Episode Five | How to Take Care of Your Brain as an Entrepreneur with Guest Dr. Hill

everyone take care of those brains welcome back to another episode of innovation for entrepreneurs the podcast that unlocks the secrets of successful product and service Innovation and launch for businesses I'm your host Megan Anderson Innovation startup coo and founder of your business co-pilot here to guide you through the exciting journey of Entrepreneurship and Innovation let's get started uh welcome back everybody to a new episode of innovation for entrepreneurs I'm really really excited about this episode because it's quite different than the ones that I have either recorded myself in the past or even different from the guests that I've had in the past so today we are uh here with Dr Andrew Hill uh he's a trained functional neuroscientist from UCLA and um owns did you found the business as well did so founder and CEO of peak brain Institute and you have locations all over the country even sounds like you're going a bit Global so we'll talk about that as well but what I'm really excited about here is we're not talking about Innovation Theory and startup practices today to day but more about entrepreneurs themselves their brain what they struggle with how we can overcome some of those so I'm hoping to bring some helpful tips you know to get people across uh some of those barriers that we all face in the entrepreneurial and startup space so welcome Andrew uh thanks for having me nice to be here yeah um well tell us uh a little bit more about yourself I'd like to know um this is just such an interesting feel I think so did you know you always wanted to go into this space or what led you in this direction yeah so I've been in uh this field this this thing called uh neuro feedback which is the primary technique that we use for about 25 years at this point uh and I've been running my own companies for about half of that so um Peak brain my current company is about 9 years old this summer so it's sort of my main uh startup as my own entrepreneur and uh as you alluded to you know I have um offices both in the US and overseas and most of our clients actually work with us virtually so we are sort of always online we have 12 hour a day 7 day a week coverage and coaches are helping people stick wires to their head and measure their brain activity and do interesting interventions so I didn't know I always want to do this particular thing but I've been working with you know humans uh who are either suffering or having you know goals around brain and mind for a long time and I worked a lot in acute psychiatric environments and also in residential facilities for folks that had multiple disabilities language and cognition and everything else um and did all that work for maybe 10 years or 11 years between undergrad and grad school and toward the end of that time I ended up getting injured working in acute psychiatric environments and I couldn't keep doing that work so I left that environment and eventually a couple years later went back into Human Services sort of missed working with people and I got a job at an Autism Center that primarily used this technique as one of their big interventions and I had tons of experience with autism and ADHD and other you know childhood type phenomena and I uh was shocked at what I was seeing I was seeing changes in weeks and months and symptoms dropping away and people's lives changing and it really flew in the face of what I thought was possible for a lot of the the brain stuff we deal with so after a couple years working uh there I ended up going back to grad school uh UCLA to essentially figure out how this stuff works you know no one really knew before that how neuro feedback works we still don't completely know the brain that's mostly because we don't really understand the brain that well um it's more of a phenomena you manage and less of a discreet thing we understand deeply but but yeah I ended up um going back to grad school studying how neuro feedback works you know I sort of did some uh you know good studies some Placebo control double blind studies showing that neuro feedback does create this uh experience uh in in the brain activity this this this rapid change and after that you know the your listeners might not know any any any any of the listeners who are entrepreneurs who have left Academia know exactly what I'm talking about but you can't get the same kind of path anymore if you're a grad student if you're thinking about your your postto and your lecturing job and your tenor track job and your lab and your Grant um that path while I was in grad school um dwindled and and shrunk so most people would do that when I was starting off in grad school but five years later six years later when I was finishing you know 5% 3% of people who were applying to those kind of jobs were getting them so the academic play landscape really got somewhat uh narrow and I ended up deciding to go and do companies I started uh uh two companies as I was graduating at my PhD one was a neut Tropic you know biohacking uh Product Company and one was uh neuro feedback company focused both on General brain phenomena but also on addiction and an awful lot of work around alcohol and uh disregulated Behavior around alcohol so in that environment a company called Alternatives that we ran for about three or four years um we had an awful lot of those uh highly stressed out entrepreneurs that are deeply successful uccessful but whose lives are sort of falling apart in full catastrophe mode while they're you know building their company and so that tended to mean interpersonal stuff and alcohol and a lot of either anxiety or ADHD depending how they started off and um would get these people who are broadly disregulated and the neuro feedback stuff that we do tends to help uh many of these phenomena really quickly and so uh after sort of seeing how thoroughly people could be um it's not about the change of the technique per se but just showing someone their brain saying look here's some resources stress fatigue speed of processing Sleep Quality anxiety it's not a diagnostic landscape where I'm saying here's your D here's your label it's more like hey here's some resources right what do you want to do what you know these important to you how here's how they operate it's kind of like digging through your spreadsheets with a sophisticated accountant and coming up with hey here's a new kpi here's a new thing that you're you know you might want to pay attention to because it seems like it's affecting your performance and I do the same thing with brain data I dig through data and model it with that people and say look at this over here might mean X and this over here often means why are these things relevant are they valid are they important and I also do performance testing which is prettyy straightforward to see if somebody has got Reaction Time issues or inattentiveness or something so now the process is really digging through somebody's brain with them and helping them understand it learn the resources and start to come up with a strategy to make change so very very cool um so I have a million questions um first of all like it completely makes sense the path that you bring people down because some people may know that there's some problem and even know like Pathways to fix those things but until you see something on paper which I think you I understand is you're taking data from brain waves or brain activity and actually putting it in a tangible format for people to see then they may actually put two and two together of the steps they need to take and you give them those resources as well but then if you take another test thereafter and people see that change because the brain isn't something you can see or like internally anything in your body you can see um but in the medical practice when you can put some of the things that are happening internally on paper and now start to measure them that may give people like the sense of wow this is a Direction that's this resource is actually working so then there're you know more adherence to keeping on that path to making you know progress and change absolutely and people often you know when they first start figuring out whether suffering or goals are they often have a perspective on things in their brain kind of happening to them it's the diagnosis they got it's the suffering or the crisis they're in not so much hey you have some resources like anxiety is really common for high stress High performance individuals But anxiety is a natural phenomena we've got about a half a dozen different circuits who have different jobs and they're supposed to do certain things the front midline holds things in your mind the back midline evaluates the outside world so you can Orient behind the right year processes social and sensory those things are all in use and yet if the world becomes unpredictable difficult dangerous we sort of ramp up those resources and now we can find ourselves not just uh Focus but overfocused and perseverating not just evaluating but ruminating and you know these are natural things that can cramp up that can adapt into that direction so you can get somebody who's highly successful but highly burnt out you can see it in their brain activity as poor Sleep Quality as certain flavors of anxiety or attention difficulty cropping up and again it's not so much a diagnostic here's your label it's more like oh hey here's a bunch of resources do you find yourself percept rating oh you do okay well that works for you at at at your job that's awesome how does your partner feel about that at 7 p.m. ah okay all right so this little bit of like hyperfocus and you can't shift gears okay great so we walk through these resources and help people figure out which ones they enjoy which are working beautifully which might need some support and then we would give them tools to uh make those changes yeah sounds fantastic it sounds really helpful and um successful as well so I I want to take it take it back a step actually can you just explain the basics for the listeners who are very new to it of the neural feedback like in general so there's a couple things to think about one is the assessment process and the other is the intervention or training uh process so assessments are things called brain Maps brain mapping or qeg quantitative EEG and all that really is is a full head recording of EEG that is then compared to AG matched uh databases because people are kind of weird but age is the biggest thing that shifts how a brain looks across time speed of brain waves the amounts of brain waves even like a kid has a thinner skull than a than a teenager so kids have larger brain waves than than teens do for instance you get older and your brain slows down especially with uh speed of processing or sleep changes so we do this thing called qeg we put a cap on the head squirt it full of gel have you sit still for about 10 minutes eyes closed 10 minutes eyes open and gather resting baselines now your brain activity at that level is something that's always the same so if I did a brain map on you today and in a couple of weeks and in a couple of weeks and in a couple of weeks you'd see essentially the same 10,000 foot perspective on the kinds of things that you know you you'd be looking at you wouldn't always understand perfectly what you're seeing but there's a consistency a stability of the of the resources across time and we also do performance testing so we have people sit and do the world's most boring 20 minute sort of go no go style you know sit there with your finger and a mouse and click only for some things that pop up and we figure out you know where we can see your inattentiveness or impulsivity by you know missing things or overreacting so this is the assessment process and I sit down with people and say look here's a handful of things that are unusual in your brain which of these things are important to you and the things that are reliable things we can see pretty much across people that are served in the brain are all of the features of attention also most of the anxiety things uh speed of processing which has a huge impact for high performers who are sort of mid years one of the things that happens as we get tired and burnt out is our Sleep Quality starts to go down and without deep sleep at night we end up with slower speed of processing and that means that you have delayed recall hunting for Words hunting for names trouble reading rapidly or absorbing information rapidly it's a speed of processing thing and so often my midyear CEOs type I'm wondering I'm getting some all no it's just your speed if you get better deep sleep you'd recover and for those folks who are concerned about their memory let me say one thing from a gerontology perspective if you're having trouble with short-term memory access for words and names and little tip of the tongue things that's actually not memory it's purely a speed or a synchronization thing if you lose memory with aging the first aspects of age related cognitive you know memory Things Early dementias are episodic memory losses if you forget your wedding and your birthday and this party you had and those big events that's concerning that's memory but when you can't remember the name of that person you just met yesterday it's attention or speed or sleep or fatigue so those are not that concerning even though those things get in the way a fair amount for uh people's lives day today they're not pathological more than they are sort of suboptimal so we do this mapping and I sit down with somebody and say hey look here's your executive function you're attentive or impulsive or have this reaction time or some stamina or maybe an auditory you know processing thing and generally when doing brain mapping if I'm doing my job well I'm not telling somebody anything new I'm sort of outlining things they already are somewhat aware of and things that they know about but now we're looking at it in data which as you alluded to it has a really powerful uh impact all on its own just seeing it externally seeing it there gives people permission to not be as overwhelmed or as guilty or shamed instead they're like oh yeah hey it's it's just my it's just my brain and then you know I'm telling them that they can make changes in this phenomena so it's never a conversation where I'm you know I'm sorry here's the problem it's more like oh hey here's some stuff you might want to do so once we have that perspective we then exercise the brain using uh various techniques but neuro feedback is something that almost all of our clients do and neuro feedback is a process of exercising brain waves involuntarily and then you make changes over time so let me give you an example of how we might do this um let's use uh let's use circuits involved with executive function why not so there's two big circuits on the in the brain that help scaffold or manage the executive function or the control over the attention there's a circuit on the left to the mid cortex whose job it is to stabilize the mode you're in keeps you focused when you're focused keeps you on when you're on keeps you asleep when you're sleep so it's the thing that sort of maintains the the spotlight the crispness clear and bright and on the road in front of you but if the the world is not as exciting we start to drift a little bit called inattentiveness Left circuit does that that job of staying on even if things are low intensity if we think we want to so focus and vigilance and sustaining the attention on the right hand side a similar circuit's job is to supervise what we're doing it knows if we're on the right road if we're doing the behavior the pattern you know for paying attention in a way we think we should be so left side is the stabilizer right side is the supervisor on the precentral cortex the part of the brain that's just the back of the frontal lobe if you will and these circuits do their job using beta waves burst to Beta help stabilize and help you resist distractions and things and other brain waves called Theta and Alpha are more automatic or neutral brain waves and those will raise if those tissues aren't doing their job quite as firmly if if you will so you can stick wires on those locations and so a classic neuro feedback protocol might be 15 minutes of exercise in the left side and then 15 minutes of exercis in the right side so you put some ear Clips on put those two wires in the head and set the software up to measure the beta waves you're making moment to moment and also measure maybe the thetas and Alphas the the disinhibited the neutral brain waves and the computer watches your brain as it changes moment to moment and whenever it briefly moves in the right direction the beta goes up a little bit the alpha goes down computer sees that and applauds the brain and makes stuff happen on a screen so the little Pac-Man moves or cars start racing or puzzle pieces fill in the brain says stuff hey I like stuff stuff's cool nice and then it moves in the wrong direction for that workout and the game slows down or stops and the Brain says hey I don't um I don't like no stuff I'm bored where where's my stuff and then it happens to move briefly in the right direction and the Applause continues so the brain get this little burst of good job PR good job PR nope good job good job good job good job nope again and again for just the one little tiny thing it's doing out of a billion things that one little Flex that's making keeps getting rewarded and we don't feel neura feedback generally the first couple of times the brain's going whoa whoa hey that's interesting almost right away within five minutes the brain is noticing but we can't feel our brain waves we can't really control them voluntarily so it becomes this process of being trained where the brain is like oh okay making beta make stuff happen Okay the big trick is we're moving the goalpost so every few seconds we adjust the computer next to where the person is so that they're only getting applauded for movement in one particular direction basically that you know bring that beta up and around session three or four the brain says oh oh you want some beta and you get a big surge of of of uh beta waves being high maybe Alpha being low and for the next few hours you walk around going wait a minute I feel clear this is interesting am I imagining this I I might no I don't think so huh maybe I feel kind of different I feel kind of clear and then it wears off and the next day you're like I might have noticed something okay how was your sleep sleep was good all right do it again and then it happens more strongly the next time oh wow I felt really focused my house is clean couldn't fall asleep though oh okay that beta is too fast for you let's back off a little bit so it's very iterative where you want to like gently stretch someone's brain get a brief and transient effect that lasts a few hours to a day or so and then as you're figuring out which resource that is how it felt to move that beta the person has an experience of it of using their beta differently a little bit so for the left side you would get more clarity less distractability you'll also get more sustained sleep deeper sleep when you're asleep so as people start to notice the the shifting brain then they get different resources dayto day that they start to notice too they're not as reactive or they have better afternoon stamina or they're more creative or whatever it is so I end up getting this uh relationship built with clients where they're learning about their brain as they're noticing what's happening with their brain and it just creates Progressive sort of agency over time to create these changes and we go back and map the brain again um toward the end of the second month so about every 25 sessions or so of neuro feedback we do remapping and that's about three or four times a week seven weeks or so and generally for the big features of executive function as well as like anxiety and speed of processing just you know basic gross resources we probably all care about those things change in 25 sessions to the tune of about a full standard deviation compared to the average population especially if there any deficits if you're already super super high it moves about half that rate but if you have anything in the way you can pretty much count on a full standard deviation every other month and a couple rounds of that are usually done so about 3 4 months to make two or three standard deviations of change in executive function anxiety Sleep Quality and those changes stick after you've done enough neuro feedback about 30 40 sessions the stuff you're training reliably is stuff you're always using you're always using your interior singlet to hold things in your mind that left side circuit to stabilize so if you build it up enough it takes over and then your brain is practicing all these new modes all these new way wavs of being daytoday and probably really important for this particular listener group we also don't take away things that are quirky and a little bit unusual so if you're hyperfocused maybe you're a little OCD but you're also a CEO that's really common you can learn to control that front midline hyperfocus but not lose it so you aren't tranquilized in your boardroom or trying to do your business plan but you can move in and out of that linear mode and nonlinear mode much more easily you can hyperfocus when you need to and then put it down when your partner would rather you just listen you know at the end of the day and I get calls from from the spouses of CEOs all the time oh my gosh whatever you did yesterday do it again he brought me flowers we were talking about our emotions and therapy what did you do you know creativity work and something the CEO is talking about his emotions you know uh so I didn't decide to do that he said hey I'd like to be a little more creative and in touch with my emotions all right let's do some Alpha atheta some some Flow State Nur feedback oh yeah Flow State sounds great yeah and he got some creativity some creative problem solving and job but the real benefit was the family was like oh that was awesome do do more of that so changing your brain also impacts the rest of your company it affects your family it affects everything you do so I would encourage those CEOs and other Elite performers in in a sort of startup or or corporate environment there's a lot of pressure at that top Edge in in creativity in performance and management and you can optimize that stuff if you optimize yourself or the core top team then the whole company becomes optimized because your managers aren't stressed and short and reactive and making impulsive decisions and you have this different relationship imagine having a team full of people that you're working with and nobody was in shape and then everyone went and got in shape suddenly your team is performing better not just the individuals so that really does have pretty big impact here in uh in brain work too so um I've had a million thoughts since you were explaining all of that I mean it sounds fantastic and um you know one thing you touched on and I just want to reiterate one thought that was coming through my mind as you were explaining this is oh could the service become addictive because it kind of goes away and then you notice that you're performing better when you have it but you mention that it's like more like a training it sticks you build it up in that you have to keep going to keep the gain so once you're attentive enough creative enough uh focused enough you can stop but I do have people that are the metaphorical Jim Bros who discover how easy it is to Get cognitively Swole and they never want to stop because they're like oh my God this is awesome in fact a lot of my CEO types come in for anxiety sleep issues maybe some drinking maybe some anger and they're like ah I'm just I'm fine a littleit little bit sport and we look at their brain and anger and fatigue and stress and as you work that out takes you know 3 4 months and you can usually create a pretty dramatic transformation for the individual a lot of those folks are like well what else you got this is awesome is there more can I do more well yeah you can keep training because it's not a zero sum thing we're actually building tissue and building connections so you can keep going as long as you want and I have a few of those Elite performers athletes executives uh creatives who just keep going because you keep getting benefits yeah now we don't usually need to keep going um I would say that 2 to 6 months is pretty classic for lots of complaints and goals if you for instance had a lot of impairments you had a major brain injury uh your nonverbal autism and stemming and seizing you know lots of really severe brain stuff those people we often work with for 6 months to a year and often a couple of rounds can go back in and work on the brain but for most things for typical brains that are largely intact even really disregulated with anxiety and cravings and stress and fatigue and not sleeping well almost everyone's brain moves how we want because you're just doing exercise this is not some magical particular technique it's exercising resources and since they're resources that affect you you start becoming control of that process just like an athlete well I love that workout felt great let's do more m wonderful so we find that yes you can get to permanent change but it's also a little seductive it's not addictive a little seductive in that people once they discover they have this change like oh awesome or you know I often start training one person in the family and they're like this is great I've got a spouse I have two kids I have an uncle and everyone starts getting involved at the family level too so just like when you train you know I I've done things like train the entire sales team at a highend company you know like the five you know Elite salespeople for instance that has a massive impact on every single person in the company when the salespeople are 20% more efficient more creative better listeners less reactive uh it really has a huge impact and it also does when I'm working with a CEO and now he brings in his wife and his kids and someone everyone's training together has a pretty big impact on that you know organization so to speak as well yeah what a fantastic marketing model for you too that's the cheapest customer when you get a referral because you didn't you know in your own business um either that repeat service or just a word of mouth because the service is so great and makes such a great impact um so that's fantastic that you're able to help people in that way um you know I had another thought when you were discussing teams and often in corporations or in just a team- based environment in any company companies often will um you know give a stip in or something for individuals for professional development um and they do things you know I've seen like Executive coaching I've received that myself through my Corporation um you can go to like some workshops right um sometimes college credits are even paid for so like in that bucket have you ever seen corporations CEOs get this for themselves and then be like wow instead of professional development I want my team to go through this for x amount i' never have it happen at a huge level an awful lot of time I've had one individual come in for themselves you know somebody who's a high level executive at a company and after he or she finishes their work they're like okay I'm gonna send over this person from my company and this person my company and this person because I know they have some needs yeah um so I see that often I also you know because we work on things that are suffering driven as much as performance I often get highlevel folks for whom everything is rest on whom everything is resting and if they are not able to perform everything f apart so you know it's it's not exactly the same corporate startup uh perspective but uh art shows like theater shows or big plays being mounted that have just launched they've got a 16-week run and there's tons of money being spent and they discover the lead actor can't show up sober so now I work with the lead actor you know and then the same thing with CEOs sometimes you find a CEO who's you know successful but goes home woman has you know ruminative OCD and checks all the Lock 17 times not because there's anything really wrong with the house or or this person doesn't have necessarily history of OCD but they're under such high stress all the time that it just transfers into not being able to put down that evaluative perseverative mode and when you help with those people when you help those people shift those resources uh they tend to evangelize not just you know in their families and friends but within their comp and if they're decision makers I usually get a couple people uh in their company as well so well we've talked a lot about high performers and what they tend to struggle with there's been tid you know tidbits that you've shared along the way just from your experience with working with them so much I want to shift a little bit and kind of talk about the opposite so those that deal with like procrastination they know they can be a high performer one day they know what it takes to um be a CEO or they have this dream of starting a business one day but they deal deeply with procrastination any tips there or things that you've seen over time with the brain for those types of listeners yeah procrastination is a complicated uh topic I'm actually working on a video right now on biohacking procrastination that you guys can come check out on YouTube soon if you want but procrastination tends to be really um nuanced you know it's a behavioral accommodation versus a all on its own and so it may have aspects of anxiety driving it or fatigue actual physical fatigue cognitive fatigue um it may be a way of asserting control it may be a way of resisting discomfort and people that procrastinate aggressively I mean many of us most of us procrastinate to some extent I think something like you know 80% of people com complain that procrastination ises a significant burden in their way yeah and something like 20 or 30% of people actually have a severe procrastination difficulty um this goes along with having you know poor resources if you're not well rested it's going to be hard to manage those resources but you can also have sort of congenital or built-in Tendencies for procrastination if you're kind of ADHD chances are you're going have a lot more difficulty procrastinating because the circuits are not as well connected in the brain that that support executive function and a lot of our entrepreneurs and entrepreneur wannabes are ADHD like you know having that pattern matching novelty seeking High stimulus problem solving mode plays to ADHD strength so we tend to get a lot of high-powered but kind of disorganized individuals cognitively in the startup space and the when you have that tendency for ADHD or maybe you've you know had a lot of concussions or maybe you had you know just grinding through life for 20 years the consequence is that the frontal lobe areas that that scaffold what you want to do delay gratification value things hold things in your mind and and and select from competing things you might want to do called response conflict these are all more frontal circuits but they're connected to the areas involved with memory the power of hippocampus around the hippocampal tissue that pulls memory in and out and so you're supposed to be able to pull memories out for context and then evaluate you know do I eat the yummy thing now or delay it to get more yummy things later and when the individual tissues are less well connected which is what happens in procrastination then we don't seem to be able to drive the context so we notice the conflict of not you know knowing what to do or having a thing to do that we're resisting but we're not able to overwhelm or overcome that executive conflict and so it ends up becoming something where we don't where we have this you know resistance to the actual engagement so I do a lot of work with procrastination and what I would say is if you have a foundational resource phenomena that's in the way definitely you know needs to be worked on that includes speed of processing and deep sleep qualities that includes anxiety also social things sometimes sometimes procrastination is a is a is a social anxiety more than an executive function phenomena because of performance uh concerns and and and you know if you don't do it it's a perfectionist thing if you really really Perfection perfectionist around things then they never quite get done they're never judged um so that can happen but I work on all of these resources the Deep Sleep the executive and the anxiety and people tend to soar just by helping them get their brain out of the way for many things procrastination is often learned deeply learned over many many years it's a habit it's got resources you're accommodating but it's also behavioral uh day-to-day and so after the resources are not in the way there's still this period of time that you need to learn to use new skills where you don't have have the same limits and frustrations that you were working through and around before doesn't mean you instantly know how to apply your time or move through things so I have about four things that I encourage people to do when they're thinking about procrastination that are not neuro feedback might be actionable things for people to think about one is think about things in a David Allen getting things done GTD perspective and the important pieces of that are really maybe twofold one you have to have a reliable place to put things that you have to do can't use lots of places to make notes you have to have one system that you rely on for dumping needs and tasks into in that system here's the second thing you need to understand which things are next actions which things are blockers and which things are neither that's it that's kind of the the core of of GTD at least the important part from my perspective so I start there with if you don't have task lists you can rely on get a conon board that's my favorite way to have people do basic GTD is a simple con Bon and there you know a lot of tools contain con Bon boards now so for project management yeah second throw a tomato at it Pomodoro Technique you know the little tomato timers that that are 25 minutes 30 minutes you set it for 25 minutes and you sprint through task blocking you you do very narrow work focused heads down work for those 25 minutes and then when the the timer goes off you enforce The Brak so you're actually scheduling your procrastination or scheduling your downtime and you try to stack two or three or four of these chunks of productivity on a topic and so by really narrowing down and sprinting almost through topic Focus you can get a lot more done uh versus the swirling you know mix of things that have to get done and then I have two mindfulness techniques that I like people to encourage uh to think about with procrastination one is what I call structured procrastination take all the things you have to do today all the deeply stressful and frustrating and scary and overwhelming things you have to do and put them down on a list make sure the most onerous scary and and and horrible on is at the top of the list and then procrastinate that by doing other things on the list it requires some self-deception but we're good at that so you know you can you can gamify that piece of it the last piece a mindful procrastination when you notice that aversion or that open loop of got to do this thing note it notice that you're resisting it notice that you're spending cycle spending energy attaching to that that task even sitting doing something different or resisting that task just observe it just notice the effort notice the investment of mental energy and attention being captured by it and when it happens again notice that again and at some point you may realize that you're spending a fair amount of energy holding these things at Bay and if that becomes a sense of Burden well then move away from that burden by moving into doing the thing and after doing a small chunk of it observe how you feel observe if that resistance you're holding is the same or I would argue you might actually feel free like you've moved through something and have a little bit more control and less of that weight that you're carrying around so GTD Tomatoes structure procrastination and mindful procrastination as ways of structuring time uh and effort without just fighting your urges all the time which is what people often have to do when they're aren you know structured well those are excellent action actionable tips that you shared with us so thank you so much for sharing those because I I love those bits of content that we can leave people with um something that they can really take and apply today um and see how that you know resonates with their daily life uh the last one that you mentioned really is around awareness I me you think about anything like uh overcoming addiction we've talked about you know tidbits of that today or um you know overcoming some big hurdle that you have in your business something a big deadline coming up awareness is always like that first step people say that all the time being aware which you shared tips on how to do that kind of notating when you have those pieces in your brain that you know you're procrastinating something and then again when you notate something I talked about this earlier and you put it on paper you almost realize you have something measurable like wow I am actually spending a lot of time on this which is unproductive and if I would have just tackled that the second time I thought about it and now shift that to the first time I thought about it that's a good way to overcome that I mean the procrastination it makes some sense you're you feel overextended the right stress stress is the sensation of not having the resources that you can rely on to meet the task or the challenge that's in front of you and so with procrastination a lot what happens with many of us especially those people have touch of ADHD is the lyic system overreacts to the perceived discomfort and then we resist we push back super hard so if you can come up with some perspective on well wait a minute that itself is actually work then you can learn to flip that into movement instead of resisting uh as the work you're doing yeah um I've seen too or this might be an assumption just something that I've you know dealt with myself and I would assume other Founders maybe struggle with this as well is when you're you know you if you transition from a job where you have like one main responsibility right you might have a lot of job tasks but one main responsibility maybe it's marketing within your company and then you decide to start your own company for marketing right um but when you are actually running a business there are more things especially when you're first starting out because you don't have the resources to hire these other functions so now you become the doer of all right you're the accountant you're the marketer you are uh the the the sales associate you're all the things so now you have it's easier I think to bounce from like one thing to the next to the next to the next um and procrastination even if you weren't um heavily dealing with it before it might creep in in just because your task outlay looks a lot different do you see that a lot with Founders demand you know this is why knowing what a next action is versus a blocker is super important because the number of things swirling around your head that you have to quote unquote get done is kind of infinite and we'll always keep adding you know you you'll never feel like there's nothing to do if you're an entrepreneur there's always stuff you could do you should do and yet you have to balance that you select the proper action for the moment you also have to select some downtime and some selfcare that's not just working and be okay with that task and list of things that have to get done that you're not doing you have to somehow be okay with that existing while not feeling horrible resistance otherwise you're just going to keep resisting so that's a really tough thing to manage but yeah I would say that folks that move into more entrepreneurial and discover the sheer a number of areas of things they have to work on that's often very uh frustrating and I often find that people you they often ask me well how do I multitask more and I sort of say well you can't yeah multitasking isn't really a thing we do that well uh get really good at switching but while you're doing the thing you're doing deep focus on it will mean that you get twice as much done the same time it's more efficient it's more quality so you know narrow Focus task blocking moving through short things even if you have lots of things you know the the amorphous overwhelm number of things building up dump it into that system you've learned to trust where those things are and then you'll be able to hopefully you know select the most important things to move ahead on yeah another great tip from you um so you mentioned self-care too and I'm a big proponent you know a lot of people think about self-care and they think it's maybe just unplugging and that may be really good self-care for them it's reading a book sitting on the beach watching the waves thinking about nothing but I actually bucket a lot more things into self-care and I could even argue going through like a program like yours is self-care because you figure out ways on how to take care of your brain you're training your brain so that you're taking more care of yourself um in these different areas that you're now you know set out to overcome um so I do a thing within my community of self-care Sundays and I would even recommend you know taking a leap of faith of going down a path of getting a service such as what you provide through Peak brain Institute would be a form of self-care well I'm certainly uh a believer in that um I also you know just more on that idea of self-care we all have things we do that because we should right we get up and we brush our teeth and we use the restroom first thing can you maybe build in something into your morning that feels like it's that like it's self-care it's not the Big Workout you have to do or the big thing that you know have to get done in the morning for your morning routine because entrepreneurs get up at 4:00 a.m. and they do 17 things before yeah maybe if that works for you but it's more important to have the minimal viable practice the MVP uhhuh what can you do that feels like it's achievable but it's also this repetitive routine self-care like exercise the one that works is the one you do meditation it's the one you do that's what matters not so much if you have the best plan on it or if you're doing the most so I'd encourage folks to think about that morning routine as a minimal viable opportunity to get into some self-care and so structure that 10 15 20 minute morning with things that support that you know maybe it's meditating maybe it's doing a little bit of journaling or task prep maybe it's something different maybe it's family time um I I work with a lot of teens and I been seeing a trend that I think is really powerful of having younger people get up early and they're doing their homework and they're prepped for school between 6:00 and 8:00 a.m. 5:30 and and 8 a.m. sometimes because a lot of stressed out people hit the you know get get home at 600 p.m. and or 400 p.m. and don't want to then sit down and do more work yeah but the morning before you go and engage with your work or your school we seem to have a lot of resources and reserve and energy and then by doing one thing for a few hours in the morning and then shifting frame shifting context to go to your job or your school it doesn't feel like you've done another chunk of work you're just into the new thing now so that's one trick is is context switching can actually add a lot of freshness so feeling really overwhelmed work in a different environment grab your laptop go to a coffee shop maybe just go for a walk and and think about the tasks and the problems environment will create a pretty large uh shift in context even if you're just changing your you know your your home environment or going outside it may change how you think as well yeah yeah I love that uh we talk about a lot about MVPs in the startup space but I've never actually heard minimal practice so I might have to steal that go for it especially for um you know advocating for self-care I love that concept so um well I feel like I could seriously talk to you for hours but I'm sure that you have other things to get to today so I just really appreciate you know coming on and educating us more about our brains our self um you know just speaking about not everyone's alone and it may be things that like don't be too hard on yourself this is something that you could overcome and this could be an Avenue of doing that is this practice of you know neural feedback and you know work on your brain so um thank you so much for joining us and um before we go I'm going to leave everything in the show notes so people don't have to remember this but where are some of the best places people can find you and in your team if they're looking for this type of service yeah so Peak brain Institute is our company you can check us out online that's our our domain name we're also at Peak brain LA on most of our socials because that was our first office we have offices in uh New York City LA Orange County St Louis London and Stockholm and about uh 80% of our clients never see our offices and we send equipment to you and we work with you remotely we're kind of like the soul cycle model for brain training where you send equipment home and coaches and screens cheer you on and get you to do stuff um so come check us out uh also I'm on YouTube at Dr Hill you know youtube.com/ dhill and uh I'm doing every Monday night a live stream where I do neur feedback on myself and discuss some biohacking topics and tips so uh for folks that are interested in a little more of this procrastination topic I'm going to can one of those the next day or two so you can go dig that up after you hear this podcast yeah very cool I'll definitely be a listener a long ter long-term listener uh may even be customer of yours in the future it was really great to meet you and deep dive into all things it just is so interesting and again thank you so much for coming on the show of course thanks for having me and uh everyone take care of those brains [Music]