Train Your Brain for Peak Function: Dr. Andrew Hill

i want people to know that if you see stuff in a brain map that is real you can almost always change it it's not real who cares if it is real you have agency so brain mapping is not diagnostic but if we find real things you can exercise those things and make them change almost always so the brain's hard to understand but not hard to push around [Music] hello and welcome to pursuing health i'm dr julie fouche family physician and former crossfit games athlete here i bring you information and inspiration to help bridge the gap between fitness and medicine and support your journey toward your healthiest self thank you so much for joining me now let's get started with this week's episode all right well welcome to pursuing health today i'm very excited to be here with dr andrew hill who's the founder of peak brain institute a leading neurofeedback practitioner and also a biohacking coach for clients across the globe he's lectured on psychology neuroscience and gerontology at ucla's department of psychology where he received his phd in cognitive neuroscience and a little bit more about peak brain there dr hill provides individualized training programs to help you optimize your brain across goals of stress sleep attention brain fog creativity and athletic performance he's also the host of the head first podcast and continues to research on attention and cognitive performance so welcome to the podcast dr hill thanks for having me julie nice to be here appreciate it well i thought we could start with where your love for this organ called the brain first began because i remember for me specifically being in high school and taking my first psychology course and being absolutely fascinated i took it same time i took biology and those two courses were what really led me towards medicine i think and i also remember reading this book i don't know if you've ever read it called another day in the frontal lobe no i haven't actually it was by a neurosurgeon but it just shared a lot of her perspective on her patients and her understanding of the brain and i remember being enamored and for a while i thought i wanted to be a neurosurgeon and then went a different route but all that to say how did you first become so fascinated by the brain i mean i don't know i was one of these people who probably always took everything apart when i was a kid and had to understand how things worked and i grew up in the 70s you know sort of just before the computer era had i been in the 80s or 90s i would have ended up you know becoming a programmer probably but the mysterious stuff that we could explore ended up you know i had sort of a different brain as a kid myself i was ridiculously adhd about the worst that anyone's ever met not so much anymore through some of the tools i use but um really in the way like dramatically different than average uh in terms of the average uh kid teen even adult and that was sort of getting me thinking a lot about the features that i was having trouble controlling my attention stress that kind of stuff and then when i was in grade school my younger brother i grew up in new england and my younger brother sledded out into the street in the winter and hit by a car oh wow and was in a coma for a month and a half or something two months and when he came out of it having lost a piece of his brain he ended up having to spend uh several months you know relearning some basic features and there's a happy ending here years later he's you know largely typical has a successful career a family college degree everything but there was this recovery period where i was like well wait a minute he's you know a seven-year-old or eight-year-old or something and he suddenly is back to a two-year-old and some of the functions like balance and some of the language stuff's impaired and this was a little brief event consciousness was dramatically impacted and now on the far side of it resources don't seem to be uniformly impaired but there's this recovery process it's very mysterious to me seeing these big shifts of consciousness and big shifts of resources wow that's amazing so you had such a personal connection to it yourself and through your brother before we dive in would you explain what neurofeedback is for people sure so um neurofeedback just as a basic technology was discovered somewhat by mistake about 60 something years ago and i can explain the fun story if you want at some point but um basically it is it's a form of what's called operant conditioning or shaping on things you can't normally feel so just like basic learning most learning all learning we know about basically is is a form of associative learning you associate two things pavlov's dog a light and food makes you so eventually the light makes you drool the same in the food made you drool it's an associate of learning called classical conditioning this is not that this is skinner's pigeons pigeons already pack so if skin or fetum whenever they packed a certain pattern they start to detect that pattern more such reinforcement learning or shaping of something that already exists so neurofeedback will simply measure a brain wave you make some parameter blood flow or brain waves and when i say brainwaves i mean the amounts of electricity or the speeds or maybe the connectivity between regions and you measure something that you're already doing on your own so for instance let's say just to give folks a more concrete example to ground it for a second there's a circuit in the back middle of the head whose job it is to evaluate the world around you and help you orient your attention the back of the world's the outside uh it's a back of head to the outside world so the posterior cingulate's job is to go ah watch the war road watch the road or heads up frisbee or scan the ocean for the person drowning if you're the lifeguard or be alert be vigilant beyond be evaluating and ready to reorient and act it's the posterior cingulate job we all have one sometimes we learn the brain learns the world is not safe or predictable and the cingulate cramps up kind of like your lower back might spasm up in a car accident so you can walk away while the cingulate ramps up in the presence of acute danger or unpredictable stress and you now are evaluating for the possibility of that in the future this is really bad we call it ptsd but there's a whole spectrum of that circuit being a little hot a little irritable for you and that can be built in or can be acquired and it's a ruminative state of chewing on things stuck in your gut a threat sensitivity it's kind of unease we have a similar circuit in the front called the anterior cingulate if that gets stuck you a little bit ocd you have songs in your head and you uh maybe bite your nails or have little intrusive thoughts or whatever and we all have these circuits most anxiety flavors by the way are like that they're not diseases they're existing circuits that have cramped up or spasmed or gotten straight so think of anxiety as being out of shape or being mildly you know tweaked not like having a disease ultimately um it can be a really uncomfortable you know uh sprain of that resource dramatically spreading your ankle can hurt a lot worse than breaking your ankle a lot worse but and having trauma is is is significantly uncomfortable for people but understanding there's a natural thing that's there for a bunch of reasons may help you change your relationship with it and if you look at a brain map which is a tool we use a qeg a tool we use to look at people's brains is a tool used to form what you go after in neurofeedback so let's say we saw on a brain map and look at yours i think at some point the cingulates would have in some people little hot blobs of beta waves if you were perseverative or obsessive or ruminative a little threat sensitive and they often work together as part of the default mode network the sense of self reverie the world that's the default mode network the background stuff um if somebody wanted to work on a sense of rumination and threat sensitivity and they were activated and this is a big concern for them i would encourage them to train down the activity there a little bit and see how they felt see if it was the right direction so you stick a wire there and you measure the beta waves the activation tone of that circuit you also measure the alpha waves which is a neutral resting frequency like the car in the driveway between modes and each circuit can make all things at once to some extent so a certain amount of beta is there all the time and a certain amount of theta and it changes moment to moment so we stick a wire back there and a couple of ear clips on and measure the cingulates pumping out alphas and beta amount as those things change relative just to you know the amount you're actually making for this exercise for this example whenever the alpha happens to go up and the beta happens to go down on its own the computer will notice that and go oh good job brain and applaud a little bit and make a little game start running or make audio start happening the brain's like wait a minute stuff i kind of like stuff and a few seconds later the brainwave is moving the wrong direction and the stuff stops the brain's like wait why'd the pac-man stop moving what that music go away it's kind of weird a couple seconds later it happens to move the right direction the game resumes applauding the brain's like hey wait a minute the outside world is tied to me and it doesn't know any different from a car or a musical instrument you're trying to figure out or even your own body the human brain is great many uh advanced mammals are great they map tools onto their brain if you're really good with a pencil or a paintbrush or a fencing foil your brain has a representation of it like it's your finger and it has a sense of it as a tool i mean when you first pick up the car and try to drive or the the fencing weapon or the bicycle it feels awkward it's like oh but eventually it's like part of your body it feels like clothes so you know we have that ability to uh to reach to bind information essentially but in this case we just exercise down applaud whenever your brain made some more alpha in the cingulates you might or might not notice anything but a couple hours later your brain go you know i was getting information happening with more alpha i kind of want information please and it just raises the alpha briefly and you go oh i feel something i mean you can't often feel the training because you can't control your brain waves or feel them but you can feel them surging later on in response to the ask so it's sort of this involuntary exercise and a big trick here for the operant conditioning people listening going wait is that we move the goal posts every so often we adjust so that the the rise in theta every so often for several seconds let's say alpha is what's rewarded so the brain learns that long runs of increased alpha are something that's interesting and decreasing your beta for a while is interesting and after several days of this it starts to build up and one little session just provokes a little effect the brain swings out and back to ground but if you keep doing it you start getting movement in the resources so sleep straps attention how you're feeling moment to moment the things related to the circuit you're working on will start to shift and the person can experience that neural feedback i joke it's a it's a mysterious but not a blind process because as you do it you get this lingering effect each time that you can evaluate and figure out am i moving towards my goals so this is to some extent why take neurofeedback out of that treatment space and psychology space and doctor doing things to you space and into a space of personal training of hey let's teach you about your brain give you some agency let's have you map your brain in caffeine if you want let's have you move through stressors and transformation let's push on your brain with neurofeedback give you life hacks to play with and as you feel different you can go back to data and look at your attention performance on really good testing and look at brain maps and they're hard to understand as i was saying at the beginning but they are stable for one person so if your brain map start to change suddenly and this happened with you we saw brain maps in the fall that were interesting and had a few things that might be worth optimizing and then we saw you again in march and i said to the data team i what's going on here this data doesn't look right let's get fresh data we had you remap because we weren't sure what we were seeing and it looked somewhat similar the remap was valid data it just was very different something had changed it hadn't changed in the right direction and yet your performance your attention test because you've been doing your feedback we're actually better which we can look at if you want but you had gotten covet i think right you've got some some illness had knocked you over some big stressor and i was seeing the consequence of it and not know what i was seeing and it didn't make sense but that's the the scientific thing is you look at the data what's sticking up why can we interpret it is there a valid model for it and it ended up being not bad data like i first thought but you know the brain being very foggy essentially yeah and then checking with you we discovered that and you know we have some interesting look on it we also then have the agency to keep an eye on it as you continue to work on your brain and we mapped your brain again and we saw that you know we saw the the sort of coveted induced fog and stress right afterwards and we saw you continue to recover over time so absolutely yeah it's been a very um interesting experience for me and i love your comparison to personal training and thinking about this training that we do for our brains the same way we do exercise for our muscles and sort of the analogy between those um and like you said it's it's this idea of experimenting but using the data to guide us and to create hypotheses and see if we're moving in the right direction so i'd love to talk through sort of my experience of how this how this experience works for neurofeedback and then what were some of the things that we found and have been working on with my brain specifically sure you bet um you want to maybe tell us uh tell the audience how what what made you look for neurofeedback or how you found it was it through one of your relationships or partners or i forget how you found it exactly it was actually my significant other lincoln had been doing neurofeedback himself and has seen some improvements and this was only a few months into him starting but i thought well you know this seems worth trying so i decided to go get a brain map so the first step is getting the brain map which you can do in person at one of your offices in la or um new york so i was in new york got a brain map right around christmas time and you just sit you have you know monica was the person that i worked with she's wonderful and you sit and you are not allowed to drink coffee that morning it's the heart of your supplements it's the hardest part um i remember trying so hard not to fall asleep but you wear a cap and put gel in all the different leads and then record your brain activity with your eyes open your eyes closed and before that you also do an attention test um and aft then you walk out and you have all this gel in your hair and have to go wash your hair it's really fun so it's a little messy but it's not like that's not painful it's you know yeah it's very seamless um and so after that you and i had our first meeting where we went over that qeg and the intention test results and i think the one of the most interesting things and this was true for both lincoln and is that like you said you're able to look at the map and notice patterns and make some hypotheses about what we might be experiencing and you were really spot on for both of us and so for me in that first map i think the two things that i recall most were the anxiety rumination type um and then also some emotional sensitivity or um sort of like getting like having emotional triggers that i would get stuck on for a while so yeah we looked at your data and we measured your attention and we found you're a pretty good performer and we can look at data if you want yeah let's do it so if you're watching on video you'll be able to actually see my brain map here and if you're listening on audio only i will make sure to make little mental little verbal notes about what we're looking at so let me share this and then minimize this no i don't there we go okay so what i've brought up for you is the attention test this we actually have two sides to this so there's a left side called the tension the right side's called response control and what these things are is measuring how well you can activate the gas and the brakes um so we have you for 20 minutes basically we try to bore you to tears not to tears but we really bore you a little bit and the way we do that is we flash a number on the screen about three inches tall really easy to see uh it's a one or a two it's a bright green number on a black screen so it's super easy to see uh it's in a big box too and we also speak the you know or visually or we speak the audio you speak the same number one or a two over the audio and the only instructions given at the beginning the test that watches the instructions is to make sure you click on the one and don't click on the two but the stimuli are coming relatively slowly and there's about 440 of them for about 23 minutes so the computer's going one one that's a very good impression is that your voice on that record no it's not no it's not it's one of the one of the employees of braintrain um but i've heard that one many many many thousands of times so the left side of the test is how you can click when the one comes up and the right side is how well you can not click when the two comes up and this left side here called attention shows your tension's pretty good it's got a 107 as the main score and the way the scoring works like most population things 100 is typical plus or minus 15 roughly so 107 is kind of a high average but when you dig in a little bit the visual system is gorgeous at 118 and the auditory's only 95. so we're starting to get into some of the value of doing attention testing with a personal training idea i instead of a diagnostic psychologist die because psychologists in 95 probably go ah it's fine for the most part or 107 wow above average great but i'm what i'm noticing is within one person the auditory system is low average 95 the visual high average above high average 118. that's almost two standard deviations of change within one person for something that's unusual and when we dig into the subscales in the bar graphs below we see something called focus which is that it's in auditory to 92 but in visual it's 119. so that's the core difference this thing called focus vigilance which is the light blue bar here vigilance is being alert to things changing when the one changes into the two and vice versa the vigilance check and you're above average you're 106 and 106. so really nice and rock solid bridge alert to things changing when things get repetitive when the one flashes on the screen again and again and again call that focus nicely above average way above average 119. when it happens auditorily fine fine wine you drift which i certainly notice and i think even and i think i brought this up in our first call is that i notice i have a very slow reaction time when it comes to audio like processing or hearing things which i i promise i always told my parents i was i was listening we're trying to listen right exactly exactly yeah yeah lincoln not my fault you can tell lincoln you want to listen and you know again not a not a performance issue in the moderate range of typical but i'm finding a bottleneck of unusual patterns sticking out and that's likely relevant we also look at your brain in a minute there's brainwave unusual stuff right behind one of your ears so we start to narrow our ideas for some valid measurement and then we can look for hypotheses there's an auditory hypothesis jumping out in that data set so we were like oh okay and we trained that resource and you know even after covert you have you know you were two weeks post code or something and this middle map and the one the right was a few days later the ones in the middle and right of the screen are only a few days apart and those are those are both better significantly better performance in spite of i'll show folks in a minute your brain looking really foggy so your overall attention went from 107 to 116 and 123 basically so you went from hot from high average to well above average in performance and that bottleneck of 92 and 90 and the focus and speed for the auditory the focus went from 92 to 115. you know so you got this one and a half standard deviation jump in sustained auditory work in spite of being knocked over by the coronavirus despite it feeling really out of it in spite of your brain looking like the sleep and stress were really thrown off you were performing better through it so this is why i was having some cognitive dissonance trying to figure out why rain maps look the way they looked because this looks like you're performing through whatever was going on in the brain without it really affecting you mm-hmm oh yeah which is really fascinating to me because i think even to clarify the timing of these the first one i had done right before christmas um in new york and i'm pretty sure that's where i did get covet around the time of omicron christmas time and i was sick just after right around christmas and then um and then i noticed some improvements in focus attention um anxiety rumination symptoms as i was training our feedback january february and then it was early march that i just all of a sudden noticed like and i had mild coveted symptoms i had you know a runny nose and a headache for about a day or two and that was it um in early march there was just one day where all of a sudden i felt so tired i went to bed at 8 pm which is never happens i slept for 11 hours and then it just felt like i needed a lot more sleep i was sleeping a lot more i was feeling more brain fog later in the day um feeling like if i didn't have like as long as i had my routine like i was getting enough sleep and i was meditating and doing the things i knew to do i i was feeling okay but if those were off like if i got one bad night of sleep it was like everything toppled over um and so i had been scheduled to do my next brain map in march and didn't really think much of it and then we found you know all of these these new findings and then the last attention test was in june so this was after doing about 30 more sessions of neurofeedback oh so that's right sorry the middle one yeah the first to the second was 30 sessions the second the third were 30 sessions you're right i had another one that i haven't bothered to open up that's that's a duplicate essentially this middle one but but i had to open the background i was confused about which ones i was looking at yeah the one on the right says 610 the one in the middle is 323 yup yup sorry so um you can also see the sustain scores here it's a 104 at the beginning in december jump to 114 and then 118. so you actually leveled up into margin and sort of stabilized and kept going you can see some of the bars kept getting bigger in june and this left side of the test is attention the alertness grabbing stuff the right side is pumping the brakes which showed some stamina issues but that was it the blue bars love called stamina that means you got harder to become resistant and you uh burned out a little bit and click on a two the deeper to the test you got when i first met you and then here what we're seeing is uh the response control quotient or how well you can pump the brakes not clicked by mistake was 108 at the beginning and again visuals 114 auditory's 100. so we're seeing an auditory specific bottleneck and then by march you were 106 which about the same score but auditory and visual we're now both 100 or above and now or last month now the response control the self controls 125. the auditory which had the problem is 128 itself and now the visual at 114 is the one that's lagging because so you sort of overshot and got really strong and the thing that used to be the weaker of the two so huge changes two full standard deviations of improvement um sustained auditory improved instead started sustained visual which went from 100 to 119 to 118 so leveled up and stabilized so you've had really good changes the best i could hope for for somebody without giant problems so to speak in their executive function this is about as good as it gets if you did have crazy problems we would have made more change but this is like an efficiency and a rock solid dialing in your attention that i'm really happy to see and apparently we've left you now more than a standard deviation above average across the board everything's stable everything looks awesome you know 125 is a big difference than 107 than one uh 108 you know in terms of not being impulsive and the 123 is a big deal a big difference in 107 in terms of not being inattentive or spacey a full standard deviation against the average person in terms of how crisp self-controlled you are yeah and i've definitely noticed that um and just to to bring it back to the process so we did this first brain map and then um i did the feedback sessions and you have a remote program so you actually sent a laptop that has all the equipment and i was able to work with somebody on zoom to attach the sensors for each of my sessions and based on our initial conversation actually maybe we go back to that first qeg and talk about what you saw and then how you design the specific training and program based on what you're seeing um because i think that's really unique too there's there's other neurofeedback products out there that are i think more like one size fits all versus taking this very um individualized approach yeah so we have your first brain map here from december you can see the date the upper right hand corner and then just to orient folks for a second who are watching we're looking at a bunch of colored circles that represent the amounts of brain waves compared to the average person but i want to caution folks just being unusual than average isn't a big deal and the amount that you're unusual than average doesn't determine how problematic things are because people are weird it's a good job you know be weird we're all weird and unique we're all we are coach used to say everybody's a special snowflake that's right that's right um so we're all a little bit weird but some of the things that get in the way classically for humans are unusual you know so to speak so when those things get in the way you can see them so you don't assume unlike the performance test we just looked at where if there's a performance hit guess what it's valid it's really an actual score and think about what it means but in the brain maps we're just looking at more raw data the amounts of alpha or beta or whatever those things are and we have to then think ah you know this is in this part of the brain it operates this way and here's what's plausible for the average person it might get in the way this way it might be a strength this way or a quirk this way and try to figure out by modeling the unusual stuff like getting a plausible you know framework around how they could operate if we're finding things you already know about or things you picked up on your performance test essentially and that's the most valid stuff to then go after to push around and to get some changes in if we're lucky well we're almost always lucky we almost always get good changes this is your first map and it looks pretty fine um the color bar here at the bottom i'm going to zoom in on is representing a bell curve so when things are up in the oranges or in red there's lots of brain waves um or lots of connectivity or lots of speed and when it's blue it's low amounts of brain waves or low connectivity or low speed or something and so we're seeing places in which you're unusual and if i said to you i probably did i'm sorry my mouse is not behaving i said to you early on in this map oh this little cluster of alpha waves on the left front corner of the head your alpha is unusual it's a little higher than average well that's a true statement now does it mean anything for you i didn't know at that stage i just had a couple of ideas there's actually two features in your alpha here as you may notice there's alph on the left side a little bit this alpha in the front middle of your head and that at the time i guess this that front midline structure is the anterior cingulate probably stuck in a high idle and so my hypothesis would have been something like ah the interior cingulate selects what we're thinking about yours appears to be stuck in a high gear my guess is you might be stuck on things in your head at times and i would have said yes then you would have said 100 and i probably talked about the fact that you have some relatively high alpha in the left front corner when you go look at the left front corner for beta see the beta is low in the left front corner of the head this left frontal lobe and the left frontal lobe is like the happy little kid on the porch the right frontal lobes of grumpy old man on the porch and as things walk by the happy little kid says hi you want to play oh can i show you something oh what are you doing and the grumpy old man says get off my lawn hey slow down so this avoid versus approach balance is always operating to manage resources and excitement and activation and stress and the left front is that happiness that buoyancy that writing motion that resilience and yours is not making a lot of beta waves so i would have guessed that it was hard to summon that happy little kid yeah i want to do stuff and if i gave you a cool project your first gut response may have been ugh more work not ooh interesting because a sense of burden and withdrawing and protecting yourself probably will have crept in essentially so i tend to do cold uh hypotheses each time i'm assuming i made the same hypothesis in december we also see here behind your right ear that's another big one for you a lot of alpha waves and some of the beta waves are back there there's a big circuit behind the radiator called the tempo parietal junction tpj and on the right the tpj's job is to map the world into the mind in a bunch of ways and your tpj looked a little hot so to speak and this is also auditory tissue so i was sort of saying aha well this is definitely auditory like inefficient or loaded up this is mostly most likely related to the auditory performance that's interesting very likely to be a real performance hit for you that's worth going after but then there's other things suggested by this i wouldn't see an intention test so those hypotheses would be things like what i call the princess and the p phenomena where you can't ignore anything around you and all the random background sounds get in it's a sensory integration issue that's what it really is but when you have this like filter of the information coming in that's kind of wide open things get loud literally loud the world's too loud but also social information can get kind of loud this can produce a sense or irritability and a social anxiety a social loading for some folks and then since you have both the anterior cingulate the front midline and behind the right ear as activated there's a specific flavor of perseverative stuck and sensory irritated thing that can that can happen when they both show up and it's called misophonia it's being like obsessively rage-filled or irritated by certain sounds like that nails on chalkboard bucket has way more things in it like your partner chewing makes you want to you know kill them or something because you're just so ridiculously you know uh hairs in the back your neck standing up can't tolerate the sound kind of thing um so i would have guessed these things walked through a bunch of resources we probably also looked at your alpha wave speeds which are how fast your brain is and we saw that the sorry delta wave speeds and alpha wave speed these are speeds here on a bell curve so zero is pretty typical in your left hemisphere we were seeing your alpha waves running kind of slow zero is average and you're running kind of slow and more importantly than slow you were spreading out some places you're right around zero other places you were dipping down to almost one negative one and in somebody who's in their 30s you might not notice this a lot but as your 30s 40s 50s the sload alpha produces a lot of word finding issues delayed recall and tip of the tongue phenomena and it's basically a speed of processing index loading things in and out of your mind gets a bit draggy and as you can see alongside that your delta waves were very very fast two to three standard deviations faster than average and delta has a couple phenomena that show up one when we aren't getting good deep sleep delta starts to climb in number so we see a fast delta and my metaphor here is normally delta is a little bit happening during the day for heart and lungs and background metabolism you kind of live in delta you don't think in it it's life to some extent it's also slow wave sleep so when this happened your doctor running really fast it's kind of like imagining your brain as an office building and you come in every morning and it's hard and sparkly and shiny and there's fresh coffee you know spring water because a team of 20 comes in at night and efficiently cleans the whole place and resets it for you well this frame with the delta being really fast and high amounts of it and the alpha being slow your your your spruce team your pit crew of 20 people has been dropped to eight and they're still there at 11 30 in the morning getting in the way of the workers spilling trash trying to rush around clean up because there's too few of them and they're tired themselves so it's this like sleeping metabolic repair state lingering into the wakeful state but also running really fast trying to like catch up in some ways for being really foggy that's what i would have guessed yeah for sure is uncomfortable yeah and i think oh good i was going to say when we find these things i mean i can already sort of people tend to react to seeing their brains a couple of ways one is like interesting and a very common way unless we're careful to point some things out is ah wow i'm uncomfortable that's really unfortunate but i want people to know that if you see stuff in a brain map that is real you can almost always change it it's not real who cares if it is real you have agency so brain mapping is not diagnostic but if we find real things you can exercise those things and make them change almost always so the brain's hard to understand but not hard to push around absolutely and that's been one of the things that's been most cool for me to experience is seeing the actual changes as i've done the neurofeedback so after this initial brain map and you came up with a program for me and i would do those sessions at home and you know for me i was probably doing three days a week each session is about 30 minutes takes a little longer by the time you set it up and then um you know i was noticing a big improvement in things like rumination um emotional sensitivity focus and um you know despite that then in march coming back with um some brain fog and some increased fatigue and things like that which we were surprised to find on that map and and so now if you're watching on video you can see that yeah this is that map in the comparison which i think just for anyone looking at looks alarming because at first you see all this nice green and blue and now you see all this red yeah so in march there was tons of red and a lot of it in the sides of the head the back of the head lots of delta and theta and alpha so the three left columns are slow brain waves where life is the three right columns are where the brain the mind the you know emotions the spirituality all the human experiences in the right side of the page and alpha is in both categories so i was like why are slow brain waves all blowing up that isn't good um and it's much worse than i'd seen you three months prior and yet the front midline hot spots were actually still dropping away in spite of this stuff getting worse and this is your brain bringing up now uh in june so we saw you in in march we have two maps that are almost the same here i'll resize this a little bit um and then i'll minimize there we go uh so what we're looking at now is june versus sorry mark to the left and june on the right and as you can see and i should tell folks brain maps don't change on their own generally if you map your brain every month day and day you know month and month out for a year or two pretty much the same every time unless you're doing big things to yourself and making changes or acutely distorting yourself caffeine cannabis adderall you'll see changes and they're interesting but clean brain maps look the same for one person that's a little bit why they're in some ways uh deceptively sexy you know we want to believe them because it's us you know it's the same thing every time here we see a very large change and what you're seeing is the slow brain waves especially in the thetas and the alphas especially the frontal lobe the alpha was basically red in the frontal lobe in dark red in the front right in in march and it's all gone green and yellow pretty much now and that front left is the happy little kid alpha's neutral so in march the happy little kid couldn't find any joy any buoyancy resiliency drive you probably increased word finding issues you were like oh man my brain's foggy right and all that alpha most of it is gone now so we aren't we haven't got you back to green yet but all that frontal lobe concentration activation uh motivation on the left is almost where we want to get it probably subjectively it's a big change probably 100 percent yet i would guess for you suspectively but we're getting somewhere the right front is where more of a dread that cranky old man gets overwhelmed and like freezes up on his porch and it's a dread experience when theta and alpha show up on the right front it can lead to depressive stuff too so you know you look so much better in that frontal lobe organization you've gone just about all the way back to where you to the to the green level for most of these features and we are still seeing well we're seeing something interesting one is behind the right ear which was the big sensory uh input area if you will the social and sensory tpj you see it really activated back in march across all brain waves and the beta brain waves showing up there suggest you were probably having a lot of a lot of uh sensory issues and you know folks that have had covid know this host covid long kobe which happens at least half the time basically feels like a concussion and i'll tell you folks it looks the same on a brain map it looks like a concussion a few months later just like and just like a concussion sometimes you don't see the effects in the electricity of the brain right away if you did an x-ray of the brain of concussion you wouldn't see much unless it was very severe same with an eeg but all that inflammation and change function starts to bloom over two or three months so this map here in march if you've got cove in december is probably you at the peak of things being bad in your eeg and then they would have hung out there essentially for next year or two unless you worked on them then here we're sitting on the right she'd be able to wake the frontal lobe up really nearly perfectly and then behind the right ear that social and sensory area the sensory overwhelm maybe some social sensitivity rejection sensitivity social anxiety stuff for some people that has also lifted beautifully in spite of every despite of the stuff that's not completely changed yet we have the delta you know those little blobs of delta next to the ears are actually sort of a little bit worse this is probably your residual like long coveted stuff little inflammation if you will a little sleepiness and this is getting in the way still of the quality of your deep sleep probably you know yeah and i think you know from my experience too it was it was so interesting to have this brain map that then matched my experience of all this new brain fog and increased sleep need and things like that and then to know okay there's something we can do about it and we did neurofeedback then for the next couple of months and we're able to see some improvement i'm curious you know because this made me ask a lot of bigger picture questions like you you are happen to be mapping people at regular intervals who are part of your program and i'm sure many of those people have you know had covet during the last couple of years and so i'm curious about what your bigger picture perspective is on that and the you know the impacts of long covenant on brain health and then for people listening you know what is there that we can do about it to help our brains recover if we are experiencing these symptoms obviously nerve feedback is one tool but what else can we use so i i do see a lot of brains um both before the pandemic and afterwards and since i do this personal trainer let me teach about your data hey data is cheap and or free long-term people tend to engage with data at gathering really easily themselves so i have the luxury with some clients of a decade of data and just dozens of maps i mean even even you and your partner i have a bunch of maps now on and it's given us that little snapshot perspective um but a lot of folks that i've worked with i've worked with for months for concussions or anxiety or trauma or whatever years ago they call me and i'm like hey how's it going they're like brain fog okay so we look at it and i would say again like i was saying a minute ago nine times out of ten that postcode with brain fog looks kind of like a concussion the alpha's slowed down so the quality deep sleep is lousy and speed of processing and word finding is crappy delta's swelled up especially the temporal lobe and you can't think clearly it's hard to pull memories out your balance is kind of wonky and you can have like a a sensory sensitivity lightened sounds get bright sometimes like they would in a concussion um very very common what i have also noticed is that for clients i've worked with that have injuries a lot of them have some mild brain injuries that gets resolved over the course of you know three to six months of neurofeedback or something for a lot of clients with old injuries the covey latches on the inflammation latches onto the old injuries and it blows up those things first and or those things get you know it's like having a second concussion after first one that second one does the damage covet finds those inflammatory areas it makes them a little bit stuck again is what i've been able to see um so yeah i do a lot of things to help people beyond that um but also let's think about you know long covet is um even you know february of last year there were articles in the lancet showing that fifty percent of people think covet seem to have some neural symptoms six months later and it's long covert doesn't have to show up right away and lankova doesn't have to show up with any covert symptoms really you can have mild covert symptoms somebody had a cold oh i had covert kind of symptoms and a month later two months later oh wait a minute what's going on and that was your experience it sounds like you got sick infected with the virus in middle december or something just just after i mapped you serendipitously uh not that you got ill but we had some data and then um you probably didn't really feel you're saying you didn't really feel the brain fog until march sometime right and that track so folks are like what the hell i thought i was better this can't be coveted it might be because it's just like a concussion can kind of bloom and it seems to do that in a lot of people so there's that my perspective on long covet and or the like it really i'm in the sort of wellness space right and this is there's this cool thing now in the wellness space is to be a jerk and to say that oh you maskers or sheeples and come on it's it's the refined sugars and seed oils and knocking on the sun that's what's doing it until you get out in the sun and stop eating cedarwood talking about masks and vaccines working immune system the thing and 99 survival rate yeah but that if you get ill it really does have a toll it's not like you exit it without it's like getting a major flu it's life-threatening or resource threatening at least and i'm starting to think that long covet is not the 50 or you know about half people i think it's a lot of people are getting this secondary inflammatory thing and also i'm starting to see research that suggests that a lot of the mechanisms of cova doing the most damage to health and cognition and the mechanisms of long covid may both be around factors of inflammation and clotting essentially but this inflammatory thing this clotting thing is in human bodies in general is a regulatory feature influenced by all kinds of factors in hormones inflammation and energy flux so i think that what we're seeing in terms of people that are at most risk for complications if they get covered and people that get the sickest when they get covered people that don't recover as well tend to have the same types of things which are about energy flux and inflammation and clotting that means that pre-diabetes and mild obesity without diabetes and heart disease with low ejection fraction and any form of blood disorder pretty much that has different blood species that aren't well balanced in the cell types all these things become in some ways precipitating factors for increased reaction to the virus so um i uh i'm trying to do i can do to stay healthy part of that is not developing secondary risk factors like high blood sugar and chronic stress and no sleep so you know it the things that keep us wellness and healthy and optimizing our wellness in general are also some of the same things other big biohacks that tend to work really well on all the same stuff that we're talking about would include hyperbaric medicine as a big one and throw someone into a hard chamber a couple of times and dramatically reduce their brain fog doesn't last but it can be a really lovely lift and palliative you can see on a brain map immediately pre post really gorgeous so that was something that i did too along with the neurofeedback from in that interval between march and june and it's hard to know what impact that had versus the neural feedback alone but you know certainly some combination of those things were helping i've seen an awful lot of people do neurofeedback alone hyperbaric alone or a mix for different brain complaints across the years an awful lot and hyperbaric alone doesn't do a whole lot for the brain it does something for acute stuff inflammatory stuff but it doesn't do a huge amount neurofeedback often does a huge amount if you add hyperbaric neurofeedback it doubles the impact of neurofeedback often wow so i think what you did was you fed your brain really well while you gave it directly to directed change information so you know it's sort of probably both is my guess in terms of really did the heavy lift for you so hyperbaric medicine folks often ask what to do i say 90 minute dives 10 of them in two weeks two atmospheres of pressure which is a hard chamber breathing in puro too yeah um also things that can work very well is the hot cold stuff saunas and ice baths contrast cooling without ice bath just sauna cool shower sun a cool shower works amazingly well for a mild hormetic stressor with all of the hormetic stressor stuff saunas ice etc if you feel worse afterwards don't keep doing it yeah if you go to do a sonic a good few and afterwards you're like i got hit by a truck well guess what you just drove inflammation up and it got stuck too soon too fragile give it try other stuff you know so but i am a big fan of saunas i'm a big fan of ice am a big fan of cold showers i'm a big fan of red light therapy but i don't understand red light therapy that's one of those areas of biohacking where i'm like ah yeah i don't know something it's doing something and folks that have one i'm like yeah yeah do it and and do it this way but i don't understand if it really really closes the loop on uh on stuff when i do directed red light stuff like i don't know if you or lincoln have i use uh infrared sensors to measure the brain's blood flow we've used that yeah you have so yes you have one of these then it's called heg passive infrared pir heg or hemoencephalography means that you're able to measure the brain's temperature like you're looking at waves uh on a beach crashing the shore to figure out how active the ocean is so we have these little infrared sensors we wear and it points inward little camera and you concentrate and you you can maybe drive blood flow up and over time it's a great tool for coveted brain fog for migraines for um developmental stuff in the frontal lobe works really interestingly so the reason i mentioned this is hyperbaric chambers are really expensive especially hard chamber access but tools like this are relatively low cost compared to that so you can get a lot of directed targeted use like this is a tool we're going to want to use more for you but apparently your frontal lobe hasn't woken up beautifully so you know um so there's a lot that can be done i think i also just want to you know as we're talking about this postcode world and and the impacts of long covid that you know yes i had a great response from during neurofeedback over the course of a couple of months but if someone doesn't have access to neurofeedback there still are plenty of other tools that that we can use and we would think that this should improve and you should return to your normal brain function over time correct for many people yeah i think especially if you uh do some fasting do some low carb do some super high quality nutrition when thinking about nutrition and that's the most accessible biohack for most folks sleep is accessible but that's mostly about doing what you know you should do but nutrition is people have lots of ideas about and when you have what i call ectopic energy when it spills out into a fatty liver is like topic energy it's it's too much storage of fat and you can get fatty muscle if you have too many triglycerides and fat floating around your muscles become fatty too eventually so that's the stuff that i'm concerned about during long-term health and if you have ectopic energy fatty liver fatty muscles a lot of not belly fat but a visceral fat under the abdominal wall around the organs that's those are fat is uh adipose is um hormonal tissue it is glandular tissue it is not inert and it it dumps out huge amounts of inflammatory cytokines and things that drive blood sugar variation and drive hunger and it tends to be really difficult so that's the one biohack if you're going low tech and you're going at everything i mean i this is not just low tech this is the foundation to start with this and sleep is is i think it's really important to learn to control that that metabolic flux so it's not overfilled nor is it leaving you adapting to deprived nutritional states energy states et cetera and there's a line there you don't want to become orthorexic and too hyper focused on this nor do you want to join the church of some particular you know ketoguru but you want to sort of navigate your information into the backdrop of what is understood to figure out how you can move yourself so again the biohacking perspective of iterative data i'm a big fan of that yeah i love that and then it's not like suppose you want to be in more of a state of ketosis for a specific reason for a specific period of time it's very different than doing it for the rest of your life and like you said just understanding how to use these tools and then being able to objectively monitor in yourself what's working and how it's working yeah and i think you i think you mentioned a good point there which is the reasons to do this type of metabolic biohacking or fasting or keto or whatever the reasons you're doing it should change how you do it how you fast how strict you are if you're a kid with lots of seizures you've got to go seriously low carb and actually pretty high fat or it won't work well for you if you're a stage competitor trying to get ready for the stage in two months you've got to drop carbs and fat otherwise you won't shred body fat and not not once you're lean anyways but if you're just trying to like remain healthy then there's a much wider range of what you can get away with and now perspective on remaining metabolically flexible so you can you know have plenty of energy have a robust immune system not have too much inflammation but yet also not fall into a coma walking by a donut shop because you smelled sugar or something you know so yeah anyways that's my perspective on it i love it well as we get ready to wrap up i want to touch a little bit about on the applications of neurofeedback and where you see the future of this tool in our arsenal of mental health tools i think that you know i know you're not specifically clinical and i i you don't you're not specifically treating diseases per se but there's a lot of conditions that have improved in people who do neurofeedback and i think even in our conversation so far we've talked about anxiety we've talked about ptsd concussions infections adhd migraines sleep um there's so many you know our brains obviously do a lot um so i'm curious um first if you could share where you see the future of neurofeedback um and and what the potential you think is um in our either you know just for our population and i mean this will ring true this will resonate for you um the difficulty doing neurofeedback is both understanding one person's brain and then understanding how what you're trying is impacting them or if it is or what it's doing and people are so variable that the best i believe the best neurofeedbackers are not one that have the best tools that have the most magical system the most complex set of wires to put on your head but who can carefully try something and learn from it and then get you a little further each time at least across people that's the safest way it may not make every person fast better than most you know magically but it's the most reliable i feel across people so that's how i i um i tend to work but that does mean that there's a burden an art burden almost a a a creativity burden in terms of like your best personal trainer in the gym can get people progressing fast because they kind of know how every little person's body works how to balance workouts how to you know give this person gruff tough love about their sleep and to give this person a doughnut because they're celebrating you know their birthday like there's different strategies and i think that that that iterative round trip of feedback the pun intended like yeah you know we have you and lincoln fill out surveys ideally twice a day how was your sleep how's your day and mostly so i can mark a polo my way towards your goals you know warmer colder getting there getting there maybe not and try to get elicit some effects and see something subjective and then move a little further that's very complicated and it takes an awful lot of things held in my mind at once to be honest and it's a skill and it's a it's the reason i it's a bit of a bottleneck for my company you know i have a couple people in the company can do it but it's about bottleneck um most therapists and their feedback only have 20 clients or 30 clients because of this bottleneck i mean i have i have i have a few hundred but i also have a whole team of coaches that are amazingly gifted skilled gentle calm caring people who are technically savvy who help people learn and do stuff so i don't have to do everything but to answer your question i think where it's going is a way to index and round trip is quantified self think dashboards of health and sleep trackers and i think it's all going to coalesce eventually into intelligent avatars we can use to test interventions on so i have a map of your brain and if i also had really really tight integration with all your state and trait changes day-to-day just that just you not having to tell me but your your aura ring your bed your stress the whatever all the metrics getting in from all your devices just registering that better and then you logging in as a dashboard could share like the tool we built that you work on thing we call our portal um a version of that that's a little more tightly integrated that actually starts to show the trends of these things as they are visualized against each other the stuff that i tend to do offline you know trends of sleep and stress and mood changing against your beta waves or against the stuff we've tried this will let you drop interventions on multi-skilled graphs and look at what's working and learn from your progress look retrospectively that will also then let me replace me and people like me with machine learning let's predict what might work for this person let's feed in more information so that when someone comes in with an unusual brain a bunch of hard responses and we're not getting what we expect they're one of a thousand people in the world maybe and the database eventually has enough people like that that can be predictive and repent you know so i'm trying to create create a system now that is persisting giftedness of skilled coaches and we're then going to use that to then mine predictive stuff eventually but i think that will five ten years from now will translate into intelligent avatars virtual representations of ourselves like you take your current brain map and train it and see what happens and say like oh turning that does this for her okay okay try this and get the effect we're looking for instead of have to have you feel a little weird or a little bit wired or tired or have your sleep turned off briefly which is what side effects happen in your feedback by the way but to test on the models so that's one benefit of real-time round-trip information another is we won't need to do databases qegs on the static arbitrary database i'm tracking information every day on you know variable time axes then we can do a brain map caffeinated stoned having a psychotic break whatever and it's just a data point in a wild type data database of people's brains which sort of solves some of the limits of eeg qeg which is this this failure of the diagnosis this now there's patterns just phenotypes or endophenotypes things that are true across people like your beta blob right there but that beta blob you have in the front midline in your head can be perseverative stuff for some people you know ocd and also just be a ceo somebody who's super highly focused with a mind like a steel trap so you can't tell on a brain map if it's in the way but if you were watching someone's stress markers for days and their sleep variability and their heart rate and a bunch of factors in a really tight way the trick that i do about hmm i think this is happening for them let's try to make this happen for them wouldn't it have to be a skill set and a gifted and a trained kind of art it could be something that would be like hey let's ask the software and people that have tried to create software thus far doing that generally haven't had the complexity uh they need to um or the systemization of neurofeedback they need to so we're trying to make that change eventually well that's very exciting to me i think that just seeing the impacts of this myself and on my own experience and seeing it in others has been really profound and seeing you know like you said in a world where we typically haven't had a lot other than medications to help people with their mental health that often come with you know side effects and other things that this i think is something that i have a lot of hope for just seeing seeing the impact that it could have in a large scale and then the impact that has on our society and how people you know if everyone's brains are functioning better imagine what that means for the world that we're living in um so i'm excited to see it grow and evolve over the coming years thanks me too um i want to close with three questions that i ask everyone at the end of the podcast and then give people an opportunity to learn more about where they can find you and what you do but the first one i ask is what are the three things that you do on a regular basis that have the biggest positive impact on your health number one is getting up really early what time is that for you um i tend to sleep in until about four some days oh wow but i often wake up before four and go oh it's about four four huh so what time do you go to sleep about eight oh wow 8 30. you know um but i do it the circadian rhythm is really um it wants to be locked in so if you lock it in you can get away with less sleep so um 8 30 is maybe optimistic but if i am going to bed at 10 or 11 i need eight hours of sleep or seven and a half but if i'm going to bed at eight or nine i need like six and i can get away with six for days and days and days i like seven like six and a half or seven you know it's definitely doable so getting up very early is a big is probably my biggest life hack honestly um and it sounds cliche to say as an entrepreneur who gets up for everyone else but there's so many reasons i use it as morning rituals um i do i do uh uh an ashtanga yoga practice a vinyasa flow style yoga another very large uh biohack for me probably among the most impactful the third is probably fasting a lot of periodic fasting so i do um have a cycling thing called lipsy leptin insulin mtor cycling where you play with the variables of time and calories and macros and i tend to cycle 22 to 44 and 66 hour fasts but i'm a middle-aged dude who's you know it's kind of fudgy so i i'm i'm who i'm who aggressive fasting is meant for middle-aged guys honestly if you're a young woman there's there's pitfalls you gotta watch when fasting when doing caloric restriction but if you're a middle-aged guy or a postmenopausal woman who's overweight or something or insulin resistant we're perfect it's like the one thing that's made for middle-aged people is is is energy you know flux stuff restricting the fasting so for me i would say getting up early uh a regular i have a minimal viable practice i try to find the minimal viable activity i can do and then not skip it like you don't generally skip going to the bathroom first thing in the morning you also don't skip the for me it's five sun a and five sun b so 25 minutes an opening and then a 25 minute little practice that i do 28 days out of 30 roughly um just to essentially cause an energy flux to burn off the cortisol and glucose that woke me up without calling for tons more before i go from lying in bed to becoming sedentary or working i wake the whole system up basically i love that so i love that a great way to wake up and interestingly um we haven't touched on this but you i know you've told me before that for most people doing neurofeedback for you know somewhere between 30 and 60 sessions for most people is what they need and then and then it really sticks with you um it's not you may want to do it again 10 years later or if something comes up but do you how often do you do nerf feedback now it's a great question um not that often mostly because uh i'm lazy no mostly because um i did a bunch and i changed myself fairly dramatically and i did it before i really got into i mean i was working as a tech in providence and i would hang out after hours and just do stuff to my brain which i don't recommend but i managed to make very large changes i did 18 sessions focused on adhd and made three and a half standard deviations of change in my impulsivity scores or something and then a decade later did a little bit more and you know i've been running my neurofeedback companies now for about six seven years i mean i've probably done 100 sessions 200 sessions in that time but a lot of my neurofeedback over the past couple of years is oh hey let me show someone something i'll set some wires up and get a screen share going and i'll be like so this is c4 i'll stick a wire on and look at that look at that bad signal and i'll just do that enough to like create a new plan for someone or to try a new game that we're being offered by their vendor so i don't do a lot of neurofeedback for me the the big stuff got out of the way if i got coveted i would do it a lot um if my stress ramped up my sleep eroded but you know you change less if you're well regulated you change the last in your 40s and 50s and beyond and i was really poorly regulated in my 20s and used neurofeedback as a heavy lifter now the stuff that i struggle with is trajectory stuff across life so while there will be that there are uses for my life and i will still use it for me the big stuff is about the anti-aging and the pro-health and the body composition and managing stress so regular meditation regular yoga sleep packing macronutrient cycling with super low carbs every so often that stuff to me becomes the i call it functional neuroscience it's the hacking the body to support the brain health most of the diseases of aging of the brain diabetes uh all the dementias um even cancer uh parkinsonian stuff these most of these things are driven by glycation or oxidation of sugars and so the fatty acids the you know cholesterols and things in the presence of oxidizing sugar is what causes all the problems atherosclerosis and dementia and everything else so for me also i've been talking about the body based biohacking functional neuroscience is to support the machine up top more than to get nice abs i wouldn't be sad if i had my chest it's not a bad right i'm not opposed but it's but it's nice that a side effect of a health hack for your mind gives you a nice body essentially so yeah for me i never had i mean i wasn't a super athlete i did a lot of cycling as a kid and as even as a college person i was captain umass fencing team an undergrad a solitary sport though um i never was a serious like athlete never got really really really in shape as an adult post-college and so for me i got my brain in shape pretty well so now i struggle with keeping it in shape and doing things that will help me you know remain repressibly youthful for the next 50 years you know so i love that this goes into the next question but what's one thing that you think would have a big impact on your health but you have a hard time implementing it or something you're working on yeah i mean this might be a function of the pandemic i'm going to say it is even though it's not um i really don't do enough resistance training and it's a big thing i coach people on when they're doing it i encourage them to do it but for me with my lifestyle my routine my laziness whatever i do not do enough resistance training i really need to i really want to and know that it would benefit me to build in uh two to four times a week of heavy heavy stuff and when i have had that in my life um you know it's helped my health and wellness longer term so you know i happen to have the benefit of not having a lot of physical you know i'm a fairly muscular i'm fairly in shape and i've you know been that way for a while so it's it's somewhat important for me as a guy who's 51 but like it's a lot more important for a woman who's 51 or somebody who's trying to drop 30 pounds of body fat and become insulin sensitive again it's so much more important for people that are trying to address something to do the resistance training it is important for me but it's something that i'm going to build in at some point over the you know over the next uh maybe i'll send you a barbell or some kettlebells or something it's nice don't send me kettlebells because like many people who got into stuff and pandemic i got really good at sourdough and i got a full set of kettlebells good on that if you want if you want a sourdough recipe that's great last question is what does a healthy life look like to you one where you're managing the demands appropriately and still finding fulfillment essentially i mean we all have stressors we all have good and bad we all have exertion and in fact you want to have exertion that that positive press that that desirable difficulty you don't want to like go sit in a rocking chair and just be idle we we fall over without pressure so you know pressure's a thing and it happens and it's it also means that relief of it becomes sweeter but if we find fulfillment in the effort effort becomes enjoyable you know things like dopamine into testosterone make effort enjoyable largely that's why you know we do things in dopaminergic and start gambling and start buying things because the fulfillment of it is very reinforcing but a life that is just stressful enough and and has habits and behaviors and and self-care and fulfillment and ways of refilling your bucket um as well as all the other ways that people have fulfillment i think fulfillment's a very personal thing some people many humans get it from other people most people do i think get a lot for the people some folks get it from spirituality or from meditation or yoga or becoming the best musician with their really strange instrument than the world's ever seen and they spend hours practicing their instrument so i think any i think a thing in life can be dramatically different one person to the next but managing if you feel fulfilled if the stress and the recovery from stress are well managed to keep you resilient flexible elastic in that stress response buoyant in that grabbing the world that kind of stuff yeah i love that answer and that balance between this the stress and resilience and i think that um and allowing that so that so that you are able to do the things that are fulfilling to you or or spend your time the way that you want to i think that for me was a great example of what happened with the postcode symptoms is initially i needed a lot more um self-care in order to balance out that stressor and i needed more sleep and i needed more time with meditation and i needed to be more careful about my diet and use neurofeedback used hyperbaric now like for example this past week i've missed my meditation several days and i have not gotten as much sleep and while i'm not at my best i'm not crashing and burning like i was a few months ago and i'm still able to get through the day and do the things that i need to do and know that i'll get back there so i love how you brought that balance up great well i'm glad to hear that you're feeling resilient in spite of some self-care and chopping away but as your coach those self-care habits are super important oh super important super important yeah um so i guess just to close i would love for people to learn where they can find more about you more about peak brain and how they might get involved if they're interested in learning more about working with you or the remote program sure so um we do remote programs all over the u.s and folks come to our physical offices in new york city st louis l.a or orange county california we also have a few partners over in europe for folks that want to get the brain map there for finding us we're at peak brain institute dot com is the main website and peek is all over the socials at peak brain la that's our first office that's all of our socials and i'm at andrew hill phd on the socials if you want to look at lots of images of reverse seared steaks and occasionally baked basically you know it's it's it's just my personal stuff but yeah peek print la and pique institute uh are the two big uh public-facing things we have and you don't have to come to one of the offices i mean i think you have come even like i've come to offices for maps at times but the whole process 100 of it can be done without visits but maybe three quarters of our clients never see our offices and the coaches just work virtually and this way essentially helping you learn to use all the technology and coach you through doing more things awesome and i think you said that if people do come to you from the podcast that um they would get a discount on those brain maps that you do correct yeah the in-office program is also can be applied to any of the remote programs um the in-office uh brain mapping works under a membership so folks pay once a year and have access to unlimited mapping uh essentially i do a few consults with you and then you can essentially do lots of mapping as you do things to your brain or look at medication look at caffeine or whatever so um normally the membership is 500 bucks but podcast livestreams get a half-price break on the podcast as if they're being referred in by a client which they can also refer people into the same but 250 for essentially within reason unlimited brain maps is about the best deal in the world to develop a sense of agency and perspective about what's happening so we try to i joke that we don't sell neurofeedback we sell agency perspective you know we help and a lot of our clients not not a huge number but 10 5 or something mostly use us for the brain mapping um because they are trying to navigate you know some perspective on themselves and hit some goals so the physical offices become sort of a club environment we have mindfulness groups in the evenings on zoom you should join that monday night monday night uh 6 30 pacific time for an hour and a quarter every monday with ian so if you need some support there's your invitation if that feels useful but yeah folks get a discount and then they can apply that club fee which is face value 500 bucks and apply that to a training program in the future essentially um and we have training programs about 5k for three months program essentially so we try to get like 50 sessions in our feedback and a couple more brain maps in so in terms of the intensity it's fairly intense neurofeedback you aren't like training on your own with the same protocol the coaches are checking in every day and giving you things to try and they're there in five minutes troubleshoot when you need help on your private chat that's always open seven days a week so it's a very handheld process but it's also as we talked about being in the show it's very much like personal training so we really enjoy facilitating people's transformation and that's how i navigate the mental health versus wellness piece by the way i work on attention adhd or stress not anxiety but when i'm talking about your anxiety i can talk about the specific circuits involved as actual physiology you're trying to work on without putting myself in the role of therapist and by teaching you to read your brain map instead of writing a report about what i think it means i'm thrusting agency upon you i'm not creating transference intentionally a really big part of us is we're not we're really trying to keep agency and uh and avoid that transfer and to avoid being put in local expertise you know that we want to make you should become your own neuroscientist that's easier than us getting inside your head which is what therapists do neurofeedback have to do to figure out what's happening so awesome well thank you and thanks for that um the offer i think you know for people listening i i have zero skin in the game here other than i've had a great experience with dr hill um you know i'm not getting any kickbacks from that discount but i think it's such a powerful tool and the work you do is so important that i just want more people to know about it and i'm excited to see as it continues to evolve so thank you so much for taking the time just to share your story and your expertise here and hopefully some people listening will come and check you out thanks julie thanks so much for having me really enjoyed talking to you this afternoon awesome [Music] thanks so much for tuning in if you enjoy listening to the podcast please consider subscribing and giving it a five star rating on itunes it really does help to get the word out to more people [Music] you