Increase Your IQ & Brain Performance With Neurofeedback - Dr. Andrew Hill

Welcome to The Sleep Experience Podcast where we take a deep dive into the latest sleep hacks gadgets and strategies to Skyrocket your productivity to new heights being a high performer is all about resting at 100 so you can execute at 100 [Music] hey this is Riley host of the sleeper side houses podcast at sleep for side Hustlers we interview holistic Sleep Experts and teacher Community upgrading their sleep is the one thing that they need to unlock their biological code and maximize the performance in an effortless Way by doing more with less do you want to become a productivity machine have genius ideas automatically pop into your mind stop feeling so stressed build better relationships and generate more income optimizing your deep sleep can do just that visit www.thesleepconsultant.com to learn more my guest today is Dr Andrew Hill Andrew is the founder of peak brain a clinic that helps people overcome cognitive challenges and reach their Peak Performance goals with quantitative EEG brain mapping neurofeedback training heart rate variability bowel feedback and mindfulness meditation the result is improved Focus attention creativity mood sleep stress traumatic stress recovery and more holding a PhD in cognitive neuroscience and practicing neurofeedback for the last 20 years I guess on The Joe Rogan Experience Podcast a guest of his own host of Zone podcast called head first Andrew is a veteran of the neurofeedback field helping people around the world transform their brain Andrew welcome to the show thanks for having me Riley it's nice to be here appreciate it yeah it's always a pleasure to speak with like-minded people who are obsessed with the brand as much as I am because I know the people around me think and know that I talk about it just too much so I really we just want to dive into you you know keeping it open what fascinates you about the brain and pushing it to its limits I mean the fact that it can be pushed to its limits you know certainly is a is a a starting place for a lot of that the fact that uh and this is something that we see both in the neurofeedback space and we also tend to see in any area of human uh change you know that that gets attention be that healing or education or athletic performance and and skill acquisition plasticity or change or development is very very uh noticeable and tends to for obvious reasons change our lives and so when you know you were joking and people may accuse you for talking about the brain too much yeah well it's all in your head right like everything you experience is coming through that lens that filter interpreted that way so uh that seems like a good place to start when you're trying to make large amounts of uh change and you know I got excited about getting into it when I saw what was possible basically yeah that's amazing and I you know and then fast forward until today I mean I'm sure you've seen so many transformations of people of all kinds of Ages you know from children to adults to Peak Performance to people in debilitating actual medical conditions just for audience what do you currently do now I I said it briefly but what do you do who do you help and what are some of your favorite Transformations that you've seen in your clients sure so um at this point Peak brain which is my company helps people regardless of what the particular goal set is as long as they have some so about a third of our clients have goals that are more Peak Performance and high level flow athletic performance high performance under stress executive performance about a third is the more classic neurofeedback population people with ADHD autistic Spectrum features uh sleep issues stress trauma PTSD you know migraines concussions these days we get a lot of post covet as well I would say that postcode brain fog in that in that same bucket of a neuro let's say so the Peak Performance bucket and the neurological need bucket and the third bucket is probably all the rest of us who are burnt out and stressed and might drink a little bit too much every so often and have some like you know trauma history and some wear and tear but none of these things might rise the level of diagnostic label but they become things that are you know valid to work on and to take control over and to learn about so yeah we we work as enthusiastically with a kid who's screaming and and you know flapping his hands and having seizures as we do with a 55 year old CEO who can't downshift left at 7 30 at night and still a jerk to his kids like it's you know it's as long as you have goals and you can describe them then our our job our our process with folks is to sort of dive in and show them what their brain looks like show them what their performance looks like and instead of sort of doing this diagnostic relationship where aha here's a here's a label here's what's wrong we say here's data let's work together and model it and think about what could be going on teach you to think about your brain waves your brain regions your performance testing and out of that almost always emerges someone's perspective of stuff they already know so we're sort of modeling we're creating ideas about what is plausible in the brain Maps what is likely in the performance testing yeah and out of that people know you know yeah that's that's really interesting and you know people sort of always have that hunch but you know sometimes the Numbers Never Lie but it kind of gives people I'm sure when they see the mapping for the first time you kind of like do you ever feel yourself like this in this situation that in that situation like yeah how did you know because it's uh yeah all the time every day 10 times a day I I joke I'm kind of like your your tailor or your priest or your mom I have I I have to take measure out and I'm like your waistline is what really you know yeah um and people have the experience when I'm describing things in the brain Maps because I do this sort of cold hypothesis generation process where I say you know this part of the brain and these brain waves are unusual and you know first I say things like good job be weird we don't care about the fact that it's unusual on its own but here's some ideas about how they can operate and we find a region and we say here's some plausible points of suffering or bottleneck or something like that and it's often true because the stuff that I tend to model is the stuff that is most valid in the the data and I day in day out got comments like oh my God you can see that I had no idea you can see that phenomenon I experience all the time be it brain fog or executive function stuff or rumination or sleep dysregulation you know when sleep gets thrown off there's a few characteristic uh phenomena I was thinking earlier today about this podcast and I was like oh sleep's a big you know Topic in neurofeedback and brain mapping everything else and there's like four or five different really interesting overlaps with regards to sleep now of course classic neurofeedback was discovered because of manipulating a brainwave that maintains sleep called sleep spindles or SMR 12 to 15 Hertz when you're awake keeps you able to sit still not go squirrel and not have seizures the cat on the windowsill watching birds with a still body and laser-like focus is literally the opposite of ADHD wow but if you can't make that SMR State you also can initiate or sustain sleep very well and this other phenomena that's very very poor especially focally you've got seizure activity sometimes so um SMR as a core sleep architecture core regulatory feature of the brain helps regulate sleep but then we also think about things like the alpha Theta States the creativity and Flow State stuff and that's a hypnagogic state training you bring people to the edge of sleep yeah where there's a crossover and there's a dropping away of the monkey mind and an insight and a bubbling up and an opening that moment as you fall asleep and you solve world hunger or write your next book or solve that business problem and then you wake up in the morning and you think oh wait a minute I had a good idea last night you know yeah so we you can train someone's brain you can bring them to that edge for 20 25 minutes at a time wow which is a lot of time potentially to spend in that liminal state of ideas and receptive attention and things bubbling up so you can use these techniques in your feedback that are promoting aspects of sleep but not in a sleep context yeah that's that's amazing and then the application of that is they actually come sit down play games with electrodes connected to their brain based on what their brain mapping is and slowly creating their brain right yeah yeah neurofeedback the technique is largely um across the field most of the techniques are passive meaning they don't zap the brain which is what we we do basic uh classic you know tailored neurofeedback but generally you would stick a wire or two to the head and measure someone's brain in real time and as the brain happens to shift itself in the right direction so SMR this frequency I touched on is involved with executive functions sleep architecture seizure suppression self-control it's a good thing to train up in a lot of people which is one of the reasons we spent some time focusing on it as our one of our core uh manipulations but the way you would often train that up initially is on the right hand side of their brain somewhere between the crown and the right ear there's a circuit involved with some sleep architecture stuff but a lot of things involved with supervisory attention or not yeah and it does its job with this low beta frequency we call SMR 12 to 15 Hertz beta and it doesn't do its job it releases Its Behavior to be a little more automatic with a brainwave called Theta about four to seven Hertz so theta's like lubrication in the brain you need it if you don't have a lot of theta you can't move your brain around your thoughts around you can't activate stuff or switch stuff out of the gear it's in but if you have too much of it especially in those circuits on top of the head the brain is like squirrel you can't pump the brakes on anything so you often want to train that SMR up on the right side for sleep and executive function overlap essentially the the maintenance of sleep Dr Martin Arns wrote a really great paper about 10 years ago Arns um and he's out of Utrecht and he he wrote a great paper about 10 years ago showing the similarity in the literature between sleep spindle stabilization difficulty and ADHD in the brain so this basically positive idea that ADHD is a sleep disorder essentially or or an architecture of sleep a parasomnia or something anyways to train the brain as an aside to train their brain you stick the wire there on the right hand side and measure your SMR measure the data and the Brain happen to briefly move in that right direction you supplied it with some auditory or visual feedback or both and when it moves in the wrong direction quote unquote you would withhold the Applause and the Brain goes oh hey wait why is my Theta dropping doing stuff I like stuff stuff's cool where's my stuff oh there's my stuff and the computer's going good job good job good job nope good job good job nope and then the big trick here is we move the goal post so this is shaping or operant conditioning I can think Skinner's pigeon's not Pavlov's dog and uh we end up sort of gradually producing an effect and it's a very transient you've experienced that you've experienced it rapidly and quickly you were saying but you didn't experience a a dramatic permanent change right away it was like an inflection like a hard workout whoa I felt that what the heck yeah yeah huh and then it went then it wanes and wears off later that day the next day and you're like interesting so we use that a lot we have our clients fill out sleep surveys every morning and they check in on their day surveys every day we have a live chat going all the time with each client so we're kind of helping be like personal trainers for your brain and that can be to answer your first question towards someone with very you know great difficulty yeah or with a lot of performance goals yeah so we're a partner in that for people generally so yeah no kidding and I would imagine people see effects pretty short and pretty pretty fast overall like someone first comes to see you they get their brain mapped let's say they're doing a couple sessions a week how fast until they see the results they usually want yeah we we recommend three times a week and they're about half an hour sessions and somewhere around session three four five uh someone's like hey wait a minute I think I'm feeling something huh and you know about half the time it's nah and the next time they're like no no no actually yes yeah um and then maybe one person out of 10 gets a month in is like I don't feel anything yeah but their sleep is changed or their stress has changed or they're tolerance to cannabis or Adderall has gone away so you know not everyone's really good at noticing the internal currents I find that people with a lot of Anguish and Trauma um people out of brain fog people who are deeply creative uh meditators those people are aware of the shift of currents like this you break the brain fog off even a little bit yeah it's like a Disney movie and a Sunbeam hits you and birds laying on your shoulders and you rush back and going oh my God I I was seeing better you were probably attending better no no I'm seeing better the world was bright and clear and that's great let's let's let's do some more of that you know yeah so it's a journey where we don't know what's happening always but we're trying to elicit an effect gently bring it up and then iterate and it becomes more permanent as you hit 20 30 40 sessions you start getting a stabilization and your brain is practicing that mode you mean it's doing most of what we do a lot of what we do in neurofeedback is working on resources and those resources are always there and often being used so sleep stress and attention are often manipulated or speed of processing often manipulated and you're using that all the time yeah you get far enough with a new resource change and the practice is really why it's permanent it's or stable at least uh because your brain is it likes to be in a mode likes to use the resources it has so it stays pretty stable yeah so that's and you know once they go through that 20 30 40 sessions after that they're kind of in maintenance mode and then you probably only need those tune-up sessions once every year things like that yeah yeah I often don't do tune-up sessions I would say only half the time to folks come back um and and the half time they come back yeah we have a couple different relationships with clients and their data and their brains than is typical um we have uh several offices in the U.S plus a couple overseas and in our physical offices if folks are nearby they get a membership and they have free mapping of their brain throughout the year amazing uh and so all your podcast listeners if they're near La or St Louis or New York City or Orange County it's 250 a year for a membership unlimited Maps a couple of consults in education it's a tool to use to understand your med changes concussions covid whatever wow uh and then the neurofeedback's on top of that essentially in our in our packages and people do that for a few months so most of our clients do three months to begin either in the office or from home and they generally get done 40 sessions or more in that time frame and we map the brain every 20 or 25 again and you can usually make an a visible change yeah in the data of the brain maps and the performance testing that matches the person's experience pretty well as it builds up at about the magnitude of about one standard deviation in the data every 20 or 25 sessions so someone comes in with major brain fog or major ADHD or a big cluster of you know trauma threat sensitivity activated in the back of their head and it's a couple standard deviations out of range you don't know where they want to be it will feel good necessarily or even if it's valid maybe a lifeguard not someone with trauma but you know that if you work on it and you get some subjective effect and you keep going that that's going to move to that degree roughly okay so it it's very mysterious what we do but it's not especially blind right because you're experiencing stuff and you're like hey wait a minute um coaches I noticed this so we doubled down on that instead of doing therapy like most people do and keeping that that that container that transference thing going so we can be deeply aware of how your nuances are shifting we thrust the agency back up on you like you're an athlete and have you log a lot and check in a lot and do your own work and you know yeah so so once people have done 40 sessions or more which is three months if it's something like ADHD or a sleep issue or some trauma um they're usually fairly stable if it's concussions if it uh is a lot of goals if it's developmental you know autistic Spectrum stuff yeah it's usually six months before they're really leveling out and stable yeah um and there's clients of mine I've had both people with great needs and those with sort of great goals you know more Peak Performance ones who have trained for hundreds and hundreds of sessions for years and years and years a couple of those are just like people who aren't going to ever leave any possibility off the table sort of squeezing the resource those performers and a couple are like people I met in their you know early teens or earlier with a lot of difficulties as they moved into adolescence and now they're in college and or Beyond and they've like soared and I've been part of that Journey with them I met them with difficult language or seizures or social difficulties and now they're teaching college or now they're performing in front of you know concert halls and now they're writing papers so the relationship they have with their brain is different and Peak brain as a as a company uh often becomes this resource people to help them demystify their brain so we started doing it in that mode it became very powerful as an educational thing beyond the sort of even just the change you get sometimes seeing your brain you can you know the scales fall away and you go oh yeah that habit I have I'm eating sugar at 10 pm every night it is screwing in my deep sleep oh my God look at that I can see it yeah oh that's how bad it is oh okay yeah yeah let me back off it on the carbs after 6 p.m or whatever you know yeah so it develops agency instead of um concern and part of that is if you see something in a brain map that's a real difficulty for you yeah since you see it you can usually go after it and change it it's not hard to change brain data it's just hard to understand it so to speak so as you narrow in what matters to you it becomes really uh uh progressively more enjoyable to train your brand basically no kidding and I'm sure that it's a pretty good positive addiction for a lot of people too especially when they feel it in real time yeah I don't know what the metaphors you know those Jim Bros they're like can't put their arms down because it's really easy to develop a giant upper body for some of you guys you know like there's a certain I have certain segments of clients who are like what are you kidding I'm never stopping this I get I got the Zone I get to use this one uh I get to use it I'm stressed and why stop and and that alludes the idea that you can get State shifts not just a trait a resource change from neurofeedback I'm really often working on resource changes but some people really do enjoy the acute State shifts especially when you're doing like creativity work or you know you can do access or you can you can get juicy or loose in your resources and send yourself off to therapy to work with your therapist to like you know help pry stuff or help you yeah process stuff properly um so it's just another tool like you might you know have your meditation or your yoga or your sleep tracker or your bed Chiller or whatever it is you use to yeah hack your environment or hack yourself you know amazing yeah I think that's that's incredible I work with a lot of people who are on the high performance I'm probably similar to who you work with a functional medicine testing looking at genetics looking at hormones but this is just one thing with the brain because our thoughts create a chemical reaction inside of our body and so we can be in either anabolic response a catabolic response and everything that goes along with it so I think what what anyone who's really considering it should really jump on the bandwagon for sure what about for people who just want more at-home devices maybe they're not close to a center is there any gadgets tools softwares that you suggest people might be able to use in their house yeah um there are some biofeedback devices I mean you alluded to controlling the the mode you're in you can get great HRV bio feedback devices to balance yourself between the sympathetic and parasympathetic you know train the vagus nerve yeah what happens in the Vegas doesn't stay in the Vegas so you can train the HRV and get this like flexible control over your stress response you can lean out of sympathetic and back into parasympathetic but in terms of neurofeedback we do our programs at home with you with the same hardware and software and send it to you and do live supervision and do live brain mapping in your living room yeah so if you want to map your brain on your caffeine and without your Adderall and without the comfort of your own home I'll send you a little amplifier and teach you how to do it and you know wow yeah and our clients have a Live support system during the time so as we teach them how to do the basics then they set themselves up they stick wires on take a photograph and say coaches and be like oh that looks great or I want to move the left one over you know about half centimeter and the coach is always there seven days a week to to sort of support site the metaphor here is like being at the high-end gym with your workout pad in front of you looking confused that's one of the complicated machine and a coach runs over and says let me see oh yeah one of these cool here's how I set this one up here's the seed height lever here's the you know and because the software's a little finicky and a little complicated but it's not hard to do the techniques of neurofeedback yeah it's hard to know what to do next or how to progress how to chase a goal how to adjust for an effect you get yeah but we can teach you to stick ear Clips on find a couple spots in your head check check first 50 or 60 hertz noise in the signal yeah log what you're doing track your sleep ask for help and so our coaches jump on your private chat every couple of days and say hey haven't seen a sleep survey in a few days or hey thanks for filling out your day survey good job wow you're all super focused I think we're on track and then I I help guide that uh Progressive workout planning every couple of every few days you know so amazing love it all Andrew last question I have for you here sure in terms of you know a lot of these Peak performers they're entrepreneurs they're high level CEOs things like this have you seen direct tangible benefits in their brain performance with how much they're making in their business um as a leader with you know they're managing hundreds of employees potentially things like that yeah I would say there's two probably really interesting almost like categories there yeah one of them is the person that's become successful but at the cost of regulatory resilience good and the other is the person for whom the failure of regulatory resilience is getting in the way of them being successful got it and I've had folks come to me just after getting funding when everything has fallen apart yeah and I've had folks come to me when they have conquered the world financially yeah but not in any other way and they've really short hooded in a bunch of other ways and in both cases we make magical Transformations generally we take the person who's 50 50 year old highly successful CEO yeah who's kind of anxious and kind of burnt out and can't talk to his wife and six months later we've made dramatic changes in anxiety executive function Sleep Quality yeah we get calls from his wife Thanking us for whatever we did yesterday because I had the best conversation ever Alpha Theta neurofeedback for acts of Consciousness and we get calls the next day wow uh or from the therapist oh what keep working my client that way that's a great great session because you get access you can make yourself kind of Juicy right so for the folks that are on that brittle you know successful brittle side that's one of the the failover places that happens with success the other one is as as the stress of architecting your success builds up there's pinches you find your perseveration your threat sensitivity your obsession your sleep dysregulation your ADHD and I work with those people all the time because people that are trying to move to that Arc of small to large business or launching their first product and often I do get them right after they have had a tiny bit of success because that's when the PIN should start becoming most visible for some people and that you know High performer landscape and it's because the cost of not addressing the pinches is suddenly very very like oh okay yeah this thing has to be dealt with right now and we can usually create change in you know you feel it in a few sessions and for things like executive function and stress and sleep and just getting your brain in shape three months is is a sufficient amount of time for most folks to create this this Arc and you're getting really good support from a few weeks in in terms of the new resources building up so time scale yeah entrepreneurs love that they love like all right let me solve this yeah yeah and so half of them solve and then they move on another half and like what else you got doc yeah meditating and I get them doing you know a high protein low uh carb diets whatever else you know those ones that are brittle and burnt out are often the ones that want more of whatever else I got and we get them meditating and they continue to do neurofeedback that population because they're like huh all right let's see what else we can get you know this is interesting yeah I've noticed a tendency for these middle-aged mostly male mostly burnt out CEOs who have a little hint of OCD or other anxiety when they first show up got a great transformation in three four months five months six months and then they often back off a tiny bit on the neurofeedback but continue a bunch of other stuff with us including meditation yeah and then they come back and say hey Doc uh I gotta talk to you about six months after they get into meditation seriously they're they're a little bit like sheepishly trying to ask me a question they don't quite want to ask me yeah and what's happening is they're experiencing events while meditating suddenly oh absorption events balls of light warmth feelings of shaking these are called the genres these are absorption events that happen usually when you've been meditating for 10 to 20 years in concentration practices classically and they're getting them their first six months of meditation because neurofeedback's on board and meditation structures on board and the plasticity is so high that you're getting transformation continuously from some of these people so incredible yes to answer your question but it's a little bit specific right based at least you know in those two categories so yeah love it I feel like I could talk to you two hours about all this stuff if people want to find more about you they want to come to your clinics learn more resources where can they visit yes we have Peak braininstitute.com as the website and all of our socials are Peak brain LA because that was our first office yeah and I'm at Andrew Hill PhD on the socials but that's mostly like baked goods and reverse sear steaks and things it's not really that brain focused unless like cooking so awesome well thank you so much for coming on today Andrew that was all your socials that was all my socials yeah yeah come check us out ask us your brain questions we have some challenges going on right now for the end of the year uh and uh all the podcast listeners can get discounts for brain mapping in the office or on a remote program sent to your home so let us know if we can support you incredible okay we'll put all that down below in the show notes all right guys thank you so much I hope you enjoyed the show if you would like to learn more about how sleep can benefit your personal or business life visit the sleepconsultant.com until next time thanks for listening to this sleep Experience Podcast we'll see you next time on next week's episode be sure to subscribe and follow us to get future updates on everything sleep energy Focus stress and better performance foreign