She was dead tired at like 730 at night, every night she gets up at the crack of dawn, but 7 30 she's tired. She goes to bed at about eight, eight 30, and then bing, I know you know what I mean.

Bing, wide awake. So she was wide-awake. Toss turn, toss turn. Can't sleep. And she is so frustrated. You know, by the time it's like 11 o'clock or 11 30. I'm beside myself.

What am I going to do?" She didn't want to take like the, you know, the heavy heavy things. So I was like, do the tones. Do the Delta tones and so she did Delta Tones and she said she had to run through 20 minutes of them.

She fell asleep and She slept all night, woke up and was refreshed. she's not the only person to say it and there are many people who use them like every night before bed because it just resets.

It just resets and allows them to relax and to get into that state. Welcome to Take Back My Brain with Lori Hammer, where real healing starts in the brain.

I'm Lori, a functional nutritionist and mom who's walked the path from anxiety and burnout to clarity and calm. Each week, we're going to dive into brain-based tools like amino acid therapy, gut health, fasting and faith to help you reclaim your energy, emotions and sense of self.

Hello, everyone. Welcome back to Take Back My Brain. I am your host, Laurie Hammer, and today I have with me, so excited, Jen Best. She is here today and she is the founder of Cognitive Function Development Institute and the developer of cognitive function development therapy, or CFDT, which is, don't tune out, which is a groundbreaking neuroscience informed approach to improve your mental clarity, your emotional regulation, and adaptive functioning, whether you're a little kid to all the way to like 150. So your entire lifespan, she is master neuroplastician, educational therapist, certified parent coach, And brain-based interventional ish, like she does it all.

Let's just be honest, Jen does. And so she really helps women and children, veterans, trauma survivors, those with lots of brain dysregulation, cognitive challenges, processing issues, all those things.

We're going to dive into that today. So I know that sounds like a lot, so don't leave. I want you to hear this because we're gonna help your brain up level.

And Jen, welcome to the podcast. Thank you. It's so great to be here. I really appreciate the opportunity and. like you said, stay tuned because one of the key things about cognitive function development therapy is that it's rooted in fun.

Yeah, that's what we want. So I have to say like cognitive functioning development, therapy, the CFD, right? You call it CFT? Okay, I've got it. I don't know, i need some cognitive help here today.

But what is it? Yeah, what it is, is essentially, it's a methodology, a way of interacting with individuals that first of all, we start with an objective measure of cognitive function, so we figure out where these things are at.

What are cognitive functions? They're your attentional networks and your memory systems, and they all have to work together. They lay the groundwork for all of your other functioning in life, having conversations, learning things, doing new things.

It's all rooted and it all kind of lays on the foundation of these cognitive functions. And so cognitive function development means that we are taking where you're at and moving you to a better function.

it also involves the nervous system as well because you know these things are all intertwined. So, we do cognitive function development in order to change people's, to engage neuroplasticity, changeability in the brain, and to improve function.

So take them from whatever level they're at to the level that is more appropriate, is the levels that they want to be at, reversing them back to a level where they used to at if we're talking about older individuals.

It runs the gamut. Got it. So what would cause, whether it's delays, disruptions, development or challenges, what affects that functional development?

Oh, interestingly, so it can start all the way back to generational trauma. Wow. When individuals have trauma or they've been traumatized, The recent studies have shown that it actually changes the brain organization of the child, the baby, and the father's contribution to the whole process.

It actually changes the RNA, which again, contributes to this setup for the brain and nervous system functionality. And then once the child is born, then they're in an environment.

If they have this generational component to it, the environment may interact with them differently than someone who hasn't had that generational type of setup.

Interesting. It can be something like that. It could also be environmental in terms of, you know, people have, they can have some rough stuff that they go through and that can change.

There can some interactive things within a family. So family systems all have dynamics. And sometimes parents just don't have the resources, the, resources that the need in order to establish a really safe or firm foundation for kids, despite their best intentions.

It's not anything necessarily that they would want, but it's what happens. And I especially see that with anxiety. So anxieties and if a parent goes through depression and those types of things, that can really interfere or it can cause trouble with development with ease with which the child learns or the children is able to interact.

Yeah, that's so interesting. How did you get into this? Well, I know how these things come from. I do know. From a personal perspective. With our family, and we have three grown children now and two grandchildren, but the three-grown children at the time when we started this about 16 years ago, they had kind of already gone through the educational therapist thing.

I had worked with Jean Osmond, who was the co-creator of the Orton-Gillingham approach for dealing with individuals with dyslexia. So, kind of all of the programs that are, you know, around today for helping with DyslexIA can kind-of tie back to Jean Osmond and Paula Roem and the Dslexio Institute of Minnesota.

Yeah. And so, I had to work with her and, when my kids had gone through tutoring and that kind therapy, but we really didn't get as far as we needed to get to.

developing the reading and what needed to be developed. And so that led me kind of on this mom on their mission to, okay, what else do we have to do? Because there's got to something.

It's not good enough to just say, Okay, well, he's 13, and he is only reading like, this is my son, 13. He's only So, you know, and yeah, I'm not going to do another four years to kind of hope that he maybe gets up to something better.

So that led to, it was like fortuitous. The whole, this whole concept of, okay, wow, there are cognitive functions and they can be changed. And so that launched into the realm of cognitive function development, the whole neuroscience behind being able to change the brain.

which will then cause all of the tutoring or all the educational therapy and those types of things to work much better. Better. Yeah. So much. I was just on a podcast with Ashok Gupta.

We had a great conversation. We were talking about a lot of these same things, retraining the brain, the neuroplasticity of everything. I'm so fascinated because now we're having a conversation with you.

How does all of that marry together? Because I think it's on the same premise. just kind of approached in a little bit different way. So it's so fun to see what other people come up with, to be like, oh, this can work in the brain and we can do it this way, and I love that you're geared toward that developmental therapy.

A lot of parents are like okay, I can get my kid to meditate and breathe, but I still need something else, right? So, and the nutrition piece of it. And I think when I'm addressing the nutritional piece with the amino acids, like that makes your job easier.

But I can see a lot of times where it would be the reverse as well, where you're working on that cognitive development so that you can make those changes nutritionally.

So they really work together and people are always looking for that. One thing, right? And there's never that one thing. That's right. Yeah. It's so many things put together because we're complex beings.

So you can't expect like just amino acid therapy is all you'll ever need or just cognitive functional development is, all your ever needed. Your brain thrives on so.

Do you have to come at it from so different angles is what I'm trying to say. Oh yeah. Yeah, when you are doing this cognitive function development, what does that look like?

So everyone listening, whether you're a child or whether your an adult, you have somebody with early stage dementia, whatever it might be, What does it look?

Hey friend, just a quick break to remind you if calming your brain is the missing piece in your practice or in you home, my Mind Thrive certification course teaches you exactly how to do that with targeted amino acid therapy.

So it's real science, real results, no band-aids. Enrollment is now open. Link is in the show notes. So, back to the Show. A couple of the keys that we have are what I call simultaneous, meaning at the same time, multisensory.

We're going to engage many senses at an oscillation approach, which I know that, again, that sounds like, wow, those are a lot of work. We have no idea what that means, yes.

Break that down, Jen, break that. So think of it in this term. We're going to be engaging, we're gonna be doing an exercise. For example, let's say we are going be using cards.

I have these really huge playing cards right here. This is a tool that I could use with pretty much anybody, whether it's over remote, because we do remote or if I'm across from them in person.

And I can show a card and I but I want you to do, if I need working memory developed, I'd want to add three if the card is black, and I just want one if it's red.

I'm going to be setting a tempo and I am going be showing these cards and they're going going back and forth and adding either three or adding one depending on the color and i'm gonna start with a pace that's comfortable or maybe even a little bit slow to meet with the person and then i am gonna increase the pace and increase pace until it gets to almost like they are in a race.

And you're going to feel… Good. Okay. All right. We're just going do five more. And so that technique of bringing them, oscillating or bringing up to the point of peak performance or peak up and then letting them come back down and be like, I did it.

So I can change things based on complexity, you know, what I'm going to do there, how fast I go, and what kind of impulse or change I give in between, because I could pause in-between and say, okay, now name three things that are blue.

and throw their brain off track and then have them come back on track. So really interactive and dynamic. And it depends on who I have in front of me because also with that at the same time, many senses type of engagement, I'm also going to be thinking of in terms of, am I showing something visually or am giving it to them auditorily?

And I don't want to go with what they're good at. I want a work. We are working on functional weaknesses. And so technique wise, we have to do that in a way that really engages them and makes it, you know, compelling because we're working.

Um, I can do images. Like if they are in front of me, they can use something with dice or all sorts of interesting things that are going to help engage this for them.

So that's a little bit of the technique and kind of what we're doing and how we are doing it. Yeah. And so why does that work? Well, because I'm targeting function.

So if working memory is what is a person's weakest function, what I need to do, What is working? Memory working. Memory is. What allows you to update information, to hold information and, and exchange it, for example, you know, if I say 15 plus three, You're going to go, you have to think about it and go.

Oh yeah, that's 18. You understand what 15 is at your age and stage. Do you understand? What three years, those are encoded memory. Those are things that are, your just pulling out of memory plus is something that you.

Understand because you know what adding is, but in order to do that process of coming to 18, That is a working memory function. And so if your working memory is weak based on objective measurement testing, which we do, then I'm going to have you use many different ways to change information and update information.

And why does that work? Because you're doing that and that is creating the pathways. When you create the pathway and you run down them over and over again, they're strengthened.

Whether that's with numbers, letters, images, motions, we use a lot of motion along with verbal output. So auditory, verbal, motion-based. All of those senses coming together and working together helps the brain to coordinate and then make the weaknesses come on up and meet with the other parts.

And then the whole thing, the full brain is more efficient and works better. Does that help? Yeah, no, that helps a lot. So brain efficiency is good. This is a good thing.

So I know when I took your test, I think my working memory was low, right? Like that was something we needed to work on. And like, of course, they took it at like 4.30 AM too.

So that may have had a little to do with it, but nonetheless, it was still low. I love the card thing, so I need to keep remembering to that at the moment.

But I was competitive. When I take it I'm like no, no I did not miss that one. Give me one more shot. It was so mad. Because like I knew what that is, you know, if I had had little more time.

So I feel like I needed a little more time, Jen. So speak to somebody who has a brain injury, who's coming to you, like traumatic brain injuries. A kid with a concussion.

There's so many kids with concussions now. Yeah. Speak to that. What does it look like to work with you if you have a Well, it's going to be similar to what I was just showing you.

Okay. Only difference is that, you know, we were going start kind of at the level that the person is at and able to tolerate. And then we're going move forward from there.

We are going, again, still have fun and we are probably going do higher repetitions with lower weights, if you want to think of it, kind as that methodology.

Because what we want do is to really stimulate clearing of the glymphatic system. You know that your body has the lymphatic systems, so your cells release waste into your lymph and then when you move your that lymph, the cellular waste.

Well, in your brain, you have a similar process that happens. They just call it your glymphatic system because of glial cells. And so when you has neural inflammation, so that's inflammation around your neurons, neurons are those little connections in there, then you're going to have impaired function.

So whenever you an injury, whether it is a concussion where it's a real force that actually happened to you, now get this. When emotional impacts happen, the brain processes them like a blow job.

So similar thing there. But so we're going to be activating many different parts. And like I said, doing these exercises and engagements is going help that system to clear out some of those stuck points and to help process of decreasing that neural inflammation.

That's amazing. Can you give us a couple examples of people you've worked with that have gone from A to Z with you? Yeah. We just published on our YouTube channel, we sometimes do testimonials and things.

One of the really impactful ones that we did, this was a young kid that came to us who was actually adopted and just a hard situation. And that left him with a lot of anxiety about people leaving him and things like that.

And there was difficulty with being able to engage at all in a school setting, which you can understand because so much of his world was tied up in surviving, not being left, feeling safe.

So there were nightmares. There was extreme they would call ADHD, you know, not being able to attend. And so coming in and doing CFDT, he was able, I think it took him probably about 16 weeks.

So it was, it's a time. But I get reports, okay, the nightmares are reduced, not having nightmares. Able to part ways. So comfortably go into a different room and have that separation without the anxiety.

And the really exciting part was, you know, being in school and then having the teachers go from, complaining, well, he never pays attention. to wow, you know what, there's engagement and there is focus.

And now the learning part is happening because his system is not stuck on fight or flight. It's not struck in a crisis mode. His confidence went up and whereas, friendships were not, they weren't safe in his world.

Yeah. To now going out with friends appropriately and just having a really nice time. So that's one of the changes and that was made to, you know, kind of a preteen.

Sure. We've had people that were on the older side of this spectrum, some strokes, come in really because they've come and really depressed and anxious after stroke, like my life, what's going on?

Am I ever going to be the same? You feel violated, I'm sure. Yeah. And excellent, excellent progress. return to confidence function much better. One particular gal who gave us a really nice testimonial, she had three little strokes and she like researched the type of stroke she got and everything and it lined up when we did our assessment, the weak parts lined with what she was seeing in the research that she did, and she's in her 80s.

In her eighties, it was fantastic. But she needed work on her executive and her orienting. Those are the attentional networks. And so now, you know, she is able, her balance is better.

She is fluent, She's back to being fluent with the words, And she was able to remember things and functionality is greatly returned without any other therapy because she had to wait so long to get into physical therapy.

So she just did this and it was awesome. What about somebody with OCD? What have you seen with that? Good. Yes, we've seen some great progress with oCD.

That's kind of based on, I don't know, stuck patterns. This is how I think of it. And resolving those stuck and clearing out and getting everything to work together better has really been helpful for individuals that have suffered in that way.

I'm thinking of a, we have a family that we just love to pieces and they have two foster adopted daughters. One of them has some OCD issues. The other one has an eating disorder and we've just spent a little time with them and it is exactly how you describe it.

It's just stuck, right? Just stuck. And so how does this unstuck, unstick things for somebody with OCD, that insane perfectionism kind of thing? Well, so here's a couple things.

First of all, when assessment happens, there will be weakness in working memory, I guarantee it. Okay. So when we are doing our technique, first of, we make sure that, you can say, hey, aren't going to do this perfectly.

I know like when you were doing the assessment, you're like, wait a minute, I want to do this. But we will deliberately have them. experience like saying, okay, we're going to do six of these and I want you to get three of them wrong.

You have to three them. And so basically it's normalizing and having them practice doing it, which I know that seems really weird, but it really helps because their system, their nervous system experiences safety.

It doesn't get activated to, well, I'm not safe and this is a danger. Instead, it becomes an experience of safety to it's okay to be wrong. And it is okay.

To do something different, to have this different engagement. With the OCD and that as well. Again, changing that working memory component of things is one of the things that we find is really helpful for they process through that stuck patterning and they're able to change it.

So experience that. Yeah, so good. People with anxiety, depression, eating disorders, I'm thinking to myself, had I known about… I got good results with what I did, but I wish I would have…

There's so many things I know now I could have incorporated at that time. Somebody like me who was anxious, who is depressed, you had some OCD issues, You know, bulimic for, you know 12 years of my life.

If somebody, if I were to come to you now in that situation, what would you, how would that change things for me? Yeah. Well, first thing is with the assessment and being able to understand like how these components fit together, You would have like, yeah.

Okay, I can see these are my weak parts and then experiencing having a different experience with your nervous system. So being able to laugh, which is when people are in anxiety and depression, it's extremely difficult to do that.

The technique and being to have rapport and experience that, you would feel lifted and enlightened and that would help you to process through and make these changes.

And we also find that when you have the disparity in the functions, your system is just working so hard. It's like trying to get through blockage. Or sometimes I like to talk about it like if we had an orchestra and we have these different sections of the orchestra.

And when you're having conditions like you were talking about, if you are dealing with depression and anxiety and eating disorder type of behaviors, that's being fueled by something that is bottom up.

meaning motivators, there's some kind of motivator, some pain, background, something that's coming up that is not able to be released. And so it's like a couple of the sections in that orchestra, they're not even playing the same song.

And so the poor, you know, the conductors going, wait a minute, wave, waves. So much dissonance. But the technique of CFD is to get those ones that are not playing what they're supposed to be playing, but aren't at the right song on the rights song.

And then that safety technique wise and that confidence building by doing these types of exercises that. Non-threatening. that are not benchmarked or that can be benchmark in order to verify improvement because you'll know.

You'll feel it and you will understand it in a way that you wouldn't if you just talked about something. The system does not, you don't talk out dysregulation.

So… You can't. It's like you can talk about dys regulation. you Can't medicate away a nutrient deficiency. Like those things are… Just the way it is.

And we try to, right? I'm not against therapy at all. Please don't. Anybody don' think that. But you can't talk away this. It's a dysregulation going on.

Okay, so we talk nutrition. So once you get amino acids, once your system with proper nutrition and you get your functions balanced, then you can go on to so readily be able to understand, okay, maybe why I am responding the way I'm responding or how can I respond better?

And so it really makes the next things down the line more effective. more effective. And it doesn't take so long. I mean, you think of all the people that have been years and years in years of therapy and they're not any better.

That's because they are still dysregulated because the therapy isn't going to re-regulate them the way it needs to be. It doesn�t fix the nutrient deficiencies.

So it's such a nice Dance is such a nice song when we're incorporating the nutrition, the amino acids and the therapy that you've got, cognitive therapy.

So it's huge. And then we were talking about this music and this dance and stuff you have. I want you to talk about your frequencies because I am so excited about you frequencies.

Like when I met you at the conference, I'm like, why aren't you selling these? No, right? Well, we are now. You are, now, so we've got to get the word out, Jen.

We have to give the world out. So tell about the frequencies and how those make a difference in your nervous system and brain regulation. Your brain has waves in it, and I know some people are like, what does that even really mean?

I don't know. Does it matter? They can be tracked. I mean, if you have different machinery to do that. But what we do is we have our tones, we call them our brain builder tones.

And so we've got alpha, which is at a certain frequency, it's between seven and 13 hertz. So the alpha tones are also overlaid with gamma. to have the best effect on the brain based on what we're trying to impact.

And so for the alpha frequencies, that's like cognition, emotional, physiological regulation, sensory motor. And so once people are having certain difficulties, we're going to pair the right tones with what they need.

So we've got alpha, beta. Beta is really good for enhancing Autonomic regulation, so if someone's stuck in fight-or-flight, beta is a really good option for helping them to get unstuck from that.

Gamma, gamma tones, again, it's not just gamma. We have them overlaid in different levels. Gama tones are fast, and the research supports that they're really good for working memory.

And for people who have like Alzheimer's, dementia, Parkinson's. So using the gamma tones is really impactful for that. My two favorite, though, are the Delta and the Theta.

And so we tend to use those most frequently. The Delta tones, that's a really slow, it's less than four hertz, and they're very calming. They're what helps people to sleep.

I just got a testimonial, two different testimonials, but one is from a gal who was really having trouble sleeping. She was dead tired at like 730 at night.

Every night she gets up at the crack of dawn, 7.30 she's tired. I know you know what I mean. Bing! Wide awake. So she's wide awake, toss turn, turn toss, can't sleep.

And she is so frustrated by the time it's like 11 o'clock or 11.30. I'm beside myself. What am I going to do? She didn't want to take like the, you know, the hemorrhoids.

Yeah. So I was like, do the tones, to the Delta tones. And so she did Delta Tones and she said she had to run through 20 minutes of them. She fell asleep and she slept all night, woke up and was refreshed.

She's not the only person to say it. And there are many people who use them like every night before bed because it just resets. It just reset and allows them.

to relax and to get into that state. She also said that her mom had been a very, her brain had just been really active and like always was spinning. And so she used them to help just reset that spinning and her Mom was like, I've, it just, It was so profound because I actually felt my brain like slow down.

So they're really impactful. Then the theta ones there, I really like that. They're good for working memory, but they're also, they are uplifting. I'll call it that, up lifting for the brain.

they don't make the brains speed up and go faster, that they just make it feel more cohesive and uplifted. So when do you use these frequencies? So you're talking about Delta could be used before sleep.

When else do use this? Do you just put them on in the background or what do do with them? Well, they're really best if you use them with headphones. And so, you know, can download them to your phone.

Okay. Put in headphones, You can use like if, if know that you're going to be going into a meeting that might be charged. Uh-huh. That would be a good thing.

You could use it while you are in the meeting so you don't have to listen to it or? Well if want to. I generally say, use your Theta's during the day.

You're going to use theta to have the uplifting effect. Use the deltas at night. If you're sensitive, if you are highly sensitive. We only have them at 10 minute increments because this is powerful.

Like this isn't like, oh, I'm going just do this for an hour. This impacts your brain and it impacts it fast. Okay. That's good. Yeah. And so, you know, You can do one or two rounds, but you wouldn't want to do Delta if you're highly sensitive to it right before you going to have a big meeting.

Cause you may just be really relaxed. Yeah A little teeny bit of experimentation with it, but you can't go wrong. If you're a person who has, you know, a tendency to be anxious and have trouble sleeping, using Delta before sleep is just golden.

Golden. And theta for uplifting. Then anyone that's in your life that is afraid of the dementia, the big D or the Big A, Alzheimer's, or Parkinson's or MS or those types of things, the gamma tones.

And the gametones, you can use those, especially if you have that type of concern, used in two or three rounds, up to 30 minutes a day. Oh, wow, okay.

So, and that's on the website. Also, another thing, our website is brainbuilders.health, And on there, we also offer, if your purchase tones, You can have a 30 minute consultation with me.

That's amazing. And I will just go through and you can talk about your symptomology and kind of what you're dealing with so that I can recommend and say, you know what, we might want to do this one or that one.

Also, just like the assessment that you had, people access the assessments if they're interested in having that, which could probably direct our information even better.

Right. So that can be accessed that way as well. Awesome. Well, all of that will be in the show notes. So everybody check those things out. But I'm excited about the tones.

I mean, I am excited by everything that you do, clearly. The tones are so exciting to me because it's just so easy to use. You just put your headphones on and you listen and relax or you let it uplift you.

Let it do whatever it needs to do. Your brain will absorb what it need to absorb. And it'll just ignore what it needs to ignore. I mean, it's just frequency, and that's the beauty of it all.

It's kind of like with my laser or like red light therapy or whatever. Just frequency. And you don't need a lot. Although the fact that you said just 10 minutes, that enough.

You don' have to do 10 hours of, just ten minutes a day, you can do that. doing a lot of things while you're eating breakfast or whatever it might be before you go to bed, or you can plug it into your laptop.

I could have it in right now, working on some client cases or something like that. So there's lots of options out there. I just had my meeting today and so she was telling me because she got the delta and the theta and she's been going through a really tough time at work.

She does a very challenging position and they are getting me through. She said, I used the Delta before, and during the daytime I use the Theta and she said I can steal them in every cell of my body.

And she has that wonderful South African accent. It was just glorious. Well, it makes it even better then, right? Anything you want to leave the audience with, this has been a fantastic conversation.

Yeah. I just really want to have hope for change because if you're dealing with chronic issues, given the number of different things that we can do together will allow people to that change can happen because there is so much change that can happened to our bodies and our brains that we don't have to be stuck in the patterns that's we've been in.

We can have hope for our children so that they can go on like my son did and graduate from the University of Arizona, summa cum laude, you know, so like with high honors and a master's degree program.

coming from someone who had such difficulty with reading. So, you know, there is such hope that we can have and it's accessible. You can do it over the internet.

And you can things in person. The options we have today are so much greater than they were ever before. Research is showing how effective these things can be.

We have peer-reviewed research on our results for our cognitive function development. So it's right at your fingertips to get something done. Yeah, I love it, Jen.

I can't wait to do more collaboration with you. This is going to be a fun journey, you and I together. Thank you, thank you for being on today. We appreciate you so much.

And we appreciate all that you're doing for everybody in the world. So this is a world message and we're going to get it out there. Awesome. Thank so you much and thank everyone for listening.

I know that, you know, somebody who needs this information, so make sure you like, subscribe and share, share share. Please share this out because there are so many hurting people out and this, is information that somebody you need.

Make sure that your sharing that. If you have the opportunity, please leave a review that is amazing to me. That's a gift to my heart. It's also a give to the show and helps us to reach more people.

So God bless you and I will see you in the next episode. Thanks for listening to take back my brain. If today's episode helped you connect. With hope or direction, I want you to follow the show, leave us a review, and share it with someone who needs it.

And if you're ready to start your own healing journey, explore our courses and our coaching programs at lorihammer.com backslash store. So until next time, remember you cannot medicate away a nutrient deficiency and healing your brain isn't just possible, it's powerful.

Jen Beyst

Rewiring the Brain’s Hidden System: Trauma, Memory & Frequencies