Why Supplements Are Not Enough: Training the Brain’s Electrical Software to Restore Balance

Introduction to Neurofeedback and Brain Rewiring 0:00

Well, welcome back to the Heal Your Brain Masterclass. I'm your host, Doctor David Jockers, and today I've got the honor of interviewing Michael Cohen from center for brain.com. We're talking about Beyond Nutrition rewiring the brain's electrical software for optimal healing. And Michael is the author of neurofeedback 101 and his new book, The Mind Rewired 25 Stories of Healing, Trauma, Anxiety and Beyond with neurofeedback. And he is an expert when it comes to the brain. You guys are in for a treat.

We're going to talk all about trauma and balancing the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system so you can really sleep well, reduce anxiety, reduce depression, and really thrive in life. Be able to focus and be productive, by quieting your mind, balancing your brain. And so you guys are in for a treat here. So without further ado, let's go to the interview here with Michael Cohen. All right. Well, here I am with Michael Cohen. He is the founder of centerforbrain.com, and he is the author of neurofeedback 101 on Amazon's best selling book on Amazon.

And his new book, The Mind Rewired 25 Stories of Healing Trauma, anxiety and Beyond with Neuro Feedback. And he's an expert when it comes to neurofeedback and really understanding the brain and how it works and how it drives behavior and the stress response in our body. So really great topic. And today our title is Beyond Nutrition Rewiring the Brain's Electrical Software for Optimal Healing. You guys are in for a treat here. And so Michael, great to be with you. And let's start with nice to meet you.

After hearing you so many times. Yeah. And you're a fan of the show, which is, which is a big fan of your show. Oh, great. And so let's let's start with your new book, In the Mind Rewired. You talk about the brain software and why is optimizing biochemistry often not enough to stop symptoms like anxiety and brain fog? Well, you always have to be dealing with inflammation, with gut microbiome type of issues with nutrition. I mean, that is foundational. That's but can you take can you do all those things and still have anxiety?

Can you do all those things and still have a sleep problem? Can you do all those things and still have A.D.D.? I mean, yes, we know that. And we see lots of clients actually, who have done a tremendous amount of nutritional work with often very good functional medicine docs or functional medicine. Do nutritionists, and yet they're still struggling. So yes, you can improve the hardware and you need that to be good.

Why Nutrition Alone May Not Resolve Symptoms 2:50

But it's kind of like I want to learn how to do a certain dance so I can be in the best physical shape I can have. Wonderful. You know, you see these people who are really great in sports, but they can't dance very well because the timing isn't perfect. There are many, many things that disrupt timing in our brain, how our brain, different parts of our brain pay attention, how they help us be more calm, how they help us go to sleep, how we quiet our minds. These are different systems in the brain, and they have to run in a pretty functional, well timed way.

And when that timing gets off, the electrical signaling, the, which is kind of the software, when that timing gets off, it can just get off. And how do you get it back even when you do all the nutrition. So doing being able to do neurofeedback, which really means I'm going to retrain the electrical signaling in my brain. I'm going to retrain the timing in my brain by using some special sensors on my head that help tell my brain when it's getting the right beat, when it's getting the right timing, when it's getting the right signal.

And how does it do that? You're watching a video game. You're watching a movie, you're seeing that movie. As long as your brain is doing the right thing, and as soon as your brain starts missing timing, it kind of fades away or it gets smaller. So it's a real time feedback system. But basically, in simple terms, the answer is how do we get our brain to get on the right beat, get the right timing, and do certain kinds of things? You need something else beyond often nutrition. That being said, if you eat crappy, if your nutrition is bad, if your microbiome is off, if you have a lot of information, it's going to be harder to train.

So it's really very important that you get both working together. Yeah. No doubt. And we have this the part of our nervous system called the autonomic nervous system, which the best way for listeners to understand that is it's automatic controls our heart rate, controls our digestive system. We have to think about it. It's constantly running and there's two main branches to it the sympathetic or fight or flight branch and the parasympathetic or rest and digest branch. And we need both of those. We need good sympathetic and parasympathetic tone.

They're both vital to life and survival. But most people in our society are wired into more of a fight or flight, or simply a higher sympathetic tone, lower parasympathetic tone. And, you know, they're in this constant state of fight or flight. And how does that impact, you know, our ability to even if we're trying to make good, healthy choices and live a healthy lifestyle, how does that impact our ability to live and thrive? Well, when your brain is over ramped. So we're just going to call back about sympathetic as being overwhelmed.

I mean, we live in an incredibly overstimulating world. It's just the way it is. And that happens both from everything from electronics to sound to light to maybe eating too much. I can't even I don't know how food and nutrition directly impact sympathetic, but I think it must at some level. Well, well, no doubt, because we're releasing a lot of stress hormones. So stress hormones are glucocorticoids, meaning that they're going to elevate blood glucose because they're trying to get us ready to run real fast, right.

Or fight. So fight or flight, we need elevated glucose because we need to produce energy quickly, you know, without oxygen. Right. So and so that's what we can use anaerobic fuel with glucose. And then what's going to follow if we don't burn that glucose up through exercise for example, fighting or are fighting running. Then insulin is going to come out right, and insulin is going to bring that glucose down by putting it into cells. But the issue is that when insulin is elevated, it stops fat burning.

And it also makes us more hungry in general. And so we're going to end up with more cravings, more hunger and an inability to burn fat for fuel. So yeah, when we have high sympathetic tone, it's definitely going to impact our nutritional habits.

Sympathetic Overdrive and Nervous System Balance 7:10

We're going to tend to want more comfort foods, things that are going to give us kind of a quick burst of, glucose. Right. And a lot of dopamine. And, at the same time, it's going to block fat burning and that and the, the issue for a lot of the clients and people we all see is they may be doing exercise like crazy to calm that down. You know, I've got to do a lot of exercises to calm. I need to do yoga. I need to do meditation. I need to, take supplements that help calm this down. But they're working.

If their brain tends to be in that sympathetic mode, and that could be from anxiety, that could be from previous trauma in their life, that could be from really stressful work. But then when they can't let that down, they're working really, really hard to be calm. They're working really, really hard to get that sympathetic down, to be able to go to sleep better, to be able to reduce the stress level. Neurofeedback has an incredible is an incredible tool that helps people reset some of those circuits so that you can get your brain to go there without working so darn hard.

When, you know, I tell people all the time, you work way too hard to be calm. I mean, it's kind of crazy and, why should people have to be doing that? There needs to be other tools. And there's tools like the vagus nerve stimulator, which maybe you have discussed in some of your talks. It's a device using either electrical stem or light stem or magnetic stem that helps target the vagus nerve that helps with increase parasympathetic and reduce sympathetic neurofeedback is arguably the most powerful and fastest way to reset some of those circuits.

I mean, I I've had people who came in just wired. I mean, they are just extremely anxious, extremely stressed. I can't stand it anymore. It's ruining my life. And in 2 or 3 sessions they're like, oh my gosh, I'm doing a lot better. Not because we did something to them, but they literally with neurofeedback, you're training your own brain signals to shift. You know, you're kind of learning a new dance. Your brain is really good at being anxious. Let's teach your brain a pattern of how not to be anxious.

So. So how does neurofeedback work? Can you explain more about, you know, that process and how that works? I will not be able to explain it well enough. I'll tell you right up front, because really, we're talking about, well, how does the brain change itself? So fundamentally? Neurofeedback is how I'm going to use I'm going to put my fingers over my left and right temporal lobes. Okay. Your left and right temporal lobes play a role in emotional regulation. Emotional balance, getting triggered, getting stressed, getting angered.

You probably don't have any, people who listen to this who have those problems, but there are a lot of people who do. And so if you want to improve that, how do I exercise that limbic system, the temporal lobes, in order to say, I'm going to practice helping your brain learn to be calm, learn to not get triggered, learn to not get angry or as irritable. So we put sensors on the head. I mean, this is how neurofeedback actually is done, not necessarily how it all completely works. You put sensors on the head, it measures your brain activity.

And basically, you know how when you're playing a video game and you don't know how to play it and you're learning how to play it and you're having to figure it out, how does your brain actually figure out the right thing to do? You have no idea how to play it, but you keep working until you find the right patterns that help you get better. The same happens. We're using basically a video game for your brain. We're measuring your brain pattern, and you're getting better at improving the brain pattern.

And it's when you do the Pacman goes or you see a rocket ship going, or you see the movie very clearly, but as soon as your brain starts doing less good at that pattern, the Pacman stops or the spaceship slows down and the movie fades out. So it's everybody knows that any kid can learn a video game. They don't like asking for instructions, right? You ever seen a kid ask their parents, how do I play this video game? I don't know, I haven't seen that. Yeah. I've got I've got kids that play video games.

Yeah, they just figure it out. So how does their brain do that? It is identifying patterns and getting better at patterns. We're using the brain's pattern and helping you learn to make a better, more functional brain pattern by rewarding you when you do that. Just like a video game rewards you when you do better. Interesting. And how does it work? Like, do you get that? Do you get people to start by thinking, by trying to be aware of certain certain patterns or. Okay, so we're measuring the neurons.

This is okay. So right now for you to be listening to me and paying attention to me, you are fine. Neurons in your prefrontal lobe and your auditory cortex so that you can engage in this. Can you feel them firing right now? Probably not. Yeah I hope yeah. No. Yeah. So we don't feel our neurons. Nobody does. You know. How do I learn how to you know, I'm going to learn to be on a balance board. Can you explain to me how I learn to balance? You probably can't, because your brain really just figures it out, right?

How Neurofeedback Trains Brain Timing 12:40

Just like the video game. I can't tell you how I got better at it. I just practiced and did it. So really, fundamentally, we're just using technology to tell the brain when it's doing a better job of making a certain pattern. Now, which patterns that you measure and give feedback on. There is a lot of different ways to train the brain. So if I train you over your temporal lobes, I'm targeting a system for emotional regulation. But if I train you over what is called your there's an area of your brain called your premotor cortex.

That's on the top of your head towards the front part. That plays a role in kind of I hope I can say this, getting off your butt and getting things done. You know, this is the how do I engage in activity? How do I get things done? How do I be more, you know? Yeah. How do I really start a whole task? If that part of your brain you train that it's going to have a completely different effect than if you train your temporal lobes? Or if I am anxious or I get overwhelmed in situations that is in an area of your brain called the parietal lobe, which plays a role in proprioception.

So I can easily get overwhelmed. And how do I calm that down? So you go to a gym, there's a lot of different exercises. You go. Neurofeedback is fundamentally a gym for the brain. It's different. You have to have somebody who knows what they're doing to help you identify which part of the brain can I exercise to help me achieve less anxiety, better attention, improve my memory? Quit having my mind race and race and race be a better sleeper, be more emotionally balanced. All of those things, are really just exercises.

It's just that rather than exercising, like in the gym, it's more like learning a new pattern I am right now. I mean, I see people all the time who I say, I interview them and I go, so it sounds like you are excellent at worrying. They go, oh yes, I am an excellent worker. So can we simply train? So you you're excellent at that pattern. Can we teach you to be excellent and not worrying and that's just identifying a pattern in the brain, which tends to be in an area called the anterior cingulate.

That plays a role in. Okay, I need to quiet my mind and focus on something else, not have that thing loop in my head. Now, how do you target these different areas of the brain are using like, electrodes? What exactly are you doing? In general, most neurofeedback is using some kind of electrodes, although there are other types of neurofeedback that measure, infrared, type energy and things, and even oxygen in the brain. But the most common is measuring electrical. So you're measuring using electrodes.

But what does that mean? And measure we all make electricity with our brain. If I put a sensor on the head it's going to measure your electrical pattern. So we put these sensors on your head. It measures it. What do you do when you're sitting there? Watch a movie, play a Pac-Man game, watch a space game. How in the world can that make me more calm? How in the world can that make me be more focused? How can that help me sleep? Because I'm getting feedback instantly. That's helping my brain learn to create more functional patterns for those targets.

But how do we figure out where to do it? Which is a question you asked. Some people use brain mapping, meaning we do put a cap on your head and measure all the electrical activity and go, where are things different than what you know? Here's what's typical for other people your age range. Gee, you're making way too much activity in the center or cingulate, so I'll bet you can't quiet your mind and they go, oh yeah, I can't at all. But we also know, I mean, neuropsychology, neuroscience knows what do these different areas of the brain do?

So if you came in to me and say, every time I go home and I get tired, I get really too angry and I yell at my kids. My sister, by the way, once came back and said that, so is that okay? So there could be a nutritional problem and we really need to rule that out first. So is that a blood sugar problem? Is, is that, you know, low energy? That is because I have not having enough energy. So I do try to make sure we're not training something that really is more of a nutritional problem, but let's assume they've already been through some of that and haven't achieved a solution yet.

Rather rapidly, you can train in a few sessions over the temporal lobes, and all of a sudden people will say, I'm less angry, I'm less emotional. I'm, you know, kids are not having tantrums. I don't want to make it sound like it's always that quick. It's not always that quick. I mean, every, you know, when you go to the gym, how long does it take to get in shape? It's different for everybody a little bit. But, but you have the ability because we know what different areas of the brain do. You don't always have to have a brain map.

And some, some clinicians, there's clinicians all over the country that do this. And I wish there were more. And we hope there will be more, because it's every therapist who gets this and really starts to learn. It goes, how come I didn't do this before? I'm making I'm helping clients with their anxiety, with their mood, with their attention. So much faster than I did before. Because you're giving people a gym, you're helping them learn to improve it. Yeah. So basically what you're trying to do is you're you're mapping the brain to kind of see what areas are firing to high, what areas are not firing in the appropriate amount, and then correlating that, of course, with their health history, maybe their symptoms, things that they're having and then providing the proper I guess you can say, stimulation into those, into the areas of the brain that are, that are low, that are weak, and kind of in a sense, trying to put the brakes on areas that are hyperactive in order to create more balance.

You said that better than I did. That's very good. That was a very good explanation. And that's it. And that's a very good way, a simple way to think about it. Exactly that. And you know, you don't. It's not the brain is incredibly complex. So yeah, you know, I had someone who came in who said he's a lawyer, you know, he has a new job. He has a tendency towards anxiety. He got incredibly overwhelmed by his new job. Great pressure. And he kept saying to me, I need to be more focused. I'm having a hard time getting things done.

You need to help me improve my motivation. So even though I had a brain map, I actually targeted those specific areas of the brain that do that. And after 2 or 3 sessions,

Brain Mapping, Targeted Training, and Real-World Cases 19:40

I didn't think we were making, he wasn't reporting any progress. And so I'm like, is it possible that maybe this is just overwhelm rather than lack of focus? And so we trained an area of his brain that plays a critical role in being overwhelmed and being anxious. After one session, he comes back, oh, I got a whole lot done, you know, right after that for the next two days. So, you know, when you go to a doctor, do they always know exactly, even if they've done lots of tests, exactly what the problem is and what to do about it?

I don't want to suggest it's just, gee, we always know the right answer. Sometimes you have to work with people to figure it out. Just no different than clinical news. You know, functional nutrition. Sure, you are constantly adapting to how that person responds. So part of neurofeedback is having someone there who can say, well, how did your brain respond to that? And and what can we do? And I often see people who say they eat well, they have no nutritional problems. They've done all this other stuff.

And then after a while you're like, let's review that again, because something's really standing in the way of your brain exercising and making progress. Just like if you went to the gym and you were not eating as well, or didn't have good nutrition, you're just not going to get is in good shape. So we really refer out a lot, for nutritional issues. And also, quite frankly, we live in Florida. Mold is an issue. And so people are being affected by that. I don't know what your view on, EMF, which is both phones and, Wi-Fi.

But yeah, I tell people now, and this is based on the last 4 or 5 years of experience, they come in, I have a hard time falling asleep. My brain is racing. I wake up at 3:00 in the morning, I can't get back to sleep. I'm like, where's your router? How far is it if it's not at least 30ft, 30ft away and you don't have a booster in your area? I'm like, well, you need to do that first. And I've had enough people come back to me after to go, oh, I'm already sleeping better. We didn't do anything other than your brain is somehow getting overstimulated by some of this stuff.

Yeah, I always recommend people put their Wi-Fi on kind of a schedule system. You could turn it off like you can schedule it to go off like in our house. It's off by 11:00 at night and it doesn't come back until 6 a.m.. So like, we know we're going to be sleeping during those hours, like there. We should have no need for Wi-Fi. So it's just an automatic program, that goes off and on. And so I think that's really wise for most people to do $8 Christmas tree timer at Home Depot. That's all they need. Yeah. There you go. Exactly.

Now, your book, you actually feature 25 stories of healing. Is there a specific one? Like an NFL player or a student with ADHD that illustrates how quickly the brain can pivot once it gets the right feedback? Yeah, lots of stories, but I do want to mention that, I've been in the field for almost 30, well, actually for 30 years, and there are clinicians all over the world that I meet, and they tell me these incredible stories. So it's not just my story. So I decided I'm going to invite some clinician.

So I have 12 different clinicians who have some who have linked us up to clients for the clients to tell their story. So we actually interviewed those clients. This particular, client came from, George Roselle in Sarasota. He's a psychologist. He was doing a small study with NFL football players. So, the guy actually allowed us the player actually allowed us to use his real name because he's out there trying to get other, NFL players to do it. His name was Pat Carter. He played for the Lions. He played for the Cardinals.

He played for the Oilers. And, you know, what does every I think he was a, and you know, what is everybody, you know, getting hit over and over and over. And he described, you know, from the time he was young, you know, your job was get up, get whacked and get back in there. And so and later, you know, they said, you know, the NFL knew about it, but they just didn't say anything. So they knew that he was going to have his body beat up. But he said, wow, I didn't expect, you know, in my 30s and 40s, I was going to have to deal with my brain issue.

So, he started having problems with terrible problems with sleep, with mood. He said he would have his wife, you know, and him would all they he'd get mad and they wouldn't even talk to each other for 2 or 3 days, and they'd go to a different part of the house. And she wanted him on to go see a psychiatrist, and he heard about this study from another player and decided to enroll. He didn't live that far from, that was, Sarasota. And so he started doing it. And within he said a few sessions, his relationship with his wife was changing.

He was starting to improve his sleep. He was starting to feel more clear. He had a lot of impulsivity issues. He was overspending and things like that. Well, look, anybody who's had concussions and and we're picking on a football player, quite frankly, a lot of people in their lives have gotten whacked in the head. And they were told they went for an MRI and they were told, no, you don't have a concussion. By the way, an MRI is not the gold standard for identifying you have a concussion. It just means you're not bleeding.

You definitely want to rule that out, but later is when you see the effect of what is called post-concussion syndrome. These players all have post-concussion syndrome. So they're emotional. You know, they get excessively emotional. They didn't used to be like that. To be an NFL player, you better be steady and calm. This is post. You know this is post-concussion. And so not just football players but an example for anybody you know that's ever gotten whacked in the head. Nobody said, gee your emotional problems, your memory problems, your attention problems are all from that thing that you did ten years ago, 20 years ago.

We see that all the time. And Pat, you know, had a serious issue. And when he was able to see Doctor Roselle and you can see in the book there's a particular type, there's a variety of different types of neurofeedback. So you can sometimes get confused. Gee, there are all these different types of, neurofeedback, but there's lots of different gym equipment. They all do similar things, but in sometimes different ways. So what you want is people who know what they're doing to help you, particularly when you're dealing with the brain.

So I mean, Pat is now I mean, within about 15 or 20 sessions, I think just a dramatic shift in his brain in his life. His wife became a big advocate. He said later, after once he started doing that, he had kind of stopped going for a little bit. And she's like, you got to get back down there. You're slipping. You you need to do this again. And, and quite frankly, I do neurofeedback on myself. I'm 72 and I definitely was having memory issues about 10 or 15 years ago that my wife is like, you got to do something about your own brain.

And so my brain is better now than it was definitely 12 years ago. And that's great. Now am I doing nutritional things also? Absolutely. 100%, I figured. So you're listening to this podcast. So. Yeah. So, I mean, you got to put it all together. So there's not one thing when you got complex problems, when you got really bad anxiety, when you've got depression, when you're just struggling to keep up at work.

Trauma, PTSD, and Faster Healing with Neurofeedback 27:30

I have a lot of people who come in. They are struggling to keep up at work. They frankly, a lot of them have done a lot of research in nutrition, but you can't fix your processing just by taking the right supplements. When something, whatever it is, has gotten the timing off in your brain. There's lots of things in our world that get the timing off in your brain. And okay, I am now in better shape. My brain is better able to respond if I have good nutrition, and neurofeedback actually works much quicker when you get the right nutrition because it's training.

Yeah. And you're working with a lot of different people, like kids with ADHD, for example, people with depression and you're helping them without the side effects of pharmaceuticals. Absolutely. I mean, you know, I'm not I, I'm not a fan of pharmaceuticals, but I'm not against pharmaceuticals. I mean, there are times where you really need them there. It's the question is, are they good long term solutions? Yeah. And you know what? If you can learn to get your brain better at regulating yourself, isn't that the better choice?

What's the downside of that? Takes a lot more work than taking a pill. You know, nobody goes if you're really out of shape. How long is like I said, you go to the gym and actually get in good shape. It's not a month. You know, this takes time. It takes effort. It actually doesn't take effort to sit there and do it. It takes effort to go, there's cost associated sometimes a lot of times insurance might not pick it up. Of course, insurance doesn't pick up nutritional stuff either. But, I think that the challenge is, I mean, whether I have to tell you a quick other story, we had an autistic boy who was 16, 15 months of 16 months.

This is in the book. But it was amazing to me. It was a client of ours. And we had seen the mom. She was a equestrian. I don't know if you know anything about equestrians, but they've all fallen off horses multiple times and they've had some level concussion. So she had multiple concussions. And when she came in, she was just not thinking, well. And so she came in for herself. And she was one of those miracles, like in 6 or 7 sessions, she's like, oh my God, I'm thinking clearly. And she'd been the mayo she been, I mean, she bill, I shouldn't say names, but she'd been to a lot of places because they had the means and nobody had help.

So one day she calls, she wants to bring her son. How old is he? 15 months. We're like, okay, what are we talking about? I think he's autistic. So she comes in. He's not, I think by the time she got him, it was 16 months. He's not responding to his name, so he just wanders around. He doesn't respond to his name. In three sessions, he's completely responding to his name. Now, what does that mean? What did we do? We actually didn't do anything to him. We helped him train his brain pattern. You can do that at 15 months.

You can do that at age 92. Our brain is always learning. This is just. Is my brain learning a pattern? So it improved the pattern and his brain was able to use that information effectively. Could that have taken two years? Maybe. But usually kids at that age actually respond much quicker. Yeah that's right. That's really interesting. What a great story. And and let's talk about like trauma a lot of people have had maybe child early childhood trauma. You know, relationship issues, divorces, maybe bankruptcies, different things like that.

And typically when they go in to see a psychologist, they're usually going through talk therapy. Obviously there could be prescriptions that are prescribed as well. But, you know, in the, in the mainstream model that they do a lot of talk therapy. Right? And some people get do better with that. But why does that often fall short for these kind of early childhood adverse, events that people have experience? Why do they not get lasting healing with that? So trauma affects your brain development. And that's true.

That's particularly true when you're young and that's called, you know, childhood trauma and developmental trauma. But a lot of people experience trauma, you know, later in their life also. So that has a different kind of I mean, that still has a brain impact is just a little bit different, that these are lasting kind of impacts that go beyond just, okay, Kim, can I just look at a brain map and tell you exactly where your trauma is in the brain? We see some markers. We see some markers of hypervigilance when we're doing brain maps of people who have had this.

But the question is, what do you do about it? Talk therapy is a tool for somatic therapy, which is body oriented. Therapy actually is a very good tool. Nerve. But these are complex things to deal with. Just like concussion, just like depression and anxiety. They can I mean, sometimes they're light, but sometimes they're complex. So what neurofeedback does is to give a tool that helps get to the deeper parts of the brain. So you have an area called the amygdala. You have areas that play a role in how your brain got affected in the first place by this trauma.

And you can do talk therapy, but you're doing talk therapy to the person to try to reorient and help them change how they respond to that. You're not able to get right into the brain and say, let's help you change the timing and the wiring in that area that is most affected to help you be more calm and to help, not just be more calm. But, you know, people have nightmares. People have, you know, get triggered badly. I mean, there's a lot of emotional dysregulation that occurs with this neurofeedback because arguably one of the best tools, extra tools for trauma.

So it doesn't mean you don't need to talk therapy. You do. But one of the best trauma therapists that I've ever met said, she she and she's written a book on neurofeedback and trauma and developmental trauma. Seven Fisher. And I asked her about what is the difference between you doing trauma therapy now with their feedback versus what you used to do? Because she did it for years without neurofeedback. She says, what used to take me five years for some of these complex cases to do, I can do in a year or less.

Yeah. So it's just a great foundation that you can use with talk therapy to get these kind of lasting healing results for people that are dealing with PTSD or early childhood, adverse adverse events and things like that.

Finding Practitioners and Other Nervous System Tools 34:10

And addiction, you know, we have addiction problem. We have a sleep problem, we have a chronic sleep problem. We have a chronic anxiety problem. I don't know if you do. You see that, 100%. Absolutely. I mean, it's and, you know, it's almost a pandemic of anxiety and sleep and of course, addiction. So we need tools other there's not enough good talk therapist around to deal with all these problems. And if I can provide some tools that help people get get their brain under control, that helps all the other stuff work a lot better.

Yeah. No doubt. And so obviously people can go out. They can they can buy your book The Mind Rewired where and you also have neurofeedback 101 where they can learn more about neurofeedback, how it works. And it really gives them hope. You know, in the Mind Rewired, you go over 25 stories of healing trauma, anxiety and beyond with with neurofeedback. So they're going to be inspired by that. Where can they where can people go to get neurofeedback treatments? Is there, you know, a great website where they can find practitioners?

Obviously they can go to your website to learn more, which is center for brain.com. Where can people find practitioners in their area, or is it something that they can do virtually? How do so I do even on my website, I give some guidelines on how do you find neurofeedback providers in the book? I give some guidelines. How do you find their feedback providers? Look, the reality is you got to use you got to use Google. And now I was going to play a role, but I would say use Google to find people in your area.

Make sure that when you find someone that they actually have a lot of information about neurofeedback, not that they just list neurofeedback as one of their services. You want somebody who's really spent time learning this, using it, and you got to ask enough questions, just like you would if you were saying, I want to come to you for trauma. Well, I want to come to you for anxiety. What's your experience? You want to know some of that. So because there's not enough neurofeedback people, you kind of you're going to need to find people closer to where you live.

But I will say we are seeing, bigger, you know, people who are further away and there's nobody really close to them. We're doing a lot of what is called home use training, supporting people where we train them. They literally remotely we do it, you know, by zoom, for example, there are a number of companies and other practices that do that. So I encourage people just to look at what resources are and options are available to them so that they can have access to this and to recognize, by the way, and we didn't get a chance to talk about that.

There's a number of other tools that are emerging in my book, you know, provide some information about that. There are other really good tools to help regulate your nervous system. Neurofeedback is not the only thing. It's probably one of the strongest and best things, but it's not always available. It's not always the cheapest. So there's there's there's an emerging set of tools out there from vendors. What are some of those tools you mentioned vagus nerve stimulators. Right. So there's something called audio visual entrainment, which is basically think of a metronome for your brain.

So but it's with light and it's with sound and it's getting your brain to pulse around a certain healthier frequency. So it's driving, you know, you go to a disco and you dance to the beat. Right. So this is the heard of the brain. Have you heard of the brain tap? Yeah. So brain tap is one of those is another company called Mind Alive there. Some other companies come and and they do it in different ways. So you have to kind of recognize is more than one way to do it doesn't necessarily permanently help your brain shift.

Does anything permanently help your brain shift? Neurofeedback often does. But if you're eating crappy, if you live in a moldy environment, you know, I mean, I want to go back to that because I do mention you got to clean up your act for this stuff to really work and these other tools. PMF you've talked about PMF and light therapy. Well, there's some specific types for the brain that also play a role. So those are very important because PMF of and and light therapy affect blood flow and metabolic activity in the brain.

You just need things that are a little more specialized. Well, you'll get more impact if you get things that are a little more specialized. From v light to a company called neuron X that make these light helmets to, there's several PMF and there's a company called Neuro Field that does something for very intensive pulsed magnetic fields.

Sleep as the Foundation for Brain Health 38:40

People might go, oh, aren't transcranial magnetic stimulation. That's something a lot of psychiatrist do. Isn't that magnets? Well, that's magnets like with us. Excuse me, a sledgehammer. It's hitting your. It's hitting you with really high intensity magnetic fields. But your body, you want your biology to shift naturally and gently and not push too hard. So we prefer actually lower level tools over a longer period of time, if that makes sense. Yeah for sure. And and we'll probably a little bit more, more specialized, more personalized, treatment protocols. Yeah.

Yeah. Well this has been a it's been a really great interview. I, I would recommend our listeners go out, check out your book. You got two great ones with the new one is the Mind Rewire 25 Stories of Healing, trauma, anxiety and beyond with neurofeedback. It's something all of us can benefit from, retraining our brain, right? All of us have had trauma. We've all had, you know, traumatic situations, whether it was in early childhood or later in life as adults. And, you know, we need to balance the brain and we balance the brain.

We're able to balance the sympathetic parasympathetic nervous system. We're able to be in better control of our mind, our emotions, our behaviors. So, you know, that's going to form better relationships. It's going to allow you to be more successful in your healthy lifestyle pursuits and, have more joy, more happiness in life in general. Better sleep, waking up refreshed, restored, less anxiety, less worry. And, you know, more time to spend focusing on on your purpose and things that you really desire in life.

So again, I would definitely recommend checking out the book The Mind Rewired and also neurofeedback 101 from Michael Cohen. And check out his website, center for brain.com. And Michael, great interview. Any last words inspiration here for our audience? Well, I won't give an inspiration, but I'll take off on something you said that didn't reinforce enough. Sleep is number one, two and three. If you are not waking up restored, if you are not, if you are tired during the day consistently, and I'm talking like 17 year olds, 20 year olds who are tired all day long, they tell you there's a problem that needs to be addressed whichever way you get it.

That is the most important of all. And neurofeedback is a very good tool for that. But that's complex and it requires a multi-tiered approach. So that's the one I'll tell people, you know, somebody who's tired in the day or wakes up and doesn't feel refreshed within a half hour. That's a reason to go find out what they need to do something. Yeah, no doubt about it. Absolutely. Well, thanks again, Michael, for this great interview. And guys, again, check out his books neurofeedback 101 and The Mind Rewired.

You can find those on Amazon.com. And also his website center for brain.com. Thanks again for your time Michael. Everybody be blessed