Latest / Gladden Longevity Podcast / Rebalance, Rewire, and Optimize a Dysregulated Nervous System: Metrics + Tech + Protocols - Episode 261

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Rebalance, Rewire, and Optimize a Dysregulated Nervous System: Metrics + Tech + Protocols - Episode 261 · Gladden Longevity Podcast

1:58
Welcome, everybody, to this edition of the Gladden Longevity Podcast.
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I'm your host, Dr.
2:03
Jeffrey Gladden.
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And as you know, we're here to answer four primary questions.
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How good can we be?
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How do we make 100 the new 30?
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How do we live well beyond 120?
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And how do we live young for a lifetime?
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And to that end, we're going to continue to talk about one of the topics that I think is
2:25
really foundational, quite honestly.
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In fact, maybe you've heard me say this before, but I really think all of life in essence comes down to one thing, and that's optimizing the nervous system.
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And that has to do with how we think, what we believe to be true about ourselves, about other people, how we respond to challenges that we come into, how we learn, almost how we
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move, almost anything that you can think of comes back
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understanding and optimizing the nervous system.
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to that end, I'm being joined by a guest that we've had on previously, Guy Odishaw, and Guy works and runs Cerebral Fit in Canada.
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It's a company that's really focused on helping people optimize brain function, if you will.
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So Guy, welcome back to Gladden Longevity Podcast.
3:22
Delighted to be
3:23
Yeah, good to have you.
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So before before we started here, we were talking a little bit about some clients in terms of looking at their nervous systems in different ways.
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And I think one of the things that we run into is helping the people balance their autonomic nervous systems, quite honestly.
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And the autonomic nervous system for the audience is really comprised of two particular things.
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The parasympathetic nervous system, which is rest, recovery, repair, driven by acetylcholine, kind of calms the system down, basically runs through the vagus nerve and
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innervates all your internal organs, controls heart rate, etc.
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And then the sympathetic nervous system, which is basically runs on adrenaline.
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binephrine, norepinephrine, dopamine to some extent.
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And basically it's more of the gas pedal, if you will, and drives stress throughout the body and the organ systems and also controls heart rate in terms of elevating it and also
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lowering heart rate variability, whereas a parasympathetic will increase heart rate variability.
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And just to define that for you, heart rate variability is the beat to beat variation that occurs with inspiration and expiration.
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When we inspire
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The heart rate tends to increase a little bit when we expire, tends to decrease a little bit.
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And the more exaggerated that response is, the more we can determine that the parasympathetic nervous system is sort of in charge, if you will.
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The narrower that change is, the more the sympathetic nervous system is in charge.
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So if you're wearing an Oura ring or a whoop or a Garmin watch or an Apple watch or something like that, and your heart rate variability is low.
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It typically is an indication that your sympathetic nervous system is potentially out of balance with your parasympathetic nervous system.
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And one of the goals of exercise is to increase parasympathetic tone, but also other things that can impact how your brain works and how your nervous system works can have a
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big impact like meditation and other things like that, neurofeedback, brain tap, et cetera.
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Anyway, Guy, with that is a little bit of a introduction to the topic.
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Do you want to talk to us for a minute about some things that you've been working
5:59
Absolutely.
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So I love everything you said.
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This can't be emphasized enough.
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The importance of the nervous system, whether it's central nervous system or autonomic nervous system, it's the information and even we could say intelligence that is keeping
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the mechanism running optimally.
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I love Michael Levin's example of the thermostat in your house, of this tiny little
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bit of technology, but its intelligence is imperative for a comfortable house to be in, but also an efficient house.
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And so you think of like a thermostat, we have a set point and maybe you've got a two degree swing.
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So on a given day, like we're here in Minnesota and we're probably heating up to 90 degrees today, but you know, I'm not going to have any heat kicking on, but the sun is
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heating my house.
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When needed, I want my air conditioning to kick in and keep me in a of a homeostatic level around 72 degrees.
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And so that seems easy enough, all of us do it.
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But if we think about it, if I set that for a bigger set point, so a 10 degree, so my house would heat up to 80, and then the air conditioning would cool it down to 60.
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So if I got a plus or minus 10 degree swing,
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You can just think of one that's not very comfortable to be in, but also the extra work that it's putting on my air conditioner to do all of that cooling.
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And then if, you if I'm not relying on the sun, if it's on the other side of it, I'm, I'm spring fall.
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I might have my furnace on board.
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And if I'm heating to 80 and then cooling to 60 now that's really inefficient.
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Right.
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And so we could kind of think about our autonomic nervous system in this same way.
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We want to have a very small range for our set point.
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And then we want these two sides, as you explained, the sympathetic and parasympathetic, to be regulating activity within this small set point and to be doing that based on the
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demand of our environment.
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And really, this is the key.
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Much of the research today is telling us this is the key to longevity.
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As this system breaks down, that's what we call aging.
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so the, yeah, go ahead.
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got a thought?
8:33
Yeah, I was just going to say so.
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I think that, you know, obviously many things go into aging.
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There are many, many factors that drive it.
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I do think that one of the things that does drive it, though, is when the nervous system is out of balance and we have too much stress in the system, if you will.
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It really takes a big toll on the nervous system.
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And I just had the opportunity to.
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See a couple of clients here over the last two days And they were kind of really interesting examples of that I might show you I think I can share my screen here And What
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I was going to show you I know the audience won't be able to see this but we'll describe it for you this is a A max pulse
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tests that was done that looked at a particular individual.
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And what we see here is this max pulse basically has two sensors in it, one that basically measures electrical activity and one that measures the pulse waveform.
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And when we look at the electrical activity, we can break it down into different frequency domains.
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There's total power, there's very low frequency, low frequency and high frequency.
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And the high frequency correlates to parallel.
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sympathetic nervous system and the very low and low frequency correlate more to sympathetic nervous system.
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What you can see in this individual is that he has a very, very high power.
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The brackets here are one standard deviation.
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So he's very, very strong power.
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We did another test for him, a brain tap test, which is also looking at this.
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And you can see that his stress index is extremely low and that his vegetative index
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Quite high meaning he has really good Overall parasympathetic nervous system tone here when you look at this spectral diagram, however The parasympathetic is actually fairly
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small.
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He has a lot of sympathetic tone, but he has a massive vagal tone Right.
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His power here is 13 ,886 which is the upper limit of normal range would be 4 ,000 445 so massive massive vagal tone
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he gives him an autonomic nervous system balance here that's normal.
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Even though he has great power, he can also have very strong sympathetic nervous system tone and yet still have amazing stress resilience and have very, very low physical stress.
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But what's driving his high stress here is mental stress, basically, in the sympathetic nervous system.
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So if you swing back over here, you can see that neuro -hormonally, he is
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100 % optimized.
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He has massive energy resources, both on parasympathetic and sympathetic.
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He has a psycho -emotional state that's 100 % balanced and he has massively beautiful looking EEG with tons of waveforms in alpha, theta and beta, a little bit in beta, but no
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delta to suggest that he's fatigued.
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And biohormone rhythms are 100 % aligned and he has a biological age
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25 years younger than his chronological age.
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So the point is that having really high Vegas tone can enable somebody like him not to really realize all the stress that he's under.
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And I found that really fascinating.
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So we had a really interesting conversation with him around who he is actually as an individual based on another profile that we did.
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looking at essentially Culture Index.
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And the Culture Index shows that he's actually pretty much of an entrepreneur.
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He's very much of a team leader.
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He's very, very innovative.
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The rules don't apply for him.
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He's fairly fast paced.
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And yet in his current position at work, he's forced to be a team player.
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He's forced to slow down and be very patient in what he does.
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And it does cause
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some stress, but not significant stress.
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He has so much nervous system strength that he's able to manage that stress even though he's not working in a sweet spot.
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So we had a long conversation about him actually looking at switching his job around to lower the stress that's clearly there, but which he actually tolerates extremely well.
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And it was a really fascinating conversation.
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So I was just gonna show you that in the thing that we do.
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The things that we do here, we can actually dissect this for people.
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Here's another guy with normal power, high physical stress, low mental stress.
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And yet when we look at his brain tap, he's very, very stressed, very high stress index, almost no vegetative stress.
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He has, again, almost a similar pattern, but much more sympathetic tone.
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Autonomic nervous system balance is is completely
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And his neurohormonal index, he's down to one percent.
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Like he is so chronically stressed, he can hardly believe it to look at it.
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And yet when you talk to him, he doesn't notice it.
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His energy resources are virtually down to nothing and his psychomotional state is one percent.
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He's so chronically stressed.
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And as people, we tend to normalize this in a way that we're not even aware of how sick we can be.
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But this guy,
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basically is really teed up for some, you know, traumatic health consequences, right?
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So his biological age is 11 years older than his chronological age and his bio rhythms are at 1 % in terms of harmonization.
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So these are two extremes that we saw just in the last 24 hours here.
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I just thought you'd get a kick out of seeing that.
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This is the kind of insight that we get at looking at people this way.
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Absolutely.
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mean, you said so much there.
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You can pull that kind of information out.
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You can supply that to the patient so they can have that understanding.
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But more importantly, there's a certain value in telling the healthy person that they're healthy and showing them.
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But obviously, more value in showing the person who maybe suspects they're not doing as well as they could be.
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but to be able to show them how not well they're doing.
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Because again, stress adaptation, we all do it and can have maybe a background intuition, but if it doesn't make it into the foreground, we just grind ourself right to the grave.
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We do, we just keep grinding on because we think that's what we're here to do.
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And we're all, you know, kind of brought up to think that, you know, we think that our hero's journey is actually to carry on in spite of, right?
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We think that's our hero's journey, right?
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Isn't that the big piece of misinformation, right?
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That we're communicating culturally.
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in actual fact, the way I understand it is our hero's journey is actually to become who we're actually here to be, to become an unencumbered by all of the stuff that we were
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originally taught, all the traumas that we're living in reaction to and actually be freed up to actually step into who we really are meant to be.
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And in that space, you you live a life that's really very stress free because you're really functioning from from your center, so to speak.
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And I think that has massive implications.
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not only for your health, but for your ability to make a contribution.
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So, yeah.
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Yeah, absolutely.
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And it's the thing of we kind of we don't know what we don't know.
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And that seems obvious to say it's different when you're living it.
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And in the second person's example of them not knowing how how they they're not knowing the experience of flourishing.
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Right.
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What they know is what they know their day to day experience.
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And they're like, I'm fine with this.
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But in trying to talk with a person like that, you might run into, yeah, but everything is fine.
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From our side, sometimes it can be, but what if it was finer?
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Just imagine what life might be like if you had more energy and more creativity.
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It can be challenging to paint that picture for people.
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You've reminded me of, so we were talking earlier about a particular case and happy to talk through that in detail, but you reminded me of another one.
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And so I had somebody in the clinic and we were doing what we do.
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So QEG biofeedback.
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So we do a 10 channel biofeedback.
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I loosely call it HRV, but it's much more than that.
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So we've got them all wired up.
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We're doing all the intake.
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And I notice that his biometrics, and like you're talking about, his
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Sympathetic, parasympathetic is way out of balance.
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And this is a guy who, you he's maybe early 40s, CEO of a company in great condition, you does a lot of athletic events, you know, as we're doing this and I'm kind of sharing with
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him some of the metrics, he's pulling out his phone and he's pulling up all of the health records from all of his executive physicals, showing me
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You know, I've got a perfect heart scan and I've got everything, right?
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I'm perfectly healthy.
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How can you be telling me that I'm anything but perfectly healthy?
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What's wrong with your equipment?
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Right, exactly.
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It's interesting.
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It's really interesting because your arteries can look okay.
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Your VO2 max can be fine.
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All these things can look good and yet you're still missing the point.
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So it's interesting.
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And in his case, you know, his report, the only thing that stood out in his report that that caught like as a red flag for me was he just shared and this was jokingly, this was
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not part of his health report, the intake process, but it was just a side comment, which is his friends kid him because he's known for being able to fall asleep anywhere, anytime.
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Even in a conversation, if they're all sitting around in the evening and there's a lull in the conversation for 30 seconds, he can fall asleep.
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Yeah, well, that's a telltale sign right there,
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Exactly.
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And that's what I said.
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It's like, like, I hear that that's funny, and it's a joke, and it's all of that.
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but does that mean anything to you?
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It's just who I am.
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I work a lot.
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You know, I don't always get good sleep.
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I'm a little tired, but whatever.
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It's no big deal.
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Well, what we found out was, you know, he had this really kind of asymmetric response in his autonomic nervous system, where he would, he could immediately lose sympathetic tone,
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like
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Mm -hmm.
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then on the vagal side, he would drop into a dorsal vagal rather than a ventral vagal.
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And so we could be doing
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Explain that, explain dorsal vagal versus ventral vagal for
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Sure.
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we think of, if we think of the kind of the old, you know, fight, flight, freeze kind of thing that leaves out the kind of rest and digest or the recover piece of it, the
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positive.
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We think of freeze as dorsal ventral.
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So it's the fainting death process in our nervous system, right?
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This ancient legacy.
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So a person can be
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high sympathetic drive or into a rest and digest or into a free state where the systems really kind of more kind of go dormant rather than optimizing regenerative state.
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So we have really these kind of these three legs to this stool.
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And fortunately, most people and most of the time we just talk about kind of the gas and the break.
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Can we talk about, you know, sympathetic tone, increasing activity and parasympathetic?
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of the vagal break or withdrawing from that sympathetic activity.
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That's the most common kind of conversation.
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And the dorsal ventral doesn't get mentioned that much, but it's in the mix and we don't usually see it unless it's pretty extreme activity that brings that in as part of a
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person's day to day.
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his history has that, his narrative has a really extreme TBI in it.
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Again, we never know in people's histories what brought it about, but it is the most likely place that this happened for him.
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And it also marked in his health history a turning point, the before and after that accident was dramatic and marked in how he was treated.
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thinking that that's contributing to his ability or need to sort of fall asleep at the drop of a hat?
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Or do you think that's just related to his lifestyle choices?
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Or how are you weaving that together?
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Yeah.
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So my best guess is that that TBI had an impact on the operation of his autonomic nervous system.
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And then it changed the signaling away from kind of a neurotypical to an atypical signaling pattern that was longer driving him in optimal states of arousal and rest and
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digest.
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So when he wasn't stimulated, then the thing would just drop off the map.
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It was just flattened out completely.
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wasn't like the parasympathetic kicked in and the sympathetic went down.
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It was never balanced.
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just evaporated.
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Sympathetic evaporated, and so we just fell asleep.
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That's what you're saying.
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Interesting.
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Yep.
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And so the way this presented in the clinic is we would try and do, you know, either neurofeedback or biofeedback.
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And the moment he was kind of left on his own, 30 to 60 seconds, poof, just out.
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And, know, we tried all kinds of things that we have all of our tricks to try and help people because people come in in different states, they're exhausted, you know, there are
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all kinds of, you know, metabolic reserves are down.
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So we have all of our tricks.
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None of our tricks worked on him beyond five minutes.
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Like, I keep him awake for two minutes?
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Yes, but then gone.
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So ultimately, once I got a handle on the pattern, we switched from doing neurofeedback into doing biofeedback, doing, again, focusing kind of heart rate variability, giving him
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data on his sympathetic and parasympathetic states.
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Mm -hmm.
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You know what I love about the guys most like most of our high achievers people they want to do it like I'm going to do it you know and so he's already trying to figure out hacks
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to stay sympathetically innervated right so he's he's doing short rapid breathing all of these things right and and so you know I got to talk him out of all of those it's like
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nope that's not what we're doing we want to restore the natural intelligence in your autonomic nervous system I don't want
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your mind coming up with a strategy to self -manipulate, we want to actually talk with your autonomic nervous system.
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Yeah, bring back that natural intelligence that's in there.
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So once I disavowed him of all of the habits of like doing it, I will do this and just let him surrender to kind of the paradigm of operant conditioning, you know, it took a few
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sessions, but sure enough, we got him to
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point, and we're not done yet, where he could stay awake for progressively longer periods of time and made it through a full 45 minute training session without having to slap
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himself in the face or do anything to stay awake, but just stayed awake.
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And so how did you do that actually?
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How did you actually bring that back
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in this case, we gamified it and we used heart rate variability, we used heart rate, and we used temperature.
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That was another thing, his temperature would be down at 72 degrees in a room that was 72 degrees.
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And that should not be the case.
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That's way too low for a healthy athletic person to be hanging out with
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his core temperature would drop, peripheral temperature would drop,
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Peripheral temperature would be basically at room temperature.
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So I'm giving him that data.
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So he sees on a screen, this little game that he's making this red jewel kind of rise as his metrics optimize.
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Now he has no idea how to do it.
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I don't want him to know how to do it.
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So I want his nervous system to figure out how to do it.
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That's how we access the intelligence of the system.
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So, know, session after session, he's getting this red gem to move up, you know, kind of in this gamified way, kind of to levitate.
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the way he's, what he's getting feedback is as his HRV goes up, as his heart rate normalizes, because we needed him more in a zone because he tended to run too high of a
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heart rate.
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And as his temperature started to rise, so he's manipulating those biometrics.
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His brain is, he's not, his brain is manipulating them.
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He's getting a reward.
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And what we see is he's able to stay awake for progressively longer periods of time.
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So maybe all of that took something like six sessions.
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That's pretty fast for somebody to change that.
27:11
Yeah, it's pretty interesting, right?
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Because you're gamifying it.
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So his cognitive his cognitive brain is online, right?
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He's keeping track of the score, so to speak.
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And yet it's his cognitive brain is not able to manipulate the autonomic nervous system in this, you know, environment.
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So it's it's kind of an interesting interplay between his will to get better and
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his nervous system getting better on its own, right?
27:44
There's kind of an interesting interplay there, right?
27:47
It was, I mean, it's a fascinating mechanism, right?
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Because you need attention, you need motivation, but attention and motivation can't do it.
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It's the brain.
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You know, most brains have just they're wired in a way they have an innate drive to optimize, to learn, to succeed, to solve a problem, right?
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Like it's a problem solving organ.
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And when you present it with a problem,
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even if it has no context, no history, no anything, like I just say, here's this red gem, make it go up.
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That's it.
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That's the problem.
28:23
How do I do that, Guy.
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I'm not telling you that the brain will just set about doing it.
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its ability to do 14 billion calculations a second, it is just chewing through mountains of combinations and permutations of activity.
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Mm -hmm.
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looking for to see a little wiggle.
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And then that gem like wiggles and the brain goes, okay, what did I just do?
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Do more of that.
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And very quickly, you know, and you know, within the paradigm of neurofeedback, you can watch a brain rewiring itself live in front of you.
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You know, beginning to create new synapses and eventually new neural pathways with reinforcement and biofeedback, you know, same thing.
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can, we can get the, you know, the cortex down.
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know, and firm up and renegotiate
29:16
its relationship with the brainstem and
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If you're listening to this, what's coming through is that really, you know, we talked about at the beginning that all of life comes down to one thing, which is, you know, how
31:44
your nervous system is operating and being able to optimize it.
31:48
When you think about what you're hearing about here is how to reprogram your nervous system, right?
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Back into an optimal state, some of which can be done consciously, some of which is being done sort of unconsciously.
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There may be an intention associated with it, but you're not consciously doing it.
32:06
I have found and maybe we can you can comment on this.
32:09
I found that meditation can have a significant impact on some of the metrics I was showing you earlier on individuals.
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We've taken people that on the neural check done by brain tap that we do that they can look really in rough shape.
32:29
And I remember a gentleman we had
32:31
who knew how to meditate, but had stopped meditating.
32:36
And we showed him what was going on and asked him to start meditating again.
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And he did it twice a day, faithfully, I think for just 10 minutes, twice a day.
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When he came back, he'd gone from being in like, let's call it the 20th percentile in everything into the 80th percentile in two months time, which is quite remarkable.
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And of course we weren't testing him every week
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every two weeks to see how quickly you actually got to 80th percentile.
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But it was pretty remarkable.
33:06
There again, in meditation, you're not doing anything and yet your nervous system is reorganizing itself.
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So again, there's this kind of this interesting interplay between wanting to get a result and yet not being able to try to get that result, just allowing the brain to get there.
33:26
Yeah, yeah, I'm a lifelong meditator.
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I've taught meditation for 25 years, have had thousands of students.
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I'm a huge fan of meditation.
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My challenge, like the place where I will argue with myself, right,
33:48
the guy who's in the meditation room teaching students meditation, advocating for its wonders and its miraculous nature, the guy in the clinic, when I'm thinking about specific
34:00
health conditions, so not the more general commentary that's happening in a meditation state, or sense, the way I think of it is, like meditation, telling somebody to meditate.
34:14
Now, your example, the guy had a history of meditation, so that's helpful.
34:18
But it's like playing darts in the dark.
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You're in a room, you don't know where the dartboard is, you don't know if you're being successful or not successful.
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That's what imitation is like.
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Go sit, close your eyes, meditate.
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And most people will not do that.
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And if they try it, they'll come back and go, no, that was terrible.
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And I both know there's just a lot going on in there that
34:47
you don't necessarily want to get quiet and be confronted with, right?
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And not even talking about like trauma or stress or difficulties.
34:56
It's just, you just realize like there's a lot of, there's a lot going on in there.
35:00
Like it is not quiet.
35:02
Right.
35:04
And, and so, you know, I just like my feeling around meditation is love it.
35:10
When we get to using it clinically, then, you know, there's some guard rails and training wheels and caveats
35:17
And I do like where in, again, in my meditation courses, I would never say this to my students, but in the clinic, I say it to all of my clients, which is doing some type of
35:29
neurofeedback based meditation so that there is some guidance in there and we can help help people, you know, kind of shorten the course for where we want to get them, which is
35:42
we want to get them into kind of a healthy, happy, positive,
35:48
life -affirming, health -affirming state.
35:52
And we want to keep them out of the ruminating, kind of neurotic, you know, that state, which is equally possible to come up when you just say sit and notice your breath.
36:08
So.
36:09
Yeah, exactly.
36:10
think it's a good point.
36:11
think for me, the analogy is learning to meditate is a little bit like learning to ride a bike, right?
36:20
You get on it, you keep falling, you keep putting a foot down.
36:23
It's not working, it's not working.
36:25
And then you feel it for a second.
36:27
It's like, I just felt that for a second, like that little bit of glide, right?
36:32
And then the next thing you know, you
36:35
a pedal comes down and it's a little more glide and then you crash again and whatever.
36:40
So if you're learning to meditate, I think it's a little bit like just being patient, realizing that it's going to take a little bit before you find that space where you don't
36:48
really have a thought and you just really feel at peace and you just really feel completely connected to everything that is.
36:55
And it takes it takes a little bit to get there.
36:58
So there are lots of different tools to do that.
37:00
You know, different guided meditations, brain tap itself makes a headset
37:05
as some photo modulation in the ears and the eyes, and you can dial yourself into different brain frequencies like alpha, theta, gamma, delta, whatever you want.
37:16
But the point is that having some assistance in getting there is really worthwhile in the meditation front because the benefits of it are off the charts.
37:29
They're just off the charts with regards to health.
37:31
So if you're hearing this and it's like, well,
37:34
I'm not really interested in doing that.
37:37
I don't think it's really for me.
37:38
I don't think I can do that every time I've tried it.
37:40
I've failed.
37:41
Don't give up on it.
37:43
You really want to ride that bike.
37:44
That bike will take you places.
37:46
That bike will, you know, like for a eight year old kid on a bike, that's freedom.
37:51
Meditation for you as an adult is freedom.
37:53
Right.
37:53
And you want you really want that.
37:55
That being said, there are other tools to like what guys talking about with neurofeedback and biofeedback
38:04
Other things too, transcranial magnetic stimulation and other things that can be done, right, to help put the brain back into a more optimal state.
38:13
Yeah, I just want to echo your words.
38:15
agree.
38:17
think what meditation offers, the fruits of the labor are absolutely worth the labor.
38:25
But I'm just one who always likes to talk about, like, there's labor.
38:30
It's difficult, right?
38:32
As my teacher, traditional Zen teacher said, it's boring and frustrating.
38:36
Right?
38:37
You've got to get through that, right?
38:39
And then when you do, you're like, this is why.
38:42
And so yeah, my advocacy is like anything.
38:45
If you want to learn to play the piano, you probably want to get a piano teacher.
38:51
And you want to learn.
38:53
Yeah, if you want to learn how to, you know, turn wood on a lathe, right, like take some classes on that.
39:01
It's helpful.
39:02
Like there's a reason.
39:03
so so meditation has the appearance of being so easy.
39:06
I don't need any equipment.
39:08
I just have to close my eyes and focus on my breath or whatever.
39:12
And then those of us who have done it know is like, yeah, that's not like that.
39:16
Yeah, no, it does.
39:17
I think that's a great point.
39:18
It does take some coaching.
39:19
It does take some patience on your part.
39:21
It's understand that you're learning a new skill, even though it's ostensibly very easy and a lack of doing.
39:31
It is definitely a skill and it it takes a bit to get there.
39:35
So, yeah.
39:36
Yep, absolutely worth it.
39:39
what's your sense of, know, we could jump into that other case that I had?
39:46
Yeah.
39:47
why don't you talk about that other case that you brought up initially?
39:50
That'd be good.
39:52
So I'm going to do a version of what you did.
39:55
And I'm going to throw something up on the screen.
39:56
We'll describe it for the listening audience.
39:59
But should anybody see the video of this?
40:02
They'll be able to see that.
40:04
I will just.
40:13
So what we're seeing here again to see the scene is somebody doing 19 channel neurofeedback.
40:19
They're flying a plane with their brain.
40:22
And in this case, I'm doing this, I always do in the clinic when we're doing neurofeedback, we're also doing a 10 channel biofeedback.
40:30
So we're monitoring the biometrics at the same time we're monitoring the EEG.
40:34
In this setup, we're actually training on neurofeedback and just monitoring on
40:42
So this person, a little bit of their story is.
40:46
Let me just interrupt you for a quick sec.
40:48
So just so people can get a visual of this.
40:50
So there's a woman sitting in a chair with a cap on and the cap has EEG leads attached to her head.
40:58
She's looking at a TV monitor ahead of her and on the monitor is is an airplane that's flying and she's putting her brain into a place of concentration, just kind of a place of.
41:14
It's almost a meditative state to some extent, but kind of putting your brain into that space that enables the plane to keep elevated and keep flying over different obstacles and
41:24
things like that as they come along.
41:26
And then behind her are a number of screens that have her full blown EEG and some other biometrics.
41:33
And that's kind of what we're talking about.
41:34
So.
41:36
Yep, great.
41:36
Thank you for that.
41:38
So again, in her case, we've, you 55 year old woman, you know, 30 years of chronic depression has done therapy, has done medications, all at scale, has tried every
41:51
intervention.
41:52
Eventually we came up on her list of things to try.
41:56
And I will say, you know, much to her credit is,
41:59
As little success she's had in escaping this chronic depression, she has continued to try.
42:06
that is, you know, is obviously that's the most important thing for people who haven't yet been successful is that they don't give up hope.
42:17
Yeah, no, mean, God bless her, right?
42:20
mean, that's a difficult road to go down.
42:23
Yeah, yep, absolutely.
42:25
And so she came in, we presumed, you know, neurofeedback and neurostimulation for chronic depression.
42:32
That was the workup.
42:33
That's the path we headed down.
42:36
We weren't seeing the kind of results that our clinical findings would typically tell us we should see.
42:43
We should see more change over the series of sessions she was having.
42:48
That led us to kind of go back, reinvestigate her case.
42:52
and then kind of come back in with some different approaches.
42:55
And that was adding in the biofeedback to see what her autonomic nervous system was up, because maybe the problem wasn't living in her central nervous system, but was living in
43:06
her autonomics.
43:06
And sure enough, that's what we found.
43:09
And so that's kind of what we're seeing here.
43:11
So here on the screen, what we're seeing is kind of heart rate variability, which is very high, coherence, which is okay, temperature.
43:20
turned out to be low on a pretty regular basis.
43:25
Skin conductivity should be stable, peripheral circulation, hers is extremely low.
43:32
Then we're seeing a spectral display, so we have the very low, low and high frequency of her heart rate variability.
43:42
So one of the things that caught my attention right away was her heart rate variability is much too high.
43:49
for her demographic.
43:52
And so as I looked into it, we see that her heart is beating, that it isn't being well paced by her system.
44:00
And so as we talked about earlier, this is one of those things that is a factor that leads to poor health.
44:08
And statistically, we would even say suboptimal longevity is because her system isn't being regulated to a homeostatic state.
44:18
her heart beating tends to be way too fast and is changing gears far too often for what the environmental demand is.
44:28
Her heart doesn't need to be working that hard.
44:30
Well, you'd expect to expect her to your point if she was just sitting in that chair, maybe her heart rate would run at 65 or 70 or something like that.
44:39
You know, being there with a cap on and all that.
44:42
But instead, you were seeing it jump up to 95 or close to 100 and then back down to 60.
44:48
And so the the variation in what was happening was just, you know, sort of inappropriate, if you will, to the context in which she found herself.
44:56
Right?
44:56
So, yeah.
45:00
And so now we're looking at data here that is from four sessions in, and what we see is her heart rate variability has now normalized, and yes, we could say objectively it's low
45:13
on a health index, like this is a low, but it's accurate now.
45:19
Her heart is beginning to be paced and
45:23
and that's the main thing for her we needed to restore was first get her heart reconnected, so it's being paced.
45:31
Then we can start training her heart rate variability to move to a more optimum state, but we couldn't do that when it was off running on its own.
45:41
So this is an interesting point.
45:43
So we tend to think of high heart rate variability as being a good thing and low heart rate variability as being a bad thing because high heart rate variability typically is
45:51
associated with high parasympathetic nervous system tone and low heart rate variabilities associated with high sympathetic nervous system tone or more stress.
46:01
But in this case, she had high heart rate variability, not because she had a lot of parasympathetic nervous system tone, but because
46:11
The heart rate was just kind of unhinged from what was going on with a respiratory rate.
46:16
And so it was indicative of another problem.
46:19
So, you know, everybody's used to looking at their Whoop and Oura ring and Garmin and Apple watch and see what their heart rate variability is.
46:25
And so we will say, well, mine's, you know, really high.
46:28
And it's like one of the first things we have to question is, is it appropriately high?
46:33
Right?
46:34
Not just, that's great.
46:35
Congratulations, because it could be great, but maybe it's inappropriately high.
46:40
So it's kind of looking under the hood a little further.
46:43
Exactly.
46:43
And that's exactly what happened in her case.
46:45
Whenever we would mention autonomics, she'd be like, you know, I've got my wearable.
46:50
I'll leave the name out.
46:51
And, you know, it says my HRV is really high and my recovery is good.
46:55
And, and then when we looked at it, you know, with clinic level equipment where we could break the components out, we saw this finding and that.
47:05
was what ultimately led to a treatment plan that was successful and allowed her to break free of her chronic depression.
47:14
was was interesting when we were talking about this before you kind of started treating her initially for her depression, right, which is what she presented with.
47:22
And she'd been treated for I don't know how many different years.
47:25
But to your credit, I think when you started to see this disconnect between her heart rate and heart rate variability, that didn't really correlate with depression either, so to
47:36
speak.
47:36
And it was it raised the question in your mind, I think of did she have a traumatic brain injury?
47:40
Was there something in the past that we didn't know about?
47:43
So,
47:44
Yep.
47:44
So the finding in her EEG that had some markers of TBI, although in her health report, she denied any TBI.
47:56
So we set the TBI findings aside.
47:58
That's not uncommon for the report to show some metrics and the person not to have a history and we set it aside.
48:05
But in her case,
48:08
All of those factors coming together.
48:10
She's not moving in a typical fashion given the treatment.
48:15
We look at her autonomics.
48:16
Her autonomics are off in a way that you might make you think TBI.
48:21
That revisited the TBI metric that said there was a TBI.
48:27
Eventually, she brought forward the story of when she was 13 and fell on the ice and cracked her head open.
48:34
But today we could all kind of go, yeah, that's probably a TBI.
48:37
That counts.
48:39
But at the time, it was a band -aid and some ice cream and away you go.
48:44
There was no treatment.
48:45
It went on.
48:46
But it also marked the point for her of this transition.
48:50
And we know from TBIs, one of
48:54
very common things that's impacted is the autonomic nervous system.
48:58
But along with that, I think they can be separated, but they often go together, which is the endocrine system.
49:06
So you get a TBI and it knocks your endocrine system off, it knocks your autonomic nervous system off.
49:11
You're kind of set up for a version of what her next 30 years look like.
49:17
And so, yeah, exactly.
49:21
And so, you know, like trying to parse
49:24
Was it a endocrine issue or was it a autonomic nervous system issue as if it could be siloed?
49:32
You know, they're interrelated and so academic to pull it apart.
49:38
But her health history indicates, you know, problems in both.
49:44
so training her in biofeedback and getting
49:50
autonomic nervous system to recalibrate and bringing in the coordination of her cardiac rhythm, her respiratory rhythm, and her baroreflex.
50:00
So getting those three metrics to kind of line up and then train that.
50:06
And, you know, again, I kind of laugh at these.
50:08
So after one of the sessions, she said, I had this really weird experience.
50:12
And she starts to describe the experience.
50:14
It was like this.
50:15
And she's kind of concerned, not overly concerned.
50:18
She's not a dramatic person.
50:19
but kind of framing it in a, like, is something wrong?
50:23
And, you know, and I just smile and I say, what you're describing is the feeling of relaxation.
50:30
And he had just never encountered it before, right?
50:33
And she'd been in chronic stress, chronic hypervigilance, and encountering, just flirting with a state of regulation and at ease was foreign, like she, like, you know, and so, you
50:48
know, and
50:48
we see this, I'm sure you see it too, is people, again, it's that they don't know what they don't know.
50:54
And if people have never been, or it's been so long since they have been regulated, it's like foreign territory.
51:02
Yeah, and we tend to normalize, right?
51:04
We tend to normalize whatever is if you live with it long enough, it's like this becomes the new baseline.
51:09
You see that also when people improve.
51:11
It's like they start off here, then they improve a lot and they come back and say, my gosh, I'm so much better.
51:16
And six months later, haven't seen so much changed because they've normalized the new baseline.
51:22
So it worked kind of both ways.
51:24
I think one of the interesting things, though, was when you
51:27
switched up your protocol to stop treating her for depression.
51:31
And you started treating her for TBI.
51:33
I mean, I think that was kind of the genius move here, quite honestly, to recognize that what you were doing wasn't working and then to say, OK, what are we missing?
51:42
And then to switch up the protocol, still using the same equipment and the same techniques, if you will, but with different targets and different metrics to actually
51:53
train the brain a different way based on.
51:55
Now we're treating TBI.
51:57
Now we're treating traumatic brain injury, right, as opposed to depression.
52:01
Yes.
52:02
And when a person is using, we're doing S -Loreta neurofeedback that really allows us to train kind of what's called volumetrically.
52:12
So in other words, we can train the brain in three dimensions, not just surface.
52:17
Most neurofeedback is surface neurofeedback, training a patch of cortex.
52:22
And it's great not to speak against that.
52:25
It has its place for sure,
52:28
Advancement in equipment and software has allowed us now to dial into something the size of a voxel.
52:35
So a voxel, think pixel on your screen, a voxel is when it's three dimensional.
52:40
So a little five millimeter cube of neurons and how this voxel is talking to that voxel.
52:47
And is it talking to that voxel in the right language, in the right time, in the right amperage?
52:53
So these kind of three metrics.
52:56
And so when
52:57
training somebody, you we might be training four, five, six, 700 metrics at one time that are distributed through the brain.
53:07
So when we're training, when we're training initially around depression, we were looking at the networks associated with depression, the what's called symptom checklist or the,
53:17
the affected areas that are, you know, kind of evidence -based to appear in depression.
53:24
Mm -hmm.
53:24
That's a completely different list of metrics than shows up on the TBI list, the traumatic brain injury list.
53:31
So yeah, us switching the metrics that we were changing, what the computer was asking her brain to do at a very granular level, how her brain is moving energy and information from
53:44
region to region, changing that and training her autonomics, just a complete game changer.
53:52
She went from 30 sessions
53:54
very little positive change to maybe 10 sessions of a meaningful positive change that changed how she was at work, not only in her performance, but also her relationship with
54:10
the people in the office, coming home at the end of the day instead of just, you know, crashing on the couch and doing nothing, actually having the motivation to join a gym, to
54:21
call a friend to go out, to cook a meal.
54:24
We saw change across all of those domains.
54:27
Again, her life opened up to her and she could start to participate again.
54:30
You know, but it's worth saying not only could more importantly wanted to, right?
54:38
Like that intrinsic motivation to engage.
54:43
And then that was met with also the ability, like both sides were there.
54:48
And that was simply by getting brain circuits reconnected.
54:52
Yeah, no, that's great.
54:54
Yes, it's fantastic.
54:56
So, you know, as you've listened to this, I think you're starting to see there's lots of ways to go about optimizing the brain.
55:04
And I think if you're if you're living with something and you've normalized it, but the more you think about it, it's like, geez, I'm not sure I really want it to be that way.
55:16
I'm just telling you, we live in a day and age where these things can be deconstructed and understood and your brain can be
55:22
reprogrammed and retrained.
55:25
There are many, many different techniques that overlap and interface with each other and complement each other in this regard.
55:30
But working with someone that can at least open the door for you would be a first step to go forward in this.
55:37
So super cool stuff.
55:40
Great.
55:41
I agree.
55:41
Well, thank you again for making time to talk.
55:44
It's always a delight.
55:46
I learned so much.
55:47
yeah, super fun.
55:48
No, I really appreciate it, too, guys.
55:49
So thanks so much for sharing all your wisdom with us.
55:53
So thanks.
55:56
Absolutely.