[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome to the Heart Rate Variability podcast. Each week we talk about heart rate variability and how it can be used to improve your overall health and wellness. Please consider the information in this podcast for your informational use and not medical advice. Please see your medical provider to apply any of the strategies outlined in this episode. Heart Rate Variability Podcast is a production of Optimal LLC and optimal HRV. Check us
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Welcome friends to the Heart Rate Variability podcast. I am excited to talk about HRV and the brain today with Brandon Parsons. We connected at the last AAPB meeting or conference and I think we spent like 8 hours post conference till the early hours of the morning just nerding out, having fun. I won't give all the details about everything that we we happened, you know, nothing, you know, too risque, but we just connected both on the nerd side of things. I think we got into philosophy, maybe some quantum physics.
We had a blast with the group at our table and so excited to bring you on to the podcast because I know if we have half as much fun on this episode as we did at AAPBD and we're gonna have a good time. So I'm really excited to have you on the show, my friend.
[00:01:31] Speaker B: Well, thank you so much for having me, Matt. And yeah, what happens at a conference stays at a conference, as we all know. But I'm sure we'll be able to have a bit of fun today as well. And it's all the reason to get out and get to APB this time around next year.
[00:01:44] Speaker A: Yes, great to see you there. So I would love, as we sort of explore HRV in the brain, which as we were talking about before we started recording something that we kind of talk about on this podcast as a secondary topic, we always, as I like to say, sometimes when I work with, you know, I get excited about polyvagal theory. Sometimes we forget we have this amazing thing called the brain on top of the autonomic nervous system. I think some brain people forget that there's this whole other side of the nervous system. So I'm really excited to explore bringing this, especially with your work in neurofeedback, bringing these two topics together. But before we nerd out and have some fun, I'd love just to give our audience just an introduction of you, a little bit of background about you and your work.
[00:02:34] Speaker B: Yeah. So I will be a little bit different than I think most of the guests on your podcast because I am really a brain guy, right. That is my interest that is my passion. That's what I've been working in for almost 20 years now. So I started back in 2006, actually, as a BFE course assistant. I was lucky enough to land this gig where I was getting trained by world renowned experts in different fields and everything, really, around the globe, and got exposed to biofeedback, to neurofeedback, to a lot of different modalities, a lot of different interventions. Obviously, one of the first things I did was HRV, because it's easy, it's accessible, it's something that gets done. But I really did fall in love with neurofeedback. I was already in psychology at that point, doing my bachelor's degree, and I had actually suffered three pretty severe concussions. One at the age of 13, one at 15, one at 17, and I was 20 years old when I started and went to my first BCIA neurofeedback workshop back in the day. I was living in Montreal, where I'm born and raised, and decided, hey, I'm going to do some neurofeedback training. It's supposed to help with post concussive symptoms. I still had a whole bunch of anxiety, sleep problems, headache, attention issues. I mean, you know, the list, name it, I had it. And long story short, it really made a big difference in my life. But the first 1520 sessions or so, I saw actually no change whatsoever. And what that really hammered into me was the fact that this is not an automated process. This is really a therapeutic and clinical process that requires an active human being with us to do this type of training, which is why I love to see approaches like yours and like you have at Optima, because it is really something that does bring together the expert clinicians with the patients, with the end users, with the people who are going to benefit from this technology. So. AppLAUSE hands off for the responsible approach, because it's absolutely lovely. So my passion really started there, and I really got on board with Neurofeedback and decided at that point I wanted to do that as a career. And I never thought I had the capacity in me to master the neurosciences and the brain and all the complexities and everything else that seemed way beyond my reach. But when you're passionate about something, you really do fall in love with it. So I was kind of in the existential CBT kind of streams of standard psychology, humanism, positive psychology, all the more recent offshoots. And really, neurofeedback and biofeedback lend themselves very, very well to those approaches. It's essentially like CBT on steroids. To a certain extent, I love that. So I have a master's in vision science and a PhD in neuropsychology and did my thesis work actually on integrating neurofeedback into a learning context to improve performance and learning, and showed that it is possible to do, to kind of integrate that into a living, existing system to improve outcome, which is one of my main passions at the moment, is kind of taking the clinical side out of the equation and really being able to apply these techniques in their given context where we want these changes to occur.
So I guess that's the 32nd background.
[00:05:41] Speaker A: So when and how did heart rate variability, as you were exploring the brain and as I did do it formally, but, you know, our past, my existential CBT, those were the things that really resonate with me as a young mental health professional with that is I'm just. We were just starting to touch on the brain in the mid to late nineties, like, you know, as I always like to say, yeah, it may have been the decade of the brain, but for most people, that research kind of hit in the early two thousands. So I just had kind of missed that, but then got just absolutely nerded out about it early on in my career, but didn't hear about heart rate variability until much later in this. So I'd love to hear, as you started to explore this a little bit more formally than I did, where did heart rate variability kind of hit your radar?
[00:06:37] Speaker B: Well, it was actually born. And it's interesting because like we talked about before we started recording, that is what I'll be talking about mostly today. It really came of the observation that as we were doing neurofeedback sessions with a lot of the younger kids, I realize that they're having a lot of time with what I call the two active ingredients of neurofeedback, one being the operant conditioning, the kind of more automatic side. It's the brain getting reward and everything else. But there is also conscious, involuntary regulation going on. We can learn to manipulate and influence different brainwaves, especially the alpha rhythm. And we'll be talking a lot about alpha today because it is something very, very, very in tune with HRV.
And it's. It was interesting because we were looking for different tools that we could use to help these kids understand how to control their physiology.
And breathing is probably the easiest and most accessible to consciousness. We looked at, oh, well, why aren't we doing biofeedback or HRV? Biofeedback. And let's start integrating it, we eventually ended up changing our whole entire training process at the time to start with three or four sessions of only HRV as an introduction to autoregulation before getting into the neurofeedback side of things. And I'll kind of give you a glimpse of what's going on. We did five minutes of HIV biofeedback at the beginning of every session. Following that, as a lot of other professionals started doing, I think, around the same time. I don't think we invented it, but I think a lot of people had the same kind of observations.
[00:08:01] Speaker A: Excellent. So for our audience who might not be as familiar with the neurofeedback side of things, I've been trying to memorize what the different wavelengths mean. And all that part because there is so much crossover, whether it's aapbased. I know I'm going to is in r here in a few months. And, you know, you can google all these abbreviations. Don't ask me to pronounce all the words in these, but what would be like if somebody asks you, oh, neurofeedback, what are you doing? If you were to give maybe a long elevator speech on the science that I know fascinates you, what is neurofeedback?
[00:08:43] Speaker B: Well, so it's actually, it's funny. It's one of those things that is difficult to give one of those medium length answers on. Either you can say, well, it's brain training and that's that. Or you can go into this, you know, week long explanation of what neurofeedback is. But no, in the middle ground, I'd say it is kind of brain training. It is operant conditioning. It is voluntary self regulation of brain activity to a certain degree. And each one of these are what I consider the active ingredients of the process.
But like in HRV, we're looking to reestablish homeostasis. We're looking to reestablish balance. Now, where neurofeedback kind of departs from some practices of biofeedback is brain activity is very dynamic and changes on a split second basis. Right. So there's a lot going on. There's a lot of different regions. Some parts of the brain should be active at certain times and should be calm at other times. And so it is a little bit more complex in terms of analysis and in terms of understanding. Yeah. If we fundamentally break it down and go to the really simplistic level, we can talk about delta activity being very important for sleep, and that's usually what it represents. On the more complex side, delta is hugely important for vigilance, just being able to maintain attention. It's something that's fundamental for executive functions because it helps link up a whole bunch of different systems in the brain. So if we just kind of stop and say, oh, depth is sleep, and that's that huge part of the picture. Yeah, exactly. Theta is another one we'll be talking about today, because theta is seen kind of as the enemy, right? An ADHD, too much theta, this and that. Yeah. But also theta and anterior midline. Theta is hugely important for executive functions, for working memory, for introspection, for hypnosis, for a lot of different types of different therapeutic techniques and states and everything else. It's hugely important. So essentially, we start neurofeedback with an evaluation. An assessment, usually a 19 cap Qeg. We're going to measure a person's brain activity. Some people compare it against a normal database. So a database of people without any kind of disorder, without any history of medical problems involving the brain, no long term medication use, and they test normal on most psychological and physiological measures. They're like what I like to call unicorns because, I mean, there's no ideal brain, and so they get all these people who are close enough to it and then kind of calculate that variability and it gives us the norm. But there's so much more than just training to the norm, right? When we talk about optimal functioning. And what I didn't go into in my kind of very brief history is I have worked in optimal performance capacities. I was working for the Vancouver Canucks back in 2010 year. They made it to the cup and then lost in game seven against the Bruins of all teams. I'm sorry if anybody Bruins fan, but I'm a Montreal boy, so you can't expect me to like the Bruins. Yeah, I think it's in beans. It's in my blood. It's just, you know, it's. It's. It's how it is.
[00:11:25] Speaker A: I don't think anybody's going to hold that against you. I think you're okay there. Yeah, excellent.
[00:11:32] Speaker B: And, and, yeah, so. So neurofeedback really is kind of a reestablishing that. That homeostasis, that. That first assessment allows us to kind of break down and say, okay, where the imbalances occur and what brainwaves. And then it does resemble HRV training, except that we try to do training fairly regularly, two times a week, about 60 minutes sessions broken down into trials or runs of three to five minutes for most practitioners and for most protocols. And there's a lot of variability, right. And, like, in a lot of biofeedback practices, there is a certain sense of, well, everybody's kind of doing their own thing. There is more and more of a growing consensus around what I just described as being QEG based neurofeedback. But that can extend from one channel amplitude training to two channel coherence to 19 channel Sw. Loretta. Neurofeedback. I mean, there's so much to learn. And that's what I'm really passionate about, is we're lifelong learners in this field, right? We're always discovering new things and new ways of helping people, and that's kind of the medium to long elevator speech.
[00:12:32] Speaker A: I like that. So oftentimes on this podcast, we'll talk about things like RMSsD for normal breathing. You want to increase that low frequency during biofeedback practice. One of the things about Neurofeedback that I like, I'll dip my toe in, I'll go to a workshop, but I'm just like, oh, my God, how many books am I going to have to read before I even get close to knowing what someone like yourself has accumulated over the years? It's like, yeah, you want your prefrontal cortex more active, amygdala down regulation. I can teach people on it. But, like, when I listen to you all speak, I'm like, oh, my God. So, like, are you one of the things I think that, like, okay, HRV, biofeedback, while there's complexity there, just understanding what a frequency measurement is, you know, probably a semester long course to fully understand it, but you get into different parts of the brain, different wavelengths.
I'd love to. Just when you're looking at the brain and doing neurofeedback, what are you looking for? What creates a theta or alpha or a delta?
What creates these brainwaves?
[00:13:48] Speaker B: Fundamentally speaking? Again, I'll get into the technical definition. It's the summation of the postsynaptic potentials that are generated by pyramidal neurons that are oriented perpendicular to the surface of the scalp. That's the kind of very, very.
[00:14:03] Speaker A: Can you say that one more time? I gotta just absorb that here for a second.
[00:14:08] Speaker B: So the summation of all postsynaptic potential. So a post synaptic potential is the consequence of a action potential. So we're not actually measuring direct neuronal firing, but the consequence of neuronal firing on the postsynaptic neuron, it either excites it or inhibits it. Right.
Increase its probability of sending off another action potential. Or decrease it when you get thousands, and typically, we say hundreds of thousands to millions of these occurring simultaneously in our pyramidal neurons. So the neurons that are in, essentially the cell bodies are mostly in layer five of our cerebral cortex, and they have to be oriented the right way to create a dipole, an electrical field that we're able to measure with electrodes on the scalp. And it's going through the skull and the scalp and things that don't conduct electricity all that well. So we get these tiny little microvolts that we amplify a few thousand times, and we get these nice kind of waves, a little bit like we do when we look at HRV, but on a much more condensed kind of scale. So we're looking in the frequency spectrum, typically from about one to 30, 50, with more recent technology up to 100, 2200 hertz. Sometimes. Yeah, it's cool. It's difficult to distinguish some of those faster brainwaves from muscle tension and other environmental artifacts, but we're starting to learn more and more about it. And even there are some systems that go way down into the lower spectrum, actually have some crossover into the hrv frequency spectrum bands. We're talking about infra slow frequency, and some changes that occur on second to minute time scales. And there is a bit of an overlap there. And there are some theories that suggest that maybe what we're doing with infrasol frequency actually bridges or connects with a lot of what's going on with hrv or other bio resonance rhythms that we do see in the body.
[00:15:52] Speaker A: Yeah. So if I'm in, let's just say, and I know you already told me oversimplification. So. But, but let me. So I. Delta does promote healthy sleep. I know I'm oversimplifying everything grossly here. So you're measuring delta and whether or not I'm going to have get to sleep or if I'm stressed out, I don't have a lot of delta. And again, I'll let you correct me, you're looking at the results of action potential. So whether or not neurons are firing.
[00:16:30] Speaker B: Or not, how the hell out of given synchrony. Oh, it's, that's. This is the very complex mechanisms of it.
[00:16:38] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:16:39] Speaker B: Essentially. And then we're not even talking about harmonic effects and everything else, right? Because if you have a 1 hz rhythm, right, something hitting once per second, if you get a 2 hz rhythm and, and that they sync up so that every second hit is simultaneous, well, then you're going to exaggerate the amplitude of your one and 2 hz, but it's not actual real amplitude. So there are a whole bunch of harmonic effects and everything else that are occurring.
It is. It's hugely complex, but it's super interesting.
Essentially, what we're looking at when we're looking at EEG measures is how the brain on a large scale synchronizes its activity. Because we do need a certain degree of synchrony. We're not looking at single neurons firing here. We don't have the discrimination necessary to see, for example, the stimulation of a certain part of the visual cortex. No, we're talking about eyes open. Eyes closed. Yeah. We're going to see differences in the alpha band, where alpha is going to be much larger with eyes closed because we're cutting off visual input. So all those neurons start idling, essentially.
[00:17:35] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:17:36] Speaker B: In terms of delta activity, what's interesting, like I said, is it's. Yeah, it's fundamental for sleep, but we do kind of see correlational analysis between a certain amount of delta in the resting state, especially. And that's typically with the way we run our assessments, are resting state baselines where we're looking at how much delta, how much data. We know, for example, that people with ADHD tend to have too much of these brainwaves. And based on where it is in the brain, we can also kind of extrapolate on other neurodevelopmental problems. So, for example, someone with dyslexia, we tend to see that kind of arcing from the back right occipital through the left temporal region. And again, based on the person, based on the subtype of dyslexia, what's interesting is a big part of this field is moving more and more towards what I believe was created in 2009 by the NIH in the states, which is the RDoC research domain criteria for those who don't know what that is. It's this really interesting initiative to move away from the grocery list of symptoms to establish diagnoses that we use in the DSM towards actual physiological and biological markers. If this thing called ADHD exists, I should be able to measure it in the brain. And we do see three or four different subtypes. Maybe there are three or four different kinds of ADHD. They don't quite correlate with the inattentive or the combined or the hyperactive subtypes, but there is a bit of overlap in that regard. So it is very interesting to see QEG is not a diagnostic tool, but it is probably a differential diagnostic tool.
[00:19:12] Speaker A: Yeah. Can you just define what you just said, because I think you caught everybody's attention, because about every other episode, I advocate for throwing the DSM in the trash can. So, not a huge fan. Let's just put it like that. Not a friend of the pod, so to speak. So when you say what you just said, which I think is incredibly powerful, where are we just kind of fine tuning our definitions of these? Well, what are we? What, as we hook somebody's brain and we're measuring brainwaves, like I said, are we going to get to the point where we might be able to distinguish four different types of ADHD or better define things like autism and those sorts of things? Are we fine tuning at that point?
[00:20:00] Speaker B: Yeah, we're getting there slowly but surely. A lot of that data comes from, essentially, multimodal neuroimaging research. So we're combining EEG more and more with things like fMRI and MRI, because they are both very complementary. EEG is fantastic in terms of temporal precision. It's very, very fast. It's essentially almost the speed of light thing. We're getting very, very quick responses, whereas fMRI, there's a 1.5 to six second delay in terms of processing that signal and actually understanding what the brain is doing. These are physiological mechanisms that technology won't overcome.
It is just how slow the brain metabolizes oxygen and blood flow and everything else. So we do like to combine the two, because fMRI gives a whole bunch of spatial precision, whereas EEG gives that temporal precision. And the idea is to say, okay, we have this disorder called ADHD as an example. Well, ADHD is characterized by this and this and this symptom. It's a checklist, essentially. Okay, I can give you any number of reasons why someone is exhibiting inattentiveness and agitation. Take anxiety, for example. Someone who is very, very stressed out, and especially a young person, they're gonna have a hard time paying attention to what the teacher saying in class. They're going to have a hard time sitting in their seat because they might be nervous about what's going on around them. They can manifest those exact same symptoms. However, the fundamental underlying cause is not at all the same. Right. We use clinical judgment today to distinguish the two. And as we all know, clinical judgment is great. It's wonderful when we're good at it. Not everybody's good at it.
That's where the problem comes in. So the idea with things like QEG and even with HRV profiles is to be able to say, okay, I've got these two different patterns for someone exhibiting the same symptoms. These should not be called the same disorder. These are two different things because they manifest differently physiologically in the brain and the person. And in that way, we should be able to separate our diagnoses better. The whole purpose of a diagnostic is what is to orient towards the best treatment. And we do know that a lot of QEG profiles and a lot of different disorders can give us information on what pharmacological treatments are best. We can predict with pretty good accuracy whether a psycho stimulant is going to work in a kid. We can predict with even better accuracy whether an antidepressant is going to work in someone who's depressed. Certain molecules of antipsychotics and schizophrenic patients. The list goes on and on and on. We can really figure out medication response beforehand. I know very few psychiatrists who do eqeg before prescribing. It's trial and error. Oh, it's not working. Let's up the dose. Oh, you have side effects. Let's lower the dose. Not working. Again. Let's change molecules. And this can go on for months and months and months. Right. And that's. And that's kind of a big problem. And that's. Again, one of the reasons why I love techniques like biofeedback and neurofeedback is we're kind of breaking down that passive medical approach of, you have an imbalance. Take this pill, it'll fix it to like, you have an imbalance. Let's figure out how we can help you reestablish that. And it really is that holistic approach that I. That I love.
[00:23:07] Speaker A: I love that. Okay, so I won't go on about throwing the DSM in the trash. Let me.
Yeah, I just. I mean, my thing. And. Well, let me ask you this question, because it is sort of. I think my justification of that comes from my work with trauma, that we don't ask the developmental questions. And there was a big push by the leaders in this field to scream at the DSM authors and editors, like, you gotta look at developmental history.
After hearing you talk. Though, I would say that developmental history is probably playing out in what you're seeing in the neuro sessions. So you're sort of getting a snapshot of that. But what I love is with ADHD, specifically, the youth I've worked with is trauma. And ADHD can show up in so many ways together, autism and trauma. If you don't look developmentally, you may be medicating and you, as you said, you may be medicating. Wrongly, as a trial and error, as we just throw medication and medications. I'm not against them, but if they're done strategically so we could get the developmental thing, we could get the, a better assessment of what might work, what not, might not work, and just avoid.
I'm not going to say we treat young people as guinea pigs with medication, but it just seems like we. I'll get a youth on my caseload historically, that has six or seven different medications. I don't know the kid anymore. Because they're so heavily medicated.
[00:24:45] Speaker B: No, no. And I'm going to say, I'm going to give a bunch of little anecdotes and I hope it's all right for you, Matt, and for our listeners. Please, medication again, I'm not against medication either, but I think it's important that we understand that, fundamentally speaking, medication in most cases is abandoned. It is there to cover up something that is vulnerable. It is there to help someone who isn't immediate need, but it's not, in most cases, a long term solution. We need to be doing something else. It is not curative medication, in the context of psychological disorders are meant to treat symptoms. That is, mask them, make that ADHD kid less troublesome in class, regardless. That's a whole other thing. Yeah. In terms of psychopharmacology in general, I like to tell a story about how back in 1914, they are pharmaceuticals who everybody knows. Yeah. Patented this new miracle treatment. Fantastic. It was in kids cough syrup. It was in different medications, help with headache. It was supposed to help people relax productivity, insomnia, everything. It was heroin that they had the patent on. And I don't know, I see you smiling. Maybe somebody's gone into this before. And we look at that now, we're like, oh, we were so dumb. We were so silly. Yes, yes. And I hope that it won't take us another 100 years to look back to where we are now to say, guys, what are we doing? Kind of thing. Again, these things can be essential in a lot of cases, but we use an abuse medication and it is not a final solution. And that's where I kind of get into it with some psychiatrist colleagues, sometimes even where I say, that's great, they need to be on medication. Now what? Yeah, now what?
Too often it falls out and like you said, it goes into polypharmacy. And that's a big problem, especially when you want to withdraw, because what do you take away? First, you taper everything off equally and slowly. That causes a lot of problems. And again, it becomes a nightmare. Very very quickly.
[00:26:37] Speaker A: Absolutely. In fact, you know, and I was working with a fairly severe population. We hospitalized them to get them once we stabilized behaviors to an extent hospital to get them off the medication because we knew they needed that level to deal with everything you just talked about. So let me get us back on track, because this is the problem with you, is we, like, we open doors and then we go explore. So let me get back on those. So you gave us a great working definition of neurofeedback. So we got the delta, we've got a heart rate variability, we got the time, we got the frequency domains.
Where do these sort of come together? Because that's the other thing that I kind of struggle is knowing, like, being in the neurofeedback world enough to be, you know, like, just blown away by what's going on over there, but like, a little scared to, like, get too deep because, gosh, a PhD may give me the expertise I need to talk like you talk about it. Where. Where do. Are we talking about two totally different cutoff systems, which I'm assuming we're not. How do these integrate into each other? Or did the science evolve where Delta versus high HRV doesn't really makes sense to talk about.
[00:28:00] Speaker B: They're fairly complex relationships. One of the things we were talking about earlier is that anterior midline theta, that theta we get over FCZ. And for those who at home know the 1020 system, it's between FZ and CZ. So we're kind of over the anterior portion of the cingulate cortex, which is really important, a lot of high level, low level functions. And typically, typically in someone who's healthy, we do get a nice increase in theta over that region when we're doing hrv type breathing. And that's indicative of a lot of different things. That's that low level kind of. And again, in the brain, we tend to talk about the body as being low level systems because they're autonomic and they kind of. Again, I'm not kind of trying to discount anything about biofeedback because it's hugely important, but it is that kind of part of that part of the brain where we do get an exhibition of activity showing, hey, this is having an effect. Now, for those listeners out there who are used to working with ADHD, you're thinking, oh, theta over that part of the brain is bad. It's related to ADHD and inattention and dishibition and everything else. We do see a differential change in those populations who do have an excess theta. It goes down and the theta beta ratio tends to normalize. So there's definitely something a little bit magic going on in that region that is, again, all about reestablishing balance and homeostasis. So again, one of the things that we'll get into a little bit later, but I'm going to give a little bit of a preview of it, is that theta we talked about, related to a lot of different states, is also hugely important for introspection. Being able to go into our own heads, metacognate, think about ourselves as a living being. Introspection is one of the, for me, prerequisites to conscious and voluntary self regulation. If I can't feel my temperature, I don't know whether I need to put more clothes on because I'm cold or peel layer off because I'm hot. That's the kind of simplified level of it. So in working with kids with ADHD or in kids with autism spectrum disorder who sometimes have a lot of difficulties with this introspection, just doing that kind of HRV, we're assuming, and what I've seen anecdotally and what we do see in some research is that we are actually increasing that kind of mind body connection. So I think there is something really, really fundamental at the heart of what is going on in terms of HRV. Just hitting that, you know, even close to that resonant frequency, most people breathe between 18 and 20 breaths per minute without training. Pulling that down, even just closer to six already has a pretty big impact.
[00:30:28] Speaker A: Awesome. Well, you just gave us a topic for the next interview I do with you because introception is something we've been and we'll just have it. You would be like the fourth or fifth guest speaking on that issue. So I can't. I'll just throw out that invite right after this show to bring you back to talk about that in our series. So I would love, because, you know, the brain, one of the things I like about the autonomic nervous system, as I started to learn, is that we do while it's below consciousness most of the time, as is what's going on in our brain. You know, again, introspection is. Allows us to kind of get attuned to some extent with that is, you mentioned the breath.
And you know what I have loved about heart rate variability. And working with Doctor Ina Hazan is looking at how we can utilize the breath to kind of take our autonomic stress response to the gym. Strengthen ventral vagal breaks. Just a generic way to look at the research of strengthening that break building more emotional regulation, you know. So I'm curious how you bring the breath into this, because we know the breath also has impacts on, you know, brain functioning as well.
[00:31:48] Speaker B: Yeah. So before I get into that, I'm going to jump on one thing you said, because it is hugely important, I think, and it's. It's kind of bridging off of what you said earlier, talking about trauma and talking about somebody's past. When I have somebody come in for neurofeedback, essentially, I don't really care if the problem was caused by parents and youth, if it was something purely biological, if it was something environmental. It doesn't matter. I'm in the here and now. I want to know, what can I do about it? So I do get a lot of parents, especially here in France, where psychoanalysis is still very, very much strong and alive and very, very, very dominant in the psychological field. I do get a lot of guilty parents who come in and say, my child is autistic, I was told, because it was either I loved them too much, sure, not enough, and it's always one of those two extremes, right? So homeostasis, right? Well, you gotta give them that. It's all about balance. But the idea is I'm taking them in the here and now. Now bleeding into that, into the actual response to your question and then sidestepping a little bit. For starters, you talked about the consciousness and subconscious, everything else. We can also look at EEG kind of in a very similar light. Right? And again, we're simplifying, but the activities associated with consciousness would be beta and alpha activity. Beta activity would then be the subconscious, and then delta activity would be the non conscious. And if we kind of delve into hypnotherapy approaches and then how their models are formed, one level can only speak to the neighbor, right? So consciousness can speak to the subconscious. The subconscious can speak to both consciousness and the non conscious. But non conscious and conscious, they don't have that archway to get through. So by doing that, HIV breathing and stimulating that proper theta, maybe we're also bridging the gap between the non conscious and the conscious, which is where, again, work with trauma is hugely important because a lot of these things aren't. We're not able to verbalize them, right? We don't know what the fundamental causes are. And when they come up to the surface, we need a tool to help regulate and to help calm everything down, but not by burying it. It, like maybe was before, like, can happen in PTSD, but actually undoing that knot and letting it flow. And that is really where HRV is super powerful and where I use breathing techniques during neurofeedback sessions with complementary protocols. Right. Alpha, theta, behind the head. Fantastic to work with HRV in that kind of context. So teasing it all together is. Yeah, there's. There's a lot of stuff, but concretely speaking, right, I see four reasons for doing a HRV at the beginning of every single neurofeedback session like we talked about initially. The first thing is that it is a fantastic introduction to self regulation. It's super easy to regulate a person's breathing.
In about 10 seconds, I can show somebody how to consciously regulate their breathing. Most kids, some have a little bit more of a hard time, people with dyspraxia or different types of autism spectrum disorders, intellectual deficiency. But even then, they tend to learn quite a lot. We use balloons, we use imagery. I lie people down flat and make them push things up with their stomach, everything. We have fun with it, and that's also important to do.
The second is that usually, as these kids are coming in, kids or adults even, they're stressed out, they're coming in from a fight with their parents or with their sibling or from school, and they're tired and everything, and just kind of reestablishing a balance. Before I start my neurofeedback session is fundamental. Otherwise, I'm just getting all that contamination of what happened to them throughout their day or the five minutes before they came in. It's going to skew my results. I'm not going to get a pure value of what's actually going on in their brain. So by starting with five minutes of breathing, and what we started doing is actually measuring that activity as they're doing their hrv breathing to see what exactly is shifting and to see what's going on and how powerful it is. Yes, I'll be back on Matt, and we'll be able to talk about that once we have more data and we'll be able to concretely put it up.
[00:35:42] Speaker A: Oh, yeah, yeah. You can't throw that out there and not come back and talk about it.
[00:35:46] Speaker B: So, yeah, it's in progress, one of the many things that are in progress at the moment. But it's a passion project, Mike, because, again, I've been doing this for, like, 20 years, and again, it always occurred to me to measure it, but just for different technical reasons, it was more difficult. And today I had something fall into my lap where, like, oh, we can do this easily this way. So I was like, great, let's do it.
[00:36:05] Speaker A: Can I just ask a quick follow up, because something you said really fascinated me, is that using. And again, correct the language if I'm a little off here, but using HRV biofeedback before you start to look at the brain puts it in a. Puts, I guess, resets it, or puts it in a state that's more. It tells you more than if you don't do the biofeedback. And I asked this question because my wonder is you're in some ways, boy, the word that's coming across is artificial, which I don't think is the right word. But you're shifting, intentionally shifting the state. And you think you get, or you may know you get better data for you as a professional in that more regulated state than if you just kind of measure them as they come in. Yeah.
[00:37:03] Speaker B: So again, it's all. And this is the art of physiological assessment. Right. Because I want to get as much ecologically valid data as possible when I'm doing my assessments. So when I'm doing a QEG evaluation, I'm not going to do that well with the little asterisks I'll kind of come back to. Because it is going to influence the person's state. Yeah. Part of me wants to say if it's that easy to fix the problem, then the person shouldn't be doing neurofeedback training to begin with.
You know, then HRV solution is much quicker. And again, I'm a path of least resistance. I'm an Occam's razor kind of guy. If somebody is coming in for insomnia or for anxiety problems and hasn't already done HRV biofeedback, they're going to start with that because it's much quicker, it's much cheaper, it's much easier to put in place than 25 to 40 sessions in our feedback. So they're going to start with that before we move on.
But what's happening is. So if I want to measure what I'm supposed to be measuring, which is pure data, you're right, I shouldn't be doing anything. That's why we're doing this work now, where we're recording the data as we go to see our start point and our end point, but to have an actual barometer of change that is not contaminated by what is going on in a person's day to day life, if I'm doing that five minute of resonant breathing before doing my baseline measures, for example, well, then I'm going to be getting much purer values of what the brain is functioning like in its optimal state. And if there are things that need to be corrected, well, then I'm going to be able to move on those much more efficiently than if trying to work out the noise between. Okay, what's the issue with the parents, with the stress, with the test that they just had, with their anticipating? They're going after their homework afterwards? No, I want all of that gone. I don't want to have to distinguish between that and the underlying ADHD or anxiety or insomnia or everything else. It's adding confounds to my variables. So I need really pure vision of, okay, what do I have to work on here? And that's where HRV can help me get the clearest view. It decreases muscle tension. So just that in terms of high beta activity, right. Muscle tension contaminates high beta to huge amounts of I don't know what's real and what the artifact is. So being able to get rid of that, or at least lower it significantly, makes my work and neurofeedback much more efficient and much more powerful.
[00:39:18] Speaker A: Love it.
Wow. Oh, so, yeah. And that's only reason number two.
[00:39:23] Speaker B: There are two more.
[00:39:24] Speaker A: Okay, keep going. You're just like, oh, that's an episode. That's an EPS. Okay, go. You can see why we talk for like 8 hours at a table after. After we nerded out for like 72 straight hours at AAPB.
[00:39:39] Speaker B: So I think we shut down the conference, man.
[00:39:41] Speaker A: We did. We did. I think they kicked us out eventually. So.
[00:39:45] Speaker B: Yeah, so, so again, kind of recapping. Right? It's that introduction to self regulation. That's the easiest one. The second one is it's giving me as close to an equilibrium or a clean slate as I can get as I'm going into training.
[00:39:57] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:39:57] Speaker B: The third, as we discussed, is it's going to have an impact on the brain. And most of those impacts tend to go in the direction of the norm. We talked about delta activity. If I have too much, it tends to go down. If I don't have enough, it tends to go up. So it tends to balance out delta activity, which, as we said, people mostly just relate to sleep. But no, delta is a fundamental activity for a lot of high level and low level cognitive processes and emotional and behavior. Motor control is dependent on delta activity. There's a huge amount of stuff, huge relationship between delta and dopamine as well in the brain. And we love dopamine as well. Throw that connection in there as well. Theta. We talked about alpha and posterior alpha. The number of people that come in to a neurofeedback clinic who do not have enough alpha in the back of their heads is huge. It's huge. You get about 85% of people who are able to voluntarily regulate that activity and upregulate it. So to increase it, which is fantastic. And one of the most efficient tools in doing that is hrv breathing, because it is all about that calm, restful, peaceful interstate. And again, if my heart's going at 100 an hour, I'm not going to get into that state. I've got to kind of calm it down. I've got to get into that resonant, rhythmic breathing. My whole physiology has to be in tune because I'm getting an error message from my body saying something's wrong. How is my brain going to shut off and go into neutral unless I completely dissociate? It's not going to. So that is where the mind body, again becomes hugely important.
It does have some impact on beta as well, but it's.
And again, you talked about, where does this brain activity come from? An anecdote that was actually brought up, I think, by Jay at AAPB this year. Jay Gunkelman. The great Jay Gunkelman. For all of us in the neurofeedback field, he's one of the big ones. And he talks about beta being an emergent property of slower rhythms, like theta, like delta, like alpha. So for those who are, again, getting into quantum physics or going back there, Matt, an emergent property is something that arises that is larger than the sum of its components. And that's kind of how he sees beta playing out in the brain. So if we're influencing all these slower signals, then it's only normal that we're influencing beta. It's hard to say optimizing, because it is something that's very difficult to define as such. Sometimes optimizing means increasing beta power, sometimes optimizing means decreasing beta power, lowering the investment for the same result. That's great. I'm saving energy, but how to know when and where? That's still kind of beyond our reach. But we're getting there slowly but surely. And again, we're still just on reason number three. So I'm having a direct impact on my brain activity. And number four, I think the most important and the most often overlooked, one of the big weaknesses that we have in neurofeedback research, and I think as a field in general, is transferred. Right. And transfer is the whole idea that, yeah, okay, I can train someone to be more attentive sitting down in front of a computer with electrodes on their head and focusing on a video or on a labyrinth or on something else. How is that going to help them at school?
Unless I do what we call transfer trials. Right. Which are essentially putting the person in a context that is very similar to what's going on in class. Well, then they're not going to see those changes at school. I see a lot of neurofeedback professionals who start out who say I control the environment and make sure everything's calm and quiet and they have only this to focus on. Yeah, that's great. For about the first five sessions, what does real life look like? Jimmy dropping his crayon, Mark going, you know, to throw something at somebody else. And this person walking around. If we can't resist against those distractors, then it's a problem. All of this to say that HRV is a fantastic bridging tool for us. Neurofeedback. If I'm doing five minutes of HRV breathing at the beginning of every single neurofeedback session, I'm creating associative learning. I breathe, my brain switches into gear. I breathe, my brain switches into gear again and again and again. So when the person then exports that breathing practice into their daily life, and this is something we actively encourage, I get my kids to say, you're going to give me one time from now until our next session where you can use HRV. Oh, I have a test coming up. Great. Oh, I've got a hockey game. Perfect. I've got some football. Great. Wonderful. And I always check with them because they always forget the first time, but I harass them and we always get them and we get them to start actually implementing this into their daily life. And that helps us really export the work we're doing in our neurofeedback clinics out into the real world. So if they're going to be doing their breathing outside before an exam, before a big reading assignment, before a sporting event, before, you know, screaming at mom or dad, because there's a conflict and they've told us to clean our room for the hundredth time, take three breaths before responding. A lot of the time we do see pretty significant behavioral changes, not only because of that association, but because HRV is also an active therapeutic tool.
[00:44:43] Speaker A: Yeah, right, exactly.
I love it. So, boy, there's so much there.
So what is your go to? I guess like breathing techniques. It sounds like, you know, such a key tool that you teach those, you know, and obviously with you, you know, with maybe anxiety or ADHd or, or whatever they're really going through. But what are some of your kind of go to from sort of maybe that you've seen are really good for neurofeedback outcomes long term as well.
Yeah.
[00:45:19] Speaker B: So it's, I mean, it's fairly simple, right? We don't have a huge amount of time. And sometimes I will do resonant frequency analysis just to kind of see what is the person's optimal breathing pattern. Those tend to be the higher performing clients with people who are there to optimize performance or who have anxiety or post traumatic stress that is fairly complex and a little bit treatment resistant. And they've done years and years of CBT and everything else. I really want to make sure about what I'm doing with them. But otherwise we really, and especially for kids, simplify it into three main things I tend to teach them in that order. One is speed. So again, we talk about speed, 18 to 20 breaths per minute for someone who is not properly trained, whereas we get that down close to six breaths per minute. Then there's the actual length of the inhale and exhale. And again, we can talk about inhale, pause, exhale, pause. And everybody has their argument or their article saying we should pause for 1 second. No, half a second. There should be no pause in hell, only on the exhale. And I'm not going to get into those arguments.
[00:46:12] Speaker A: Well aware of those arguments, yes.
[00:46:15] Speaker B: What?
[00:46:15] Speaker A: I'm sure there's probably one in my inbox right now. I would imagine there's one. There's one in my inbox right now. No matter how much flexibility we get, it's like I want a longer inhale. I'm like, nope, you're not getting that. Sorry.
[00:46:29] Speaker B: Give me your angry comments to Matt.
[00:46:30] Speaker A: Give me the meta style and I will think about it.
[00:46:34] Speaker B: Exactly. No, but we're fairly simple because again, I'm working with a lot of kids, so if I'm working with kids, I'm going to lose them if I get into things too complex. So essentially we typically do four, six for the simple reason that most people coming in are overactive and overstressed. So we really don't want to favor that parasympathetic side. Some people say that it puts them to sleep and that's where you just switch to five, five breathing. And again, I kind of let them manage the pause. Everything else, if I see that they're, you know, breathing in, and then I have to hold it for like 3 seconds. Then I'm going to obviously kind of help them out and show them. No, no, we inhale slowly, and, yeah, we teach them. So again, three things. Speed, diaphragmatically, breathing with the sTomach, and that oftentimes I lie them down. And this is something, actually I started doing with the Canucks back in the day. I'll put two tennis balls, one on their stomach, right in the belly button, and then one on their sternum. And if the chest breathe too much, the ball rolls and smacks them in the chin. And so that's a great negative conditioning procedure that gets them to really breathe their stomach and not with their thorax as much as. Yeah, it works quite well. So speed, depth, and then what I call the quality of breathing, which is, like I said, the inhale is the active part.
It should be a slow, active inhale, and then the exhale is really more passive. You're just controlling the valve of the balloon that you're letting the air of kind of thing. You're just letting the pressure kind of take it out. And so active, passive, active, passive. And most kids, even starting at four or five years old, are able to really integrate that into their practice.
And again, you figure out ways of getting them to do it at home. I tell them to teach their parents. That's the first thing I do is whenever I get parents come into a session, the parents don't stay for the sessions with me. They're outside when they come in. They want to see what's going on. It's not my job to explain. It's their kid's job to explain. So I get their kid to explain what's going on in a session. Again, that's all part of my whole approach where I want the person being trained to be as autonomous as possible. So based on their explanation of the parent, I can see, okay, what do they understand? So they say, oh, it is breathing. Okay, what about breathing? How do we breathe? What are the different, you know, what are those three different things? Which is why I kind of come back to those kind of keywords and numbers and everything else, because that's how they integrate it. And then they show it off to their friends, to their coaches, to this and that. And it really does kind of grow almost exponentially from there. And that's. That's really what we want.
[00:48:53] Speaker A: And it seems like young people can be both sometimes the best students and the best teachers on this. My wife being a second grade teacher, her kids just eat this up, like. And, like, the parents will say, like, I go into their room and it looks like they're meditating, you know, what's going on, and then they teach their parents. And, you know, and from my perspective, again, working with, you know, youth that really may have been even in the court system or just too hyperactive to even be in the public school system, like the family system to me, is such an important part of that regulatory process because you often had parents, and it was this cycle is the child's behavior triggers the parents, but then the parents are more triggered. So it just gets in this really dangerous at times kind of cycle. So I love that you're having them teach their parents as well.
[00:49:47] Speaker B: Yeah. And it very quickly becomes a family tool. And I think the best victory that I don't want to say I've ever had as a neurofeedback professional, but it's up there on the list is when the parents of a five year old autistic spectrum kid came in one day and said, brendan, we want to talk to you before the session. And that's, of course, you're sweating bullets and then you're not feeling very good and you're like, oh, God, what's going to happen? And, you know, the parents pull you over and say, my son told me I had too much high beta. What does that mean? Kind of thing. And again, that's exactly the reaction to having is the first, the relief, and then you burst out laughing, but then you're like, oh, I actually have to explain what high beta is now. And I don't know how they're going to take it, but it's magical to see those things. And we talked about introspection and that ability to kind of understand more about yourself. It really does start with things like breathing and heart rate, because they are the primary fundamental physiological mechanisms that we have conscious access to, to kind of build on those foundations. For any practice of biofeedback and or feedback or any kind of therapeutic technique, it should be required education on how to properly breathe in school.
[00:50:59] Speaker A: Absolutely. So let me, you know, I want to respect time here and again. There's. There's been doors open to at least a half dozen more episodes that I'd love to have you back to talk on. I'm so glad to introduce you to our audience if they didn't know you before.
Okay, so I'm looking, let's say maybe our typical audience, maybe struggling with anxiety as we all kind of are at this point, maybe wanting to perform a little bit better. Maybe they're like me and. And started to hear about these brainwaves and go on Amazon and see that you can buy a device for $300.
I'll let you verbalize the non verbal here. What should somebody, obviously, if they're listening to this, they're an HRV nerd already. That's our family here at the optimal or the heart rate variability podcast.
So they're already in the technology. They're like, oh, how do I use this to reach whatever my goal might be, or the goal for a loved one might be? Where would you encourage people to if they're interested in Neurofeedback? Did they go by that $300 device on Amazon or do they reach out, do a Google search, find a professional, just give us some advice for those that you may have sparked an interest here.
[00:52:29] Speaker B: Yeah, so again, it is interesting, and Neurofeedback is kind of at this tipping point where we do see a lot of startups, like a huge amount of startups and Indiegogo, and then crowdsourcing on different neurofeedback devices.
It is getting to the point where there are a couple of pharmaceutical companies who are developing their own neurofeedback systems. So I think they do kind of sense the trend towards this kind of therapeutic technique, that it is the time to be investing and developing and getting into it. Home training systems tend to not work very well for the simple reason. Garbage in, garbage out. The quality of dry electrodes today. And I'm sorry to all those people who love those super sophisticated systems that go on the head with no gel, they're not good enough. And especially when we talk about faster frequencies, right. In terms of beta activity, in terms of gamma activity, it can't really pick up the lower end of the spectrum. So any of the infra slow, forget that you need specialized equipment to begin with. But even one, two, 3 hz, most of the delta band, they're not able to pick up. They pick up two things fairly well. One is muscle tension and the other, if it's a decent system, is Alpha. But Alpha is kind of seen as that panacea of well being and health and everything else. No, there is a subtype of anxious people who have too much alpha. And if you buy one of those muse headsets into the relaxation protocol, you're going to probably send yourself into a panic attack, but you're not going to be more relaxed, that's for sure.
[00:53:56] Speaker A: Yeah, that's not the goal.
[00:53:59] Speaker B: An assessment is always necessary before doing anything, and that's kind of where HRV for me is.
I don't want to say, again, a bridge to Neurofeedback, but it is a first line intervention for a lot of these different problems. And again, I wouldn't say to somebody, go out, buy your HRV system and do it at home. I would say, go out, buy your system, educate yourself, and then go see a professional for three to five sessions, have them coach you and make sure you're doing it properly. And again, I know professionals who do two to three sessions with their clients, send them home for a month and say, check back in with me in a month. I'll be monitoring your data online. We'll make changes if we have to. And that for me, is the responsible approach. We're not quite there with Neurofeedback yet. We really do need someone there for most sessions. But I think that there is the possibility of heading there down the road. Road.
But, yeah, in all cases, I would say it is important to consult with a professional and a responsible professional. Again, if you're consulting for anxiety or insomnia or anything else, if you're going for neurofeedback but you haven't yet done HRV biofeedback, they should be sending you down that alley first because it is a very powerful tool that can bring about a lot of fundamental changes. Worst case scenario is it's going to shorten the work I have to do in neurofeedback afterwards, even if it doesn't fix everything the way it's supposed to.
[00:55:20] Speaker A: Evan, I mean, that gives, I think, folks, a really good checklist. Is HRV helping you reach your goals? And if not, then a neurofeedback professional whip? Again, I'm assuming that most neurofeedback people have a understand heart rate variability. That's been my experience. But, yeah, you're shaking your head. Yes, I would assume. I'm assuming you know everything. You know, you've had, you've got the HRV stuff pretty much down.
[00:55:48] Speaker B: So it's a rudimentary understanding for most professionals. But, yeah, to a certain extent, we're not specialists in HRV. We're not specialists. They won't be able to rattle off all the normative data for rm SSD based on age groups, high performance, everything else. But again, it is a really fundamental part of any intervention handling the whole body. And like I said, the easiest way into that system, at least in my opinion, is breathing. Breathing, and breathing with its direct impact on the heart and heart, and breathing with their impact on the brain and the rest of the physiology. Right. It's cyclical. So some people first report when they do HRv breathing, symptoms of anxiety and stress, and it can send them into a panic attack. I'll do one or two neurofeedback sessions with them, calm down their high beta, maybe increase alpha a little bit, and they'll do HRV breathing. I'll say, wow, this is like magic. I feel like I'm melting into my chair kind of thing. This is wonderful.
As again, so they're very, very complimentary techniques.
[00:56:46] Speaker A: Awesome. Well, I think that's a great place to end here or I'll spend another 8 hours with you nerding out about emergent properties of that. So I actually, for my audience here that I delayed gratification a lot during this episode because probably the doors have been open, are good ones to walk through the rabbit holes that I wanted to go down with. You probably did our audience here a favor, but I just appreciate you, my friend.
Like said, I could literally talk another 8 hours with you and go down these rabbit holes. And I really do genuinely hope you come back just on the introspection piece. It's been such a theme by the time this one gets published, I think I've had gewirt Schaefer innate iguanmande on to talk about it. So I'd love to get your voice exploring that as well. So, hey, I appreciate you coming on the show, sharing your expertise, and I hope it's the first of many episodes we can do together.
[00:57:49] Speaker B: Yeah. Thank you for having me, Matt. And thank you, everybody in the audience. And you heard him, ladies and gentlemen. Harass him. Let him know what you want the first rabbit hole to be, and then we'll sit down and do another one of these. With pleasure.
[00:58:00] Speaker A: Awesome. Well, we'll put information about Brennan in the show notes so you can get information on him and his work. And, hey, my friend, I appreciate you. Thank you for your time. I know you got a lot of exciting things going on in your life, including a new child who maybe just wanted to come into the world a little earlier than expected. So I appreciate you making time for this and what I know is a fun, exciting time in your life. So thank you.
[00:58:31] Speaker B: Thanks so much, Matt.
[00:58:32] Speaker A: That all right, as always, we'll see you next week. You can find show notes and everything
[email protected]. thanks for joining us today.
