Revolutionizing Mental Wellness: Discover Why Many Top Biohackers Swear by Neurofeedback—Live!
Episode Summary
I recently joined Tony Wrighton on the Tony Wrighton podcast to talk about why neurofeedback keeps showing up in biohacker circles, and what actually moves the needle on brain health. You can watch the original conversation. What follows is drawn from that discussion, in my own words.
Why are biohackers turning to neurofeedback?
Neurofeedback gives you a tool to make real changes in resources you usually treat as fixed. You already track muscle mass, bone density, lipid panels, maybe a methylation analysis. You can do the same with your brain. You can look at your speed of processing, your alpha waves, how much impulsivity you carry, how deep your sleep is, how much brain fog you're hauling around, and whether that old high school concussion still shows up.
Two things pushed neurofeedback into the spotlight in the last few years. The technology became more accessible, and the stigma around mental health and cognitive performance dropped. Stimulant shortages played a role too. For changing executive function specifically, stimulants do not work as well as neurofeedback does. People started looking for tools that produce lasting change rather than a daily dose.
The field has spread across several formats. Traditional clinical neurofeedback with a provider. Intensive programs like Dave Asprey's 40 Years of Zen, a weeklong format. Self-driving consumer devices that adjust in real time. Gadgets that tell you whether you're meditating. The space is expanding fast, even if it still reads as niche to most people.
What is neurofeedback and how does it work?
Neurofeedback is biofeedback on brain waves. You measure what the brain is doing in real time using EEG, and when it briefly shifts in the useful direction for a particular resource, you applaud the brain with auditory and visual feedback. Most forms run as passive operant conditioning. The computer watches your brain and decides, for this exercise, to reward more alpha or more beta in a specific location.
This runs below conscious awareness. You cannot feel your brain waves and you cannot directly control them. So you sit watching what feels like a simple game stopping and starting at random. The brain, meanwhile, hears "good job" again and again for the small shifts it happens to make. That is the mechanism, and it works on the big gross resources common to everyone: executive function, anxiety, speed of processing, brain fog. You will not see the subtle content of thought. You will see the resources.
I run my clinics starting with a QEEG brain map. At least half the field uses quantitative EEG, and I encourage anyone considering neurofeedback to start there. We put a cap on your head, fill it with gel, and have you sit still about ten minutes eyes closed, then eyes open, to get physiological baselines. We add a 20-minute computerized attention test that measures impulsivity, inattention, reaction time, stamina, and fatigue. Then we compare those three measures against age-matched samples to see, on a bell curve, where you stand out.
The goal of brain mapping is not to make you average. People are genuinely weird, and that is fine. The goal is to flag what sticks out, tell you what that pattern often means, and let you decide whether you care. If it tracks with your experience, you can go after it.
How fast does neurofeedback change the brain?
Most people do not feel the brain wave exercise for the first couple of sessions. Around session three, someone says they think they notice something, and then it wears off an hour later. What you feel depends on what you are training. Train up alpha on the posterior cingulate, the region involved in evaluating, orienting, and threat sensitivity, and you feel relaxed. Train beta in the left central area, involved in vigilance and stabilization, and you feel clear and switched on, briefly and subtly, before it fades.
As you repeat the protocol, those windows of effect build up. After roughly 30 to 40 sessions you produce a permanent change. Every 20 or 25 sessions you can map the brain again and watch the changes accumulate. In about 25 sessions, roughly a month and a half of training, you can move about a full standard deviation on the bell curve for executive function, anxiety, speed of processing, and fatigue markers. The data shifts, the performance shifts, and your experience shifts with it.
This becomes an iterative process, like working with a good personal trainer. You track sleep, stress, and attention, layer in interventions, meet the goal where it is, and adjust as you change. Brains change more slowly than you would like and faster than bodies, which is the part I find genuinely useful.
Does neurofeedback improve sleep?
Almost every neurofeedback provider asks about sleep daily, and half my clients arrive saying their sleep is fine, they are here for focus or drinking or trauma. Then we exercise the brain and sleep flexes anyway, the way your shoulders report back the day after a hard gym session. For about 24 hours after a training session, a window of subtle differences opens up in sleep, stress, attention, mood, speed of processing, and creativity.
The field itself was discovered through a sleep component in the brain. There is a brain wave called sensorimotor rhythm, SMR, that lives on the sensorimotor strip. SMR helps you sit still, focus, and pump the brakes on impulsivity. The same rhythm keeps you asleep when a car goes by, because the burst of waves tells the brain the noise is not threatening. It also starts memory consolidation as you move into deep sleep, and it makes the brain more resistant to seizures. Train SMR and you get changes in both daytime focus and nighttime sleep, because both lean on the same thalamocortical circuits.
A common pattern: sleep gets shorter first. Someone goes from eight or nine hours of poor sleep, never rested, to six and a half hours feeling good. About three weeks in I start hearing, "I'm not sleeping much but I feel great, this is weird." The sleep architecture has corrected itself. The brain is now getting its resource buildup in three sleep cycles instead of five, so it stops at three. A few weeks later sleep stretches back out a little.
You also see vivid, story-driven dreams a few weeks in. Travel dreams, exploring environments. I think this is the place cells in the hippocampus, which encode environments and are among the brain's biggest generators of plasticity. That same plasticity is why exercise and exploring new places carry an antidepressant effect. A single neurofeedback session produces a plasticity boost you can measure for 24 hours, stronger than most things you can measure. That makes it a reliable way to shape change in a fairly controllable direction.
What sleep metrics should biohackers actually track?
I have a whole rant on sleep tracking. Stop caring about your REM number. REM is like your blood pH. If someone tells you it is modifiable, they do not know what they are talking about. You cannot change it much without becoming psychotic, and the trackers cannot measure it well anyway. The REM number on your ring is not valid.
Track total sleep and deep sleep. The infrared trackers measure deep sleep reasonably well, and deep sleep is a flexible resource that changes day to day with your behavior. Work out too late at night and it drops. Fast before bed and it rises. Hit morning light, get morning activity, stop eating at the end of the day, and deep sleep enhances. Train the brain and you can put your thumb on the scale, then read the result the next morning. That feedback loop is where the learning happens. For more on this, see biohacking sleep.
Does light timing or food timing matter more for sleep?
Here is where I kill a few biohacking sacred cows. Your bedtime is not the important appointment, your wake time is. Lock your wake time and let the sleep urge build. Light matters far less than people think, and the blue-blocker glasses are mostly missing the point. The literature on light points to morning light as the important cue, not evening light. And the variable that drives circadian change is intensity, not color. So skip the tinted glasses and just keep bright overhead lights off at the end of your day.
The number one cue your body uses to know what time it is, ahead of light, sleep, and activity, is food. Eat in the time zone you want to live in.
The mechanism runs through melatonin. As melatonin rises at the end of the day, it suppresses insulin release, which drives that snacky craving in the last couple of hours before bed. Eat late and you go to bed with blood sugar elevated. Any significant blood sugar during sleep suppresses growth hormone. Once you pass 35 or 40, you get one circadian pulse of growth hormone a couple of hours after you fall asleep, and that is it. Go to bed full and you lose that pulse, your heart rate stays elevated, you stay warm, you skim the surface of sleep, and you wake up tired and hungry. Start the night fasted or at least unfed and your cortisol dips, then surges back to release blood sugar and wake you in the morning with energy and no hunger.
Your body takes three to four hours to process a meal. Eat at eight, sleep at ten, and you have just pushed your circadian rhythm forward by four hours. The human circadian rhythm runs longer than the 24-hour day, so if you do not entrain it daily, it slides. Shift workers and rotating-shift nurses carry strong cardiovascular, anxiety, and sleep risk for exactly this reason.
The useful trick: food timing lets you sidestep jet lag. Before I fly from Los Angeles to Stockholm or London, I shift my meal times two hours a day for three days toward the destination zone. I arrive with essentially no jet lag. Personally I eat in about a six-hour window and finish by early afternoon. I am a middle-aged man, so I get away with that. For early time-restricted feeding and the metabolic case, see strategic fasting.
A caution for women under 35: female bodies adapt to metabolic stressors fast, so aggressive fasting and macronutrient restriction can downregulate hormones. If you are premenopausal, get enough good fats and avoid hard calorie restriction. A practical approach for anyone: think about caloric deficit on the scale of a week, not every single day. That keeps you from hyper-adapting.
Does brain training really prevent cognitive decline?
Most consumer brain training does not work, and a lot of it rests on iffy science. The cognitive games, the memory and matching apps, have solid research showing no skill transfer. You get better at the game and it does not carry into your life. Sudoku and crosswords might do a little, probably not much.
What does protect aging brains is role replacement and role continuity. I used to teach gerontology at UCLA, and this is the durable finding. If you are a military jet pilot, you retire from the military and fly commercial, then teach physics in high school using flying examples. You keep tapping the expertise, the passion, the things that engaged you, even as the specific role changes. Find the thing you like to do that resembles what challenged you historically. That replaces the engagement and pressure a game cannot reproduce. See the critical aging window for more on when this matters.
On the gadgets, I am skeptical of most of them. Binaural beats do nothing. Humans do not have a frequency-following response for auditory input, so an "alpha wave" binaural beat does not produce alpha in the brain. If you enjoy it, that is because it gives you a ritual to anchor a meditation. Try the same practice with a mantra or no audio at all and you will likely feel the same.
There is no "best" neurofeedback device either. I can get you in shape with a Nautilus machine, a kettlebell, a resistance band, or calisthenics if I know what I am doing. The same is true of brain tools. Start with goals, not gadgets. What does success look like, do you have assessment tools, and is the thing you are doing moving the needle? A lot of devices end up in a drawer because the outcome criteria were never clear. You can do plenty with no tech: meditation, exercise, walking, sleep, journaling.
Is red light therapy worth it for brain health?
I resisted photobiomodulation for years because I assumed it belonged in the same bucket as binaural beats. Then I got one in my hands, felt something, and started mapping brains before and after red light therapy. You can see changes build up over a few months.
I have been using a device called the Neuronic, a white headset full of LEDs. You can run sustained 1070-nanometer red light across the whole cortex for mitochondrial support, or target specific quadrants of the central strip. The piece I am most interested in is pulsed light. Light entrainment behaves differently from auditory entrainment. Pulsing red light in a brain wave frequency appears to enhance the frequency the brain is struggling with. I do not fully understand the mechanism yet, so I stay cautious, but the data changes look similar to what fine-tuning the EEG produces, just aimed at different goals.
Map first. Find where your cortex shows unusual frequencies, stuck patterns, or inflammation, then target the photobiomodulation there. It is targeted without being as finicky as measuring electricity in real time. I lean on PBM for the metabolic end of the pool: post-COVID brain fog, concussion, accelerated aging, mold, Lyme, and heavy metal exposure. One thing worth knowing is that on a QEEG, concussion, post-COVID, Lyme, and mold exposure all look roughly the same. You cannot tell the cause of brain fog apart at a high level. For the red light mechanism, see brain biohacking with photobiomodulation, and for the fog itself, biohacking brain fog.
What can a brain map actually show you?
A brain map is stable day to day and month to month unless you do something to change it, which means you can run acute contrasts. Map clean, then map again with caffeine, a racetam, a methylated B vitamin, cannabis, or your Adderall in your system, and you see the effect jump out visibly. Even a single cup of coffee reads as night and day for most people. That kind of contrast crystallizes what a substance is doing for you in a way that makes immediate sense.
The encouraging part: most of what we treat as things happening to us are things you can get in and change. A handful of brain features resist change, and those tend not to be the ones causing trouble. Anxiety, stress, sleep, attention, mood, and speed of processing are the easier targets. For the conditions, see biohacking anxiety and does neurofeedback work for ADHD.
My standing advice for biohackers is to resist the consumerist reflex of grabbing the next shiny object for every symptom. Sometimes you need the right knowledge, not the best device. Think about goals rather than diagnosis, define what success looks like, and run an assessment before and after so you know whether the work is landing. Start with a brain map alongside a blood panel, build a coherent plan from what you find, and let the tools attach to the plan rather than the other way around.
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