Understanding Neurofeedback to Improve Anxiety, Sleep & Social Skills with Dr. Andrew Hill

Welcome to the Joe Cohen Show. Join me as I share my experience with biohacking and invite top health experts to explore the latest technology, supplements, research and resources for optimizing your body and brain. Hey everyone. I'm here with Dr. Andrew Hill. He's a neuroscientist, entrepreneur, and biohacking advocate. Dr. Hill has a PhD in cognitive neuroscience from UCLA and is best known as an expert in neurofeedback as a practitioner, brain, and brain fitness coach. He founded the Peak Brain Institute, a company. Dedicated to helping people understand their brain and giving people access to brain changing technologies, including neurofeedback and brain mapping. I have him on here. Basically my short bio for him would be, he's been in this the longest as anyone I've been aware of. I've been in the biohacking industry for quite a while and his name has been popping up. since for quite some time. And I actually know some people that went to him and they were happy with their results. And neurofeedback is something that I haven't really done as deeply as some other stuff. It's something that I have a relatively superficial knowledge of, and I'm hoping to really get into the details of it. Who should do it? What is the evidence for different conditions and, even maybe some basic questions. So hopefully we'll be able to understand who should be doing neurofeedback and what it can help with and the mechanisms and yeah. So great to have you on. Oh, thanks for having me, Joe. Nice to be here. Awesome. I guess my first question, and we're going to start from a little basic stuff. What's the difference between brain mapping and neurofeedback? Because you have brain mapping, you talk about brain mapping, you talk about neurofeedback. What's the difference? How do they have to do with each other? Sure. So most most forms of neurofeedback as practiced are an intervention landscape where you're doing something to the brain and brain mapping is more of the assessment process where you're evaluating the brain or understanding the brain and you can use brain mapping for lots of reasons. Now I use it to guide. And plan neurofeedback interventions the way your coach at the high end gym might use the DEXA scan and bone density scan and the functional strength assessment to figure out where there's some stuff to go after. But you can use brain mapping or quantitative EEG in a bunch of ways, including looking at. Medication response. There's some good work by Suffren and Emery showing you can really predict a lot of different medication response using EEG. There's work by Andy Luchter at UCLA, who was on my dissertation committee, showing that about 10 days after you start an SSRI, the EEG changes in predictable ways. If the SSRI is going to work a few weeks later, so you can see these sort of big sweeping changes in the brain and the brain data and EEG is this relatively low cost, but mysterious, very data rich landscape when you're looking at. Physiology. It's like genetics a little bit in this way where you get so much data back, but it's a little hard to figure out a little hard to you make meaning of. And so this is why we could we combine performance testing or continuous performance test CPT stuff for executive function with the actual physiology, the measurements of the e. G. Because. When I tell you how your executive function works. So brain map to back up a second. We'll have two aspects to it. One is a performance test. We always do a really boring go no go style executive function test for about 20 minutes and essentially unload your resources bore you to tears a little bit and see how well you do when you are forced to re engage resources again and again. And then we have you put a cap on the head and squirt it full of gel. And we have you sit still about 10 minutes, eyes closed and eyes open. And the performance compared to the average person, your age is pretty informative. You can decompose some high level label of attention problem or ADHD or something into actually what's happening into. Aspects of inattentiveness or impulsivity, fatigue and stamina, auditory versus visual processing and really get this granular read on how executive function works for you. And so I start there because it helps outline some of the real stuff. Executive function testing CPTs are quote unquote valid. They have almost no practice effect. Everyone interprets in the same way. The labels are meaningful, and so you can dive into your own performance and start learning how it works just with the behavioral testing, if you will. But then some of the magic comes when you look at the resting patterns you have in your brain. So if we put a cap on your head and recorded you sitting still for 10 minutes or so, eyes closed and eyes open. We're getting a fingerprint of resources, something that is the same all the time, roughly, it changes glacially slowly over months and years, but you'll have an average amount of brain waves, an average speed of brain waves, connectivity patterns that are a little unique to you, and we compare those to the age matched sample because age is the biggest factor on. The patterns in the brain to some extent, and we might say, Hey, look, you've got this pattern here and this pattern here. And those are true statements in terms of data. But then making meaning of these biomarkers or phenotypes is really where brain mapping starts to shine because you can look at the resting amount of your theta waves, which is a brain wave to give some folks a primer on brain activity. We have these different brain waves running down from brainstem. Pretty close to almost no cycles per second. Very slow. Delta waves delta is a brain wave up to about two or three or four hertz, four cycles per second. And it runs as a metabolic background wave. It's the heartbeat of the brain. It helps the deep sleep and memory consolidation and immune function and the involuntary reflexes of heart and lungs. All that is delta. You live in it. You don't think in it. And theta, the next one up, 4 to 7, 4 to 8 hertz, is the lubrication of the brain. It releases the brainwave circuits, the modules, to do their job. Takes the brakes off a little bit. And then you have alpha waves, which is more of a neutral wave, like the car in the driveway. It's idling, it's between the gears or shifting through gears. And then you have beta waves above that. And that's where the mind and the voluntary and the active and the perceptual stuff all lives. And all of this is being produced by a sheet of tissue that wraps the brain called the cortex, the bark of the brain. And there's billions of these little... Generators, electricity, and they organize into columns 30, 000 or so neurons, probably 100, 000 support cells producing this little city block of activity. And it all produces the same rhythm. Like you're hearing, one section of the neighborhood is producing one little block party song. And then the next neighborhood over is a different little block party song. And their songs influence each other. So these are little rhythms being produced, brainwaves and that whole little 30, 000 neuron, corporate little block, little kibbutz will bounce up and down and do its little theta rhythm. And the next one over my doing alpha or beta or whatever. And this is how we organize information flow throughout the brain. And some of the parts of the brain have primary responsibility for receiving input like the auditory cortex or the visual cortex. And some other parts have 10, 000 foot supervisor stuff, executive function and high level thought phenomena. And then between those two levels, you've got these modules that are very conserved across people, big giant hubs, things like the default moat network and things like executive function and sleep networks and how the cortex and the thalamus connect. These are all really similar across most mammals, essentially. And so you can look at these hubs in the brain and I could say to you, Oh, look, you've got a lot of beta waves on the front midline. That'd be a true statement. But then I would want to ask you if it's interesting or important to you. So I would start running through a few things that having a lot of beta waves in the front midline. Might produce. For instance, front midlines, the anterior cingulate, its job is to be a little ceo and help you decide what you're focusing on, what you're valuing, what's important, and it's always in use. But when it gets stuck a little bit, then we start to hyper focus and select The same thing again and again. And if we make too much beta, that can be a little bit of a perseveration or an obsessiveness. So a lot of my high performer biohackers come in and they're like, Oh, I just want to optimize nothing's wrong. And we look at their brains. I'm like, dude, you got a lot of front midline beta. That usually means you're stuck in your head and obsessing a little bit. Is that true? Oh God. Yeah, it's true, but I don't want to lose that. Okay. No problem. But you want another gear to put that down and be nice to your wife when you get home? Oh yeah, it'd be great. Like having control over that circuit's the goal, not necessarily labeling it as good or bad. People are weird. Looking at your brain, you're going to see lots of interesting quirky features. Good job. Be weird. The goal is not to say, Why aren't you average compared to this bell curve? The goal is to walk through all the outliers, unusual quirks you have and start to paint this modeling picture. This exploratory picture of, hey, here's a feature. It might mean X, it often means Y. Oh, that sounds interesting and important to you. Okay. And unlike a doctor diagnosing, we haven't gotten to discrete truth. What we've gotten to is agency. You can now try something, you can exploit it, you can stretch it, you can iterate through change. And produce some subjective experience by doing the next part, which will be neurofeedback on the brain or something else. Okay. So that's all quite interesting. There's a lot to unpack there. This is a, quite a big field. Yeah, I guess when I'm thinking about neurofeedback, there's benefits and negatives to each brainwave, right? Is that, would you say that's true? Meaning there's some kind of trade off to each brainwave? If you have more of a certain brainwave, you're going to have. Meaning, maybe you'll be a little more creative, but then maybe a little less executive function. I don't know if that's the trade off. It is a little bit. It is. Yeah, that is the trade off. Theta is disinhibition. It's both taking the brakes off and having air in the brake lines. If you've got a lot of theta... You tend to be very outside world, stimulus driven, pattern driven squirrel, and that can be ADHD, but if you have a lot of theta on that front midline I mentioned, the anterior cingulate, instead of being impulsive, stimulus gets caught in your head and now you play songs in your head all day long, or you bite your nails and can't stop. It's not exactly OCD, but it's disinhibited focus of that cingulate, so it depends on where you're looking for. If you can't make theta, then you can't retrieve memories. You take six and a half hertz theta as a memory thing. See, it's similar to neurotransmitters as well in the sense of let's say serotonin will do one thing in one part of the brain and a different thing in a different part. Same with pretty much every neurotransmitter. Yeah, exactly. And this correlation to that front midline I might keep mentioning is a serotonergic heavy tissue, so if I look at your brain on a brain map, on a QEEG and say, hey, look, you've got a lot of front midline beta And it's in the way a little bit. Now you can do neurofeedback, but you could also do explore N acetylcysteine, NAC, which has pretty strong pro regulatory input on the front midline, apparently, I think through serotonergic cofactors. So people that have intrusive thoughts or obsessive often, like 40 percent of humans, get a pretty good result from NAC. By understanding how your brain serotonin or more the glutamate though? Probably the glutamate, yeah. But of course they're not discreet. Neurotransmitters are usually yoked to each other, right? And on that note, just as an aside, because I know there's a huge biohacking community listening to this. All you guys who are monkeying with your choline to produce executive function stuff, or you're monkeying with your histamine to produce more focus, be a little careful because choline and, Histamine are interrelated and if you push too hard on one, you break the other. So really watch, especially those of you who are looking into sleep hacking, really avoid things like antihistamines for sleep because you actually destroy memory circuits over time and create pro Alzheimer's pro dementia type phenomena. But yes, the front midline is both serotonergic and glutamatergic, all All circuits have specific jobs again, and neurotransmitters usually have specific jobs, like serotonin, dopamine, acetylcholine, all these neurotransmitters are either excitatory, causing more firing or inhibitory, reduced firing, depending on where they are, which circuit, except for the big two, which are glutamate, And GABA, which are almost the same neurotransmitter in, in some ways early in life, early in development, you respond to GABA with a glutamate kind of response and vice versa. Actually, they're very similar molecules and they balance you between that activation and deactivation mode, so if you drink too much alcohol and GABA goes up too much, you pass out. If you drink too much for years and your brain produces extra glutamate to balance that, and then you withdraw the alcohol now you have seizures. So that glutamatergic GABA balance is that sort activation tone, if you will, of the whole brain's metabolic activity, okay. So what is the most common problem in, let's say, regular people and the most common problem in biohackers? And I'd say that. From my knowledge of neurofeedback, I'm assuming the most common issues in general are anxiety, attention, ADHD and Let me think, would, maybe sleep? Yeah. Yeah, those are the big three. Those are the big three, the legs, the stool, yeah. I want you to unpack those three and how they relate to the different the way, the different waves and, Yeah, let me pull back a little bit further, a little higher level. Okay. There's different things in the brain that you can, different resources that we all experience and use. And some of those resources are complicated. are not meant to change an awful lot later in life, like visual fusion, making one image out of two eyes, or language production and reception. That stuff's supposed to be, according to developmental stuff, locked down a little bit after you finish developing it. This is why it's hard to learn a language without an accent, because language receptive tissue doesn't want to keep learning new speech sounds after age nine or ten. So some aspects of the brain are more fixed, these primary tissues for auditory and visual, and they're really tough to recover from. If you blow out part of your brain and have a stroke and can't move one of your arms, that's a very complicated thing to repair, probably won't be fixed, but an awful lot of the brain. is not that. An awful lot of the cortex is regulatory. It's stuff that's meant to change. It's meant to adapt and shift against the pressures, demands, challenges of the world, and then get you to max them and optimize and maximize your game, minimize your pain, et cetera, et cetera. So there's about six or eight of those things that are high level. You can think about not as diseases or disorders or suffering, but actually as resources that are meant to be tuned. And when they get a little mistune or stuck in one of their modes, now we call it a disease name or a suffering name. And all of the anxiety stuff, for instance, is in that, is in that category. So I don't know when someone's got a hot front midline, if they have OCD or if they're just an effective CEO, no idea. I'll talk about the the anterior cingulate, its function, how it works and see if it matters. Or the back midline, posterior cingulate, that's the lifeguard, watch the road, heads up. And maybe when you have a hot posterior cingulate, you've got a trauma response and you're threat sensitive and you're easily activated and you're ruminating, or maybe you're actually a lifeguard, like maybe it's fine, maybe it works for you. So You can recontextualize a lot of this anxiety and behind the right ear, there's a big chunk of tissue called the tempo parietal junction, which I call the princess and the P because it gets irritated by lots of stuff coming in. And when that one's hot, you tend to be a little bit flooded with the regulatory features of sensory or social. So the six or eight are executive function or attention stuff, all of the anxiety flavors. Sensory, social, speed of processing, sleep, and there's other stuff you can work on too that are a bit more amorphous or a little higher level like creativity and insight. There's a whole category of neurofeedback to get really reliable access to things like Access consciousness, creativity, flow states, alpha, theta, neurofeedback is to get you in that hypnagogic state between awake and asleep and educate you in ways of going nonlinear to pull information out, get back to your linear state. But generally, the big resources, once you look at them in a brain map. You can recontextualize, reframe your suffering, your ADHD, your anxiety, your sleep issue, your speed of processing, your sensory or social. There it is. It's jumping right out in your brain map. Okay. What do you want to do? It's yours. There it is. That's how it works. Great. Okay. This, you can take some supplements that you can do some neurofeedback. Oh, this responds while the meditation and you can start navigating change. And the thing about neurofeedback and brain science in general is it's really mysterious, but not blind. When you do stuff to yourself, you feel stuff and it progresses and it builds up. So it's really obvious to you that it's not a placebo because your seizures go down or your ADHD goes away or your trauma response becomes under your control or you stop craving alcohol. Or your migraine incidence goes down. So very durable effects in neurofeedback, but we're working in this phenomenological space where we're trying to steer stuff that is a little bit unique to you and interpret it and then gradually demystify it as you start to learn to push your brain around through, lots of things, including neurofeedback. So what would you say in terms of, because it seems like a, one of the reasons I never got too deeply into it is. Simply because of the complexity of it, right? When I did it once or twice, uh, I, it was hard for me to go to sleep that night. Oh yeah. Yeah. You were trained a little too fast then. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So what I realized whoa, this is a whole new world on its own that I could just be fiddling with day in, day out for the next who knows how long, and still even if I was doing it for 20 years, I'll still probably be learning new things all the time by just fiddling with it. So it was just like, this is like a black box. Yeah, and this is why I encourage folks to use brain mapping as part of the neurofeedback. I would say half to two thirds of the field does QEEGs or brain mapping as part of the neurofeedback process where you assess the brain and periodically reassess and as things change. As the person's experience changes, as their performance changes, it all converges with what they're telling you, what their executive function tests look like, what the brain looks like, how their sleep and stress and whatever else they're doing for surveys. Those things all converge. So you see the person's iterative sort of change. And as you look at the brain again and again, what their brain means for them starts to become more clear. to them. So as I teach you to read your brain data and we keep re mapping you every other month or something, you'll have shifts if you're doing things to your brain. And those shifts will then show up in your brain data, which helps you validate what you're looking at, helps you reframe your biohacking. In our physical offices, a lot of our biohacking clients, I do have an awful lot, I'd say the vast majority of our clients who do brain mapping do neurofeedback with us. But I have a few clients I use the brain mapping for tailored nootropics, they run through their entire nootropic stack and figure out what each compound does with a brain map or they examine different blends. I have one person who I won't name on the podcast, but that person's a that they work for a big nootropic company and they've gone through several brain maps examining the different blends that company produces to figure out, which of them might be best for this person. And the discovery was that none of them actually works super well for you. And, you can see it on the executive function testing and you can see it on the brain mapping and see big, gross features. When you throw a cup of coffee in your system and map or paracetam or Adderall or cannabis or your pre workout, big, gross features. They're not easy to interpret. The mapping comparison databases are all of clean, resting brains. But when you have a clean brain of you, And a caffeine brain for you, it starts to, and I have your performance right up against it. You can start to demystify or you can examine what's my Adderall doing. Oh yeah, I am less impulsive, but wow, my anxiety markers got turned up to 11 and my reaction times got a little bit sloppy. Huh. And start to figure out that maybe I'm taking too much Adderall or maybe I don't need it, or wow, this Adderall is not making me less impulsive, just more awake. Maybe I should shift to caffeine and you can use brain mapping to start to paint out different perspective on yourself. The same way you might look at your blood panel and go, Oh, crap, triglycerides better back off on the Ben and Jerry's, and take control of your your high sugar diet or something. It's just agency is this almost the starting and ending place of brain mapping. But then the neurofeedback gives you this ability to gently iteratively. Initially, it's a transient effect. You don't create big change in your brain. And that's what you experience. You put your thumb on a scale and you go, Whoa, I noticed something. Great. The next day. The, or the day after the goal would have been, ah, that happened. Aha. That means that protocol should be adjusted this way. Try this and you would have a different effect that night and you do it again and you gradually steer yourself towards different effects and again, the reliable stuff to go after in this way. This subjective iterative way is executive function, anxiety, sleep, stress. Sensory and social and speed of processing. Those are the big gross features that love to train, love to tune and you can change them to the tune of about one standard deviation, one, bell curve population level. evEry other month, every 2025 sessions, you can take ADHD phenomena or PTSD phenomena or OCD phenomena. And move them by one standard deviation every 2025 sessions. So two rounds of that typically gets rid of ADHD or trauma response. It's just regulated or craving for alcohol or whatever fairly permanently. There's really good literature on ADHD because that's one of the big things that's been used for clinically. And there's research showing six month, five year and 10 year stability. There's research showing good stability in seizures. The average reduction in seizures is about 50 percent in the literature, but I can't say I've ever seen a result. That's as poor as 50%. It's almost always dramatic reduction in seizure activity when you train the brain. So it's just a landscape of tools and gradually you can create permanent changes as you get up into 30, sessions of training. The brain takes over. You're using that stuff all the time. So if you train your impulsivity or your sleep onset ability or your whatever. As you get enough in, the brain is now starting to practice that mode every day, and it becomes a more long term change for you. So neurofeedback is not one of these things you have to do forever, but you have to, as you experienced in a couple of sessions, you have to be on top of it and watch the effects and steer it and iterate it towards what you actually want to happen. And that's where people can get in trouble is buying a one size fits all system that they rent for, without guidance or this is not true just of neurofeedback, but the sophisticated biohacker knows that when the claims are glowing on the package, when the tin says it does magic. It doesn't. And the more magical the tin says it is inside there, the more you should be skeptical. When the language is too buzzword heavy, when the word quantum is stamped on the box, run away it's just not real. And in neurofeedback, there's a lot of magic, but all the systems that do neurofeedback are a little bit magical. So learning to use them and learning to know what to do next is actually somewhat difficult. Even if you have a system that should just do it all for you, they generally don't. And you have to take some control and learn the person. If I did your brain and your twin brother's brain and you got nuts, you have one, but two people with very similar brains, very similar complaints, very similar goals. And you do the same neurofeedback protocol, slightly different effects. People are unique. You have to iterate, I think with every treatment there's pros and cons and for me The biggest thing is that it's it's a commitment. It's not you have a supplement whatever it's a commitment You got a really it's some trial and error. I'm sure that not always the first time it's like boom magic it's exactly the way you want it. You have to tweak and adjust and Maybe you went a little too far. And it takes time. Go back a little. Yeah. The time is the biggest thing for folks. We generally train people for between three to six months. Three months is classic like ADHD or trauma or whatever. And you can get the good solid two standard deviations of stable change. That's sufficient for somebody dealing with acute PTSD or ADHD because it. It takes you from having those things really off the bell curve, really dysregulated to typical or above average in many of those things. And things like ADHD, you're left with the ability to go into a high stimulus, pattern matching, responsive mode. So you don't lose anything if you're the best guy in the court or the video game field. And you train your brain, you don't lose that. You just have another mode to be in when you aren't in that, giant high stress environment. So you can move the brain through some changes, but you're right. It takes about, generally I try to train people for at least 40 to 50 sessions, which is a three month program, three times a week for three months is 40. And if you're training from home, which most of our clients do, we encourage four times a week. So you end up with this like 55 session, three month program. Two standard deviations of executive function improvement in just three months? For folks who are struggling with anxiety or ADHD or a sleep issue or whatever, that rapid change... Against the landscape of trying everything or managing their goals or suffering for years without a lot of actual shifts, it's a pretty rapid landscape. Once it starts moving and you feel neurofeedback classic forms, which was I do, passive noninvasive forms. We don't zap your brain. We measure your brain and we applaud it with auditory and visual stuff. When it moves, we teach it to move. You feel that in three or four sessions. Usually you Can feel it the first time, but not usually three, four sessions. And you're like, Hey, wait, huh? Nah. Maybe. Nah. And then the next time you're like, Oh, wait a minute. No, this neurofeedback stuff does something interesting. And then it tends to be a little stronger. It builds up. And when you shift gears, you feel the thing you've done differently. No, I was very skeptical when I first did neurofeedback. And this was a while ago. This was in 2017. So it's quite some time and, uh, I was very skeptical because it sounds weird. It's just like a bunch of beeping sounds. You're like, what the hell is this? No way. This can't be changing me. Yeah. This is I'm just like, all right, forget about this. Let's unpack that. Let's unpack that. So they stuck, but I felt it right. Like I felt it after, after the session was done, I noticed a brain change, a significant brain change. What I would consider beyond the placebo effect. So there's this placebo range where you're just like, Oh, I'm not sure. And then, and then there's a kind of where you're like, nah, this is a little stronger than a placebo, I think. I would say one person out of maybe 15 or 20 feels the first session. I have a bunch of ideas about why and who, that is for, but about one person it's no more than maybe five, 10%, but that person's whoa. And typically the most common after effect your first time is something we call the windshield wiper fairy. comes by and like cleans the world. You're like, Whoa, things are quieter, but clear. And that's interesting. And then usually you sleep better that night. But if the beta waves were a little faster than you needed, if they trained you up too much, put too much weight on the bar, then you feel a little sore, effectively feel wired and you can't fall asleep that night very easily, which is classic sign of the beta. They tried was too fast for you. That's what happened. It was just harder for me to go to sleep that night. And even for two nights in a row, And so I was just like, I got to be careful with this stuff. Yeah, but that's actually a good thing because with that strong initial response, it would give the person working with you an immediate sense of what to do next. That would give you a much different experience the very next time. So let's unpack what's actually happening in classic forms of neurofeedback. So I'm going to guess that they probably trained. Put some ear clips on and put one or two wires on top of the head. And those would have been on the strip of tissue that runs ear to ear, probably on the one of the sides, maybe the left side, given that experience. And they would probably be trying to bring up some beta waves. There's some big circuits on the central part of each side of the head, left and right. The left is the part that keeps the spotlight clear and free of mud or snow and on the road in front of you. It helps you maintain the mode you're in. And oddly enough, it helps you stay awake when you're awake and asleep when you're asleep. So you tend to get ADD inattentive stuff, but also sleep maintenance issues. When that left side beta tone is a bit wonky. And the right side is the supervisor, the principal who walks around going, are you sure you want to do that? No, I didn't think so. Oh, there you go. Good job. Are you sure you want to do that? No, there you go. Helping monitor and pump the brakes and reframe the behavior. And these two circuits use beta waves to do their job, and they become more automatic and reactive using alphas and thetas. So a classic executive function, or sleep, or high performance work might involve sticking wires on those areas, above those areas. And just measuring the beta moment to moment that you're making and also measure the slower brainwaves, the alpha neutral mode or the theta automatic release mode, just measure the amounts of brainwaves moment to moment. And whenever your brain happens to make more beta briefly and less alpha and theta, a computer will see that and applaud your brain. Oh, good job, brain. Good job. Good job. Good job. A couple of seconds later, your brain will. Move in the wrong direction for the workout. And the game will slow down or stop, and your brain says, Hey, I don't like no stuff. There was stuff. Where's my stuff? And then it happens to move in the right direction briefly, and the game resumes its beeping or its visuals. The brain's Okay, cool. Stuff again. I like that stuff. And the big trick here, this is operant conditioning, this is shaping. So we move the goal post next to where the brain is every so often. So that as the brain gets tired, you're making more theta, the subtle drops in theta that you get still are applauded. And so it's mostly involuntary. So classic neurofeedback is involuntary. Operant conditioning. So you end up with this, uh, moment to moment applause. Your brain goes, Oh, that's interesting. Theta is making stuff happen. Alpha is making stuff happen. Cool. But after three or four sessions, your brain goes alpha or theta or whatever. It makes a bigger change. You typically get a within session or hour and a half, two hours after the session, kind of maximal effect. Not a linger for 24 to 36 hours. And that sounds like what happened for you. You've got like a strong effect. Chances are they put their thumb right on something you really needed, but it was a bit too much, a bit too soon. Like you went into the gym for a low back and they had you do, Roman curl chairs until you got exhausted. It was just not great for that resource or something, but that's an interesting effect because now you're. You get your hands around something and now you can steer that effect. But doing brain mapping will help you avoid getting too many of those negatives as you go. So What were some things that you were able to do for yourself that with neurofeedback, what were you able to improve with neurofeedback? Yeah, so I worked all across mental health and all across human services in my twenties and thirties, and I kept putting off going back to grad school or med school or something because I was the worst you've never met somebody with worse ADHD than I had in my, even mid late twenties, just Disinhibited, hyperactive, moving a thousand miles a minute, getting in my own way, in every, modern adult way of living kind of thing. And I had spent 11 years at that point working in really acute, both psychiatric and developmental psych with kids and all kinds of stuff. And I got injured working inpatient psych and couldn't keep doing that hands on work. So I went to work for an autism center because I had some experience there. And they primarily did neurofeedback and I started seeing executive function and autistic spectrum stuff change. And I was just like wait a minute. I've been working with populations like this for years. As far as I know, this is not changeable stuff. And yet I was seeing really strong changes. Now I know they're actually pretty common, but it blew my mind. And I started hanging out after hours training my own brain. So I paid 400 bucks to have our, to have my own brain map done. Cause 20 something years ago. The data was sent off to a third party clearinghouse for processing. It was, very limited skill. And I would stick around after we closed the shop and look at my brain maps and set up the software and try stuff. And really two things to, that I might want to relay. One is over about two months, I made three standard deviations of executive function change and effectively eliminated my ADHD, at least when I bare down to control it. It doesn't get in the way and I was able to then go back and get a PhD and study how neurofeedback works. So it's, self fulfilling benefit of neurofeedback. But as an, as a slight quirky story that's different when I was hunting around training random features in my brain map, and I don't recommend people do this. You don't want to hunt and peck and just look at stuff in your data and put your thumb on it, but I didn't know any better. And I was, I had some front midline theta and I saw that's interesting. That's a big feature. I'm going to train that and. I remember feeling really tired afterwards. And for the next two days, my legs felt tired, oddly enough, as if I had done a long run or something. And didn't think too much of it. But about five or six weeks later, I realized that I had to go buy nail clippers because I had spontaneously stopped biting my nails habitually five weeks before and hadn't noticed that I had stopped. It was so thorough. And it was like lifelong nail biting up until that point. Just stopped and like just completely was taken out of my perspective where instead of fighting against it, you know, when reading a book or being stressed, whatever, just didn't do it until the point my nails grew back and then getting in the way of typing and thing. Wait, what? Oh, I guess I gotta buy nail clippers. Huh. Okay, you know in my 20s and then You can do these kinds of things you can do these kinds of put my thumb on the scale See how things feel but what is that now? You know bites their nails. I used to bite my nails I've yeah, I don't bite my nails anymore, but I do find that I don't, I guess I don't have an urge, but if they get too long they start bothering me. So I, I always have to clip them in my hand. They're always like wait, can you see, yeah, they're always like short, but they're not big. Keeping them short's a great way to not bite them if you have that tendency too, because it's like the irregularity, picking at threads, small little edges of things. There's a. Little hints of OCD, OCD when it's not OCD quite produces, um, There's several tech type phenomena like biting your nails is in the same category as OCD So is something like misophonia where you get enraged by small sounds or you kill your partner because they're chewing too loud You know agoraphobia claustrophobia. They're all the same circuits actually and That front midline is part of that circuit set. The other one is when it's environmental, like social anxiety or agoraphobia or claustrophobia or misophonia behind the right ear is involved because you map the world in and that sensory stuff actually is a driver for the obsessiveness, but you probably have a front midline. Is that? More of which, which wave um, it, it produces all, it produces beta and alpha and theta and all the waves. Most tissue produces a combination of waves to tune what it's doing. So the front midline, the anterior cingulate communicates with other parts of the default mode network, like the posterior cingulate and the hippocampi and other areas all the time. But it's very frontal and you can think of the brain to some extent as divided up where yeah. The front half of the brain is about the inside self and the more high level cognitive stuff, and the back of the brain is about the outside world. So the midline structures, the cingulates are decision assisting structures. The front midline, the anterior cingulate, the CEO is there to help you decide what you're thinking about, what you're valuing, what you're holding in your mind, what's important to you. And the posterior cingulate does the more evaluation to what you have to focus on. Watch the road, heads up kind of stuff. So if I looked at your Singulates and I saw that the one in the front was making beta. I might guess that you were obsessing because it was caught in high gear like you actually had intrusive thoughts or something. But if I saw theta. I might think that you had again, stimulus driven stuff like biting your nails or songs in your head all day long. It's a really common one. When fate is super high stuff just latches and it just sits there and spins. You're like, why is that song in my head now? So if your obsessiveness is not the same thing all the time. It's Theta, grabbing just whatever was happened to be crossing your desk. But if it's the same complicated, slightly quirky, intrusive thoughts, now it's Beta, now it's the tissue in high gear, doing the same thing all the time. I think I've got Theta because, basically, the way my brain works is, I get absorbed into whatever I put in it. If I'm listening to music, I get absorbed in that. If I do, if I, whatever I'm doing, like I, there's like some hesitation. There's usually if it's something that requires. There's a little bit of initial hesitation. But then once I get in it, I get it. That's probably those circuits left to the supervisors of your attention, they make theta when things are boring and they look for stuff that's interesting to latch onto. And when you latch onto stuff, the theta goes away and your strong beta climb. So that's somebody who can't focus unless things are a little bit interesting and intense, but once they're focused. They're more focused than most people. That's executive function. Yeah that's more classic executive function left and right sides of the brain. With an adult, it's just somebody who learns to structure their, high intensity to get into work with a kid. For any parents listening who have kids that Need things to be interesting to get into them, kind of ADHD type phenomena. Be careful, your kids will train you to yell at them, because the intensity is better for them in some ways than boredom. So they'll wait until they're yelled at the third time to take the trash out, versus getting up off the couch and doing it, because the valence, the intensity of the stuff has to be there. So somehow they're actually looking for conflict, because it has... It's more clear than just doing the behavior in a self directed way. So if you know you do that, then you can maybe trick yourself into leaning into things, intensity points and structuring time that way. This is why things like Pomodoro technique and sprints and things like that are really good to do because you're anchoring yourself to stimuli, and to reward events and a little dopaminergic, even if it's. Artificially, Oh, I finished a 30 minute sprint. It's got that little like reward value to it. So you can play games with yourself too, if you need that way. But we would see on your brain extra theta and alpha on the left and right, probably. And then those would tell me other things about. How your sleep worked, um, how your auditory versus visual worked, and then you could, dig into deeper phenomena there. If you increase REM sleep, let's say as one of the things, or deep sleep I'm assuming you can increase deep sleep with theta but REM sleep, for example. REM sleep is biohackers beware, REM sleep is nonsense. Oh, interesting. REM sleep is nonsense. Guys, let me just tell ya, don't believe your sleep trackers. REM sleep is a joke on sleep trackers. You cannot... Okay. You cannot measure it outside of a really complicated lab. It's really hard to measure REM. Also, maybe more importantly, REM is something like blood pH. It protects itself. It regulates strongly. REM does not get dysregulated until you're going nuts. If your REM is dysregulated, you're hallucinating. You're having psychotic thoughts. Like you're, by the time your REM is an issue. You got worse problems. So don't worry about your REM, your aura ring, which I'm wearing one. And I had a whole wrist full of devices for a while. They're not measuring REM effectively. They just aren't. They're pulling magical unicorn numbers out of the sky and labeling them REM. Deep sleep, decent and deep sleep is a thing you have control over with behavior. Circadian stuff, body temperature, exercise. When you eat, you can control deep sleep. And deep sleep is that garden that will impact other resources. So learn to do the fasting before bed to allow growth hormone to surge, which means more deep sleep at night or better Delta regulation because Delta. When in high amounts when you're asleep, is that slow wave sleep signature, the SWS, the non dreaming sleep. REM looks like you're awake. If you put an EEG on somebody and measure their brain while they're in REM, the brain looks awake pretty much. Sleep trackers can't tell REM apart from light sleep. They have no idea because they're not really getting A movement is very similar, perhaps in light sleep and REM sometimes is rolling movement and stuff. That's very hard for a single sleep tracker to pick up. So look at your deep sleep and your total sleep numbers. They're decent, but all sleep trackers are iffy. My experience after wearing, covering both wrists with them for months to figure out which of the devices my clients for using, you know what they actually meant. My take is they're all decent, but just pick one. And ignore REM, look at deep and total, and just pick one device. Be it Aura, or Whoop, or Biostrap, or, 8sleep, or Bedit, or whatever. They all have some variability, but the, treat it like a body fat scale. The percentage of body fat probably isn't accurate. That's very interesting, because the reason I asked you about REM sleep was because I find that I'm able to influence deep sleep. And, um, and I actually get very good deep sleep. So that's always been good. My REM sleep is always a little it's on average, maybe like an hour and 15 minutes, according to these devices and on average, sometimes higher, sometimes a little lower, but usually an hour and 20 minutes. Let's say, so I was thinking like, I wonder what that, and I was reading that like REM sleep is related to creativity. So now I'm trying to improve my creativity. And I'm thinking, okay, one of the ways I could do that is increased REM sleep. But I haven't found really good ways to do that except just increasing the total amount of sleep you're getting. Yep. That'll do it. And increasing anything that drives up plasticity should produce a REM sleep burst later on. You actually notice this in neurofeedback. As you train the brain a few times, very common early response a couple weeks in is, whoa, I'm having really interesting active dreams now. Wow. They're really like when I was a teenager, like there's a storyline and I'm I'm doing things that have several chapters, this full blown characters. Wow. My dreams are really detailed and visual. That's plasticity and the dreams often with neurofeedback, the dreams often have a travel component. People report going on trips or on a journey or on a quest with crazy characters. And what we're talking about probably is BDNF in the hippocampal place cells because that's one of the biggest drivers of plasticity in the brain is the hippocampal. Brain derived neurotrophic factor, growth hormone in the brain, essentially. And BDNF released in the hippocampus is strongly released when you explore new environments. This is why... Things like exercise are so antidepressant is because you cause a, if you're exploring an environment, going for a run, going for a walk, you're creating encoding of place information. You're also doing something with the eyes going side to side, which is a signal of safety. If you have time to look left to if you're walking and you can sway your eyes, you must be safe. So it allows the hippocampus to create more of a changeability signal. If your eyes are close together and you're looking right in front of you at the tiger. No time for plasticity. Plasticity goes away, time sampling goes way up, and we stress out and go into sympathetic mode. So you can hack some of these things and learn to control some of these features, both behaviorally and, at the resource level. But yeah. And so things like social, like you mentioned social is one of the main parameters in which you can improve with neurofeedback. What are you improving socially? You mentioned autism, but like what are the issues that people have socially and what does neurofeedback improve? So when we look at brain maps, we only see indirect high level features. And so what we would necessarily. Guess about what the person's experiencing might not, be a real close fit, but behind the right ear that tempo parietal junction We bring in the world there and map it into the self mapping to the default mode network and so you tend to see a area behind the right ear either disinhibited too much theta not enough alpha or activated too much beta And it's a, it becomes a predictor of being, it being hard to filter out information coming in via the sensory and social channels of information. And so you tend to get people that, I call it the princess and the pea syndrome, where you can't ignore small little sounds. You have sensory irritability or sensory integration issues, like sitting in a coffee shop, working would be your worst nightmare. You can't ignore or filter anything. Or, you can get higher level features like eye contact becomes difficult. When that area becomes hot or you become overly empathetic in some ways and can't shrug off someone's anger and judgment Or you notice the world's pain and you just can't not feel it So if you have both of these cingulates and behind the right ear, I call this pattern the gifted poet It's all the same complaints all the same circuits. You might get an autism, but the opposite phenomena You're extra socially intact, extra queued in, you're reading people's minds by looking at their faces. It's all the same reasons, and you're actually anxious, but you're so powerful with these resources that they're burning oil a little bit, and you can't stop thinking, you can't stop feeling. And you have all the resources with which to catastrophize, obsess, feel deeply. And so these people like write songs and poetry and great magnum opuses or deal with mental health challenges sometimes. But it's that same circuit behind the right ear and I would not know looking at a cold brain map. If this person has a lot of difficulty with social and sensory in a way where they're overwhelmed by that flood and missing it a little bit or not parsing it out well, we call that autistic spectrum stuff, or they're drinking it in deeply and it's uncomfortable, but they're really getting it at a nuanced, rich way. We call that social anxiety, perhaps, or, a nuanced social perspective. They're both unusual. This is why brain mapping is not diagnostic because you wouldn't know which of those cases, but you can say, Hey, look. This tissue is a little unusual. Does that seem valid to you? And if so... Do you care? Do you want to do something? Do you want to change it? So because we're indexing both what things mean, and if they're important to go after at the level of the person, you can start to really tailor your brain changes to yourself because you're not trying to fit yourself into a diagnostic landscape or the DSM, ideas about where diseases are. You're really dropping down to brain resources and reframing them. For the person, and this means that you can show someone their back right TPJ, the princess and the peace stuff, which is probably causing some social anxiety. But if you frame it as, Hey, look, here's a resource. Here's how it's unusual here, how it operates. The moment the person understands that they're suffering from their social anxiety is not gone and the history hasn't changed, but it's suddenly a lot harder to feel overwhelmed or ashamed. Of this thing. It's just your brain. All right. You want to change it? Get after it. Let's do something here. But when you understand how it works and you see it in data, it's like looking at your broken shoulder on an x ray. It might be frustrating. It might be painful, but you're probably not ashamed of your shoulder. It makes sense. And we're often not in that. Place of balance perspective when it comes to the brain, we're often overwhelmed by our anxiety response, executive function stuff, our cravings, our fear responses, our lack of restoration from deep sleep. But if you learn how these things work, then what the specifics you work on is a little bit irrelevant. It just becomes control and you can iterate through change in a bunch of ways. So all those six areas I mentioned are all changeable things. Executive function, stress, sleep, sensory, social, and speed. So how do these things, how do these things interact with meditation? Let's say, so they're, do they, are they synergistic? Is it in place of one another or they are synergistic. They are synergistic. I generally combine mindfulness and meditation support with our clients historically with. Neurofeedback. And I have clients for whom they don't want to combine them both or for whom it's not appropriate. I have clients for whom they love combining them both and my perspective is if you combine neurofeedback with other things that bring up plasticity, you accelerate change. Quite a lot, actually. Neurofeedback tends to accelerate the change you get from other stuff. really solidly. But meditation alone is a big builder of plasticity. So I'm a big fan of having people combine that. I would also say that meditation is good. They are. They are. They are. Yeah. There are some things you can do with meditation that are very close or the same things you can get done with neurofeedback, but that's like a lot of the benefits. seem like they're the same. Attention, depression, like all these kinds of benefits they seem like they're the same, but you're saying the mechanisms are very different. The mechanisms of meditation are voluntary anchored attention. Meditation is paying attention in a particular way. On purpose to the present moment and then doing something with it, maybe replacing judgment, the curiosity or noting what you're noticing or anchoring and re anchoring or having a sensory input or something, but it's an executive function. Anchor. It's voluntary. Only do stuff. You can feel neurofeedback and go after involuntary tissue. That's not you. In the top frontal area of cortex and tune that, take a seizure focus you have and tune it out, or a concussion you have and wake that tissue up. You can't get access to that voluntarily, so you can do things you can't feel, which is most of the brain with neurofeedback. And with meditation, you're mostly working on the frontal lobes. The insula, all the awareness areas and some of the cortex. So you get secondary effects on stress response, sympathetic power, sympathetic speed of processing. You reduce the age related cortical decline and thinning of your cortex with meditation, but you're not probably going to work on making yourself seizure resistant or getting rid of the posterior cingulate. Meditation is not a great intervention for anxiety. You drop yourself into the anxiety. So I don't want somebody meditating their way out of PTSD, but you can get at the posterior cingulate, soothe it, dissolve that hyper clenched up, watch the road, kind of tendency. Now meditation can be brought in to help you continue to transform and control your brain. So I think they work hand in glove, just like therapy. There's a landscape for therapy as well. What about things like, Pharma supplements, drugs, let's say more supplements, right? Do they, nootropics or other things, do they work hand in hand with neurofeedback as well? Or are you typically like them separated? Mostly separate. I often like with nootropics and other things. Neurofeedback makes permanent change to big resources. Let's rebuild the whole machine and then let's figure out if you need stuff to some extent for like nootropics anyways, for medications, most medications you train straight through and the floor comes up to meet the person and then you can pull the meds if you wish. A couple things in people's medication. Pharmacopeia or their lifestyle or things you have to be careful with because as you do neurofeedback, they start to get much stronger. And that includes things like Adderall as well as cannabis. If you're habitually, partaker of those things and you do neurofeedback three or four weeks in, you're going to be three to four times more impacted by cannabis or Adderall than you expect. And it might happen all at once. So out of nowhere, you're like I can't get off the couch because I'm at the joint and used to be like, all day, every day, it really starts to potentiate the impact of dopaminergics and other things. So you really get this need to back off on your Adderall, your Ritalin, your Cannabis. Most other drugs doesn't really have that much impact. You can train straight through them because you're training the brain relative to itself. What it matters is mapping the brain. You gotta measure your brain relative to this population level database. They're free of caffeine. They're free of Adderall. So I want you to map your brain first thing in the morning, before meds. If stimulants are your jam, like Adderall, then you gotta do 48 hours washout to get a clean map. If cannabis is your jam, you gotta do 24 hours for a clean washout in the EEG. Reasonable to get a nice, clean set of data. And then the brain maps, those pictures of your brain, those are stable. A brain map is the same, month after month after month, until you add things like neurof Oh exactly. Yeah. Okay. So then you want to remap every couple of months. But the point is, you don't have to be free of this stuff while you're manipulating your brain. You can just change it. And then get a little bit of a clearer picture to get a new assessment in, if you can. What do you do about the thing of, let's say... For me, right? It depends on what mode I'm in. If I'm traveling, I want my brain to be one way. If I'm deep in, focus and just need to do a lot of reading, I want it to be another way. If I need to be at conferences, I want to be more social. Different brains. For me, let's say, for example, I'll do microdosing with psychedelics to put me in a more social mode. I don't when I'm doing micro dosing with psychedelics, I'm less inclined to want to do defocus and read. I'm more extroverted. So what I'm saying is like when I change my brain. I do it for different purposes. How does that work with neurofeedback? Cause you're making the change. It's more permanent. I guess You're changing traits, purpose, you're changing resources and traits, not States with neurofeedback. So if you had those three goals, pro social, pro focus, creative, whatever, you could train the resources on all those things. And then you'd have on tap the ability to move into deep focus mode when you wished. To pull back and move into more receptive, chill social mode when you wished, you'd have smoother gear shifts. So the goal of neurofeedback would should be to create broad resource access so you could move into, again, the person with OCD doesn't necessarily want to lose that front midline hyperfocus if they're a CEO, but they might want to be able to put that down at 5 30 p. m. and not try to solve their wife's problems all night long. And if you can control over it. Great. So you don't need necessarily now to go home and have a drink of scotch to put yourself in that less critical mode. You can say, Oh, let me power down and literally feel different. Three seconds later. That's the control of your feedback through the nerve feedback. You're able to control your state more conscious. Yeah. If I sent you to the gym for a few months, it made you curls all the time. And then you came across a heavy thing in the road. You wouldn't go wait, left arm, a bicep. You just pick the thing up and move it. And that's what happens when I put you in a new car, when you tune the machine up and the steering and the brakes, everything works better. You perform differently. You start to lean in. And so I got frantic calls. My kid got up before he made breakfast for us. Or I asked me the trash out one time. He got up and did it. Or wow, the school called home and thanked me for putting on stimulants. I didn't put them on stimulants. I just did neurofeedback. So like you get this visible change in behavior because none of us want to suffer or be effortful. You want to lean into good resources. So if suddenly it's easier to read, you read more. Because it's enjoyable if it's easier to be calm and focused with your partner, then you give them that space if they need it because it doesn't take effort for you. It's actually just a, an exercise of your resources. So having those resources, not bottlenecks, I actually flipped the question. What's in the way of getting into that focus mode, that social mode, that creative mode, what's in the way of those things? Let's find those bottlenecks. Let's eliminate those. And then you'll move into those modes. Whenever you wish more reliably, okay, And so you yourself do you still do neurofeedback on yourself or only every so often? I've done a fair amount And my brain does pretty much what I want it to do So every so often most of what I'm figuring out. I want to develop some really interesting new protocols. I'll often try them but No I designed neurofeedback protocols for a couple hundred people a week, a few hundred sessions a week generally. And we have a whole team throughout the world, about 20 senior coaches that help work with me and design, and adjust plans day to day. But No, I, I have, as I develop expertise in different areas of biohacking, I have accomplished to a large extent what I need to in those areas. And then I tend to move a little bit out of intense work with them. So I did a bunch of neurofeedback and still do some, but I've made the changes I want to make. And, I helped found TrueBrain, nootropic company years ago, and I'm a big fan of nootropics. But the reason I helped found TrueBrain was because everyone was asking me every single day, Hey, what's the best place to start? Hey, what am I, what should I take? And my mom was one of them. So I created like the world's best, like first starting place nootropics for the best, broad goals and true brain started to produce those compounds. My mom still calls me and says I'm having trouble finding paracetam. Can you find, cause she knows about nootropics now, which is awesome. My 75 year old mother biohacks, but It's all about agency and I don't take a lot of nootropics myself because I'm not like, if I was doing a high pressure speaking schedule and travel schedule, I would probably dial some in to support that. But instead I'm focusing on some omega 3 fatty acids and vitamin D and some magnesium, just basic things. And I'm not really, yeah, I want to build a foundation and change the system and then only add state changers or specific things. As needed or for specific suffering or for specific goals. And I, for myself, don't have really have the need to keep pushing it. My brain, I don't think I would know what to do with more resources. I sleep, I really focus on sleep. And other forms of biohacking to keep the machine. So how many hours do you sleep? I sleep about I go to bed about 8. 30. I'm usually asleep by, before 9. I get up a little before 4. So I get about 7 hours, 6 and a half hours of sleep. I usually I'm waking up before 4 going, Oh yeah, 3. 52. Okay. And get up, getting up then. But I wake up without an alarm, 4 a. m. and I go to bed. Feeling the sleep urge between eight and nine. So I get six hours of recorded sleep, six and a half to seven. And my aura ring usually gives me an hour and a half to two of deep because I've dialed in the phenomena so I can get an, and even if I'm like traveling or short hit or stressed or ill. My brain's regulated enough that it prioritizes deep, so I tend to get the hour and a half to two hours of deep no matter how much sleep I get, which is a good sign that you're regulated. By the way, if you have to sleep 10 hours to get your 2. 5 deep, then you're not well regulated. Essentially, if you can get away with Some nights that are short sleep, but you still manage to squeeze out the deep. It's a good sign Your brain knows what to do when it's sleeping I'm I would say I'd fit in that category now, even if I get pretty little sleep. I It does definitely prioritize the deep There you go. It's a good sign. So what does that mean though? What's the sign? Deep sleep is required for memory consolidation. It's required to release growth hormone. It's required for all kinds of rest and repair. There's this literal mechanical agitation cycle, like a washing machine that goes through and moves waves of cerebrospinal fluid at two Hertz pulse through the brain to wash out all the metabolic. Okay. Thank you. Biproducts as a delta like rinse cycle for the brain. So you need to do delta because it creates that metabolic cleaning. It also moves memory from short term, which in the hippocampus into longterm distributed throughout the cortex forever. And then the growth hormone effect, you need the delta to actually get growth hormones. So people often report increased dreaming after they start a new intervention. Oh, I'm dreaming more. You're probably not. You're probably sleeping more deeply with Delta and therefore you can encode the experience of dreams and remember them because you had Delta and Delta's deep sleep. So worry about deep sleep, ignore the rim. But but yes, you need to have enough of that deep for the metabolic reset for circadian processes. And if I looked at your brain when you're awake. And so the speeds of your delta or the amount of your delta was unusual. I could predict what your sleep is doing because the architecture would leave signatures when you weren't getting enough of different quality of sleep. Okay. And so what are we looking at in terms of cost for neurofeedback? What are the options? Yeah. We are pretty competitive worldwide. We tend to price under most people. Most of our clients do a there's two things we do. One is brain mapping and the other is brain training. And we always include, of course, the brain mapping in the brain training programs, but you can come to our offices and just do brain mapping. And we have a annual membership at our physical offices, which include New York City, LA, St. Louis Orange County. Plus we have some pop ups in London and Stockholm. You can come to those offices and do a membership driven. Brain mapping thing where it's unlimited and we charge 500 bucks for that. Although podcast listeners get it for half price. So two 50 a year for unlimited access to brain maps in our offices. That's the best deal in the world for QEGs. What does that mean? They could go whenever they want. Examine your nootropics, learn your brain injuries, check out your post COVID, learn how your ADHD works. Yeah. Unlimited. Neurofeedback's more expensive, takes a lot more time and attention and technology from us, and we give you equipment, and you're often doing it from home. Our three month program adds another 5, 500, and that's 55 sessions of neurofeedback, so we're coming in at that. 100 session rate, essentially, and our longer programs, it drops below that. And, groups, people, families, people training for longer pay a lot less generally. Each session is how long, for example, about half an hour. And I might have you do they're also getting the gear as well. Yeah, during the length of a program, we provide equipment. We give people a little laptop bag, essentially, with a laptop, EEG amplifier, paste gel, wires, bits and bobs. It's all turnkey, so there's nothing really to buy or to worry about complexity of. And then we do a couple live do two weeks of live visits, for three times a week. The coaches are working with you to teach you to stick wires to your head. And initially, if you're not near an office, we're also doing a live brain map remotely. Like our QEGs aren't unlimited remote, but we do them remotely in our programs. And so if you're doing a three month program, we're going to start with a remote brain map, unless you're near an office. And then you're going to spend a couple of days putting a cap on your head and getting gelled up and having the coaches walk you through doing your own EEGs in your kitchen, which is cool. And then we do the first two weeks of instruction on neurofeedback and neurofeedback systems are not super complicated. Here's an example of a small micro neurofeedback amp. This has a two channel amp. I usually use four channel amps these days. But essentially three wires is a single channel of data. So a lot of what you're doing, let's say your first handful of sessions, a couple of your clips, one wire on the right, one wire on the left, and you train 50 minutes in the right, move a wire. 50 minutes to the left and the software set up to do two different things. You exercise one half and the other half and might take you 30 or 45 minutes in the first two weeks working live with you guys. And then we give everyone a private Slack channel. So you have the seven day a week, at least 12 hour day support. We have coaches in Europe and the UK, so it's pretty broad now. And. After you're doing, after you've done your first two weeks, you can then get help setting up and troubleshooting wire placement, or we can hop on your private slack and bug you for not filling out your sleep surveys because That happens. It's coaching process where the coaches work with you to help you iterate and get those three to four sessions done. And then they're watching your reports. Hey, thanks for that sleep survey. Great. Now try this. And we're working together to speak to their coach. The coaches and I are on their Slack channel all the time. So seven day a week access, but we're trying to get our clients to train their brain three to four times a week. So we're going to touch base on that channel. The coaches also offer live calls and desktop shares and things, whatever needed. And I do a data review with people whenever they have fresh data. So it's very much like teaching somebody to do their neurofeedback. Instead of treating them and doing stuff to them. It's a different experience when working with PeakBrain. A lot closer to your personal trainer. Teaching you to run the machines and the fitness thing and have good form, you look over every person's brain map? I do. Why? And I teach everyone. Do the coaches not do that instead? They do. They also do that. Oh yeah, it's all, it's education at every level. So I look at every brain map. And I teach every person to look at their brain map directly, at least once or twice. The coaches also do that with me and with their clients. And then the coaches come to me every day and say, Andrew, my client, the session number. We just tried this effect. We have this planned. What should we do? And I'll say, oh, grab their data. Okay, look at this. See this here. This might have been too fast for them. It looks like we might have undershot or something. Try this instead. And they had this goal, right? Now try some of that too. And if that lands well, twice more. And then next week, I think they wanted alpha theta. See if that's true. And then add some more of that. The coach goes, okay, and adjust the two week plan. Goes to the client's private chat or phone call and says, Hey, thanks. That sleep survey. Ooh, sorry. Your mother in law is a jerk. Here's the mother in law's a jerk protocol. Or whatever. And you learn to like both support the person iterating towards their goals, but also being responsive to what they're noticing day to day. Someone is trying to abstain from alcohol who, is hung over because they couldn't. You approach that differently than somebody who's having a trauma response or who got a bad teacher report at school or, and so there's a bit of iterative like response, responding to what they're doing day to day, but then really trying to help them support that longer term change. All right. Wow. Awesome. I think neurofeedback is really promising and I think I'm Gonna, it's something that I definitely want to get into and really explore it. It's, it is a commitment, but I think that for me, I chose a different path but I think I'm running out of that. The meaning, like I chose the pharmacological, looking at my lab data, looking at, genetics and like all this other information, which was tremendously helpful for everything. That I've been able to, I had tons of health issues, I got rid of all them, the attention problems, the cognitive issues I've been able to improve it in a different way, but I think that neurofeedback is one of those things that some people, a lot of people don't like a lot of supplements, or they don't really, they don't like doing a lot of the things that I've done, And so I think whereas they'd rather just spend the time. Whereas me, I'm like, let me push off meditation, but I think, but I do think it depends on the person. Some people are more physiologically based as well, meaning they might have physiological anxiety that is really tied to specific neurotransmitters. But I think it could have been either way. I think if I would have done neurofeedback, I could have had tremendous. Success based on a few experiences I had and based on the research, it seems like there's a lot of good stuff coming out about it. And I think it's really promising and it's one of the, like meditation and neuro feedback are the kind of the next goals of mine after, optimizing my labs, optimizing my specific, neuro chem, neuro chemistry stack and bodies, and all these supplements and diets that that I do. It's like after I think for me now is actually like a good time that I want to start focusing on more meditation, more nerve feedback, things like that, although I think for a lot of people, especially kids, I would say that a lot of people I would say would be better off doing the neurofeedback, trying that first, like you mentioned. Parents do come to me because they don't want to put their kids on stimulants. When the teacher or the school nurse is encouraging them to, and they're like, what else is there? And they find neurofeedback because they're hunting for alternatives. Or, I often get folks who are. Kids and adults who've tried medication, you get an ADHD kid with anxiety, they're not going to do well with Ritalin or Adderall. Or you get an adult who's tried every medication for their sleep or their depression or anxiety and they're not working because they're medication resistant or they're Quirky brain, you can still get changes with those people. So I find that neurofeedback, iss the best tool when things are really acute. It's weird, but neurofeedback tends to work fastest and most obviously, the worst things are. Which is not normally true in mental health. So the more acute your anxiety, your ADHD, your seizures are, the more rapid the changes are. Which really probably speaks more to the brain's ability than the neurofeedback's ability. Once you get some regulation, it just takes off. The brain loves to re regulate. But I, I think it's not, it's not either or learn your brain that I think you should do the brain mapping, but then decide what your goals are and you can pursue change or alleviate suffering or pursue peak performance. It's all valid. It's your brain. Go forth and transform. And, the only thing I don't want people to tolerate is not understanding themselves or feeling overwhelmed or things are happening to them in their brain because a lot of the brain changes all these regulatory features. They shift, shift happens, get yours, get some of that change. And if those big regulatory features, attention, sleep, stress, sensory, social speed, if those things are in the way, those things love to change and get some support changing them. And you can very likely make really large changes over time. Wow. Yeah, that's great. So if somebody wants to find you or sign up. How would they go about doing that? Yeah, check us out at peakbraininstitute. com as our website, or peakbrainLA is all of our socials, because that was our first office. And yeah, come find us, ask us your brain questions, the chat box, the website is not some... Bot. It's actually our senior staff and our coaches. When they're bored, they hang out in the chat box and answer neurofeedback questions. And we're going to give every listener of the show a discount. If they want to come in and get brain maps, it's that discount to 50 membership, but you can also use for full remote programs. So if you're in the U S or overseas, and you're interested in getting up and running with neurofeedback, let us know, and we'll design a program for you. Awesome. And could we call that a discount self decode? We can. We're going to put self decode as a coupon and I'll create a little URL and I'll shoot it over to you so you can put it in the show notes. So it becomes a self adding coupon when people click on it and stuff. Awesome. Yeah, no, that, that's really great. I I actually, I really do think that neurofeedback, it's like it's really great and it's something that. People always ask me like, what do I, we have on self decode, we have a neurofeedback as a recommendation for quite a few things, whatever this clinical trials on it, it comes up as a recommendation. But, people then have the questions like, what do I, neurofeedback. So now what? It's a lot of marketing out there in the space there's devices that are more sizzled than steak, things that, again if it says that it works without any intervention. And it's all magical and it works because of magic. Be careful. There are devices in the neurophilic landscape that if you look a little bit at their, they don't pass the sniff test and these are like DIY devices. No, these are devices that are like franchise devices, rental devices devices where there's companies behind them that are just. Cranking out devices, but without any tailoring of the process and there's marketing and business process, but no actual clinical or tailored work with the individual. I get people all the time coming to see me who have side effects created by one size fits all systems they've been using that they bought or rented and they create, what you described after your one, two experience that if you were using a one size fits all system and you called and they'd say, I'll keep going. And then over three, four weeks, you'd not have crappy sleep issues. You'd be anxious. And if you keep going. It becomes permanent. Now, what do you do? You can back it out. You can change it, but not without guidance. And that's my big complaint is, neurofeedback is pretty powerful. I really do encourage folks to lean into the end of neurofeedback, where brain mapping is a tool to make sure you're operating in a sane landscape. And also work with people who can iterate, who can help you adjust. Don't just say there's a particular magic box that does everything. Make sure the person the team you're working with. Is able to answer your questions, communicate with you, unpack things, explain things, that's really where the good neurofeedback is. And there's probably five or 6, 000 people in the world that do this work at a high level very well. So if you can't, if you can't do remote with us, find one of them. And a sign of one of them being good is they do brain mapping generally, and they communicate with you about what your goals are and about what your brain is doing. Yeah. I guess the equivalent would be like somebody says, Hey, I've got energy problems. And then they didn't do any kind of blood tests or whatever. So you don't know if they're iron deficient. You don't know anything about them. Yeah. And you go to the one, the one health coach who always gives everyone B12. Great. Until you get the person who's got a methylation status that's wonky. And now they got crazy anxiety from it. Ugh. But if they think B12 is magical, it always works. Then, that's my issue with the brains are weird. People are weird. Got to tailor it. Got to be careful. Okay. Awesome. Thanks for coming on. I really appreciate it. And yeah, hopefully. We'll speak again. 67% of listeners aren't subscribed to the show, so please don't forget to show your support by hitting the subscribe button. Now, you'll not only be supporting the show, but also investing in yourself and your health journey, all while helping to keep us ad free.