Episode 157 Neurofeedback with Dr. Andrew Hill

you're listening to the journey podcast could neuro feedback be the game changer that helps you understand your brain leading to a happier healthier mind and better well-being learn more in this thought-provoking episode hi I'm Patra brunbauer and with Decades of experience with sadness pain anxiety and stress I finally figured out how to leave all that behind and this podcast shows you how to break free permanent so you can reclaim your sanity and find the self-esteem and energy to go after the life you desire with real talk about mental health holistic healing and the tough journey of coming out the other end this is the journey podcast welcome to today's episode join us as we delve into the Intriguing world of neuro feedback a groundbreaking approach with the potential to transform our mental health and overall well-being in this episode we uncover the intricacies of neuro feedback and its profound implications for mood regulation mental Clarity and emotional balance we explore how this Innovative technique allows individuals to gain deeper insights into their brains functioning and offers a unique opportunity for self-improvement Dr Andrew Hill cognitive Neuroscience UCLA is the founder of peak brain Institute and a leading neuro feedback practitioner and biohacking coach from clients worldwide at Peak brain Dr Hill provides individualized training programs to help you optimize your brain across goals of stress sleep attention brain fog creativity and athletic performance here is my interview with Dr Andrew [Music] Hill hi Dr Hill it's so great to have you on the podcast today I've been looking forward to getting to chat with you because neuro feedback is such an interesting topic for today's episode welcome to the podcast thank you for having me it's nice to be here yeah it's my pleasure and what an exciting topic to dive into for starters would you like to share a little bit about yourself and your own story and actually how you came to be in this really interesting field of neuro feedback back sure so I guess I've worked in mental health or Human Services working with people one way or another for kind of a long time I was doing work in residential environments in group homes with developmentally disabled adults who had no language often vision and hearing impairment so there's an awful lot of both cognitive stuff as well as learning each individual person sort of version of tactile sign or the way they communicated the way they used tools or utensils or things and I did this work for a long time with more acute people you know the more difficult environments both chronic and these group environments and then I worked after that for a while in really acute psychiatric impatient environment where it was a locked facility and a lot of really acute behavior and people in really Edge case suffering things breaking down getting really disregulated in acute stress and obsessive and psychiatric breaks with thought disorders and dual diagnosis with both alcohol and psychiatric stuff and as a maybe less intense exercise I also end up working with geriatric Psychiatry and then developmental a kid latency Age 4 to 10 Psychiatry impatient and saw lots and lots of just incredible things but also saw a lot of really deep suffering we weren't necessarily doing much to you do much to support a lot of holding patterns a lot of revolving doors a lot of people were getting paliative care in some ways for mental health or for really cute suffering or trauma without really much change longer term and at this time 20 25 years ago longer the insurance landscape in the US the mental health care the inpatient hospitalization everything was shrinking over the first few years I was in impatient mental health the first four years the average length of stay that was being paid for for people in acute psychiatric distress dropped from 11 days down to three days in four years and anti-depressants and some major mood stabilizers are barely starting often not working at all even for a couple of weeks so I was seeing that phenomena that environment that business if you will that industry fall apart and working really hard in it trying to work with people and doing decent work at the individual level and I got injured and I couldn't keep working in that really acute environment especially because it wasn't well staffed or safe and without physical ability I couldn't do the workouts doing anymore so I left Mental Health and Human Services for a few years and went into high-tech and did work in Big Data before it was called that and spent a lot of time developing some tech skills just before the 2000 bubble corrected basically which was a bit more of a whimper than a bang of course as we discovered there was no Y2K in the tech industry but there was a bit of a market shift right after that a bubble that corrected in the marketplace so I left Tech with a shrinking Tech environment and messed working with humans so I found a place nearby that worked with kids that had more difficult developmental stuff that I come across but also worked with this stuff called neuro feedback that I've been hearing about and I walked in there hoping to get internship and observe a day or two a week or something and I walked out with a job and was very excited and so for a couple of years just Dove really deeply into neuro feedback working mostly with a mix autistic spectrum and ADHD another non-specific developmental complaints lots of strings of letters attached to things but really they're just categorizations when people have really acute developmental stuff going on and that can be highly performant people like kids with ADHD it's not really a disease process or a disability but it really gets in the way when it's severe all the way through we had a lot of kids with no language having seizures having extreme sensory difficulties or extreme obsessiveness we had some adults with brain injuries and kids with brain injuries we started seeing some more acute anxiety phenomena because you all the Spectrum kids and adults there's this overarousal of the nervous system this hyperactivity almost this disinhibition of the system and that's part of what leads to this sensory stuff and other phenomena in sleep and just soothing that was pretty profound so I was working in this environment having come from this somewhat jaded perspective of human suffer and we can't do a lot about it but oh hey this technology stuff's kind of cool let me get deeper into that and within a couple of months I was seeing things that I didn't really believe had been possible with reducing problems reducing suffering and helping people really retrain their brains in the way they wanted especially for things like executive function just a couple of months I was doing a lot of testing a lot of brain mapping within a few months I became the technician at this Center who was trained to do everything if they had a training course they wanted to send me to oh hey here's a cool thing we think might be might dovetail go and do a three-day training course Over Here Andrew and I had the luxury I did not know this at the time but I had the luxury the gift of the person that hired me was deeply agnostic to any technology in the somewhat fractured landscape even back then and so I just learned everything at the behest of this job I had and it was great and I got better and better at doing it I started seeing change everywhere and we were doing an awful lot of like pre-post testing of course or testing with both executive function attention testing as well as brain mapping or the EEG and we would routinely see on attention testing we routinely see a couple of standard deviations of change in just six or eight weeks when someone has severe ADHD or something or a major sleep issue and that was not what I thought was possible with adult brains let alone developing brains and it seemed to be happening in both and as I was being trained in this field this kind of nent field even then the field was really fracturing out into three or four different types of neura feedback different theories about how it worked different ways of going after it including different frequency ranges to train or different types of things regular bands of EG like Alpha Beta Delta gamma stuff like slow cortical potentials stuff with micro stimulation like lens all these different techniques were fracturing out in the landscape and the providers were all pretty difficult there fracturing groups of providers little churches of neuro feedback who didn't play nice and they all agreed that neuro feedback worked well and they were all getting effects that were better than most stuff that medication was being pointed at for these same complaints and yet they had really different ideas about what was the right way to do it how it worked how it could work and those ideas were not reconcilable they were in deep conflict and yet they were all getting good results so I call this a blind man and elephant situation we all have a piece of this thing we're describing and it's at the close level potentially valid but as you pull back nobody really understands the thing they're working with after a couple years of seeing people transform left and right seeing seizures drop away seeing anxiety and Trauma drop away seeing executive function sleep changes all the time seeing occasionally things like language recovery and autism doesn't often happen but it can and I was just shocked at the amount of change and also a little bit frustrated just int at how little we actually really knew about it and so much of it was clinical lore and apprentices teaching apprentices and The Field's only 50 60 years old basically it's only three generations of people who mostly taught other people and there are more neuro feedback providers in the world now I think than ever before but there's not that many there's probably about 15,000 worldwide and 10,000 of those are probably in North America and most of those are in the US it's not a very giant field and 20 25 years ago it was much smaller and so I after a couple years of working in this environment doing Nur feedback learning everything I could I ended up getting a couple of different employment exposures to I was trying to really widen my neuro backing so I worked at mlan hospital for a year doing neuroimaging of depression working with Dr Mike Henry there's this great study where people would want to discontinue from antidepressants because they were moderately impactful or not impactful or years later and so we were looking at brain changes as you voluntarily withdraw are can you see structural changes in the brain as you go and I was working in learning about ECT and other really Extreme Ways of working with the brain and just getting deep everywhere I could and I took all of that and went to study n feedback at the grad level drove across the country Over the Rockies on a much too small motorcycle for that trip and ended up at UCLA studying cognitive Neuroscience which is this melding of how the brain produces the mind and how the mind is influenced by the brain and the sort of human piece of it in some ways and spend some time learning much more about the brain much more about EEG more professionally and formally and then about ways to study EEG ways to study the brain and I did a placebo control double blind study on neuro feedback as part of my dissertation one of the first ones because the study was done the research was done in maybe 2010 or so and I published it in 2012 but that was one of the very first double blind studies because it's so hard to Blind EEG if you move or twitch or cough or unplug something you can kind of tell working with software vendors we came up with a way to maybe do Placebo control and we tested a bunch of mechanisms and it seemed to work pretty well and so I ran a 40 person study looking at left versus right hemisphere training and frequency versus sham training essentially and looked at What's called the evoke potential the momentary event in the brain that is reacting to the reward because the way neur feedback works for those folks who aren't familiar not all forms of it are like this but most forms are relatively passive where you in some ways measure the brain stick a wire to the head and measure the brain measure a brain wave feature like the amount of a brain wave the speed maybe its connectivity just to another region and as you watch something fluctuate whenever it happens to move briefly in the right direction you applaud that with stimulus auditory visuals and when the brain moves in the wrong direction you withhold the stimulus or you slow it down so this is operant conditioning and you adjust the goalposts as you go so you end up with this thresholding effect where the computer is chasing you and moving next to where you are and then whenever you happen to briefly shift your brain gets more information and goes oh hey wait okay stuff's happening whenever I drop my Alpha all right I'm G to drop some Alpha and you can train the brain b basically involuntarily it's an involuntary exercise because you can't really feel your brain but the brain notices these little runs of alpha dropping let's say create bursts of gameplay on the screen and the Brain notices that oh okay over time you can gradually shape the activity that's neuro feedback and we develop this double blind process in the software eager it's one of the big gold standard softwares where you grab stored clips of e EG off the disc shuffle them blend them scale them to match the size of the person EG and then blend on the screen a mix of the story EG and the real EG so you can see coughs and blinks and movement and wire being unplugged but all the training parameters all the numbers of how much Alpha and where the frequencies were coming off the stored files that were noncontingent to the person's brain and what I was measuring was well how is a brain knowing what we're rewarding how is neur few back happening what's going on we don't know what's happening I looked at what the brain did in the moment that the beep or the game event happened to clawed the brain having just moved or moved more in that direction and found really easily that the brain reacts in the frequency range you are applauding within about five minutes in everyone and you can watch it change over a few days of training you can watch the phenomena the evoke potential the learning event in the frequency range this desynchronization in the frequency or training this burst of it in amplitude which causes the synchrony of the waveform to shift so you can see this little like oh ah beta whenever you applaud beta and it doesn't take very long it's within 10 minutes for everyone and it's interesting because most people don't feel neuro feedback most forms of neuro feedback you feel it sort of three four maybe five sessions in you're like hey wait I might be feeling something huh nah I'm imagining it and the next time you're like oh no no wait a minute wait a minute oh yeah actually this feels like something for a few hours huh and then you get these After Effects you build it up it's usually fairly gentle I think when done your brain doesn't react it starts to learn and move and that's what you notice but the brain knows right away the mind's like a few days in like hey wait I think I'm sleeping different I think I was clear for a little wow but the brain right away is like hey why are we applauding Alpha Alpha's doing stuff oh okay I like stuff I'm gonna make some Alpha hey wait where' my stuff go here's some more Alpha oh I like stuff and you kind of gently move the brain in this direction so for the Geeks in the room it's involuntary operant conditioning instrumental conditioning is a more valid term here but if you want to dig out my dissertation you can find the evoke potentials that related spectral perturbations for the reward event and it shows that neuro feedback is it shows how the machine is yoking to the brain how that Loop is created and where the learning can be applied essentially if any neuro feedback professionals are listening this actually can tell you if neura feedback is happening in real time or not or if the person's like too distracted or moving too much or causing too much signal issue you can tell if it's happening real time if you know where to look so a little Pro tip for any real high LEL Geeks Who are listening yeah anyways that's how I got involved and longwinded but I had to dig in to understand mechanisms and some of the science and now I bring it back to people so yeah thank you so much for sharing your story and as you're speaking about that I really envisioning the potential of all of this and how we can help like you said people who were on the Spectrum or with anxiety with PTSD possibly addictions we can work on those kind of things and a very gentle as you mentioned most people aren't even feeling anything when it's happening so very gentle way non-medicated also for those people who may not respond to medication or have very bad side effects to medication this would be a great thing to try and not just in the mental health applications for it but also a lot of other places where you've mentioned you know we could do brain mapping also and this could help our sleep it could help with stress with attention with our performance so almost a limitless potential to what we could do with neuro feedback now you did mention there aren't that many providers who do this so how can people try neuro feedback or where could they find out can they do this themselves or they need to see a certified professional how can they go about this yeah there are tools sort of proliferating especially as technology gets more accessible I don't love most of the off the Shelf tools they're a little too one siiz fits-all and even some of the clinical quote unquote clinical tools are a little too one siiz fits-all or they let the software automate too much and I think that breaks down if people are not average it's fine to use one siiz fits-all system if you're in that sort of typical range but if you're trying to work on quirky phenomena or really acute phenomena that are quite different there's really two things that I think add to Nur feedback One is using an assessment a brain map a quantitative EEG and not all approaches will use a brain map well do an analysis of your brain and then tailor the work to you so I think that's the first sort of threshold for criteria and unfortunately that means that you can't just buy a cheap system off the shelf and slap it on and let it do the work there's no magic box there's no magic system to do the work but you can do really good work with lots of systems so the system the software itself the hardware itself self is not that important actually it's kind of like I can get you in shape with a nautilus machine or kettle bells or barbells or or big giant rocks out in a Scottish field what would you prefer what is your jam and we can get you in shape that way you can do lots of things with lots of different techniques and neuro feedback if you know what the brain is doing you're trying to work with what the goals are you're trying to get and then if you understand how the techniques the Nur Fe techniques you're using work and that can break down sometimes when you get access to Tech that can push your brain around but not necessarily knowing how to use it that's where we getting into side effects and problematic outcomes from n feedback because you can create briefly gently subtly different things than you want oh I feel a little spacey I feel a little bit on edge oh hey my sleep was worse last night I was waking kind of irritable it's transient it wears off unless you repeat it again and again and again and so you build up this phenomena and you don't want to move yourself progressively towards your resources not working how you wish or towards increased suffering that's not a good sign neur feedback is not a landscape where you push through stuff and it gets better generally if you're feeling something quirky or off after a session and you tell somebody that you're working with it just don't do it again and it wears off but you do 5 10 15 20 sessions that way and you may need some professional support to back yourself out of that corner that you've built because it's going to be somewhat stable unless you retrain it that's sort of a hint of my answer is a brain mapping is important therefore a professional to help you do it to gather some data to interpret some data becomes somewhat important training your own brain is pretty easy you can stick a couple wires to your head and set up some software and run it knowing what to do next can be a little tricky again about 15,000 people in the world that do this I would say 2third are probably in North America but you can find psychologists and therapists who do this all over the place any big metro area essentially in the world and I do mean therapists and psychologists it's mostly a clinical practice in that landscape there are a lot of things for which neuro feedback is deeply impactful and effective that probably should have a therapeutic component a container some skills some additional work done Nyack might be the coach in the gym helping you build the resource but there's that coach in the field helping you learn to change the behavior and the release and the habit and evaluate all the voluntary stuff so at Peak brain we use nerve feedback and mindfulness as the two pieces to that but for deep suffering therapy and therapeutic support is probably really necessary or useful as part of the process if not alongside Nur feedback then before it after it Etc including things like trauma and other really deep acute suffering and depression hugely impactful for those phenomena Nerf feedback is but it's also potentially dropping dynamite in the kidy pool and you don't want to decompensate for tenuous coping strategies and stress response when you're grinding through without any support and then you start monking with your brain you probably should do it with some care and guidance and maybe work with somebody who does nerve feedback and is a trauma therapist or whatever or maybe you're somebody who's done 30 years of your own therapy journey and your your skill that you're suffering sadly and you got it mostly well regulated but you're looking for more that's a argument for somebody who may just really more want to get into learning their brain and dig into physiology and then you might not need the therapeutic support in that container in that landscape but once you know what you want if you want to get in and become your own biohacker which is one end of the spectrum you want to work with a therapist which is the other end of the spectrum or maybe in the middle use good tools and guide it but then go off and train yourself and get deeper into it you can find a solution again most big cities have therapists doing this and you can roll your own there's actually really accessible hardware and software these days there low cost software there the open EEG project there's open BCI BCI 2000 you can roll your own software and Hardware this way but the software and the hardware is not the hard part using it is building a kettle bell or a nautilus machine was not the hard part in creating physical transformation in people I would encourage folks that are like thinking about the best tool or how to build their own get out of your own way a little bit and buy some reasonably cheap hardware and software and the costs have come down when I got involved in the field initially at that first center you needed two computers per person to run neura feedback they were connected by parallel Cable ONE computer ran the signal processing one computer ran a video game and then you had a person hooked to one of the computers and a technician sitting at the other one basically and it was $5,000 $10,000 more just for a system way more than that I think it was 12,000 back then and nowadays you can get an e amplifier for under a th000 bucks you can get software for a few hundred bucks maybe a th bucks for good software and you can buy brain mapping systems for five grand or six grand it's not cheap but the same cost that used to be tough for a clinician to buy a couple systems a prosumer now spends that much on the phone sometimes or a laptop themselves you can get access to it and now it becomes okay well would you like to be on a guided Journey would you like to be taken care of of would you like to just you know get into the weeds yourself and my company Peak brain chose to support people who are really needing access to nerve feedback but don't necessarily need the pure clinical support if you're in your first psychotic break or first deep suffering with trauma nura feedback is a hugely impactful resource and I encourage you to find somebody who can help you do it but at Peak brain I mostly have people who can handle lowkey if you will psych stuff but really helping you learn about the resources not the labels it's not about diagnosing your problem it's about helping you figure out what's going on in your brain and then taking control of it because you can see things in your brain for what I call regulatory resources some stuff in your brain you can't see and some stuff in your brain you can't change that much because it's kind of locked down after a certain point things like the way you hear language kind of locked down or visual Fusion two streams of vision into one picture kind of lock down if you have a stabismus or an eye injury and you have some correction and you have two eyes lined up later in life you see double for the rest of your life except for rare exceptions it's really hard to change things like the visual organization tissue or the language production tissue but it's easy and actually meant it's intrinsic to change tissue involved with sleep executive function sensory processing social processing speed of processing so if you can start to know how these things work and also all the flavors of anxiety they're not disease processes the regulatory you have big giant hubs of tissue whose job it is to do certain things and if you learn how these hubs work and how they tune then you can take control of them and you can change them and this is what I was seeing 25 years ago in this first center I was seeing us tap into regulatory resources of executive of sleep of sensory of seizure suppression and I didn't know that was possible it had not been my landscape for the Brain before that fast forward to me being a neuroscientist and teaching for a long time at UCLA teaching developmental psych and gerontology and all kinds of things my perspective is one now of hey there's all this stuff in the brain that you can just look at and you can learn and it's not that complicated it's like looking at your triglycerides on a blood panel and going oh I better back off in the bed and Jerry's and you learn you control it you don't just take the guru's word it's like looking at your ketones on a breath meter versus listening to a keto Guru telling you what the number of carbs you should have is well learn your own insulin response learn your Ketone generation it'll be different for you than what the guru says based on your when you fast how often you exercise all your body mass all kinds of things the same is maybe even more true for your brain people are weird good job be weird like by itself it doesn't really matter as you dig into a brain map or brain performance data or human testing data this is where both its benefit and it's sort of why hasn't gotten more adapted it's an exploratory landscape brain mapping is not diagnostically valid I can't look at your brain and say aha you have this label that a diagnosis I can say aha you've a resource it's a little unusual and it looks a little like this and that often means it can be some suffering over here or a thing over here and you can get pretty close for the regulatory stuff so like ADHD you can spot pretty cold for people most of the time as well as big resources of like OCD or PTSD they're very easily Spott in a brain map but when you see someone's front midline their interior singular cramped up in high gear making lots of beta which is perseverative obsessive or lots of theta which is like songs in your head or having a tick or something like biting your nails when you see this in someone's brain map you don't know if it's true it's plausible but the front midline might not be OCD maybe they're just an effective CEO and the back midline the posterior singulate his job is to go watch the road heads up careful careful it might be activated in a lifeguard or a mom with n kids who's very effective at managing a chaotic environment and it's a skill it's a strength or maybe it is a stress response and a cramping up in a rumination maybe it's both maybe the CEO has OCD and it's both a strength and a cramped up resource that he or she can't quite regulate you don't have to take it as either you can look at your front midline and go oh beta waves yeah I do kind of get stuck in my head oh actually that matters to me and you can then exercise that tissue and change it the regulatory stuff you can change a lot of the cortex to the tune of a standard deviation against the population a standard deviation every 20 or 25 sessions of sort of typical band changing neur feedback it's about the rate of change when someone comes in with like an ADHD or classic PTSD phenomena or they've been drinking for 20 years and are hyperactivated and cannot self soothe and cannot turn their mind off you see phenomena in brain mapping and performance that's off the mean by two to three standard deviations basically someone's impulsivity is most human testing data set up where the average score is 100 and 15 points is an AG matched standard deviation so when someone comes in with ADHD phenomena be it from actual ADHD or a concussion or a postco thing or whatever they're coming up around 50s and 60s and 70s in a bell curve instead of 100 or above where you want to see a high performer you can tell and it gets in the way and everyone knows and you also see it in their brain generally and if it's ADHD you see tons of theta squirrel and people are disinhibited and if it's add what we used to call add inattentiveness it's lots of Alpha and you can't shift out of neutral but it's usually not one thing it's usually a mix of things and people are not labels you walk through different resources and then you can go after those things you can change someone's executive function or stress response or hyperfocus or rumination in a way they feel in a couple of weeks in in a way you can see in data in a couple of months in a way that's permanent and has a few standard of change in a few months and that is diametrically opposed to what I thought was possible working in the trenches of acute psychiatric and group homes and crisis centers I did not know we could change this way I did not know that understanding yourself just understanding yourself can shift your suffering before you even make changes it's not even about Nur feedback sometimes you see your brain oh oh and you know how to shift your behavior or you give yourself permission to have some suffering to work through it and just the agency alone it became as important to me over time as the neuro feedback that we do Peak brain has this access policy so in all of our physical offices most are in the US you can come in with an annual membership where it's a one-time fee and brain maps are unlimited to give you the agency so you can look at your medication your Aderall your caffeine status you can look at your cannabis your Pro workout whatever and examine how your brain works under different circumstances and take agency and demystify and progressively learn more and more because a lot of the things that we lump into those buckets of labels actually they're kind of just regulatory features not disease processes that's really true of trauma response of all the anxiety stuff including sensory and social irritability and OCD and PTSD generalized anxiety most sleep issues executive function things they're not really disease process they're disregulation like a cramped up muscle that's gotten stuck in one place and if you do stuff like these non-medication interventions like meditation like therapy like neuro feedback you don't Rob yourself of the strength of the cramp you only Rob yourself of being stuck there so the person with front midline hyperfocus who's also got OCD doesn't lose the ability to hyperfocus when they wish after nerve feedback they just don't have to or the person who who's always in lifeguard mode and is is a bit threat sensitive and ruminating is still able to keep themselves safe when things instantly become unsafe and dangerous they're not tranquilized but they don't have to walk around stuck in their gut when things are chill that's the promise of understanding your brain is figuring out that some of this stuff you're experiencing has range it has levers it has features that are not that complicated to understand and you can take a peek at them and then you can try stuff in your life sleep hacking Nur feedback medit medication all kinds of stuff feel it shift see it in the data and take more agency progressively as you go so that's my big takeaway and that's why it almost doesn't matter if you do Nerf feedback or not find somebody to do brain mapping first and then you can go through and do some interventions based on what makes the most sense if you want to come work with us you can see us in London or Stockholm in the US we're in Los Angeles New York City St Louis and also Orange County California Peak brain works about 80% virtual though so if you're in one of our countries then you can work with us without a visit to the office in Sweden and the UK you'd have to visit the main hubs to grab equipment and to grab a brain map but in the US we would send your equipment out and map you from home and we've made the process of having amazing brain coaches walk you through getting good data and learning software while you're sitting in your kitchen on a zoom on an any desk on a screen share we have coaches on seven days a week we give you a private chat that set up so you get handholding and real-time support and education whenever need that's one model and I may be biased I think it's a great model but I hope people are hearing is not so much come work with Peak brain we're awesome I mean we are so come work with us but is the fact that neuro feedback is this tool that gives you agency and before that understanding your brain can reframe it I can't tell you the number of people I have that are therapist referral sources in my big Office Centers like in LA and St Louis who send me clients not because they necessarily need ner feedback but because the therapist can't figure out the line between anxiety and ADHD or sleep issue or how those things are intertwining and affecting each other and they're really trying to figure out what needs therapy and what might need a medication referral and what might be a concussion this is Agency for the provider or the mom not just the person working with their own brain so agency is my big takeaway here folks and this is true not just about brain stuff I've alluded to breath hacking with ketones I love the biosense device which is amazing or you can look at rich blood panels for figuring out your own triglycerides to manage those every year wearing an aura ring for Sleep hacking for Sleep hacking by the way only pay attention to Deep Sleep the Sleep trackers are misleading and inaccurate but deep sleep is the thing that you can both measure with some validity and you have some control over use the Deep Sleep On The Trackers as the thing to pay attention to but again takeaway is take the agency there's a lot more that may be tractable and understandable about your suffering your frustration the goals you're having trouble reaching in your performance you may be able to understand them and then make some change so brain mapping is painless except for goopy hair not that uncomfortable and over pretty quick I encourage folks to start there and everything starts to unfold yeah and that's what it's all about like you said the agency and actually understanding that we're not condemned to a label or suffering for the entirety of our lives but there are things we can do there are things to understand and to make change and a lot of them like you just mentioned are very accessible and they're becoming more and more accessible especially if you're not living in one of the bigger centers you can still take advantage of that so yeah I encourage our listeners to connect with you or connect with a provider or just find out more even online as to what we've been talking about and really make those changes in their lives and Andrew also has his own podcast called head first with Dr Hill so you can listen in from your favorite podcast provider on that and get get some more info and we will of course be linking to all of Andrew's offerings in the show notes as well so be sure to check there for the website and how you can connect in the different countries if you're in the US I think this will be pretty straightforward in Europe maybe we'll need to do a little bit more connecting but I'm sure that we can get you the connections and the tools that you need if you want to make the changes in your life yeah this has been another incredible episode and I really hope our listeners have enjoyed this journey into neuro feedback as as much as I have I kind of get the sense that this is a bit of a rabbit hole once you lift the lid on this there's so much information and many things that you can learn about but this has been a fantastic start to it all and thank you so much for coming on today and talking about this Dr Hill because what a fascinating topic and so much potential to change lives oh well thanks so much for having me nice to be on a little bit of a journey with you today yeah I truly appreciate it and I'm kind of thinking there are probably many more topics that we can talk about in the future but hopefully this will serve as a good starting point for listeners to dip their toes and and find out more about newer feedback thank you so very much for your time today and for your wisdom and knowledge on all of this and take really great care of yourself oh thank you and folks take care of your brains talk to you soon thank you so much for taking time out of your day to listen in if you enjoy the journey podcast please support us by subscribing sharing on social media and leaving us a review We Are appreciate you and you can find more of the journey on Facebook Instagram Tik Tok and our website the journey.com sending you love and courage and see you next [Music] time