump will be big and strong and move a lot of blood and if you do jack up cortisol briefly because you hit the weight super hard raw you feel it it mobilizes a little fat it burns off and goes down again it doesn't cause cortisol resistance or insulin resistance or glycogen resistance essentially in the morning because you worked out too hard first thing so those are the metabolic biohacking tricks that I like and then within that I often layer in depending on the person this has to be individualized but fasting is a super useful tool as well because with nutrition or energy because some of these circadian roles as I'm describing are energy flux management rules but you can think about energy in terms of food and you can partition or manipulate the macronutrients the amounts or the timing and those three things create different signals and we'll play with leptin insulin mtor Etc so I often help people figure out a more circadian appropriate biohacking appropriate aging appropriate strategy for their goals with regards to those three features of time caloric restriction or macronutrient partitioning because those will also create secondary effects that feed back into the regulation the last thing I want to ask you about is your wearables so wearables are becoming a hot thing personally I'm a big fan of the aura ring myself I've had one for the last two and a half years probably going to upgrade to version three at some point because I like it that much yeah that's what I have I have the three it's all right you don't see any I've created but I don't notice any difference yeah I don't think there's any urgency to upgrade FYI yeah I hope the software the pricing's not quite as good yeah yeah exactly so speaking of wearables I saw you earlier mentioned I believe the biosense is that what it was yeah the biosense we use a peak brain is a coupon Peak brain 20 I think for that but this is a breath meter for acetone I use an aura ring the EEG devices we use for hum training and for Office training are basically wearables as well so we have you know little wires you can stick on we've also got infrared headbands you can use this is another small EEG wearable is a bit of exaggeration but you clip it to yourself and then put three wires on and do your brain training a lot of consumer wearables in the brain space are nonsense it's really hard to spend a couple hundred bucks and not have not lose your money on something that's just bunk honestly so don't get into the small wearables that are for your head that's important to do something even the Sleep trackers and I do love my aura ring even the Sleep trackers are very imperfect and do not do a lot of what you would think they do I wore a forearm full on both sides of sleep hackers for several months couple years ago of all the sleep trackers just to get a sense because all my clients were like oh my sick doctor says this and this says this and this says this and I didn't know what to make of all the different things people were telling me so I had to get a first person perspective on what they said for a while but with sleep tracker is the most important thing for you and for everyone probably look at the Deep Sleep Numbers which are decent because HRV is a decent measure for that and Total Sleep ignore completely ignore pretend it's a made-up number the measurement of REM it is not a real number on most of these slick trackers is completely invalid perhaps more meaningful more meaningfully REM doesn't Flex day to day really not the same way that other things do like total amounts of sleep or deep sleep so if your RAM is shorted significantly or it's disrupted significantly for a few days or weeks you rapidly lose your mind like you literally become psychotic and dysregulated and develop a thought disorder if you got issues with the REM you got bigger problems the REM is not the thing you care about and so don't worry about it deep sleep will though will Flex based on stress amount of sleep amount of energy when you eat exercise all kinds of stuff it will definitely Flex in response tonight to that so look at your deep sleep and husband that sucker get it to be 20 25 of your total sleep get enough sleep and then play with the circadian rhythms and those things will often give many people a nice floor to then build some pretty good performance gains on top of are there any other things you look at when you look at your aura ring and does it shape somehow your day some in someone's shape no I just look at deep sleep I just look at Total Sleep that's it that is it is just not and the aura is the best of all the options the or and the whoop I think are the probably the top ones and I recommend the whoop when folks are serious athletes for the coaching ability and the broader data sets but the newer one especially is very little you aren't getting in the new auras um with body temperature and some other metrics in there there's some spo2 stuff even though they're trying to implement now but I don't think that the do everything devices or do everything I think that heart rate variability is a decent measure for deep sleep and unless you're going to measure the only way to get better measurements of sleep staging is you need multiple things you need this kind of stuff heart rate variability you also need actography actually movements like the biosense guys who do really interesting sets of sleep trackers their main kit has a wrist strap but also an ankle tab so you can do actograph your movement and get an extra limb involved and get much better measurements of a light versus deep sleep really elegant to offer that in a consumer product big fans of the guys at bio strap big fans even though I'm not quite as trusting right now of the newest I haven't tested the quality of the newest tracker they have but we have to it's like a body fat scale in your gym in your bathroom yeah it's got a number on it and you want the number to move in a certain direction you're happy when it does it means something but the absolute number doesn't really mean much and the fluctuating number a little bit day to day doesn't all might just be how much quality you had that day and you know how or have you dehydrated a little bit more in that day so I wouldn't be too attached to thinking of the wearables as being the Quantified softwareables aren't that accurate and I also don't think that you in for many of us I don't think you need to measure blood-based blood sugar I think measuring insulin levels might be better that's a hard thing to do and you can't do it with wearables unless you have significant blood sugar issues I don't think you need to wear a blood sugar wearable or even do finger sticks and if you can produce ketones in the breath then you don't have high insulin or high blood sugar so I like to find a flag or a metric that I know that I can operate within within some sense of range and if I happen to go on one side of it and things get tripped oh I crashed my ketones a few Mornings in a row oh I guess I better back off the carbs instead of going oh my God my keto Guru said if I have more than 65 grams of carbs I'll never hit ketosis again don't be attached to that don't there are no gurus there aren't people that are absolutely right for you so you got to learn the system and that's why I like these sorts of tools just like the aura ring deep sleep symmetric that I keep track of and I know like I I I can quantify or I can gauge my good and bad habits a bit I haven't been sleeping as much the past week as I want to my ordering gave me four hours and 20 minutes of sleep last night but I got almost 100 minutes or something of deep sleep anyways so I'm feeling fine today and had I got eight hours of sleep and no deep sleep I'd be horrible it's predictive I often use sleep trackers often with adolescents I have their parents use them and have them do psychoeducational stuff gamify it reward them for good sleep numbers and draw their attention gently the fact they might be a jerk tonight because they have no deep sleep in their sleep track when they first wake up et cetera et cetera and gamify the sense of control over it anyways a big fan of sleep tracking and hacking as well as the macro hacking stuff yeah there's really two pieces that have to be added into the brain performance piece yeah that's amazing Dr Hill thank you so much for all this information and the Simplicity of things people can do I think that's always so important and if people want to find out more about you working with you your company any resources that you have like where should people go sure we'll definitely give you guys a discount for brain mapping at our local centers we have offices in New York City St Louis La Orange County and a couple overseas but we also work with clients all over the world that are visiting offices so just come to one of our websites or socials and hit us up it's at Peak brain Institute it's the website.com and then the socials are all Peak brain La my own personal social Andrea Hill PhD is mostly full of baked goods so if you want to see baked Goods that's where you go um but yeah if you like to do some work with your brain and the technical stuff we certainly coach on the more lifestyle factors we have mindfulness groups every week we offer mostly we need neurofeedback so if you're near an office you have a nice discount Club fee through the show that you can get you unlimited brain Maps if you're not near an office you still have a discount and let us know how you can support your brain health and goals and we'll talk to each individual about that as we need to amazing thank you thank you sir nice to meet you face to face and be back on show in this later iteration it's great