A neuroscientist explains how you can optimize your brain for health and focus. He also covers: ▪ The warning signs to look for that your brain health is in decline ▪ The supplements to consider for optimal brain health ▪ How to alleviate stress in your life And we cover so much more! You can find links to everything that we share in the show notes by going to theproductivityshow.com/430.
Episode Summary
I sat down with Han on Asian Efficiency's Productivity Show to talk about training your brain for focus, sleep, and performance. Watch the original conversation. What follows is drawn from that discussion, in my own words.
How does brain training actually change focus?
I run Peak Brain Institute, and I came to this work after more than a decade in inpatient psych, acute developmental disability residential facilities, and dual-diagnosis settings. I saw enormous human variability and very little movement using the tools we had. Then I walked into a clinic doing neurofeedback for autism, expecting an observational internship, and walked out with a job. Within two years I went back to grad school because I was watching changes I had been told were not possible. Seizures, migraines, brain fog, attention, sensory integration, all moving.
Here is the operation of neurofeedback in plain terms. There is a part of the right motor cortex that helps you stay on task. It does its job using a mid-frequency beta wave called SMR, sensorimotor rhythm. If you have watched a cat poised in a windowsill, motorically still but mentally ready, you have seen SMR. We humans use it to pump the brakes, to stay asleep when a car passes outside, to resist going "squirrel."
Put a sensor over that part of the head and a couple of ear clips to compare against. Measure how much SMR you make moment to moment, and how much theta, which behaves like a lubrication frequency that lets things slip. When your brain happens to make a little more SMR and a little less theta, the computer rewards it. A car moves. A Pac-Man eats dots. Drift the wrong way and the reward stalls. This is operant conditioning, and we move the goalposts every few seconds to reward a trend rather than a single event.
You cannot feel your brainwaves, so the first few sessions feel pointless. Then your brain notices it gets more information from the world when it drops theta and lifts beta, and it starts doing that on its own. You go to wash the dishes and discover they are already done. The mind got more organized and could execute and move to the next task.
In a roughly three-month course of about 40 sessions, people typically gain around two standard deviations on executive function measures and on the corresponding brain activity, and they feel it. Brain maps do not shift on their own. When physiology, performance, and self-report all converge on change of that size in a linear way, that is a strong signal. If you want the deeper background, I cover it in Does Neurofeedback Work for ADHD? and the SMR neurofeedback primer.
Why does it feel like everyone has brain fog or ADHD now?
People are genuinely struggling with cognitive performance more than they were. The pandemic dumped stress and sleep dysregulation on top of habits we were already bad at protecting. Whether there is more actual ADHD or autism in the population is a separate, complicated question, and it matters less than people think.
What matters is what you are experiencing and what you want to experience instead. I see about 30 to 40 people a month who arrive with a fresh ADHD diagnosis for their first brain map. Half the time or more, when I look at the brain, I do not see ADHD. I see a mix of poor sleep, speed-of-processing issues, and an overcharged stress response, all fighting each other. What you get is a brittle, reactive person being labeled hyperactive because they are driving a sports car with the e-brake engaged and a foot on the floor, dodging across the highway because they run at one speed and grind through fatigue.
Actual ADHD is poor management of that SMR frequency. The cat in the windowsill is the opposite of ADHD. The ADHD state is high theta with weak relative SMR, a rhetorically disinhibited brain that cannot sit still. We also call SMR sleep spindles, the activity that keeps you asleep when a car goes by. That is why ADHD almost always travels with a sleep problem. For the brain-fog version specifically, see Biohacking Brain Fog, and for stuck-loop patterns, Biohacking OCD.
I am not in the business of handing you a label. I show you your physiology and your performance, model what is going on, and hand you the agency to go after it. If you want answers, see a doctor. If you want questions, come see a scientist.
What does a real brain scan show, and which ones are junk?
Before the useful part, a warning about the bunk. Biohacking has real quackery in it, and tools with the word "brain" attached go bad fast. One reliable filter: if the word "Quantum" is attached to a device, walk away. The Rife-machine and "quantum biofeedback" gadgets do nothing and cost a fortune. Unless you are standing in a physics lab, "Quantum" usually means someone is reaching for your wallet.
The legitimate version is quantitative EEG, or qEEG. EEG measures the electricity your brain makes, passively, from outside the head. We put a cap on, fill about 20 points with gel, and record. We always do two things. First, a deliberately boring 25-minute attention test where you click on some targets and resist others, so we can watch your performance fall over time. Then 10 minutes eyes closed and 10 minutes eyes open of resting physiology.
We compare all of it to an age-matched normative database and look for what sticks up on the bell curve. The performance test alone breaks out about 14 or 15 features: inattention, impulsivity, auditory versus visual errors, transient errors versus long-term trends, reaction times, error-proneness, repetitiveness. Far more granular than "ADHD." And the catch: you will trip the attention flag with mold exposure, with post-COVID brain fog, with concussion, with major anxiety and sleep deprivation. ADHD as a label is symptom-driven. The physiology tells you which mechanism is actually in the way. I lay out the full process in the QEEG brain mapping guide and the differing patterns in Biohacking with EEG Phenotypes.
What do the brain's big networks tell you about your patterns?
The cortex contains big networks people now recognize by name. The default mode network handles your sense of self and inner narration. The salience network flags what deserves attention. The executive network selects in real time among competing options, like deciding between the crossing signal and the car coming around the corner.
A lot of high performers carry a touch of anxiety. The same circuitry that produces a sharp CEO also produces the person with features of OCD. There is a circuit in the front midline of the head, the anterior cingulate, whose job is to switch your focus and hold what you are thinking about. When it works, you walk into the store, grab the eggs, and leave with your wallet because you kept it in mind. When it gets stuck in beta and cannot produce alpha, the neutral idle frequency, it selects the same thought again and again. That is the experience of perseverative or stuck thoughts. Drop it onto theta and you cannot stop the behavior, so you find yourself biting a nail every few seconds.
There is a partner circuit at the back midline, the posterior cingulate, whose job is to watch the world. When I see that region running hot with beta, the brain may be caught in a "watch the road" mode, scanning for danger because it learned the world is not predictable. We call that rumination. I would not know it was true for you, only that it is plausible, and then I would ask. If it fits, we exercise the beta down and bring alpha up so you get a felt experience of putting threat sensitivity down on purpose. Alpha as the brain's idle and brake is worth understanding on its own; see Decoding Alpha Waves and Biohacking Anxiety.
How do you actually retrain a brain?
At Peak Brain, neurofeedback is the heavy lifter, roughly half-hour sessions three times a week, with a fresh brain map every other month and twice-daily client self-reports feeding a tracking dashboard. Around it I layer everything else that supports brain health: sleep, circadian timing, exercise, meditation, and metabolic work.
There are no gurus here. I meet each client where they are. I will not tell a lifelong vegan to go carnivore. If someone wants anti-aging, anti-injury support, I might use narrow feeding windows so they can generate ketones, but I work with the lifestyle they already have. The brain is weirder than the body, and also far more flexible. Think about how much a trainer can change your body in three months. You can do more with the brain. For the mindfulness component, see Biohacking Meditation, and for fasting, Strategic Fasting.
The metabolic angle matters because the diseases of aging are largely metabolic. Most dementias, diabetes, and many cancers are systems falling over from regulatory instability, with high insulin and high blood sugar acting like kerosene on a fire. We can fast a type 2 diabetic from a high-protein base and get the pancreas regenerating beta islet cells. The brain responds to similar leverage, and faster.
What are the best circadian hacks for a sharper brain?
Your brain integrates outside cues to figure out the time of day, then sets a master clock that cascades down to reset clocks throughout the body. Better circadian entrainment buys you more efficient sleep, more efficient stress handling, and better body composition. Three rules carry most of the weight.
Stop eating a few hours before bed. The strongest external timing cue is when you eat. Evening light is a weak signal, and most blue-blocking-glasses claims are overstated. Food is the big lever.
Get up early. The time to sleep in is the start of the night, not the end. Morning rise time matters more for circadian support than your bedtime.
Move before you eat in the morning. Get up and do something low-intensity for 15 to 20 minutes. Cortisol released on waking squeezes the liver, the liver feeds you breakfast, and you have an hour or two of energy to burn. Go for a walk or do some yoga. Skip heavy kettlebells that spike cortisol and glycogen further, and skip going straight from bed to desk, which lets that energy sit unused. Working the energy flux is itself a circadian signal.
The one light cue that counts is narrow. Behind the optic chiasm sits the suprachiasmatic nucleus, the SCN, which reads the color of light hitting the retina. It is mostly tripped in the first hour after sunrise, when the light is low and red. Once the sun climbs, the color shifts and most of it reflects back into space, so light becomes weak entrainment. Get outside within an hour of sunrise.
A bonus: move your hard training to the afternoon or early evening, when cortisol sits at its circadian low and cardiac output is highest. Every rep moves more blood, and a brief cortisol spike from a hard lift mobilizes some fat and settles back down without driving the resistance you create by hammering yourself first thing in the morning. I work through the morning piece in detail in Biohacking Your Morning, and the stress side in Biohacking Fight or Flight.
How should you read sleep and metabolic wearables?
I track metabolic data in an app called Cronometer because humans are terrible at estimating calories and macronutrients. I measure breath acetone with a BIOSENSE meter, which reads a downstream effect of several days of behavior rather than the last thing you ate. I wear an Oura ring. Version 3 is fine; I do not notice much difference from earlier ones, so there is no urgency to upgrade.
On the Oura, I look at two things only: deep sleep and total sleep. Heart rate variability makes deep sleep a reasonably trustworthy number, and it flexes with stress, sleep amount, meal timing, and exercise, so it is actionable. Aim for deep sleep at 20 to 25 percent of total. The REM number on most consumer trackers is essentially invalid, and REM does not flex day to day the way deep sleep does. If your REM is genuinely shorted or disrupted for days or weeks, you do not need a tracker to tell you; you become psychotic and dysregulated quickly. Chase the deep sleep figure, not the REM figure.
Treat any wearable like a bathroom scale. You want the number trending in a direction, and the trend means something, but the absolute value and the small daily wobble may just be hydration or data quality that day. The Oura and the Whoop are the better consumer options, and I steer serious athletes toward Whoop for the coaching and broader data. For real sleep staging you need more than one signal: HRV plus actigraphy, ideally from more than one limb, which is why I like the BIOSTRAP setup with a wrist strap and an ankle tab.
On metabolism, most people do not need continuous blood glucose unless they have real blood sugar issues. If you can produce ketones in the breath, you do not have high insulin or high blood sugar. I woke up at 0.5 acetone, equivalent to about five millimoles of blood butyrate, decent ketosis, the morning after a couple hundred grams of carbs including sourdough, cherries, and a pint of ice cream. That is possible only if you maintain metabolic flexibility. Eat carbs routinely and you blunt that flexibility, drift toward chronic high insulin and high blood sugar, and that direction leads to metabolic decline. Learn your body instead of obeying a keto guru. With teens, I have parents use a tracker, gamify the deep sleep numbers, and gently connect a rough night to a rough mood the next day. For the data side of all this, see Biohacking Sleep and Biohacking Intelligence.
Where to start
Pick the metabolic and circadian floor first: stop eating a few hours before bed, get outside within an hour of sunrise and move, and watch your deep sleep number trend toward a quarter of your total sleep. Those changes give most people a stable base. If you want to map your brain and train specific circuits, Peak Brain Institute runs offices in New York, St. Louis, Los Angeles, and Orange County, and works with clients remotely as well. Start with a brain map, find the mechanism behind your label, and iterate from there.