Latest / Profitable Christian Business / Your Brain Isn't Broken: ADHD, Sleep & Peak Performance for Christian Entrepreneurs | Mike "Ox" Ochsner

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Your Brain Isn't Broken: ADHD, Sleep & Peak Performance for Christian Entrepreneurs | Mike "Ox" Ochsner · Profitable Christian Business

• 0:00
  Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the Profitable Christian Business podcast.
• 0:05
  I am your host Doug Greathouse and today's conversation is for high capacity entrepreneurs who love God but feel like their brain doesn't always cooperate.
• 0:12
  Maybe you've got big vision, maybe you've got drive, maybe you've been even labeled ADHD, but you've also been told the only solutions are medication, Easter meditation, or
• 0:23
  practices that just don't sit right with your faith.
• 0:26
  What if that's not true?
• 0:27
  What if your brain isn't broken?
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  What if it just hasn't been optimized the way it was created to work?
• 0:32
  My guest today is Mike Ochsner, applied neuroscience expert, bestselling author of Unleashed ADHD as your $6 million superpower, and someone who rebuilt his own brain after
• 0:42
  multiple concussions.
• 0:43
  He works with elite special operations units, Fortune 500 executives, professional athletes, and faith-driven doctor-grewers, helping them improve focus, performance, sleep,
• 0:52
  stress resilience, and decision-making without compromising their faith.
• 0:56
  And today we're going to talk about...
• 0:58
  ADHD as a potential superpower, faith compatible brain optimization, why most entrepreneurs are fighting their own neurology, and how to calm a racing mind without
• 1:06
  sedating your brain.
• 1:08
  This one is practical, provocative, and it might completely change how you think about your brain.
• 1:14
  Welcome to the show, Mike.
• 1:16
  Wow.
• 1:17
  Thanks a lot, Doug.
• 1:18
  It is a pleasure to be on here with you and I love your podcast and what you're doing and honored to be on.
• 1:26
  Well, thank you.
• 1:27
  It is a pleasure having you.
• 1:28
  I am supremely interested in this topic myself.
• 1:32
  it's not only going to be great for the audience, it's going to be great for me as well.
• 1:36
  So if somebody's hearing your name for the first time, what problem do you actually solve?
• 1:42
  That's a great question.
• 1:44
  I've done a lot of things through the years.
• 1:47
  over a decade, I worked a lot in the tactical world where lives depended on performance.
• 1:53
  And as I was working in that world, what we saw was about 99 % of people's lives, even in that world, was non-tactical.
• 2:04
  And what I was helping them with on the neurology side was helping the rest of their life like nothing else that they were doing.
• 2:10
  And so as a result, I worked with uh lots of elite athletes and executives and students in uh basically uh very expensive schools who want to be able to unlock performance and uh
• 2:32
  really are running at full speed right now and don't have the ability to grind harder.
• 2:37
  So they need to figure out ways to be more efficient and effective.
• 2:42
  Nice.
• 2:42
  This is more of a curiosity question for me.
• 2:45
  Is it primarily men or do you also work with women?
• 2:49
  A lot of yes.
• 2:53
  It's almost, well actually a little bit over 50-50.
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  So just over 50 % are women and just under 50 % are men.
• 3:03
  And a big reason for that is mothers and wives buying training for their husbands and kids.
• 3:13
  Wow.
• 3:15
  So out of the some of the people we work with, we talked about special operations, executives, pro athletes, etc.
• 3:21
  What do most of them understand about the brain that other people don't?
• 3:26
  Well, most people have a pretty limited understanding of the brain, even though it's as important as it is.
• 3:35
  And so a lot of times when I go into work with somebody, I'm not saying I'm going to help your brain work better.
• 3:42
  We're looking at specific metrics and specific things that they want to do better.
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  And it's just that I happen to see the parts of the brain that are going to make that happen very quickly.
• 3:54
  And so we use
• 3:56
  neurology drills to get the results that they've been trying.
• 4:01
  Mindset of different training regimens, different organizing scheduling systems, all sorts of different things depending on the application.
• 4:12
  Wow, uh you mentioned the word mindset because in MySpace we use that term a lot.
• 4:17
  uh Can you talk about a little bit about the difference between what you do and mindset?
• 4:25
  Absolutely, they're both very important.
• 4:29
  Mindset, to a large extent, is a uh conscious discipline.
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  It's something that you consciously do.
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  It takes willpower, it takes effort, it takes calories.
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  And neurology helps free up more bandwidth and more calories to make mindset easier.
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  And so...
• 4:55
  If your brain's not in survival mode because of issues with balance or vision, then it's much, much easier to execute on all of the mindset things that you know you should be
• 5:08
  doing.
• 5:11
  Wow, that is super cool.
• 5:15
  Yes, neurology is the foundation or the platform that makes mindset work.
• 5:23
  So when you say the word superpower, I really feel like that is a superpower.
• 5:28
  Can we talk a little bit about ADHD?
• 5:31
  ah And how, like when somebody is told, when somebody is told they have ADHD, it's often like, they have a problem.
• 5:40
  Can you explain why it might not necessarily be a problem?
• 5:45
  yeah, there's different, basically ADHD is a collection of symptoms.
• 5:52
  And it can come, that collection of symptoms can come from a few different things.
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  It can come from brain wiring at birth.
• 6:00
  It can come from concussions.
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  It can come from a lack of sleep.
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  It can come from nutrient deficiencies.
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  It can come from illnesses.
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  And those same collection of symptoms get called ADHD.
• 6:14
  regardless of the origin.
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  So let's just look at brainwiring, the way that God made us.
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  About 10 % of the population has what's called a hunter brain.
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  And we aren't satisfied with accomplishments as long as other people.
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  We need more variety.
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  We need more stimulation.
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  If you think about that in a hunting context if you are in a valley of It if hunters are in that valley At some point they're gonna get bored of it before they actually run out of
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  things to shoot and they're gonna move to the next valley well, that's gonna cause the animals in the first valley to be able to reproduce and The numbers to come back up if we
• 7:06
  didn't have that oh Wonderlust
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  that desire for change and novel things, we would uh basically hunt the animals to extinction before moving.
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  So it's a great asset.
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  If we look at Christopher Columbus, if we look at any great explorer that uh found America, that explored and settled America, it was people who were restless and who wanted
• 7:36
  new things.
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  And it was
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  It was an asset to have ADHD.
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  In a classroom with 30 people, it is unmanageable to have people who uh act out, who need to move around a little bit more.
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  And so it is considered more of a disorder now because people who have ADHD aren't as docile.
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  So one of the things that I do
• 8:09
  is I help people basically get the underperforming parts of their brain working better and the overperforming parts of their brain calm down.
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  And the end result is even if somebody has ADHD wiring, they're able to be calm in a mixed environment for longer.
• 8:29
  They're able to have more self-discipline without having to just, oh, force it and fight it and use.
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  tremendous amounts of willpower.
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  It's more natural and easy, but you still have all the assets.
• 8:44
  That is pretty amazing.
• 8:47
  I'm just going to say whatever Mike tells you to go check out after this interview, we're going to plug that link right away.
• 8:53
  Just go find that link because this sounds like something especially a lot of Christian entrepreneurs need.
• 8:59
  And I think just overall, I don't have the statistics, but I would imagine there's more ADHD entrepreneurs than just about any other segment of professionalism.
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  because it's kind of the what it's one of reasons we become entrepreneurs.
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  think I think about Thomas Edison.
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  You mentioned Christopher Columbus.
• 9:18
  I think about people like Thomas Edison and even oh who's Tesla Elon Musk.
• 9:24
  I believe they probably have ADHD right or Thomas Edison had ADHD.
• 9:29
  So oh yeah I can see how it could be more of a benefit if you learn how to oh leverage it I guess would be the word.
• 9:41
  Yeah, and that was a huge challenge for me as a Christian because I was basically told I needed to take meds or I needed to do Eastern meditation or mantras that they really
• 9:58
  didn't fit with.
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  It was just like, well, I'm faking it until I make it.
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  This isn't real.
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  isn't me.
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  Why am I saying this junk?
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  And so I tried meds.
• 10:12
  and I didn't like what they turned me into.
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  And the other stuff, it just wasn't a fit.
• 10:19
  And fortunately, neurology is just kind of having access to the owner's manual of the brain that God gave us and going to the section where the issue is and plugging in the
• 10:32
  solution.
• 10:38
  Again, that is awesome.
• 10:40
  You had mentioned concussions, right?
• 10:42
  And I know from my research before this interview that, and often it's the problems that we have as entrepreneurs that we solve that we end up helping other people solve.
• 10:52
  could you talk a little bit about your concussion story and how you led you into this?
• 10:58
  Yeah, I'm a serial entrepreneur.
• 11:01
  I've uh bought companies, started companies, sold companies.
• 11:06
  And a lot of the reason that I was able to do that was because of my ADHD.
• 11:11
  And then I started racking up too many concussions.
• 11:15
  I had 15 where I lost time, uh dozens more where I didn't lose time, but they were still good blows, and then a lot more subconcussive impacts.
• 11:28
  The combination of concussions and ADHD, I had vertigo almost every night.
• 11:35
  I had attention and focus issues.
• 11:37
  I had anger issues, sleep issues, and lots of random pain.
• 11:43
  as an example, the first neurology work that I did, I hadn't been able to do a single push-up without pain for the prior six months.
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  And I did about 20 minutes of vision and balance drills.
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  and all of a sudden I could do 20 push-ups without pain.
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  And I didn't understand why it didn't make any sense because I didn't do anything with my shoulder.
• 12:05
  It was all stuff with my eyes and inner ears.
• 12:09
  And basically, I came to find out that when the eyes and the inner ears aren't working together correctly, the brain goes into threat mode.
• 12:20
  And when the brain goes into threat mode, all of the things that are problems with ADHD
• 12:26
  become bigger problems.
• 12:27
  uh It is harder to exert willpower.
• 12:32
  It's harder to have self-control.
• 12:34
  It's harder to analyze risk.
• 12:36
  It's uh harder to do all the things that we need to do in order to be successful in business.
• 12:48
  getting a little bit of a lag on my end.
• 12:51
  We'll edit this out.
• 12:52
  But I heard most of that and I think most of it got recorded.
• 12:58
  You had mentioned something about pushups and pain.
• 13:00
  I want to go back to that just for a minute.
• 13:02
  So are you saying that there are ways that you can tap into your brain to push out pain, like to where you don't register it?
• 13:14
  Yeah, I'll give you an example.
• 13:16
  It's it crosses over with what I did in order to be able to do the pushups.
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  It's really common after road trips and airplane flights to have either neck pain, back pain or random joint pain.
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  And about a year and a half ago, I was going through the Salt Lake Airport, had a layover.
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  There was a restaurant I really wanted to go to and get some food.
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  So I was booking it to the restaurant and all of a sudden
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  my hip and my knee hurt bad enough that I slowed down and started limping.
• 13:50
  And I was like, hmm, I didn't just get hit with a bat.
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  Let's try something.
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  So what I did was I stuck my thumb out in front of me and I imagined that my head was in a compass rose.
• 14:02
  And while I was looking at my thumb, I nodded my head in each of the eight cardinal directions.
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  And what that does is it gets the eyes and the inner ears on the same page about which direction straight ahead is.
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  And when that's off, one of the things that the brain does is it creates the sensation of pain to get you to stop moving because it's afraid that it's going to fall or run into
• 14:32
  things because of that conflict between the eyes and the inner ear.
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  By getting them back on the same page,
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  There's no reason for the brain to limit movement anymore, and the sensation of pain goes away if that was the cause.
• 14:48
  And I've seen this play out over and over and over again.
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  uh
• 14:54
  Yeah, I had an orthopedic surgeon in a class and it was uh a real high dollar class where they uh flew in for the weekend and at lunch I was talking about vision training and ran
• 15:10
  the ran everyone through a few drills and at the end of it he was mad.
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  He was on the front row and he was just clenching his fists and I could see the muscles in his jaw flexing and
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  I thought he was really going to lay into me and I asked him what was going on.
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  And he said, my back has been hurting for six years and I postponed surgery to come to this training.
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  And what I was going to tell you at the end of lunch was that I couldn't do anymore because I was in too much pain and your stupid drills that shouldn't do anything made my
• 15:45
  back feel better and I'm good to go.
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  And what he was mad about wasn't feeling better.
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  He was mad that he had tried all these different things to make his back feel better and was scheduled for surgery.
• 15:58
  And it was vision imbalance that were a huge driver of the pain.
• 16:06
  Wow, wow.
• 16:08
  So here's one thing that most of us entrepreneurs struggle with at least at some point is overwhelm and feeling like we're brains overloaded.
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  What is one sign that you know your brain is overloaded?
• 16:25
  Well, one of the things that's real common with an overloaded brain or just uh with an active entrepreneurial or ADHD, depending on which angle you're coming from, but with all
• 16:37
  of those types of brains is the chatter in the brain as you're trying to go to sleep and not being able to go to sleep and having racing thoughts and then trying so hard to sleep.
• 16:53
  and being so frustrated that all that effort is just not doing anything.
• 16:59
  And that is one of the biggest signs.
• 17:04
  What I find myself, and this is actually something my wife suggested I do when I get that either when I first wake up or I'm going to bed, like I wake up with racing thoughts or I
• 17:13
  go to bed with racing thoughts is to write those down.
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  And once I have them on paper, I tend to be able to go to sleep because I feel like it's not lost, right?
• 17:22
  I think the anxiety over that being lost information is actually what's keeping me awake.
• 17:27
  Have any insight to that?
• 17:30
  yeah, writing things down is a great thing.
• 17:33
  Having a little voice recorder that you can use without turning on a light or thinking and just hit the button and record and then go back to sleep.
• 17:46
  There are specific things that we can do to turn down the parts of our brain that are keeping us from going to sleep.
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  And there's
• 17:59
  specific things that we can do to activate parts of our brain that will let us go to sleep with less effort.
• 18:05
  And by doing that, by turning down the overactive parts and turning up the underactive parts, it becomes a lot easier to sleep.
• 18:17
  Nice.
• 18:18
  We ask a uh fill in the blank question on every single Profit with Christian Business podcast episode.
• 18:23
  So your fill in the blank question is most Christian archivists struggle with their brain not because they're broken, but because blank.
• 18:32
  They don't have the owner's manual.
• 18:34
  They blame issues on age, on all sorts of things that aren't necessarily correct.
• 18:44
  And then they try to fix it with hacks and tips and tricks of the week that may help with symptoms a little bit, but they don't go far enough upstream to help with the root cause.
• 18:59
  And when we actually
• 19:01
  get far enough upstream and help with the root cause, then everything else works better and plays out the way that we want it to.
• 19:12
  That this is so cool with so much good information and I feel like oh everyone should.
• 19:21
  I'm gonna pause for a second.
• 19:24
  I'm having trouble a little bit with your audio and so sometimes like I'm missing some of the things that you say.
• 19:29
  So again, this is gonna have to be an edit, but like sometimes you're I don't know if it's.
• 19:34
  on my side of the hearing of it or if it's on the way that you're coming through.
• 19:38
  So sometimes I'm slowing my response or I don't know what to say in response because I'm hearing only part of what you said.
• 19:45
  oh So is there any way we can tweak the audio on your side to see if that's it?
• 19:54
  I am...
• 19:59
  trying to see.
• 20:00
  uh If you've got any ideas for something I could do, I'll definitely try it.
• 20:06
  ah Do you have, uh so a lot of times there's multiple inputs trying to, that could be the problem.
• 20:15
  Like sometimes it'll be wanting to use the mic in my camera rather than the microphone in front of me.
• 20:20
  And there may be some interference there.
• 20:22
  So I don't know if you have multiple inputs and you guys need to decide on the correct one.
• 20:27
  Let me check.
• 20:29
  I should have everything turned off but my headset.
• 20:34
  If something got turned back on.
• 20:41
  Nope, everything's gone.
• 20:44
  oh My internet, I've got two services and I bind them together.
• 20:53
  And I've got that readout on the side of Riverside so that I can see from second to second how stuff is.
• 21:02
  And it looks like it's good.
• 21:05
  Okay, okay, well, we'll just continue.
• 21:07
  I was just, if there was a technical fix that we could get, and maybe it is on my side, but I don't know what I would change either on my side.
• 21:14
  So oh my internet is also, I've just, we just improved our internet.
• 21:20
  So I don't know oh what it would be on my side.
• 21:24
  So oh we'll just proceed.
• 21:27
  I'll just do a five, four, three, two, one countdown and I'll pick up on the next question if that works.
• 21:32
  Yeah, I apologize.
• 21:33
  I would fix whatever in a heartbeat if I knew what it was.
• 21:39
  Yeah, you just broke up there a little bit too.
• 21:46
  Alright, so I'll just do a 5-4-3-2.
• 21:50
  Maybe here's what I'm gonna do.
• 21:51
  I'm gonna stop the recording for a second and then start a new one.