Habits and Hustle - Episode 52: Dr. Andrew Hill – Founder of Peak Brain Institute, Top Peak Performance Coach
Episode Date: February 25, 2020Dr. Andrew Hill, the Founder of Peak Brain Institute, is a top peak performance coach in the country. He holds a Ph.D. in Cognitive Neuroscience from UCLA’s Department of Psychology and continuous t...o do research on attention and cognitive performance. In this episode, he discusses the power of gaze direction, breathwork, and meditation as a method used to help calm the brain. Some of the keys habits he talks about are the importance of waking up and working out, not eating 3 hours before bed, and much more! Peak Brain Institute Youtube Link to this Episode ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Did you learn something from tuning in today? Please pay it forward and write us a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts. 📧If you have feedback for the show, please email habitsandhustlepod@gmail.com 📙Get yourself a copy of Jennifer Cohen’s newest book from Habit Nest, Badass Body Goals Journal. ℹ️Habits & Hustle Website 📚Habit Nest Website 📱Follow Jennifer – Instagram – Facebook – Twitter – Jennifer’s Website Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Transcript
Discussion (0)
When there's a penalty on the field, referees are there to sort it out.
When there's an accident on the road...
Sergeant Lindros, I'm glad you're okay.
That's where USAA steps in.
We help make the claims process easy, so drivers can get back on the road fast.
Making the right calls. That's what we're made for.
USAA
Membership eligibility and product restrictions apply in our subject to change. USAA means United Services Automobile Association and its affiliates.
San Antonio, Texas.
Vitamin water zero sugar just dropped in all new taste.
It was zero holding back on flavor.
You can be your all feeling.
I'll play and all self-care you.
Grab the all new taste today.
Vitamin water zero sugar. Nourishcare you. Grab the all new taste today. Vitamin water's zero sugar, nourish every you.
Vitamin water is a registered trademark of glass O.
Welcome to the Habits and Hustle Podcast.
A podcast that uncovers the rituals, unspoken habits,
and mindsets of extraordinary people.
A podcast powered by habit nest.
Now here's your host, Jennifer Cohen.
All right guys, welcome to Habitson Hustle. I have a really good guest today that I'm actually
very excited about. So I hope you are too. His name is Dr. Andrew Hill and he is a cognitive
neuroscientist. I say one of the leading ones in the
nation, you may Dr. Andrew not agree but I think it's pretty fair to say. He
does something very very interesting. He does neurofeedback with the place
his own place it's called peak brain in Los Angeles. He actually has a lot of
different places around the country that you can do it.
So we're going to get right into it and talk about your brain and how you can optimize your brain.
But first, a few words from our sponsor. So here's something a lot of listeners will be interested in.
Or gains grant for greater good. Or gain is giving away $150,000 in grant money. So if you're a startup business working in nutrition,
mind-body wellness, or promoting healthy lifestyles,
then you should listen up.
So if you're like me, you know how challenging it is
to start your own business.
So having the right support and more money to work with
can really help.
And that's where organ comes in.
Organis is a brand that makes convenient and
clean nutritional products. It was founded by Dr. Andrew Abram, who is a great story. He actually
developed the original nutritional shake during his fight to beat cancer while he was a teenager.
He realized he wanted to share this recipe with the world. So he actually quit his job as a doctor and founded Orgain.
Now, Andrew knows from firsthand experience
that people who want to change the world,
one idea at a time, often need financial support
to get off the ground.
And he wants to pay it forward.
So Orgain will choose three deserving startups
and grant them $50,000 each to help
take their business to the next level. To apply for the program, your startup needs
to be two years or older and in the business of promoting healthy, vibrant lives, either
through nutrition, active lifestyles or mindfulness. The application period ends March 20th.
So if you think you're a good fit, please visit
or gain.com slash grants today to learn more.
That's or gain.com slash grants to learn more.
Welcome.
Thank you.
Thanks for having me.
Thank you for coming.
Where do we start?
There's so much here with you.
First of all, what I find so interesting
is that this was not something that you were, I guess,
were doing from very, very early on.
You just became, not just, but you became,
you got a PhD when you were 35.
Yeah, yeah.
Was there something that happened that kind of brought you
to this area of work?
Or?
I mean, I spent a good decade more than a decade between like undergrad and grad school
just working because, you know, as one does.
Yeah.
And I worked in a lot of health and human services fields.
I worked in inpatient psych for many years.
I worked in group homes with retarded adults who were nonverbal.
I worked in addiction.
I worked in latency age kid, you know at risk kid groups.
And in all those environments I saw not much change.
A lot of people were in some holding patterns and we called you know revolving door clients
who just come and go you know every few days.
And after years of this I was working in a psych hospital in charge of doing hands-on
restraints and teaching people how to do these things.
And this was a very violent psych hospital in Massachusetts that was having five or ten
or fifteen emergency hands-on codes every single shift around the clock, just 30, 40,
you know, a day.
And it was a pretty dynamic, dangerous place that I ended up injured and blew out some
discs to my lower back.
I couldn't do that hands-on work I've been doing, I was looking for something else to do.
And so for a while I was in case management with kids and then I ended up going into high
tech.
And after a few years in high tech, the tech bubble kind of corrected a little bit.
I was doing tech evangelism and sales engineering and things.
And I was looking for something to do that was back in the health and human service, but not in this sort of, you know, cattle call, cattle pen kind of holding
pattern for mental health that I'd experienced. And I went and got a job at an outpatient
center that worked with autism a lot, because I had a lot of experience with that kind of
population, and I preferred to do more high-functioning outpatient work by that point. And this
was a center in Providence, Rhode Island,
called the Neurodevelopment Center that was working
with autism ADHD.
And I started seeing things change.
I saw kids ADHD eliminate symptoms more often than not.
I saw kids with autism start making eye contact
and lose sensory and gracing issues
and have language come back every so often.
I saw seizures go away and I was just kind of flabbergasted
because from, you know, at this point,
15 years experience and mental health,
most of these things were non-trackable,
non-changeable things.
So we just kind of managed with medication
and didn't have a lot of tools
to help people make transformation.
And then I've seen transformation happen here
at this new center all the time, you know,
most of the time, dramatically. And so this kind of all the time, you know, most of the time, dramatically.
And so this kind of got me thinking, of course, and how I described this back then, the
field of neurofeedback had three or four big schools of thought that were all mutually
exclusive in how they think the brain works.
And yet, they're all getting really good effects.
And this is still true today.
Now there's more like 10 different ways
of pushing the brain and neurofeedback,
but they all get really good effects
or most get really good effects.
Why don't we start by telling people
what exactly is neurofeedback?
So, neurofeedback is simply a form of biofeedback
or exercising your physiology.
Most forms of biofeedback will help you exercise
something you're aware of a little bit,
like your heart rate or your breathing. Neurofeedback will help you exercise something you're aware of a little bit like your heart rate or your breathing.
Neurofeedback exercises things you're not really aware of, like your blood flow in your
brain or the electricity in your brain called brain waves.
So this field's been around since about 1967.
It was discovered sort of accidentally at UCLA, Dr. Barry Sturman was working with cats, and NASA
went to him and said, look, astronauts are getting sick breathing in rocket fuel vapors.
Please figure out how dangerous this methylhydraseine stuff is.
And so Sturman was a learning scientist, still is.
And this is back in the 60s, animal testing was a bit different than it is now.
So, you know, with that context bear with me for a moment, he would take plexiglass cages
and put cats inside of them, a cat, and put a beaker of rocket fuel in the cage and close
the door.
Oh, last.
And just wait.
And the vaporized rocket fuel would make the cat sick.
And they would, they would, they would, they would, they would, they would, they would
stumble and be dizzy, they would have, they would cry, they would stumble and be dizzy,
they would have seizures, coma and die.
And he did this about 32 or so cats and of those about 24 had a perfect dose dependent curve.
More minutes exposed to vapor met more symptoms.
Around 40 minutes to an hour in, they had seizures.
But eight of the cats were super cats and refused to have seizures.
They needed two and a half hours of exposure before they showed these instability events in the brain.
They couldn't figure out why some of the cats were seizure resistant,
but most of the cats were not.
And then he realized that six months before or something had done another experiment
with these super cats to see if you could raise a brain wave,
they make a lot of anyways by squirting chicken broth into their mouth whenever it shut up.
And they did. They got this brain wave trained up. It's through this biofeedback process.
And interesting, put them back in the subject pool and months later they'd seizure resistant brains.
So he took a lab assistant of his who was medication uncontrolled epileptic, having tens of seizures a month.
They built a machine, trained her brain off and on
over the next few years, she went off all her meds,
made seizure free for over a year.
Oh my gosh, so wait, so is biofeedback
and neurofeedback the same thing?
All neurofeedback is biofeedback,
but some biofeedback is not on the brain
or on the central nervous system.
The central nervous system is anything in case by bone, like the spinal column and the brain, mostly.
OK, so basically, so basically you're
saying that neurofeedback can cure or re-regulate.
Or re-regulate people who have epilepsy?
Yeah, it suppresses seizures.
The literature, a sermon published a metadata study in 2014 2014, I think in 2012, that showed the average reduction
of seizures is 50 percent, and 5 percent of people have complete control of seizures.
Oh my God.
The average reduction is 50 percent.
Because there's a lot of other claims, right?
So besides that, you claim, right, that neurofeedback could help with ADD.
Yeah, the lowest hanging fruit is ADHD stuff.
ADHD, okay.
Sleep, stress, attention, anxiety, trauma, OCD, PTSD,
developmental trauma.
Okay, so I have a question.
Chronic pain, immune systems.
Let's start with ADD, because it's a very common
like you know, like kids are always diagnosed
with that whenever someone is all over the place, they're like, oh, I had ADD.
I actually heard that ADD is not even a real thing.
It's kind of a term that people slap on someone because they want to put a label on you.
Sure.
I think that's somewhat true.
Okay.
I think that if you pathologize things,
you should be careful not to call it a thing
unless it's really getting in the way.
Right?
As you said, if you don't like it, it's not the criteria
for if it's a diagnosable problem.
ADHD, unlike another problem, like a seizure disorder,
is a specific illness.
That's right.
And it can make, there's many different types of them,
but it's a dysregulation that's an illness, if you will, a cause. ADHD is a continuum of
normal human attention. Some of us are hunters, some are gatherers. Classic ADHD
are stuck in this hunter mode, and they can spot anything. You put the person
who can't focus. The ADHD kid in a video game or a war zone or an intense fight,
and that person is more on than the average person.
Right.
It's not a deficit of their attention.
It's a management of their attention.
So you put them in a classroom and that hyper-focused they found playing video games, they
can't find in a boring boardroom or classroom.
So it's relying on the environment.
This hunter brains, relying the environment to cue you to notice what you have to do, to
put you in a mode.
Is it my entire mode?
Am I in pick the very mode?
Whatever it is.
And ADHD is simply an inability to range yourself appropriately to inhibit, inhibitory
focus and sustain focus and things like this.
Pump the brakes, pump the gas.
Okay, because ADD, I thought that it sounds to me that ADD, or it seems like I thought I
had it, right?
Because I can hyper-focus on things that I really like.
And the things that I mocked good at, all right?
I don't know what results you're in test.
Did you have ADHD?
No, that's what I find so interesting.
So because we were just saying this off before we start,
is that I feel like there are everybody is really good at something,
but not everything.
We all have our things that were...
So I was kind of thought,
what I thought it was was that people
who can hyper-focus on what they like,
and the stuff that they're not good at,
they just can't focus on.
Most people can though.
But that's what I find,
but I even labeled myself,
even though it wasn't actually even true.
Well, salience or interest will always drive up salience.
So if you find things exciting, repetitive, sexy, dangerous, any high-availance, we'll make
us more on. ADHD or not. The problem is often, classic boy ADHD types
repulsive will require the stimulus and they'll do things to create it. So
they'll be disruptive in a classroom. Or an ADHD will fight with you and create
conflict because
now they're lit up and on in that conflict state.
So yeah, it can be a thing, but it's a very small fraction probably of the people we call
ADHD, Brady D.
Broadly is now a behavioral kind of bucket, just like stress or whatever else.
And it's over diagnosed, I think.
I just find it interesting because when you have a seizure, for example, that's like a real
physical thing that you're actually going through versus...
So is ADHD.
Yeah.
Or OSE, but it doesn't see, it's not as obvious, right?
Like, when you have a seizure, it's very obvious.
Right.
Well, ADHD is instead of trade resources.
Meaning it's how you're kind of tuned.
A seizure is a failure of that stability of trade. ADHD is a type of trait. An OCD is also a failure of regulatory traits.
Meaning you have a circular that does something. It's biased to do things in a certain way.
And ADHD is just a certain bias. But OCD or seizures is a failure of the circuit to do what it should.
And gets stuck in a certain way or the system to regulate properly.
Okay, so how does it work? Break it down? No, no, no. Break it down to how neurofeedback works.
Okay. So biofeedback on your brain waves or EEG biofeedback or...
So some of the biofeedback is basically what happens?
So neurofeedback on the brain waves EEG biofeedback is measuring your brain waves. So you come in, sit down, and we would put a couple ear clips on your ears and a wire
on the spot, the spot of the brain we want to exercise.
So there's a spot on the right, in the middle of the motor cortex that is involved with
supervisory attention, knowing if you're paying attention.
So if you measure brain waves, there's one spot compared to the earlobes, you end up
getting a measurement of different brain waves changing under that electrode all around. Your brain's
changing all by itself, right? So there's a bunch of brain waves. If we filter out of that signal
off your head, a couple of brain waves called theta, which is between 4 to 7 cycles per second,
and beta, which in this case, let's call it like low teens, 12 to 15.
But measure the amount of theta and the amount of beta
you're making moment to moment, these numbers are changing.
High theta is distractable.
High beta is focused.
In fact, the ratio of theta to beta in kids
is 94% accurate for spotting ADHD.
It's really very tracks with executive function,
self-control, and what you're doing with your attention.
So if you want to be sharper, regardless if you have ADHD
or not, you want to be more self-controlled,
you measure the area involved with supervisory attention,
you measure your theta and your beta.
And whenever the theta happens to dip
and the beta happens to well upon its own,
you go, yay, to the brain, with audio-visual feedback.
That was my treadmill.
Go ahead, sorry.
So when you're measuring the things changing on their own,
the brain's looking for stimulus.
So you watch a computer screen,
then watch a spaceship fly or a car's race.
Whatever your brain happens to make a little more of this state
you want to exercise, you reward the brain
with more audio and visual.
Car drives faster, pack many, it's more dots,
the music gets louder.
And the next moment your brain does the wrong thing,
the theta goes up and the beta drops
and the car slows down.
The Pac-Man stops eating dots, the music fades.
And the brain happens to move in the right direction again,
the software goes, yay, good job, brain.
And the brain starts to notice, hey, wait a minute,
when I drop my theta and raise my beta stuff happens.
I like stuff, stuff's cool.
The trick here is we're
moving the goalposts every few seconds and only applauding trends in over a few seconds and minutes
the brains make. So wait, so people come in, you stick some electrodes on their head, read their
brain waves. Yeah. Okay, right. And then from how long is that, how long is it take? Well, we start
with a map of the brain. Okay. That's what you did with us.
That's the full head cap.
We start with a gel.
It's kind of annoying.
It takes about half an hour.
And you can't take, I mean, you're not allowed
to have any stimulants like coffee,
caffeine, alcohol.
Yeah, exactly.
The brain mapping or quantitative EEG
is a measurement of your brain at rest
compared to the average person your age.
And the database of comparisons off of caffeine
or alcohol, et cetera. So you have to be relatively naive. You'll have to be clean in your age. And the database of comparisons off of caffeine or aterol, et cetera.
So you have to be relatively naive.
You'll clean your brain in the morning,
measure your rest, big, gross, trait resources,
how many of each brain wave, you know,
wear in the head, how fast are they,
what are the distributions, big, gross things
that don't change year to year.
You're a map today and you're mapping a year
is the same, barring good data quality.
So why was it for me when I went in there,
before I had the brain mapped down with the cap
and when they put the electrodes on,
they gave me an attention test, right?
But that one, two, one, two,
and I didn't really shitty on that test.
I couldn't focus on that.
And yet my test on my brain still came back with no ADD.
So what was it then?
Why couldn't I do that attention test,
but yet I still do not have ADD.
When else could it be if it's something?
What else is it for somebody?
You have to pull up the test and look at it to break it down.
But you can be with me fatigue,
can we stress?
I mean, people will score a positive on ADHD test
with a concussion or with chronic anxiety
throwing off your sleep or with PTSD, if it's severe enough, you'll still get poor issues
with executive function.
And we tease apart all the resources.
Plus, the attention test we have you do is the most tedious boring thing possible.
Oh, God, is it ever terrible?
Right.
It's a one second challenge.
You flash a number in the screen, a one a one or two or speak it over the speakers
Your job simply is to click the mouse for the ones ignore the two. That's it
It was like one two one two, but then you're saying if you can't focus if someone cannot focus
It's not necessarily because they have 80 right they can have a whole other
Sleepy studio anxiety and auditory processing issue and we tease it apart auditory versus
visual. We tease apart if it's just one of your resources or if it's short-term errors
or errors or we're time. If it's errors in being careful or errors in being vigilant and
so you tease apart this also we unload your attention. It's boring. You can't game it.
It's one second of boring trial, 440 times. But that is. It's absurdly tedious.
So you very rapidly stop being able to like
game it with your intelligence.
And you're performing at your worst.
And we watch how you fall over.
Is it vigilant?
Is it impulsivity?
Is it auditory?
Is it visual?
And that gives us a sense of how your performance functions
relative to people your age.
And then we look at your brain in the same way.
And those two things together give us a sense of what you might want to work on.
Okay, so then you get the results of the test.
Yes.
Then you go, you or someone else, we're just talking with a process of how it happens.
Go over the results.
A couple days later usually.
Right, a couple days later.
And then from the findings, you tweak, you can tweak someone's brain
technically. You can, with actual machines, you can...
You can create a brain how to change itself largely because with the way we do
neurofeedback as we measure what your brain is doing and when it happens to shift
a little bit we say, good job and it learns how to shift itself a little more
and it's very inner to you. Keep pushing it further and further. There are forms of neurofeedback
that zap the brain with electricity and make it move more. So it's kind of
sounds like it's like positive reinforcement. It's exactly what it is. It's
operant conditioning, which is reinforcement. Yeah. Yeah. So from those tests
then you go in and then you sit there.
Three times a week for half an hour.
Put a couple of ear clips on and one or two wires on top of your head,
measuring the circuit you may want to exercise.
And that is your job.
I mean, during the brain map discussion,
it's not me saying, here's what's true for you.
It's me teaching you how to read the data and say,
here's how we think about data, here's what it could mean,
here's what it often means.
Right. And which of these things seem to be the big bottlenecks for you that you want to read the data and say, here's how we think about data, here's what it could mean, here's what it ought to mean.
And which of these things seem to be the big bottlenecks for you that you want to work
on.
And so I help you come up with an idea of the priorities, but the Europe priorities.
It's not a doctor, patients, we're a coach, client, or athlete kind of relationship we
have.
And how long does it take?
It takes half an hour for about three times a week, and around three to five sessions
in, you start feeling different.
And you notice your sleep and your stress and your tension going subtly changed.
And after three or four more sessions you can often say what that's like.
And we map the brain again and measure your attention again every 20 sessions.
And we typically get more than a standard deviation of change in that chunk of time.
If you had any room to improve, you're at an ADHD or something.
You have three to four standard devi to improve, you're like ADHD or something. You have three
to four standard deviations off if you're ADHD. Now how much of this is psychosomatic? If
you think it's going to work, it's going to work, right? It works on cats. Cats are pretty
bad instruction followers. It does. It works on non-verbal children, working people in
coma. I have plenty of nudity teenagers in my office don't want to be there. It works
whether or not you believe it. I have plenty of parents that do it, office don't want to be there. It works whether or not you believe it.
I have plenty of parents that do it,
I don't believe in this stuff.
I don't like that I can do it.
Wait a minute, I'm feeling incredible.
So.
How many sessions you tell,
do you think that it needs?
I think it needs a minimum of 30 for permanence,
usually 40 for permanence.
I like to do 40 or 50 to start.
And then my clients will typically like 50 to 100
is the range roughly.
So what do you say then for people like who are like
shrink, like psychiatrist, people who go to therapy
and spend, you know, whatever they're spending
for years and years and years, and they're on meds
for OCD, anxiety, ADD, like are you really saying
that that's all nonsense?
But don't need to be in the medication.
I'm saying that for therapy, there's some things
that's really a physiology issue.
You should treat that.
Like ADHD, you might have some life coaching
or some scaffolding around your ADHD,
or the consequence of having control of your attention.
But you're never gonna have therapy
that gets rid of the impulsivity if you have ADHD.
But you can very, very quickly, in a couple of months, eliminate the impulsivity if you have ADHD, but you can very, very quickly in a couple of months eliminate the impulsivity in your brain dramatically.
Send the OCD, there may be still reasons for that anxiety disorder to have cropped up.
OCD is a normal circuit in the front that gets stuck and PTSD is the same thing in the
back.
You're going to still have the psychological import of those things, but neurofeedback can
get the brain out of the way.
So the therapy, the psychological thing, the psychological thing, the processing
can now happen.
I do think it can replace or eliminate many, many medications.
So not therapy.
But no, but like people, maybe the ADD, I get that, but the anxiety, the depression, the
sleep, then if it, and I'm not saying it doesn't, I'm just playing
devil's advocate.
Yeah, sure.
If there's such a huge rate of people, it basically almost through said 90% of people
or so who see results, or even more is 95% you said 95.
I think then why is not, why isn't everybody doing this?
And everyone asks me that when they realize especially right after they start feeling it get and go, oh my gosh, I have control over my brain. Why, why don't you doing this? And everyone asks me that. When they realize, especially right after they start feeling it,
they get and go, oh my gosh, I have control over my brain.
Why, no one tell me this before.
Right.
There's a bunch of reasons.
One, it's expensive.
It takes 50 sessions.
And if you're a therapist, I'm not a therapist,
but if you're a therapist in Los Angeles,
and you charge for three brain maps in 50 sessions,
you're 15 to 20 grand in to a program in Los Angeles.
And it's my big office that are in St. Louis, you're about 10 grand for a program.
It's a lot of money to go through a process which is kind of like psychotherapy.
So it's basically in LA, how much would this whole thing for 50 sessions would be?
Well, we charge 4,500 for brain mapping and 50 plus sessions.
But what my question is, usually it's more like 15 or 20 grand in LA.
Okay. And so it says a lot of money, it's a lot of time, you know, would rather...
But so therapy and so is everything else. Most of us would rather take the pill
than do the work psychologically as well, or we're walking on treadmill as most of us don't want
to do this stuff, it's life-child, lifestyle change things, they take some time and take chip
in a way at, we want to just take the Lepator, the One Pension Matter, something instead of doing,
you know, walkin' on when he's off to trouble.
Yeah, absolutely, yeah.
So that's interesting.
So I've got a bunch of questions.
First of all, so first of all,
while we're even doing this,
I do the podcast on the treadmill,
because I believe, and I thought,
this is what all the research has proven,
that when you move, it helps with your cognitive functioning and learning.
So you do, now that you're the expert, would you say that's true?
Learning certainly.
Movement may be, depends.
Some people are going to get some improved, like if you verbal fluency and things by moving.
Other folks will just get a simple transfer of excitation, meaning the physiological activation will turn into the cognitive
activation and this will actually drive them in a way they don't use to.
Really? Yeah, you're putting, it's kind of like putting your, your, your
guest at a disadvantage a little bit if not used and moving and talking. Really?
Probably. Okay. It's, I think it's great. You can do it. What I get, my question is,
would I get better information
from the guests then?
More and more garnish.
And more exactly.
As I say, probably more more.
I'm more activated.
So there's just a kind of coming out of it.
Because it's going to come out.
OK, good.
I'm glad I keep doing it on the treadmill.
I'm sure I'm louder and not as smooth
than the treadmill than I would be sitting down.
Probably.
Well, listen.
I can go listen to one of your other podcasts
that you've done, like Joe Rogan or whoever you've done and then I'll compare
Okay, so then let's get back so basically
You're saying that people can actually get off of medication if they actually
Things like attention stuff or sleep or anxiety we have phenomenal results all the things that all brains do right not
anxiety, we have phenomenal results, all the things that all brains do, not disordered states per se. I'm not saying our cure disease state. I can't say that.
But how about chemical, where does chemical imbalance come in?
No such thing. There's no such thing as chemical imbalances.
No, it doesn't exist. It's a theory that's never been born out. And looking
example that why it's probably quite flawed. You know what dopamine? Yes.
The reward neurotransmitter. It's also dramatically
involved with movement. The fact that we can do this is dopamine. Right, this is dopamine,
what we're doing right now. Okay. The biggest disorders of dopamine disorders are ADHD
on the cognitive side and Parkinson's. Actually, his schizophrenia is also like a dopamine thing.
The Parkinson's movement disorder, Parkinson's, are quite severe and come with them, the cognitive aspects of dopamine as well,
like attention problems.
All of your dopamine is built by a part of your brain
called the substantial Niagara of the parse compact,
the dense part of the black stuff.
The parse compact, dense part of the substantial Niagara,
the black stuff, deep in the brain.
And then like most parts of neurotransmitter production, they send the neurons out to the
brain and deliver the neurotransmitters where they need to be in circuits.
Nurtransmitters are not in circulation, they don't float through the brain looking for places
to land, they're released right where they're used.
So dopamine production, deep in the basal ganglia, substantial nigra, you can lose 75 to 80% of your dopamine neurons
before any Parkinson's symptoms show up whatsoever.
Wow. Does that mean the first 75% of your dopamine systems are relevant?
Absolutely not. It means the systems are really good at
ranging themselves over any absolute level of signal.
By inserting more receptors, making receptors more sensitive, pulling receptors out,
they can change, they can tune the sensitivity to the synapse itself.
The absolute level of a chemical are relevant.
If you love the Habits and Hustle podcast and are looking to add more podcasts to your weekly
routine, I have the podcast for you.
I know you're gonna love the Millionaire University podcast
because they dive deep into how to actually run a successful business
so you can escalate from just breaking even
to making your business and profits thrive.
Or how they like to say it,
learn how to graduate from Million millionaire university rich, not broke.
And this is because you don't need to go into debt
spending four plus years on a degree to succeed
when you have all the information at your fingertips.
So if you're ready to tune in,
I personally suggest starting off with episode two,
which is the only three things every business needs
or even episode 24, which is a 10-step blueprint
to gain clarity and reach your goals.
The Millionaire University podcast is hosted
by Justin and Tara Williams,
who actually started their businesses from Square One
and have very valuable experience.
They hit lows and dug themselves out of debt
and want to share the lessons they've learned with other aspiring entrepreneurs.
So don't wait. Now is a time to turn your business into a reality by listening to the Millionaire University podcast.
New episodes drop every Monday and Thursday. So find the Millionaire University on Apple,, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Vitamin water just dropped a new zero sugar flavor called with love.
Get the taste of raspberry and dark chocolate for the all warm.
All fuzzy, all self-care, zero self-doubt you.
Grab a with love today.
Vitamin water, zero sugar, nourish every you.
Vitamin water is a registered trademark of glass O.
So, I guess we could say also for pharmaceutical reasons
that people take it because of the farm on business.
But that's a misunderstanding how it works.
Take a look at S-SRIs.
We think all I have is serotonin imbalance.
Let me raise my serotonin, it'll be not be depressed. But serotonin
is not the most involved in depression. It's all the anxiety a little bit,
sexual function a little bit. A lot of sexual function. Depression? No, no. Serotonin.
Serotonin, okay. As is, well, depression as well. Basically serotonin is a gut
neurotransmitter mostly. It's a little bit in the brain. Mostly involve the anxiety and a few other things.
SSRIs, supposedly boosts serotonin by getting rid of the reuptake molecule.
They break the thing that cleans up serotonin out of the synapse, the reuptake inhibitor, SSRI.
So as you take an SSRI, throughout at least serotonin builds up levels in the synapse.
Except all serotonin neurons have autoreceptors to measure the amount of serotonin in the synapse
they're releasing into.
And if you take an SSRI, it's just to build up the system down regulates.
And a month and a half after starting the serotonin, you have a lower serotonin in your
brain than you did when you started. So depression is nothing to do with serotonin. your brain than you did when you started.
So depression is nothing to do with serotonin.
It's about plasticity.
Like several steps down chain,
the hippocampus gets plastic and makes you not depressed.
So yeah, so what it sounds like
that neurofeedback helps with the neuroplasticity of your brain.
It does.
It rewires your brain.
It does.
And there are no, no, not more or less, more.
More.
It absolutely does.
Or just does that.
And the study is, you know, months ago I was showing a single session boost plasticity.
Broadly, the study is out for a couple of years ago I was showing.
You can see dramatic shifts in the brain's ability to rewire itself like that with neurofeedback.
Now how about if you do have to do the sessions all within a certain period, like within,
if you just do what one, let's say, and come back two weeks and do another.
Not much will happen.
So you need to, it has to be a routine and a regiment.
It's kind of like anything else.
You have to practice it.
You've got to do a repetition basically.
It's like building your resources.
You have to keep building them until they're where you want them to be.
It's like fitness.
It's your body.
It is.
The metaphor breaks down a little bit because the brain is a regulatory machine more than
a strength machine and it tends to get itself into a new pattern and hang out there.
So once your brain learns to control your attention, suppress seizures, turn the spine and
off appropriately, not freak out about anxiety states.
Once you build enough of the resource regulation, it takes over and it remains stable.
So the metaphor is kind of like having a bad knee.
You go to PT or OT for a few months, get really strong knees. And now you have
part of your routine is doing some woodweight treadmill every three times a week.
You end up keeping that nice regulatory resource strong. But if your routine is sitting on
the couch watching TV seven days a week, the knee might fall apart.
That's interesting. So basically, if so for more
for fitness staff or physical, you have to keep it at maintain it or you lose it.
But for your brain, once it's kind of reprogrammed, it's reprogrammed.
Yeah, and to the same extent, if you did a month of training and took stop training
completely and you're feedback, it would wear off subjectively, but when the
session back lifts everything right back up because the brain remembers much better than the body does.
You have to rebuild the muscle fibers or anything.
The learning is still there to be reactivated.
So I'm still confused if it's something
that you do 30 times or 50 times,
let's just say whatever the number is, 30, 40, 50, okay?
That's still way less time than you're going to see a shrink.
Because I know people, I have friends who go twice a week, once a week, for the last 20
years of their life.
So that's still a problem.
There's a few other reasons why it hasn't gotten good penetration.
One of the reasons is no one owns it.
So you can't get insurance reimbursement for it.
You can do big studies.
You have to spend about $5 million to an FDA-level study
for your entry in the reimbursement.
No one owns it, so no one's putting the money in
to the money back.
You also couldn't blind, do placebo-controlled double-blind
neurofeedback on EEG until very recently.
I did a placebo-controlled double-blind experiment
for my graduation at UCLA on neurofeedback
and showed how the brain's responding to the event
of the reward beep, read in real time, and not in a sham case. But that was one of the first
studies ever done with a sham placebo neurofeedback. And that was in like
20-10 light of the research or something. And so this is just barely now, there's a
lot of multi-settar studies going on, but it's been hard to be sham. The process,
as you'll discover, is heavily individualized. How do you test 50 people when your goals for fitness and performance are different than
the next person over?
I'm not testing exercise.
I'm testing this technique and that technique and how it tunes.
It's very different.
It's not one thing.
It's a whole new one, suite of tools and approaches that have to be tuned to each individual
might be very, very different approaches.
One person to the next based on what your goals are.
You know, I find it. I have a good friend of mine who's a child psychiatrist and he's actually also
one of the leading ones in the country or at least I think so, right? And he's, I told him all about
this, about, you know, so excited and it and there are naysayers out there. Sure. Because, you know, key claims that there really hasn't been any real research to say, like,
definitively, this actually works.
Well, that's not.
Or is it because he's a shrink and he's a mess head-up?
It's both.
The research is weak.
But in 2012, the American and the Caving pediatricians raised nerfied that cup to level
one best support for ADHD.
The same is out of it.
The why are they not, is insurance or why isn't insurance covering it?
Because the research is weak, weaker than it is from medication.
Again, heavily individualized work, there's hundreds, maybe thousands of papers out there,
but they're all small in, or small, small numbers of people, weak effects.
And yet, I challenge your psychiatrist friend to come in my office, get a brain map.
I'll tell him things cold by himself
that I should be able to know.
And then do a month and a half of training with me
and I will change his performance
in a way he feels and I can measure.
Well, yeah, and also the truth is that there's
a lot of high performance athletes,
like Olympians, high performance,
those of those people,
and a lot of athletes, Olympians. I'm working with people and I fell a lot of support.
A lot of athletes Olympians.
I'm working with David Nurse as an NBA student coach.
I mean, these, oh David, yeah, yeah, yeah.
David?
No, I know Drew Hanlon, is that his name?
I know his name, yeah.
He was on the podcast.
I mean, yeah, a lot of these people who are super high,
and they're looking for any advantage, right?
Even like CEOs, people who are like huge,
huge business.
About a third of my clientele,
these extreme performers, the Olympic athletes,
Brian McKenzie and those other folks,
Ben Greenfield, all those guys who were seriously squeezing
every little bit of performance out of life.
And those are all wild hackers.
Exactly, those are like the,
I consider don't tell Brian Ryan, I said this,
he'll hate me, but I consider Brian and Ben
kind of like the fitness model version of like athletes,
like they're doing amazing, by thinking stuff,
but they're also about looking amazing
on a cover magazine, and living that lifestyle.
And does it work for that because it tweaks your brain?
He helps you heal more deeply,
you can raise growth hormone,
you can do, I don't know? How can it raise growth hormone?
Better sleep.
You can do sleep.
Okay, so you feel faster.
You feel faster.
For the sleep reason.
Yeah.
Over these guys, you know, for performance driven, you know, on the starting line, a little
bit impulsive, you can relax more deeply.
You can act more rapidly.
That's what SMR is.
The reason Sturman shows this frequency in cats to train up is because cats, predators,
make a lot of this frequency.
If you see a cat on a window, so watching birds, some liquid body and laser-like focus, that's
a motorically, physically inhibited state because you can leap into action much faster
from relaxation than you can from tension.
Sturman's thought and the predator has trained it up, but turns out that high SMR state, high low beta state, is motorically still mentally active to the opposite of ADHD.
So when you train a Pesomar and humans, you not only make the brain seizure resistant
like in Sturman's grad student.
You're vocabulary.
I'm trying to like, it's hard to concentrate on your vocabulary and walk on this treadmill.
I'll tell you that much.
Oh, so you don't say anything to people in disadvantaged.
Right.
You have actually, I got to hold on here to make sure I'm not going to fall.
But yes, we can often make really quite a large difference in big things, but the literature
is not there yet.
The biggest reason is it's an individualized process.
It's hard to test that way.
It is hard to test that way.
So then, it's basically if anyone has a kryptonite, this is if you have this,
if you have that, it's kind of like you're saying that it's like the heal, it can heal anything,
it can heal autism, it can help with autism, it can work on the system of your brain,
improve your stress response, your sense of integration, your attention, your sleep,
your mood. And then if there's specific things, let's do like, let's talk about OCD,
And then if there's specific things, let's do like, let's talk about OCD, right? How does it help with OCD?
So OCD often, most of the time, is a failure of a failure of this little circuit in the front
called the anterior singulate.
You have singulate cortex.
Talking like in the anatomy.
Yeah, I'll give you the anatomy and I'll break down when it does.
So you have two singulate cortexes, one in the front, one in the back called the anterior
and the posterior singulate. They're part of something called the default mode network, which
pays attention to yourself. If your mind's drifting, you're thinking about your
life, you're in that default mode network, you're reverie. It's a very active part
of where the brain can be. But there's two circuits involved, and at the
singulates whose job it is to decide essentially how you manage your
attention. The anterior, the front singulates job is to decide what you focus on, what's important to think about
or to attend to. The posterior singularity job is to decide what's necessary
around you. So if you left the house and you weren't sure if you turned off the
fireplace or the heater or whatever, you're thinking about and have stuck on it
or if there's a song in your head all day long, that's the anterior
singularity running itself at kind of a hot speed. If you bite your, or if it's a song in your head all day long, that's the anti-ersingulate running itself at kind of a hot speed.
You'll keep by two nails, or if you're OCD.
It's the selection of attention getting stuck.
So if I looked at your brain at rest, we would see a big blob of beta waves, usually, two,
three standard deviations higher than average compared to the average person in your age.
Usually it's beta, too much gas pedal, occasionally it's too much theta, which is like too little
breaking, but very similar phenomena subjectively.
And I would say, oh, for some people, this little blob of beta on the front midline is a
preservative feature.
It's stuck on things.
You bite your nails, thumbs your head, little OCD, oh you are.
This is probably related.
This is a hot, singularly compared to average.
I'm not sure if it's good or bad, but it's more active than average. Let's see what happens if we exercise it down.
And you go, I felt my brain on clench. I could put down the thing I was stuck on. I would
keep it with giggling. I'm like, what's going on? I can't find my OCD right now. I'm reaching
for it. It's not there. instead of pushing away all day long. So okay, so like then kind of like emotional eating or being overweight, weight loss.
Is that kind of also when you overeat, right, and OCD, right, because you're fixating on
the food?
And eating subtle, eating is complex.
Eating is very complex, because you can be doing it for a lot of different reasons.
But what I'm trying to get at is does it help with weight loss?
It does.
Because you're tweaking your brain.
I don't care why you have problems eating.
If it's social stuff, if it's anxiety, if it's impulsivity, if it's obsession, it'll
help.
It might be dysregulated body image.
It's not about your brain.
Right.
Then I'll get your brain out of the way.
The impulse of everything is eye to sleep issues.
Whatever it's out of the way, you're therapist
and you can work on your eating disorder.
But what I'm trying to get at is, do you actually,
would you say you still need a therapist for that part?
Or are you saying, if you have a weight issue,
or you're trying to have weight loss, or whatever the reason is, would you say that neurofeedback can help you with a weight issue or you're trying to have weight loss or whatever the reason is,
would you say that neurofeedback can help you with the weight loss versus, you know, you're
talking about having an eating disorder.
I'm talking about having any reason your brain doesn't do what you want and that can be anxiety
or impulsivity.
I mean, I eat too much, when I eat, I eat too much sometimes.
Me too.
And I obsess about it.
And I don't obsess about it. No, I obsess about it.
Because I have the food.
Like at your office.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
So let's just say so before Dr. Andrew
was this cognitive neuroscientist, he was a baker.
I was.
And when I went to his office to get my brain mat and believe me,
when I went to get my brain mat, he made just by
coincidence, not for me, but for the office. He's amazing blueberry pumpkin
muffins. And how many did I eat? Like eight? I think you're like two. But you might
take into home with you. No, I had like eight. Ask the guys who were there. And I
was fixating on like every time I had one, I was like, okay, one other one.
Okay, and I wouldn't let my brain relax until I had the next one. And so I forget if you're into it.
I'm not gonna laugh at it, it happens a lot.
Does it?
Well, did we see a little singular activation for you?
I forget.
I don't think it might have.
I think a little bit, yeah.
Yeah, but it's not this diagnostic process.
I was like, oh, OCD, oh, you get fixated.
I'll go, oh, for some people, this might be relevant.
And you're like, oh, yeah, like those love ends.
Right, and then. I'm like, yeah, like those love ends. Right.
And I'm like, yeah, okay, this is relevant then.
And the next question becomes, now that you understand
your brain, would you like to change this feature?
Right.
It's not about Dr. Patia, I'm never gonna say to you,
I'm sorry, ma'am, here's what's wrong with you.
It's always like, does this performance
say to match your goals or performance?
It does?
Great, we only ever get excited when we see real things.
Right.
Even if there are things that you're suffering with, we're only ever happy if they see real things, even if there are things
you're suffering with, we're only ever happy if there are actually big, clear
features in the data because then we can change them. So, right, so basically it's
up to the person to figure out if it's an issue for them and if they feel it's an
issue, then it's workable. If not, it doesn't matter what you see or what you think
or whatever else because then they're not going to even take action. And because I
am looking for you to say to me a few weeks or months from now, oh, I've got
some progress in these things I care about.
And so this is also why I measure your attention test, because that's a valid straightforward
read of your performance.
So you can say, I want to be more focused.
I'm not focused.
I can go, oh, yeah.
Or you're focusing fine, but your auditory processing is off.
Let's work on that and you'll feel your focus improved.
Right.
So I use the data to interpret almost what you're asking me, or labels you come in with,
diagnosed, diagnostic labels you come in with.
I'm dropping below that going, what does this person actually want?
What are you talking about?
What's your resource in the brain?
Are they really talking about?
Not anxiety, but singular, not depression, but asymmetry, not, you know.
More from our guest, but first a few words from our sponsor.
So what if you can spend less time juggling email,
meetings, and status updates, and more time
doing the work that matters most to your team?
You know, like pushing boundaries, solving problems,
and making something real.
So whether you're planning your next marketing campaign,
launching new products products or onboarding
new vendors, a sauna reduces the busy work that waste time and it gives your team clarity
so they understand their plans and goals and how they will achieve them together.
So from small companies to global enterprises, more than a million teams across 195 countries
use a sauna to plan, organize, and execute their work.
So learn more and try Asana for free.
Visit Asana.com to get started.
And now to our next sponsor.
Did you know 24 million Americans?
That's more than a population of Florida,
want to work for themselves by the year
2021. But sadly, 35% of them cite inconsistent income as one of the biggest things holding them back.
If money is a big deterrent, we're getting paid twice as fast, help you make that leap.
Have you heard of FreshBooks? It's a cloud accounting software that basically does your invoicing for you.
And on top of that, get you paid twice as fast.
And yes, it's really easy to use
because it's made for entrepreneurs just like you.
FreshBooks lets you create and send invoices automatically
except credit cards and
ACH payments right on invoices. It automates payments for
reoccurring invoices and it automates invoice payment reminders. So overall,
FreshBooks helps you face big challenges like getting paid so you can focus
on actually growing your business. And right now I'm giving my listeners a free
30-day trial of fresh books right now.
No credit card required.
Just go to freshbooks.com slash habits.
And enter habits and hustle in the habit you hear about a section and you can start your
free trial today.
Can you raise your IQ by doing neurofeedback?
I've never measured it, but the literature shows
as a few papers that show a good standard deviation
of improvement.
I usually improve alpha speed of processing measures
quite a lot during neurofeedback,
and those are highly correlated with anxiety.
Yeah, but I've never measured anxiety.
I don't believe in, I don't believe.
Well, you never measured anxiety?
Sorry, intelligence.
Intelligence.
I don't believe intelligence tests are valid, or what you know intelligence what intelligence has measured
It's a very circular definition and they've been historically used kind of in a weird way
They were started mostly in the state in California as a measure measure of chronological versus developmental age
I are you physically are you physiologically slow?
versus developmental age. Are you physiologically slow?
Right, right.
And then they've been great change every couple of years,
but I don't think they're especially valid tests.
If you go into sub-aspects of those tests,
like working memory or speed or processing,
you get into things that are actually core human things.
There's a third one now in literature called implicit learning.
Those are the big three.
Speed or processing, working memory, and implicit learning. That's all that's valid. IQ, it's got a squirrely concept.
Right. So the overall, I love IQ, doesn't really make sense. But you could help with the memory
and your speed of cognition. But there are papers that show good 15 point increases and more,
20 point increases on a key test. So when executives come to you like we're talking, what's
the main thing that they try to fix or help?
Yeah, you know most of them come with this perspective of nothing's really wrong or this one to squeeze the more performance out.
And invariably I joke that that OCD marker, I also joke it's the CEO marker.
Really?
Because it's not a problem per se. If you're using that single hyper focus and organize your mind, great.
If it's using you, it's OCD.
But if you're using that resource in an extra strong way, it's unusual, but maybe it's
fine.
So most of these people, men and women, will have this little interior, singular hotspot.
Some of them also have things like, can't settle down at night after powering through
their day, or they have some anxiety about all the different business things they have
to think about.
Or, you know, so it's just classic stuff.
Sleep issues, anxiety, sometimes they're drinking too much, you know, or using too much
coke.
Right.
How is your life style?
That's, of course.
But, okay, so, you're sick.
So, would you say you've seen a lot of, what have you seen the most, like as a correlation,
like people who are super successful in business
usually have anxiety.
Usually have anxiety.
Exactly.
Because it sounds like you said OCD.
Yeah, but that's a form of anxiety.
Okay, so OCD is a form of anxiety.
Yeah, it really is.
I mean, and I see what you see in driven people is generally some anxiety.
You also see intelligent people.
Right, anxiety.
You know, if you have all these extra resources, you have extra resources with which to catastrophize.
Exactly. In what? That's very, that's a big broad statement, right?
And I think about again below the label, okay, one of the circuits.
So I think what the anterior circuit for perseveration, getting stuck.
Okay.
The poster single it is doing this thing where it's a value.
It's happening around you and looking for danger.
So if you drop your phone, you're kind of fishing around for it when you're driving,
not that she would do this. Right. Right. But if you did, phone, you're kind of fishing around for it when you're driving, not that you would do this.
But if you did, there's a sense of,
boom, watch the road, and that's coming from the posters
and you let it throw a flag in the play.
And so you've helped people who are executives get to the neck,
kind of like level up whenever you want to say
with their anxiety or it was important.
Yeah, and be more productive in their jobs
and be less of a jerk to their support.
And if you're at home and not yell at their kids.
But they're usually productive.
Not always, of course, is it, but usually really successful.
Yeah.
You're productive, but I say to also like,
you're hyper focused in one area of your life because you're good at and you like it,
and that's where you put all your attention.
Also, these people often aren't smoothly productive.
What does that mean?
You know, they're often have the same level of output
and productivity and decision making at 10 a.m.
as they are at 4 p.m.
Oh, okay, so.
So there are a lot of powering through high power,
it's structured day in a way that makes the best for them
and then burn out all at once or get home
and like yell at your kids.
Or, you know, this is like changing gears,
I think it's very hard for somebody to hyperform.
Is this kind of what you're saying?
Yeah, hyper-specialized hyper-activate.
And they're super good in one area of their life.
And I mean, I see this all the time
with this podcast and otherwise in my day-to-day life,
that it's about having, you know, not to habits
and the hustle, right?
Like people put very specific habits and rituals in their life to be as successful as productive as possible.
So you're saying once they use up that time, that's when they're off the rails basically.
Well, it's also resources.
I mean, this decision fatigue, if you're making important decisions all day long,
it's hard to keep making decisions at home.
Right.
And then there's stamina and there's just actual fatigue.
I mean, anxiety is quite common. The most common thing are sleep issues. making decisions at home. And then there's stamina and there's like just actual fatigue.
I mean, anxiety is quite common.
The most common thing are sleep issues.
And that's not just executives and high powered performers.
Most people, I look at your brain.
I'm like, you're not sleeping that well.
But how about actual, I know you're
big in the sleep situation.
It's foundation alone.
And it's not just the amount of sleep.
It's circadian regulations.
It's getting into good quality sleep when you're sleeping.
But sleep has been huge for a long time.
The important help is powerful and important sleep is.
But I can change it rapidly within a few weeks.
Often these chronic alcoholics are shaky and nervous and can't fall asleep without a
drink.
Two weeks in a row of feedback, they can turn their brain off and fall asleep, but
will.
Can it help with addiction?
Can it help with food addiction? It can help with food addiction.
It can help with alcohol.
That's what I was trying to get at before.
Yeah, Doug Quirk did some work years ago showing that, what's your penicent, Eugene penicent
did some work showing that the restitivism rate of alcoholism is reverse.
It goes from three quarters down to one quarter from two thirds down to one third.
The relapse rate for alcohol is a huge impact in alcohol.
So I just don't, I mean, I keep on repeating this,
but it feels like it's like you're saying
that this neurofeedback is like the panacea of everything.
Why?
What has the tools in it that can do lots?
Yeah.
Does it matter?
Is there different kinds?
Because I mean, they're not the only one, right?
There's other people like you were saying
other institutes that do it.
Yeah, there's so much.
So there's about 5,000 people in the US that do this in about 10,000 worldwide.
But half of them do it the way that I do it.
Maybe more.
And that's using brain mapping or QEG as a diagnostic and sort of the lens to
understand you and then come up with some ways to move your brain.
The other half or one size fits all tools or tools have more marketing and science built
into them or tools focus the consumers and yeah it matters.
And then there's some other next generation things that are much more aggressive that you
zap your brain with electricity or do all kinds of all the sites at once in your head or
something.
None of these are any better.
They all work okay, but any good clinician or any good nerfy back coach, can make progress
with any tool.
The problem you have is some clinicians only know their magic box tools and don't know
science around it.
And so something happens, if you're not average, they won't get good results.
So I'm not a big fan of one-size-fits- all approaches for fitness at all, and that's what this is.
You're the guy who weasers up the one stair to the gym
or you're a layered Hamilton walking in
and you both want better abs, a different plan.
You can both have better abs.
They take very different plan.
For layers like, okay, cut out that,
a little bit of carb and do the little IF,
and for the guy that's 300 pounds overweight
and weasep one step, it's like,
let's have a discussion about whole body exercise
and managing your sleep and not eating at night for insulin resistance first.
And different things are important.
So it's very variable and unfortunately that then requires someone like me and the mix
who can go oh you have these goals and this brain.
Ah, I should say these approaches.
Students need to be able to have someone who could read it well as well and know?
And there's the process, who can change gears if you have effects that they don't expect,
who can bring your tools to bear.
Yeah, it's personal training essentially.
For your brain.
For your brain.
So, let me ask you this, let's get away from neurofeedback for a second, right?
Since you are a brain guy, brain doctor, ish.
What are other tools people can do? They don't have a neurofeedback place,
so they don't wanna do it.
How about stuff like meditation?
Meditation is huge.
Right, stuff like that to kind of calm your brain
or tweak your brain, does that work?
Those are the things.
Meditation works very, very well.
Meditation is an active executive function training.
For folks that haven't meditated, the active meditation may not be calming.
I can't do it. I've tried multiple times.
But people often think that doing meditation is a process of clearing your mind.
And it's not. It's a process of anchoring your mind or focusing your mind onto something.
So to paraphrase, I think John Cavitzin,
meditation is paying attention in a particular way
on purpose to the present moment.
And I would add replacing sort of judgment
with like a curiosity, like an investigation sense.
Oh, what's happening now?
Instead of like, oh, I'm doing it right.
But what happens is if you anchor something,
be it the breath cross with a lip
or you're just rising falling,
or traffic coming and going outside,
since you have a mind within moments of anchoring,
you think about your hungry,
your knee hurts, that guy's cute, whatever.
And you get distracted within moments
because you have a brain that's supposed to happen.
What you do is go, oh, wait a minute,
I'm not meditating right now.
Go back to the anchor.
You've just done a meditation, that is a rep.
Great, keep doing it.
Hold your attention onto the anchor,
whatever anchor you've chosen,
that meditation as soon as you're distracted,
let it go, not now, back to the anchor,
back to the anchor, again and again and again.
That meditation, that's repetition,
but anything else.
But repetition of focus, not a peacefulness or quietude.
The type of focus changes based on type of meditation.
Right.
The present time, which is Vapassana,
single point, which is Samatha, or concentration practice.
Do you meditate?
I do.
And so do you think it's a good tool though?
I do, a huge tool.
And you're carrying around the equipment to do it all the time.
So.
Right, you could do it whenever.
As well.
And like it sounds like with all of this,
it's getting into like, it's just changing
how it's patterned and how it's all habits.
Yeah, and I have a different view on habits than most people.
Okay, this is the most good scientist will say,
if you look at the habit literature,
they'll say, it's like a three week for a process.
Coaching to say that anyways.
Euro scientists generally have a bit of an open
and an answer to things.
But my take on habits is five weeks,
because there's many time courses of learning in the brain.
There's time course, which is minutes long.
If you do a single neurofeedback session today,
or even nothing high tech, a piano lesson today.
If you don't already play piano,
the end of the day today, every single hand area in your brain, every single hand cell would have moved around talking to different cells, every single one within hours,
cells to your organis. And then you have new cells being born all the time.
It takes five weeks for those cells to go from pluripotent sort of neural stem cells into the kind of cell
they're going to be. They travel through the brain, following messages, half of them never make
anywhere and get reserved. The other half turn into the kind of cell they're going to be, make
friends, make networks, set up shop. So there's a learning course from like a few minutes to about five
weeks. So you're saying five weeks, so you're basically upping it by like two weeks or a week.
I'm saying you should keep doing stuff because now you've literally built new physical
tissue, not just to the existing tissue, new shapes, which is new tissue.
Got it.
But how do you sell?
You will fail.
So what?
Everybody does.
But your gym, your watch, your yoga pants, they pretend you won't.
So when you miss a day, eat the pancakes.
Give up on a workout.
You failed?
Seriously, what the hell?
We're body.
We've been a part of that too, but not anymore.
A body where rejecting perfection and embracing reality.
Not in a pizza Monday kind of way, and a loving your whole life kind of way.
In a, this workout is fun, and it's okay
if I take a week off kind of way.
And then, I'm eating healthy, and it's okay
if I indulge kind of way.
In a, I like myself no matter what kind of way.
Yeah, you will fail.
We all will, but we're not gonna let that be the end.
You see that?
We're already making progress.
So let's keep going.
We are Body.
Start your free trial at body.com.
That's B-O-D-I dot com.
A journal is a journey, a place to gather thoughts,
and become the best version of you.
Papier creates thoughtfully crafted notebooks, journals,
and more.
They're curated journals cover themes like wellness, goals, and gratitude.
Best of all, you can personalize each product for free.
Put pen to paper and start your journey today with Papier.
Visit Papier.com for 10% off your first order.
That's 10% off at PAPIR.com. It's five new cells. It's five weeks if they're being incorporated into new into new habits I totally believe that I told it would absolutely have things for three and a half weeks and then fall
And off the wagon. Have you?
Before we eat many times and you know, it's also like I have great intentions of doing it and then of course, you know
I think everyone also has just they don't will I think will power is a muscle that gets
Flex too much and then it dies, right?
Like, you can't, you know what I mean?
Like, so you have to learn other things to not do tricks, right?
To not do something, to do something.
What do you think about putting things on autopilot as much as you can?
Like, wearing the same thing every day, for example.
So you don't use your white power.
Steve Jobs wearing his black dress.
Right.
The X-C-N-Decision fatigue, for example. Exactly you don't use your white hair. Yes, Steve Jobs wearing black triple neck, stadium decision fatigue for it doesn't matter.
Exactly.
It's great.
I also think that life is wonderful and varied
and you should stop and smell the different color
turnl mix.
Right.
What?
Stop and smell the different color turnl mix.
Oh, turnl mix, okay.
Yes, I got you.
Yeah, sure.
But I mean, very few of us have that many demands
on our life that we can't decide what
to wear.
No, but the idea behind it is that you are not putting brain power into something that's
not really that important.
Yeah, but also in the chemistry and the chemistry and the chemistry and the chemistry and the
chemistry and the chemistry and the chemistry and the chemistry and the chemistry and the
chemistry and the chemistry and the chemistry and the chemistry and the chemistry and the
chemistry and the chemistry and the chemistry and the chemistry and the chemistry and the
chemistry and the chemistry and the chemistry and the chemistry and the chemistry and the
chemistry and the chemistry and the chemistry and the chemistry and the chemistry and the
chemistry and the chemistry and the chemistry and the chemistry and the chemistry and the chemistry
and the chemistry and the chemistry and the chemistry and the chemistry and the chemistry and
chemistry and the chemistry and the chemistry and the chemistry and the chemistry and the chemistry and
the chemistry and the chemistry and the chemistry and the chemistry and the chemistry and the
chemistry and the chemistry and the chemistry and the chemistry and the chemistry and the chemistry and the chemistry and the chemistry and the chemistry and the chemistry and the chemistry and the chemistry and the chemistry and the chemistry and the chemistry and the chemistry and the chemistry and the chemistry and the chemistry and the chemistry and the chemistry and the chemistry and the chemistry and the chemistry and the chemistry and the chemistry and the chemistry and the chemistry and not being mindful and aware and present in your things you do willfully and voluntarily. I mean do you have the same meal every
day? Don't think about it when you're done eating or do you sit and
savor the bites? Do you drive to work and brown out on the way there because it's
the same route or do you discover the new artwork on the wall next to you?
But then this is a whole conversation about why then build healthy positive
habits because people need structure.
Right? So for me, when I build my habits and a lot of other people, obviously, it's because
they need some kind of structure to keep them on point. So they don't sway into something
that would be bad for them. But I think it's about balancing like the reward value and the
repetitive, interesting, yumminess of things, and the quick reward against, I mean,
we as humans have all these competing things, right?
We're able to delay gratification, think about abstracts, and it's that kind of stuff,
versus the answer.
We don't.
A lot of us don't have it that well, right?
That's why we put these...
It's the structure and recommend to do it.
Yeah, but it is a balance.
Even those of us who aren't doing everything right are probably still mostly getting it
and going to work, let's say.
We're hearing to structure.
Right.
And there's always, and this is always a moving target.
I love with habits when coaching about things to implement.
To really, I really try to work right up to the point of telling people what to do and
then not tell them what to do, because I want people to discover what works for them.
And to use a habit as a workbench and a lab
to play with something, see what works, refine it,
and learn from it.
And I think about a habit really more of a practice
unless it's something you're doing to maintain health,
like if you have a work at you all the time now to habit
or you go groceries, but I often think about these things.
Like for me, I have a hard time sticking with yoga every single day all the time.
And I come and go, I travel, I get injured, it's hard.
And I used to think, I've got my workout in.
Willpower was failing.
But I saw who was a Keno McGregor talked about a strong yoga and doing yoga as a devotee.
You know, you have a see guy? I'm a kid.
She's a woman.
I talked about a keynote McGregor.
She's a stung, a stung, a yogi teacher.
That's why I'm on the person.
And she talked about it being more of a devotion and approaching her daily practice like a
devotion instead of a workout.
That'll resonate with me.
And so for the next two, three months, I was like, well, it's not about getting my workout
in and therefore not of time, not worth doing or feeling it's not worth doing. It's, well, here's what I getting my workout in and therefore not of time, not worth doing, or feeling it's not worth doing.
It's, well, here's what I'm doing today because this is my practice time.
So yeah, it was a habit.
But the habit was a practice of sitting with how I was feeling and doing it regardless
of how I was feeling.
And less about what I was doing automatically.
Was it running through my hour-long practice?
It was, now I have time, let me just practice.
But within that moment, I was being very mindful,
very intentional, this is my body.
And I think if you put too much stuff on autopilot,
you might not miss things.
I get you.
But how about all these CEOs have things on them.
They come with heart problems and anxiety and sleep issues,
because they aren't taking care of the things
that are less important, you know,
then a lot of these people who I deal with right talk to their situation is they wake up most of these I wake up at 4 a.m.
And I do this and I do that and then by they're basically done like a whole week of stuff
by the time it's like 7 a.m. in the morning and they do that because they have so much other stuff to do
They want to make sure that stuff is on the way and I do that. Right so what do you so you do that too? Yeah I get
it for you. Okay so what do you do? I still have an hour relaxing, have some coffee. Well you wake
up before I am to relax. Yeah. So why don't you sleep for another hour? Because I'm not relaxing.
Okay but sleep is really important too. Yeah, but I get playing sleep. Okay, which time do you go to bed?
But nine.
Okay.
All right, so you wake up at four.
Four?
Relax.
I have some coffee, check anything urgent
that I need to check the night before.
Okay.
Then in yoga, about five, five, 30, about an hour.
Okay.
And then my company's waking up about 6 a.m.
California time.
Okay.
Throughout the world, so I'm certain
I have to answer questions.
And from 6 to about noon, I'm doing lots of stuff.
And then I change gears and do more consults
and things in the afternoon.
So really, your only real habit is
doing that yoga at five o'clock and waking up at four.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Is there food?
Do you have other things besides meditation?
That are- Which is now part of my yoga, because the yoga idea is a moving meditation type yoga. But do you have other things besides meditation that are?
Which is now part of my yoga.
Because the yoga idea is a moving meditation type yoga.
It's going to vinyasa flow to call the stunga.
It's not that you're going to be the same practice
all the time, direct a gaze, repetitive breath.
So I used to meditate, yoga, and workout all separately.
But now they're all kind of the same thing.
So for me, it's a function stacking,
kind of thing to do several things at once in the same place. And I get my meditation mark out, you know, my practice in that way.
So do you think yoga really helps with your brain too?
Do.
And breath work, you're still too.
Yeah, those, I feel like breath work has really become big recently.
And it's been around forever, obviously.
But now there's much more.
Yeah.
The more we're able to do that.
It's tension on how much control we have. And then we're discovering,'re discovering, the things that seem sexiest to me in neuroscience are
discovering there are these levers that are built in for control.
It's a controlling how we feel.
And meditations in that category, but then there's lots of this new breathwork stuff,
talking about how we actually have control over states, recovery, habits, and of course,
Brian McKenzie
people with that are really pushing that skill set.
Then Andrew Heberman, up in North Cal, is talking about how things like gaze direction will
change your activation level, how you slice up time and perceive stress.
What's gaze direction?
Literally, if you're looking up and away, your gaze is not converging.
If you're looking down in front of you, gaze is converging.
So, it experience a lot of classic stress, you know, anxiety, and your brain is looking
down in front of you, your eyes are slicing, your eyes are together, so your brain is slicing
up timebrake, wrap it, the process information right around you, because you may have to touch
things.
So where do you see, what do you say, what do you say, what do you say, what do you say?
Look up and look away. Your brain will drop down to a slower time processing and you'll
come right down. Involuntarily, in a way that's built in, in a way that breath work is not necessarily
to do something for breath work or for meditation.
How do the meditation to be intervention for stress?
Breath work might be.
What if someone can't do breath work or meditation because their brain can't slow down?
Gaze directions.
So then that thing, that's what I was saying.
You look up and you look away at a vista,
and your brain will slow down.
I like that gaze direction.
How long should you be doing that for?
Try it. It's almost instantaneous.
If you're a strafster mind's like going mile and minute,
it is almost instantaneous.
It is a built-in lever from the time you're born.
I like that one, because I'm going to try it.
I'm just doing it right now as we're talking.
It works best in like looking at like big.
The best stuff.
Yeah, like.
Yeah, no looking at my door behind you, you know.
We work like a 4K TV, like the ocean crashing
with a grand canyon, but it's not whole like my eyes
looking far away.
Think about it evolutionarily.
If you're looking far away, you're traveling.
You're on a horse, you're wherever, you're walking.
You don't care what's right in front of you.
Right.
But if you're looking down right in front of you, you might have to react very rapidly.
And that produces a different type of brain activity.
That's a good one.
Tell me another one that would be great for your brain.
To train your brain.
Meditation is the biggest one.
We went through meditation.
We went through breath work.
It's called gaze direction.
Gaze direction, change in the way you go. I have two more I want to ask you, but how about the sensory deprivation tank?
Yeah.
Huge.
Yeah.
Or more and more people are getting to do, more and more people are doing it.
Yeah.
And when you have, you're not using your other sensors, your brain has to focus more, right?
Or, or, or train your brain or to create information out of the chaos of nothingness, basically.
So you actually hallucinate and have internal experiences.
I consider float tanks to be a version of like a shamanic experience, basically.
Like shamanic experiences push your ordinary consciousness far enough that you have a slight
shift in consciousness and come back to ground later with a little different perspective.
That's what shamanism is.
It's a static technique, changing ordinary consciousness, coming back with transformation.
That's what a float tank is.
It also can cause deep relaxation responses, hypnogogic state change, which is the same thing
that re-regulates those alcoholics.
They've talked about neurofeedback, the deep ability to relax.
You can do some stuff there.
But I don't think float tanks are all that exciting.
They're an interesting tool, like an exploration tool,
but for me, there's other things that are much higher
up the list.
Can you also create anxiety?
Because you're in this water and you're by yourself
and dark is black and healthy.
Absolutely.
Right?
You should not do such a step stuff if you have a trauma history, if you have a lot of anxiety.
You shouldn't have meditations of anxiety.
You should get rid of any first and then meditate or meditate as a way of reducing tone
over time and not as an intervention against things.
Well I'm glad that you said that because again the meditation is like a panacea too of anybody
who or anybody to kind of quiet or train or focus their brains
So then if that's the case if you have an exact if you have anxiety you could do gaze direction
What else can you do you said there's all these things above century deporation tanks?
So give it yeah for anxiety or or yeah for any of these for your brain. I mean if you're brain in general
Sleep packing is up is number one.
Meditation is right up there.
Nutrition, which is a mix of how you eat and what you eat.
I've been asked you.
Do you have foods that you think really do help with brain power?
Yeah, generally the rules are.
Besides the ones everybody knows.
Well, I mean, that's the thing.
It's this very personal topic.
You are asking you.
It's personal.
You're all right. I is a very personal topic. You are asking you, it's personal.
You're all right.
I'm a gerontologist.
I really view you should minimize sugars and starches
to near zero in your life over time.
But you mean it doesn't make sense?
Yeah, because it's not rigid, not orthorexic.
I'm also the opinion you should know what the rules are
for yourself, and adhere to them perfectly, about 80%
of the time, and then throw caution to the wind the rest of the time.
Like I have muffins and pizzas and ice cream,
and I also go low carb and paleo and primal
for weeks at a time.
So I have insulin that remains sensitive.
I don't fall into a coma walking by a donut shop
or something.
Okay, we'll give me a few foods
that you think are really good for brain productivity
and brain fat.
I don't think it's about what you eat as much as,
I mean, more on the basics, it's about when you eat.
So people think intermittent fasting
is a big one for a brain health.
It's a huge, huge.
And you need to allow the system to drop its,
sort of, building mode and move into a cleanup mode.
And most of the aging and deterioration things
experience are accelerated by inflammation,
what's called glycation, or rusting from sugar.
So the vast majority of things in aging and brain development and brain performance can
be enhanced by reducing sugars, improving good fats.
But then I think you all seem to compress your eating and either do some sort of intermittent
fasting or time or seated feeding where you're doing like a, you know, for women it's
different. Women have to be very cautious
about doing too short a window
or you suppress hormone production pretty easily.
So fasting completely, do you do that?
I do that, yeah.
And I think it's better for women
than intermittent fasting actually
is to do longer fasting here and there.
But I do like 20 hours of eating,
so 20 hours of not eating four hours of eating
when I'm eating. And I see. What you do 20 hours of eating? So 20 hours of not eating four hours of eating when I'm eating?
And I see.
What you do 20 hours of fasting.
So what if I fast, there's something that Gabby,
sorry, Gabby Reese was on recently
and we're talking about this.
She's saying her friend does that.
It's a crazy diet.
Yeah, 24 and this.
That's a cult.
That's 20 and fasting.
Is a name for it when you only eat for a four hour window.
I usually eat for one hour actually.
Generally, one meal. Oh, it's one meal.
Oh, mad, one meal a day.
That wasn't even, that's crazy.
And then I skip those meals every once a week,
skip one or two days.
So I go 48 or 72 hours or more once a week.
So, do you think?
But is this for your brain, or is it just for every?
It's for everything.
It's for aging, it's for brain, it's for health,
it's for everything.
The brain kind of controls lots of stuff, but it's not just for my brain.
So.
What kind of results, how do you feel when you do that kind of fast?
On the middle of it, you feel kind of like it's on your own drugs, because it's so much
energy, so much clarity, so much focus, into key tone production.
It's kind of a cheat. I joke that it's like the entrepreneur's cheat
is to not eat because you're busy.
But like a day and a half later, you have so much energy.
And like, why do you say all these emails that 4am or whatever?
Like, it's a little crazy how much energy ketones can give you.
So you believe in the ketosis?
So you go into ketosis?
Yeah.
And so you fast.
How often did you say you do the 20-hour fast?
Every day.
Every day. So right now, you you're just gonna have an evening today. Yeah, so what time do you have?
What time do you time your meal right now my next meal is planned for 9 30 tomorrow morning?
Can you drink coffee? Yeah, I do black coffee water. It has some salt
Some pincasalt. You're looking at me till tomorrow. Yeah
Okay, and you said you do this.
How often?
At least once a week I skip a day.
I often skip two days once a week.
So I'm going to set me three hour fast.
Didn't we just have this conversation about, I don't know,
50 minutes ago when you said to me,
what about the like joys of life?
You know, when you don't you like to eat?
I do, I love it.
And you deprive yourself.
Well, we talk about being on autopilot. I talk about like start a new day fast. Last time I had a three day fast, I love it. And you deprive yourself. Well. You talk about being on autopilot, I talk about like starting out.
Last time I had a free day fast, I broke it with a blueberry pie that I made and a roast
wagyu sirloin tip roast.
And a blueberry pie.
No, but my point is you're not, like, aren't you just thinking of food the whole time?
No, no, no, you're not hungry and I fix that in food at all.
No, no, the body's fine with doing it.
Can you exercise?
Absolutely, and gain muscle.
Yeah, because the growth hormone is like 6, 10, 100 times exotid is when you're not doing it.
Okay, so.
So your body shreds down, it's insane.
I lost 40 pounds of doing one meal a day
from February through June.
Because you're not eating, is a calorie deficit?
No, it wasn't.
I was still eating three to four thousand calories today.
So you, okay. So you're, because you ate the blueberry, how much were the blueberry pie and that? No, it wasn't. I was stealing 3 to 4,000 calories today.
So, okay. So, you're because you ate the blueberry pie and that... Half of it.
...pound and a half of the meat and half the pie.
Do you also feel like you've like the consensus of accomplishment in a way?
I mean, the first couple times, what I used to doing it, it was hard to do, but it's not hard to do anymore.
My insulin is super sensitive, my body's happy to do it.
I don't even notice it.
I'm like, oh, I'm not even okay.
I stay on eating day, I'm okay great, whatever.
So then this whole intermittent thing that I was talking about
is like a cake once in a while.
Now, yeah.
Yeah, in fact, meeting more than one today
is a little annoying to me now.
Messes me a little bit.
See, I guess it's because you retrained your brain.
Let's eat that.
My circadian system.
Well, I think we're built to eat this way.
I think we're built to eat big meals a couple times
and then fast for a few days.
And then eat a couple of big meals
and a fast-free day a few days.
I think we're built to do this.
Can you give me a couple other hacks that you do?
That's a big one.
So sleep is the biggest one.
Right, well.
And there's three big circadian tricks
that people often do wrong.
So although my biohacker friends are really into like controlling light to hit, to attack
your sleep, I'm not.
I don't think it lights a big deal.
Or at least it's kind of far down on the list.
The highest things are sleep.
And what control sleep the most is when you eat. So the first rule for
circadian rule, entrainment is, circadian hacking is, don't eat for three to four
hours before bed. You have to have low insulin when you fall asleep to have the
growth hormone surge two hours later. If you don't, if you get about insulin in
your system, you'll suppress growth hormone and you'll sleep lightly all night
long. So that's with the reason behind it. So you'll suppress growth hormone and you'll sleep lightly all night long.
So that's with the reason behind it.
So you will suppress the growth hormone.
Yep.
And if you're north of 35, you're only getting growth hormone at that one pulse.
Right.
An hour and a half into nine, two hours of the night.
That's it.
That's a good fact.
That's a good fact.
So you've got about hungry, wake up, refreshed and full of energy.
You've got about full, wake up hungry, and tired.
Well, you know, everyone always, I mean, like I said, this is not a new thing
to like not eat before you go to sleep and all that.
They never heard it's because you're suppressing the growth
work.
Because insulin and growth in order,
mutually, suppress it basically.
And the next most important rule for circadian
training is to get up at the same time every day, roughly,
half an hour plus or minus.
When you go to bed, I don't care about.
When you go to sleep, sorry, when you make up, huge.
Your evening time will sort itself out.
You'll want to go to bed.
You'll feel the reflex of, okay, talking to bed.
But if you have the morning time nice and entrained,
the morning light is the only one
that really does strong entrainment
through the super chiasmatic nucleus over the optic chiasm, the optic nerves.
Can you say that in my legs?
The optic nerves have a cross, an X called the optic chiasm, behind the eyes.
And top of the optic chiasm is this little nuclei called the supra chiasmatic, the
top of the chiasm nucleus.
And its job is to sample the temperature of light coming in the retina, and time of time
of day it is. And it's very sensitive to a certain frequency of light
that's only present in the first hour after dawn. The sun's too high in the
sky and most frequencies of light are reflected back into space later in the
day. But in the morning that low horizon light is special color and the
brain has circuits specifically noticed that. So morning light is the
key for circadian, not evening light stuff. So how about like blue light and
all that other stuff? It's about melatonin. But melatonin is a very weak effect.
You can still have a fine circadian with no melatonin. But you can't have one
with no vase oppressing, which is what the superchasmatic nucleus is all about.
So that the timing is about morning timing.
Evening timing can have some impact.
Women are more sensitive than men to evening timing pushback
because you're circadian rhythms that shorter anyways.
So if you ate at night, night at night, the same time,
it'll be worse for you circadian-wise
because you'll stretch your rhythm.
But I won't stretch mine if it's early enough.
Okay, is there anything other one?
Yeah, the third one is get some exercise in the morning
before you eat.
See, this one's always very controversial
because I need to eat to get some energy
before I exercise.
Well, you might not be well adapted to...
So, it's training myself to not do it.
And you may not be having good ketone production when you're fasting.
You should.
Even after a single night in fasting, you should be able to have good ketones in the morning
and also some good grailin suppression and cortisol times, you have no appetite and tons
of energy when you wake up.
If all your hormones are kind of coming on board online properly.
You know what it is?
It's also habit, right?
So I'm supposed to have it.
So I'm supposed to have it.
I've trained my brain to, you know, it's like Pavlov
dog. I'm like used to waking up going to the kitchen having my burger. So I have to
retrain it. So I'll take, you say it's going to take five weeks.
It's a few weeks to get the habit and then about five weeks to cement this, my
guess. Yeah. So even fasting for these three hours, morning working out, sorry,
morning waking time, the consistent morning working out. If you exercise in
the morning, fasted and you're fat adapted, you consistent morning, working out. If you exercise in the morning, fasted,
and you're fat adapted, if you can burn fat pretty easily,
you burn six times as much fat, working out in the morning
before you eat that end of the day.
Six times.
Yeah.
How do you know if you burn fat easily or not?
Can you go low carb and not notice it?
If you go low carb andb and not notice it?
If you go low-carb and you keep having an energy dip,
you're telling, you know.
I mean, again, it's because you're used to it.
All of this could be because you're used to it.
How do you know if you're just-
But your insulin's getting used to it.
Yeah. Your insulin regulates its regulatory system.
It learns and changes.
If you eat keto or paleo or primal all the time,
insulin becomes very sensitive and very ranging.
If you eat sugar all the time, it goes up and stays up.
Your cell's stopped listening. So what do you think think about a forum? Do you know what that is?
Metformin? Yeah, metformin, sorry. Yeah. Because a lot of biohackers, I feel, take it because of
the fact that it like helps with your good, you know, you tell people. You're the
insulin sensitivity basically. Yeah. There are lots of positives, apparently, from that foreman,
but I have a hunch we'll discover it causes lots of problems.
Why?
Because anything it seems to monkey
with that regulatory path of energy
has caused problems historically.
What kind of problems?
Addiction.
I'm thinking heart disease or brain disease
is later on degenerative things. I don't know. Blood sugar is not something I think is later on, you know degenerative things.
I don't know.
But blood sugar is not something I think you should be messing with unless you absolutely
need to.
Right.
Because there are so many factors regulating it.
That leaning with an aggressive external force on one of those, I don't like that.
I never like that.
But yeah, people are getting effects from it, better blood sugar regulation, anti-aging
stuff.
There was some increased risk in a couple of papers with animal models
for some stroke or something, but I'm not sure.
I think that for these biohackers, I think you have to walk the line.
And if there's a supplement or a substance or a compound you want to play with, go for
it, whatever, it's your brain.
But I think if you have a problem, it is a disorder, it is ease.
You should then maybe balance the side effect potentials
against the benefit you're going to get.
But if you're a biopacker,
you're just trying to squeeze a little more performance out.
You should be very, very resistant to allowing side effects in.
Is there any supplement or neutropic or whatever
that you believe works?
I know that you were involved.
Most of them do.
You believe in it.
Again, a lot of people say that it's a good, it's a money maker.
Well, that's because the word neutropic is used
as a marketing word, not a true.
I mean, the word really means things
that improve brain performance with no side effects.
Okay.
So, medallion is not a neutropic.
Caffeine is not a neutropic.
No.
You know, and there are some neutropics
that fit into the suburban, and vitamin category.
Okay, give us a couple that you think.
Like, if you have anxiety, anesthet, it's often amazing as a nitrobic or a tyrosine
as a dopamine precursor, a couple of lot for executive functions for some people or magnesium.
Magnesium is a huge one.
What is magnesium really?
Can you give me a breakdown of what actually it does and what it helps with?
Many things.
It's helping mostly with, well, combination with muscle relaxation and with nerve firing.
So nerves use magnesium to fire more than things.
And the last fitness people did use it, of course.
Yeah, and that's mostly for muscle recovery.
And for sleep.
I mean, the effects of the quality of sleep improvements, magnesium, exceed that of melatonin
dramatically.
So you get a much better sleep improvement on magnesium.
But again, it's an essential sort of mineral we need,
and so if you supplement it great.
The trick of magnesium, neutropically,
is that people often absorb it very well.
And so you find that if you need magnesium, if you've
got issues, then you should probably
do multiple formats of magnesium, not just one.
Or you should bypass the gut to get it into your system.
So one way you can get magnesium into your system is using magnesium oil.
It covers entire legs with it, it's bath, huge amounts of mass of magnesium into your
system directly through the skin.
So you put it in a bath?
Usually on your moisturizer out of the, I'm just going out of the bath or the shower.
That's a good, and that's like very, okay, that's a good one.
So let's say magnesium tyrosine, althene, which is the amino acid found in T-Leaves, balances
caffeine beautifully.
So if you use caffeine as a lifestyle drug, a little bit of althene in there, we'll kind
of make it smooth instead of push it.
There's a lot of them.
And then you have the synthetic category, the first
neotropics, which are the racetams,
prasatam, antiracetam, oxiracetam,
phenolprasatam, premier acetam,
oxiracetam, and the whole bunch of them.
And those are all derived from the neurotransmitter GABA.
There's one step away from GABA,
which is a naturally occurring neurotransmitter,
it makes you call them.
The most of the racetams have effects on learning and attention, the kind of, you know,
research chemicals and...
Is there a supplement people can take to help them focus, to simply focus?
No.
But no.
And it won't work the same across people.
I mean, yeah, L. Tyrosine, as a tyrosine precursor will boost your dopamine.
For some people, that will be like taking Adderall. For most it won't.
Right, so it's like trial and error too, a lot of it.
And it's being smart, yeah, good functional medicine doc can go,
oh, you have altered gene metabolism for dopamine.
We should give you some little L tyrosine,
or you've altered methylation for B vitamins,
give you some methyl cobalamin. And they can shore up your metabolic pathways that way
and dial things in.
But I think for the average person,
neutrophics should be used to just boost day-to-day
and you should have a very low key thing.
Some supplements, some vitamins,
then dial in one or two cognitively activated things for you.
Like, altiracene, alfini.
Is it a myth that omega-3s,
they'll just basic omega-3s, help with brain function?
They dramatically do, yeah, actually.
Specifically DHA.
You didn't say that one though, you forgot about that one.
Yeah, I didn't forget that one.
DHA.
DHA.
And vitamin D as well,
off-synetropic, very subtle.
But the thing is, when I think of tropics,
I think things you feel,
you don't usually, some people do feel mega-threes.
Most people don't feel vitamin D, omega-3s.
You'll feel tyrosine, generally, or magnesium,
or gel.
I'm going to write that down.
And what did you say tyrosine was good for?
Dopamine.
Dopamine precursor.
So L tyrosine does be better than straight, you know, tyrosine.
But yeah, and as many others,
but none of these things will shore up a crappy diet or leaky gut or.
Of course, of course.
They're just like, they're just kind of extra,
that you can do to kind of just elevate your brain power
or your overall health.
But I would rather you meditate for 20 minutes a day
and then start playing with the new tropics.
Oh yeah, of course.
You know, or stop eating sugar versus looking for.
Oh, absolutely.
I'm a believer in what you're saying.
I think it's a lot of us.
People want the magic bullet and the quick route.
And the issue in the Intrepid field is people searching for that
instead of using it to shore up and gap fill and work on things.
Like my mom, she's on Nutriopx.
She takes a bunch of them
and I have her on a whole bunch of interesting things
and she runs out of a few months and calls me and says,
send more because you know, we're concerned about
some cognitive stuff, she doesn't have any cognitive,
she's at all.
But she wants to make sure the next 20 years are the same.
So we dive in a very low key strategy
for based on the family history
and her own great nutrition activity.
Can this help with, or actually any of this stuff, or especially neural feedback with Alzheimer's
in?
Neurfeeback probably can't help too much.
It might slow down progression, make the brain more plastic, but for Alzheimer's I would
go into the metabolic approaches.
The present program, we're looking at the 39 factors or so that drive up the synaptoclastic,
the brain turns into a synapse consuming machine,
versus synapse building machine with under stress
as an immune function thing.
And it looks like Ameloyd is a basic immune modulator
in the brain that fights against microbes.
Next time I'm gonna bring a web-sertictionary,
because I mean, thank you.
I mean, you're vocabulary,
I kinda like really pay attention.
I just talk fast, it's my East Coast, sorry. No, no, no, it's great. I mean, this has vocabulary, I kinda like really pay attention. I just talk fast with my East Coast, sorry.
No, no, no, it's great.
I mean, this has been, I'm sorry, I've kept you here forever.
That's all right.
My day off.
Okay, well, that's good.
Where can people find you?
And where more information?
Because I've kept you here, it's like way over the time
that you probably thought you would ever have to like sit
and walk on the treadmill.
That's right, that's right.
I didn't do my yoga today.
I was springing thumb, I can't push my hands.
I remember that's a spray and thumb.
This is my workout I guess for the day.
Maybe yes.
It's an example.
How many calories did you burn? Press the weight button.
The white button?
Yeah.
166?
Oh.
But it doesn't have my weight, right?
Or does it have all your...
It doesn't do it.
It doesn't have no, no, no. You put it all in there.
All right, well still.
Still you moved.
You've got your body moving,
we spoke, we got your brain kind of thinking
will turn better with the treadmill.
Where do people find you?
So we're at Peak Brain L.A.
or Peak Brain Institute,
all of our socials, our website's Peak Brain Institute.
We have physical offices in Los Angeles,
in Orange County, in St. Louis, in London,
and in Malamia, Sweden.
And we also do workshops around the world.
So we have workshops in New York City,
and Amsterdam, and London all happening this year.
Could be a lot of self-training.
Teach you how to train your own brain and a workshop.
We didn't get to that.
Yeah, it's okay.
Next time.
It'll come on again.
Sure.
So, yeah, peak print online or peak print institute, and I'm going to think I'm at Andrew Hill
PhD on socials as well.
Well, you've been at Pledge, huh?
Thank you.
Thank you so much for coming.
My pleasure.
And we'll hopefully have you again next time.
We'll go into the self.
How you can actually do this at home alone, but you've got to tune in again.
That's right.
Teaser.
Yeah, teaser, exactly.
Thank you so much.
Let her. This is your moment. Excuses we in heaven that the habits and hustle podcasts power by happiness
Hope you enjoyed this episode. I'm Heather Monahan host of creating confidence a part of the YAP media network the number one
Business and self-improvement podcast network. Okay, so I want to tell you a little bit about my show
and self-improvement podcast network. Okay, so I wanna tell you a little bit about my show.
We are all about elevating your confidence
to its highest level ever
and taking your business right there with you.
Don't believe me, I'm gonna go ahead
and share some of the reviews of the show
so you can believe my listeners.
I have been a longtime fan of Heather's
no matter what phase of life I find myself in,
Heather seems to always have the perfect gems of wisdom that not only inspire, but motivate me into action. Her experience
and personality are unmatched, and I love her go-getter attitude. This show has become
a staple in my life. I recommend it to anyone looking to elevate their confidence and reach
that next level. Thank you! I recently got to hear Heather at a live podcast taping with
her and Tracy Hayes,
and I immediately subscribed to this podcast.
It has not disappointed,
and I cannot wait to listen to as many as I can,
as quick as I can.
Thank you, Heather, for helping us build confidence
and bring so much value to the space.
If you are looking to up your confidence level,
click creating confidence now.
Click creating confidence now.