Concussion Symptoms Exposed: How Dr. Andrew Hill Fixes Your Brain And Optimizes Mental Performance

hi everyone welcome to another episode of the Curious competitor podcast uh Our Guest today is a neuroscientist by trade co-founder of peak brain uh based in La New York City St Louis where am I missing Dr Hill we have London and Stockholm as well London and Stockholm very well actually I Sweden's been on my summer training list for for a while I have a lot of Swedish friends so maybe I'll I'll visit the clinic over there St Louis would probably be the closest to me I'm local to Chicago um but I've been a part of uh I did a qeg Dr Hill will explain a little bit about you know what that means um and I have uh began my remote neural feedback training with Dr Hill and his team which has been very impressive on the business side just totally amazed at at how how turn ke youve been able to to create that and and make smooth what otherwise can be a pretty clunky process uh Dr Hill thanks for coming on of course my pleasure thanks for having me so Dr Hill when you took a look at my qeg we mentioned we were talking little bit off air prior um you had mentioned you had some findings which would I guess not be abnormal but some of the findings were abnormal so what what uh walk us through kind of what a q is and then how my brain was was presenting sure so one thing to know about when you're looking at human focused data is that people are weird I mean people are unusual so good job be weird first of all by itself we don't really care about some arbitrary metric it's always about the context and it does it serve your goals or something in the way is there a bottleneck Etc so you know I'm a cognitive neuroscientist so I play this trick of putting physiology and performance and contrast and looking for what sticks out it's a it's a performance- driven a functional performance- driven assessment but using sort of classic cognitive Neuroscience tools so we had you did an executive function test which is basically being bored for 20 minutes and then we had you do a resting assessment where we mapped your brain put a cap in the head uh squirt it full of gel and you sat still for about 15 20 minutes or so half of that eyes closed half of that eyes open so that's the basic assessment to get resting sort of data and the performance the attention stuff is a little variable day today but it's easy to interpret the brain maps are pretty stable dayto day you know it's a fingerprint of resources but they're hard to interpret because people are weird so how much Theta or alpha or how fast your brain waves are is a true thing looking at your data but what it means compared to the average person your age sometimes isn't quite as discreet so we have to play this game where we look at your performance find big outliers constraint some ideas go to your brain find some interesting phenomena see if they match and start to narrow down until you can find things you care about you know sitting down with your coach across your dexas scan and functional strength assessment and you know figuring out where the weak parts are and where you going to shave time and where strength needs to happen essentially so we have data we can look at but we did executive function testing where we flashed a number on the screen or spoke it over the speakers for about once per second for 20 minutes it's just literally unloading your resources and then doing transient little pushes changing gears on the stimuli to see if you can pump the gas you know activation tone of your resources and pump the brakes the inhibition of your resources and for you we saw really really strong performance you know standard deviation and a half or or above average for how on you can be your vigilance your background Focus your quickness really high sort of makes sense based on some of your you know skills and training but you got a sports car brain in that aspect we also look at how well you can pump the brakes and not activate when a distractor pops up this is called response control you can also think of it as being automatic or reactive or bit impulsive or something and you you had a really unusual kind of phenomena here where you had really good scores except after about 15 minutes toward the end of that test you you flared out in terms of self-control so you were able to pump the brakes on that two that kept popping up at a higher and better level than average and you had something called Prudence or carefulness to Monitor and adjust that was much better than average and yet your stamina to pump the brakes your ability to sit there and hold that inhibitory tone every moment actually wore out throughout the test and you got more tired essentially and that resource was harder so this is like a high stress if you're out in you know in a play environment and you're in a high stress environment making decisions mixing the activation inhibition there's some evidence that if you do that for 20 minutes straight your performance is going to start tailing off in specific information processing grabbing information quickly shifting gears that kind of stuff so super high performer with a couple of opportunities and fatigue essentially of the resources to maybe optimize which I think is what drew me Alisa Hagerty who was with parsley Health at the time she's no longer with uh them was uh had a a serious concussion and she was the one that introduced me to Peak brain but it was this phenomenon I was experiencing where I I do feel very high functioning uh high intensity as an athlete I I'd say I'm also um you know very creative like ideas tend to flow you know through me particularly in the early half of the day but this this bonking this zonking this uh unavailability you know really in the family life let's say from 2:00 p.m. until 6:00 p.m. some of that was blood sugar related you know if I wasn't eating enough or you know things like that and I try to you know be good with my diet and things like that but under the hood I I was very curious about you know this executive function I I just felt like I would I would achieve a state where life was now coming at me and I wasn't really playing with it uh like I was in in the first bit of the day yeah I think that makes sense because you have to sort of White Knuckle your resources and step in the gas a little bit you know push a little harder I I I will say that other stuff in your brain so that was the performance I was describing extremely powerful with a little bit of fraying fatigue but the brain Maps um look a little more classic in terms of um a couple big features jumping out when I say classic I mean these things are called phenotypes or or patterns in your data they're real things whether or not they mean for you what they often mean is sort of open for discussion you'll know but we have certain things we can measure that are really there um a couple of yours that I think you probably care about one of them in particular is your Alpha Waves your your idling speed of your brain was dragging in the map by one and a half standard deviations you're running slower in internal processing speed than you should for a person your age and aspects of your performance are so high that I don't really expect to be using average As the metric for you anyways so if you're dragging Alpha you know this this internal lag for for thinking for clarity you know probably is a bit of brain fog creeping up yeah um you may have a touch of classic uh speed of processing difficulties which you know I'm like twice your age I have a if I had that Alpha Speed dragging and spreading out I'd be experiencing delayed recall for words and names and tip of the tongue stuff little short-term memory loading blips and that can happen sometimes uh but I'm guessing brain fog non-specific kind of low-key tiredness and some stamina issues bonking like you said in the afternoon that's sort of what I would predict from your your Alpha Waves running slower than average the the name anxiety is definitely something I've experienced heavily yeah reaching for names and words and stuff like that yeah yeah so we see some of that stuff and then we all and that's in some uh the speeds of alphas and things uh I have I have pictures for all this by the way all prepared for you so just say the word and I'll I'll show them but uh you can also share them with your people on a show notes kind of format too um there's a couple other things to talk about in your brain maps and one of them is um some extra beta wave some little you know activated Tone If you will little little resources that are kind of strong but might be touch uncomfortable and then there's some brain waves where you're making extra Theta brain waves a couple different places and that can mean that the brain's a bit more automatic and those circuits are kind of doing their own thing and harder to control so one is too sloppy and not inhibited enough perhaps and one might be kind of tight and hard to relax like a muscle that's feeling either weak or spasm and a muscle that's feeling kind of cramped a little bit of a different relationship to the activation you know so uh your beta waves beta is a gas pedal of gear you use beta voluntarily you're kind of aware of it you think with it you feel with it all the stuff that sensory is beta largely the conscious mind is a beta phenomena and it's it's in the teens and up for herts or cycles per second in your beta uh now let me just stop folks who don't know our process for a second this is cold information meaning I'm not sort of saying hey where give me all the different medical history please and you know I kind of know you're a sports guy and you do stuff on the ice which is pretty awesome but you know I I I have a sense okay he's an athlete he's got his Bell Rong once or twice you know uh hockey has a certain uh uh spot in my heart too I grew up uh in Maine and when I was little I had a set of Bobby hell skates autographs so you know I was I I I have a a good spot in my heart for hockey but not real no real clear sense of like are you an athlete who's gotten injured before or anything like that so this is all kind of cold in terms of predicting stuff that being said there are some spots in your brain where you make a lot of beta waves and they're toward the midline especially the back midline a little bit in the front mostly in the back and these are called the singulate cortices the anterior and posterior singulate front and back and the singulate switch your focus around now generally the front of the brain is the inside self what you're thinking about internally and the back of the brain is about the outside world the singula to switchers sort of facilitate your focus on the inside self and the outside world where your posterior singulate which is kind of activated a little bit that's the part of the brain that does stuff like watch the road heads up heads up frisbee you know the orienting the alerting and reorienting to the outside world that circuit that tissue that resource has a sort of evaluation responsibility in real time as it's starting to orient to the stuff you got to pay attention to when we learn the world is not especially predictable or a little unsafe that part of the brain can cramp up a little bit and we tend to produce something we call rumination where we're stuck in our gut a little bit and worried and it's hard to put that down sometimes so I don't know if that's true for you but I would predict it's plausible what do you think is that something you deal with sometimes yeah you haven't missed on on really any of these and and the the reason I've always been curious about the well-being of my brain is I've spent you know countless hours in a gym and you know preparing my body and working on my game and and holding my craft uh you know on the ice I've been a pro for 11 years I've played you know hundreds and hundreds of games I don't even know what the number is and I get this question at Family parties and you know anywhere you know how's your health like what's what's going on you know how's your concussion history you know and I've never missed a game now now I've taken some nasty hits and i' but I've never been uh obviously symptomatic to myself or others but you know I'll be uh turning 30 next April and I'm like I I really am not positive um you know quality of life you know some of this underlying quiet anxiety the rumination you're you're speaking of about you know that the topic isn't I have a a few favorites but it's not totally topic dependent you know it could be whatever flavor of the week whatever's on my plate um and I I think I realized just the extent to which I was trying to train the body and and the little bit of juice I was getting out of that lime and it was like What if I could look at this problem from the side or upside down and and really look at um you know the the peripheral nervous system this is something I learned on a podcast uh I think it was on the Ben Greenfield podcast where you discussed this concept of the nervous system that's outside of bone versus inside of bone this was not something I I knew previously uh and I'm into trying to understand HRV like everybody else I'm into breath work I you know have meditated daily for you know multiple years and I'm curious what that means to you I know what it means to me currently um you know but this concept of influencing the central nervous system is not something i' had explained to me uh and I'm I'm I'm very excited and and uh fortunate to have a close friend who's advocated for what this can look like and and real day-to-day life like it's a it's a real thing to be able to go you know kind of mechanically go in and and shift gears a bit and and it's also while maybe it's a bit mysterious and not something that you fully understand it's also not at all a blind phenomena you've actually been training your CNS I mean the first time you started hitting the gym you know the first six or eight weeks was not really about your muscles it was central nervous system adaptation to heavy lifting and to straining the system that way so it could learn to adapt so you've been giv that system feedback since you were a baby flopping around and did a baby push-up and went whoa I can see 12et from this angle holy cow infirmation and you learn that Association of neurons at that point that's feedback that's the same associative learning process we use in neuro feedback to push the brain around gently and stretch those resources but in the the the piece of it I think you might be tripping over which I love is that hey look you can look at your brain and you can learn some things about yourself that are some transparent at a high level like for instance I could see that Alpha Speed uh being draggy which is that delayed recall for information now I appreciate that it's just a resource and we definitely should change it and we'll go after it with you but you know being not quite 30 that's kind of a lot of dragon speed like if you were 45 or 50 with word finding issues yeah okay whatever normal typical stuff maybe don't tolerate it but it's closer to like bone density and some abdominal fat than it is a true difficulty but at 29 30 years old you know you're dealing with a a bottleneck and resources and it's worth working out so to speak um so we saw that one we saw the the back midline beta which is a bit of that lifeguard and high gear there's a touch of front midline not quite as activated but the front midline is the anterior singulate and when the anterior gets a little bit activated we tend to uh think of the same things again and again so we perseverate or get a little obsessive so you know your mind sometimes I would get guess is playing ping pong with sort of stuff that bothers you did you hear I heard did you worry I'm worrying did you hear I heard and you know stuff probably resonates here and there sometimes when it starts to bother you so the singlets are part of the default mode Network the self-reflective awareness you're smiling because it's true right some of this stuff Rings true yeah I I am and and you you I have opportunities I I did a uh a genomics profile uh to to understand epigenetically uh I think the company was urian with uh I think it it was ago Dr mmud Muhammad it was awesome very much like uh speaking with you totally in the dark gave my genetic profile and for an hour we had a phone call where he told me about me and you know he he didn't miss and and we we integrated you know a lot of different practices that have made my life better made my performance better made my marriage better um and this is you know maybe the nickname it like the dog walking phenomenon where I'll walk the whole dog and I like oh my God I I just had this conversation did not stop from the second I stepped outside my door or like I I miss the trees uh you know I didn't pay attention to anything else other than let's say it's a I'm not happy with the way my skates are fitting right now and I'm concerned that something new is coming up or um a coach said something to me and this came up in the epigenetics conversation he's like you know you you're a perfect candidate uh to do what you do which is show up every day this Kaizen concept of trying to get 1% better he's like that is not difficult for you that is not boring for you you have this ability to stick with something for a long time he goes you're a perfect candidate for marriage you can really find the same person interesting he's like I have you know certain candidates where he's like if they don't have you know uh game seven on the line you know a million dollars on a poker game they they need this super high-intensity life to not be bored stiff um so it's it's interesting to understand the contrast and come at the problem from different perspectives and you're picking up the same thing well let's see if I can't guess one or two more things uh from your data so you've got a blob of theta brain waves Theta is um sort of automatic it lets things release and turns the tissue on so the tissue is the very modular in the brain the cortex and it tends to operate in very small modules that do specific things and share their their resources with other modules and the modules turn on using beta go into neutral using Alpha and release using Theta they take the brakes off using Theta you got a lot of theta an awful lot um on the left mid part of the brain called the central cortex and that part of the brain has a couple of really interesting qualities and having a lot of theta there can get in the way the primary way it can get in the way I don't see for you which is kind of interesting and that is uh background Focus or sustaining your attention when things are boring I see not only not a problem in that but a superlative like a strength a crazy powerful resource and just locking in and letting the information just you know absorb it without needing it to necessarily be highly intense kind of want you just describe that you're geneticist was able to pick up on this ability to lock in your your focus really interestingly um so that being said the spot in the left side of the brain that makes Theta for you and for many people when it does that it also gets in the way of something called Sleep maintenance or staying deeply asleep and getting all of your rest all your slow wave sleep built up while you're sleeping so I would guess part of this Alpha that's draggy and the word finding and some brain fog and some lack of Reserve in the afternoon has a quality where you're actually tiny bit asleep all the time when you're awake and you can't dive into the deepest sleep at night and maintain the Deep chunks of Deep Sleep the same way as you might want to and so you end up a little bit like wired and tired all the time essentially yeah yeah yeah the wir and tired phenomenon is really interesting because what what it feels like as an athlete is you you'll show up I I find it's it's slow to wake up so let's called the first 10 to 15 minutes you know really slow um I'm a I've been evaluating my relationship with caffeine I've been known as a craft coffee guy I do like the chemx every morning I'm super into it everyone the habits been reinforced people gifted to me you know companies send things to me so so if I'm going to put the stops on that this is a part of my identity that needs to die and and I I've been chewing on it that's besides and I've you know I've listened to your podcast your neur your neuroscientist would never countenance telling you to remove Co coffee or caffeine without a serious cardiac or other problem to screen it out no no coffee is good for you I feel that way and and I I I I'm trying to make this podcast not a well what about for the next 90 minutes you know next 45 minutes or this no Tropic what about this um so and and you show up to the gym you're you're in it you're you're ready to rock and there is a falloff um where you can maintain a certain level of intensity or you know decision- making and it it is funny cuz you I'm I'm so I'm strong enough in the gym and have enough experience I can kind of fake it I can I can perform at a really high level and people may not know it was my best on the ice it's you know CNS wise it's a much higher demand you're on these you know stilts uh you know you're at a threat for falling all the time like it's it's an extremely stressful sport being in uh you know playing hockey and that's where I get this really honest feedback of um you're not your best flat out and so it it is really interesting that you're saying and do you think a lot of this is in eight and I know we're speaking for the first time and this is the first qeg of mine you're seeing or could some of this revolve around the fact I take as much impact as I do and concussion history is this a is this a combo yeah it's a mix um the dragging speed of processing is not your native speed that's acquired I don't know if it's because you're too stressed out AR sleeping deeply or a couple bits of wear and tear have produced some some residual you know Delta which means you can't sleep deeply but there's a fog phenomena that looks acquired I don't know why it's there you know it's just as likely to be if I didn't know you were a hockey player who was at a high level and got your bell rung a few times here and there historically I would believe that it was basic concussion I would believe that it was fatigue I would believe it was concussion or coid or chemo or mold or lime or there's about a thousand things that create brain fog and they're kind of non-specific at an EEG level you can kind of tell something's going on but you can't really tell exactly what or why it's there now you don't have to know what or why it's there cuz you're trying to spot a phenomena you care about if I'm like oh wow there's some fog here are you foggy and you're like yeah well then you care about it great let's push it around we don't really care why it's there unless something's keeping it stock you know um but with your history there's some plausible reasons for it especially to the patterns of your Theta and some of the other slow brain waves while you do have a blob of it in the left side for Sleep maintenance and depth of sleep and strong Clarity and things you've also got a lot of theta across the back of the head when you close your eyes it kind of just swells up into big slow brain waves and goes kind of idle back there and It's oddly sort of turning off It's oddly sleepy and I think what we're probably seeing is you know some of the thing related to the fog you're experiencing and it's somewhat plausible that you fell back and hit your head at some point um especially when doing skates I have fallen back back and hit my head on the ice as a kid like I have done that injury as a 10-year-old you know who didn't know how to stop on skates yet and was you know way out class on the ice um uh back in the in the uh late 70s early 80s before we had helmets even mandatory for the peee leagues and things you know so um it's plausible there that you have a lot of this visual tissue in the back of the head that that Browns out the power is down when you close your eyes cuz it's tired essentially so I see the Sleep maintenance I see the fatigue I see the brain stressing the other big thing I'm seeing is there's um Theta more of this automatic release phenomena happening toward the front right of the head and I don't know if this feature is important to you or not um you're making lots of theta there but again it could be nothing it could be interesting the the frontal loes and the corners here they kind of operate together the dorsal lateral the the edges here on the corners of the the frontal Lo left and right and you can think of them like a like a the the porch of a house with a happy little kid in the left going hey world come here I want some I want to get into it and on the right front corner there's a grumpy old man going go away this all sucks leave me alone too hard no that's going to suck and it's the approach versus the avoid system you balance based on how resourced energetic interested excited you might feel safe you know um having lots of theta on the right front corner kind of means that grumpy old man has gone worse than grumpy and now he's actually kind of Frozen up a little bit and feeling over overwhelmed at times so I would guess at times just from the data that you maybe um get a sense of dread that Creeps in and kind of a heaviness and a not a quick anxiety but like a weighty kind of anxiety does that sound somewhat plausible yeah and and so I only have my mind to kind of uh remember back to you know what sort of brain status was I at what physically did I feel like and I'll keep old um you know hockey footage old training footage uh uh old gear around just in case I pick something up you know maybe my stick's gotten long and that's weird I'm not sure why that that's happened I'm having a tough time with Pucks in my feet um or you know I'm not I'm not moving well let me see you know what in the past has has really worked well for me and I it I call it like this um I've talked about this with other people on the podcast as well like hell is there's a there's a special place in hell where you uh have stressors or goals and you you don't want want to take action again you know towards them but you also don't want to kind of take your medicine and rest either so it's like you you don't want to partake in stress but you don't not want to partake in stress and that is not that's a handcuff yeah and and I mean I think there we often want to try you know you're pushing back you're trying towards you're always the effort is so especially for an athlete who's you know you're you have in your blood this this desire to lean in lean through develop Excel break boundaries so having to manage some of those limits in a in a real way and move through them you know but again with the brain I don't want you thinking about when I show you your brain stuff you know historically uh and and and deeply we often find problems we find difficulties like that back midline can get in the way that can be a little bit annoying and there's a few other things that are probably annoying but because we see them in your Maps this is kind of no different than looking at you know some functional stuff you want to change in your body and go yeah let's work on that bone density or that you know muscle strength in that arm or whatever that's a little lagging these days so you can think of you know this is closer to rehab for the the twisted knee or something that you have to deal with more than um fixing a disease process because most of the things we deal with in our brain I mean these singlets are not disease processes for you they're powerful and a little uncomfortable because that happens you know the back midline can be a lifeguard who's enjoying it it can be a bit of a of a trauma response a threat Sensi ity as well or anything in between and the front midline can be a highly focused CEO or can be a little OCD or both or neither it can just work fine for you at its you know more active than average level so as you navigate your brain data look through things and see big features the stuff to focus on is sort of like oh and I want to change that not so much oh my God something's different than average or there's something in the way because people are a little bit unusual so the gross stuff the big stuff from your brain maps are this fatigue phenomena I think the um to kind of get back to your question about acquired versus you know innate uh the anxiety stuff the front midline the back midline you've also got some activation behind the right ear part of the brain called the tempo parietal Junction which I call the princess and the P because it kind of maps the world into the mind and when it's kind of active you like can't miss any subtle sensory things your friend chewing from six blocks away and that dog barking you know at the neighbor's house you all kind of drink it in um these are superpowers you this is a special kind of human brain the brilliant kind of on you know fire a tiny bit kind of hot you know maybe ADHD maybe anxious maybe a little bit you know out there in extreme Human Performance maybe all that at once and none of the labels really fit like you looked impulsive on the performance test and yet you are performing better than most humans somehow like just right at the had you were fraying but up until that moment you were way out in the bell curve in your performance which isn't a thing that attention usually does doesn't just tire out so you develop this ability to you know bear down with some very powerful resources so you probably started off able to scan the world and evaluate better than most people hyperfocus better than most drink information in and then for all that Theta that's in the middle cortex Central cortex that's your ability to go boom pattern boom interesting information and shift to the novelty shift to the pattern when that gets extreme we call it ADHD but yours is an ADHD level it's just sort of just below that and operating almost like a superpower and my guess is if you hadn't have had had some concussion history or sleep quality issues or whatever's going on with the fog this would all be just serving you and not in the way and that's the difference between you know looking at your brain with a doctor and your coach and your scientist it's I'm I'm here to teach teach you how to look at your data and we'll do that you know privately and offline deeply probably but um I'm here to teach you to read your data so that you become your own expert and you know hopefully in a few weeks we'll get your speed of processing back up and your quality of sleep and making you feel chill and balanced and poised and focused but great that's all stuff we do into our feedback I'm a little more concerned about like systemically and and for for benefit for you that you know how to look at your brain data next year the year after or the year after that so that as you control the machine and pull the levers and build the resources and stretch stuff and you know maybe get another concussion you have tools to navigate what's going on and you don't have to sort of like find the right Doctor Who has the right answer that's the problem with doctors they have to be right you know coaches coaches don't have to be right they have to iterate they're they're heading you towards your goals they're seeing what works they're trying things they're they're functionally focused and scientists aren't right they're trying to disprove things you know a lot of your brain map review is like um here's the thing that's plausible can we disbelieve that oh we can't oh that's annoying that that that one's annoying okay you experienced that all right you know we're trying to like knock down ideas not sort of shoehorn in the diagnostic labels that I figured out about you from into Data you know that that's not the directionality here so once people stop being attached to like oh my gosh what's wrong with me which label is it what are these unusual features I you know once you get away from that perspective you can start thinking about your brain activity kind of like your lipid panel or your personal you know records in this in the gym or whatever you're noticing for your case you've identified the um the Pinnacle of CNS pns automatic motor premotor you you identified that when you're on your skates on the ice doing that thing takes everything uh I among the hardest sports to do is baseball among the hardest things a human ever has to do is hit an actual baseball so when you're not on the ice I encourage you to go and stretch yourself in a batting cage and see what you notice there because it's going to stretch you some some similar stuff but because you're not in motion it's almost going to give you another background another backdrop of like intervention or testing to figure out where things are changing so you know yeah I I played baseball tills about 15 at a pretty high level we had some guys go on and play pro and quite a few division one players so and I think it's this um so I will do that I'm I'm very excited maybe we're understand hitting hitting a ball coming at you 90 M hour is among the hardest things an an athlete will ever have to do as a human body it's right up there so um I those are the big things there's some stressy stuff that's probably built in because you're brilliant and one of those you know humans who drinks in all the information and tends to get a little bit on edge because of it and then there's the fatigue stuff but I think with this means is the stressy stuff is um compensatory the way we're seeing it lit up and kind of cramped up is a compensatory resource you pushing through the fog and fatigue and you're doing it just fine executive function I cannot see the fog and fatigue in your performance unless I look very very very carefully and see hints of it like you're really high performer so that lets us really narrow in on the things that are driving fatigue and the Brain maps that are likely to be most important for you and that becomes the Deltas and the alphas so you're a sports car driving around with the emergency brake on and you got your foot on the gas a little bit to make up for it and you still get where you're going all the time ahead of most cars most of the time but you might have taken out a mailbox or two on the way there if you aren't careful you know kind of thing so this is power yeah I think it's this um I I have used that ability to pattern recognize and synthesize on the nutrition side to kind of sort through what's worked what hasn't worked I've tried you know more things than most um you know failed with a bunch of them I've done that on the physiological side I'd say from a training perspective I have a you know much deeper understanding than than most players about what is it I'm trying to train um what is it you know what where am I screwing this up how could I do better less uh how can I do more to optimize my results without doing as much busy work but it's this celebration of agency because concussion and hockey it it does read like a death sentence today and and players are concerned I get asked if you know I have a 2-year-old son who might be waking up here in the next little bit so hopefully we don't hear him but um you know people ask me will he play and I really applaud uh the the mission you're on I think this was really a macro goal of the podcast and I was sitting down today was selfishly I'd love to learn how to train better and and how to get some of this fatigue gone um and and and do all that but I really want to invite the hockey Community to consider their relationship with their brand to be as plastic as it is with the body and and that we can train it in these different ways um and we might have to be just in you know 20 years ago personal training was not common place in the NHL in in Pro Hockey and it's become so um and you know maybe the next wave is is investigating who the right people the right coaches are to equip yourself with in your performance team or in my performance team on the CNS side on the nervous system side um on the meditation side on the breath work side uh that might be you know a little bit less uh mystical for people in terms of a point of entry but um I think that's from a from a zoom out perspective what I've been most excited about and you know in hockey too it's not all or nothing I mean people ask me if you had a kid would you let them do X Y and Z Sport and I don't know is a short answer for some things like I'm not sure I'd send a kid down the path of football at this point knowing what I know or even soccer and I work with NFL players and I work with International football players and and and you know soccer players there's a lot of joy and power and Beauty in that game in those athletes and that in that aspect of human performance and I wouldn't want to take it away from those people and their path but I think the repetitive head injury stuff the stuff where it's built into the game football and soccer I it's hard and rugby it's hard to to countenance that but you shouldn't really be getting too much bodyto body you know head impacts ballistic stuff not as much yes you do get some in in hockey but when you're really playing the game reasonably well even a little aggressively you shouldn't be bouncing off the ground too too much yeah yeah and I I I mean it's a big enough problem that it deserves to be attacked on all fronts right like this should be a conversation around skills coaches this should be a conversation around people with like you know Dr Andrew Hill there should be there should be considerations every day with your your personal trainer if you're in there four or five days a week this is something that you know deserves some some free will some attention pointed at it but if it's not a thing you're like if you're out there as a block in linebacker or whatever in football and you end up getting yourself hit 60 times every game it's hard to manage that level of risk and wear and tear but if you're someone who gets their Bell rung or or you know gets in a fight every so often you know a couple times a year you have a mild concussion you can manage that risk I have a couple professional skiers who about once every two to three years they come in with a pretty significant concussion from the ski slopes and usually it's off season and they rebuild their brain and by the next season they're competing again and they're able to compete comfortably knowing that they have a tool to address a concussion or some wear and tear or if they need to they can rebuild some stuff they got assessment tools they got re Nerf feedback so some of these folks I I I'm okay with my skiers going back out there and getting back in I have a couple guys that are NFL players and they love it and they're going back to play soon because we did ner a feedback but that's the Dignity of risk stuff I'm not going to tell a a hardcore athlete they can't go you know be hardcore but in hockey hockey players are all kind of Hardcore you don't necessarily need to get concussed in the course of doing your job well it happens but it's not like necessarily going to happen the game completely agree yeah so I sort of feel like now you have strategic resources to balance that risk like I would let a a kid of mine play hockey or something else that may have had injuries but doesn't necessarily make that guaranteed necessarily that you know because if you get you know this this studies showing in soccer you do one heading drill for 20 minutes and you show concussion markers and elevated Gaba for 48 hours and reduce memory function for 48 hours from one heading drill in soccer it's hard to send a kid into that environment with developing brain and all this stuff but okay you know as long as the the hockey league is reasonably polite and we aren't in encouraging you know uh a lot of aggression on the ice I'm okay with it I you I'll be I'll be down with it um but uh the point is having those tools it's you know it's it's understanding how things work it's knowing where the bottlenecks are knowing what you go after uh and then you can uh decide about your level of risk right so it's funny I I used to say when people would ask I be like I don't know maybe I'll point my kid to soccer or something and then actually I came up on that data cuz it's just seemed like a gentler Sport and then I really didn't consider the The Heading uh you know it's a little gentler for boys it's not gentler for girls they get injured much higher um they more damage and more injuries than than boys do in soccer interesting because they're just as strong but not quite as durable yeah yeah interesting you know so what is it let's discuss some of those tools uh what is it about neuro feedback that you've I mean it's really your life's work at this point um I know Al alongside other things I mean what is it you love so much about neuro feedback I love that it makes change rapidly and that you feel the change I mean it's it's this mysterious but not at all blind phenomena if you start exercising your brain waves you're like yeah whatever this is some weird wait wait a minute huh oh I feel a little different oh hey wait this is interesting and it rapidly takes the and you have to do it by validating that you know let's say I'm going to try to train your Theta down the left side and your beta up on the left side for sustained focus and deeper sleep what matters is not if I think it will work it's did you get deeper sleep and do you feel really focused after the session and if I hear that from you great let's do some more and if four sessions in you're like well doc I'm a little too focused I had a hard time turning my mind off and I couldn't fall okay we've overshot a little bit let's back off and this is kind of like calling your trainer from the Whole Foods and saying dude this eggs all over the floor my arms are noodles what are you doing to me okay we'll back off in the curl bar sorry like when it comes to brain training you you elicit effects in sleep stress attention speed of processing creativity emotional access and it gives you control over some of those things and I I I really feel like a lot of the stuff involving the brain the Mind we've pathologized and or we've talked about as if it's only problematic and most of the things the brain does that cramp up on us that get in the way are not diseases they're existing resources that are stuck in a mode front midline obsesses back midline ruminate behind the right ear has social sensory irritability left side vigilance tissue tends to get in the way of uh focus and deep sleep right side executive function tissue tends to get in the way of pumping the brakes when things are uh distractable you know like squirrel kind of stuff ADHD stuff is more right sided but these are all things that you can have a different relationship with if I show you your brain activity it stops being this thing happening to you or a label someone's given you or a big giant scary phenomena you might be experiencing and you have a perspective on it in data and you know you can be just as as suffering you can have just as much pain the the the problem is just as real seeing once you see it in data but it's kind of hard to feel guilty about it when you see it in data it's kind of hard to be ashamed or as overwhelmed when you see your like I can show your Alpha Speed running a standard deviation and a half below average you know you're having a little bit of word finding and some sluggish processing when you're not loaded up with attention it's not a new thing for you I shouldn't tell you new stuff but if I'm like look here it is it's just your brain what do you want to do about it is this important to you it puts you in a different relationship with a bit of suffering because you know the mechanism I teach you the neuroscience and I give you strategies to start going hm do I notice anything and you know your Progressive and iterative instead of just deciding ahead of time what is true and diagnosing and the the agency thing is different too I mean if I teach you how your brain works then I'm thrusting all the power back upon you instead of creating this container that a therapist might and saying here's the label here's the thing you're experiencing let me now do some top down you know restructuring I I kind of think there's definitely room for therapy in many many aspects of our lives but I also think that many of the things in the brain and mind we should think about as resources we can train not just as uh illness or things happening to us blindly so well I think the the mental training in the mind training the brain training is really going to you kind of have this uh this agency this well what are we going to do about it sort of approach and uh in sports science this this occurred you know the players used to show up they'd play every game uh they would train very hard and these were the expectations of our Elite athletes and this was unwavering um and then Sport Science got on got into this like hyper monitorization oh my God we're we're noticing some pelvic dysfunction you probably should sit out tonight you know we can't lift weights anymore we can't we can't stress our athletes anymore they're all overstressed and we we kind of lost the plot and now there's been this you know recalibration where you know athletes are you know taught and reinforced to get after a little bit and very similarly where you know we we have this impact we have these things uh that are going to occur to us hopefully not in the in the field of play but there are things that we can do about it um you know with neural feedback being you know something I found really exciting and I think you really nailed it with the guilt because I with the name anxiety for example I I would meet uh you know old family members people that I know very very well in their name I I would struggle with it I'd feel tremendous guil like I clearly just don't care about their name enough I didn't do enough of like the card game trick where I put their name in like an important place in my house growing up and I can go open the cupboard and remember where that is and I'm like there's there's got to be a better way and uh I'm really excited about you know the we have ahead of us yeah me too I uh you know my guess is just a few sessions in you're probably just barely starting to notice any sort of subtle effects in the sessions but this is about where it kicks off so uh we should be able to elicit some more moments of clarity some deeper sleep you'll probably have a few nights of really intense dreams where they're like really active and really varied um that's a plasticity boost when your dreams kick into high gear after neur feedback it's kind of like after the gym going ooh o i feel it ooh nice it's that like stretch feeling or that slight ache you feel it's a good thing in Nur feedback you have uh dreams that are really visually Vivid and detailed and have themes and been missing for me for a long time I really haven't had many dreams where I remember them particularly growing uh waking up um or or were like the residue at least of the feeling maybe you can't remember the dream sometimes but you know how you felt yeah that's uh that's a thing that happens when your deep sleep is shorted you need to make big bursts of deep sleep to create the growth hormone to then make the REM to then you know sorry the REM happens anyways but the deep sleep without that you aren't consolidating or storing the experience of Deep Sleep which means you're dreaming and then forgetting it because deep sleep isn't happening to help you uh store it basically or have that experience um but that that should come back almost almost always a lot of Nur feedback is centered around a particular frequency in the brain called sensory motor rithm SMR which is 12 to 15 Hertz and that is the frequency you you uh use to stay deeply asleep but also to not be physically impulsive to control your body perfectly so the cat in the window cell watching Burge that completely still body and Laser like Focus that's a high SMR State literally and that compared to Theta uh when SMR is low and Theta is high that's what we call ADHD you're disinhibited and reactive to stimuli so you have the kind of interesting brain that makes a ton of theta but when you're loaded up it goes away so you can like turn off high degree like like seriously crazy high amounts of distractability that do not get in the way when you're on task well when they introduced I forget the gentleman who who helped me I think it was Austin actually who help me with the um the attention test and he's like you might get bored I'm like I'm not getting bored I'm like no [ __ ] [ __ ] up I'm yeah yeah it's wonderful and and yet and yet your brain's got a little a little bit of that classic distractable inattentive a little bit spacey but you also have the other flavor of like the brilliant slightly anxious slightly you know reactive mode so this is a special flavor humans get it's not exactly anxiety it's not exactly ADHD those are two simple labels you're a unique person the map is not the territory brain map not the brain but when I can spot cold rumination pration touch irritability word finding issues delayed recall you know lack of sleep maintenance lack of quality sleep when I can spot that cold on a brain map now we believe them because we because if I can see them and you believe them okay I believe them too yeah and those are things you can change neura feedback pushes those waves around like you have Theta um I'll show you it's about three maybe more standard deviations on a bell curve higher than average um it's bright red blobs on the data sets and you can usually um change or exercise that tissue to the tune of about one standard deviation one zcore every other month every 20 or 25 sessions so it might take us some time a few months but in a few months you can actually change your executive function control and your sleep regulation permanently so I would expect Somewhere over the next few weeks there'll be this odd phenomena of you sleeping more deeply when you're asleep and waking up more thoroughly when you're awake and having more stamina in the second half of the day that should be one of the first things we notice actually is kind of a broad shift as the speeds and the Sleep regulation really starts to shift I bet I bet that gives you most of what you were hoping n feedback would do actually based on your brain I mean that sounds like a trip to M I guess I shouldn't say that with the fires but a trip to somewhere wonderful um Maui but um are there lifestyle factors other things that I can do to kind of put this neuro feedback on steroids and and really um try to enhance the results any best which way I can you can you can now you do you have some mindfulness practice meditation practice already we have teachers we build in some privates so we have a couple private sessions for you that you can get some additional instruction if you need it or there's a Practice Group every Monday night at 8:30 or time I think in the evening so you can join that and practice meditation for 1050 minutes every morning huge for building plasticity so I consider this stuff part of a minimal viable practice an MVP what don't you skip in the morning you get up you hit the can maybe brush your teeth can you do five sun salutations can you meditate for 5 minutes like what is the minimal viable here um and and it's your devotion not your workout you got to get in don't you know if it feels like a burden you're committing to too much kind of stuff start small and make it regular but yeah so that's that's the good stuff the Sleep hacking stuff don't eat before bed to allow your blood sugar to drop which lets growth hormone build uh build much better so you know the classic stuff um there are other heavy lifters you can bring to Bearer to accelerate neuro feedback um among them are um uh there's another form of neuro feedback we may have sent you one I haven't checked your kit inventory but there's a blood flow device called passive infrared hemo cograph it's a a forehead sensor that uses infrared cameras to measure blood flow in real time so you can learn to get a vascular pump of your brain to train the uh the fatigue and stuff you're experiencing it's another form of NE feedback but I'll make sure we have one of those uh for you um Hyperbaric medicine depending on your access to resources Hyperbaric is kind of expensive but very impactful when you stack it it's extremely impactful if you're going to add that be careful with neuro feedback they can mix in a very weird way so my rule of thumb when doing hyperbiotic and most biohacks is dive last in a day it's your last it's your last intervention um never dive before other interventions because you give the system too much oxygen and it changes an un unreasonably fast way or you hypernormal your brain and then you don't train the weak things the same way as you might otherwise so careful when when mixing hyper biic with other biohacks dive last in a day of interventions um but I like the other hortic stressor as much as Hyperbaric and those are much cheaper so I would encourage that sort of uh sauna and Andor ice bath kind of Lifestyle where you're doing two to four saunas a week and you know if if if you hate ice baths no problem instead do contrast cooling where your sauna routine is 15 20 minutes to heat up and flush 5 minutes to cool down in a cool shower back in the Sun and heat up a second time so like a a pump again a vascular pump uh but the hormetic stressors I think are huge and I think that building those things in saunas ice or contrast cooling uh hyper barck if you have access to it um and on that note I do want to kind of plant a steak in the ground here I'm not a big fan of soft chambers of mild Hyperbaric I don't think they do very much I think for soft tissues outside of Bones they can and and tissues that have blood flow like your muscles they can do a lot so for doing rehab and stuff they can be a nice tool or for lung stuff a really nice tool but for deep tissues without blood flow like the brain most of the brain um and Joints I think you need hard Chambers you need two atmospheres is my take on it and so all the biohackers have their soft Chambers that's awesome but I would say two atmospheres breathing in pure oxygen is is is the only Hyperbaric worth sort of like bothering with in some ways unless you're dealing with skin and soft tissue stuff and then beautiful soft Chambers are amazing for wound healing muscle healing that kind of stuff um so beyond that though I I think that some of the biohacks that are most impactful you know lifelong the stuff your mother told you to do are are the things for many of us that we need to build in in but they become a little bit nuanced person to person like there's the big topic of diet nutrition but that's as much functionally serving your goals as it is sort of spiritual and ethical so it tends to be a pretty nuanced topic person to person there is no best diet and the best diet for like body transformation body recomp and insulin resistance recovery is very different than someone like you who you're going to try to fuel High bursts of high output and healthy long-term brain aging so those are a little different in terms of goals I would want to tailor some of that to you um I often later in the process help people dial in some neut Tropic or or supplement strategies that help lubricate things further your brain is one that would probably benefit or enjoy I don't know if this is true but you might enjoy n acetyl cysteine there's these front midline and back midline hot spots and the one in the front especially tends to be lubricated by NAC and reduce our um reduce intrusive thoughts and obsessiveness and the mind spinning a little bit and it tends to be uh enjoyable for some of us um and then there's another compound coming out later this year and I have no relationship with this company in spite of how positive I'm about to encourage everyone to go check them out but there's a new version of omega-3 fatty acids being formulated that seems to be pretty magical in terms of getting through the blood brain barrier and causing recovery supporting recovery in brain damage and an eye damage central nervous system cuz most omega-3s can't get through the blood brain barrier very well you get very low penetration but there's a new form LPC hyphen DHA or LPC hyphen EPA and so it's phosphole choline bound to omega-3 omega-3 fatty acids and because of that you're getting a 6X penetration into the brain and the research is powerful showing recovery from brain injuries and eye damage in animal models mean really powerful research and there's a company whose brand is lissova ly so Veta and I think the stuff's hit in the shelves later this year any of my clients that have brain stuff I'm a big fan of Mega 3s but the landscape is a bit iffy with terms of what's out there and oxidation rates and what's actually useful and there's a lot of noise in the omega-3 landscape I think this is going to be another iterative you know leveling up of using fatty acids the same way mega- 3s were the first time we discovered them you know culturally in this country 30 40 years ago kind of thing this is another inflection like that and then beyond that I mean we'll make some changes with the neuro feedback but I'd rather make permanent changes than just tweak for you but depending on your goals depending on longterm depending how it feels there's a compound for bioh hacking called cocoline which is a choline compound and you will get a speeder processing boost and a word finding Boost from that um it'll make your reaction times a tiny bit faster I bet for you um I kind of think it might be little over stimulating for you and you may find it makes you less smooth so I'm not sure it's a good compound um again I'd rather change the bottleneck and get rid of it than just patch over it but citicoline is pretty good for long-term brain aging and brain health and it seems to be pronation helps the brain remyelinate over time so if you've got some wear and tear in oxidative stress it's a little extreme you may have issues with myelination or with oxidative stress damage so adding some CDP choline in a few times a week in the morning will be mildly stimulating will speed you up and will maybe help your brain make more thick fat and happy fatty tissue and so these are my longer term strategies you know Omega-3s cicolin uh and then managing things like I this is not important for you or for any of the athletes listening but you got to manage the sort of inflammatory aspects of sugars and free sugars carbs are okay depending on the athlete and the strategy in your life you got to manage your Macros but you can do a success human can do a successful macro strategy as long as they aren't eating high amounts of all three macros you got one and survive and perform well like you really can there are athletes who are vegan crazy long-term distance athletes they carry around giant paneers of vegetables on their 100 mile Century rides but like they can do it somehow you can you can't do that and have fat and protein in high amounts Things fall over tissues oxidize so I think for someone like you know you it's pretty moot you know how to dial in nutrition but if someone's becoming that high-powered machine you among the best things you can do is leverage protein and get your good protein in and minimize your your free sugars you know your easily burned sugars to essentially only food sources that are uh vegetables and above ground uh vegetables dominant and fruits and things but those things are also again brain healthy general advice not really super important for you cuz you know a you know what you need to do and B if you crush a pizza on a Saturday afternoon it's not a big deal for someone like you quite as much as it might be for a 60-year-old you know Grandma who has some pre-diabetes and you know it's a little different landscape so my biohacking advice would be a little general to you know manage your your carbohydrate load inflammatory load blood sugar load um I use a device for that uh called the biosense it measures breath acetone so you can learn to steer your acetone instead of using finger pricks for keto stuff this going to be useful too for figuring out what kind of carb ratios you can handle and dispose of reliably so you can actually load up on carbs pretty aggressively and remain in L ketosis and get that benefit of easily accessible ketones but also you can uh sort of not you know basically K kill the sacred cows ignore all the gurus and when they tell you you can't have X amount of carbs and instead figure out how much you can dispose of with your muscle mass snc and your awesome liver and your high output lifestyle you can figure it out using acetone in your breath because it flexes one to two days the enzymatic environment will shift to produce more ketones and burn them in your body and you get more acetone Blow by so you can kind of figure out the the impact the accumulative impact of two or three lifestyle you know sleep habits and weightlifting and diet macros and things as they start to shift and change your your enzimatic environment for energy you can steer that and that can be somewhat useful for athletes um we're trying to game their systems a little bit they can find the edges of their ketosis and their uh energy sinks that way well it's very exciting and and and to wrap up a little bit I'm I'm nearing the end of an offseason uh you know training camps right around the corner I one of the things I most enjoy about neural feedback is how non-invasive it is like I'm not completely gassed after it's not there's not a t of sweating invol right like it's not a physical phenomenon which means it can layer into you know an already you know busy training schedule or ramping up you know gam play I'm very interested you know let's say next off season we'll evaluate where my brain's at I know you're you know very into the Vince dond and some of the you know fasting protocols and things like that maybe offseason we'll have you go low carb or carnivore not right now performance requires carbohydrates the highest level I think to some extent uh but also you know the the Nerf feedback should help you recover faster that you're just starting now and as you go back into uh season I I really want you to uh let me know how you feel after games let me know how you feel after Extreme output how you feel after a hard workout or the next morning especially my guess is we really know we're on to something when the energy is coming up but you also feel like you can handle a lot more without depleting I think that'll be a real sign we're on to something and that should happen you know soon so we'll see how it goes which is what I want like I I I didn't want my stressors and problems to go away I I wanted to be able to answer the Bell well thank you Dr Hill I really appreciate um all your expertise and uh our time today we'll have to do it again I uh we did we got all the way to 3:00 when my 2-year-old be waking up here but uh for other players in the in the hockey Community uh you know I get a lot of parents of players on here what's the easiest way for them to to reach out if they're concerned about yeah so Peak brain Institute is our main website uh.com but we're also Peak brain La over all the socials so come check us out uh all your listeners get a discount if you want to come to one of the offices for brain mapping or they can use that discount for remote brain training programs cuz most of our clients never see our offices so you can work with us we'll send you brain mapping equipment we'll map your brain we'll teach you how to do Nur feedback uh wherever you are so just let us know wonderful thank you Doctor I'll have a great rest of your day my pleasure