Overcoming Anxiety and Depression with Neurofeedback Training | Dr. Andrew Hill | E1

Andrew welcome to the show oh thanks so much for having me nice to see you again nice to see you again uh we've met and we've chatted a couple of times and I've been to your lecture and training about uh about neurofeedback and I remember it was like 2018 in Stockholm I remember I was listening about this fascinating field which was completely new for me at the time and I was just scribbling no tonight just about I I did find my nose I had like six pages of oh I wish I had my pad here so I could actually show you that I still have the notes from the from the session that you kept about neurofeedback um it was very fascinating and I'm so excited to be chatting to you today about it so honored to hear that that you you know we're excited to to watch that and take notes that's great yeah well it's a very very interesting New Field and I it it interests I'm sure it interests so many listeners as well and also even even me like right now I have so many questions still about it so can you please share a little bit about your past your history how did you become interested in you know feedback in the first place sure so um I have been involved with the brain I guess or interested in the brain for many years and I started off after college I worked for many years in different inpatient environments with residential adults who had developmental difficulties and inpatient crisis Psych in addiction and all kinds of like so everyone at their most acute if you will in in their human status you know people who are suffering from major difficulties or major you know uh complications if you will of brain or mind things and um I ended up getting a little bit uh injured doing inpatient psych work I was working in a very acute psychiatric hospital and I was in charge of leading restraint teams and training people how to do Hands-On restraints and things and it was a very understaffed facility in Massachusetts and I ended up getting someone injured and couldn't do that work anymore and so I left psych for a while after maybe 15 years working in the Human Services I left went to high tech for a while and than the sort of tech bubble this is around 2000 the tech bubble contracted a little bit in the US the business bought all the fuel business Marketplace and uh I ended up going back to Human Services I missed it and I had some experience with autism so I went and found the local Autism Center that was doing something I'd heard about this stuff called neurofeedback and I hadn't really experienced it it was sort of a fringy it had been discovered many years ago but wasn't used very widely and no one really deeply understood it it appeared and I was kind of interested in it and I went and got a job working in a center that did autism and some ADHD and within a couple of months was really routinely having my mind blown by what I was seeing our clients experience you know symptoms change and resources improve you know our kids with profound autism developing eye contact and routinely things like seizures and sensory issues going away ADHD going away I mean just amazing things against the backdrop that I had experienced before which is chronic very little change a lot of suffering very little you know very poor tools we have to help people move through transformation and I was seeing huge amount of transformation in uh the neurofeedback space so to speak and yet at that time I would say now it's it's still true we don't deeply understand it in some ways it's more of a phenomena we manage but back then certainly there was three or four big schools of thought about how you do neurofeedback and how it probably works and how you'd approach it and these schools of thought were all in conflict with each other they have different ideas that we're not reconcilable and yet they were all getting really good results better than conventional you know so Psychotherapy or meds or whatever else so there was something there and after seeing this uh uh process used with this population for a few years I went and got a PhD studying neurofeedback and studying attention in the brain because I was sort of not satisfied with uh just the phenomena we were steering I wanted to understand it better so I went to UCLA for a few years and got a PhD and studied how the brain reacts to the process of neurofeedback in real time and looked at the brain's moment of binding to the information as it comes back in and did one of the first double-blind placebo-controlled studies on neurofeedback because the EEG is kind of hard to wind if you move you see the screen moves you pull a wire off or if you cough you see the signals move so we created a way with the vendor of the main software in the field called eager and to do a blinding of the EEG and then we ran people through several days in a row of neurofeedback but a full sort of 64 Channel cap on top of their head decomposing what was happening as the brain noticed the feedback you know the um just to Define for folks that are unaware neurofeedback is sort of watching a computer screen and uh whenever your brain happens to do the right thing on its own that I was already going to do that you want to sort of reinforce you applaud what the brain just did by making a game run better so you're watching a pack many dots or a car a race or something and you're training your executive function which is often on the right hand side of the head so whenever your Theta dips down the car surges or the Pac-Man needs more dots or the beeps happen or something so it's this involuntary operant conditioning reinforcement thing um it's like a like playing Mario Kart with the power of your brain without hands uh brain not mind so there's no voluntary you can't control your brain waves generally some folks have some control over them and some people can control their blood flow we do some bio feedback or nurse back in the blood flow as well and you can control that a little bit but for the most part you can't really feel your brain there's no sensing nerve endings you can't tell if certain brain waves are firing so it's involuntary exercise you sit down in the chair for nerve feedback for half an hour get certain modes your brain's already moving into applauded but most of the things it's doing are ignored the brain's like hey that's interesting stuff's happening whenever I drop Theta hmm and after a couple sessions the brain reaches for a lower amount of theta later on that day or the next day and the person's like oh hey I feel focused you know and if you train a kid or something three or four times and their brain drops Theta the next morning or something and the parent says hey could you please take the trash out the kid gets up and does it parents like what the heck my ADHD kid just did a thing and I get Franta called what's going on my kid's different yeah you were able to see actual changes and you will you were able to see like these patient stories and it sounds like your your path to this field where very Guided by like purpose and meaning you actually wanted to improve how we tweet for example ADHD or or all the same this kind of like um like disabilities that might be very hard to deal with yeah I I I did I mean there was certainly uh some amount of empathy and compassion driven this perhaps um there was also a lot of frustration because I worked at one of the most acute inpatient psychiatric facilities uh for several years I worked in residential really acute developmental disabilities with adults for many years and I didn't see much change and the psychiatric facility I saw the same people come back through get stabilized for a few days or a week leave again come back again with the same kinds of suffering this and a lot of it I didn't know this then like my my perspective on how suffering happens was not clear in the brain 30 something years ago when this was when I was working inpatient but now a lot of the reasons that I approached Human Performance and wellness and biohacking everything the way that I do is because I do sort of see some final common points of bottlenecks or failures or performance optimization that many humans engage in so a lot of the things that we have very complicated psychological diagnoses and label and medications to go after I started seeing as a the medications didn't work that well locking people in psych wards didn't work that well having them in isolated residential facilities didn't work that well and then other techniques you know I saw non-bio feedback things done with certain populations like interactive metronome done with autism and takatina which is like an adult version of that done with brain injury clients I'm starting to see actual transformation outside of that traditional medication therapy ptot kind of space and um it was pretty impactful so I went basically had to go back and get a PhD mostly to figure out how to you know move the needle a little bit and so we did a complicated experiment just looking at the process itself uh deeply so yeah well this is very interesting and I I actually love the idea like if there is a brain disorder if there was a brain disease whatever it is that's causing like whatever kind of symptom is is causing even if it if it's ADHD or depression or something like that even like traumatic brain injury like therapy seems if it's biological why would it be cured by talking like we don't we don't treat common flu or we don't we don't treat cancer we're talking it's it's biological is in your in in your cells in your tissues you need something to guide those those two to the right path as well yeah and something different resources and some things are the accommodations habits so I would say depression might be more of an experience but most forms of anxiety most forms of attention difficulty those are actual circuits those are actual like pinched up muscles and see them on a brain map go after them and even stop thinking about PTSD or OCD or sensory issues or social anxiety or anything else as a disease once anxiety stop and think about it as a resource that's stuck in a certain mode generally most forms of anxiety are us the brain latching on to the possibility of danger because the cost of missing danger is so high you don't miss it more than once generally so there's a bias towards attaching that way so we we get a sensory uh sensitization or we get a selecting our Focus sensitization or a evaluating the environment sensitization those produce specific disorders when they are acute but when they're not you know the front midline is selecting our focus when it's really cramped up it's OCD when you're using it really effectively you're a CEO when you're a little it's a little annoyed you it's playing songs in your head all day long but it's not a disease it's a circuit you know so you can learn to look at these things and that's what I moving from that acute psychiatric environment over the past 20 30 years and doing brain companies and things I've moved into the realm of let's not worry about the label for you so much let's look at your brain let's find some things to work on let's hear some phenomena let's you know create some change for you but there is a lot of agreement a lot of convergence around the different ways and people often suffer yeah so so can you tell a little bit about like um do you need to quantify the Brain before you do neurofeedback do you need to like see what's going on and then you start training or can you like if you have a diagnosis can you just like start training it's a good question um you can there are things you can do without you know there are benefits you can get by doing brain training without doing an analysis of the brain but the more unusual your brain is and the bigger your needs are the less likely that some one-size-fits-all system is going to work for you um so I recommend most people who actually want to make change do an assessment of their brain to then do tailored uh interventions um if you do the wrong intervention for your brain with things like bath feedback or neurofeedback they're generally fairly gentle even when they're the wrong thing and you don't like how it feels and you you kind of learn oh that's the wrong workout I'm sore today oh was the seat on your workout machine set too high oh yeah maybe it was and you can make adjustments metaphorically here um so you can iterate with neurofeedback and learn and a lot of practitioners I'd say a third of the field doesn't do brain mapping or this process of analysis of the brain but we really rely on brain mapping and attention testing to develop a set of uh landmarks and big resources to help create sort of models with somebody about how their brain works and what they might want to work on and what's most important and how things are feeling and I find the brain mapping useful even without the brain training if I I can sit down with somebody and show them that their alpha waves are running slow and say oh you're probably having some speeder processing issues is it hard to load words into your mind are you hunting for names and they're like oh my gosh yes I thought it was Alzheimer's and they're like 45 no it's not Alzheimer's your brain is slowing down let's figure out why oh your Delta wave is just super fast you're not getting good deep sleep are you yeah I'm not ah maybe we should you know maybe we should get a sleep study or do some mouth taping cool your room because if you can get more deep sleep you're suddenly be walking around less sleepy during the day and the Alpha Speed comes back up and word finding will improve so you sometimes can can find the thing the intervention the biohacking you know or functional sort of intervention you might want to do without the neurofeedback the tech being the next solution but I do kind of think like the brain mapping is your high end like dexa scan and fitness scan and bone density scan and then most forms of neurofeedback are closer to like rabbit a kettlebell and working out a couple of specific you know areas or doing some compound movements and getting the system to move you can't be specific picking up a kettlebell works out a whole lot of stuff at once or a barbell does doing a whole compound exercise and most neurofeedback does too it's it's a little hard to be terribly specific so you tend to work on big resources like sleep stress attention and that's why I limit myself to some extent to those big modules that we can kind of see I mean Neuroscience is practical we think about the salience network executive function Network and the default Network those are Big Rich Hub quartal areas and you can see those on a brain map so you can go oh I have ADHD and look at your brain map and go oh executive function hubs where you can say I have PTSD and look at your brain map and see default mode Network hubs and you can then have more agency to go after it without the language of the diagnosis more about like oh yeah this thing's sore let's work on that so there's myself yeah I I love that um actually you were talking about the the brain waves and I think there are many misconceptions about brain brain waves as well in general like what they are and people should say like oh increase your alpha waves and does it like does it happen throughout the whole brain or like tell us a little bit about how brain waves work and what is the significance of having certain brain waves in certain brain areas for example yeah that's a pretty sophisticated uh topic I probably won't do good Justice uh to today but a couple things to think about one is we make all brain waves pretty much all the time all the slow brain waves call things like Delta Theta Alpha are the stuff of life you live in Delta it's the heartbeat of the brain it keeps the metabolism moving it keeps the cells doing their cellular stuff it keeps your heart and lungs and the brainstem moving when you're deeply asleep Delta's surging to cause slow wave sleep and wash the brain with an agitation cycle like your clothes in a washing machine so you need this sort of deep delta waves to live it and if you have a brain injury a concussion apnea mold Lyme anything that makes you foggy even covet you produce extra Delta as your brain's feeling foggy so if you don't sleep well and you feel tired you're actually making more and faster amounts of Delta when you're awake as your brain tries to make up for the lack of extra Delta it tried to make the night before so that's Delta the deepest if you will frequency slowest one it's a little surging wave a little rhythm in the tissue like a pattern of activity that's like a motor or a mode that the tissue can turn on and Delta's about twice per second a little firing wave and these waves are created by something called micro columns or mini columns one refers to the voltage one refers to the size and they're about 30 000 little neurons in a column and with glial cells which are the support and computational insulation a bunch of other stuff and glial cells they're metabolically active but let's ignore that for a second little column of you know 50 60 100 000 glial cells about 30 000 neurons and we have millions of these micro columns and these are the CPUs we think in the cortex so wherever you go in the top of the brain you find little clusters and micro columns and they're all talking to each other but the micro column itself fires as a computational unit tends to do the same thing as a whole you know of cells and you can have Micro column dancing twice per second and that's Delta wave or four times per second and that's a Theta wave and Theta is sort of this Theta runs four to seven cycles per second or Hertz um Theta is sort of lubrication for the brain it lets things occur that a module wants to do so if you have a bit of tissue who has a certain job and a Theta wave passes over it kind of like does starts doing its job um there's many things called Theta I'm grossly oversimplifying for instance there's a Theta around six and a half Hertz that is the moment of memory awareness of pulling an idea out of your mind and receptive you know generative memory basically you can't make six and a half hurt you can't pull things out of your memory it's kind of a weird phenomena so there's a few you know subdivisions um next one UPS Alpha which is the great neutral of the resting frequency like the car in the driveway just idling and ready to go and you shift through Delta for lots of stuff you use Delta to put tissue into idle before you activate it um it's really lovely frequency but you also use it as like the basic processing speed of the brain so when Alpha slows down with aging you feel slower and you have problems grabbing stuff out of your mind when your kid and your Alpha slows down you can't absorb stuff so if a kid who's got a sleep issue and their mouth is slow or a developmental issue you say something to them and it just slides off them nothing gets in because they aren't binding to information rapidly enough and then you have beta waves which are somewhere around 12 13 Hertz up through about 40 Hertz is the beta wave frequencies there's many things in there and beta is where life is and sorry uh where thoughts are and perceptions are experiences are and the mind is basically so slow stuff is life fast stuff is the mind the beta waves are modular so you'll find little bits of tissue pumping out little bits of beta as it changes gears fast beta slow beta lots of beta a little bit of a beta so that's the activation mode to the gas pedals and you can put a cap on someone's head I think you've you've done this with me I think right um and I can measure your brain at rest and your brain your spectral power the amounts of brain waves in different regions is relatively similar for you day after day year after year like a fingerprint it's kind of characteristic to you so what we do is look at where in your cortex where the top of the brain you might make large or low or fast or slow amounts of brain waves or have different connectivity patterns and then based on the tissue based on where in the brain it is we say aha you know this part of the brain like let's say the front midline it's doing this unusual thing two examples might be makes lots of beta or might make lots of theta so a lot of gas a lot of you know Verve or or zoom in your front midline and people get obsessed they have songs playing their head as I was saying earlier they get obsessive you get lots of theta there and stuff distracts you and captures your attention that's more of this of the songs playing in your head less of the OCD more of the like I'm thinking about you know the song's playing again so you can kind of predict things about different modules and these modes are then tunable because they they're sort of built to a pattern based on who you are what you learn and how you bring up built but they're kind of stable but also learn over time especially the resources that are what I call regulatory The Big Three sleep stress and attention are foundational things below the cortex that use the cortex interchange back and forth and they really scaffold many of the resources we think of as the Mind sleep and attention have overlapping brain waves that are shared to produce the the architecture of sleep and the control over the attention if you've ever seen a cat lung on a windowsill watching birds that liquid still body and laser-like focus that's a brainwave state that most animals make called sensory motor Rhythm there's a strip of tissue that runs ear to ear and when we're still in the body calm in the mind it's we're making lots of this low beta frequency 12 to 15 Hertz humans and neurofeedback was discovered in the late 60s because by mistake um Dr Barry Sturman UCLA discovered that some cats he had trained up some smrn became seizure resistant on another experiment there was these super cats who were kind of resistant to being knocked over by a rocket fuel exposure is how the experiment went but turns out that that was a very serendipitous Discovery he trained his lab manager who was an epileptic with an auditory feedback system and produced seizures for her with this SMR frequency that was the core of the field so mid beta frequency and now 50 plus years later we are still evolving our techniques our practices our understanding of the brain but it's reached the point where the average person who wants to get into their brain can actually look at it the same way you might look at your lipid panel and go oh I should probably make some changes and improve my performance or your bone mass density or cerebral bone density your muscle mass or something as an aging marker you know you may want to check your bone density when you're a 40 year old or 20 year old woman and then again when you're a 60 year old woman if you have big big drop increased uh you know risk for long-term Health you should do bone density you have to have that kind of metabolism of course some women do so does that kind of stuff but you can do it with regards to the brain now with your stress your sleep and your attention your big resources so that's my mission is to help people learn to not just change their brains with neurofeedback or other forms of biohacking but to conceptualize how this stuff works in a way that is not about diagnostic labels and it's not about being out of control you know these things feel out of control ADHD anxiety trauma seizures migraines these things feel really like we're out of control when they happen but yeah if you look at the maps and understand them and start taking a little bit of control yourself that's so empowering that I find that process changes your relationship with your brain quite a lot sometimes yeah I I can actually totally uh agree with that and I have done like we did this brain mapping would you call it quantitative EEG is that like the synonym for it yeah okay so we did this we did this brain mapping and you did interpret my results to me and I it was a few years ago so I don't really remember interior what was it but I do remember you were first of all I was like when you say like that there is nothing clinically alarming there so like don't worry about you were able to give like a quite detailed view on how my personality might be like how what kind of a thinker I might be like and just like you were telling me that hey it I think it was in the occipital lobe there was some level of beta wave or something like that and you were like you might be prone to a little bit more stress if you start overthinking a little bit more anxiety so maybe like focus on stress uh management relaxation and just like taking it easy when you think like you have 2 much thoughts because I am like I'm very curious person if I delve into a topic I want to know everything about it and yeah I might overthink and I might over stress myself or or work or whatever so just like that inside just like a it's like oh okay so it's actually seen in my nature of my brain it's just like that and it just there's nothing false or there is nothing wrong with it I just like this is like I can like focus on Stress Management and this will this will like uh be better then and I think it worked I have prioritized for the past few years I really focused on Stress Management and just taking it easy and yeah doing things with not in a hurry especially if this was possible after my studies ended and then I was able to lose the deadlines and stuff like that but yeah I think like I have this experience that you described about and if you're able to point out something in your brain like hey your brain that part has more of that sort of a brain wave maybe do this and that I mean that already brings like this sort of a really like oh yeah so so while I do have techniques to change the brain and I do help people make lots of transformation you know over months usually I sort of joke that I'm not selling neurofeedback I'm mostly selling you some agency some perspective um I mean like we should map your brain again we we never charge clients for repeat maps at any of our Peak brain offices so you should get a map done uh next time you're in the states one of our offices or I can send you to Copenhagen if you actually have some on there I can map you anyways yeah so you'll probably have a change even though it is relatively stable for you you'll have a change since it's been years since you've mapped your brain you've had a bunch of big life experience changes the world's quite different I would imagine your stress is different your sleep is different your self-care habits and strategies and things you've learned that to do are a little bit different that will impact your brain and how I if I should show you the old map and the new map and the changes and say Here's a plausible way to interpret this particular data point change the things that resonate with you oh yeah that does feel real to me will now tell you about your brain in a very concrete way so you can then build on that trust the improved stability or improve sleep or improved speed of processing you built up whatever it is so we like to provide the mapping at all of our offices without charge again and clients come do the biohackers love our offices because they can come in and test paracetam and cannabis and Adderall whatever else and just do map upon map on map and look at real-time data and examine uh yeah we have a lot of mutual friends who've done this Claudia did a methylene blue one recently Claudia blog and you know uh the folks have done some you know maps of their brain on active uh nootropics so it's kind of a fun way to do again even if you're not trying to solve problems you're just trying to develop a better sense of you know how your brain works and who you are it can be uh useful so I'm a big proponent of using brain mapping not as a diagnostic because it's not really valid you're doing population level analysis you know I'm looking at you on a bell curve and a bunch of things I can tell what's unusual but brain waves are mysterious and people are weird the job is not to hey why aren't you average Let's Make You Average we don't want that we want to say hey here's some unusual stuff in your brain here's some plausible interpretations are any of these valid do you you know are these important to you do you care and as you probably uh discovered it sounds like when I made hypotheses about what is plausible we found largely valid things that's the the relationship people tend to have with the brain mapping is more like sitting down and going over hmm what's interesting here and less like what's wrong here because if you find something real you can generally go after and make a change so it's never a I don't want to find out it's always like oh what what's going to be my low hanging fruit to improve my performance that's the kind of relationship we try to get you to have yeah well it's like it's like blood work you just go and do do the test and check that everything's okay or if something declined then you can kind of fix it or work on it but at least cool so okay so you mentioned a couple of clinical applications uh namely ADHD autism but you also talked about just like uh stress and sleep and do you tend to work more with people or clinical populations or healthy populations it's pretty split I would say about a third of my clients are extremely high performers now extremely high performers often have difficulties but they don't come to me to fix a problem they come to me to squeeze out more performance essentially so I have a lot of extremely you know visible high-level athletes actors business owners you know high-powered CEO types and a lot of those folks do have things to work out they often have touch of anxiety they often have some substance abuse history they often have some you know other stuff going on but they're not coming to me for problems or coming because they squeezing out a little more performance you know after being remaining calm in front of the press on the red carpet or a surgeon remaining calm you know deep into a stressful surgery the value of a little bit better performance is so high for these folks or a boxer who just lost a fight who's got some concussions now and has to do a rematch in the spring you know there's this huge value for some of these individuals with let's squeeze out a little more performance let's remediate small damage um and then I have about a third of my clients are probably the classic neurofeedback practice space which is adults and kids with anxiety ADHD social difficulties seizures migraines concussions just basic neurological kind of difficulties and then because we have a pretty wide sort of Peak Performance Brand the last third is the rest of us you know all of those of us with a mix of challenges and benefits who want to optimize who have a wellness perspective um most people in the neurofeedback field are therapists and Peak brain uh is unusual in that we are not and don't try to be your therapist we are your coaches and your scientists and we are on your team and you're navigating your change and we're cheering you on and helping you back to your data but we're not developing we're not taking the agency we're not creating a transference thing where we're the expert for you would rather make you your own expert because teaching you your own Neuroscience where it matters to you is a smaller ask than creating a clinical container around you that is then well supported at least at scale the way I'm trying to do this across the whole world so you want to create neuroscientists in individual people as they have things they want to learn about basically hmm so that's super interesting so basically it could be applied like anyone could do no feedback and probably benefit from it is there any harms or any risks in doing neurofeedback there are risks but sort of under the perspective of if you work out wrong and keep working out wrong it causes trouble and can cause injuries in the context of neurofeedback most forms not all forms most forms are passive in that they watch what the brain is doing and applaud it with something that is not uh very insistent like auditory or visual information there are some forms of neurofeedback that do really active stimulation electricity back into the brain for instance when when they try to push the brain around and there's forms of doing micro stimulation or neurostimulation that is not neurofeedback that is simply trying to push patterns into the brain with electricity or magnetism or whatever else generally all of those things do not produce rapid change and they produce the brain's a system that has lots of like places where it's trying to maintain efficiency and stability in a bunch of resources so you can kind of push it a little bit and it swings up a little bit and then swings back to where it was for the most part for most things the brain experiences so just like that with neurofeedback you can push on a little bit and get an experience and then get it to go back and the person can go huh I kind of liked how that felt yeah let's do more of that or maybe it's a mix so maybe we try training up beta on the left hand side which we might do for inattention we also might do for deep sleep so if someone has lots of slow brain waves on the left side and they need some support there we train it up after a few sessions they'll come in and say oh yeah I actually felt really focused really clear it was really great and when I got to sleep I slept really deeply it was awesome I had a really hard time falling asleep though once I got to sleep no problem but like the transition was weird ah okay let's iterate let's let's think about what that means let's back off a little beta waves try a version of it so the client has this like personal trainer slash athlete relationship where they're like oh how do I feel now you know and you can get thrown off um but it's the side effects of neurofeedback are kind of like calling your trainer from the supermarket and saying dude I dropped eggs all over the floor in the produce section my arms are noodles what are you doing to me because they worked you out too hard with curls that day or something neurofeedback it's well I felt too focused or kind of wiped out or kind of dreamy or I had some rebound anxiety for a little bit and then it wears off so if you're blindly expecting that we have magic tools for you and your therapist thinks that they know everything and don't actually check in with you you can get progressively pushed in the wrong direction and I do have inbound prospects every single week people that use a one-size-fits-all neurofeedback system that they buy or rent and use for a while and get pushed further and further and further towards anxiety and sleep disruption those are the common things that happen when protocols land poorly so if you're asking are these mainly are this mainly like the risk of some consumer devices that you can just order online and train at home or does this actually happen as the clinic as well it does both yeah anything that works can work in the wrong direction if you but you have to and work at it in the wrong direction so you have to sort of over trust that it's doing the right thing and ignore side effects and reinforce them over many sessions generally to get bad effects going but it happens I've had folks that were supposedly pretty high functioning autistic come into my office stimming and flapping and no eye contact and the mom said we trained 80 sessions with a one-size-fit system with one protocol I got from somebody and they got worse and worse and worse and the autism regressed and we had to kind of back it out over the next few months that story has a good ending that kid graduated about two three years ago now valedictorian from his small liberal arts college in the Northeast so he went he really had a lovely you know we recovered the problems so to speak but even now every single week some incology says oh I bought a system I paid two grand a month for it or 10 grand for it for unlimited sessions and I've been using it and it got a little bit worse but I asked person I bought it from they said to keep doing it and things got worse and worse and now I'm always anxious and can't sleep and I don't feel good and it happens all the time so or someone says oh my practitioner said I should just keep pushing through it because it might get worse before it gets better that is not true in neurofeedback generally you know you might get away with making things worse on the way to getting better but you don't have to ever make things worse to get them to feel better so if you feel bad after after a session like you know a workout shouldn't be painful the next day it should be oh yeah I felt my muscles but if you have too much germs you know I mean there's no reason for that there's no reason to push yourself the point of pain stiffness and you can't get off your couch when you work out there's no reason to push your brain that hard either in fact we don't want your brain to react to a training protocol we want to gently move in response to one over time and you can lay it hard you can create side effects and create dissociative States you can mix the wrong neurofeedback like someone has general anesthesia and you do the wrong neurofeedback the day after and you just create profound Association yeah so this kind of emphasizes the fact that if you are starting with a new just totally new thing like in our feedback here uh it may be good to work with a personal trainer so like a professional neuroscientist who knows what your brain is supposed to do how the treatment outcome is supposed to be and can then evaluate our going into right direction or not with yeah and again I I would emphasize that your neuroscientist psychologist or trainer isn't necessarily somebody who knows everything either it's kind of like having somebody teach you to ski then they say there's the path down the mountain there's the trees head down the path not down through the trees because you're more likely to get good results if you head down the mountain path and if you ski through the forest you know and they'll meet you at the bottom and help you adjust your Technique that's sort of the role of the neuropathic trainer they're helping you with like let's try this version now let's try this exercise try that and the good neurophybackers don't believe what their machines tell them in terms of diagnostic labels or outliers they use that to develop models mental models about what's happening for the client and then they help the client validate the experience I mean I joke to clients and this is a very you know mysterious experience but it's not at all blind you experience stuff so we'll figure out if our ideas about your brain are valid a few days into training your brain because whether or not you got the effect is a very clear experience so you know we get to evaluate stuff instead of deciding you know I joke that if you want answers you go see a doctor but if you want questions ah come see a scientist or things to try ah come see a scientist we'll give you lots of stuff to think about and try and evaluate and model and push on but we're not necessarily trying to get to the inviolent truth you know doctors have diagnoses and the medication trainers scientists have iterative approach to get closer and closer things you're looking for so we work in that scientist Coach Way aims for you instead of uh therapist and most neurofeedback people do too even the ones that are therapists which is most of them they still work as this iterative uh uh support system for you in some ways well that's all good info and good reminder of just be a little bit of wary of of all of the things you can find on Amazon I guess um so um how quickly does neurofeedback start working let's say we have a typical ADHD uh kid how how fast would you expect to see some changes how many sessions for example I would say regardless of what it is you're working on or nothing at all just experiencing some Peak Performance work or creativity or something you feel most people this is a bit individual to the person most people feel neurofeedback sessions start Landing about the third or fourth session in I would say about 1 out of 10 or 15 people feels it the first time maybe one out of the same 10 or 15 people kind of has a sense of it happening but never really but things change anyways in their in their sleep stress Etc over the next month or two um so in the case of a classic uh difficulty that you can measure like ADHD or PTSD or something we do attention testing alongside our brain mapping so we actually have really good uh sense of how the change occurs for ADHD for instance and we like to do a minimum of about 40 sessions for everyone regardless of what you're doing because that's enough training or for zero oh okay I like to train a minimum of three times a week roughly uh for three months and map the brain every other month roughly and that 40 maybe 50 session course of training is enough to create a couple of standard deviations of change on a bell curve in attention if you have any need at all there any deficits at all like ADHD or a concussion or something causing big attention trouble we can reliably move you up the bell curve about a standard deviation every uh 20 or 25 sessions so that means that if you do 40 50 sessions with severe ADHD you probably don't have it anymore you may have a hint of it and if you have anything beyond severe ADHD you might even be above average permanently uh afterwards after 40 50 sessions not everything changes that robust Lane reliably working on sleep stress and attention generally does working on things with active disease processes pushing back against them does not like schizophrenia or you know someone has a lot of damage from drinking or something you might need more training or someone's got autism it's a different brain or a lot of brain injuries it's kind of a different brain you might need more training and now you need 50 to 100 sessions 200 sessions um but generally people will do with us and in the field in general something like 50 to 100 sessions to address OCD PTSD sleep issues some things that are more systemic like migraines and seizures are not usually eliminated but knocked way back the system's made more stable and resistant to being destabilized so the literature shows that the average response to seizure is about a 50 reduction in seizure incidence I've never seen a result that poor it's always like oh my goodness the seizures are going down that's really cool and then the person gets stressed out two years later and stops sleeping well and you know she's just creep back up a little bit you train and they go right back down the same's true of Mike probably it's a thing that you can like work at if you need to in the future but ADHD big anxiety stuff Flow State access we do alpha Theta work for a lot of our Flow State you know Peak Performance clients it's a permanent kind of access change over time you know that you can get access you can get built up basically so we don't really have to do long-term training unless you want to keep making improvements for most people do you have any like very striking or surprising or interesting patient story that you've seen to know feedback I completely understand if like you kind of chair or uh if you if you can like somehow make it very Anonymous and and share something that would be like that was something that maybe you didn't expect or something that was more than expected I mean it's more it's more that I just wouldn't know where to start in finding because in in working in traditional psych my perspective on how change happened and how suffering happened was one way and moving into neurofeedback I expect 70 80 of my clients to eliminate their big stress sleep and attention difficulty even when it's really severe in a few months so most of our clients go through life-changing transformation rapidly um so there's a a podcaster named Kelsey Dara who talks about I can of course give you public stories that are public um Kelsey talks about having a lot of anxiety and really hating to travel and planes make her feel horrible and she would abuse alcohol and Xanax whenever she flew because otherwise she couldn't like deal with being in a plane and we did a bunch of nerve feedback with her for like a month and a half or something and she had to fly from LA to Boston or New York and figure well it's on the east coast um six hour flight and she found herself she had she got the airport late stressed out got a middle seat because she got there late or something hated it was extra stressed out and was landing on the East Coast before she remembered that she had Xanax in her bag and had forgotten to order any alcohol because she wasn't that stressed instead of every plane trip being a massive life you know battle to get on the plane to numb herself and I've heard that from 50 people who can now fly in a plane drive across Bridges not get triggered by their you know anxiety Trigger or whatever so the really severe anxiety stuff is reliable that's my most favorite thing to go after in some ways um what is it in society that you train with narrow feedback depends on the flavor of anxiety uh there are specific circuits that I alluded to earlier anxiety is not a disease process per se like getting a cold or having an injury it's more like having a resource that's a strong resource that's supposed to do one thing that cramps up and gets stuck so in the cortex I tend to see the anterior cingulate when we're over focused that produces Obsession you know OCD type anxiety the posterior cingulates evaluating the world around you so if you drive a car and you get distracted the posterior singer says watch the road or something else hey Inca heads up and you grab the Frisbee or something that's a posterior cingulate good job you know orienting you to the environment but when the brain learns the world is not safe or predictable it starts evaluating in high gear all the time and that's PTSD it's extreme or there's a part in the back right that takes the whole world in as the junction box called the tempo parietal Junction and if that's hot and somebody then social information and sensor information is literally louder to you so faces get loud people's anger gets loud sounds get right through you so lots of things are in that sort of nails on chalkboard category it's a big bucket suddenly with all kinds of things in it if the back right is has that sensory or social anxiety or if your eyes are closed the visual system if I see it not shutting off with their eyes closed I might predict somebody's having hyper vigilance the brain can't stop scanning or preparing to scan the environment even though the eyes are closed you know brain's like Preparatory Vigilant if you will so for all these things I wouldn't assume I knew for you or for anybody that they were true but I would say aha hey let's look at your brain hey look at this is this plausible do you kind of ruminate are you a little threat sensitive are you hyper Vigilant oh you are oh that's annoying sorry experience that glad we're seeing that would you like to change that would you like to work on that I bet this is if this is valid I think it is I bet if we lean on on this and exercise the beta down bring some Alpha up a little bit you'll be like oh that's nice and if we get that effect we can build that over time and you know take like the threat sensitivity someone might have the the trauma response let's say which is really common these days even when it's not PTSD level the world is so hard for so many people and the sense of powerlessness and being out of control and the global context these days is so high that everyone's really threat sensitive so you might want to drop that or reduce the tendency to sit there and chew on stuff and worry about stuff just by training down the beta at the posterior singlet bringing up the alpha so your resting level is not it's like you know chill and then you can go there that's an important point about neurofeedback you're not tranquilized if you're someone who has PTSD or OCD and you train down the cingulates say you're a Zen monk when you're not in high stress you can still move into high stress modes whenever you need to or want to you just don't have to stay there down the hyper Focus whenever you feel like it or put down the worry if you feel like it and then pick it back up again when you're in the middle of a car accident or a dark alley or whatever so yeah actually yeah yeah yeah it resembles a lot of this idea that many people are afraid that if they I don't know train mindfulness or stoicism or something like that they become emotional zombies like you know it just that you have more flexibility to choose in what kind of a brain State you want to be in certain situations so when you actually do need to calm down you're already more readily able to use the skill of controlling your own nervous system on your own mind or brain in a sense that benefits or is adaptive to the situation yeah and even before you make a change as I was saying earlier you may discover something about your brain that is true and go yeah okay I am kind of anxious I see it my maps oh yeah that's true oh yeah I do worry a lot oh I did caught in high gear and then you can do non-neurofeedback things like Dr heberman talks about uh he's a uh uh a research neuroscientist and a vision scientist and he talks a lot about how the direction of the vision will change how rapidly you process time so what I often coach my clients in a panic attack is if they're ramping up and activating you know that means they're looking down at Perry personal space things you can potentially reach or things that can reach you stuff that's around you and your mind's going with time trying to slice up what's around you but if you look up in a way at a Vista like the ocean the sky or straighten out your your virgins the direction of your eyes changes your brain notices that and slows down time processing until these little like 300 millisecond slices now instead of like 50 millisecond slices so suddenly you actually slow down so if someone's ah you can you can you can teach them and that's not like mindfulness or breath work you don't have to learn it for to work the eye Direction time processing thing is built into all animals probably and definitely humans so it's an interesting so that's so looking up looking up is like calming yes because the brain assumes that what you're looking at is far away you have time to deal with it now you're on a boat a horse or you're walking looking something far away you have the opportunity for pulling memories out for making abstract thought for loading things into your working memory for making creative decisions the cost of not doing those things there's no cost for taking time if you're in if things can touch you or you can touch things and they're at all stressful there's no time you can't think abstractly you can't go huh I wonder you have to act you have to react so that's why the brain's like you know these little 50 millisecond slices when you're ramping up in your stress but you can literally just go nope I'm now downshifted once you know where it is you don't have to practice it just try it once God look at the sky once the ocean once and go oh oh that's what he's talking about okay and then all you have to do the next time you're ramping up with your stress is remember that that lever is there and reach for it and it will be there it's nothing you have to learn unlike mindfulness which I don't like mindfulness for anxiety interventions because it can really just make it worse until you get Beyond you know the learning of it essentially or breath work breath work's hard to do if you're anxious um I will say the only important thing to remember if you're having anxiety and you are trying to do some breathing is make the length of time that you exhale longer in the length of time that you inhale that will drop the sympathetic uh tone and put you back in parasympathetic a little bit so if you do a yeah yeah oh it will slow you down but you have to remember to do it and you might be like activating having a hard time controlling system but if you look away it will work it's it's there's there's no chance of it not working it's built in that's that's a great tip that's a very very nice because I think like when people are anxious they just want to like something fast that's not the time to start sitting down in a Lotus pose and think about what kind of a meditation technique should I use here um yeah cool so okay so we have talked quite a lot and covered quite a lot about neurofeedback and that has been like a very fascinating I learned so much new things and I would like to know because you have so much knowledge in general about like Total Health optimization brain optimization you don't only look at one specific single area and but you have actually like um you have more holistic view on the whole whole system so what would you say would be like the second I mean I know you have a lot of tools uh you have a lot of expertise but like if you had to name one specific effective brain health enhancement thing or brain longevity and Sandman thing what would it be besides no feedback I mean of course what you choose and how you implement it is largely dependent on what you're trying to solve right if there's an acute difficulty versus performance optimization versus long-term aging you may want to emphasize different things uh like how like the word you know I'm sure you're into fasting because you're in our community of biohackers and everyone argues about what breaks the fast well what breaks the fast is different depending on why you're fasting for seizures for cancer for you know body recomp different rules different reasons so I think that that's a hard one there could be lots of things you could do that could be the number two those could be fasting stuff it could be um resistance training it could be macronutrient partitioning in your diet to handle insulin swings um I think it might be sleep it might be sleep optimization uh and I would say that that will improve other stuff you're doing sleep optimization improved neurofeedback we can improve it with we can improve sleep with neuropathy back but if you hack your sleep behaviorally get better effects on neurofeedback and everything else so I would think watching your sleep with you know an aura ring or a whoop strap or something good watching the heart rate variability changes at the night making sure the deep sleep you're getting is sufficient is about the number one number two I guess thing we can do for optimization I don't really care about most of the data coming in these sleep trackers by the way the only thing I care about is your Deep Sleep Numbers I've had long conversations and why is that because they're not valid the numbers aren't valid um why why is the deep sleep important ah because that's the Delta and that's the restorative mode that's the rest and repair that's the growth hormone release that's the memory consolidation that's the one that's actually sleep in some ways it's the Delta mode we need to go in and out of it for Sleep architecture in Cycles but getting Delta it's also another reason is that sleep tracker is like the aura and whatever else none of them do REM very well at all it's like a magical estimation that it's just not accurate but Ramos was not something that changes much in human brains until things are very very bad I have clients being like Oh my tracker says I don't get more than a few minutes of ram I'm like oh are you psychotic no you're getting plenty of RAM that's really the rule if you're hallucinating actively all the time something's wrong with your REM if you're not it's fine seriously that's about how how uh how how strict it is RAM is protected by the brain in a bunch of ways deep sleep is not protected the same way if you're stressed cortisol if you have less time you know deep sleep will Flex night to night so you can measure it somewhat reliably and it is impacted by Behavior so it's actionable so you can watch the number and you can then do things like tonight so some rules are move low intensity exercise before you eat in the morning not high intensity don't call for more cortisol or call for more glycogen you get resistant to those things but call but work out just enough to burn them off you know 10 sun salutations or something or a low-key yoga practice walking stretching something something you can talk over for exertion levels and then move your resistance training your kettlebells your whatever to the afternoon so uh I I saw your Instagram met with seems Instagram today when ring lifted up he should be doing that in the afternoon you know pressing you in the afternoon not in the morning because in the morning he he may call from our cortisol if he works out too hard he probably won't because he's Mr but the average person who goes to the gym first thing in the morning loaded up on coffee and hits the weights hardcore is calling for tons of energy to be deployed the body's woken up by a cortisol and glycogen signal the cortisol squeezes your liver feeds your breakfast blood sugar goes up you wake up and you should have enough energy to go out in the world and hunt your breakfast evolutionarily speaking if you move from the bed to the couch or the bed to the desk or the bed to the breakfast table and you become sedentary after waking up or you just take an energy after waking up right away it's a confusing signal the body's like wait a minute so you should really burn off the energy that woke you up but not call for more and only later on consume calories that's a really the most powerful sleep hack is when you eat not light I know our biohacker friends love light and love to hack with light and love to use glasses and things I don't care about the blockers I don't think they're useful but warning light is somewhat important for circadian rhythm and morning activity is really important for circadian rhythm but the number one exogenous cue for circadian entrainment is actually when you eat so number one doctor number one rule for not screwing up your circadian rhythm not screwing up your deep sleep is don't eat before bed give yourself if you're metabolically healthy two hours or a kid two hours if you're metabolically not that healthy try three or four and let your insulin drop let your cortisol drop let your everything else drop if you go to bed with any insulin which you will have if you're chronically elevated or if you have eaten before bed and blood sugar goes up if you're falling asleep with any insulin in your system guess what no growth hormone released for you when you're asleep which means you aren't dragged down into deep sleep you don't rest and repair very well you don't restore tissues very well so about the worst thing someone can do for their sleep and for their brain is to eat before bed this is like such an uh interesting interesting topic and so many insights that I already got when you were talking about this like I kind of want to do another episode of this just like insulin and like at the brain and yeah it's also very important considering things like Alzheimer's risk both deep sleep and your insulin so it's a hugely hugely important topic I think to think about think about in in our and in our area everybody's life even though you're not like metabolically at the moment having any problems but like you need to prevent them to happening and I have a probably we should do another another podcast but I have a whole bunch of uh techniques that I use for doing sort of insulin resensitization body recomp anti-aging with a from a body perspective to support the brain and a lot of that is around sort of not not just listening to what the keto gurus say about how many carbs you can have and how much fat you need but actually measuring some things in real time and so steering uh the process if you will of metabolism instead of just following people's rules so we can talk more about that I'll leave that as a tease maybe for folks yes definitely that sounds like an interesting episode okay one thing that I like to ask to kind of wrap up is that what is the one thing that you would tell to your younger self in terms of like just being healthy or one life advice that you would give to your younger self right now at this age with all the knowledge you have you know I grew up in a farm town getting up super early and going to a farm to work and pick fruit um or to get up before dark and bicycle for miles to a bakery and start baking it like three and four in the morning when I was a teenager and even younger um and then throughout College I lived a normal stay up late kind of life and I worked in Psych hospitals and was super you know working three jobs all the time and staying up all the time and somewhere around like 10 years ago I started getting to this habit of getting up like I used to when I was a baker or a farmer getting up at four in the morning at the latest and I started doing it because of what I learned I coach a lot of folks not in neurofeedback but in General Life stuff and I started doing a lot of work around morning routines with some of my most productive people and I you know want to practice what you preach so I started dialing in my perfect morning routine about a decade ago or more and it's a ridiculously powerful hack for me and I don't know why but if I get up at 4am instead of it like 7am or something I need much less sleep I'm much better regulated my circadian system stays in trained meaning I get a sleeperage when it's right time I wake up naturally with no alarm I don't know what it is but for me getting up significantly Before Dawn like when I teach the Circadian things it's always about that light is only present for about one hour after Dawn or after Sunrise is the color of light that will drain the Circadian rhythm to the vasopressin system in the suprachosmetic nucleus so you want to get Morning Light but for whatever reason getting up for me three hours before Dawn or something produces this dramatically different experience of life and I don't know why it is but what I would what I would have told myself as I entered colleges don't give up that Baker farmer lifestyle still get up at three and four in the morning because it does something magical I don't exactly know what it is but whenever I've lived that way in my life everything has been significantly easier and I've had everything everybody's call you can imagine you know so okay can I ask when do you go to bed between eight and nine usually okay yeah yeah so you get like a solid proper eight hours of sleep that's seven and a half seven sometimes like I what I find is I can get away and not notice it with about six and a half I really enjoy and feel well rested about seven and a half so as my life gets more stressful as an entrepreneur I'll stay able to late and I'll get a little bit stressy and I'll be like Oh I'm only getting six and a half hours sleep you know but my aura ring is still happy with the quality and I'm still happy how I feel I just know that where the edge is for me because I've I've watched it Fray historically here and there and I'll be like oh getting up too late and the solution is not to sleep in uh this is my tell my clients never sleep in if you want to sleep in the time to sleep in is at the beginning of the Night Never at the end of the night thank you for your time and it has been a super interesting discussion can you also please share how to get more information about what you do like your your clinic and yeah where people can find more information sure thank you it's great to see you and I'm happy to spend some time talking to you today um my company Peak brain Institute is in several states in the US and we also have several Partners overseas and many of our clients never see a physical office because we do all of our work with brain mapping and brain training remotely with gear with uh gear sent to you so folks can visit our offices or our partners we have ones in the US and a couple in California one in St Louis one in New York City we also have Partners in London and Copenhagen who can do some mapping and we're about to be available in Hong Kong and a couple places in Australia but even with all those offices that probably is only a quarter to a third of our client contact and we send out a lot of little brain mapping amps and gear and teach people how to do stuff so if you want to work with us we can be your brain coaches no matter where in the world you are but if you are near one of our offices we'll give all the podcast listeners a discount and you can have a half price one-off fee with free repeats to the offices at least in the US the ones that are branded Peak brain will just give you a brain map I think it's 249 it's the discount price we'll give listeners and I'll do that the same discount if I'm doing it at any you know conference or anything for you as well but like for you I've given you one already we should do a repeat for you because we don't ever charge them uh repeat Inca so I'd love to see over the past for plus years whatever it's been uh how you're yeah exactly um so Peak brain Institute is our company um you can find us on socials I'm Andrew Hill PhD on socials and the company I think is usually Peak brain LA because that was our first city looks up there but I would encourage folks to get in touch if you have brain questions or want to check out your own brain because we can uh we can show you some things about yourself thank you for listening to the mind and psychology I'm Inca land and today's discussion was with Dr Andrew Hill a cognitive and neuroscientist and the founder of peak brain Institute if you liked this episode please leave a 5 star review on iTunes as this really helps me to spread the word about these topics you can also subscribe to your preferred media whether it's YouTube or Spotify so you'll find new episodes easily see you next week at the same place