Neurofeedback Training & Trauma with Dr. Andrew Hill

[Music] Andrew you ready to do it I am let's let's do it all right here we go so five 4 3 2 and one all right folks welcome back to the podcast I very excited to have as my guest today Dr Andrew Hill Dr Hill are you ready to go I am thanks so much for having me guy nice to be you're welcome so Dr Hill is the founder of peak brain instit and a leading neuro feedback practitioner and biohacking coach for clients worldwide he's lectured on psychology neuroscience and gerontology at UCLA's Department of psychology where he received a PhD in cognitive neuroscience at Peak brain Dr Hill provides indivi individualized training programs to help you optimize your brain across goals of stress sleep attention brain fog creativity and athletic performance he is a host of the head first podcast and continues to do research on attention and cognitive performance Dr Hill welcome thank you I appreciate that great introduction uh and we also of course do a lot of work with trauma because that's a thing you can see in the brain uh and just to jump right into the deep end of the topic um uh one thing I was thinking about as you know what can I offer to a trauma informed audience so to speak um when we look at a brain map or a a measurement of someone's brain at rest if the trauma you've experienced is somewhat acute and somewhat recent the brain sort of cramps up in response to it and you sort of see the resources overactivated kind of similar to how someone's lower back might spasm up in a car accident so you can walk away but 10 years later there's this resistance the stiffness of the tissues having been sort of pushed to their Edge and they're now regulated a little differently um most anxiety phenomen including the complex stuff involved with trauma is actually not a disease process it's sort of a an accommodation of a naturally occurring useful daily resource that's spasmed up super hard so if you have classic sort of trauma response stuff like PTSD end of the pool uh you'll see the posterior singulate the back midline of the brain as being somewhat activated this is the of course the the Lifeguard who wants to go watch the road heads up heads up when you're doing that appropriate thing and evaluating the environment but when you learn the world is not especially safe or predictable this can cramp up and you can sort of see that the brain develops this uh overevaluation mode where it's now uh essentially ruminating so trauma and suffering and all kinds of things that we deal with with our minds the the risk I think the the extra burden we carry is that a lot of it feels invisible and blind to us it's happening to us but we don't really know why and I love to show people their brains and show them the real stuff that's that can be suffering but when you see it on data when you see it painted out in pictures and colors you start to develop a different relationship with it now you can think of your trauma response your anxiety your OCD your sensor irit ability whatever kind of like your shoulder that separated during that soccer game you can be annoyed at it it's frustrating it really hurts probably should deal with it but suddenly it's really hard to feel overwhelmed quite as much or guilty or ashamed or even disempowered as much if you understand how it works so that's sort of our role at Peak brain for easy and complex stuff to sort of go hey it's just your brain would you like to figure out a little bit of that neuroscience and see how it works I wanna that's a great intro I want to dive more into that but uh I first want to find out you skipped right over this very important question and that is where are you from originally and where are you currently ah I am from originally the Northeast uh I was born in Maine and grew up mostly in Massachusetts uh you can't tell because when I moved down from Maine to Massachusetts my mother was like to all the kids like oh don't drop your RS you sound so tough don't do it so we all learn to speak like newscasters a little bit and we you know not have like clipped diction uh of of New England but um then I moved to uh years ago and I moved to the West Coast to Southern California for Gra school and I live in Los Angeles now and after grad school I taught for a few years uh at UCLA and I opened up some startups and did some things around addiction and uh have have a company um that's still running called true brain that I helped found in 2012 after grad school which is neut Tropics which are cognitive enhancing compounds I think um and uh I also open Peak brain as our sort of the final form if you will of this thing I'm trying to do this empowered evangelist coaching take control of your brain thrust agency upon you kind of role something that's not really a therapist where there's a container and transference and nor is it purely mechanical like a coach in the gym it's somewhere in between we're using tools of access and insight and agency and perspective and self and transformation but it's somewhat mechanical and iterative and the person with you is is there to help Shepherd not you know necessarily treat in that way um that a therapist might so uh I live in I've in Los Angeles as a long-winded answer now uh yeah how so how did you get into this field into this interest you know I had a lot of uh experience working in pretty much every uh aspect of mental health that you can imagine um before grad school um many years working as a manager of residential environments for people with multiple disabilities uh you know developmental issues that were quite severe no language uh motoric issues caly um people that were visually and auditorily impaired so I spent you know years sometimes teaching someone to use a fork or learning their particular version of tactile sign pigeon so I could communicate with their 30 words that they happen to you know hold on to really really acute Edge case in some ways human suffering and then I worked in acute psychiatric environments cuz that was better than working in the acute developmental in some ways for seeing progress and seeing change still wasn't great and I saw a lot of really acute suffering that just wasn't uh progressed it was somewhat managed it was paliative that field Andrew to working with people in that in that context in those cont well I'm good at it basically uh I'm good at understanding people I'm good at um working with someone and putting myself in their shoes and communicating with them that can be somebody who's got kind of iffy language or a sensory issue or a kid who's got wild ADHD um or it can be somebody who's suffering with subtle complex brain stuff at this point I mean I sort of one of my gifts is you know Ed teaching people about stuff in whatever way they need to know it whatever way whatever language whatever perspective whatever metaphor and when I was doing that in acute psychiatric environment to calm people down and I found that I could sort of be you know a a a force for soothing and uh low toning regulating really pretty violent environments where people getting very disregulated in like locked Ward facility you know cute psychiatric and when I was working with people that were really acute non-verbal uh deaf blind I found that seeing how they used language was and interacting with them even in a limited language 30 40 50 words tops total there's still a way to connect with every individual at that level no matter how impaired that piece of it is and even folks that didn't have language when I ended up working in neuro feedback my my first job in neur feedback to to bring this surr to your question how I got into it was I was working in psychiatric acute work and I got injured I was I was doing restraints I was in charge of uh I was doing many things at a psychiatric hospital on the east coast and one of them was teaching all the other technicians how to do safe restraints when there was you know violence happening and and self harm happening and this was a time when the uh Insurance system was ceasing to pay on mental health and the average bed stay so to speak in these impatient hospitals I was working at when I started there was 11 12 days of approval and after a couple years it was down to two days of approval and you don't even get met psych Mets working in two days usually for for a lot of things so staff was dwindling and Acuity was going up and the revolving door was revolving faster and I got injured and I I I I blew my back up pretty aggressively and for the next couple years left Human Services completely after 10 years doing different Human Services work and went to Hightech sales engineering and databases and all kinds of cool Tech stuff and then then around this is year 2000 now the tech bubble corrected or just after and uh I decided I miss working with people so I went and found an Autism Center which had some of the developmental skill set that I was good at and uh did neuro feedback and brain mapping EEG which I was super interested in but hadn't had any experience in but I had the geekery deep and I could you know handle any Tech that I needed to so I ended up working this place in Providence which uh over a couple years taught me to do neura feedback and I started seeing all this amazing change with executive function and sensory and social things that I had good experience for more than a decade of of thinking that could could not change we couldn't change this point of suffering or that phenomena and then I was seeing change happen more often than not in a developmental neuroatypical developmental population and it just blew my mind and at the time uh 2000 early 2000s the field of neur feedback was not that young it was discovered in this form sort of in the late 60s but it was still somewhat nent still is somewhat nent in terms of a wild west of techniques and providers and ideas about how it works and back then there was about three different schools of thought that all had pretty vitriolic uh arguments within the field about how it worked and they all disagreed and they all created completely different approaches about how to do things to the brain because of that disagreement and all you know yelled at each other climbing crabs out of the bucket and the uh the weird thing is is no matter that they had this you irreconcilable conflicting under underpinning of ideas it all worked really well they all got better effects than traditional Psychotherapy or medication for the things they work for they all worked so I call this a blind men and elephant situation where we all have a piece of it and we're kind of describing something and you know claiming we have the truth and we don't and there was a perspective that was missing so after doing this for a couple of years I ended up uh doing the doing the the work as a neuro feedback technician for a couple years I ended up going back to grad school and studying how neur feedback works and looking at the Loop of information as the neur feedback is presented into the brain how the brain reacts to it and how we can bind that learning signal and you know doing cool sophisticated stuff to actually figure out you know what all these different Giants that I learned from in the field like you know what was going on there look can I re something can I solve some of these problems can I Advance the the Practical field of ner feedback so that was my PhD very well put thank you and I loved earlier when you were describing your feedback and uh you were kind of making an analogy to you know a a shoulder that's thrown out when when something goes on in our head in our brain it's like there's maybe for many of us there's like what is going on so how do what do you do specifically walk us through an example someone comes in let's use if you can trauma on the Continuum there as as an an example sure so you know we all have brains uh we're all weird no one's average the goal is never to say wait a minute why aren't you average so a lot of human analysis a lot of assessment of individuals is really focused on typicality difference from average in terms of what really sticks out and that's really true of brain stuff because the brain matures and so you have to do sort of AG matched uh comparisons this is true of like IQ test this is true of strength test true of height it's a lot of it age match Developmental and that's precise and it's not perfect but you still get a sense of variability within an age of natural you know bell curve of variability so we would do something called brain mapping as an assessment where we we do two things as part of that one is the world's most boring 20 minute attention test and we have you like click on a mouse when a one pops up on the screen or is spoken over the speakers and not click on a mouse when a two pops up but the computer's going one one two again and again for about 20 minutes and shifting back and forth between auditory and visual so of course you start missing the ones and drifting and you start error you know clicking on the twos and we can tease apart things that are much more granular level than like just ADHD and te AP part impulsivity aspects or fatigue or auditory versus visual or stamina Reaction Time quirks repetitive monitoring errors and really decompose the executive function into these things that kind of lump together at the DSM level at the diagnostic level into things we call ADHD now but you can have those phenomena from covid or from a concussion or from trauma disrupting your sleep so we first measure the executive function because it's one of these foundational things in the brain that flexes under any stress at all and really describes other resources because the executive function resources about half of them are shared with the things that stage sleep appropriately so you tend to get this um sleep and uh uh uh executive function overlap there's a there's a frequency in the brain called sensory motor Rhythm that neurologists call sleep sleep spindles or Sigma and it's used for motoric inhibition for sitting still basically and for pumping the brakes and not going squirrel so if you see a cat in a window sill watching Birds that's still body and Laser like Focus balance Poise ready that's a high SMR State high sensory motor rhythm tone State and that calm cat watching Birds is literally the opposite of ADHD you can't have motoric Stillness and you're pulled by information that's variable um so we first do intention test because it matters for everyone basically and then we do what's called a brain map or a qeg where you put a cap on the head and you squirt it full of gel um and and some ear clips and measure the brain at rest for about 20 minutes T of that eyes closed and also eyes open m now those three things the performance and the two physiology measurements are compared to a database people your age and then we sit down over Zoom or something usually and I tell you how weird you are you know and some of the performance matters oh there's some in attentiveness an auditory processing issue who your reaction times are kind of a little iffy you tired it can matter it's it's interesting the brain Maps though I don't know what's true for you I just know what's weird for you people are weird great good job I this might all be just awesome or fine or performant or amazing but hey let's talk about some of this Stu that's outliers that's unusual for your age group for your you know as brains in general some of it tends to matter and I keep my guesses to the stuff that's plausible not every little bit of data that's showing up because data is noisy human data is very variable so we look for big things that are sticking out and I sit down with you and might go over a handful of pages of data that have little heat maps showing bright colors where things are unusual so uh we might see in this example some Blobs of uh red in the front and back midline and uh the the red would be like large amounts of basic everything's color shaded so blue amounts on a heat map or cold or low amounts of brain waves and red is a large amount of brain waves and again by themselves not that interesting but if you looked at a brain and saw a lot of beta waves a strong red activation on the front midline or the back midline you would know someone's singulate anterior singulate or post Ste singulate was more active than usual with beta waves true statement you got a lot of beta waves H you know strong and the singlets are involved with switching your focus around naturally they do lots of stuff and generally the front of the brain is the inside self and the back of the brain is the outside world in terms of how we process information so the singlets help hold the internal attention on what you're thinking about in the front and do the watch the road heads up frisbee kind of thing in the back help you Orient and evaluate and reorient to the outside world well when these guys cramp up then the one in the front we start to perseverate sess get stuck in our head play songs the one in the back we tend to ruminate get visceral become threat sensitive ruminate and um you know both of those things can happen and then you're sort of playing pingpong with stuff in your head that bothers you did you hear I heard did you worry I'm worrying now did you hear I heard you know and then this Resonance of of visceral worry and cognitive where he starts to ramp up so when I look at someone's brain Maps I don't know if they have a PTSD phenomenal from the posterior singulate but it's plausible maybe they're just a lifeguard and it works for them I don't know if the one in the front is like OCD features maybe they're a CEO and it works for them but maybe their thoughts are having them and it's a bit cramped up and it's a bit intrusive so I would walk through these features and say hey uh your posterior singul is kind of hot um that often means we're feeling a little activated and threat sensitive EV valuing the world constantly are are you ruminating a little bit does that sound real oh it does ah so sorry you're experiencing that I'm glad we're seeing it because the next step of neuro feed of brain mapping and this neur feedback stuff we do is if we see stuff in a brain map you can change it it's hard to understand our brain but it's actually not that hard to change regulatory features stress sleep attention speed those are things that are supposed to train uh attune and adjust and regulate for you and they actually respond really well to being pushed on stretched this is sort of why they cramp up as well you know the the posterior singulate isn't necessarily a disease process when it cramps up into trauma it's an acute accommodation because guess what the cost of missing danger High you miss it twice game over so there's this negativity bias where the brain's like oh my God Tigers I've learned Tigers exist I'm gonna think about tigers all the time dude I'm reading a book is it a tiger book no I'm taking a bath are there water Tigers bra what are you doing and that's the singulate deciding hey have have you thought there might be some danger you need to evaluate in or to have you thought maybe and that can be a surface level a recent a trauma classic PTSD phenomena earlier stuff earlier life long-term movement uh cptsd developmental trauma isn't really about the posterior singulate because you've learned and developed in a world that was more adversive that had less secure attachment and so you don't see the singulate cramped up against the the environment being un UNM monitorable or needing more monitoring than than you're doing instead you get deeper tissues that actually don't have EEG don't have actually brain waves and things like the per aqueductal gray which is the part of the brain that dumps like natural morphins into your system when you hit your thumb with a hammer that moment of pain relief after you slam your thumb is uh natural endorphins and keyons turns out we've discovered recently that periductal gray also codes experiences of emotional pain so it's not doing the threat sensitivity where's you where's the where's the tiger it's doing the thing hey did you remember that years ago there was a tiger you missed yeah you really should think about that just in general yeah hey don't forget there's Tigers every so often so it's a pre-alert not the actual visceral alert but it's a bias towards that and it's very very involved with uh trauma stuff it tends to also have um coupling with the amydala which doesn't have EEG either or brain waves either but um for folks who are wondering why I'm saying brain tissue doesn't have brain waves EEG or brain waves is only a feature of the bark the CeX of the brain it has something called paramal cells neurons that sit in these giant columns that burst together in electrical firing and create information and coding a lot of the brain subcortical doesn't have those cells that burst in rhythmic waves so the cortex is connected to those tissues like the amydala but the amydala itself doesn't burst in beta waves or alpha waves or things like that doesn't have those signatures so if someone wants to train attachment which is an amydala thing the amydala helps code for um the emotions you associate with memories so if you have a trauma experience you go into the the towers during 911 your amigdala then is activated about those experiences or if you give someone beta blockers going into a trauma experience or do therapy later on with beta blockers on board and re activate the amydala you create new learning around the trauma response and pull the teeth of the emotional access this is a a newer tool that's being used sometimes these beta blockers in acute trauma response and also prophylactically for for people for trauma workers for crisis workers um so let me let me jump in wow okay there's a lot there sorry there's a lot there pause for a second um we introduce you here we're talking with Dr Andrew Hill at Peak brain Institute um so very interesting here you know you you mentioned uh about the kind of position of uh what you're talking about here in terms of uh trauma therapy yeah um and it's what not very not very well understood how does someone who has been traumatized maybe they have experienced uh complex PT they come to you how do you work with them um no matter what you're working on drama ADHD seizure Peak Performance creativity all I really care about is do you have goals around your regulation and your performance those can be goals of suffering reducing suffering those can be goals of performance but I knowing what success feels like what regulation feels like for someone where things are important tells me an awful lot about how to help them generally but I also do my review of someone's brain data cold I walk through it blind interesting okay and I say hey look your brain has a few interesting features do they matter to you so someone could come to you maybe they have been traumatized uh but you would know that before you did their brain mapping right yeah Mo in fact I would say you can even flip it many of us have threat sensitivity activation a trauma response some perseveration some rumination some social activation and you see that in a lot of people even those without uh trauma d diagnoses so to speak you know with we can have disregulated threat sensitivity without a therapist giving it a name it can be really in the way it doesn't have to be exactly like everyone else's either you know it can just be about your mother-in-law because of learning or it can be broad or it can be only when you have low blood sugar only when your sleep gets iffy and that's what I find too is it's never one thing it's never just about your singulate learning the world sucks and now keeping your fists up it's also about the Sleep maintenance issue that that's given you and how that slows down your speed or processing and then you can't think clearly so you stand in the gas internally and then you feel brittle and pushed and and even more unrested later on and then you get angry because you're so underresourced that you're so protective that you can't just feel anxious and now you're angry as well and it's a very complicated phenomena but if I look at someone's brain those things are all true for that person perhaps but what I'm seeing is their trait resources instead so I have the freedom I have the opportunity the necessity to drop below the level of the diagnostic label or the thing that they've been told right and say hey here's some Neuroscience about you here's some physiology that I think's interesting and it looks like it might be a little unusual good or bad um interesting you know we measured some performance this might go along with it it gives us some context but how much this is interesting and would you like to change it so I'm able nervous I'm feeling very uncomfortable in the world how do we how what do we do how do I work so then I would do neuro feedback generally now man with a hammer every problem is a nail per maslo but neuro feedback is my heavy lifter so that's my that's my big hammer and it's this process of training those brain waves those eegs so in the case of like classic PTSD you might want to exercise the posterior singulate and relax it so it learns to put its fists down more voluntarily you can decide to to stop evaluating and stop ruminating essentially and the way you would do that is you would look at the singulate generally there's a lot of beta waves there there might not be a lot of alpha waves might be hard to find the neutral wave which is the alpha the rest mode between the gears and you might have a lot of of theta a lot of juiciness a lot of disinhibition a lot of squirrel in that tissue so it's it cramps up it spasms and stays activated it's hard to relax metaphorically and that's a function of having a lot of theta a lot of beta and not a lot of alpha for for many people so throw some ear Clips on stick a wire on the scalp a little bit of paste stick it there measure the beta measure the Theta measure the alpha so this relaxation tone this Alpha this neutral and that tissue is going to vary moment to moment so are the activation and the release tones the betas and the thetas you measure them moment to moment whenever the brain happens on its own to make more Alpha for half a second and less of the other two you'll plot it make a sound happen make a little puzzle piece start filling in make your Pac-Man eat some dots make your car chase more zombies whatever it doesn't really matter what the stimulus is but the brain hears good job brain good job brain good job brain nope good job good job good job nope whenever it happens to make bursts of Alpha and then the big trick is every 30 seconds or so you move the goalposts so this ends up being something called operant conditioning where you're shaping you're applauding Progressive successive changes in Behavior the weird thing is the behavior is involuntary because you can't feel your brain waves so the mind's like really this stupid Pacman on the screen stopping and starting is training my brain really okay my friend said this works all right whatever and you don't feel it the first time either so you're like all right that was kind of weird and then you do it two or three more times and you're like oh hey wait a minute huh because the brain goes oh Alpha makes stuff happen couple seconds a couple sessions in and it reaches for a huge amount of Alpha and you feel that and you're like whoa and this this particular protocol the the training down the the r the outside ranges thetas and betas training up the alpha at pz at the parietal uh midline produces a sensation that feels like you're unclenching your mind Hey wow that felt like am I imagining this no this actually feels like wow hey guys this feels really interesting I feel kind of calm I'm I'm not sure I like I kind of like this wow and then it wears off and you're like I'm much was I nah I must have wanted that to happen and you tried it again and it's stronger you're like no actually something happened great how was your sleep actually my sleep was kind of crappy after that relaxation aha okay do half of that let's add some of this okay try this now beta for Sleep regulation dial it in how'd that feel wow I was calm and I had great dreams and stuff great that was really weird all right do it twice more this week let's build it up and see how how it how it stabilizes so it's mysterious but not blind this is the opposite of diagnosing and being right about what has happened in the past it's all about spotting a phenomena stretching it creating subjective experience iterating it's much closer to personal training than it is to medicine or psychology and its actual practice and you see why you know it's all about thrusting agency back upon you instead of creating I was just GNA say there's something very it feels very self-empowering and so how would this is really fascinating to me and I love the way you're articulating this because you're doing it in a way that I haven't heard before um it's very exciting actually how would you describe this so we got a lot of listeners here obviously who are therapists who are survivors combination of the two coaches Etc how would you talk about this in terms of how it differ differs from other forms of therapy for yeah clearly goes hand in glove right I mean there's resources and there's habits and and there's cognitive stuff and there's attachment and there's learning so you want to get your brain out of the way but you also then want to learn skills and and and and learn to drop away accommodations and callous you've built up through behavioral things to protect you and that's different than having a disregulated spasming resource a little bit you know they're related but you can you know you learn to first not be triggered by your mother-in-law and then you learn not to yell at her later on those things don't necessarily happen all once you may be like wow she didn't leave me shaking mad that was interesting it's kind of a jerk though still huh all right and and and you progress you you have a different relationship with your resources so with a therapist in the mix and most neuro feedback people that do trauma work are therapists like they do neur like Anon and therapy together but you can also work with a therapist we we do a lot with the MDR with brain spotting family systems sematic experiencing and they all dovetail beautifully with neuro feedback because a the neuro feedback helps keep the brain moving so it gets the brain out of the way so the therapy lands really really well um B it actually jacks up plasticity to 11 for like 24 to 36 hours after every single neur feedback session so literally your therapy starts to get in learning uh all kinds of things start to change faster and you can use neur feedback both to like break through cognitive blocks you can do alpha Theta nerve feedback for hypnogogic State access for someone's really shut down alexic you know numb you can actually Break Free into that moment of insight and awareness as you fall asleep that like wow cool idea you can get reliable access to that state that can be useful for a trauma context um so controll dissociation almost uh you can also do things around the perac per aqueductal gray and the posterior singlet directly and as you work through someone's brain resources they can do the different shifts in their life and their safety and the relationships as they need um a lot of therapists have come across uh Bessel vander's book the body keeps the score um Bessel wrote the forward for a book by Seaburn fiser which is called U neuro feedback in the treatment of Developmental trauma and while some of the techniques are a little different than when the book was published a lot of that is good backing for folks that are wondering about this landscape and I would say it's pretty valid not just for developmental trauma but in general how Seaburn rights is is quite informative on the brain processes and how we think about it and how we go after it in some ways so for folks who are more therapists than I am and are really interested in that dovetailing and how it how it Blends I would say seber's book is a great book uh she's also been on this podcast you can access her interview too so at Peak brain Institute break it down what do you do yeah so we do neuro feedback programs and some mindfulness training but mostly neuro feedback and brain mapping and we have centers uh all around the US and now opening up in Europe and uh folks can join the club so to speak and get free access to unlimited brain maps and they can explore how the stuff that doing to their brain changes them how their medication Works how their cannabis is hitting them how their adol hits them whatever and uh it's a great tool of agency first and foremost and then many of our clients do what's called neuro feedback and those programs are usually about three months long we actually are unusual in that about 80 85% of our clients train their brains from home and never see our offices we send out equipment we do remote coaching remote assessments and our clients work with us live and have Live support seven days a week to do neuro feedback and progress through stuff so even more agency you can do it at home take control of your stuff even if you uh can't get to one of our offices we have offices in four US cities in um two in Southern California and la and Orange County also in St Louis and New York City and we're opening up in London and Stockholm right now and we have other partners throughout the the world as well so we can often help you no matter where you are which is kind of fun as well now do you offer uh workshops for therapists who are interested in learning how to do this or we um do not right now supervise therapists but we're working on a platform a wellness platform that should let us support therapists doing this work a little bit better um the the that question you asked I get asked every single week by a therapist at least once um the field of neuro feedback has been actually shrinking over the past 10 or 20 years not growing um because the people that discovered it have been finally retiring and dying essentially like it's that kind of field where it's always been taught in this like black art Apprentice teach and Apprentice Teach an apprentice and the research literature always lacks it lags by decades to what's possible clinically for a bunch of reasons clinician should hear this onean you couldn't blind neuro feedback couldn't blind e EEG until I did the first study in 2010 or something on double blind placeo control the EG you couldn't really do it you couldn't blind the EG before that also it's individualized how do you test something across groups of people that's heavily individualized it's also expensive no one owns neuro feedback how do you spend 5 million bucks on a you know class a gold standard you know nah style study and then we've had well poisoning aggressive well poisoning from insurance companies and big farming things in the 70s and 80s that really worked against the field so it's this bizarre off in the niches kind of black art and the number of providers is actually shrinking there's probably only a couple thousand providers in the US total who do this with any sophistication essentially um although the cost of hardware and software is coming down so much that we're getting this prosumer biohacker kind of overlap as well so what we're trying to do at Peak is and we we've built a system for this now it's how we run our worldwide virtual business but we sort of track as you report your sleep your stress your mood your anxiety dayto day and as you report the stuff you're doing your meditation your neuro feedback we're actually having uh overlays and seeing how the stuff we're helping you plan and try and execute on is landing so when you tell us oo my sleep was really crappy after that new protocol uh one of your coaches will see your report grab it help adjust your workout plan for the next couple of sessions if it matters or to respond to your new needs jump back in your private chat and say hey thanks for that sleep report yeah that beta protocol might have been too fast let's try a slower one I checked in with our clinical team they think 15 Herz was too fast let's try 14 and a half we'll do a short session if this lands well you might feel a little bit less focused but sleep great and so it's this very iterative process where folks get to learn what they're doing essentially as they do it and and you know that keeps us out of the treatment landscape and more into the training uh just just to be clear so the people listening therapists listening uh they can recommend refer their clients to you this can be an adjunctive yeah in all of our physical offices you know we give all of our podcast listeners um a discount so the annual membership is usually 500 bucks but it's half price for folks you're oh listener to your podcast who want to come on in and mentioned it um and that gives you unlimited access to brain mapping so a therapist can use that um refer a client in and then with the client's permission of course we would share that video of the discussion and the high points and and the neuroeducation around the client's brain with the therapist and I can't tell you the number of therapists who's you know the scales fall away when they realize they can distinguish ADHD from anxiety in a brain map right um or ADHD from trauma cuz they can look the same or a sleep issue from ADHD because they can look the same and that is such a tool for a therapist to know where there should be applying pressure is it psycho educational because it's sleep in ADHD is it something we should be doing DBT on because it's the trauma response thing you know like it's just information it's just data so this is why we provide the brain mapping in our offices with this sort of open-ended you know agency and yeah folks can send their clients in their patients in from wherever they like in the US and other places we are and we can send gear out remotely so folks are acute we can do we we do full virtual uh systems and we send them out and we work with you wherever you are and we would be more than happy uh uh delighted to have other people on the team to handle aspects of need and goal that we're not experts in you know we we have we have a mindfulness teacher for you we got a nerfy back we have two or three different nerfy back coaches on your team to make sure that someone there seven days a week week and you got a couple clinical scientists uh I'm I'm your head coach essentially with other coaches but if we can add somebody external to that team and then they're also on your private chat and they get cced on your data and oh we love that because it helps someone else support your transformation uh please yes awesome awesome all right Andrew what is the best way for people to reach you and get in contact with you yeah thanks Justin so our most of our socials are on Peak brain LA because that was our first location and our website's Peak brain institute.com so come check us out ask us your brain questions I also have the head first uh with Dr Hill podcast which uh has been lying fallow for a few years but is starting to drip out episodes uh momentarily again so come check us out there too we'll have all that linked up at the trauma the podcast.com Dr Hill awesome love to have you back at a later date I appreciate you being here my pleasure guy thanks so much for having me enjoyed it all right take care