Impact Sports, Head Trauma & Reversing Brain Injury with Dr. Kristen Willeumier

Hello, dearest listeners, and welcome to the Longevity and Lifestyle Podcast, where I invite pioneers and thought leaders in all things longevity and lifestyle to give us the strategies, tools, and practices to live better and help us reach our true potential. Today's guest is Dr. Kristen Willimere, a neuroscientist with research expertise in neurobiology and neuroimaging and author of the very insightful book, Biohack Your Brain: How to Boost Cognitive Health, Performance, and Power. Dr. Willimere conducted her graduate research in the Laboratory of Neurophysiology at the University of California, Los Angeles, UCLA, and the Laboratory of Neurogenetics at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. She received MS degrees in physiological science and neurobiology and a PhD degree in neurobiology from the University of California, Los Angeles. She was a postdoctoral scientist in the Department of Neurology at the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, where she continued her work in the field of neurodegenerative diseases. She was the recipient of a National Research Service Award fellowship from the National Institute of Health and has presented her work internationally. Having served as the director of neuroimaging research for the Amen Clinics, she led the efforts in utilizing imaging technologies to understand the neurobiological correlates underlying psychiatric disorders. In this capacity, she oversaw many pioneering studies, including a clinical research trial investigating the long-term effects of repetitive subconcussive impacts in National Football League or NFL players and developed a protocol to successfully reverse brain damage and improve cognitive health. Dr. Villamayor is widely published in peer-reviewed journals including the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease, Translational Psychiatry, and the Journal of Neuroscience. In this episode, part 1 of 2, we discuss Kristin's fun journey to to where she is today, including jumping off of waterfalls in the dark in Chile, how learning in a Buddhist monk monastery can positively influence memory retention, what an education in neuroscience has taught her about brain development and decline, training in show jumping with Olympians, studying how contact-based sport causes brain damage in professional athletes, but also developing a protocol that shows that brain function can be restored with dietary and lifestyle changes. Powerful morning routines for conquering the day and maximizing brain function, benefits of sleep for the brain, peak brain health for optimized clarity and focus, and much more. Listen back next week for part 2. Before we begin, please hit subscribe to the podcast to get your weekly dose of longevity and lifestyle inspiration. I would also love to hear from you, dear listeners, so please leave a review or comment to let me know what you think on Apple Podcasts, iTunes, or on Instagram @longevityandlifestyle. That's @l-o-n-g-e-v-i-t-y-a-n-d-lifestyle, L-I-F-E-S-T-Y-L-E. Please enjoy.

Welcome to the Longevity and Lifestyle podcast, Kristin. It's such a pleasure to have you on today.

Claudia, it is such an honor to be here. You are looking beautiful and radiant, and it's just, it's just such a joy to be on your podcast today.

Thank you so, so much. And I have so many questions and I love the area of neuroscience, the power of the mind. So I'm so, so, so excited, many respects to have you on. However, I would like to start with a funny story I hear you have about jumping off a waterfall in Chile. Can you tell us a bit about this?

Oh yes, you've always got to start with a good story. So back in 2008, I was on a reality television show on ABC called The Mole, and The Mole was known as one of the smartest reality television shows on TV. Essentially, the backstory is the show picks 13 people to be on. One person is the mole. The whole goal is you go through these challenges and you try to accumulate money. With each challenge, you can win— the total pot can be up to half a million dollars. You can imagine a young neuroscience graduate student would always love to have half a million dollars to get their life started. And so one person is selected to be the mole that thwarts the group's ability to be able to earn money. So the very first challenge, this happened to be filmed in South America. And I arrive night one in Chile, and they take all of us to this waterfall in the middle of the night. It's cold, very chilly. I have to get in the water on this little raft. I literally felt like I was Huck Finn on a raft. No way to steer it except with my body. It's not like I had a little paddle.

And we're using our hands on the side of this boat.

You actually use your balance. So it's a very tiny wooden raft, and we were in, in the early part of the rapids, right, that are about to go over. And there is a bag of money that they had dangling over the waterfall.

And this is really nighttime.

At night, this is at nighttime in Chile. I don't even know the people that are next to me. I'm like, who are these people? What am I doing here? Am I crazy? Is it really worth half a million dollars to do this? But my adventurous side said yes, and my adventurous side said, I want the money. Like, I am a competitor and I'm gonna steer this little raft with my body. No, there is no paddling. Anybody can go back and actually see this. I'm sure it's on YouTube, or I know the seasons of The Mole are on Netflix.

I'm gonna have to link this.

Oh my God, I'm actually afraid I probably shouldn't have said anything because this was amazing and so fun. This was the show opener. And just for clarification, we have a zip line on us tied. So as you're on the raft, you can fall off the boat, right? I mean, you're literally going over the falls, right? The little raft goes over the falls, you leap to grab the money. So I am one of the fortunate people that grabbed the money. So I was feeling quite victorious, but I thought to myself, this is how this show is starting. I can't even imagine what the rest of it will be. I actually made it at the halfway point of the show. So it was really, really fun. So for people who love The Mole, love reality television, you know, back in the day, again, 2008, Anderson Cooper used to host the show. This one was hosted by John Kelly, who is a very well-known sports reporter in the US.

Amazing. Well, you have a very adventurous side for a neuroscientist.

But very interesting. You know what? We only get one life.

So I am with you.

Can we wear many hats is what I say.

Yeah, I mean, I've done the zipline. Well, now I've done it a second time, but the first time was the Great Wall of China after hiking for— and this is back in, gosh, it's going to date me now, 2005, where it was still crumbling and falling off. And had it not been for a little lovely lady who was trying to sell us some plastic toys and following us and warning us, she was literally like the guardian angel being like, don't walk there, you're going to fall off the Great Wall of China. Don't walk there. There was no rails. There was nothing at the time. I know. So this is back in the safety levels of China. I'm sure now there's everything done really nicely and it's fine. And then it was either you do this final long loop or you take a zipline down. And for whatever logical reason I had back in the day, I'm like, maybe the zipline is quicker after this 3 hours. I mean, that zipline, like, already the wall is falling off. We could have fallen from the wall.

But anyway, so your choice was based on fun. Which is really cute. It's like, this will be fun.

And hey, I was like, if I die, at least I'm dying in a fun way, right?

So I applaud your spirit of adventure. I already know a little bit more about how your brain is wired just by you doing that zip lining instead of walking down back to safety.

I could say same to you as well from in the dark. At least mine was during the day.

I have seen what my brain looks like, so it explains a lot.

I'd love to do that at some stage. Exactly. There's clearly some wires that are maybe a little bit crossed in mine.

I know we used to say it's a little bit of faulty wiring. No, you are loving your life and enjoying the adventure. And I can't believe you ziplined off the Great Wall of China.

Yeah, no, that, I mean, I've done hang gliding over Rio de Janeiro and, uh, Cape Town. So yeah, I've been lucky in that regard. Okay.

Say no more. You and I are very similar.

Kindred souls. I love it because I had a mentor tell me once, but this was— I was already kind of wired this way, but he said, you know, get out of your comfort zone every day. And I was thinking, if I get out of my comfort zone once a week, I'm already doing well. But now if you have that in the back of your mind, it's like you just push yourself out of your comfort zone, right?

That is fascinating. I love you even more now.

Thank you. You can clearly tell we have a lot in common. I'd love to start with your childhood and what your biggest influences were to take you on the path to go down for passion and brain health and neuroscience.

Well, I have a very unusual road to neuroscience. As we were talking about before we started recording, I grew up showing horses competitively. So at the age of 7, I started riding horses., and I was brought to the barn called Ardee Farm. So my trainer, Alex Jane, had always wanted to be an Olympian, so we had Olympians training at our barn. So at a very young age, I started getting trained on horses to be a hunter jumper from somebody who is as sort of dynamic as we are. So the kind of, the kind of athletic training I was getting at very young ages Talk about pushing me out of my comfort zone. So I just started showing these jumpers and horses that were off the racetrack over fences that were 4 foot high, 5 foot high for speed. And for the next 10 years, that's what I did. I was a show jumper. I went to school in my family. My parents made the deal with me if I wanted to keep showing horses, I had to get straight A's, which I actually think is a really smart parental strategy. It was a great incentive. But what it also did, as I sort of aging into this sport, I wanted to understand how to improve the mindset and mentality of elite athletes. So if you want to be a professional equestrian, which is what I wanted to be, an Olympic equestrian. And by the way, my trainer's son has been an alternate on the US Olympic team. So just, wow, being in that environment, I think, was really inspiring. So sort of my initial goal was I wanted to understand the mind, and I wanted to understand how could we train the mind to perform at optimal levels. And I really was thinking of that in an athletic space. Yeah. So I did my undergrad degree in psychology over at Boston College for that reason. But then as I started thinking about it, I'm like, well, wait, I want to know more about the actual physiology of the brain. I want to understand the organic aspects of how our brain is working. So it, my interest just expanded past wanting to figure out how to have optimal performance in sport or in life to understanding the organic nature of the brain. And that's what really drove me into going into graduate school over at UCLA. Started off doing a master's degree in physiological science, again, working in a lab, working in animal models, understanding how hormones influence brain function. And then I thought to myself, I want to understand diseases that we feel are incurable. So Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and of course, a lot of young neuroscientists want to go into that field. But I just thought to myself, if I'm going to spend my time working in a field and sort of dedicating my life to this, I want to work on things we feel are incurable, working on things that are in the visible world and the invisible world. So that really started to open up this whole new experience of what is going on in our brain organically. And I also felt like we can cure things. I wanted to really get into that space of How do we take these diseases of the brain and help sort of modify our lifestyle or what kind of approaches are available to help cure and reverse these diseases? So that was the trajectory from sports, you know, then to psychology, into the organic brain function, into wanting to really understand more about degenerative diseases and ways to restore brain function.

Yeah, and to actually solve it as well. And thank you for sharing that. And I like the fact that it already started with mindset, right, which is different. It's not so much about organic part of it, but about— yeah, well, that was fine in the brain and how that can influence your day-to-day and sportsmanship to getting through the day, right? I mean, one of the big things that, you know, we discuss on the podcast with different guests are morning routines. And I'll ask you your one as well. Oh yeah, and that's mindset. You set yourself up for success, right?

Every morning. And it's no different than training as an elite athlete. You set yourself up for success by having rituals and practicing and repeating those rituals, which is why, you know, we'll talk about this. I ended up working with professional athletes. I had no idea that my early sort of career in sport would then translate into the career that I'm doing in the field of neuroscience and understanding traumatic brain injuries and professional athletes and how to restore and facilitate brain function, which if we can restore it in athletes who are playing collision-based sports, that means we can apply these principles to helping people restore and optimize brain function, just having a healthy brain for life and applying those to people who have degenerative issues.

Yeah, I'd love to dive into that in a minute, but maybe for people who are not so familiar with the brain, I mean, they know it's between your two ears and it's used for many things, but I mean, literally very, very flat. Right.

So it's this beautiful 3-pound organ, right, that's sitting between your ears. It has 86 billion neurons. It makes trillions of connections. What's really fascinating, because I used to study the brain at the level of the single cell, so I was a neurobiologist. I did a master's and a PhD in neurobiology, and I used to have to grow cells in cell culture and keep them alive for weeks. To a month and really understand how these individual neurons communicate with one another, which is really beautiful. It's probably why I really appreciate the brain. And I've always said every neuron is precious because each one of these neurons, each one of these 86 billion neurons can make between 10,000 to 40,000 connections with other neurons. And to show it in a book, I have my beautiful brain book. It's literally called The Beautiful Brain Book. To have a visual of what one neuron connecting with thousands of other neurons look like is so beautiful and exquisite. What it speaks to is the correlation is as we are aging, you know, people are asking, you know, how do we protect the brain and how do we improve our healthspan and our lifespan? Well, it's improving the connectivity. Just thinking that that one neuron, we can help improve and make more of those connections. That's how we keep our brain healthy for life. But it's having an appreciation of what it is, this sort of interaction at the level of the single cell. Every single neuron in your brain is precious. And why it's so important to take care of your brain health is from birth all the way till age 25, your brain is in this tremendous growth phase, right? And it's setting down all of the neural architecture. So we always say in the clinical setting, parents really should not relinquish their parental role until kids are 25 years old. At 16, we hand them the keys and say, hey, good luck. Have fun out there.

Don't hit anyone.

And that beautiful prefrontal cortex, which is in the front part of our brain, we call that the brain CEO. It helps you to make good decisions. It regulates impulse control. Yes. All of your mind is right there up in the prefrontal cortex that is still developing at age 16. It is not fully formed until the age of 25, which is why any child that is on the road, you know, you want your parents keeping an eye, making sure they're driving safely. No texting while driving, please, because you're not able to focus on two things at the same time. You know, I always like to debunk the multitasking myth. You really can't. You want to be focused on the road, and more kids who are now texting and driving are getting into accidents Actually, one of the young ladies who lives in my building— so I live in a building of 500 people, residents here in Los Angeles. She got hit by a girl, an 18-year-old girl who was texting and driving. She's in a wheelchair right now. Oh, I'm so sorry. And she has compassion for her. Thankfully, that's just the wisdom of somebody who's older and understands this is what happens with our youth. But I think it's important to really, for anybody who's listening, any parent who's listening, the brain is still in this active phase of development all the way until 25. So really help your kids to make great decisions. They need you. That's what parents are for. But then once we get into our 20s and 30s, well, I should actually say age 40 is when the brain then starts to shrink in volume. And that's when I say not so fun anymore. By the time we hit 40— I am there— by the time we hit 40, we really need to be very proactive about our brain health. If you start taking care of your brain in your 20s, you're actually ahead of the game because you're working with the brain in a time where it's very plastic and it's making all these connections and it's in this very active growth phase. This is why when kids who play collision-based sports, they're like, yeah, I'm fine. I can hit my head hundreds, if not thousands of times against another human being and get up the next morning and do it again. But trust me, when you're 40 and 50 and 60 and 70, you feel the effects.

Yeah.

So, you know, we want to start to become proactive about taking care of our brain health because that brain shrinkage starts to happen in our forties. We lose about 5% of our brain per decade. So that shrinkage keeps happening and we have to be proactive to help prevent the shrinkage and to help keep those beautiful neurons connecting with their neighbors. And we'll go into all the cool things we can do to, to take care of that. I'm really excited. That's why I'm here.

Yeah. To dive into that as well. But I'd like to just pick up on one of the topics you discussed with the professional athlete. And I guess, you know, anyone. And it was only until my mother last year had, through a series of events, a very bad fall and had an extreme concussion that I actually appreciate what a concussion is. You know, I thought, oh, you bump your head and it's fine. You know, with my kids, if they're at the nursery, like, oh, they bumped their head. They had like a sticker on their back saying, I bumped my head. If you see me vomiting or something, please tell someone. Yeah, like really.

They do. Yeah, they put a little sticker on there.

Wow. Yeah. And I was like, you know, oh, they bumped their head, it's a child. But then when I saw the effect, obviously this is in an older person, but tell me, tell me about what happened to your mom.

Was she—

yeah, so she had some vein treatment on her legs, and for whatever reason, the doctor decided to do both legs at the same time. She's in her 70s, so obviously you have to rest the legs then after, and she has low blood pressure. As is. Um, you know, she's very lucky to be alive, quite frankly, because that was on a Friday. So all Saturday, legs up, lying in bed, not moving because of the tightly wrapped legs. And she woke up on Sunday morning, went into the bathroom, and thankfully my father was there, and he hears this like timber crash. And she must have really fallen like a plank backwards because she fainted. Turns out she had two blood clots in the lungs. Which caused lack of oxygen, which caused her to faint. But she fainted so badly that my poor father, you know, I'm sharing this with the audience as well, but my poor father, you know, thankfully was there to hear it. Had he been somewhere else in the house, he wouldn't have heard it. But walks in to see his wife lying unconscious with blood leaking out of the back of her head, right? I mean, really, like, you don't want to imagine it. My mum's with a medical background. He was always like, the patient for anything. And he had to call 911, and the guy on 911 helped my father save her life by teaching my father how to do CPR because he'd never done it before in his life, and until the ambulance got there. So anyway, a little thing, but thankfully now she's back, and you know, they're going to be traveling next week and everything is good again. But that was 8 weeks in hospital, and the concussion was so bad You know, we were kind of joking about it, but you know, they're in Florida and she was looking out the window at the palm trees. She's like, oh, is that Manhattan? Is that Central Park? And she had no idea who she was or where she was like that. But it came back. So anyway, that was for me a real eye-opener regarding concussion. And I'd love to hear your experience working with professional athletes, what you saw, and also with the brain imaging, right? Because you're a big fan of the brain imaging.

I'm a big fan of the brain imaging. First of all, I'm so happy to hear that your mom has recovered.

Thank you.

My heart goes out to her because she hit her head probably against the tub or some kind of hard stone floor. A stone floor?

And like literally crash. I mean, the impact of that, you know, and then she had bleeding in the brain, but it was in the ventricle, not in the brain matter, which was like a lifesaver for her. So anyway, there was like these serious events. Oh my God. It's just—

It's unbelievable.

From what happened, she got really lucky in terms of it could have been a lot worse.

So, yeah, that is extraordinary. So I will tell you, because she had the low blood pressure, you know, I'm somebody who's had fainting spells. I've had them, you know, an earlier stage in my graduate career because of stressful events. And it's really frightening and disabling when you have low blood flow, low blood volume and faint because you're just going down and, you know, head injuries.

It happened to me too.

Yeah.

Yeah. In the subway in London.

It happened in the subway in London?

Yeah.

Twice.

Twice?

Yep.

Do you have low blood pressure?

It's okay, but it's if I'm overworked, not sleeping enough. This is back in my investment banking days. Yeah. So.

Oh, that's high stress. My fainting spells, I mean, I had one in front of the Department of Neurosurgery at Cedars. I had— well, giving a presentation that I knew, that I actually knew quite well. And all of a sudden I saw the stars and I just fell back into a chair, which was hilarious. And then I said, can I get up and keep going? And they said, no, we're going to reschedule you. But I was having all these fainting spells. To the point I had to— they were actually thinking about having me wear some little bracelet in case I fainted and they didn't know what was going on. My mentor did not want me to drive a car. Yes, it's actually very serious. It's debilitating. Yeah, it's debilitating. And you can have a concussion like what happened to your mom. So I'm really sorry to hear that happen. Yeah, I've had the great fortune of working for the Amen Clinics, and I'll share with your audience a little bit about them so they can understand the perspective that I have on this matter. So the Amen Clinics is an outpatient psychiatric center in the United States. They currently have 9 locations. They see on average 3,000 to 4,000 patients per month.

Wow.

And the people that come to the Amen Clinics have complex psychiatric disorders. So on average, the patients we would see would have 3 to 4 psychiatric diagnoses. They failed 3 previous treatment providers. They're on an average of 5 to 6 medications. Wow. And they come to us to utilize neuroimaging as a way to gain a deeper understanding and perspective on how their organic brain is functioning, number one. And we would target treatments for patients based on the blood flow patterns in the brain, the activity patterns in the brain. So it was just a deeper level of analysis. And, you know, I understand most people will never use brain imaging, will never have their brain imaged unless, you know, they have a neurological disorder. So we are quite unique, especially in the space of psychiatry. You know, the Amen Clinics has been around for 30 years. When I was working there, I was their director of clinical neuroimaging research. So I helped establish their database of over 130,000 scans. I think it now is 160,000. And we would look at the brain using SPECT imaging. So that is a way to look at blood flow and activity patterns. SPECT stands for single photon emission computed tomography. And it's a nuclear imaging study.

So you are— similar to an MRI for people who aren't familiar.

It is similar to an MRI, except MRI is safer because that does not use radioactive material. We use nuclear imaging. But if you have a complex psychiatric disorder and you cannot figure out what treatments are going to work, it's actually a very smart strategy in terms of targeting treatment. And our goal with patients is always natural first and then using medications. So our clinic philosophy was a very holistic approach using dietary and lifestyle approaches, medications when necessary. We have, you know, technologies as well, the transcranial magnetic stimulation and neurofeedback and hyperbaric oxygen therapies and IV therapies. So we have everything sort of all in one in our clinical space. And having been their clinical research director, you know, I have been the beneficiary of looking at thousands of brain scans, both functionally, and we would also do what's called quantitative EEG, where we could look at the brainwave patterns and then When we look at the electrical patterns of your brain and compare them to a normative database, we can see which areas are working hard, which are not working hard enough. That's sort of, uh, the broad brushstrokes of our clinic and who would come into our clinic. So back in 2009, when I started working there, we decided to do a brain imaging study in living professional athletes, just asking the question, Does playing football cause long-term brain damage? And we wanted to assess using, you know, the functional imaging, the electrical imaging, neurocognitive assessments, neuropsychiatric assessments, and then offer a therapeutic rehabilitation protocol for those who were interested, which I thought was really so lovely of my mentor to do because a lot of research studies really just look at the damage in the brain, and that's it. So if you're a research participant and we scan your brain and we show you that you have global diffuse perfusion deficits throughout the brain and then send you out the door, that's not really empowering.

No.

So I actually, I'm really so grateful because, you know, my mentor paid for the entire study, and what we did was we looked at 100 NFL athletes who are on an active roster for a minimum of 3 years. But you also have to take into account if they were on a roster for 3 years, they've also played 4 years of collegiate football, 4 years of high school football. So you kind of look at that and say they've had a total of 11-year lifetime risk. And if they've played peewee football, you know, that just accumulates the damage. And what we found Again, back in 2009, 10, 11, should not be surprising, but it was severe global perfusion deficits throughout the brain, frontal lobes, temporal lobes, parietal lobes, various regions inside of the brain, very low perfusion. And why is that so important? Well, your brain is an energetically hungry organ, right? It's 2% of your body mass, but utilizes 20% of the body's energy. If you have low perfusion in the brain and we do not correct that, you're going to lose those neurons. It's just what happens. And one of the things that I learned from that study, so we offered this, what we call it, an open-label pragmatic clinical intervention. So a lot of times when you're doing interventions, you if you're going to publish it in the scientific literature, you're going to look at one thing. Okay, here we have athletes with traumatic brain injury. Let's put them on omega-3 fatty acids and see what it does. But truth be told, when you're in a clinical setting, you really want to do everything possible to help the people that you're working with. So we offer the opportunity for the players to enroll in a brain-directed weight loss group, which I ran, teaching the players how to eat and the things to do to get brain fit and healthy. We offered a nutraceutical protocol based on what was in the scientific literature that would help improve brain function. We offered the opportunity for them to do cognitive training based on taking a neuro cognitive assessment and then tailoring the training to the areas that they had deficits in and then helping treat the psychiatric issues. And I will share with you in this particular cohort, and this is really fascinating to me, you know, half of the players were overweight or obese. So that's, you know, close to 50 out of 100 players.

Sorry, but these are active players or just in that cohort?

So we had active and retired. So we had as young as 25 and we had as old as 85. So it sort of ran the gamut. That's actually a very good question. In the overweight or obese piece, it's actually not surprising when you have linemen who are 350 pounds. So linemen to have— yeah, they have a greater body mass. The slimmer players are going to be your kickers and your running backs. And your quarterbacks, but you have all of these linemen, offensive and defensive linemen that are greater weight, just greater body mass. Now they have a low percentage of body fat, but they just have this greater body mass. And having excess weight on the body is inflammatory and can damage the brain. And we published research studies on that, again, which is part of the reason why we ran— I ran the brain-directed weight loss group. We wanted to get these players at an appropriate weight for their size and knowing that was going to help their brain health because it's going to reduce inflammation in the body. So I think what I was sharing, sort of the study characteristics, right? So you've got half of them that are overweight or obese. 28% of them had depression, which is 3 times that of the national average. 81% of them had problems with frontal lobe function. So frontal lobe, that's the prefrontal cortex that allows us to make good decisions, right? That is our working memory. It's our organ of personality. It's really responsible for all of our higher-level cognitive abilities. So when you've got damage to that, now it's not surprising because they use their head to impact, right? When you make collisions with the other players, you're using the front part of your head. Frontal lobe damage. Not surprising. 19% of them had dementia.

Wow. And so how old were they? They were in their 20s and 30s?

From as young as 25 to as old as in their 80s, 85. So you have a range, but it's a much higher percentage of neurodegenerative disease in these players. And in 2012, a study came out in the Journal of Neurology by Lehman at all. And they asked that question, what is the neurodegenerative mortality of NFL football players versus the general public? And they found anybody who plays in the NFL has a 3 times higher risk of a neurodegenerative disease, 4 times higher risk of Alzheimer's or ALS. So, you know, our study clearly showed there were perfusion deficits in the brain. There were deficits in perfusion in the hippocampus. So that's the region of the brain essential to learning and memory. I will tell you from a neuroimaging standpoint, when people get older, they might get an MRI of their hippocampus. They'll look at hippocampal volume and see how much it shrunk. So here we have these players who are having, you know, perfusion deficits to one of the very important regions of the brain that are essential in cognitive function. That's the region of the brain that when we're sleeping at night, it takes all the things we've learned during the day and consolidates it into our long-term memory storage. So when that area is not working optimally, we're going to see people with cognitive dysfunction. So we showed, and again, it's almost, it's not rocket science, right? We showed that playing football, you know, can cause long-term brain damage. But what was really revelatory to me, and I had no idea that we could impact perfusion to the brain and restore brain function in such a profound way in these professional athletes, really exciting, very simple dietary and lifestyle Modification. So we found, you know, the first 25 players that came back, or no, it was the first 30 players that came back after 6 months on this protocol being in my group. So I ran the weight loss group every 2 weeks and all of the guys would get on the phone with me and I would teach them, I'd give PowerPoints on how to take care of their brain health, what foods to eat, what not to eat.

Right.

You have to share this with us now in a few brain healthy. Yeah. Brain healthy strategies. The supplement protocols, I would call them every week and have them tell me what they're taking because I had to make sure they were compliant, right? And follow the supplement protocols, make sure they're doing the brain training games. But they came back in 6 months and we rescanned their brains. So we did the SPECT imaging and we gave them the neurocognitive assessments. And I will tell you, I was shocked to see how much we could improve perfusion to the brain. And, you know, we've published this research in peer-reviewed medical journals, but for me as a scientist to see this validated proof that things as simple as changing your dietary practices and including nutraceuticals could help make such a profound change in perfusion to the brain. I was blown away.

Why do you think that was? Just out of interest, why was it able to have such a profound impact?

Well, it really illustrated to me that there's a lot of power in the foods that we're eating, our ability to keep our blood vessels open, right, and healthy. And, you know, there are certain nutraceuticals that can help do that.

Right.

We talk about omega-3 fatty acids can help thin the blood. So cardiologists love them because they keep the blood nice and thin. And thin blood usually means nice oxygenated blood.

Right.

We don't want thick blood ever. Thick blood equals less oxygen coming to the cells. Thick blood means there's probably too much sugar. Right. You're insulin resistant. It's just not good. So We learned thin blood is good for health. You learn those omega-3 fatty acids help to maintain brain structure and volume, and they help build all of your cell membranes. So I think people now understand how great omega-3 fatty acids are. But again, this was for me back in 2009, 2010, 2011, is seeing how impactful something as simple as that would be, or a or ginkgo biloba. Those things are vasodilators. They help keep the blood vessels open. Now, there's very simple ways to keep your blood vessels open, like a good exercise routine. But if we are restoring and rehabilitating brain function, you have to go the extra mile and you have to really make sure you're doing these things. That's where, you know, I didn't realize how powerful supplements movements could be until I saw this with the neuroimaging. And we could image the players. I mean, because this study was ongoing and we really worked with these athletes the entire time I was at the clinic, we didn't just run the study and say goodbye. We ran the study and those players came back to the clinic and they still do. I'm still in touch with these.

Wow.

Lovely. It's pretty extraordinary. I mean, now the whole world understands chronic traumatic encephalopathy is this neurodegenerative disorder that we're seeing in athletes who play collision-based sports. It's not just found in professional athletes that play collision-based sports. It's in high school athletes, it's in collegiate athletes. And the concern there is that the repetitive subconcussive impacts, the cumulative exposure is shearing and tearing the delicate neurons in your brain, and it's causing an accumulation of the tau protein. Same thing that we see in Alzheimer's, phosphorylated tau. But it's happening in these high school athletes. Wow. And because of this, the damage— now, I know a lot of parents don't know. This is another reason why I wrote the book, because I wanted to empower parents who have kids that play these sports how to get ahead of the game and how to be really brain healthy even with their kids. So you've got this damage that could be inflammatory. So we want to bring the inflammation down. But I'm going to ask you this. Do you know how many on average impacts that they are taking in a football season?

In a season? Wow.

In a season. If you were to just—

I guess it depends what position they play, and I'm not the biggest—

that's correct, that's correct.

But I'd say on average in a season, 60? 650.

Wow, 650. So there was a really extraordinary paper that came out in 2011 in the Journal of Neurotrauma. So they put the accelerometers in the helmet. So it's called a HIT system, Head Impact Telemetry System. And they measured the rotational, right, the acceleration forces, both linear and rotational in high school athletes over the course of 4 years. So these are just repetitive subconcussive impacts, 650. In college, it's around 1,300 impacts.

Wow.

So over the course I mean, that's every year. You know, linemen take higher number of impacts, around 800. Even high school quarterbacks are taking impacts. The safest position besides being on the bench, it's a kicker, the coach, right? But the kicker. So you have these, you know, over the course of 4 years of high school, 4 years of college, you know, that can be 8,000 impacts.. But that's not the bigger concern. Then there's the G-forces to the head. So you're playing a game of high school football. And now this could be, again, it's not just limited to football because you've got ice hockey, you've got rugby, you've got soccer, all of these impact sports. But football, you also have the G-forces. So they found over the course of 1 year of high school football, 17,000 Gs. Of linear acceleration. Over 4 years, it was 56,000 G-forces to the beautiful brain that sits suspended in cerebrospinal fluid, right? So the G-forces are the linear impacts. Then there's the rotational impacts. So the rotational hits, that kind of the ones that go to the side of the head, right, and can cause that sort of a little bit of shift. One season of high school football, it was 1 million radians per second squared rotational acceleration. Over the course of 4 years, it was 3 million radians per second squared. Those are the damaging ones. So it's not surprising to me that we're seeing the presence of chronic traumatic encephalopathy in the autopsied brains of high school football players because We can only diagnose CTE at autopsy, but in a research setting, we've seen it in living players. So all of this is to say that we've got these athletes who play collision-based sports. Doesn't have to be professional, could just be collegiate, could be high school, who really are in need of proactive strategies to support their brain health. And why this is so important to me getting back to my childhood. So I showed horses competitively for 10 years. I have taken hundreds of impacts, not 5, not 10, probably not the same number as a collegiate athlete or a professional football player, but hundreds of them myself. So, you know, I am connected to this issue. It's very personal to me. And as you know, I have a father who had Parkinson's. So I think about— we think about degenerative diseases in the normal population. Most people don't get diagnosed with one till they're the age of 65. Athletes, you know, we're seeing these degenerative, you know, diseases happening in their 40s and 50s. So we know, and I know you had Dale, the brilliant Dale Bredesen on, shared the same information. The changes, the cellular changes happen in the brain 20 years before you have a symptom, a cognitive symptom. So we want to be really proactive about keeping good blood flow to the brain, giving appropriate nutrients and nutraceutical interventions when necessary to help support that. It's almost like all hands on deck. I wrote this book because I felt, you know, a lot of people are never going to see their brain and they're never going to see there's many reasons that perfusion deficits can happen. And I kind of want to help be that cheerleader, that inspiration to get people to care about it more, not to just prevent the diseases of aging, but also to just, you know, have a healthier mind. And healthier thoughts. And I mean, we've, you know, I know you're going to have questions about that too.

So yeah, I'd love to. Well, there's a bunch of different things I want to cover, but you know, what does that protocol look like? We've talked about, you know, sports players, but I think even for the stress that kids have now, even in schools, but, you know, having to push themselves so hard, performing grades, lack of sleep, right? We know how important sleep is, and I'd love to talk about that in a minute as well. But What would be some measures that you would recommend for parents who have teenage kids or even, I don't know, even younger children, but also, you know, in their 20-somethings, etc.? What are some of the protocols for the younger sort of preventative cohort, if you will, to start getting?

I think the smartest thing to do, and it's why I wrote the book, so I gave more details. The smartest things you can do with kids is is teaching them healthy brain habits. And what that means are, you know, the kind of foods that you should be eating every day to support brain health. Trust me, I mean, we were kids. I don't think my parents were really thinking about brain health when they were feeding me. Of course, my mom actually did a pretty good job, but we now know the Mediterranean diet is really one of the best ways to slow and potentially reverse neurocognitive decline as well as protect us from cardiovascular issues. So teaching kids about how to adopt these brain healthy habits and learn to love fruits and vegetables. You know, we want to limit the meats and sort of the fatty foods, minimize the fried foods, minimize the sugar. You know, again, I work in a psychiatric clinic. ADHD kids, ADD kids, you know, get hopped up on sugar. But literally teaching kids about the importance of clean eating choices, not exposing your brain to toxic substances like drugs and alcohol and marijuana and Monster Energy drinks and sugary drinks like, you know, the sugary sports drinks. We want to try and replace those because the habits kids are taught when they're young they will continue on with when they're older. Adding some of the omega-3 fatty acids. I think if you're going to have a child who plays a collision-based sport, I would have them doing a brain-directed multivitamin, a really good omega-3 fatty acid. It's funny with supplements, people ask me, I'm pro-supplement because I've seen what it does to the brain. And one of the other roles that I held at the Amen Clinics. I was their director of nutrition and nutraceuticals. So my job was to use neuroimaging to show that supplements were effective in the brain. So for those who doubt, you know, I used to do QEEGs, and based on the brainwave activity, I knew which supplements would be specific for that particular child. So if you have a child who plays a collision-based sport and they're struggling with focus and impulse control or anxiety, there are different nutraceuticals that we could add to that, sort of to their protocol to help them manage it. Like you were talking about anxiety, you can use a GABA supplement, which is wonderful. It's a great way to calm down excessive brain activity.

How do you spell that for people unfamiliar? GABA?

Yeah. G-A-B-A. GABA for stress.

It's great. And just for kids or for adults as well?

Oh, either. Kids and adults can both use GABA. So if I had a child who was playing a collision-based sport, what I would probably be doing— people have asked me this before— I would have them do a quantitative EEG. EEG to see how their brainwaves are functioning. It's relatively inexpensive. It's usually $500 to do it. Non-invasive way to get an idea of how their brain is functioning. And then when they have a concussion, you can go in and do a follow-up EEG to see what has changed. And then you could use neurofeedback protocols to help stabilize brainwave activity. So that's That's one thing. But again, we were talking about teaching kids, you know, healthy foods, staying away from drugs and alcohol and the monster drinks and the sugary drinks, the multivitamin and omega-3 fatty acids. I think all of those very smart strategies, easy to do. You know, it's really about teaching kids the right way to take care of their brain health. And if they're playing a collision-based sport, wear your helmet, make sure if you're feeling dazed or disoriented, take yourself out of the game. Parents need to be really vigilant about their kids who are playing a sport and start to notice any signs, right, that your child has had a concussion or concussive impact. Most boys are not going to tell their moms, unfortunately. No. Yeah. I fell off of horses. I didn't get up and run to my mom. Mom, my trainer had me get back on. Of course. And I did nothing for my concussion. I did nothing. So we've come a long way in understanding what's going on in the brain, although we've understood what concussions and traumatic brain injuries do to the brain for the past century. I mean, this data has been in the scientific literature. We're just now— we're now in a really extraordinary space where we are doing cutting-edge therapeutics. To help restore and revitalize and rehabilitate brain function. I mean, hyperbaric oxygen chambers, gene therapies that are being used to lengthen telomeres. I mean, we're doing some really, really extraordinary things, which is why even if you've played these sports and you're listening, you're like, is there any hope? Yes, I promise you there's hope because I have seen the brain images of people who have had— one of our football players had frontotemporal dementia. We scanned his brain, really low perfusion to the front part of his brain, and we put him on a protocol. We had him do hyperbaric oxygen therapy. He still ended up passing away with ALS, but we worked with him for 7 years. Wow. The imaging showed we could still reperfuse parts of the brain that were damaged. And, you know, some people might look at that as, oh, that isn't a success story, he still died. But I look at it from the perspective of— same with Dale Bredesen. It's like, how much can we bring the brain back to a space where it can rehabilitate and restore itself naturally? And That's the key. That's the key. It's like eating the foods, doing the things that you can do consistently over time that are going to put the brain in that restorative space.

Yeah. And all the benefits of that as well, which we'll dive into. I'd like to talk about brain and sleep and why is sleep so essential. And I'm totally guilty of the teenager, 20-year-old. Oh, I can get by on 3 hours sleep. I'll sleep when I'm dead. Get into my 30s with kids. Forget that. That's not happening anymore.

Oh yeah. Then your kids are not allowing you to sleep. Correct.

And then, you know, burning the candle on both ends, like, oh, finally the kids are in bed. I can get to work on do X, Y, Z and, you know, all these things as well. And so not prioritizing. Now I've gone full circle and I have my Oura Ring and I have my sleep tracking and I know the importance of sleep, but I'm I'm still trying to optimize myself, and my REM sleep is always 1 to 5%. It's not enough. I can't get it up. And if you have any tips on that. But I'd love to hear you from a brain and neurological point of view, the importance of sleep and why do we need good quality sleep and what is that really?

It's such an important topic. It's funny, I was doing an interview yesterday and the person who interviewed me said that is the most Googled topic. How to improve sleep. And I love that we're in this sleep revolution where people are actually appreciating it. I was with you in college. I never slept. Like, I stayed up all night. You're like, oh, I've got fun things to do. Why is sleep so important?

I was the last one leaving the party. I was like, well, you know what, I'll be fine.

Exactly. Exactly. I will tell you now, with COVID my husband and I are in bed at like 9 o'clock at night. I went from, oh my God, I'm like, I'm not that old and I'm going to bed at 9. I mean, yes, I know what sleep does to the brain, but this is actually really early. So from a sort of neuroscience and neurological point of view, I look at sleep. There's 3 really fundamental things that I think sleep is important for. Number 1, clearing out the toxic accumulation of misfolded proteins. So if we're wanting to prevent diseases like Alzheimer's, which is really a protein aggregate disease, right? You get these abnormally folded tau and beta amyloid. And so when we sleep, you know, we have this extraordinary system called the glymphatic system. It's like a brainwash. It's your cerebrospinal fluid is actually able to move at a greater rate and help forcefully clear these abnormally folded proteins. And if you're in the biohacking world of the world of, you know, extending your lifespan, protein misfolding is one of the key elements to degenerative decline. So really think of your sleep as a way to help clear all the proteins. It's your brain brainwash, and you want to get that, you know, 8 hours of continuous sleep. So that's one. Number two, for a sharp memory, you need to sleep, because when we sleep, it's when we take all of those great things that we've learned during the day, and our hippocampus is working to consolidate those memories and put it into various regions of the brain for long-term storage. So for all of those who say I can get enough sleep when I'm dead. I'm like, if you want to preserve your cognitive function, you have to sleep. And number 3, sort of one of the most critical pieces that I don't think is talked about enough. When we sleep, we are able to process and work through all of the emotional events, the emotionally reactive events that we have had during the day. So think of sleep as like your psychotherapist that you don't have to pay for because you're actually able to help process this. So my father was a firefighter, and I'm very connected to professions that are shift workers, right? You know, you've got nurses and doctors and firefighters and police officers who aren't always able to get, you know, a full night of sleep. And what the research has shown is even as much as losing half a night's sleep, it's more difficult to be able to release the post-traumatic stress and post-traumatic stress disorder because you don't have enough time to process those memories. You know, you were talking about, you know, you're not getting enough REM sleep. You know, you need to go through all of the cycles multiple times during the night and let your subconscious mind do the work to handle it so you can wake up more at peace. Because truthfully, a happy mind and a peaceful mind, I think that's one of the greatest gifts that we can have. Yes, I want to help people preserve their cognitive function, but as we're getting through this global pandemic and you're seeing the rise in mental health issues and kids committing suicide, I mean, oh my It breaks my heart because they can't manage that, the psychiatric piece. So sleep is really critical for people who have any sort of psychiatric issues. And again, think of it as your way to help resolve things that you may not be able to work through during the day.

I really like that as well. I'd love to hear your view on how do you optimize it, right? So say, you know, you try to always get your— I mean, you said 8 hours. Oh yeah, many people who get the 8 hours, maybe you do, you go to bed at 9 o'clock at night, but, you know, even 7 to 8 hours, let's say, maybe some even get 9. But what if you're waking up during the night, or, you know, you're tracking your sleep and you're not having that nice sort of 1.5-hour cycle periods happening? What are some hacks, some strategies that people can use to improve their sleep?

Yeah.

So I've got lots of them because I have— now I have such an appreciation of sleep. So one of the things that we do in our house, number one, our lights are on a dimmer switch. And usually by 8:00, 7:30, 8:00, we try to turn down a lot of the lights. Now it's still light outside because of, you know, we're in the summer months, but that dimming of the light help stimulate the melatonin production. So melatonin production usually starts around 9:00 PM, and that's the signal for your brain to go to sleep. It actually starts all of the circadian rhythms and the clocks in the body to kind of get you into that sleep space. So dimming the lights, we turn down the temperature in our house. I learned about that a long time ago for people who struggle with sleep, not only turning down the temperature, but I found this works well for men. If you get those cool packs, remember when you were a kid and you got a bruise on your arm and you went and they gave you—

I still have those in my freezer.

Yeah, you've got the cool pack. So you can take one of those and put a towel around it and put it on the back of your neck and your brainstem to help cool you down. And it actually works really well. For some reason, men tend to like that. So that's another sleep hack for us in our household. I'm always concerned about EMF and wireless frequencies just impacting your sleep state. So the minute we turn the TV off, I go into the bedroom and I power everything down. So there's no— we turn off the wireless. We have sleep shades, so our room is really dark and yeah, it's pitch black. Even my husband has this little alarm clock that's by his head. I put a little EMF sticker on it to help reduce the EMFs because he keeps it right by his head. People don't appreciate even some of the subtle electromagnetic forces that are in the air that can impact your deeper sleep quality. This is why I think it's really important. Power down your phones. Don't have them in your bedroom.

So airplane mode, though, is okay, isn't it?

You can do airplane mode. I know some parents might want their phones by them because they're kids or they're used to it. If you sleep well, then it's fine. I mean, I can fall asleep anywhere. I have no problems with sleep. My husband's the exact opposite. No, my husband's the opposite. He said he can hear me breathing and he wakes up. He's like, ah, you've woken me up. So again, we've refined sleep protocols for him and making sure that I get to sleep. Other things that you can do, magnesium and GABA before bed are really great sleep aids. Epsom salt baths or showers, anything cooling. Like for men, I've had my husband just take a shower You could take a cool shower, take a shower because it helps calm people down. I'll take the warm Epsom salt bath. So it's relaxing. It relaxes the muscles and helps support a deep sleep. Some of the other fun things I do, so I have heating pads. I love heat. Heat actually helps me go to sleep. So I'll put the heating pad on my shoulders, right? Or my back, and it helps me go to sleep. And I have one of these. Cool little shiatsu massagers from TrueMedic for my feet.

Is it the Japanese acupressure mat with the little spiky things?

I have one of those. Well, it's these little balls. It's called TrueMedic, and you put your feet in it and it wraps around. It actually will like wrap around your ankle, and it's got the little balls that go under the feet. It is fabulous. I will tell you, I now do this before I go out to run. And I do it sometimes at night if I want to just calm myself down because I can't run out and get a massage and just stick my feet in a little shiatsu massager. I've got my heating pads. My husband turns the darn air down to 67 degrees, so I'm freezing in here.

We turn—

got the biohacking Bedrooms. My husband used to be like, why do you keep turning the wireless off? Why do you do that? I'm like, honey, I don't want any. I'm like, we already live in this building with 500 people in it, and there's who knows what is going on. I'm like, I'm doing my little part to create an electrically neutral space so we can just calm down. And I mean, there are kind of cool biohacking devices you can get, like little alpha stimulators that you can hold to help bring your brainwave state into alpha or theta or delta. I mean, those are kind of fun.

Those are the Muse. I was talking with someone else about Muse. Yeah, I've got— what are your favorite ones for the brainwaves?

I do have Muse. Well, I have a little box that I've got from a company in Germany. I'm not even sure people can get it, but the little box has all the different frequencies on it. It can put you into beta, alpha, theta, delta. So if you were having trouble sleeping, you know, when you're going to sleep, you're just shifting brainwave frequencies. And brainwave frequencies are just millions of neurons, you know, that are communicating at a very specific wavelength. So as we're— like, you and I right now are in the beta brainwave sort of wavelength. We're working, we're active, we're thinking. You know, alpha is a little bit slower. So that's when we're relaxed and focused. When our eyes are closed, we're in alpha, which is why when we meditate, meditation with your eyes closed automatically puts your brain in alpha. And I will tell you this because I do EEGs on people. Brain, and I do them with their eyes open and eyes closed. The minute you go into eyes closed, your brain waves completely shift. You don't even have to be in that really connected, mindful state, because I was trained in meditation by yogis and was certified in Tae Kwon Do in Korea. I went in through a whole process. I went through, I went through a whole process. So I, you know, I am— was it after you're in Chile, jump jumping from the waterfall, or it was before Chile jumping from the waterfall. I, I live in Los Angeles in Century City, and right down— I should say down the street, it's probably like 20 minutes away— in the Pacific Palisades is a place called the Self-Realization Fellowship, and it is this beautiful meditation garden that was started by Paramahansa Yogananda. It A little part of Gandhi's ashes are buried there. So people from all over the world will come and pay respect, and they have monks that walk the gardens. So when I moved to LA in 19— it was beautiful. When I moved to LA in 1998, one of my dear friends said, you need to visit this meditation gardens, it's gorgeous. So I went and I visited the gardens and I thought, this could be a great place to study, right? I'll bring all my neuroscience textbooks. And, you know, I bring my textbooks, and I'd be sitting, you know, in the gardens looking over this beautiful pond with koi and ducks and geese and turtles, and, and I would fall asleep. I'd actually bring my books, and then I'd get real sleepy. And but I found that if I studied there, I did extremely well on all of my tests, all of my exams. I kind of thought of it as my lucky space to study for school. And then they had a little booth that was like, do you want to learn how to meditate? And I was like, oh, you know, I'm not one of those people. That was, you know, back in the '90s. Yeah, that was back in the— I'm like, no, I just like the peace of these gardens. And then I thought, you know what, why not? And so I got the literature there and I remember reading, you know, meditation was one of the fastest ways to calm the mind, right? To connect to your higher self, to gain access to greater wisdom and knowledge and be more spiritually connected. You know, these are very big promises from this practice. You know, maybe I should look into it. So there are classes and lessons that you take and you learn how to sit properly and breathe properly and close your eyes and look up to the third eye. So I'm like, I'm game. I'll try this. Well, I went full in and learned. Not only was I inducted into a ceremony in 2005 by the monks, and I used to walk the gardens with the monks. They were fabulous. I'm like, I love these people. They can handle anything. They can handle anything that comes their way with ease and grace and peace.

Is it to do with the brainwave?

Because do they operate not from the beta brainwave but maybe from like the theta? They are constantly in, probably in an altered state of mind, but they know, they have trained the mind not to be reactive. So they allow events to come into their life, but you don't react because remember, that's the choice. We have a conscious choice in how we react to situations in our life. If we don't develop our conscious mind, then we just react impulsively. But the practice of meditation allows you to take the beat, slow and quiet the mind, right? Calm the thoughts, reorient the thoughts. Really, meditation is just about turning off the thoughts and being present and connected with the all that is, being connected with nature. It's very much a connection on a different energetic level. Now, we can talk about it from a brainwave frequency, right? If I'm putting an EEG on your head when you're in a meditative space, you can be in this beautiful alpha wave frequency, which is relaxed, and you can be relaxed and focused. And that is one of the spaces you can really be most receptive to learning. And I feel that might have been the magic of studying in this beautiful meditative space because I'm fast. Yeah, yeah, I'm connected. And I will tell you, it strengthened photographic memory. So I was able to take the textbooks and I would read, and then I would go into my exams and I could just see the pages. I'm like a walking experiment. I'm always experimenting. I'm like, how is it that I'm able to retain all of this information that I'm reading? Because I was relaxed, I was focused. Sometimes I would sleep there and then I'd wake up and study. But I also did that library. Sometimes I go to the library, you know, I'd sleep the first hour and then study.

Power naps.

Exactly.

Einstein had like every 2 hours he'd have his nap and then wake up again.

Right. So I believe in the power nap. I actually feel— and it's either prepping your brain to like consolidate and learn or it's just refreshing and reenergizing you because to learn something, you need to be focused. So one of the beautiful things about meditation— so here I stumble onto it, you know, in the late '90s, early 2000s, before I had any idea of what it did to the brain. But I had the tangible results that I got incredible grades, you know, in my neuroscience classes. And it was really fun and easy. And I'm like, wow, my photographic memory is really on point. So I I thought, okay, this stuff works. I would do their all day. So they would have an all-day Christmas meditation, 8 hours. So you do 4 hours straight and then a little break for lunch and another 4 hours. And I was fine. I was able to sit for 8 hours, no problem. So what I will tell you is meditation hones your power of focus and concentration, and that is one of most powerful assets you have in taking care of your brain. Always. It's being able to rein in your conscious mind and direct it wherever you wanna place it. And circling back to fitness trackers, I know you love your Oura Ring and you track everything. One of the beautiful things about trackers in terms of taking care of your brain health and your overall health and longevity is it makes you maintain a focus on that. So every day you're looking at your sleep, and we naturally want to expand and learn, like our sort of consciousness, our higher consciousness, our evolution. We're always wanting to do that naturally. So by tracking, you're focusing on it and you're expanding naturally, and you're going to keep learning better ways, right? Here's how I optimize my sleep. Here's how I get my REM. You know, to be 10% of my sleep instead of 5%. That's doing that sort of full circle, taking— so the beauty of meditation and honing the power of focus of your mind, and then using that now in your everyday life to benefit your healthspan and your lifespan.

And focus and retention, you know, all these different benefits to have it at the drop of a hat. You can be like, yeah. Page 42.

I can remember that. If you don't focus when you're learning, you won't remember. So as people get older, they say, I'm having my senior moments. My husband's like, where did I put the keys? Where did I put the glasses? It's because when he put the keys down, he wasn't focused on where he put it, or he put it somewhere else, not in the usual spot. And I like to tell people, if you're concerned about you know, you're losing your memory. Were you focused when you heard the person's name? Were you focused when you were trying to learn what you wanted to learn? This is how CEOs and executives get ahead. It's about training their power of focus. And this is, again, it's one of the genius pieces of meditation. So we've done brain imaging on meditators. And that's exactly what it does. It helps improve prefrontal cortex function, which is the CEO of your brain. That's the area that helps with focus. It helps expand or increase volume of the hippocampus, the area of the brain important in learning and memory. And it's also been shown to expand and improve brain volume in the hippocampus, which back part of your brain involved in coordination and gait. It's motor coordination and thought coordination. Oh my gosh, my dog is again on top of the printer, which is hilarious. He's got a great cerebellum, by the way.

He's always balancing on things. Balancing on things. Well done. Yeah, I'd like to ask you with the different types of meditation, right? Because you have like mindfulness training, which my understanding is it's more sort of prefrontal cortex versus if you get to sort of deep meditative states, there's like dental meditation where they show brainwaves and function. Is there one type of meditation you would say is much more advantageous over another? Are there any big differences between them?

Well, I would say just from my—

Oscar's photobombing us.

I love it. This is him showing his great cerebellum balancing on the back of the couch as I speak. So with meditation, I think one of the most important aspects— I don't want to say one is any better than another. What you want to do is make sure that the meditation, number one, is working for you. Most people are using it to help get control of their thoughts and quiet a restless mind. Those who want to go into some of those deeper forms of meditation where you're actually going into the deeper alphas and betas. And some advanced meditators can go into that gamma brainwave state, which is like a super high perception state. I feel like some people go into meditation to connect with higher levels of consciousness, connect to the universal mind. I mean, this is sort of taking the conversation into a really unique space. There are different kinds of meditation, as you were saying. There's ones where you can focus on a word. There's ones when you can look at a mandala. A great meditation is really one where you're quiet and you sit in the stillness, because the stillness and the quiet is what helps calm the mind and calm the thoughts. For most people, I feel that meditation is important as a thought calming tool, how to reduce those, the negative thoughts, the repetitive negative thoughts, that spin cycle that people get on. And I, I'm going to take a beat to talk about that for a minute. I think it's not a bad thing to have repetitive thoughts or negative thoughts. I sometimes think of it as strategists. I think we are strategists analytical thinkers, and we're always looking at our environments and what might be risky or what might not be working right. And that is negative thoughts maybe used in a positive sort of putting a positive spin on it. But a lot of times people who don't have good mind control and understand that, you know, we can shift to a more positive thought Meditation is a great way to just calm that down. It's literally teaching somebody how to quiet their mind as they are doing when they are sleeping. Right. We don't have negative thoughts when we're sleeping. It's because we've brought the brainwave frequencies down to a space where you're not in a ruminating space. So it's really a way to, when we are awake and we're conscious, to quiet our mind, quiet our thoughts so we can reach for a better feeling thought. So I look at meditation as a, a great way to control our thoughts. I use it as a great way to learn how to hone our focus. Mm-hmm. It is a great way to help boost our memory powers, and it's a way to connect to higher levels of consciousness and higher levels of knowledge. And you will know when you get there. I mean, some people are going to listen to this and be like, okay, what is she talking about? Sometimes you have to work with a meditation coach or work with a yogi or a higher level master who can help you to understand what it feels like. So I can use Muse. You brought up technology. I have the Muse technology. I think it's really fun. A brain computer interface. Put a little strap around the head. It's got like 2 leads and measures your brainwave activity on a very superficial level, but it's enough to tell the user your brain's really active and it's enough to give the user feedback when you're shifting your brainwave state. And I love that as positive reinforcement. So I think the Muse is fantastic. Now you can come into the clinic and see somebody like me or get an EEG where where we've got 19 leads around your head and we can say, here's when you're in a meditative state. We can have you listen to a guided meditation CD and show you what your brainwaves look like. We can have you try your different types of meditation and give you a snapshot of what your brainwaves look like. I'd love to take a picture of something. That's the part— you can tell I'm a scientist, can't you? I love science. But if somebody's listening and they I've never tried meditation. They're like, I don't have 5 minutes, I don't have 10 minutes. What I would say to you is, what if meditation is the key to helping you access your highest level of information? It is your key that's going to give you the insights that are going to help guide your life in the right way. It is the key to help you know who's good for you and who's not, what business relationships to engage in, which to pull back from, what ideas to move forward on, which ones do you need to pull back on. I feel like it's an underutilized asset. Yeah. And I'll tell you, most CEOs know this and they try to learn like, oh, I need to have my guru or my meditation because those are really connected, you do not get bogged down in anxiety and depression. It actually helps to lift your mood and your well-being. You're not as reactive. You see things from a different vantage point. So it's like working your inner eye. You've got your outer eyes. Yeah. Through which you gain information, you know, sensory information. And then you have that inner wisdom eye. And that's, you know, besides all of the amazing things it does to the brain structurally and functionally, like I just told you about, there's this extraordinary sort of intangible amazing quality. It's like you see professional athletes, like you see LeBron James who does the commercials for Calm. Like people who are in the know, who are really successful, know that finding that time to connect and be contemplative is such an asset.

And it's such an asset. And I think it's just the power of human potential, which is, you know, part of my mission, what I'm on as well. And I think one area I've been really fascinated about getting better at is intuition and listening to your intuition. And I think meditation opens up that opportunity and that possibility. And, you know, learning to listen to that inner voice and not the negative one that's kind of like this in them. What do you sort of felt sense, right?

Do you know what you do? So I love that you're on this path because this is the path of the extraordinary mind. What you want to do before you go to sleep is write down either the question that you want the answer to. So in the morning you can wake up. So when I would run my brain-directed weight loss house groups with all my clients, my football players. It was so much fun. I would have them have the list by their bed, either of the things that they wanted or the goal weight they wanted to achieve and how they were going to achieve it. I said, have that list by your bed when you go to sleep. I want you to read it every night and think about it. Like, this is what I want you to think about before you go to sleep, right? You don't have to count. Yeah, I actually like to give people sort of to positively motivate the conscious mind because it's going to talk with the subconscious mind. You know, the subconscious mind is going to come online when we're sleeping, and I want to imprint very positive things on that subconscious. So when you wake up, you have the answer to your question, you have the deeper insights, you know, that you might be able to glean from your conscious in that early morning waking state. This is sort of that coming full circle when I told you I was an athlete and wanted to work with pro athletes and the mind and the mindset, like the visualizing. I talk about it in the book, the importance of visualizing your success. And meditation has a piece there because meditation can calm the mind. Meditation can, for some people, lead to that visualization process because people don't realize what you think, you become. Your thoughts become your reality. And so we want to prime the mind not to worry about the stresses of life. This is why I like meditation. I think of the meditation as like the chalkboard where you take the eraser and let's just erase the stuff that isn't working. We're not going to focus on that. Because focusing on what's not working just gives more energy to the things that are not working. Yeah. But I also want to say I applaud people taking a look at it from a strategic risk management perspective. That's why I kind of have a fun spin on negative thoughts. Like, okay, we all have them. My gosh, that's just normal. It's just okay. But let's sharpen our intuitive mind. Let's sharpen our strategic mind. Hey, when the negative thoughts become overwhelming, put your feet in the shiatsu massager, right?

Jump in there.

Have a cold shower. That'll shock you. You will not be thinking of the negative thoughts.

You're thinking how darn cold you are, right?

Of course, I digress.

Yeah, no, but it's such an interesting area. And I mean, this is your field, especially as well. And on one day, you know, and this is synchronicities or destiny or whatever it is, but 3 different people, 3 different— it's completely unrelated— were telling you about the Silver Mind training. Oh yeah, of course. Yeah, where you train your minds for the alpha, you know, so similar to what you were saying as well, and accessing different states of mind. And that there were studies, and this is, I guess, you know, going back 50, 60 years, but there were studies about successful business executives and that they had a natural ability to go to the state, right? So for people who aren't familiar, because it's a bit confusing, alpha sounds like it's, you know, the highest state, but actually beta is the active mind. Alpha is the one below it, right? Yeah.

Beta is the— it's the state that we're in when we're having a conversation with somebody, we're working. It's the thinking mind. Alpha is relaxed and focused. So you get into alpha, we're in that relaxed state. That's why being in a really relaxed relaxed state and studying is so impactful. Like when I talked about going to the— I will tell you, if that's where anybody wants to start, find a meditation garden that's known for sort of a higher vibrational energy, or going anywhere. Go to the beach and study. Go to a labyrinth or some kind of gardens, because that— go to a park. It will help to put you into the alpha state. And remember, when you close your eyes and you're awake, you naturally go into alpha. So it's not that hard. The theta we call the daydreaming brainwaves. They're one step below it, and that's where you're super creative. And then delta are your slow, sleepy brainwaves, and that's where we go when we're sleeping. But if I do brain imaging on you and you've had a brain injury and I see high delta, that tells me you're having slow, sleepy waves in your awake state, and that's not great for cognitive function. So I can look at it in two different ways. But as you were saying, the Silva Method, what's so great about it is he's trying to explain to people the importance of getting into alpha. But when you're really good at meditating, and I know you'll probably understand this, I explain it to people, it's not just sitting quietly and closing your eyes and sort of connecting in. For me, it's really fascinating in the front part of my brain, in my frontal lobes. It almost feels like I'm— like it's waves on the ocean.

It's like a vibration.

It's a flip that switches in my brain, and I automatically know when I'm there, and I just sit quietly and listen and connect. And I will tell you, information will just flow into your— an idea will come in, like, call Claudia, right? Oh, I should call Claudia. Like, it's interesting.

It's like—

it's like— thank you. It's like connecting to a universal energy, intuition, or—

yeah, yeah, exactly.

However you want to call it as well. Yeah, whatever you want to call it. The geniuses of our time have all done that, and that's why I think it's really— it's an asset. You know, find time to carve out that— carving out 5 minutes is just training yourself to do it. You could do it in your bed before you sleep. Like, I'm actually pretty open-minded with people. Like, you know, if that's how you need to do it to, like, get into your restful state. Yeah, it's training yourself to do it. But as Claudia von Boeselager was saying, you know, connecting to your intuition, it will never steer you wrong. And it will always tell you who the people you should be around, maybe the people you should pull back from. It's really quite fascinating.

It's the perfect feedback model. And my understanding is that, you know, kids are very connected with it and we train it out of them. And so I'm telling my 5 and 7-year-old, I'm like, you know, you've got this thing called intuition. You need to listen. They're kind of like, what is she talking about?

Well, see, you know what I love about kids and we need to to really stay connected to our childlike nature. That's why when I work with older people and I say, look to kids as the model, because kids don't hold negative thoughts, by the way. No, they don't hold negative thoughts. They're like, wow, they're happy, they're screaming. You take a kid to the playground, they're often running on the swings, jumping off a jungle gym. Like, that is how we need to be living our life. We need to live our lives with joy and laughter and in the present and inquisitive. Kids are always asking questions, so keep asking. I will tell you, somebody who has aged gracefully— and I'm gonna do this kind of cool parallel, but I just love her— is Betty White. So Betty White, the actress, she comes visits somebody that lives in my building. I see her all the time. She just turned 99. The woman is glowing. She just looks gorgeous.

What's her secret?

We get this. So I found an interview, I think it was in People magazine, and they asked her, yeah, what's your secret? What do you have to share? And she said, well, number one, I think it was about being happy. Don't sweat the small stuff, right? Don't worry about what happened yesterday. Just think forward and think optimistic thoughts. But the other thing which was so cool, she thanked her agent because she's still booking jobs on television, okay, at 99. And I thought to myself, you know why she has a sharp mind? And this is kind of a cool full circle thing for people who might be older who are listening. This woman memorizes scripts. Dorey Living. She is still memorizing at 99. So when I have my husband who's like, where's my car keys? I can't find my mask. Where are my glasses? This woman has stayed active in keeping her memory sharp because she has to. She's honed her instrument. This is why when I talk to people about what are the secrets to aging well and health and longevity. And we've now sort of crossed into that mind piece, which I love. Me too. It's that enjoying life and having the optimism of a young child, right? And bottling that. I think she still has that kind of optimism and she glows. So it's living life in that healthy mental state. And meditation is a way to get there. Like I said, looking at your kids and being out and exercising and doing the exercises that you love to do as a kid when you're older. I have friends who are in their 70s that kayak and paddleboard and, you know, I'm sort of doing a full circle also, like bringing blood flow back to the brain, you know, is a very healthy way to age.

Yeah, it's finding your activities and the ones you love as well.

Hey everyone, it's Claudia von Boeselager here. Before you take off, I hope you enjoyed the episode and learned as much as I did. If so, please hit subscribe so you don't miss out on our next episodes. I would also love to hear what you thought, be it your favorite part, quote, or other feedback from the episode. So please leave a written review on Apple Podcasts or on social media. And if you think this episode will help someone in your own life, share it with them. Together we can change our own lives and the lives around us for the better. Until next week, goodbye, farewell, and choose to live well.