High Performing Brain: Sleep, Cortisol & Nootropics (Part 1)

blue light is not your evil problem in the all of the literature all of it that looks at evening light shows that the intensity of light matters the color does not full stop color does not matter the brain is insensitive to Blue Light late in the day because blue light doesn't exist late in the day generally so we're not listening for it with our brains it only exists for half an hour before Sunrise to 1 hour at most after Sunrise that's the window where light matters that's it and I don't care about evening light more sacred cows we should kill today light doesn't matter light does not matter in the evening and blue blockers are not doing you any good we're we're killing biohacking sacred cows today the only thing I really care about that's absolutely critical is Dr Andrew Hill is a UCLA PhD trained functional neuroscientist the founder of peak brain Institute and a leading neuro feedback practitioner and biohacking coach for clients looking to optimize their brain to reduce stress and brain fog enhance sleep creativity attention and athletic performance so Andrew I am thrilled to be sitting here with you today I've been looking forward to this for some time um after you very kindly mapped my brain and had a look at it which was super insightful for me um but I think it all started back when I met you 2019 at the First Health optimization Summit in London yeah and even then hung out in in human and did some some cool podcasting and talked about lots of B eery it was great we did we did in the early days of the podcast and I was like surprised just how much you were able to tell me about my brain at that that point without uh without actually doing a map uh then just even when I was sitting next to you at dinner um but yeah recently obviously we have had a good look at my brain which we'll go into a bit later um but let's start with what is brain mapping sure so brain mapping is measuring the patterns the resting resources in your brain so brain mapping uses something called EEG or brain waves and we make lots of electricity with our brain and some of that is related to momentary thoughts and emotions and information processing but a lot of it is not a lot of it is just like standing patterns resources that are tuned in certain ways and the cortex the surface of the brain has these big communication hubs these big areas you know you may have heard of the default mode Network that has a couple cortical hubs or the salience network or other networks in the brain and the cortex has these big chunks of brain that have certain jobs and you can look at the brain at rest look at the amounts of different brain waves to get a sense of how that tissue how that resource is acting and we have brain waves called things like Alpha and Theta and beta you know beta is a gas pedal Alpha's neutral and Theta takes the brakes off so you can kind of predict looking at a part of the brain based on the amount of brain waves it has in a certain range what might be going on and you know people are unusual so the goal is not to say hey unusual feature it's to use a comparison you know you against the average person your age will see things stick out and then that stuff becomes informative hopefully and you can kind of start to unpack uh the the things that show up in a brain map or qeg somewhat reliably are regulatory features attention stress sleep speed of processing sensory processing social processing and then stability phenomena resisting seizures and migraines and things all of that shows up kind of reliably in a qeg brain map and it's the same day after day after day brain mapping is not picking up what you're thinking or what you're feeling or if you slept well last night unless it's very extreme it's mostly picking up how you tend to be the resources in terms of their their General way of being so I can't tell if you're depressed but maybe I can tell you have a tendency for depression I can't tell if you're having word finding issues maybe have a tendency for word finding issues and so what I do with data is I walk through the unusual features with someone and teach them about their brain say look here's a part of your brain it's making lots of beta that means it's in high gear sometimes that's experienced like this or like this and usually I can walk through someone's data cold without them telling me anything and find six or 10 things they really care about and they already know that's The Sweet Spot of brain mapping is not doing this like here's an idea I have about you I'm your expert no no no it's more like oh hey here's your brain here's some plausible stuff you know how you feel which of this stuff is most interesting most important and so that's what we do with brain mapping and then we do this thing called neuro feedback to shape the brain waves over time and make change and that change shows up in the brain mapping and we also do um attention testing or executive function testing alongside the mass and we get congruent change in uh performance testing as well along with with the uh brain changes so super interesting so just to kind of for people listening to understand a bit better when we look at brain waves yeah you know I i' sort of heard and looked at things like Microsoft research for example they did some re interesting research around people going from one meeting to another and how the brain was kind of heating up if you like right and the individuals becoming quite stressed because they're not having any break and then what they found is if they gave them a 10-minute break actually the stress didn't arise uh and they could sort of have a reset and they were looking at brain wave activity how can we like with that sort of knowledge how can we optimize things obviously doing a brain map which we're going to come on to can be extremely helpful because then you're individualizing it but are there broad principles like we need to rest in between uh workflow yeah for that particular um example we tend to have about a 45 minute window of ability to control attention resources and as we get later into that window grasping information selecting from among competing bits information takes uh resources you know you may have heard this concept of decision fatigue where you you know late in the day don't want to decide anything I don't care what we have for dinner pick something because you can't deal anymore with just simple decisions same thing happens with just basic information processing especially in a meeting context because the intensity is low so there's nothing to grab you and pull you back into that meeting necessarily so you have to voluntarily keep activating the sustaining of your vigilance and your focus there's a bunch of circuit on the Le hand side of the brain the precentral gyrus whose job it is to stabilize that attention it keeps the vigilance and focus on the road in front of you even if things are boring so you can decide to focus in the boring meeting you can decide to keep paying attention if this left area is making good beta waves if it's not we call that inattentiveness perhaps but once you know how this works you can change it in lots of ways you can bring up this left bait activity with neut tropics it through meditation you can improve it through sleep hacking the same area stabilizes vigilance and Sleep Quality so the ability to go into deep sleep and come out of it with some Harvest some some restoration is a function of this left side tissue that helps you both turn vigilance on and turn it off so you don't have to wake up when you hear a dog bark in the middle of the night so that's left side beta and you can change it with again supplements neut Tropics meditation medication uh circadian hacking you know bio hacks involving you know light and and sleep hacks that we all know so there's lots of things you can do once you know how this tissue is operating but like we saw this in your brain we saw a little bit of low power alpha beta on the left hand side and that often produces a bit of in attentiveness which we didn't see for you and so my guess was not so much inattentiveness but poor deep sleep poor sleep maintenance was my primary guess for you and that same tissue helps us again stabilize the clear calm Focus and I got little hints that you might be kind of grinding through your focus to keep yourself engaged from your data but yeah so so you can you can learn how your brain works but then what that really does is it gives us sort of the the reason why we might want to adhere to those good biohacking habits we know um sometimes just teaching somebody about how this stuff works can get them to go oh yeah let me change that one big one is if we look a brain map and I see that your alpha waves are slow and your delta waves are fast which we did see for you that's a sign of the mind running kind of draggy like all this power is there but it's hard to access kind of like a sports car with the handbrake on and the speed of processing the Alpha Speed was a bit draggy for you which we often see in people and that can produce difficulty with feeling crisp and clear issues with word finding or information retrieval but it's just the idling speed of the brain and for you the delta waves have pushed way up into positive postive numbers which suggests the metabolic background mode was pushing into the foreground so you're probably a bit brain fog kind of grind through it not feeling as clear as you want perhaps and so for you doubling down on the Sleep hacks now you're already a a a sophisticated biohacker so you're doing all these things but if you weren't doing any of these things and you added them in you should feel a change and for you the depth of Deep Sleep the amount of deep sleep is the big concern I would have for your particular set of uh scores and I'd be giving you again if you needed this advice I'd be giving you you know fast before bed uh let me stop there for a second because people often know we shouldn't eat before bed they often don't know why and once you know why it's a lot more important you realize how important it is to do so two two criteria two uh details here that are important one the release of melatonin suppresses in insulin release so as you start to get melatonin rising in the day the pancreas is stop producing insulin you have this drop of insulin pre uh precipitous actually as you start to get tired late in the day and that melatonin signal builds up and that causes snacking because the falling insulin makes us go oh I have insulin to release is there other calories to store can I shove them in my fat storage evolutionarily that makes tons of sense doesn't make so much sense when you have ready access to calories all the time like we do now so first of all you can't uh uh dispose of those calories that that well the blood sugar that well if you eat late in the day secondly having any blood sugar that's elevated at night means you don't release growth hormone when you're sleeping and if you're above 35 or 40 you only get that one pulse of growth hormone a couple hours after falling asleep that's it in a 24-hour uh window younger people get little trickles of it all the time plus that one big pulse but older folks we only get the one pulse so if you have a habit of eating before bed you're going to chronically be underr because you're not getting into deep sleep I don't know that's why we see the excess deep sleep for you probably not because you're a good biohacker you don't need a for well no actually this because this is interesting and I was going to ask you there because I was aware of the insulin melatonin connection I think what happens is you know I used to be very good about eating early and then Life Changes right so my kids are now teenagers and they play a lot of sport and any mom who's like a soccer mom or whatever it is or gymnastics or netball all the things I do is I'm running my kids around and so what's happened is that eating time has shifted a little bit later so now I'm getting two hours before I fall asleep as opposed to the three to four hours I was getting before two is probably enough if you're insulin sensitive and I would expect that you are um just on the idea of kids uh sport I work with a lot of uh teens who are very serious athletes that have disregulated sleep because they come home from hockey practice soccer practice whatever 700 p.m. 8:00 p.m. 900 p.m. and they eat right then so it's really hard for a parent to be like okay let's stop and have food on the way from school to soccer or whatever it's a kind of difficult thing so often the behavior is reinforcing poor deep sleep and so I'll see a a 13-year-old who looks deeply unrested and they're getting away with it because they're so powerful on the sport pitch but they can't sit in class without falling asleep because they're just not getting good sleep regulation you you know how your sleep regulation is when the intensity comes off in the world then you know how rested you are When The World Isn't pushing back you can't sit in a quiet room without falling asleep yeah if I'm quiet I'll fall asleep that's for sure um and I mean it's I suppose I've always been top of person who can fall asleep anywhere but I'm a light sleeper but with that I think this will be helpful for a lot of moms that are listening because what I tend to do with mine is I will give them their dinner earlier right but I can't eat it then cuz I'm running around around with them and I just don't want indigestion drop them then I'll come back eat and go back to collect them the issue is they are then hungry right they've just played sport sometimes my daughter might have done three hours of gymnastics she's going to come home and want to have something Y and it's hard to avoid that being next to bedtime so it's not a full meal but she's going to have something what I might recommend to ameliorate the impact uh you what you want to do is minimize the blood sugar Spike and minimize the Cascade of signaling hor hormones that will respond to that a 10-minute walk um after you eat will dispose of most of the blood sugar simply through mechanical sequestration to Big like thigh muscles and the glum muscles and things and it will allow you to store all of the sugar you're eating without releasing insulin so if she goes for a nice stroll around the neighborhood after dinner with you or something that would be better than not doing that also if you've if you've depleted your glycogen after a big workout you can suck down a lot of calories and it just sucked right into the muscles without causing the same kind of uh load of energy you have to dispose of so it might not be as bad for kid athletes because they're kids because they're athletes but you can still sort of think about ways that you're um optimizing you know get get also get the kids thinking about is my Sleep Quality affected do I recover as well from a workout and you can be very experimental and look at at how carb refeeding after the workout feels the next morning on sleep or on athletic performance how does it feel to refeed how does it feel to not refeed and that can be really important I mean thing is kids have such little raging fires of metabolism they can get away with a lot but I really care a little more about teaching a kid how things work so that when they're 12 or 13 it's fine when they're 17 18 19 25 if they haven't learned to regulate sleep regulate nutrition regulate stress response executive that's when Things Fall Apart is when the structure of the earlier home kind of drops away and suddenly they're in college and there's you know Pizza everywhere and they can stay up all night and no one's making them study that's when things really become problematic is when all that structure and you know the reasons why you shouldn't eat at night for instance just knowing that that that it suppresses growth hormone gets a lot of my college students going oh I want abs I don't want to eat before bed okay great you know whatever the the motivation is now your sleep is better and you can learn to regulate the phenomena so yeah much better um interesting and I guess when we're looking at sleep what was interesting to me was you know you were saying how it doesn't look like I'm getting enough deep sleep and yet my aura ring we were talking about this tells me that I am and I've noticed this is inaccurate right but what about trackers like I find so I wear a Roop and an AA because I like the for the working out honestly I'm addicted to the overall step count I have no idea why with aura I think it was almost the only reason I wear I don't even really care about steps but it feels good at the end of the day when I look at how many I've done 10,000 steps I actually do tons being a m some days I'm like 19,000 so I feel good I'm like who I did lot of steps but which I'm sure is good for blood flow but um whoop seems to be a little harder on me with sleep uh it it it seems like you know when I'm tired it seems to recognize I didn't sleep as well Aura seems to be very gracious and tell me most of the time that I'm doing everything right yeah um for people listening you know if they want to track that and even what you were saying there you know looking at refeeding versus not having a late meal after you've worked out like my teenage son goes wants to go to the gym at 9ine o'clock at night that's just completely out of Cadian alignment for him for me but works for him um how can and and you know moms and dads listening to this how can they track their sleep to actually see what making a difference yeah so fan I mean it is how you feel but it's not just how you feel oneof oh I think I slept well last night it takes some practice to get good at raing that there's good research though showing that the most sophisticated sleep trackers are no more accurate than self-report after a month of self-report so if you report how you feel in the morning how much sleep I got how restful my sleep was you get you get good at that so you don't need to spend three 400 bucks on a sleep tracker I do I encourage folks that want to get one to get a nice sleep tracker I like the I like the aura I like the whoop neither of those devices are good at telling the quality of deep sleep you know uh uh good or bad quality apart they can just tell if you're getting deep sleep especially the aura just says yep deep sleep but it has no idea if the Deep Sleep itself was not good quality and that's kind of a rare place to be getting enough deep sleep but not enough quality but I see it all the time on these trackers okay so so they're reasonably accurate then if you say oh I got an hour an hour or 90 minutes of deep sleep that's probably right but the depth of that deep s we can't assess right um the amount of deep is good is a pretty reliable measure um reliable the way a body fat scale is the absolute number might not be all that accurate but the changes are yes basically okay um there are some misleading stuff misleading data points in the Sleep trackers I spend a lot of time disabusing clients of the notion that REM matters on a sleep tracker REM is nonsense on a sleep tracker it's completely irrelevant and it's a madeup number by most of the algorithms you cannot track REM without measuring EEG cannot track on body temperature heart rate variability and movement doesn't work that way and so all of the Sleep trackers are utter nonsense when it comes to REM tracking so I encourage you to ignore the REM R numbers because they're confusing and misleading and they're they're bad they're bad numbers which is interesting right cuz I know when I was on holiday I Got a notification saying uh you're making up for REM sleep you sleeping way way more REM SLE but it's nonsense from what you're saying it's not true it's not it's not true and it doesn't matter because Ram is a phenomena that self-regulates it it's meant to be produced to clean up the brain and do some learning and recovery and healing and the body demands it and keeps the REM going whether or not you have an experience of dreaming you're you're making REM every cycle we might not remember our dreams if we aren't sleeping well enough we don't make deep sleep can consolidate long-term memory so we don't remember the dreams but everyone makes REM unless they are hallucinating and full bore crazy or profoundly severely depressed there are some states where REM goes away but you have bigger problems than is your dreaming happening at that by that point it's a really extreme case it's kind like blood pH blood pH doesn't change that much and I'm tired of biohackers worrying about alkaline water and whatever blood pH holds itself in a very narrow range if you eat alkaline foods the only pH you change is that of your urine you do not change the pH of your blood in fact if you're able to change the pH of your blood by you know one point it would kill you you would just die your body would fall apart instantly all the metabolic processes would fail all the enzymes proteins everything would just fall apart so RS like that you don't have to about it because it maintains itself and you can't measure it accurately so forget about it it's just just don't worry about it do measure the total sleep that's decent on these trackers and deep sleep is decent on these trackers and you can think about the Deep Sleep being a fraction of the total sleep as the thing to work work on so for adults 25% is a great number to head for and for children 30 35% is where you should be at for deep sleep um and what about when you're looking at the brain and you're looking at Maps um and you see someone who isn't sleeping as deeply or maybe they're not having enough sleep is that there's a lot of um talk and scientific data coming out around that predisposing you to things like Dementia or outes you know other forms of autoimmune all kinds of stuff yeah um it has a huge impact um and and Sleep Quality phenomena uh they're the sort of thing you can get away with or have suboptimal sleep for a very long time and it does build up over time the these are things that can accelerate trajectories of Aging pretty aggressively and if you control the quality if you improve the quality you can back out of Aging trajector sometimes and have lots of recovery in fact all the time I mean I do about 30 brain Map Reviews every week with people and all the time all the time we're seeing phenomena in the brain where I'm like this person's not resting really well all the time like it happens more often than not that sleep is disregulated but it's the kind of thing that gets put back on track very very quickly for most people so I talked to a lot of people in their 50s who were like I'm really concerned about my memory I look at their brain I'm like oh your Alpha Speed is all spread out you're having word finding issues and delayed recall and tip of the tongue huh oh gosh yes okay that's not your memory that's your speed of processing your memory you notice memory difficulties one notices memory difficulties uh in aging when we reach for episodic memory experiences we've had that's the place you first lose memory in age related cognitive decline word finding and delayed recall for names is not memory it's speed it's handoff speed hey brain give me a word here it is here I come it's kind of mismatched timing you can't hand off information between parts of the brain so if you're only having trouble with word finding names forgetting little tip of the tongue things forgetting what you were told last night after dinner that's not memory that's the speed of The Binding the speed of the processing and it's not as acute in terms of like a long-term trajectory of Aging can feel really in the way but it also recovers very very quickly if you can get a few nights of deep sleep in the brain speeds right back up and you can see this really powerful uh and you feel more verb verbal fluency you can also go after it with you know non neuro feedback ways if you take choline form cocoline uh or Alpha GPC that speeds up the the brain all the racetams especially parasamgate has a very powerful speeding up of ver of of the alpha speeds you got a verbal fluency boost that's really really noticeable so supplements neut Tropics sleep hacking meditation neuro feedback even things like resistance training improve the brain's uh density and speed of processing so speed of processing is a basic core resource to the brain that we can feel and it flexes dayto Day based on deep sleep based on fatigue based on stress so that's a thing that I would want to you know not label as a problem but think about is like what does success look like what does you know what does it feel like for you to feel better okay it's better rest maybe waking up at 5:00 am feeling you know invigorated and refreshed and ready to go but also like at 5 p.m. are you still smooth and clear and crisp and handling all the stressors or are you starting to like you know flag a little bit in terms of handling everything that's a speed of processing thing as well so and is some of that to do with like um when you look at people's brains is some of that to do with being an early morning versus a late type of tour so if you look at someone who feels fresh and vibrant in the morning like my best work generally if I go resistance train right it definitely DS things up for me and then I can come back and I can knock something out in 40 minutes that might take me an hour and a half now it's 5:30 take me an hour and a half to do double time um is that a real thing the difference is between people who are sharper in the morning versus people who say they're night owls yeah I don't believe so we're we're we're killing biohacking sacred sacred cows today uh no I don't think Larks and owls is a thing I think humans are ultimately quite adaptable and people that think they're night owls are people that have just regulated Circa rhythms and they're finally waking up at the end of the day and people that think they're Larks are dialed in and can wake up cleanly and crisply in a circadian appropriate way where their circadian rhythm is lined up with the Earth's photo period and they're synchronized failure synchronization creates weird things like waking up in the middle of the night or having better afternoon energy instead of morning energy because your cortisol is reversed those are things that I think we should be taking control over not sort of allowing oh I I I work better when I get up at noon no you don't you talked yourself into that kid with ADHD or whatever but if you dodge your sleep in properly you'd sleep two-thirds as much get more rest out of it and feel incredible so dog your sleep in in a regulatory sense figure out how it has to work and it gets way more efficient you don't need as much and you feel much better when you're not sleeping too and is there an Optimum amount of sleep that the brain there's not actually no people are weird people are so weird um eight hours is still a pretty good metric most adults I think seven and a half is closer to what they need but there are adults that need nine there are adults that can get away with four it's rare to have that little um 6 to eight is about the adult range that seems to be uh typical um my hunch is that many of us getting six hours are under rested slightly but not everyone uh there are people who can get away with four hours of sleep and there are people who can more than get away for whom it's optimal but it's very very rare and so again I don't care about the total hours if you feel rested it's probably sufficient but I would like to think about getting 25% of your hours as deep so if you're getting eight hours of sleep I want two hours of deep and that is sufficient if you're aiming for two hours of deep on your aura ring or your whoop strap and you're getting eight hours of sleep you're going to feel incredible probably unless your deep sleep is screwed up in some way and then it's the am the quality not the amount and now i' try to work on things to change the quality you know move your resistance training from the morning to the afternoon uh put a bed Chiller on the top of your bed so it mimics you know getting colder and then warmer throughout the night uh mouth taping blackout curtains uh fasting before bed going for a walk first thing in the morning uh keeping your morning wake Time Rock Solid consistent I don't care about bedtime and I don't care about evening light more sacred cows we should kill today light doesn't matter one light does not matter in the even blue blockers are not diming you any good really blue blockers are are just EMP about those CU that's that's that's a that's a biggie yeah all of the literature all of it that looks at evening light shows that the intensity of light matters the color does not full stop color does not matter blue light is not your evil problem in the evening Bright Lights might get in the way a little bit overhead lights might get in the way a little bit with circadian but but colored is not the brain is insensitive to Blue Light late in the day because blue light doesn't exist late in the day generally so we're not listening for it with our brains it only exists for half an hour before Sunrise to one hour at most after Sunrise that's the window where light matters that's it that's the Circadian window for getting the super chmatic nucleus sits on top of the optic kayos and to sample the color of light hitting the eyes and causing the Cascade reset for all the body CL and sunset not at Sunset no there is no circadian information communicated just at Sunrise okay so this is interesting because I heard Andrew hubman say that if you go and get some Morning Light that will protect you against Blue Light in the evening but what you're saying is there's nothing to protect against regard there's nothing to protect it doesn't actually matter the human brain can absorb can shrug off one hour of circadian disruption every single cycle no problem and there's good literature showing if you lie in bed and stare at your phone for an hour before bed or two hours whatever you get or or wake up in the late and look and check your phone you get one hour of circadian push that's it that's it and you that's mean as in it might delay You by an hour falling as it pushes your K Rhythm for by one hour but that's that's not more than you can kind of shrug off right every day you can adjust to that every day more than an hour we can't we can't just adjust to but one hour we can handle it without causing a reset without pressing the whole Rhythm forward just shrug it off and so so Morning Becomes super important so Morning Light like the other Andrew says is you know important but honestly fasting before bed is more important than morning light when you eat is a stronger exogenous cue than light dramatically stronger when you eat is stronger than light stronger than when you sleep stronger than everything else so eat in the time heard that the light in the morning was the key and then the second was the the food other the way around yeah food number one number one circadian support for exogenous for outside world uh cues is is food light is a close second but I believe everyone's focusing on light because we have three companies selling orange glasses I do not believe there's anything valid in those claims so literature falls apart when you look at it and all literature that looks at does color matter finds that it does not matter at all so I don't think you should give your money to folks selling those orange glasses I also think they can cause trouble I you know I've been doing biohacking with clients for 25 years at this point we didn't call it that 25 years ago but that's what we've been doing I have come across a significant number of people to buy orange glasses throw them on and get sick get dramatic migraines get thrown off get dizzy I'm fairly certain that narrowly constraining one frequency of light into your eyes is not a natural thing and the brain doesn't do that well with it for some people so I would actually argue it's not doing any good and for some people it might be causing harm so no stay away from stay away from evening light manipulation does not matter if you want to think about evening light maybe don't use overhead lights use desk lights on at home maybe put your TV onto the dim setting versus the bright setting maybe as opposed to putting blue blockers on and try to filter it out you know what's really interesting is uh I when I was away and I didn't have my blue blockers I found no difference in my ability to fall asleep if I looked the only thing about having a phone is if you look at something stimulating the light itself seemed to have zero impact on my sleep data yeah if you start arguing with some jerk on Facebook about something you care about you're gonna be a little activated you know it's not going to be quite is uh and so I I do think evening rituals evening routines are good to to to slow down to move from screen journaling to give yourself a different timing and different intensity I think it's important but the only only thing I really care about that's absolutely critical is the morning routine I want folks getting up early in a fasted State and doing five or 10 minutes of lowkey activity before you eat and before you have coffee or other forms of caffeine again activity in a fasted State early in the morning is a strong circadian queue so in order of importance fast before bed get up early in the morning go for a walk or do some yoga those will do more than all all of the expensive biohacks that you're people are spending money on once you have those sorted out now buy your light your blackout curtains now get your mouth tape now get your ooler chili pad now get your other things to start optimizing and dialing in but the big ones are food and morning activity in a fasted state so so fasted morning activity and then food yeah the reason is that you're you're woken up by a surge of blood sugar and cortisol and that means that glucose receptors and cortisol receptors have been full very very recently so if you go and hit it hard at the gym at 6: a.m you're calling for more cortisol and more blood sugar into a system that's recently been full and so the signaling will be a little bit insensitive but if you do your hardcore workouts between 4: and 7 pm. when cortisol is at its natural lowest you really feel that release of cortisol it mobilizes body fat it mobilizes healing and muscle growth and then you burn off that cortisol and you're left in a low cortisol state to go to sleep versus in the morning you might Jack yourself up and actually you know remain kind of stressed if you do it too much so what do you do with someone like me who's a mom and 4:00 is when everything begins with the kids picking them up bringing them home giving them dinner taking them to clubs what do you do with that because the reason I put it in the morning is because it's the only time it's going to happen um I would encourage you to switch to sun salutations or or some sort of yoga practice that's intense enough to feel like a workout but not so intense that you're calling for massive amounts of cortisol first thing in the morning you know do 10 sun salutations in 15 minutes try that right um and then three to five times a week resistance training is important especially important for a woman um especially important for a woman who's you know not 35 and Below yeah he's in par huge huge for bone density for muscle mass for you in your mid years every workout you do that's stressful is going to add metabolic sync metabolic Reserve you can rely on in 20 years so I'm a huge fan of intense workouts for somebody in your category but I might recommend sort of stacking the workouts in a way where you can get the most out of them with the least amount of effort and time and for someone like you that might be kettle bells you can do a 20-minute Kettlebell workout and it's as intense as an hour of doing the big five workouts in a gy mhm so you know I would say the workout you do the exercise you do is the right one you there it's better than the optimal one the one you do is is all you really care about so if all you can do is CrossFit at 6 am okay or or four 4 pm fine whatever that's that's great it's better than not doing it but if you want to be optimal first thing in the morning work out just hard enough to burn off the cortisol and burn off the blood sugar that you have floating around with without calling for more that'll be circadian support and a little bit of waking the body up and then find that half an hour three four times a week later in the day to to hit it hard to be aggressive be explosive to feel exhausted after you work out that's the time to do it I think for circadian support but you know you there's an infinite number of things you could try to biohack and so I tend to think of this as like the big factors and then dialing things in over time this is why not eating before bed is so critical this is why morning activity is so critical those are probably more important than when you work out for for circadian rhythm for instance so and sorry well I I lost a sound there so if we're looking at that then before we we drive in dive into the brain map just so people have some principles to work with we've talked about sleep we've talked about Morning Light we've talked about timing of food um in the evening specifically what about when we're thinking about influencing Cadian rhythm with food in the morning and also productivity and uh getting those that food intake and macronutrients right versus fasting to optimize brain activity um the the morning again just to uh reiterate the idea that we're full of blood sugar and full of cortisol first thing if you do your gentle exercise and burn off those substances then eating a little bit of food or having coffee is a good idea but if you throw in caffeine and food into your system before you've burned off the cortisol and blood sugar that's why morning eating is not ideal that's why Dr Hub says give it an hour after you wake up to have coffee it's to allow that cortisol to drop so that when you take caffeine in you get another cortisol Spike instead of just throwing more cortisol on top of cortisol so unless you're working out he says right and then you can have the caffeine the reason he says that though is not because it's ideal it's because we end up with this um insensitivity to cortisol first thing in the morning and therefore if you hit the gym hard you actually move less uh metabolism you burn less fat you build less muscle because the cortisol has been sort of background level if you drink coffee the fat burning aspects get um reintroduced because of the chlorogenic acid the caffeine the blood pressure changes everything else so it looks like coffee in a morning workout reintroduces the fat burning but it doesn't necessarily cover everything so I think Andrew is wrong about this I think that you should be working out in the afternoon and doing yoga in the morning uh before your coffee basically um I mean Andrew and I agree on most things we're both neuroscientists he's more of a vision guy I've showed a stage with him a couple of times you know I I think he's a sweetheart and kind of brilliant but I disagree with some of his circadian perspective stuff um I I I don't and some of his neut Tropic stuff too I don't agree with how he talks about many neut tropics I don't think he's uh I think he's read papers about them and hasn't thought about some of the side effects or some of the real world uh problems with neut Tropics um because you know things lot of things are called neut Tropics that aren't really neut tropics and have side effects or have secondary problem secondary impacts that we don't want to have and this is true about sleep hacking so I I I think we should be going to basic principles and then sorting the system out and then layering things on top of that once we need to make fine Vine tune changes basically ummet yeah yeah the neut Tropic yeah before we come on to that yeah just the diet perspective what's if we want to really optimize that focus and concentration and get work done early in the day yeah diets complicated uh nutrition food it has uh reward value there's cultural things there's religious there's ethical things in food so could I come up with a brain healthy diet that will work better for most people yeah sure is that a good idea for people maybe not you know I mean don't tell a vegan to go carnivore that's never going to work you know I don't think either of those dietary States is all that healthy to be super carnivore or vegan I don't think either one is is necessarily that good for your brain um but I that's just my opinion and I think that people can find out what works for them by learning how to track the important features so get a food scale and a good good app like chronometer or My Fitness Pal and learn if you don't already know learn what 100 grams of chicken is and 100 grams of vegetables and like start figuring out for yourself what you're actually eating one one bit of advice here is don't try to change stuff when you first start doing this just track that's it just get religious about logging everything and track and weigh and estimate everything don't change it just for a couple of weeks watch and look back you know what are your macronutrients how what percentage of carbs how many grams of carbs are you get enough protein and as you start to figure out what works you can really focus on protein as the as the macro to emphasize everyone's always focused on low fat if it's the 70s and 80s or low carbs if it's the next two decades and humans do really well healthy wise actually if we restrict Believe It or Not hum do adequately well with a low protein diet that's high carb and we do pretty well with a high protein diet that's low carb we don't do well with fats carbs and proteins all at once there's very few Foods in the natural world that contain fat protein and carbs in high amounts the only things that exist in that category are things that are meant to grow other things basically milk and nuts seeds they contain fats proteins and carbs because they're meant to grow creatures yeah so most things that we in our diet shouldn't have all three of those things together basically and you know in our biohacker world most of us generally lean towards lower carb but there's this problem where people lean into high fat I don't think we need high fat most of us I don't think we need to be ketotic in ketosis deep ketosis anyways I think being in light ketosis is important but I also think that again biohackers are doing it wrong you should not be sticking your finger to figure out if you're in ketosis you're really measuring your digestion and your bloodstreams ability to handle what you've just eaten not so much the downstream metabolic processes to shift yourself into fat burning so I I use a a a device to measure ketones in the breath and it's called the biosense I have a coupon if folks want it but it's a it's a breath meter measuring acetone so acetone or breath it's it's late it's Downstream in the metabolic chain so instead of measuring what your stomach is dumping into your bloodstream you're measuring the downstream enzymatic blowby of acetone which is a function of burning ketones so you're measuring the metabolism using ketones not the digestion producing them in the short term I mean you can eat one bit of sugar and crash your ketones in your blood have no impact on your acetone and your breath interesting it's a two or three day window device quite often yeah I'm not a fan of the Lumin I think it's okay no I I I mean it's it's oversimplifying the presence of carbon dioxide or not it's it's just measuring it's basically telling you if you're fat burning or not I think it's not that exciting a metric I I'm a big fan of the device it's great industrial design feels great in the hand love the battery life think the app is great yeah but I don't think it's that informative I much prefer the biosense which is not quite as rugged lighter weight cost the same roughly but the information I get out of the biosense I use the biosense I I I low every morning and then before each meal and for a couple of years I was doing that and figuring out how to go in and out of ketosis doing different fasting periods looking at what a long fast would do to my ketones Etc and what I found is if I maintain relatively good behavior with my diet you know not eating tons of crap and carbs you know keeping protein is the number one macro um I can get away with eating carbs as long as I'm not doing it every single day I I I I kind of had an epiphany after staying and in like ketosis for a few weeks um and going in and out of it throughout the week you know carb refeeding and stuff you after a couple weeks of it or a couple months of this or even longer I was like you know what I'm gonna take a break from this and I ate a pint of ice cream at 10 p.m the next morning I was still in ketosis interesting because my body could could dispose of a 100 grams of carbohydrate couldn't do that three days in a row ketones would start to drop but I could do it one day every few days I could have a large carb load without kicking myself out of constant light ketosis so for me I figured out where the load was how many carbs can I dispose of every day where it where where is the actual number and how much protein do I need you know and with those two metrics and watching those I can maintain relatively lean body and feel pretty rested and not feel super stressed and have good energy and I can still have bread s ice cream yeah it is really interesting isn't it so I did uh when I I was just out for just under two weeks on holiday and I when I arrived at the hotel they had like you know some of the gym and they had an inbody scan and I think inbody scan always makes you lower body fat than you are but at least if you're measuring against the same thing right so I measured my inbody scan on the day of arrival and then I ate on holiday had ice cream with the kids cuz they kept getting ice cream in the evening I was like Hey I just F see some ice cream and so then I did an in body scan 12 days later to see what happened and it was really interesting because I couldn't work out with the same intensity because that in terms of the heaviness of lifting weights right I could do kettle bells and other things because it was a hotel gym and I put on 500 grams and I lost about half a percent of body fat and gained muscle having more cars and obviously like from all the weight training and stuff my body has got good at disposing of the carbs right and I did exercise every morning and the other thing that I did and you were and you were in caloric deficit probably you were probably walking and having different lifestyle and you probably I introduced like a little like um yeah an end of day just 20 minutes of activity to close it out before dinner so uh we went for a walk after dinner yeah and so yeah as you say but it was interesting but I did gain interestingly I did gain a little bit of weight so maybe not a deficit but it was actually the other way was muscle I mean you know could have been I guess a little bit of water uh it grabs it's not a big deal yeah I mean you might that's that's just daily variability almost daily variability so it's quite interesting this there's been studies there was a high school uh uh science teacher in the US a couple years ago who was overweight and he wanted to prove to his science class that it's all about calories in calories out and while other stuff matters the number one thing is that Thermo uh that that law of th thermodynamics and so for 90 days straight or six months straight he ate McDonald's every single day you know really CRA in the US McDonald's is horrible food just for those you have men here it's just the worst possible soy and Seed oils and fried food it's just horrible very low nutritional value and he just tracked the calories though and kept himself in a caloric deficit and just lost all the weight over six lost all the way soal calories do matter but vacation it's very common for folks to go on a cruise cruise ship and gain 10 pounds but go to a non- cruise ship like a like a City vacation and lose 5 pounds just because many of us don't walk we go from the car to the computer desk to the couch and we don't walk and if you suddenly go from like a sedentary lifestyle to doing 10 20,000 steps a day it has a huge impact last time I was in uh Sweden I uh I was in Malmo and I just like walked around and I was doing about 10 miles of walking every day I lost like 15 pounds in two weeks not because I wasn't eating but just because I was so much more active than I was in the US at that time so so you lose and this is also the French paradox we think it's the French walking is causing the health not so much the the wine they have or anything else it's the walking between meals and and the lack of sedentary lifestyle that seems to be so Pro productive and do you think that like avoiding carbohydrates during the day can enhance that brain function I find particularly I'm sensitive at lunchtime so avoiding carbs at lunch seems to help my manage my BL my blood sugar better uh and also I have better afternoon productivity I I I think so I think it can be very different one person to the next though so what I would encourage folks to do is keep track of what you're doing but also monitor how you're feeling because that really is the uh that is real how you're feeling is something to pay attention to you back oh maybe not okay sorry we can pick that stopped recording so I had to refresh it I was a bit worried um gotcha okay so um before we dive into my brain scan I have a few questions from my community that they wanted to know um and so if I could maybe rapify those and then we'll have a look at my brain which I think will be interesting for people music and beats for brain waves how effective are they completely non binal beats do absolutely nothing zero they are an utter waste of your money Boral beats are a form of meditation that's all that's all it's happening so find something if you want an auditory stimulus meditating find some good music that's meditative and listen to it do not spend money on binol beach the human brain does not have a frequency following response for audio entrainment doesn't exist it's never been shown there's been lots of research looking for it that has disproven or failed to find it basically I did a ton of double blind Placebo controlled inal beat studies in my grad work because I thought it oh this is cool stuff this must be something interesting and everyone's reporting experiences let me go find it zero there's nothing there now the brain does respond to light entrainment it looks like so this is not necessarily saying that light and sound don't do anything and certain frequencies of Light May actually do a lot 40 HZ light seems to do a fair amount but bin oral beats monoral beats that kind of stuff it's just a stimulus to pay attention to it's just a meditative anchor it's all it is so please don't spend money on uh hemisync Bin orall beat type phenomena because as far as every single study has ever been done has shown there's nothing there that's special beyond the music itself acting as an intentional anchor basically interesting um maybe as a little bit of crap right if you want to prime your brain before you get down if it's a bit of your routine as opposed to helping you concentrate jurry yeah but I would argue maybe you'll get more out of meditation straightforward meditation depending I mean if people always meditate with guided meditation it's kind of like never driving a bike without training wheels you might never learn how to Anchor your attention without the external Focus if you never do it so while I'm not adverse to folks listening to music as a meditative experience I do think that you might be shorting yourself if you aren't also learning to Anchor your attention without any stimulus interesting yeah I I I like both um what about smell how is that affecting brain wave activity can we dial things up with certain sense I don't know yeah I'm not sure I has some impact um I'm not sure I'm not super familiar with that research what I will say is we know the brain is part of the the nose is part of the brain like the eyes part of the brain so is the nose pretty much the thefactory tissue there's a a plate of tissue that sits just at the top of the nose called the cribiform plate like a cribbage board has holes through it and lots of little glami nasal uh nerves come down and they sit in that plate that plate is filled with mucus and odorants land in it and that are processed um smell is very unusual you we know it's part of the brain we know it's heavily involved we don't really understand it deeply it has more individual sensors than any other system it can it can distinguish from Individual compounds much more than Vision or taste can for instance but we don't know why and we're still figuring out how smell Works in some ways and and and you know how much of of its part of the brain uh it can it can create State shift certainly and Aroma theapy seems to do something there's literature on Aroma theapy showing uh pain changes immune changes recovery from injury changes with aromatherapy so it seems to be impactful I just don't know if the literature is demonstrating a why and B if there's a robust effect in the absence of expectation or Placebo essentially so I don't know but it's interesting and and again I always drop back because I work in the brain I tend to fall back into these perspectives of well what you're feeling is probably valid let's focus on what you're feeling and experiencing and I think with uh aroma therapy you know odorant creating change I think there may be something there well let's not worry about because we don't know yet about the AL factory system all that well let's focus on the state shifts you're experiencing because those seem to be valid and what about uh neut Tropics Are there specific ones that or are they very individual and require brain mapping to really do it properly they don't require brain mapping per se but they are individual and your needs will uh dictate which neut Tropics you might need there's no like one size fits all neut tropics and you know I I also want to encourage folks to really look at the definition of the word neut tropics are things that are probrain health or anti-brain injury or aging with no side effects many things called neut Tropics do have side effects caffeine racetams all kinds of things have side effects so be cautious what I want folks to think about for neut Tropics is if you're pursuing that like wild west landscape of finding random substances and dialing in your brain activity um don't do it it with risky compounds and things that aren't well researched unless you're suffering deeply you're suffering deeply you might need to risk side effects to get some relief but if you're already performing well I encourage you to really be careful and dial things in slowly and only pursue substances that don't seem to have any side effects because there's no reason to risk impairments and I work with clients who like use certain neut tropics and get in trouble and get damage from them I have several clients who are suffering from Lion's man uh problems right now I have several clients that are suffering from uh tianeptine problems which is a neut Tropic some people take which is a serotonergic new compound and it's really a tricylic anti-depressant being used off label as a neut Tropic but people get in trouble with it or or Katon people get in trouble with that and think it's a neut Tropic and these are not really neut Tropics these are things that have significant downside what downsides just because somebody that's I mean are they high dosing it because like um I always read about two grams of lion's man being beneficial like what's going on there might might be for some people other folks get depersonalized and lose all sexual function two and once yeah and once your system adapts it's really hard to readapt that cogenic system so people get depersonalized D realized side effects from liin man are yes the the side effects are very similar to SSRI overdosing or or SS sudden withdrawal it's the anhedonia the lack of feeling present the lack of Joy the lack of sexual function lack of orgasm uh really quickly introduced by things that screw with your serotonin brain doesn't like to have super high levels of Serotonin so they go up really strongly the brain downregulates its ability to hear to be to be sensed by to have cotone signaling happen so yeah it's uh not Universal Lots people love lion man but go look at Reddit in the Lion's main recovery forums there are thousands of people every day showing up going oh my God why did no one warn me this stuff is horrible my life is over because they don't feel present anymore they don't feel real it's a dep personalization der realization thing that happens wow I wasn't aw coming in because they took yeah Lion's man can do it ashwag Ganda can do it I I've had a couple clients get in trouble by taking ashwag gandha and lemon balm at the same time and then smoking weed okay and they end up basically having massive anxiety attacks and they're left depersonalized long term after that combination serotonergic are very dangerous to take as neut Tropics they tend to be very hard to control if they have problems so what would these be this would be you've mentioned a few ashwaganda lemon balm um ashwaganda lemon any of the aromatic herbs affect serotonin basil lemon balm Lemon Grass but also ashanda affects uh serotonin um and then the neut the the sort of more heavy hitter neut Tropics things like tianeptine which is a tricyclic anti-depressant that's been used in Russia a lot of neut Tropics stablon is the brand name that's all over Europe in the US as a off label neut Tropic people are getting trouble with low doses it acts like a stimulant High dos is like an opiate so people get like opiate uh withdrawal problems from it sometimes um and yet ashwaganda the ones you're you're talking about there ashwaganda holy basil for example often uh recommended for per menopause or women to help with sleep to help with hot yes and for Sleep exactly yeah but you know the the the dose makes the poison here and some people are very sensitive to serotonergic so just don't assume that somebody else's experience with these compounds will be yours and go carefully um and then the differences between a brain in per menopause uh that we see what happens for women this is about brain fog poor sleep you mentioned progesterone going down and how that impact sleep what about like brain differences that women can uh just be aware of and things they can do to improve them yeah the number one thing is probably we get a change in speed of processing so suddenly women start feeling like they're not as clear or as bright or as you know mentally sharp as they used to be and I have an oddly large number of middle-aged women coming in now with their very first ADHD diagnosis they've ever ever got like I'm 47 and I just got diagnosed with ADHD you look at their brain they're not sleeping great they're foggy and I think what's happening is the low-key background executive function things are hard to push past once your sleep erodes and so we tend to get a lot of um you know if your sleep's eroding it'll bring up your anxiety it'll bring up your ADHD it'll bring up your whatever your trauma response and so it really is important for folks to understand the individual phenomena and not just hand wve and say oh it's menopause that's why not feeling clear maybe it is that doesn't mean you shouldn't address it because that flattening those trajectories over time is will keep you healthy 20 30 40 years from now I mean you know 20 years ago we didn't think hormone replacement therapy was necessarily important it was used sometimes Ren wasn't used other times now unless you have hormone sensitive cancers in your family most doctors encourage HRT because it means that 20 30 years from now you're much less likely to have Osteo issues to have dementia to have accelerated aging it it's protective to have those hormones brought back up but it's a case-by case basis so those are very subtle things that I would definitely bring other people in to consult on should we have a look at my brain and show what uh what can what we can do with brain mapping because I personally found it super super interesting uh and some of it made uh I think as you were guiding me through it some of it made a lot of sense and we could piece together what I have been feeling um but yeah talk us through it and then talk about how I can improve these things sure let me share some data with you I'll show you some things um so we have two things to look at one is a performance test and one would be a brain map itself and the performance test which I'll bring up first we're looking at some bar graphs here just so listeners know this was done with me who's used to caffeine in the morning without caffeine right we might do a separate one with caffeine this is uncaffeinated Angela right and you're being compared to a database of people your age without caffine their systems which is why we had you abstain and now if you had caffeine we could compare within you how that made changes so we're looking at uh some bar graphs the set on the left the AR the the red and purple bars those are representing how crisp and on can be how much you can grab information on that test it was how well you can click on the one and the right hand side side is how well you can pump the brakes and not click you can see the left is label to tension which is the on button the the gas pedal and the right is labeled response control which is the inhibitory tone pulling back steering pping the brakes and for the scores in the page the average score is going to be 100 plus or minus 15 is typical so if you look at your scores you're actually coming in high average everywhere you know up in the 112 113 115 or above 118 117 for a lot of the scores so you're in that like above average broadly range everywhere except if you look on the right hand side you can see the visual system has a 93% response control which is your lowest Global and as you drill down scroll the page here as you drill down the orange bar is showing an 87% in what's called Prudence Prudence is your ability to Monitor and adjust as you go so the two would pop up on the screen you're supposed to not click on that two Prudence means that it's hard to remain careful and you get a little bit more automatic or reactive or impulsive now in the auditory system you're your Prudence is 115 you're way better than average at not being overreactive to auditory information but with the visual at 87 you are more visually distractable and pulsive than the average person for the visual so we're catching a visual impulsivity against really solid gorgeous executive function scores that are average and the bar set the Clusters here are Level which is good nice and efficient so visual attention is mostly we're catching but it's very subtle not a huge amount of stuff in your performance and how would this show up for me like if we were looking at it you mentioned like if something an object was coming I might overreact I mean on the road for example in a way unless I break too hard and the person behind me goes into me that could be a positive right because I'm going to react quite quickly presumably to an accident potentially happening right or or Sports throws a ball you're not going to miss it you're going to you know react to it and track it very well but you're going to have a hard time tracking visual things in a boring environment sit and watch a movie I walk out to a cinema looking out the window yeah yeah and at school I would and walk around and yeah that was a bit of a pain in the classroom so well now you know it's visual not auditory so audio books will not beting his reading for instance we go all right let's switch to your brain so here's your brain Maps these are colored Circle documents um I'm on an eyes open page you can see some orange some Reds brain waves are let me clarify so when you saying eyes open this is where I was required to sit and instead of closing my eyes in silence I was looking at fixed spots on the floor yeah yeah and you me so you did 10 minutes of eyes closed recording looking at your brain at rest and 10 minutes of eyes open recording looking at your brain with the visual system activated and in both of those cases we're comparing you to an AG match sample so you can see there's a color bar at the bottom of the screen that reads3 pos3 that's a bell curve a population normal distribution and when we get up in the edges of that of that scale that's when things get somewhat unusual so the uh the Reds we're seeing means that you're making more than three standard deviations above average for where those brain waves are high and we have some high brain waves in beta waves which are the voluntary ones and then alphas and thetas which are less voluntary more just automatic processing so I actually wanted to point out we talked about this once before but you can see the beta waves have this let me zoom in a little bit scroll over you see the beta waves have this pattern where they are strong on the front middle of the head that's the anterior singulate it holds things in your mind and then strong on the back middle of the head that's the posterior singulate helps you Orient to the outside world watch the road heads up I kind of stuff and both of your singlets are making lots of beta which probably means they're kind of in high gear and what that tends to produce for people the one in the front makes us perseverate makes us kind of obsess get stuck on the same thought again and again and the one in the back get stuck evaluating and we call that rumination or worry so it looks from the beta like you're kind of stuck in your head and stuck in your gut kind of obsessive and worried a little bit and I think you experienced some of that is that Val yeah yeah I'm I'm quite obsessive about things okay well there it is it's right there isn't it cool see really cool and I suppose my question would be obviously everything has its upsides and downsides when I'm obsessed with things I think that I feel that drives me to achievement uh with things I don't know if that's true um but then I think in an anxiety inducing situation it's like I want to be able to put it down faster and I wonder right you know obviously the brain training could help with this but could meditation also help with this probably not because I mean yes it would help over time but it's not going to change the state you're in once you're getting overwhelmed meditation is not a great intervention for stress it helps you learn to control it over time but doesn't change it if you're experiencing it in real time um there's lots of things you could do with this beta uh certain supplements will have an impact here um the front what type of supplements the the one of the ones that's most supported in literature is one called NAC nisine it tends to dramatically dissolve the over focus of the anterior singulate and in there's some good studies showing in kids with medication resistant OCD that NAC is effective something like 40 or 50% of the time in pulling the teeth of intrusive thoughts so if you're a little obsessive and it's in the way I might encourage you to look at NAC but many of these tissues are part of the default mode Network which runs pretty hot with the Amin so things like MTHFR Val comp all these genes that that impact neurotransmitters are likely a little quirky my M another straty yeah I can see it I can see this beta so I was able to guess that cold um what you might want to do is a nice deep methylation analysis and figure out which B vitamins you know which species like you need hydroxy B12 or hydroxy B12 or methyl B12 you know cobala B12 what do you need for the version you can find that out from methylation and then dial in the right B vitamins and it should bring down some of this excessive beta which will feel calm to you inter the other big thing on this page you can see the betas the alphas and the thetas they all have a lot of activation sort of toward the right hand side behind the right ear there and that's a big chunk of tissue whose job it is to bring the world into the Mind into the self and when you're running lots of beta that tissue is working hard when you're running lots of theta that tissue is hard to control so you can kind of think of this tissue next to the right ear as being like a strong muscle that wants to cramp it's powerful but it's hard to relax and this area brings in the sensory world and the social world and so from this pattern I would guess you have a tendency to not be able to ignore small background things that are sensory your kid chewing the dog barking from three houses away everything kind of gets in that's what would disrupt my sleep any kind of noise if my kids are up it'll it'll disturb my sleep okay and then because the world comes in back there not just the sensory world but the social world can get loud so you might be somebody for whom people's emotions their anger their suffering is really obvious and you can pick up every little subtle Nuance in the world you're drinking it all so I call this pattern the anterior singulate the posterior singulate and the right Tempo parietal Junction I call this The Princess and the P gifted poet kind of you're very sensitive kind of gifted but a little anxious so um these are features you could change neuro feedback can change it by one color shade one zcore every other month 25 sessions or so of anything yeah yeah you'll still be able to turn it on and hyperfocus when you wish put it down if you don't that's the difference between neur backa medication is you're not changed you're given range okay interesting having the gift without the downside yeah and a lot of these are gifts and so we want to maintain them and you were saying sorry just for listen I accidentally spoke over you there so it' be five sessions or sorry every other month one standard deviation which is Big yeah we would probably want to try to accomplish two full standard deviations or more and would expect to have that done in 3 to four months Prett 50 60 sessions of neuro feedback should create two or three standard deviations of change in these tissues which is great to see data change but honestly more like four or five sessions in like the second week you should be going wait a minute oh that feels like something interesting and then you get to feel what it's like to bring the beta down and determine yourself if you like it so you have this freedom to like stretch and test and try stuff and gradually take more control over your brain interesting so you know you can learn how these gifts work and learn where the line is between them being stuck and being you know something that serves you I want to show you one more thing on this page and then maybe one more page on this page you can see your Theta brain waves are high in the back of the head now the Eyes Are Open here the back of the brain is visual tissue and there's just no reason to leave the visual tissue stuck in slow brain waves with the eyes open Theta allows information to pull your attention it's impulsivity it's what you're seeing is visual impulsivity right here in the back of the head in Theta that matches the visual impulsivity we saw in the performance test so now we know why your visual system is distractable it's because of the back of the head running too much Theta therefore that becomes something you can change if you wish and how would this be showing up in my life again this is that visual distractability thing you hate long road trips uh you you miss things on boring movies my husband always like why are you concentrating or if I'm on a long car journey and I'm driving there would be a real propensity to fall asleep I have to be very careful or or or to miss the exit or to miss the turn or to get lulled yeah yeah it's that kind of stuff yeah this is this interesting as well when I spoke to um Dr David seagull he was actually saying to me because if I look up like can get a flicker that rapid eye movement very quickly he said I would be highly um hypnotizable is that consistent with this as well I don't know how I feel about hyp hypnotizability I'm not sure if I I would be able to spot it um I would think your mind grabs information very very easily perhaps too easily here um but this looks like somebody who's both brilliant and anxious you know little ADHD the mind's running super fast but it's a little bit like a steel trap it's a bit stuck on things to hyperfocus that kind of stuff let's go back and look at one more page which is the speeds of your brain waves because we talked about your sleep a little bit I want to show people what that looks like um you can see different features showing up in the uh okay so here we go here's the I overshot here's the speeds of the brain waves we're looking at um Delta and Alpha and Delta is the uh rest and repair brain waves soor I'm trying to get the right here we go so left hemisphere Delta as you can see is running positive three 2 to3 standard deviations above average so you're way out on the corner of the bell curve in terms of how fast your Delta is and that's not generally a good thing Delta likes to be average or zero on the bell curve and here your Delta is running so fast you can think of this like your metabolic background in reserve kind of pushing into the foreground your brain's resting you when you're awake because because you're not deeply rested enough at night and so this tells me you're shorted on deep sleep significantly the quality of your deep sleep is not ideal this might be from a sleep issue itself or it might be you know covid or chemo or mold or lime it's more of a metabolic tiredness in the background that's persistent and less of a true sleep signature but it can be caused by sleep for some people other big thing before you go to the alpha would this be because I'm not getting enough sleep probably yeah yeah this does not look like the quality this looks like the amount first yeah one extra sleep cycle will feel magical so Dr Hill's big rules of fixing your sleep the time to sleep in is the start of the night yeah go to bed early um try that for a few nights and see how you feel now the alpha is being caused by the Delta probably you can think of the Delta like the handbrake on in the car but the alpha is the sports car only doing 40 mil an hour you know not feeling all that power and you can see your Alpha's coming in uh just below zero all the way down to negative one so the Alpha Speed the idling speed of different parts of the left hemisphere spreading out not staying synchronized and for a lot of people what that produces is some difficulty with retrieval so short-term memory hunting for names and words also absorbing stuff like trying to learn or read after dinner things kind kind of slide off you and not get in it's the speed of processing so I would expect a lowkey short-term memory blip um and some difficulty feeling foggy and not as fluent verbally as you might want to feel and not as smart as you know you are you know you can't quite access all that raw power because the brain feels like it's dragging and not quite as uh reliable in terms of thinking quickly and crisply and clearly so that's the Alpha Speed and the Delta as a sign of like a background sort of metabolic drag essentially when you talk about someone being smart around stuff can you see that on here uh can you tell like I can't see on yours you can I can't really see it on yours though um did I stop sharing I can't tell yeah you stop sharing okay good um I will be able to guess how smart you are once you're rested I can't tell now because you're so unrested that the speed is all over the place the Alpha Speed if you're regiona well rested will stay ionized you a similar number throughout the left hemisphere and we're looking at a bell curve and the place you are in the bell curve for Alpha Speed correlates very very highly with the place you are in a bell Cur for for an IQ test what you do is you take the number the alpha position on the bell curve and you double it and that's the shape of the of the IQ test basically so I can't tell where you are because you're dragging down below zero you're tired you're aren't feeling rested so the menopause is getting in the way of seeing that speed you think this is a hormonal thing as much as anything else I don't know why it's there but there's something in the way and and menopause is the is the most parsimonious explanation there could be maybe got covid maybe had old head injury maybe your kids are stressing you out you're aren't sleeping who knows we saw the head injury something yeah yeah we saw some wear and Terr but I think you know what I think it might be and I think maybe a lot of people will find this um is that when you're a mom like your kids go through Cycles right and I'm very much an early person and now mine are growing older and they they've got more activities and they're going to bed late so it's now shortening my sleep because I I'm happy to be asleep you have to adjust that yeah you'll have to adjust that because as you can see it's probably creating a signature of fatigue now it's not getting the way of your attention that visual attention is not from your fatigue that's like a built-in phenomena either you're born a little bit with a visual distractability or you you know bang the back of your head and can't control the visual tension quite as well because of old cussion it doesn't matter to me though why the why doesn't impact how you go after it and make change it's just regulatory tissue if you see stuff that's real change it you know whether or not it's there because of some old cause it doesn't really matter unless you're reintroducing new causes if you're sleeping underneath an AC unit that's dripping mold onto you at night well that's GNA be hard to work around but if you moved out of a moldy house I don't care if the fog we're seeing is from mold or concussion it's you know it's it's all just fog and you can work on it interesting and so just so people kind of understand then the next step with a brain map like this would be then to basically do some neuro feedback uh based on when you and I were talking offline based on people's goals right so for example we would then look at what are my goals uh in terms of what I want to achieve and I know for example for me I want to feel more rested I'd like to be able to put things down I'd like to I would like to have more energy in the evening I am hope after about 8:30 900 p.m. um and I think I would like to be able to control that attention better because I think it gets a little bit in the way of relationships I think that my family certainly feel like we've got to like move fast to get Mom's to keep Mom's attention do you know what I mean because I'm I'm somebody I guess sounds awful doesn't it but I my brain moves very quickly and I need to be I need to feel engaged it's not really my kids much as anyone right I I need to feel engaged well we saw that that's all that Theta High Theta doesn't like boredom it likes intensity and if any of your kids have high Theta they'll train you to yell at them because they'd rather be yelled at take the trash out than be bored and take the trash out they don't know that but the intensity is rewarding because it suppresses the wandering distractable mind oh interesting so yeah interesting I can see some of that um cool well what we should to do is a is a part two right of of um improvements that you can see in brain mapping um I know that you also you have so you're based in LA but you also now have a clinic in London do you have clinics elsewhere or where are the we do you do yeah we have six of them um there's four in the US in La New York City St Louis in the Midwest and also Orange County California um and then in the UK it's London Center uh and then in stock in Sweden we're in Stockholm oh wow and uh um in the UK in Sweden and the us we do a lot of virtual neuro feedback so we send equipment to you and we work with you 100% virtually so we have coaches online seven days a week that'll help you learn to run software stick wires to your head troubleshoot when things are going wrong and gradually keep you on the path of of incrementing through different changes so you don't have to worry about did I set up the software right or how would I do next instead there's coaches there to help you learn to uh iterate through some changes so we have people training their brain from home about 80% of our clients work from home and they train their brains for half an hour uh three four times a week and we touch base every day how's your sleep how's your day you know giving you new things to try it's it's very much a a coaching type practice I don't know if you have this in the UK you must but we have a company called Soul cycle in the US we send excise B home yeah they they send equipment home and coaches and screens cheer you on getting your workouts in it's kind of of how we work where we take the complexity of clinical neuro feedback instead deploy it to you and teach you the basics but then stay on a sort of management path with you so you can move through uh structured programs and will the changes then hold after that training eventually eventually yeah as you hit 30 40 50 sessions things like attention anxiety sleep they stay changed not everything does seizures often push back you have to do a second round of training for seizures for instance and some take a lot longer someone say got non-verbal autism and his stemming and having no eye contact you're going to see change when you train their brain but you're probably gonna want to do a year or two of training off and on to really get them to you know get as much change as they can get when it's more classic trauma anxiety craving for alcohol people do three to four months and they're permanently changed and they're resilient against future stressors in that way interesting so it's kind of a fun transformation to go through yeah it would be fun we'll see what we can do different brain by by Christmas Andre sure I could be real ab and see I'll go into 2025 able to control these things um so how can people find out more I think you have uh a discount code that we can put in the show notes um orless y we'll put it in there um and share with everyone I know that I have program members who are also just really interested in this I think anyone who is interested in performance uh will be interested in this and for me you know what's so enlightening is some of the things that you've picked up on you know I've done years of therapy as someone with mental health issues and you can see that you know my brain can be anxious can get depressed um and that's just really really interesting because you can go back and do like yungan therapy and all these different things right but actually you could just do some and not to to take away from any of those they've been they've served me very well over the years but neuro feedback sounds like it has a very strong place in terms of how it can influence the brain me I I think so I I also think just seeing your brain Maps you you've alluded to it just seeing your brain Maps can create this awareness this agency oh yeah my alpha waves are a little low I do have trouble with concentrating on a low stimulus whatever so just helping you map this out and see how it actually shows up in data doesn't change your suffering instantly but it is suddenly a lot harder to be overwhelmed by it or or ashamed by it when you know how it works and it creates real actionable change so yeah you can do Nur feedback you can take neut Tropics you can do lots of things you can also just drop down to the basics in executive function anxiety and sleep regulation and there's you know basic things you can do there that we all know um and knowing where to Target and why you should do these things can become very compelling once you look at a brain yeah 100% so so come find us we're at Peak brain LA on the socials and Peak brain Institute is our website um although we have a Peak brain. co.uk for the the folks over across the pond as well um and I'm also on YouTube at Dr Hill drill and you guys can watch me do neur feedback I do live streams every week I I do biohacking talks for different topics every week so come check me out ask your brain questions and let us know how we can support you amazing thank you Andrew we will link to that and your YouTube channel and everything else in the show notes um yeah it's been awesome it's been very enlightening ah it's great great to catch up with you again nice to see you too hopefully virtually after years of not not spending time hopefully in person again soon