Latest / The Trauma Therapist / Episode 780: Neurofeedback Training & Trauma with Dr. Andrew Hill

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Episode 780: Neurofeedback Training & Trauma with Dr. Andrew Hill · The Trauma Therapist

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All right, welcome back to the Trauma Therapist Podcast. My name is gat
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Meckferson. My mission is to help trauma therapist be their incredible selves, to
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be human, to be real, not just a clinician. I'm a big
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believer in who we are is more important than what we know, and this
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requires cultivating authenticity, genuineness, and vulnerability, and that requires intention. Can
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learn more about my courses and workshops by going to the Trauma Therapist project dot
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com. That's the Trauma Therapist Project dot com. Let's get started. All
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right, here we go. So five four, three, two and one,
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our folks, welcome back to the podcast. I am very excited to
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have as my guest today, doctor Andrew Hill. Doctor Hill, are you
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ready to go? I am? Thanks so much for having me, guy
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NICs to be welcome. So. Doctor Hill is the founder of Peak Brain
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Institute and a leading neurofeedback practitioner and biohacking coach for clients worldwide. He's lectured
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on psychology, neuroscience, and gerontology at UCLA's Department of Psychology, where he
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received a PhD in cognitive neuroscience. At Peak Brain, doctor Hill provides individualized
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training programs to help you optimize your brain across goals of stress, sleep,
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attention, brain flog, creativity, and athletic performance. He's a host of
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the head First podcast and continues to do research on attention and cognitive performance.
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Doctor Hill, welcome, Thank you. I appreciate that great introduction. And
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we also, of course do a lot of work with trauma, because that's
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a thing you can see in the brain. And just to jump right into
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the deep end of the topic, one thing I was thinking about, as
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you know, what can I offer to a trauma informed audience, so to
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speak. When we look at a brain map or a a measurement of someone's
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brain at rest, if the trauma you've experienced is somewhat acute and somewhat recent,
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the brain sort of cramps up in response to it, and you sort
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of see the resources overactivated, kind of similar to how someone's lower back might
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spasm up in a car accident so you can walk away, but ten years
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later there's this resistance, the stiffness of them, tissues having been sort of
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pushed to their edge, and they're now regulated a little differently. Most anxiety
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phenomena, including the complex stuff involved with trauma, is actually not a disease
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process. It's sort of an accommodation of a naturally occurring, useful daily resource
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that's spasmed up super hard. So if you have classic sort of trauma response
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stuff like PTSD, end of the pool, you'll see the post deer or
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singulate at the back midline of the brain as being somewhat activated. Is the
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course the lifeguard who wants to go walk the road, heads up, heads
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up. When you're doing that appropriate thing and evaluating the environment, but when
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you in the world is not especially safer predictable, this can cramp up,
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and you can sort of see that the brain develops this over evaluation mode where
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it's now essentially ruminating. So trauma and suffering and all kinds of things that
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we deal with with our minds. The risk, I think, the extra
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burden we carry is that a lot of it feels invisible and blind to us.
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It's happening to us, but we don't really know why. And I
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love to show people all their brains and show them the real stuff that can
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be suffering. But when you see it on data, when you see it
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painted out in pictures and colors, you start to develop a different relationship with
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it, and now you can think of your trauma response, your anxiety or
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OCD, your sensor, yourtability, whatever, kind of like your shoulder that
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separated during that soccer game. You can be annoyed at it. It's frustrating,
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it really hurts. Probably should deal with it. But suddenly it's really
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hard to feel overwhelmed quite as much, guilty or ashamed or even disempowered as
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much if you understand how it works. So that's sort of our role at
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peak brain for easy and complex stuff, to sort of go, hey,
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it's just a brain. Would you like to figure out a little bit of
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that neuroscience and see how it works? I want to. That's a great
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intro. I want to dive more into that, but I first want to
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find out. You skipped right over this very important question, and that is
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where are you from originally and where are you currently? Ah? I am
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from originally the Northeast. I was born in Maine and grew up mostly in
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Massachusetts. You can't tell because when I moved down from Maine to Massachusetts,
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my mother was like to all the kids, like, oh, you don't
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drop your rs. You sound so tough. Don't do it. So we
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all learned to speak like newscasters a little bit and we you know, not
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have like clipped diction of New England. But then I moved to years ago,
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and I moved to the West coast to southern California for grad school and
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I live in Los Angeles now. And after grad school, I taught for
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a few years at UCLA, and I opened up some startups and did some
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things around addiction, and I have some a company it's still running called True
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Brain that I helped found in twenty twelve after grad school, which does nootropics,
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which are cognitive enhancing compounds, and I also open peak brain as are
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sort of the final form, if you will, of this thing I'm trying
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to do. This empowered evangelist coaching, take control of your brain, thrust
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agency upon you kind of role something that's not really a therapist where there's container
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in transference, and nor is it purely mechanical like a coach in the gym.
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It's somewhere in between. We're using tools of access and insight and agency
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and perspective and self and transformation, but it's somewhat mechanical and iterative, and
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the person with us is there to help shepherd not you know, necessarily treat
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in that way therapist might. So I live in in Los Angeles as a
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long one that answer, now, yeah, so how did you get into
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this field, into this interest? You know, I had a lot of
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experience working in pretty much every aspect of mental health that you can imagine before
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grad school, many years working as a manager of residential environments for people with
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multiple disabilities, you know, developmental issues that were quite severe, no language,
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motoric issues, sebile palsy, people that were visually and auditorily impaired.
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So I spent you know, years sometimes teaching somebody who's a fork or learning
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their particular version of tactile sign pigeon so I could communicate with their thirty words
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that they happened to, you know, hold on to really really acute edge
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case in some ways human suffering. And then I worked in acute psychiatric environments
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because that was better than working in the acute developmental in some ways for seeing
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progress and seeing change still wasn't great, And I saw a lot of really
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acute suffering that just wasn't progressed. It was somewhat managed, it was palliative.
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But I saw a lot of that feel, andrew to working with people
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in that context in yeah, well I'm good at it. Basically, I'm
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good at understanding people. I'm good at working with someone and putting myself in
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their shoes and communicating with them. That can be somebody who's got kind of
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iffy language or a sensory issue, or a kid who's got wild ADHD,
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or it can be somebody who's suffering with subtle, complex brain stuff. At
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this point, I mean, I sort of one of my gifts is,
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you know, teaching people about stuff in whatever way they need to know it,
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whatever way, whatever languide, whatever perspective, whatever metaphor. And when
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I was doing that in acute psychiatric environment to calm people down, and I
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found that I could sort of be a force for soothing and low toning,
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regulating really pretty violent environments for people getting very disregulated in like locked ward facility,
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you know, cute psychiatric And when I was working with people that were
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really acute, nonverbal, deaf blind, I found that seeing how they used
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language was and interacting with them even in a limited language thirty forty fifty words
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tops total, there's still a way to connect with every individual at that level,
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no matter how impaired that piece of it is, and even folks that
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didn't have language. When I ended up working in ner feedback, My first
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job in ner a feedback. To bring this around to your question, how
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I get into it was I was working in psychiatric acute work and I got
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injured. I was I was doing restraints I was in charge of I was
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doing many things at a psychiatric hospital in the East Coast, and one of
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them was teaching all the other technicians how to do safe restraint when there was
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violence happening and self harm happening. And this was a time when the insurance
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system was ceasing to pay on mental health and the average bedstay so to speak,
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in these impatient hospitals I was working at. When I started, there
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was eleven twelve days of approval, and after a couple of years it was
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down to two days of approval. You don't even get met psych meds working
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in two days usually for a lot of things. So staff was dwindling and
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acuity was going up, and the revolving door was revolving faster. And I
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got injured and I blew my back up pretty aggressively, and for the next
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couple of years, left human services completely after ten years doing different human services
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work and went to high tech sales, engineering and databases and all kinds of
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cool tech stuff. And then around this is two year two thousand now the
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tech bubble corrected or just after, and I decided I miss work with people.
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So I went and found an autism center which had some of the development
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skill set that I was good at, and did neuro feedback and brain mapping
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EEG, which I was super interested in but hadn't any experience in. But
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I had the geekery deep and I could handle antech that I needed to.
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So I ended up working in this place in Providence, which over a couple
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of years taught me to do neuro feedback, and I started seeing all this
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amazing change with executive function and sensory and social things that I had good experience
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for more than a decade of thinking that could not change. We couldn't change
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this point of suffering or that phenomena. And then I was seeing change happen
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more often than not in a developmental neuroatypical developmental population, and it just blew
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my mind. And at the time two thousand early two thousands, the field
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of neurofeedback was not that young. It was discovered in this form sort of
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in the late sixties, but it was still somewhat nascent. Still is somewhat
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nascent in terms of a wild west of techniques and providers and ideas about how
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it works. And back then there was about three different schools of thought that
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all had pretty vitch triolic argument within the field about how it worked, and
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they all disagreed, and they all created completely different approaches about how to do
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things to the brain because of that disagreement, and all, you know,
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yelled each other climbing crabs out of the bucket. And the weird thing is
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is no matter that they had this irreconcilable conflicting under underpinning of ideas, it
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all worked really well. They all got better effects than traditional psychotherapy or medication
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for the things they work for it. They all worked. So I call
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this a blind men in elephant situation where we all have a piece of it
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and we're kind of describing something and you know, claiming we have the truth
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and we don't, and there was a perspective that was missing. So after
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doing this for a couple of years, I ended up doing the work as
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a ner feedback technician for a couple of years. I ended up going back
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to grad school and studying how neur feedback works and looking at the loop of
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information as the nerve feedback is presented to the brain, how the brain reacts
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to it, and how we can bind that learning signal and you know,
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doing cool sophisticated stuff to actually figure out, you know what all these different
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giants that I learned from in the field, like you know, what was
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going on there? You know, look, can I agree with something?
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Can I solve some of these problems? Can I advance the the practical fields
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of nerve feedback? So that was my PhD very well put. Thank you,
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and I loved earlier when you were describing your feedback and you were kind
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of making an analogy to you know, a shoulder that's thrown out when something
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goes on in our head, in our brain. It's like there's maybe for
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many of us, there's like what is going on? So how do you
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what do you do specifically? Walk us through an example? Someone comes in,
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let's use if you can trauma on the continuum there as an example.
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Sure, so you know we all have brains, uh, we're all weird.
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No one's average. The goal is never to say, wait a minute,
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why aren't you average. So a lot of human analysis, a lot
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of assessment of individuals is really focused on typicality difference from average in terms of
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what really sticks out. And that's really true of brain stuff because the brain
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matures, and so you have to do sort of age matched comparisons. This
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is true of like IQ test, this is true of strength test, true
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of height. It's a lot of its age match developmental and that's imprecise and
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it's not perfect, but you still get a sense of variability within an age
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of natural you know, a bell curve, a variability. So we would
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do something called brain mapping as an assessment where we do two things as part
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of that. One is the world's most boring twenty minute attention test, and
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we have you like click on a mouse when a one pops up on the
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screen or spoken over the speakers, and not click on a mouse when a
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two pops up while the computer's going one, one, two again and again
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for about twenty minutes and shifting back and forth between auditory and visuals. So
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of course you start missing the ones and drifting and you start error clicking on
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the twos, and we can tease apart things at a much more granular level
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than like just ADHD and tease a part impulsivity aspects, or fatigue or auditory
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versus visual, or stamina, reaction time quirks, repetitive monitoring errors, and
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really decompose the executive function into these things that kind of lump together at the
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DSM level, at the diagnostic level, into things we call ADHD. Now,
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but you can have those phenomena from COVID or from a concussion or from
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trauma disrupting your sleep. So we first measure the executive function because it's one
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of these foundational things in the brain that flexes under any stress at all and
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really describes other resources. Because the executive function resources, about half of them
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are shared with the things that stage sleep appropriately, so you tend to get
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this sleep and executive function overlap. There's frequency in the brain called sensory motorhythm
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the neurologists call sleep sleep spindles or sigma, and it's used for motoric inhibition,
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for sitting still basically, and for pumping the brakes and not going squirrel.
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So if you see a cat in a window still watching birds. That's
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still body and laser like focus balance, poised ready, that's a high SMR
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state, high sensory motorhythm tone state. And that column cat watching birds is
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literally the opposite of ADHD. You can't have motoric stillness and you're pulled by
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information that's variable. So we first do intention test because it matters for everyone
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basically, and then we do what's called a brain map or a q EEG
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where you put a cap on the head and you scuirt it full of gel
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and some earclips and measure the brain at rest for about twenty minutes. Ten
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of that eyes closed and also eyes open. Now those three things, the
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performance and the two physiology measurements compared to a database people your age. And
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then we sit down over zoom or something usually and I tell you how weird
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you are, you know, and some of the performance matters. Oh,
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there's some min attentiveness and auditory processing issue. Well, your reaction times are
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kind of a little iffy, tired. It can matter. It's interesting the
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brain maps, though I don't know what's true for you. I just know
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it's weird for you. People are weird. Great, good job. This
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might all be just awesome or fine or performance or amazing. But hey,
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let's talk about some of this stuff that's outliers, that's unusual for your age
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group, for your you know, as brains in general, some of it
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tends to matter. And I keep my guesses to the stuff that's plausible,
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not every little bit of data that's showing up, because data is noisy.
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Human data is very variable, so we look for big things that are sticking
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out. And I sit down with you and might go over a handful of
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pages of data that had little heat maps showing bright colors where things are unusual.
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So we might see in this example some blobs of red and the front
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and back mid line, and the red would be like large amounts of basically
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everything's color shaded some blue amounts on a heat map, or cold or low
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amounts of brain waves, and red is a large amount of brain waves.
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And again by themselves not that interesting. But if you looked at her brain
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and saw a lot of beta waves a strong red activation in the front mid
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line or the back mid line, you would know someone's singulate, antior cingulate
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or posterior cingulate was more active than usual with beto waves. True statement,
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you've got a lot of beta waves, oh, you know strong. And
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the cingulates are involved with switching your focus around naturally, they do lots of
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stuff. And generally the front of the brain is the inside self and the
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back of the brain is the outside world in terms of how you process information.
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So the cingulates help hold the internal attention on what you're thinking about in
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the front and do the watch the road heads up frisbee kind of thing in
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the back help you orient and evaluate and reorient to the outside world. Well,
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when these guys cramp up, then the one on the front we start
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to perseverate, cess, get stuck in our head, play songs. The
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one in the back we tend to ruminate, get visceral, become threat sensitive,
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ruminate, and you know, both of those things can happen, and
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then you're sort of playing ping pong with stuff on your head that bothers you.
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Did you hear I heard you do to worry? I'm worrying? Now?
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Did you hear I heard it? You know? And then this resonance
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of visceral worry and cognitive worry starts to ramp up. All right, let's
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just pause here for a second to thank our sponsors. All right, we
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are back. So when I look at someone's brain maps, I don't know
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if they have a PTSD phenomena from the posterior cingulate, but it's plausible.
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Maybe they're just a lifeguard and it works for them. I don't know if
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the one on the front is like OCD features. Maybe they're a CEO and
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it works for them. Well, maybe their thoughts are having them and it's
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a bit cramped up and it's a bit intrusive. So I would walk through
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these features and say, hey, your posterious singulate, it's kind of hot.
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That often means we're feeling a little activated and threat sensitive, evaluing the
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world constantly. Are you ruminating a little bit? Does that sound real?
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All? It does? Ah, So sorry you're experiencing that. I'm glad
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we're seeing it because the next step of of brain mapping and this neur feedback
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stuff we do is if we see stuff in a brain map, you can
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change it. It's hard to understand or brain, but it's actually not that
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hard to change. Regulatory features, stress, sleep, attention speed. Those
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are things that are supposed to train a tune and adjust and regulate for you,
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and they actually respond really well to being pushed on stretched. This is
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sort of why they cramp up as well. You know, the posterior singulate
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isn't necessarily a disease process. When it cramps up into trauma, it's an
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acute accommodation because guess what the cost of missing danger? Hi? Miss it
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twice? Game over. So there's this negativity bias. What the brain's like,
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Oh my god, tigers, I've learned tigers exist. I'm going to
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think about tigers all the time. Dude, I'm reading a book. Is
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it a tiger book? No, I'm taking a bath. Are there water?
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Tigers? Brain? What are you doing? And that's the post diosingular
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deciding, Hey, have you thought there might be some danger? You need
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to evaluate an orient to have you thought maybe? And that can be a
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surface level a recent a trauma, classic PTSD phenomena, earlier stuff, earlier
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life, long term movement c PTSD. Developmental trauma isn't really about the post
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diosingulate because you've learned and developed in a world that was more adversive, that
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had less secure attachment, and so you don't see the singular cramped up against
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the environment being unmonitorable or needing more monitoring than you're doing. Instead, you
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get deeper tissues that actually don't have EEG, don't have actually brain waves,
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and things like the Perry aqueductal gray, which is the part of the brain
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that dumps like natural morphines into your system when you hit your thumb with a
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hammer. That moment of pain relief after you slam your thumb is natural endorphins
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in caphalons. It turns out, we've discovered recently the Perry aquiductal gray also
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codes strong experiences of emotional pain. So it's not doing the threat sensitivity.
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Where where's the tiger? It's doing the thing. Hey, did you remember
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that years ago there was a tiger you missed. Yeah, you really should
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think about that just in general. Yeah, hey, don't forget those tigers
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every so often. So it's a pre alert, not the actual visceral alert,
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but it's a bias towards that, and it's very, very involved with
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trauma stuff. It tends to also have coupling with the amygdala, which doesn't
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have EEG either or brain waves either. But for folks who are wondering why
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I'm saying brain tissue doesn't have brain waves EEG or brain waves, is only
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a feature of the bark. The cortex of the brain that has something called
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paramidal cells, neurons that sitting these giant columns that burst together in electrical firing
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and create information and coding. A lot of the brain subcortical doesn't have those
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cells that burst in rhythmic waves, so the cortex is can conected to those
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tissues like the amgdala, but the amgdal itself doesn't burst in beta waves or
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alpha waves or things like that, doesn't have those signatures. So if someone
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wants to train attachment, which is an amgdalar thing, the amygdala helps code
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for the emotions you associate with memories. So if you have a trauma experience,
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you go into the towers during nine to eleven, your migdala then is
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activated about those experiences. Or if you give someone beta blockers going into a
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trauma experience, or do therapy later on with beta blockers on board and re
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activate the amygdala, you create a new learning around the trauma response and pull
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the teeth of the emotional access. This is a newer tool that's being used
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sometimes, these beta blockers in acute trauma response and also prophylactically for people for
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trauma workers, for crisis workers. So let me jump in. Wow,
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okay, well there's there's a lot there. Looking were introduce you here.
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We're talking with doctor Andrew Hill at Peak Brain Institute. So very interesting here.
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You know you mentioned about the kind of position of what you're talking about
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here in terms of trauma therapy. Yeah, and it's what not not very
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well understood. How does someone who has been traumatized, maybe they have experience
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complex petzy they come to how do you work with them? No matter what
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you're working on, drama, ADHD, seizure, peak, performance, creativity.
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All I really care about is do you have goals around your regulation and
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your performance? This can be goals of suffering and reducing suffering, those can
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be goals of performance. But I knowing what success feels like, what regulation
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feels like for someone where things are important, tells me an awful lot about
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how to help them generally. But I also do my review of someone's brain
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date a cold, I walk through it blind interesting and I say, hey,
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look, your brain has a few of these interesting features. Do they
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matter to you? So someone could come to you maybe they have been traumatized,
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but you would know that before you did their brain mapping right. Yeah.
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In fact, I would say you can even flip it. Many of
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us have threat sensitivity activation, a trauma response, some perseveration, some rumination,
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some social activation. And you see that in a lot of people even
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though without trauma diagnoses, so to speak. You know, we can have
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just regulated threat sensitivity without a therapist giving it a name, and it can
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be really in the way. It doesn't have to be exactly like everyone else
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is either you know, it can just be about your mother in law because
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of learning, or it can be broad, or it can be only when
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you have low blood sugar or only when your sleep gets iffy. And that's
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what I find too, is it's never one thing. Some are just about
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your singulate, learning the world sucks, and now keeping your fists up.
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It's also about the sleep maintenance issue that that's given you, and how that
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slows down your speed or processing, and then you can't think clearly, so
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you stand in the gas internally, and then you feel brittle and pushed and
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even more unrested later on, and then you get angry because you're so under
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resource, that you're so protective that you can't just feel anxious. And now
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you're angry as well. And it's a very complicated phenomena. But if I
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look at someone's brain, those things are all true for that person perhaps,
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But what I'm seeing is there trait resources instead. So I have the freedom,
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I have the opportunity, the necessity to drop below the level of the
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diagnostic label or the thing that they've been told and say, hey, here's
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some neuroscience about you. Here's some physiology that I think is interesting, and
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it looks like it might be a little unusual, good or bad. Interesting.
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You know, we measure some performance. This might go along with it.
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It gives some context. But how how much this is interesting? And
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would you like to change it? So I'm able to Really, I'm very
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nervous, I'm feeling very uncomfortable in the world. What do we do?
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How do I work well? Then I would do neurofeedback generally. Now,
26:12
man with a hammer, every problem is a nail or a maslow. But
26:17
neuro feedback to my heavy lifter, So that's my that's my big hammer,
26:19
and it's this process of training those brain waves as EEGs. So in the
26:26
case of like classic PTSD, you might want to exercise the poster or singulate
26:30
and relax it so it learns to put its fists down more voluntarily. You
26:33
can decide to stop evaluating and stop ruminating, essentially, And the way you
26:37
would do that is you would look at the singulate. Generally there's been a
26:40
lot of beta waves there. There might not be a lot of alpha waves,
26:44
might be hard to find the neutral wave, which is the alpha,
26:47
the rest mode between the gears. And you might have a lot of theta,
26:49
a lot of juiciness, a lot of disinhibition, a lot of squirrel
26:52
in that tissue, so it cramps up, its spasms and stays activated and
26:56
it's hard to relax metaphorically. And that's a function of having a lot of
27:00
theta, a lot of beta, and not a lot of alpha for many
27:04
people. So throw some ear flips on, stick a wire on the scalp,
27:11
a little bit of paste, stick it there. Measure the beta,
27:14
measure the theta, measure the alpha. So this relaxation tone, this alpha,
27:18
this neutral on that tissue is going to a very moment to moment,
27:21
so are the activation and the release tones, the betas and the thetas.
27:25
You measure a moment to moment whenever the brain happens on its own. To
27:29
make more alpha for half a second and less of the other two, you
27:33
applaud it. Make a sound happen, Make a little puzzle piece, start
27:36
filling in, make your pac man eat some dots, make your car chase
27:38
more zombies. Whatever. It doesn't only matter what the stimulus is, but
27:42
the brain hears, good job, brain, good job, bring, good
27:45
job right, nope, good job, good job, good job nope.
27:48
Whenever it happens to make bursts of alpha. And then the big trick is
27:52
every thirty seconds or so, you move the goalposts. So this ends up
27:56
being something called operant conditioning, where you're shaping. You're applauding per aggressive successive
28:00
changes in behavior. The weird thing is the behavior is involuntary because you can't
28:04
feel your brain waves. So the mind's like, really, the stupid pac
28:07
man on the screen stopping and starting is training my brain? Really? Okay,
28:12
my friend said, this works all right, whatever, And you don't
28:15
feel the first time either, so you're like, all right, that was
28:18
kind of weird. And then you do it two or three more times and
28:22
you're like, oh, hey, wait a minute, huh, because the
28:25
brain goes, oh alpha, make stuff happen a couple of seconds, a
28:29
couple of sessions in and it reaches for a huge amount of alpha and you
28:33
feel that and you're like, whoa. And this particular protocol, the training
28:37
down the rain the outside range of states in betas, train up the alpha
28:42
at PZ at the barietal midline produces a sensation that feels like you're unclenching your
28:51
mind. He wow, that felt like am I imagining this? No?
28:56
This actually feels like wow, hey guys, this feels really interesting. I
29:00
feel kind of calm. I'm much like I kind of like this. Wow.
29:03
And then it wears off and you're like, I'm much was I?
29:07
Nah? I must have wanted that to happen. And you try it again
29:11
and it's stronger and you're like, no, actually, something happened. Great.
29:12
How is your sleep? Actually? My sleep was kind of crappy after
29:15
that relaxation. Aha, Okay, do half of that. Let's add some
29:19
of this. Okay, try this now, it's beta for sleep regulation.
29:23
Dial it in. How'd that feel? Wow? I was calm and I
29:26
had great dreams and stuff. Great. That was really weird. All right,
29:30
do it twice more this week. Let's build it up and see how
29:33
it stabilizes. So it's mysterious but not blind. This is the opposite of
29:37
diagnosing and being right about what has happened in the past. It's all about
29:41
spotting a phenomena, stretching it, creating a subjective experience, iterating. It's
29:45
much closer to personal training than it is to medicine or psychology. And it's
29:51
actual practice. And you see why. You know, it's all about thrusting
29:55
agency back up on you instead of creating. There's something very it feels very
30:00
self empowering. And so how would this is really fascinating to me? And
30:07
I love the way you're articulating this because you're doing it in a way that
30:11
I haven't heard before. It's very exciting. Actually, how would you describe
30:19
this? So we've got a lot of listeners here obviously who are a therapists,
30:22
who are survivors, accommodation of the two coaches, et cetera. How
30:27
would you talk about this in terms of how it differs from other forms of
30:34
therapy? For you know, psycho clearly goes hand in glove, right.
30:38
I mean there's resources, and there's habits, and there's cognitive stuff and its
30:44
attachment and there's learning, so you want to get your brain out of the
30:47
way, but you also don't want to learn skills and and and learn to
30:52
drop away accommodations and callous You've built up through behavioral things to protect you,
30:56
and that's different than having ads regulatedasming resource a little bit. You know they're
31:02
related, but you can you know, you learn to first not be triggered
31:07
by your mother in law, and then you learn not to yell at her
31:10
later on. Those things don't necessarily happen all at once. You may be
31:15
like, wow, she didn't leave me shaking mad. That was interesting.
31:18
It's kind of jerked though still huh, all right, and you progress.
31:22
You have a different relationship with your resources. So with a therapist and the
31:26
mix and most neurofeedback people that do trauma work are therapists, like they do
31:30
nerfed back and tra and therapy together, but you can also work with a
31:33
therapist. We do a lot with the MDR with brain spotting, family systems,
31:37
sematic experiencing, and they all dovetail beautifully with neuro feedback because a the
31:42
neurofeedback helps keep the brain moving, so it gets the brain out of the
31:47
ways. The therapy lands really really well. B It actually jacks up plasticity
31:52
to eleven for like twenty four to thirty six hours after every single neuro feedback
31:56
session, So literally your therapy starts to get in and learning. All kinds
32:01
of things are to change faster, and you can use neuro feedback both to
32:06
break through cognitive blocks. You can do alpha theta neuro feedback for hypnogogic state
32:09
access for someone's really shut down lexithymic, you know, numb, You can
32:15
actually break free into that moment of insight and awareness as you fall asleep that
32:19
like wow, cool idea. You can get reliable access to that state that
32:22
can be useful for trauma context to control of the association almost. You can
32:28
also do things around the peri peri aqueductal Gray and the posters single it directly
32:34
and as you work through someone's brain resources, they can do the different shifts
32:38
in their life and their safety and the relationships as they need a lot of
32:43
therapists have come across Besl vander Kulk's book The Body Keeps the Score. Bessel
32:49
wrote the foreword for a book by Seaburn Fisher which is called Neurofeedback in the
32:53
treatment of developmental trauma. And while some of the techniques are a little different
32:59
than when the book was published, a lot of that is good backing for
33:02
folks that are wondering about this landscape. And I would say it's pretty valid,
33:07
not just for developmental trauma, but in general. Seaburn Rights is quite
33:12
informative on the brain processes and how we think about it and how we go
33:15
after it in some ways. So for folks who are more therapists than I
33:20
am and are really interested in that dovetailing and how it blends, I would
33:23
say Seburn's book is a great book. She's also been on this podcast.
33:28
You can access her interview too. So at Peak Brain Institute, break it
33:34
down, what do you do? Yeah, So we do neuro feedback programs
33:37
and some mindfulness training, but mostly neuro feedback and brain mapping, and we
33:40
have centers all in the US and now opening up in Europe, and folks
33:45
can join the club, so to speak, and get free access to unlimited
33:49
brain maps and they can explore how the stuff that doing to their brain changes
33:52
them, how their medication works, how their cannabis is hitting them, how
33:55
their adderall hits them. Whatever, great tool of agency first and foremost,
34:01
and then many of our clients do what's called neurofeedback, and those programs are
34:07
usually about three months long. We actually are unusual on that. About eighty
34:12
eighty five percent of our clients train their brains from home and never see our
34:16
offices. We send that equipment. We do remote coaching, remote assessments,
34:20
and our clients work with us live and have live support seven days a week
34:24
to do neurofeedback and progress through stuff, so even more agency, you can
34:30
do it at home, take control of your stuff even if you can't get
34:35
to one of our offices. We have offices in four US cities, in
34:37
two in southern California in LA and Orange County, also in Saint Louis and
34:42
New York City, and we're opening up in London and Stockholm right now.
34:46
And we have other partners throughout the world as well, so we can often
34:50
help you no matter where you are, which is kind of fun. Now,
34:52
do you offer workshops for therapists who are interested in learning about how to
34:57
do this? Or we do not right now supervised therapists, but we're working
35:04
on a platform, a wellness platform that should let us support therapists doing this
35:08
work a little bit better. That question year has asked. I get asked
35:14
every single week by a therapist at least once. The field of neuro feedback
35:20
has been actually shrinking over the past ten or twenty years, not growing because
35:24
the people that discovered it have been finally retiring and dying essentially, like it's
35:30
that kind of field where it's always been taught in this like black art,
35:35
apprentice teach and apprentice, teach and apprentice, and the research literature always lacked.
35:38
It lags by decades to what's possible clinically for a bunch of reasons.
35:43
Clinicians should hear this. Wan. You couldn't blind neuro feedback, couldn't blind
35:46
the EEG until I did the first study in twenty e ten or something on
35:51
double blind pacebo control the EG. You couldn't really do it. You couldn't
35:53
blind the EG before that. Also, it's individualized. How do you test
35:59
something across groups of people that's heavily individualized. It's also expensive. No one
36:02
owns near our feedback. How do you spend five million bucks on a class
36:07
A gold standard NH style study. And then we've had well poisoning, aggressive
36:12
well poisoning from insurance companies and big Farman things in the seventies and eighties that
36:15
really worked against the field. So it's this bizarre often the niches kind of
36:21
black art, and the number of providers is actually shrinking. There's probably only
36:27
a couple thousand providers in the US total who do this with any sophistication.
36:31
Essentially, although the cost of hardware and software is coming down so much that
36:37
we're getting this prosumer biohacker kind of overlap as well. So what we're trying
36:43
to do at peak is and we've built a system for this now it's how
36:45
we run our worldwide virtual business. But we sort of track as you report
36:51
your sleep, your stress, your mood, your anxiety day to day,
36:53
and as you report the stuff you're doing, your meditation, your neuro feedback.
36:58
We're actually having overlays and seeing how this stuff. We're helping you plan
37:02
and try and next yout on is landing. So when you tell us,
37:06
oh, my sleep was really crappy after that new protocol, one of your
37:09
coaches will see your report Rabbit help adjust your workout plan for the next couple
37:15
of sessions if it matters, or to respond to your new needs, jump
37:19
back in your private chat and say, hey, thanks for that sleep report.
37:22
Yeah, that beta protocol might have been too fast. Let's try a
37:24
slower one. I checked in with our clinical team. They think fifteen hurts
37:27
is too fast. Let's try fourteen and a half. We'll do a short
37:30
session. If this lands well, you might feel a little bit less focused,
37:32
but sleep great. And so it's a very iterative process where folks get
37:37
to learn what they're doing essentially as they do it, and you know that
37:42
keeps us out of the treatment landscape and more into the training. Just to
37:46
be clear, so people listening, therapists listening, they can recommend or refer
37:52
their clients to you. This can be an adjunctive. Yeah, yeah.
37:58
In all of our physical offices, we give all of our podcast listeners a
38:00
discount. So the annual membership is usually five hundred bucks, but it's half
38:04
price for folks of your oh, listener to your podcast who want to come
38:07
on and mention it. And that gives you unlimited access to brain mapping,
38:10
so a therapist can use that orferre a client in and then with the client's
38:16
permission, of course, we would share that video of the discussion and the
38:20
high points and the neuro education around the client's brain with the therapist. And
38:25
I can't tell you the number of therapists who's you know, the scales fall
38:30
away when they realize they can distinguish ADHD from anxiety in a brain map,
38:35
or ADHD from trauma because they can look the same, or a sleep issue
38:38
from ADHD because they can look the same. And that is such a tool
38:43
for a therapist to know where there should applying pressure. Is it psycho educational
38:46
because it's sleep in ADHD? Is it something we should be doing DBT on
38:50
because the trauma response thing, you know, like it's just information, it's
38:54
just data. So this is why we provide the brain mapping in our offices
38:58
with a sort of open ended to agency. And yeah, folks can send
39:02
their clients and their patients in from wherever they like in the US and other
39:06
places we are, and we can send gear out remotely, so folks are
39:09
cute. We can do. We do full virtual systems and we send them
39:15
out and we work with you wherever you are and we'll be more than happy,
39:20
delighted to have other people on the team to handle aspects of need and
39:24
goal that we're not experts in you know, we have we have a mindfulness
39:29
teacher for you, we got a neuro feedback We have two or three different
39:31
nearact coaches on your team to make sure that someone there seven days a week.
39:36
And You've got a couple of clinical scientists. I'm your head coach essentially
39:39
with other coaches. But if we can add somebody external to that team,
39:43
and then they're also on your private chat and they get c seed on your
39:46
data and oh we love that because it helps someone else support your transformation.
39:53
Please yes, awesome? Awesome? Or Andrew, what is the best way
39:58
for people to reach you and get in contact with you? Yeah? Thankssin
40:01
So are most of our socials are on Peak Brain LA because that was our
40:05
first location and our website's Peak Brain Institute dot com. So come check us
40:09
out ask us your brain questions. I also have the head first with Doctor
40:14
Hill podcast, which has been lying fallow for a few years but is starting
40:19
to drip out episodes momentarily again, so come to there too. We'll have
40:22
all that linked up at the Trauma everyspodcast dot com dot Hill. Awesome.
40:27
Love to have you back at a later date. I appreciate you being here
40:30
my pleasure guy. Thanks so much for having me enjoyed all right, take care