Discover Your Peak Brain | Dr. Andrew Hill | Ep 251 ABTY Podcast | @peakbraininstitute7638

welcome to the always better yesterday podcast I'm your host Ryan heartley this podcast exists to equip and Inspire your heart centered leadership every week we bring interviews with some of the greatest heart sets and mindsets on the planet I hope the heart print of our time spent together is that it creates new possibilities for you and all those you come into contact with if you'd like to explore what we could make possible for you then head to ab. co.uk SLC connect and book in a free 30-minute call to begin our journey together I just want to express a huge amount of gratitude to our sponsors exhale coffee I have been a big fan of exhale coffee since meeting Alex and the team back in 2022 exhale is the first coffee to be Sauced roasted and lab tested specifically to maximize its antioxidant and anti-inflammatory potency an independent lab test has shown that one cup of XL coffee has the same antioxidant power as 1 8 kilos of blueberries or 55 oranges I'm a huge fan and Mrs H loves the decaf especially because she knows that exhale used the Mountain Water decapitation process which uses only pure glacial water from the highest mountain in Mexico and no nasty chemicals simply head to Exhale coffee.com Ty for your special offer and lastly before I introduce this week's guest please please do subscribe to the channel if you haven't already it would really help us leave a greater heart print on this world on episode 251 I'm joined by Dr Andrew Hill founder of the peak brain Institute Dr Andrew holds a PhD in cognitive Neuroscience from UCLA has extensive experience in the field of neuro feedback and qeg Peak brain is a network of dedicated biohackers neuroscientists coaches Wellness providers therapists and trainers who can help you understand your brain and create customize plans for change towards your goals Peak brain wants you to know yourself to understand your brain and to be able to take that perspective into action Peak brain wants to help you demystify your brain and learn how it performs and how it works and through Neuroscience backed interventions they want to teach you to overcome any bottlenecks in your brain performance you can find Peak brain coaches at their office is across the United States Europe or online through their remote programs it's episode 251 with Dr Andrew Hill Dr Andrew Hill welcome to always bet this podcast how are you brother I'm doing well thanks thanks for having me today I'm GNA start with a confession I I have watched far too many crime series documentaries like as a kid I watched far too many um documentaries and that was my start of a fascination with the brain the fascination with psychology so I've been a a lifelong student of psychology like do you have a nerdy story like where's where where what captured your imagination for the brain yeah good question um I mean I was always one of these kids who had to take everything apart you know my my uh my dad was always a little shagrin when the entire uh House's power would suddenly go off because I was mucking about in the Attic with something electrical and you know blow a fuse in the basement you know when a 100y old farmhouse blows the power everyone starts yelling in the in the house so uh I um you know had this this geeky childhood and then uh I was about I don't know 7th eth grade in the US which is probably about 12 15 12 13 years old and my younger brother um I I was living in a part of the US called New England which is fairly wintry he sledded out into the street and got hit by a car and had a brain injury and spent the next eight weeks or so in a coma and uh recovered from it reasonably well over many years but initially it was pretty striking to me as a young person seeing this Consciousness status change that was quite extreme from you know losing a very small part of his brain essentially and uh then watching him recover I mean he was not a a young child anymore but I watched him over two or three years rebuild things like walking and aspects of language and other stuff so I was both impressed by how dramatically we can have a a change to ourselves from a small injury as well as seeing this uh Arc of transformation back into um you know fully functional human largely so um that really got my attention and I ended up uh years later working in human services working in uh group homes with developmentally disabled adults and working with uh acute psychiatric environments and acute uh called dual diagnosis so psychiatric and drug addiction environments where people were really really compromised and um did this work for 10 11 years it was pretty good at it you know one of these people can walk into a chaotic environment where people are deeply suffering and kind of you know calm things down and uh help people regulate a bit better and I did that work for many years and um was working at the time uh when I finished that More Human Service you know in the trenches work I was working in a psychiatric hospital lock facility I was in charge of training everyone how to do Hands-On restraints and I was in charge of showing up first and directing them if we had to and the Health Care system was falling apart in mental health uh this is just before 200000 or just after 2000 and um we had really lousy St Staffing and so I was showing up again and again and again multiple times a shift to environments that were not safe and I ended up getting injured blowing out some discs in my back and had to leave that sort of you know skilled Allied Health work because I didn't have a advanced degree and yet I couldn't do the Hands-On you know direct face Toof face work I was doing because I had some injuries so I spent some time doing case management for that hospital where I would um help work on discharge planning and help do safety checks in the home sort of like a almost like a social worker but without the degree and uh found it fulfilling but really missed um both doing more direct person work and I was also having trouble sort of moving up in this Health Care environment so I was thinking about you know what I want to do and I ended up leaving healthcare for a minute for a couple of years and uh went into high-tech and after two or three years of that um with a market correction I left high-tech you know there was sort of a a bubble around the year 20 000 that that corrected and then um I missed working with people so I I saw oh I've heard about this neura feedback thing this brain training thing it seems to be really Germaine to a lot of the suffering that I've seen you know especially childhood uh and developmental if you will suffering uh I wonder if I can find a place that does this and not too far away there was an Autism Center that that did primarily neuro feedback as their treatment or their intervention and I had a lot of experience with atypically developed individuals so I walked in for an internship and walked out with a job and uh spent two years working in that environment kind of you know no pun intended having my mind blown at what I was seeing happen you know people with ADHD developing self-control in a matter of weeks people without language and autism starting to produce some small language here and there things like seizures dropping away OCD dropping away trauma dropping away sensory integration issues just dropping away in a couple of months and this really flew in the face of everything I understood yeah I'd been working in the the worst areas of human suffering the edge cases for 11 years at that point and all I was really seeing was revolving doors of suffering people would come into a hospital or an acute environment and get managed briefly for 3 four five days get discharged out into a less safe environment have something destabilized come on back in again and again and again and these were for teens and adult the little children were you know essentially only stable if they were in environments that were safe and then would rapidly get into theable environments again so I was very frustrated in this sort of holding pattern Mental Health Human Services uh piece of it and then I was working in this know feedback Center and I was seeing change in weeks and months which didn't make sense based on what I thought I knew about you know people in the brain and suffering and at the time in the field now again this is just past 2000 so we're 22 23 years ago and the field was is not that young the field has been around since the uh late 60s mid-60s really but you know still pretty early on 20 year 25 years ago and there was three or four different schools of thought in the neuro feedback space that all used different technology and different ideas about how it worked and what it was doing and and and what the best way to approach it was and there was uh this is back in the days before the modern internet we all hung out on on news groups and use net arguing and yelling at each other about my way is the best no my way is the best no what you're doing is stupid and the field was full of this really vitriolic you know conflict constantly because it was a nichy area full of passionate people yeah who were trying to figure out how to advance it and the weird thing is of those you know four schools of thought so to speak the four churches of neuro feedback they all had amazing results better than traditional medicine and yet they all said each other area of neur feedback wasn't doing it right so this struck me as what I call a blind men and elephant situation yeah you someone's got a piece of something and they're describing it but there's no real sense of the overarching perspective so that provoked me to go back to grad school and study uh neuro feedback so I got a PhD at UCLA and spent my time there studying uh laterality left and right brain uh organization as well as how um a lot of the experiences we have as humans are scaffolded by the brain think called cognitive Neuroscience aspects of executive function stress sensory sleep a lot of the stuff we experience is managed by the cortical tissue the top layer of the brain and because of that you can start to get a little bit of a perspective on how it works because you can sort of see it with non-invasive techniques and uh as I eventually uh went deeper into you can change it you can use tools to shift the brain and then remeasure it and see the changes you're experiencing and so it starts to take this brain stuff which includes massive amounts of suffering at least clinically and massive amounts of you know need for improved performance and understanding in non you know clinical environments and we start to give people control over it and give them perspective and Pierce that mystery and that to me you know I thought I was doing this because I wanted to do cool high-tech stuff with brains but what really ended up driving my mission here was you know even before you make an intervention just sitting down with someone going over their brain data saying look here's a feature in your brain it often operates like this what do you think oh my gosh that's so true about me oh instantly changes someone's relationship with their suffering it's not instantly changed in terms of the amount of problem but the perspective on it does a 180 it's much harder to be ashamed or overwhelmed when you understand how something works some pain or some stress it's just part of your body and the Brain loves to change so when you start showing somebody their their cortex their brain activity and you find their real trauma ADHD seizure disorder sleep issue whatever well there it is and now isn't it cool you can see it and is this something important to you would you like to maybe change this because if we see it well we can stretch it and exercise it and probably make you feel something so it it it flips all of this perspective of mental health from this top down the expert giving you the treatment and deciding what's wrong and giving the label into individuals really thinking about their individual resources that might scaffold both performance and suffering but it starts to give you a different relationship with it you know if you see your triglycerides are high on a blood test oh crap better back off on the ice cream you know you see your sleep your alpha waves are slowing down you have some word finding issues well you better hack your deep sleep so you can speed your brain back up but it gives you this agency instead of this perspective of I'm suffering ah I have a diagnosis and to me that was the the dramatic draw as it were into building uh companies that help people do neuro feedback and and things like that that was the the impetus so to speak yeah I love that and and thank you for sharing that and I think I can see you wearing an aura ring and there's definit little big big wave of like wearable technology and it's I remember wearing a woop I had a for a good couple of years and you know that thing used to tell me I just never sleep enough it's like it was it was telling me something something I intuitively knew but it was nice to have some accountability to make sense of stuff that was going on on the inside and then to have that kind of playb as well here might be some of the consequences of that here might be you know it's it's making like what you say the mysteries of the invisible kind of you you can interact with it and if you can interact with it you you can change your personal experience and like you know when we when we're growing up um we're often taught like the heart's a pump the brain is a computer and and you know the work of the heart math Institute have shown that the heart is far more than just a biological pump and I guess from your perspective what would be the best way to uh see the brain what is the brain is there a consensus as to what this thing is a lot of the brain a lot of the brain both in you know pure science you know what is true as well as at the individual level we're often working with phenomena more than discreet details we deeply understand when it comes to like a blood test for you know heart disease they have different levels of of of blood products and if your triglyceride you're too high or you have too much C reactive protein it's a pretty discret indication of something particular in your physiology but when it comes to the brain people are weird so it's really hard to tell what's unusual what's a problem when you just look at someone's pattern of brain activity you can tell what's unusual like I look at your brain and say aha you've got lots of theta here or your alpha waves are unusual speed or your beta's doing this connectivity thing but I don't necessarily know what it means from that observation of your brain I will have a some guesses some plausi you know people are unusual so when you look at a brain I can tell compared to the average person your age here's some amplitude some speed some connectivity that're a little unusual aha now this part of the brain these brain waves here's what can happen here's some plausible ideas does this ring true is this valid and at the level of EEG of brain waves uh the stuff you can see somewhat reliably include all of the I call them regulatory features the stuff that's meant to change as it touches the world these are attention sleep stress uh and all the anxiety stuff that you know fits there social function uh sensory function those things are meant to adjust and so if you can figure out where they operate and how they operate you can apply pressure and you can literally change your executive function trauma response OCD and it gives people again this this sense of control and less of a sense of ah something's happening to me that has a name somebody gave me a label and I find that is uh again the the most important part often yeah there without being too conspiratorial there are a number of documentaries out there that that reveal that these big tech companies know far more about the nature of the brain and they're using that understanding to capture attention keep people's attention on things like social media it's almost like they reverse engineered that and and and and I guess so much of that is happening without us even knowing you know I let my kids go on their iPads every now and again right because I know some of these things that are bad enough with a telephone a phone at my age let alone a child without that regulatory capacity and the things that pop up the noises that they make the sensory like yeah I is wired for their attention right yeah I mean it's also not just reverse engineered but sort of forward engineered in that when we're producing videos for YouTube or titles for our podcast we are now trained to have little you know click bity little short attention grabbing things that create engagement in attentional engagement and then the rules for doing some of these media things are okay after you grab them then you got to deliver and then you got you know we're we're taught by bu the YouTube algorithm or the Apple podcast algorithm so while we may not be thinking about doing Bubblegum and you know fast food type of media that's what's rewarded so it's it's it's a little bit difficult for us to sometimes have a a genuine experience I think when we're reacting to those yeah those pressures it's it's having consequences on a mass level I think with people's you know their mental well-being the epidemic is was one of Mental Health crisis and attention and focus and um I just love to know from from your perspective then um like what what are the Hallmarks would you say of a healthy brain how would we know when the brain is is healthy or maybe you can explain that from the perspective of what an unhealthy brain is like yeah I mean again brains are so variable and our experiences across people are so different that not just our high performance is different but our suffering can be different so what I would say is instead of thinking about is my brain optimal I mean I I look at brain mapping or pictures of brain activity and they're not showing what's good or bad they're showing what's unusual and so when I sit down with someone showing a lots of unusual bright colorful patterns of their brain ah what's all that red it just means you have large amounts of beta or low amounts of this by itself not that much let's figure out if it matters to you yeah so there's no real like particular you know master plan or perfectly healthy brain and when looking at your brain and trying to make judgments about it I wouldn't compare you to some perfect pattern of a brain I just compare you to all the folks your age or a few thousand people your age and see in a bell curve okay what sticks up what's where are the outliers and then figure out if the outliers if the the patterns the biomarkers are classic do they represent things that are often true we call these phenotypes so having a high thetab beta ratio is the ADHD phenotype having slowed Alpha is is the speed of processing you know delayed recall for words and names it's phenotype having a front midline uh hot spot in betas obsessiveness back midline trauma response and and rumination these aren't always true if you have a hot back midline your posterior singulate chances are pretty good that you're ruminating and threat sensitive maybe you have some PTSD but maybe you're a lifeguard or a mom with nine kids who lives in a high energy State and loves it um it doesn't necessarily mean it's a problem it's just unusual so I through brain activity with you and say look here's some things and they usually make sense if I'm you know I'm not telling you novel things I'm saying hey here's a measurement it often means this kind of thing oh wow yeah that makes sense to me or sometimes yeah that doesn't sound like me okay this is you this is a normal pattern for you let's move on and I tend to find about between two and about 10 things per person that rise the level of hey these are reasonably conserved across people these often get in the way often represent performance opportunities what do you think and so I'm not giving somebody a diagnosis I'm not saying you have ADHD or PTSD I'm saying oh look the left side of your brain doesn't sustain Focus as well would you like to clean off the mud off that Spotlight make it brighter oh you would now a psychologist would say look you're inattentive and you have ADD let's work on that I'll I'll treat you instead I'm saying look your left mid motor cortex can't sustain vigilance also looks like you aren't sleeping well are all these are important to you great let's work on those resource levels and so you get people the ability to change without taking on the weight of that diagnostic label or the stigma doesn't mean there's not a place for therap therapy and psychological medical perspective on this stuff there really is but it's not the only way to deal with it you shouldn't require a middleman to work on your own physiology you should know it you know like the aura ring you mentioned earlier you know how 10 20 years ago none of us had sleep trackers yeah and now we're ashamed by our aura rings and loop straps every morning and go oh crap better back off in the ice cream or you know fast before bed or get up in the morning and walk now you you were joking about the AA ring for a while I had both wrists covered from wrist to Elbow with sleep trackers um rings on both hands I had three rings and about seven or eight different wristbands I was comparing them because I work with a few hundred clients a year typically around the world and we ask them about sleep every day day because when you work on the brain no matter what you're doing you're topping into regulatory features that will Flex when you work out when you go to the gym for your you want to get you know nice and trim or you want to work on your back injury other stuff happens when you're in the gym you get a little bit of a flex of the whole system that happens in neur feedback so we we watch your sleep day today because changes in onset depth dreaming happen as you gently push on the brain and how you push in the brain will affect how the Sleep unfolds a tiny bit so you can use that as like a gauge hey how'd that workout feel wow I was wired after it and couldn't fall asleep oh okay that was too fast for you let's back off a little bit how'd that feel oh that felt amazing I had crazy dreams all night long oh yeah your plasticity is going up let's repeat that a couple times and see if you notice stuff during the day so you can start to really demystify the machine and that is really I think the the Big Value here more than any particular thing we do even just looking at brain data and just helping reframe your stress response your speed of processing your whatever it is into the actual physiology I mean I can't tell you the number of people who come in in their 40s and 50s who are a little bit worried about their memory thinking they're having age related memory stuff and they're not and you can quickly look at their brain and go oh Alpha Speed is slow that's actually speed of processing so you're noticing it when you're reaching for information but it's not your memory it's speed and the reason for it oh delta waves are super fast are you tired all the time oh you are yeah your sleep deprivation is the E BR on in the car I guess we say handbreak in the UK on in the car and that's causing a drag in the system which is why you're pushing so hard so you can kind of start to grab the data and really paint out things that ring true for people and then from then on if I teach you how your sleep works yeah oh my gosh I'm not getting good deep sleep I know that my oring says it oh my alpha waves are slow what do I do okay don't eat before bed get up early go for a walk see how circadian queuing you know supports you couple weeks of that you start to feel different couple months of that map your brain and show the change yeah just there's just so much hope in that isn't there because I think so many people are led to believe that it's a fixed it's a fixed State alth that's just the that's just the technology I've been given and makes me think because you're talking about the the the ADHD conditions is the is an adreno type of what you said um the Theta and the beta and I know that there's there's a number of things you like binaural beats that are out that that they're trying to change frin waves meditation a variety of different things meditation is huge meditation is massive and everyone should be doing it you know 5 10 minutes every morning would would do wonderful things um hugely impactful meditation is about the best thing you can do that you have access to that's not a normal if you will day-to-day routine thing that can make a huge impact and then sleep hacking and other stuff you should be doing and dietary stuff we know we all tend to be shorted on protein and have excess sugar uh as a population of of creatures we could do better there um but binol beat just to harp on that for a second they don't do anything they're nonsense um human brains as far as we can tell don't have what's called a frequency following response the early research on benol beach showed that if you pulse an offset sound the brain May pick it up but that was an animals humans don't seem to have that frequency following response never been determined I was very excit excited about Ben oral beats when I got to grad school I thought oh my gosh I can do some cool research so I spent six months doing Placebo control double blind Ben oral beat research and found nothing again and again and again in behavior in physiology in performance and most of the literature out there is extremely poor and weak and basically disproves that it does everything so while there might be something there I think what we're seeing when people express some experience from B all Beats is they're using as a meditation Focus it's another flavor of music it doesn't really have a special frequency like when you do the alpha Boral beats it's not making Alpha Waves closing your eyes makes Alpha Waves so or meditating can take your your Theta up and bring your beta down so that's what's doing it and the binol Beats become an anchor uh a focus for that meditation but they're not magical so don't pay 50 bucks or whatever for a special audio track find your favorite auditory Focus for meditation and practice that and you'll you know get as much out of it I would guess yeah because I think what you're saying is that um if we Le because I'm trying to figure out how much of this is um chicken and egg right how much of the ADHD is Manifest in me because of my brain waves or how much of my environment is influencing like what's your perspective yeah ADHD is not an acquired phenomena but it's a it's a fluffy uh bucket it's it's got a it's got a an amorphous um set of criteria such that ADHD is not just now the diagnostic thing your psychologist says it's a cultural thing we all know what add is I mean just just the label add there's not been an actual diagnostic label called add since 1987 that was when it left the the DSM manual it's all ADHD with different letters after it for mixed or primarily inattentive or combined whatever but we we all know what add means and we all use that oh I'm so ad today but it's worse than that your you know your kid has some performance or behavior issues at school and the school nurse or the teacher oh they have ad put them on stimulants right so it's this you know it's a problem in that way but ADHD is not an acquired phenomena it's also not a pathology per se it's a normal human variant 20 30% of humans have different executive function it's like 10 to 20% of us are left-handed you know something around the same loc uh uh percentage has decreased inhibition and notices all the patterns and processes very rapidly and tends to attach to outside stimulus the hunter the hunters are good at noticing the animal or or reacting to the environment but a hunter is not going to do real well in the boring evening campfire discussions you know they need that intensity The Hunters versus gatherers this more of a theory than a true brain uh proven phenomena but it is a normal variant and ADHD only gets in the way when it's really extreme or it's poorly matched the environment you're an accountant sitting working on spreadsheets and that's it and you're strongly ADHD you may need to do things to manage sitting and focusing in a discreet low intensity way if you want to do that more often you've probably picked a uh career that's not that because it didn't play to your strengths and instead you're doing something that's a bit more Dynamic and intense and has variable demand you you'll soar in those environments yeah but more than the diagnostic label I mean you're you're born with having high Theta which is squirrel you know and disinhibition or you're born with having high alpha which is sorry what huh add inattentive stuff relative to the beta waves and the ability to shut off the Theta and Alpha and surge the beta when you decide to focus that's what executive function is to some extent it's the organization of that and if your Theta is generally high you're going to notice every single thing around you and have a hard time focusing unless things are intense but you're going to focus better when things are intense than somebody without that state so this is why we get high performance individuals with ADHD doing things like stock trading or extreme athlete uh stuff you know really really strong athletes have a lot of disinhibition but under high intensity things still and become crystal clear so they can't necessarily sit and do their taxes but you know I want that person uh on a on a on a on a a football pitch you know running through and noticing all the patterns and changing gears so if it gets in your way if you you know if the football player's wife is mad because you can't do the dishes or you know have a conversation without getting distracted well then okay work on your ADHD but it's not really a pathological it's a it's a normal human variant we need people who can react faster see the patterns fight better and we need people that can sit and weed the plants and notice the this the slower moving information and be be more careful in our decision- making so normal human variant yeah yeah and I and I and I think that would have been made much more obvious in a world where you know let's just take the Lost scenario that TV show where everyone just ends up on a on an island you just fall into your natural strength I watched that program for 10 years what a waste of my life but um because the ending was not satisfactory I know it's so sad but um you know I think that situation everyone I know it's t but everyone then deployed their strengths right and I think the world would be like that if we didn't have the systems and structures like you know Academia I've got a 10-year-old and 11year old and an 8-year-old that go into a schooling system one of them has learned how to advance very well they they're playing the game the other one has gone I'm not playing by your rules I'm not interested equally capable but not interested to perform and um you know so there there be many many people out there that not only go into the school system like that they'll go into the workplace like that and U I think there's some huge implications in what you're talking about not only on the individual leader and how they can optimize themselves but also how they can optimize an environment of other people with brains you know what are some of the huge implications for leaders from from the work that you're seeing so if you're somebody who manages people who have uh different brains than average which you do if you work with people then you have weird people that's that's just how work you know only about a third of us are average and the rest of us are kind of weird so you have some unusual people and if you have people whose executive function is not typical you know you can do things to maximize productivity and make their jobs easier like give people standing desks or desks that change height if they have ADHD or um structure meetings that have that are shorter and have you know defined outcomes uh think about some of the productivity hacks you might use as an individual and bring them into the level of the company things like uh David Allen's GTD where you break down or getting things done where you break down tasks into categories and you think of the blockers the next actions and things you can get accomplished uh and then you work through sprinting you know so pomodora techniques which is uh the Tomato timers you sprint through 20 minute chunks those things are hugely impactful for an individual trying to structure their time but for a company as well you got a bunch of creatives yeah give them balls to sit on and standing desks and create Dynamic sensory Rich environments for them to be fed by and look at things like structuring time and deadlines and and realize that's a bit of a a problem for some of the artistic and creative types yeah and so work on structuring it and and and making discret smaller sets of deliverables important because the ADHD person is gonna think they can do everything think it's going to take no time at all because they understand it instantly from the time they see it but the idea of all the steps involved to get there there's a temporal discounting or an effort discounting oh yeah I can do that I get six weeks to do it I know how to do that that's easy but then you're 10 days before it and you're starting it and structuring and freaking out and that's the problem with ADHD and you as a manager a leader can scaffold that make some break points for projects give reinforcement before the end of the project yeah you know help people navigate be a mentor more than a boss you know a leader more than a manager um these are important things when somebody has different resources and and that can be true not just of ADHD but somebody who has anxiety or sensory social you may have somebody in your office whose sense of humor isn't typical or whose eye contact isn't or whose language is a little bit weird you know you can have exceptionally intelligent people with quirky social skills who are really valuable for you both in your company culture as well as the output of the product so maximizing these people's uh enjoyment of their job everyone all of us our enjoyment of our job is not that hard to do if you think about some of the resources that might need to be either supported or uh allowed to run free I mean you got somebody who's highly productive in Sprints or highly productive in certain tasks and it's really useful for your company great set them free you know You' be surprised at what people can do when they're chasing uh things they find stimulating so that's how I tend to run my my company I have a company called Peak brain we have uh maybe just shy 20 people not a huge company but it's about eight and a half years old and we ran another company for about three years before this it's very similar and my management style because I get a lot of people who are early career and I often I've trained them I a lot of my first batch of employees were my students then my interns and my employees then help start companies with me so nice rich you know decade of of instruction with some of these folks what I found is when people start working for your company you can you know pretty quickly figure out for many of them there are some things they really enjoy and some things they really don't and if your company the structure the the role that you have allows it then you can get a massive uh multiplier on productivity and Sid step some of the classic constraints of productivity if you're just really playing to people's strengths and not making somebody you know someone has poor auditory listening or or you know doesn't show up to meetings on time don't make them do three meetings a week for an hour you know have them do standups have them do check-ins have them do endday summaries so really think about someone's executive style like you might be if you're a teacher you might think about learning style which is not really a thing it's more about the material than the person but think about the material in your workplace is the material suff you can put down a particular Channel and you know get something out of it you mentioned your kid you know one is thriving in the system and one is like ah this is annoying uh you probably have some of this in the UK but in the US we have a private education program called the monasi which finds a kid like your your other one and says Ah what do you like oh you like manga oh you like football oh you like this let's funnel everything through that one channel all your math is manga all your art is manga all your politics M you know whatever and you funnel everything through that one thing the person cares about and suddenly the person who is resistant against the systems is leaning in and accelerating and and surpassing what you expected so the reason I was laughing a minute ago as I spent um 12 years in the UK Police Service in a variety of kind of organizational development roles and we' our calendars would be back to back you know there'd be so much business we running meeting to meeting and then we get to one meeting is Right we've got one hour to be Innovative let's be as our most creative thinking Innovative let's strategize ination now yeah let's be Innovative now and I was like I'm Innovative like like let me run wild like I love a good like you can see my whiteboard like but not when I haven't made sense of my last meeting I'm thinking about my next one in all things in between and I think it's really powerful what you've just said because it requires a style of leadership that is beyond getting stuff done thinking about how do I create the environment to get that stuff done through and with people at their most Optimum State rather than just Hammer Hammer Hammer and you may need to change how you expect work to be done and you definitely might need to change how you train people you know different people may have different needs and that matters a lot once you start uh moving into more complex uh roles if if someone is just you know putting rubber bands on packages eh doesn't really matter who it is and you can ramp up the intensity and now it's more about keeping them from falling over through boredom making errors but if you have a complex skill set you know I uh most of my employees are coaches quote unquote mix at EEG technicians tech support education all kinds of stuff but it's really coaching practice the same way your high level coach in a gym might be they know the equipment they know how to get results they don't necessarily know what your goals are why you want to get them but they're going to help you build toward your goals that's really how we work but I have to teach my people the the employees a fairly large different set of skills or they come in with skills Tech skills EG skills interpersonal skills you know I work with folks that have a lot of anxiety or ADHD and you know our coaches have to learn to not be frustrated when that person with ADHD or anxiety doesn't show up to their meeting early on in process with this at least before the ADHD is gone uh but the idea is that we end up needing to sort of tend different skill sets you know some people are exceptionally good a client is suffering and they can move right into that you know careful listening calm commiserating sympathetic mode and other folks are like H I'm so frustrated my client's not getting better you know and you have to really teach different skill sets you know I spend more time teaching data analysis with one person and more time helping somebody realize how anxiety works and why there may be some unskillful Behavior coming back at our coaches from this person who's chronically stressed and traumatized and angry it's a different set of skills across our coaches that might need to be uh you know brought up but eventually at least at least from my perspective all of our coaches are pretty wonderful uh so I I think humans are really um really variable it's it's not really that people cannot learn you somebody with ADHD could learn to become an accountant if they really wished and sit and do boring spreadsheets I I may be biased but um it's really about if you can structure the stuff you're engaging with to to ways you feel that you want to yeah I think it's powerful I think you know when you say the question there's no right or wrong there is just when you play that back it's like does that work for you does that help or do hinder the life that you want to live yeah and uh you know some people have the self-awareness to put themselves in a situation which enables them to shine and bring forth the best of themselves and others are suffering without realizing why that is I want to pick up on something you just said and I know we've touched on this a number of different times but I really want to package your answer to this which is you just said when the ADHD is gone yeah well what some people have been led to believe that that's it I've got that for life I am I have like what's your research and your experience yeah generally generally ADHD is built in you're born with it and it develops but you can change it uh there's lots of ways to change a brain um many are somewhat slow and gradual and they're happening so slowly you don't even notice they're a function of change you just think you're growing developing but the brain actually is learning and reacting to the world you're in and changing and other ways of changing the brain are actually really fast um you can start to get a handle on how this works if you learn how the brain works so we do something called brain mapping or quantitative EEG which which is a resting fingerprint of resources alongside that we do executive function testing or ADHD testing you know go no go tasks and when someone comes in with complaints that are in that landscape either diagnosed or not they generally on a bell curve are coming in with scores that are one to three standard deviations off the me like really problematic excessive Theta excessive Alpha two three standard deviations so we're talking like two and a half% of people uh something like that yeah yeah I mean it's it's it's the more extreme cases or on a performance test you're having somebody on a bell curve who's coming in you know the average score on on testing for Human Performance is usually for most tests uh age normed and you set it up so 100 is average and 15 points is a uh standard deviation so 85 to 115 is typical and ADHD you have 40s 50s 60s 70s you know so 70s two standard deviations off the mean um that's what you tend to get in performance whether or not it's a diagnostic ADHD or a postco brain fog or a concussion when there's executive difficulties that's how they jump out in in data and generally the brain and the performance data match and they match the person's experience they're converging and you're kind of picking up something real with that case which is most cases of seeing actual difficulties you can then exercise the brain waves the Theta down the beta up that you're seeing half an hour roughly three four times a week you start to feel it three or four sessions in you don't feel it right away usually and you start making changes to the brain activity progressively and if you do something like 40 or 50 sessions of neuro feedback which is three months you can usually uh make two standard deviations of permanent change in executive function which takes severe ADHD and makes it mild it takes moderate ADHD and gets rid of it and the literature shows in children and Adolescence at least that's most the literature is it shows good long-term change in 6 months 12 months 5 years and 10 years and in so you're really getting a pretty thorough shift and when I show you that the way we do brain mapping and neuro feedback is we map at the beginning we map every 20 or 25 sessions so often you might do three months or four months and map three times and you're seeing the changes that you're feeling build up as you go so day-to-day we're asking how's your sleep how's your stress how's your mood how's your mother-in-law whatever and you're reporting variable experiences ah my motherinlaw is a jerk today I'm so mad oh okay well try this and try that and you know personal trainer metaphor here but then things start to shift and it's really really rewarding to sit down with somebody six eight weeks after they start go over their second brain map and show two three standard deviations of improvement in executive function and brain activity and have them go oh my gosh my mom's been noticing this my wife's been noticing this my teacher says I'm really focused now I'm so proud of myself self look at your brain young person you've changed it isn't that awesome cool what else you want to do so it really takes this you know lifelong almost stigma and frustration about not controlling ourselves and it starts to give people control right so influence that's my real Empower very much so yeah agency is my watch word here I like to think of this idea that in much of mental health in Psychology and Medicine we rely on somebody giving us information it's this top down it's got this you know psychology transference your therapist your provider has the expertise and the knowledge and the care and they create a container and you're inside of it that I feel is not as empowering as it could be and so I tend to use the educational aspects of teaching you how your brain works to sort of thrust agency upon you instead of creating a container and treat you so that as you go progressively learn more and more map your brain more and more often hack your sleep more and more often and try to push your brain around and feel it change after a few months of that when you've worked through a lot of suffering of ADHD or trauma or your seizures are reduced the neur feack was discovered because it reduces seizures sort of uh by mistake in the 60s and the literature says that it reduces seizures by 50% roughly I've never seen a result that poor not once it's almost always like oh my gosh my seizures are reducing really quickly wow um so when you get people change and it starts to show up in a couple of weeks it's a very different landscape than medication which can take weeks to work or psychology or you know therapy work where you're sort of working through years and years of stuff to make small change there's a very rapid change for regulatory features attention stress sleep mood attention uh uh uh sensory social speed of processing these are things you can get in and change so that's really the takeaway is you don't have to think about the diagnostic label you can be like where am I suffering and what is in the way probably measure it and then come up with strategies and neuro feedback you know to change the EEG yes we make very large changes in a few months but there's lots of ways to change your brain um I've occasionally had somebody come in you know a dad brought their 17-year-old in a couple years ago ah my son's going to college next year we're really concerned can barely get out of his own way high school was horrible uh what what are we working with Doc okay let's look oh wow yeah a lot of executive function difficulty a lot of impulsivity but look at this your speed of processing you're a 12-cylinder sports car oh my gosh and look at this you can notice everything oh my gosh and over here you're picking up all the emotions right oh wow okay you're kind of a cool brain yeah and telling the 17-year-old this I think okay great person has tons of needs gonna come back in for near feedback shortly don't hear a thing four years later got a call from the dad hey just wanted to call you and thank you my son just graduated top of his class just hearing that his brain was not broken and understanding how some of the features work and where he can work around it gave him enough sense of power and control he went from being a kid who would not do anything in high school to self-motivating to finding ways to strategize to structure his time to move through problems just hearing how he worked gave him enough perspective to make change so you don't need to do feedback my my goal is not to sell anyone neuro feedback it's to sell you agency shift happens get yours take some control but doesn't really matter how you shift it's really about what your goals are and what you want to do with your brain so one of my guests recently his name is John Aldridge and um he talks about um from a Christian perspective around masculinity and males one of the underwriting questions he says that the masculine has to try and answer is just have I got what it takes I.E that there's something about competency that is important to this masculine journey and I guess what you've just said is a wonderful example of actually it's not a question of am I competent it's where am I competent it's where do my strengths liow where do I work and now I know that now you've given them the gift of that awareness it's like oh well I can I can start building my life around where I am competent and I can start doing things with in line with how I actually do work rather than just constantly swimming upstream and also knowing how it works can give you a sense of what you're already doing I mean if you're kind of burnt out out in your mid mid years and look at your brain and find that your delta waves are very excessive and your Alpha Waves you're running slow that's a function of your deep sleep not being wellmaintained and you're like oh yeah my ordering tells me I only get 20 minutes it shames me every morning yeah you're right doc okay yeah well then that's what we're seeing and you're also having word finding issues and short-term memory and you're burnt out at 3M all that sounds right it does okay it doesn't doesn't really um necessarily you know now put somebody in a in an alley oh sorry that's it it it it's it's the start of the conversation it's like okay well here's this stuff you know sir you know that you're eating before bed and staying up too late and and burning the candle you know that here's the impact of it right so now that you see this this actually dovetails with other stuff you care about that you don't love and resources okay now you know what's important so don't eat before bed that will Cascade and deeper sleep better word finding better resilience yada y y so just getting a handle on how the system works can give you an intervention that you can then really lean into and make great change no matter how you make changes you know change can happen so so much of this biohacking stuff is about undoing all of the the things that are hidden in plain sight isn't it the blue lights the you know coffee as soon as we wake up not looking at you looking at our screens as soon as we wake up rather than getting sunlight into the eyes for me when I embarked on this leadership Journey when I started to get more pressure and responsibility once I became a parent the best thing I did was start to get up early I started to get really early and I would go to the gym um and I wouldn't I'm a coach and I lead a personal development Community but I would always stopped short of giving that advice to say hey you need to do this because I was only speaking from my lived experience it was working for me and the my whoop so I I I knew that they were working for me I knew that I felt better as a human being but then my whoop was like dude you're not sleeping enough like and I was like well I'm not really sure because I so then I start to prioritize sleep and I miss a few kind of gym sessions early morning and I'm like oh this isn't this is I don't feel better and then I hear you on a podcast you're like yeah I get up at 4:00 a.m. several hours before uh sunrise and all of your you know your Liv the experiences better and so I just love to know your perspective on what is the significance of of early mornings and and why why why is that why does that have such a detrimental effect on on your brain well I mean I'm I'm getting up early but I'm also going to bed early so you know okay there's wisdom right there because cand the time to sleep in the time to sleep in is the start of the night not the end of the night your morning wake time is extremely important for circadian entrainment in fact I have the the three big ones are don't eat before bed because you need a two three hour window of clear ing blood sugar people often don't know why and it's really important it helps you understand that you should do it when you have uh melatonin release as the day gets later melatonin starts to release uh late in the day melatonin suppresses pancreatic insulin response completely so as melatonin starts to be released you have a sudden drop of insulin in your system this is why you get Snacky at the end of the day dropping insulin makes you want to you know put more sugar in because you have the ability to release more insulin oh better store some fuel but we have this snacky phenomena if you resist it then you have lower blood sugar as you fall to bed uh fall asleep if you have lowish blood sugar you have a very strong release of growth hormone when you're sleeping if you have any blood sugar you have no growth hormone so if you go to bed because if you eat before bed you wake up fat and tired and hungry but if you fast before bed you wake up full of energy and lean it's very strange so the reason is the Circadian rhythm is pushed by when we eat the number one exogenous Cube number one CU from the outside world for circadian is not light it's not when you sleep it's when you eat so eat for the time zone you want to live in when traveling fast before bed get up early so today I get up at 3:30 during this podcast at 5:30 my time I usually get up about I set an alarm for 4 I'm usually waking up just before it because I'm well and trained when I don't get up early um when I'm staying up until you know 10: at night or something 10:30 at night and getting up at you know 5 or 5:30 even 6 my sleep is different dramatically different it is not as deep my aura ring shames me more um there's just not as much recovery I don't stay well in trained and I need more sleep if I go to bed late and get up even relatively early for you know modern humans get up at 6:30 or 7 My Sleep Quality is not the same as it is if I go to bed earlier you 8 8 at night and get up at 3:30 or something my sleep's amazing my or ring you know gives me a crown or something so it you know I I find that if we're well and trained then the amount of sleep we need reduces this happens in neuro feedback by the way almost every time when someone sleep is off you know they have like they're sleeping enough hours but the quality is not great and they're always burnt out one of the first things that happens a few weeks in is suddenly they amount of sleep compresses where they go from like nine hours of crappy sleep to seven hours of amazing sleep all at once they like whoa it's weird I'm waking up way earlier than usual but I feel good way less sleep but I I don't understand why well you're getting more deep sleep in the sleep that you're getting and back to our sleep tracker Obsession um folks if you have a sleep tracker please ignore the REM numbers they don't mean anything they're they're made up by the providers they're not valid deep sleep is the only thing you should care about on the Sleep trackers it's the only thing you have control over besides total yes you can control your hours in bed but deep sleep is the garden you can't control your REM even if you could measure it on a sleep tracker but you cannot even if you could measure it it wouldn't matter REM is like blood pH it regulates tightly if you throw it off too far bad things happen so if you have issues with REM you're crazy you're hallucinating you're having like really really bizarre experiences by the time your REM is a problem you got bigger issues than your RAM so don't worry about your REM because you can't really control it you can't really measure it and you're always having it those folks who don't think they dream at night you're dreaming but you're not having enough deep sleep to consolidate the memory of having had the dream so lack of dreaming is a lack of deep sleep not an actual lack of REM so focus on the deep sleep and two days three days of behavior before every night will impact how you regulate so you can play with fasting before bed you can play with moving your intense energy your intense exercise the kettle bells working out that kind of Hardcore ra stuff move that to the afternoon between 3 and 7M that's when cortisol is naturally lowest and cardiac output is highest so having a a cortisol Spike will burn off the the blood sugar the body fat the energy and then leave you nice and relaxed for bed so in to back up a little bit in order of importance fast before bed get up early the Wake time is important evening light doesn't matter so much Morning Light matters a little bit the supermatic nucleus above the or the the vasor pressent system above the optic kaym the supermatic nucleus its main job is to notice Morning Light and it's only sensitive to light that's in the air for up to an hour after Sunrise happens that's it so if you're getting up out of bed more than an hour after Sunrise you're aren't getting that Morning Light q and as important as light is activity so to stack all these things fast for two hours before bed get up early seven days a week and when you first get up don't go work out hard don't go grab coffee first thing don't become sedentary on the couch first thing do 10 minutes of something that's intense enough to burn off the energy the cortisol the glycogen that woke you up but not so intense that it calls for more don't do your CrossFit your kettle bells your steady state 10 mile run first thing in the morning do your five sun salutations your Tai Chi get your wife a cup of coffee from the place in the corner you know do that lowkey to wake the entire body up you know evolutionarily wake up in the morning with no food in the cave and go hunt in the jungle for chickens the body's meant to do that it's not meant to go sit in the couch and start eating sugar it's not meant to jack up your cortisol in the first hour after you wake up because cortisol is already high if you slam coffee or go work out intensely first thing in the morning you're calling for cortisol against receptors that have just been occupied you might create cortisol resistance actually having less body fat reduction than you would if you worked out in the afternoon perhaps because you're sensitive to cortisol at that point so fast before bed get up early go for a walk I don't care about light I don't care about screens I don't think it's a big deal if you're if parents are concerned about screens you know it's more about the habit for your kid the transition time the Circadian rhythm is not that impacted by screens humans can push uh can absorb one hour a day of disruption and that's about what a screen does if you wake up at 11: p.m. and look at your phone it pushes your cadm by about one hour which you absorb you you shrug it off basically so I don't care about that too much I also think all of the biohacker emphasis on Blue blocker glasses is nonsense there's good research showing that the intensity of light is what matters the color is irrelevant irrelevant irrelevant completely so and also human eyes are meant to see full spectrum light yeah and you know I'm I'm one of those people who can't tolerate those r red glasses if I put them on Guarantee 5 minutes later I've got an actual significant migraine because my my brain does not like the constrained signal coming in of one color for some reason so if I'm putting on the red filter on my iPhone I'm just just the guy with a red filter on my iPhone rather than actually being a biohacker yeah so exactly it's it's it's interesting and it may have some small effect but it's not the biggest thing to worry about if you're you know concerned about red light and putting glasses on and putting flux on your screens and turning off your lights at night but you're still snacking before bed you're starting in the wrong place so while it might matter you there other sleep pcks that can matter for some individuals those include exposure to light those include ambient light when you're sleeping or having a bed that's cool enough you know these can matter for some people but the big ones are not there the big ones are food awake timing and morning activity those are the really really big ones for circadian exogenous circadian and remember we don't have one circadian rhythm we've got about a thousand and they're supposed to Cascade and resynchronize dayto day that supermatic nucleus causes a a master signal that causes a cascading a resynchronization of all the clocks in the body theoretically every day but if you get used to giving your brain circadian signals routinely like don't eat before bed or get up early and go for a walk after a few days of this that's when it starts to work out out so you can do the same thing with supplements I have a for for for Sleep Quality I I don't love um lots of crazy supplements I think you can get a large amount of support by again circadian signaling meaning the supplements don't make you tired but if you take them at the right time of day after a few days you start getting tired when you should the Sleep urge buil in and these are really common supplements you know alanine and Gaba when mixed together have a six times effect on sleep s than either one does alone dramatically a larger effect mostly because the althenia gets through the blood brain barrier and causes Gaba metabolism to start gab itself can't move through the bloodb brain barrier without Transporters but if you start the metabolism for it now you're calling for it so you get this really strong surge of Gaba as well and then melatonin but not the doses most people take most humans most biohackers are dramatically overdosing melatonin the only reason to take large doses of melatonin is to shut off cancer if you're dealing with cancer stuff or cancer risk macro dosing melatonin may be a very good idea there good research recently showing a great study with with with uh with stage two colon cancer where it just shut it down with high doses of melatonin so there's something there in melatonin but the maximum human dose of Melatonin for blood level is 300 micrograms mcgs a third of a milligram any more than that you don't get a higher blood level you get secondary and tertiary effects you know second third day effects from the melatonin and another important feature or fact about melatonin is it's manufactured from serotonin you take serotonin and cut off a part of it and now you get melatonin all serotonergic neurons have an auto receptor a receptor that sniffs how much it's dumping into the synapse so if you raise serotonin too aggressively with like prac or something you actually have a drop in serotonin this is a weird phenomen weird fact nobody knows ssris lower serotonin in the synapse they don't raise it they raise it briefly and then the cell goes oh crap too much serotonin it pulls back right and the effect is not on your mood is not the serotonin it's some Downstream effect on the hippocampus causing plasticity has very little to do with serotonin so same thing's true about all these other species of neurotransmitters they're meant to regulate and when you get in there you know it's less important that you're discreetly going after any like Leverage you can pull and more important you're moving through the whole system and tuning it and this is true of the sleep stuff as well as any particular you know neurotransmitter just sounds like the golden thread is to learn how to live in harmony harmony with nature harmony with our rhythms harmony with our brain waves it's yeah comes back to and feel them and measure them I mean 50 years ago 100 years ago we didn't look at triglycerides you know and even 30 years ago your doctor told you by triglycerides now you can get your full Gene scan for a couple hundred bucks you can get your methylation status you can get really sophisticated information and you can start to become your own expert you know we're we're get we're hurtling towards a time when we're going to be able to ask our computer hey what's the best medication for me for this or hey what my jeans say about this to your like Siri or your Alexa whatever and it's gonna say oh your jeans say this would you like me to order this from Amazon you know it's that's where we're heading very very shortly intelligent avat avars who can test our health status against the literature against the supplement stacks out there and that's going to mean that this consumer biohacking this agency we have to dig into literature to dig into science is just going to accelerate so we've had an opportunity to biohack and maybe we've you know maybe we have a responsibility to biohack to take care of our suffering it's going to start becoming easy not just possible and necessary buty easy as we start getting uh the gap between science and translation into practice the gap between a finding in a paper and somebody on the street understanding it those gaps are going away like really rapidly and so I think we're going to be in a place in a couple of years where all of the supplements all the interventions all the stuff we're doing won't be things we're doing because we think we should or because some Guru told us yeah but because we looked at our data went crap my behavior is causing this or my resources look like this I would like them to do something different and you'll be able to and and you can do that now with the brain with neur feedback but I really think that the whole landscape of physiology and medicine is starting to uh make itself more visible or starting to understand some of the deepest Promises of uh the science and how that might actually inform the individual's performance so well I'm really grateful for your time want I'll be super respectful I'm I'm sure we're just scratching the surface of all of the things that you've uh you've discovered in in with Peak brain and all the great work you do I have a word here always bet yesterday it's called heart print and the word is uh is a tip of the Hat a word a phrase that we used to use in policing which is um that every contact leaves a trace it's the lockards exchange principle we used to teach the detectives The lockards Exchange principle to get them into the mindset of thinking about when I go to this scene where is the offender left of themselves like what what evidence am I going to find but I think we as human beings leave a heart print on everyone we interact with and the word kind of symbolizes like a ripple effect a a um a legacy the things that we make possible for for other people Andrew I just wonder what you think your heart print will be I mean the work that I do is really about giving people individual people agency so they can then change their resources their suffering so there's this idea you know classically meditation is an act of reducing suffering for yourself as well as for other people if you're less attached you're less reactive you're less got your fists up in response to suffering then you're going to cause less suffering and have less suffering yourself and the same concept applies to working on your seizure disorder or your Cravings or your trauma response it's not your fault you have a trauma response response but it is your responsibility to learn to navigate it and take control and reduce your suffering even if it was caused by being in a traumatic environment that wasn't your fault you still have the opportunity and the responsibility to learn how it works and to change it and I find that when individuals change their own resources there's a Cascade effect in everything they touch and everyone they touch gets changed so having somebody take a 180 perspective from I'm suffering with a diagnostic into ah here's how I'm built interesting I want to work on that just that Cascades out and now their kid their parent their teacher their friend their therapist when they walk into the therapy session say hey um my trauma response is doing this and oh I'm also impulsive and can we work on my not feeling safe around my mother-in-law when they're doing it from a physiologically informed perspective it's not just about the experience of trauma they understand learning they understand how the amydala works they understand safety in containers and that can help somebody accelerate through their own transformation but if you're like a parent who worked on your own ADHD or drinking or seizures or trauma and then your kid comes home having a really extreme uh event at school or something you're going to know how stress Works differently for the kid too because you learned yourself how it worked and so you know if the kids dealing with social or sensory overwhelm or something and you learned how your own s social or sensory phenomena work especially parents and kids you know often they have very similar brains there's a as an aside boys usually have their mom's brains FYI I don't know if that tracks in your family but that's interesting it's it's much more than 50% it's like 90% of the time it's very strange that a lot of the intelligence the empathy the speed of processing the anxiety those come from Mom looks like um in a dominant way the same way that mitochondria you're only carrying your mom's mitochondria none of your dad's you have no genetic material in mitochondria from Death all mom wow pretty sure the brain is biased not 100% the same way but it's biased strongly towards uh mom's genes so the agency is the heart print leaving people with a sense of possibility a sense of power piercing that sense of overwhelm because they don't know what's going on that this overarching labels happening to you that's what I like to leave people with is a sense of like well wait a minute oh this is much more Nuance than I thought and it's not all Bleak and oh wait there's some strengths here and oh wait I understand it now and hey this just gave me six ideas about things I could do in my life right now so it's not treating from a top down perspective it's being in someone's Corners they move through goals and self- understanding the same way that somebody walking into a high-end gym might sit down and go over their dexa scan and bone density and functional strength assessment and then sit down and talk about what's going on and where the goals are not you're overweight but like oh you want to be stronger and have more some body recom and oh you want to be on stage in six months and oh you you know want to give child birth without pain and work on the pelvic okay great those are great goals let's let's iterate towards them gives people agency instead of here's a new label for you here's an identity you must take on now I'm going to be your treatment provider I'm I'm kind of poking at doctors a little bit but my my my joke here is that doctors are wonderful but they have to be right right you go to them for discreet information but scientists you come to us for questions and coaches you come to us for techniques for iterative support so I like to take a science and coaching perspective for the brain instead of a treatment perspective because it instantly provides that communication of agency it leaves that heart print and that particular heart print Echoes it causes them to do the same thing to other people around them so that's powerful if uh someone listening is called to to engage with your work either personally or with their business with their corporate where's the best place for them to visit in find out more yeah so we have we're all over the Internet of course uh Peak brain La is our first socials we do have a separate UK uh presence and companies you can find us on uh Peak brain. co.uk or Peak brain institute.com is the main website um we've got coaches in a few different countries us Sweden and the and and the UK but most of our clients work with us remotely so if you're in one of those countries you can do a rental program and grab Hardware software and work relatively inexpensively still expensive but less than you might expect and if you're in a different country we can still support you but you'll have to purchase some equipment um and uh we've got coaches on seven days a week more than 12 hours a day worldwide who can jump in and help you place a wire or refine a goal or you know build new neur feedback protocol so uh come check us out at Peak brain LA and the socials is probably the best place and we'll uh we'll add a coupon code as well for the podcast so folks can get a discount that cuts the we have a brain mapping membership at our offices so if you're in one of our physical offices you can pay one time and have free access to brain mapping for the year as a tool to keep mapping as you try stuff and our list price on that is 500 us it's cut in half uh when you're a podcast listener so in the UK for instance Chris can do a I think it's 250 pounds instead of dollars it's you know roughly equivalent but um that's an annual where you can have a few maps and get some mentoring and some support now of course we want to do Nur feedback with you if you want to but the goal is really to communicate this agency so folks are listening and they're curious uh come on into the office or give us a shout we've got Partners in many countries we can send you to for mapping and uh would love to start teaching people about their brains so come find us love it Andrew thank you so much for your time brother be honed if you leave us a final thought from your goodself yeah thanks Ryan thanks for having me I would say folks just remember that whatever you're dealing with your performance goals you're suffering it's not how you are always you know you're going to change shift does happen take yours grab yours learn how it works so if you're overwhelmed if you're struggling if you're in pain if you're foggy the brain loves to change and will change in ways you can you can stretch it and an awful lot more changeable than it's conventionally understood so don't tolerate your suffering don't tolerate being overwhelmed by what's going on pain is real but the secondary pain you know there's a concept in Buddhism of the second Dart you hold a coal you know the reaction you have to suffering you stub your toe and you you know it hurts you scream at the bed for 10 minutes that hurts more or you pick up you know anger to hold at somebody is like grabbing a coal you burn yourself before throw it at somebody the same thing's true of the ignorance if you're frustrated about your trauma response that may be adding more suffering to your trauma response so learn how it works and you can start to then you know play some aido on that uh on that um suffering and take control of it and use its strength to uh to your advantage a little bit Andrew appreciate it brother thank you thanks Ryan thanks for having me hey my friends thank you for making it to the end I hope that our time spent together today has left you a little bit better than before you push play I'd really appreciate if you just took a moment to leave a review to allow me to meet more people where they are and hopefully leave them a little bit better too if you're curious to know how I through always better than yesterday can serve you your team your organization then head to always better than yesterday.com to connect and while you're there let me know one or two things you're going to do as a result of listening to this conversation I absolutely love hearing your thoughts your Reflections and the things that this spark in your own heart and mind if you want more insights from my heart and mind I do send out short episodes on a Monday Tuesday Thursday and Friday and again I hope that they serve you well I appreciate you listening I'm Ryan Harley host of the always better than yesterday podcast a podcast for heart-c centered leaders just like you keep leading my friends always 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