55: Top Brain Experts Expose: The Real Way To Hack Your Brain (TIPP & Next Level Neuro)

Welcome to my podcast called you Must Be out of youf Mind. My name is Dr. Don Wood. Everyone has experienced some trauma at times during their life. These traumatic events and experiences create a significant impact on how your mind works on a day to day basis. At the same time creates long term effects on your emotional and physical health.

It will interfere with your ability to.

Stay present and in the moment. After years of research, I used my knowledge of neuroscience to create what I call a memory reset. This memory reset reduces and eliminates the impact of the trauma and allows you to experience peace and clarity. My podcast will share many stories of people experiencing similar symptoms to you and how their lives have been positively impacted by our TIP program. I can't wait to share with you how the impossible is possible and why you must be out of your mind. And there it is.

Well, welcome to another episode of youf Must Be out of youf mind. I'm Dr. Don Wood and I'm your host. And as always, we bring on great guests and we've got another great guest today, Matt Bush, who's with Next Level Neuro. And we're going to go over a lot of the, the Neuro stuff which is right up our alley. And welcome, Matt, to you Must be out of your Mind.

Thank you, thank you. So happy to be here and share this time with you.

Yeah. So tell us a little bit about yourself and to give our audience an understanding.

Yeah, sure. So my own story in this Neuro world actually started off as a bit of an athlete and I was kind of a multi sport athlete throughout high school and recreational through university years. But I loved playing beach volleyball and soccer. And about age 22, I had had enough injuries and you know, sprains and strains and things like that that I was the guy coming out to the field or to the volleyball court wearing two knee braces and two ankle braces because I was in pain all the time.

Right.

The doctors were telling me, well, you know, you're just getting old at 22.

At 22, yeah.

Just part of the aging process. I didn't know any better, honestly. And about that time I was introduced to my now wife, Kathy Mock, who owned a neuro education company. She's like, hey, let me teach you a couple of these exercises. We actually, we happen to be walking around Disneyland on the day that this came up, right. And my knees were killing me from walking on the concrete. And she goes, hey, let me teach you these exercises and let's see if we can knock down your knee pain. And she had me do this weird movement with my elbow. And surprisingly, the pain went from like a four or five constant annoying level of pain to a zero. And I was like, what is this, you know, witchcraft? What is going on?

That's Disney. It's magic.

Yeah. And she goes, well, when we move your elbow like that, we're working with your brain and your nervous system to tell it how your knee should move. So I was like, okay, I need to know more.

Right? Fascinating.

So Kathy taught me the whole series of the basic mobility exercises, and they're neurologically focused. I did them for about eight weeks. And I remember that time period because at the eight week mark, I went out to a soccer game and I opened up my bag of equipment and I recognized that my knee braces and ankle braces were not in there. I left them at home. I'm like, decision moment, right? Am I gonna play the game without the bracing or am I gonna leave and go back? I was like, I've been doing these exercises. Let's see what happens. And so I played the game successfully, completed the game. But it was the very first time that I didn't have pain. After, I was like, I could wake up the next morning and play again. I could play in a tournament. This is great. And so that moment really changed my direction, not only for my own body and my thinking, but my career, my family. Like, that was the pivotal moment. And so I went, I need to know everything I can about this neurology stuff. I need to understand this brain inside my head and figure out what is going on. Because if these simple little exercises can reduce my pain that much, there's gotta be more. She had told me, this is only scratching the surface. You know, this is just where we start. Like, I need to know everything. So I changed directions to pursue some education in that years down the road, became a lead instructor for the company that she owned. And then in 2018, we founded Next Level Neuro. And so it has become an education company, first and foremost, where we teach other people how to use the brain that's inside their head. And we, we focus a little more on the physical. And sometimes you might call it the autonomic side, like the sympathetic parasympathetic nervous system. But in the physical body, there's kind of been two camps. One is that all pain and discomfort is driven from a physiological, from a tissue perspective that you might say pain equals injury. And that's often not true. And then the other camp has been most of the pain and discomfort we feel in our physical body is Somewhat psychosomatic. It's emotionally driven or stress driven, which is also not always the case, although there. That certainly exists. But people tend to pendulum or kind of ping pong back and forth between I have a physical pain or I have a physical expression of an emotional pain. And they go one to the other and one to the other. But right in the middle, what they continue to bypass or to jump over without knowing it is there's a nervous system in there that's in control of both of those things. And if the nervous system itself is having trouble perceiving the world around us, understanding the signals from inside of our own body, dealing with the stress or the emotions that are going on, there's only so many ways that that nervous system can, quote, unquote, speak to us. And it's usually not through our cognitive thought. It's usually not language. It doesn't say, hey, I have a stress problem, or hey, I have a vision problem. Inst. It gives us nondescript low back pain.

Right.

And they were like, what do I do with this?

Well, I believe 80% of all the pain and discomfort is psychological.

Yeah.

I think 20% is physical. That you could actually physically damage it. It just needs to repair. But if the psychological is an imbalance, it won't repair the physical.

Yes. There's definitely a hierarchy at play. And where we all grew up thinking it was the physical body that was in charge, it certainly is not. I agree with you there.

Yeah.

And I agreed. And the hierarchy of importance, our psyche and our emotional state really kind of trumps our physical body. Yeah, yeah. And then just we may be on the same page here, but in our perspective, of course, that's all happening within the nervous system. Right.

Well, it's a perfect example of it. I'm an example of what you're talking about because I grew up in a very, very loving home with all kinds of love and support around me. My parents never yelled, never screamed, never argued, never fought, and never hit us. So I grew up with a nervous system that was always in balance. So I played hockey and tennis and baseball, but hockey and tennis were my two main sports. I had 60 stitches in my head, six concussions, and I never missed a hockey game.

Wow.

And that was because my nervous system was in balance. It could do maintenance.

Yeah.

It could hit, it could fix. So as long as the nervous system is dysregulated, then it's not going to do maintenance. So inflammation goes high, the genes regulate. Inflammation go high, the genes regulate. The immune system go low and Neuroplasticity goes low while the. It's not doing maintenance during that time. It's doing minimal maintenance because it's waiting for the trauma to be complete. But it never resolves. It keeps looping then. So they're constantly in this inflamed state and with low immunity. And that's what I talk about, and that's what our program is, and it makes perfect sense. I'm living example of it. I played through injuries that most people would be out for weeks, and I could just play right through them because my mind was getting the maximum maintenance done and they weren't. And so they would spend four weeks, five weeks on an injury. Right. I wouldn't be more than two or three days, and I would be feeling better.

Very cool. Fascinating.

Yeah. So I played tennis, which is another sport that's tough on your knees, tough on your joints, all those things, the pounding, the constant pounding. I, till this day, have never had a knee problem. Never had any problems with any of that. Yeah, and that. That's a. That's proof that the body can maintain itself.

Similar story from me, because when I started doing those exercises and. And practiced those and started to do really nervous system regulation from that point forward. Age 22, I'm now 43. I've never had another sport injury. I played pickleball, soccer, beach volleyball, you know, all types of recreational sports. It just doesn't happen. Like, the body becomes so resilient. And when something does, knock on wood. Fingers crossed. I can't predict the future, but when the body and the nervous system are working together and regulation is happening, it just changes your whole experience. It changes what your body's able to do.

Yeah, I'm in a total agreement with that. The mind and body are designed to heal, but the brain is the only organ that doesn't fix itself. You've got to go in and do an intervention. So it's repairing everything else, but it's not repairing itself. So when you have a trauma, you know, then you have to do an intervention to go in and clear up that trauma, and otherwise it keeps looping. And that was my daughter's case. My daughter had Crohn's, which was an autoimmune disorder. And then she had idiopathic pulmonary hemosiderosis, which is a lung issue. And neither of them. They told us there's no cure for it. They don't know what's causing it. As soon as I hear that now, I'm like, oh, good. They don't know what causes it. Right. And she'll have to live with it and manage it and cope with it for the rest of her life. And she'd eventually end up with a colostomy bag. And they could. They cut out 24 inches of her intestine during that time. And so it wasn't on that that I figured it out. It was on the second one that she got the autoimmune that my wife said to me, this must be your fault. This must be coming from your side of the family. Because I was adopted, so we didn't know my family history.

Okay.

So I went on a course and study and I studied to get my PhD and research it, and I discovered that it was. Well, we didn't know at the time that my daughter had been traumatized when she was six, between six and eight. And then it made sense that the trauma was creating this. I just had to learn how to fix the trauma. And then we solve the problem.

Yeah. We see so many clients where an early childhood trauma, or sometimes it's a little later, but often it's childhood. Right. That basically plants that seed. And they're in their psychology, in their brain, that you might describe it as the world is not safe or I'm not safe. And they go into this protective survival response where exactly like you were talking about a minute ago, the nervous system and the brain lose their ability to drive maintenance and healing and repair. Eventually, it also generates an ongoing dysfunction on the physical side or on the immune side when the real driver isn't initially coming from those systems.

Yeah.

Yeah.

My daughter suffered for a lot of years until I figured it out. And then when I solved the trauma. Right. Then she has no Crohn's, no lung disorder.

Yeah.

And the doctors just say, well, she must have been misdiagnosed. Well, you cut out 24 inches of her intestines.

Yeah.

You know, so whenever I hear that word, idiopathic. Right. It's just saying that we don't know. We don't know what causes it. And a lot of the disease, they're just. They're taking shots at it. They're. They're using their best educated guess as to what could be causing it. But the doctors who are in medical school, who are gastroenterologists, lung people, all the different professions, they don't get any trauma training. They get zero.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Zero, zero.

And. Yeah. And so even the wellness people, you know, the people are working on gut issues and health issues. They don't get any trauma training. The nutritional people don't get Any trauma training should be trained, but it's not being trained, which is good for us, but bad for the society.

Yeah, yeah, very true.

So tell me a little bit about what you do, what kinds of people that you serve and.

Yeah, so we primarily focus on the practitioners in the health and fitness world. We, we have a few programs for clients or people who just generally want to understand how the brain works. But most of our education targets the folks who are out there helping people in the real world. So physical therapists, osteopaths, occupational therapy, hands on therapist of any kind, that could be massage or rehab. And then we also work with sport coaches and personal trainers and people who are kind of in the sport and fitness world. Right, but the reason we work with those folks is they've in a lot of places, they've become the frontline health practitioners that see their clients one, two, three times a week. And they will be able to observe or detect when something's going wrong far earlier than someone will make an appointment with their doctor. And so we're like, if we can put this education about nervous system regulation into the hands of the people who are working with clients every single week and seeing them face to face every week, there's a huge, you know, positive benefit there, huge value to be able to make ongoing, lasting changes that are really powerful for those clients that go beyond, can you do your rehab after surgery and can you pick up some weight? You're really molding and shaping their brain and nervous system to be more regulated so that it can recover. They can address neurologic deficits that these people have, maybe a vision issue, maybe a balance problem, maybe something in their brain itself and still do that within their scope of work and their license. We're, we're not playing outside of our lane, but we teach them how to take this work and really make it active. So you go, what does the client need to do to help their brain be more regulated? And I use this example with them that when your nervous system is dysregulated, it's a little bit like a crying toddler. You can't tell the 2 year old, stop crying, everything's gonna be fine. And as adults, we often try to tell ourselves it'll be okay. Or sometimes I use the phrase that we try to mindset our way out of trauma. Useful tool, maybe not the whole entire story. So if you have the 2 year old who's crying, you don't just tell them to be calm, you pick them up and you hold them, you make them feel safe. You rub their back, you make soothing noises, maybe you feed them. Right. You're showing the nervous system that it's safe. You're not telling. And the same thing works with adults like to, to address that nervous system that's in crisis or in dysregulation. When we start to try to talk to it, it's not really listening. Like, the brain basically shuts down language processing centers and cognitive thinking skills while we are in threat. And so it doesn't work to, to tell your client everything's going to be okay. We need to show their nervous system that it's actually safe and repeat that with enough frequency so that it can have the neuroplasticity behind it to really make it sticky so that it stays there despite whatever ongoing loops that they may be facing.

Well, neuroplasticity also shuts down, goes very low.

Right.

So the genes that regulate that are down regulated along with the immune system. So you got a perfect recipe for disease and injury coming in because body can't fight it off. And especially from childhood because between the ages of 0 and 7, the children are growing up in a literal world. They don't have the ability to look at things and use reason and logic. So if they're told that they're stupid or they're broken or they're defeated or whatever during that period of time, they take it in as fact. And then it shows up in adulthood. And so when things go wrong, right, something happens, they get injured, they don't have the defense that they need in order to protect them. And then the injuries keep on coming and we, we see it all the time. So between 0 and 7, the brain is literal. So during that phase, it's focused on survival. Only thing that matters is survival. So what are they connecting survival up to? All the messages they got in those early years, those messages are wrong. It's dealing with faulty intelligence. And then when it gets older and can learn reason and logic, it's still operating with that faulty intelligence.

Yeah, it's gone through so many experiences where we, we say that your expectation creates your reality. And so if you. Silly example here, but if you were to get invited to a party on a Friday night and you're like, I really don't like parties, but you go anyway. Your experience there is probably going to reinforce your own belief. Like you probably sit in the corner, you don't really talk to people, you don't try the new food or get up and dance. And on Monday morning someone goes, hey, how was the party? And you Go, well, it wasn't that great. Different person gets invited to the same party. They're like, I love parties. They're going to show up, talk to new people, dance with the music, try all the new foods, have a great time, get asked on Monday morning, how's the party? And they go, oh, it's amazing. Right? So in that, from that childhood experience, what you were just talking about, when we go through years of personal experiences where the nervous system is, you could say it's looking through a certain lens, it has a certain paradigm where it's expecting threat, danger, insecurity within the environment. It's going to find those things. It's going to find the evidence to support its own presuppositions, because it can't ignore if there is any evidence at all of a lack of safety.

It can't ignore that the autonomic nervous system kicks in.

It kicks in, and I tell my clients, I go, it would only have to be wrong and ignore it incorrectly one time, and something severe would happen. So it really can't let off of that paradigm. So if you filter all of your personal experiences through that, all the way through your later childhood, your teenage years, your young adult life, your young professional, professional life, and then you wake up at age 30 or 35 and you go, whoa, my life is not what I wanted or not what I expected. Why do things feel so difficult for me? You go, well, imagine if we went all the way back to before the trauma occurred, and we could picture your life as a cannonball being shot out of a cannon. It would have a certain trajectory right. Of, like, where it theoretically might have intended to go. But when we introduce that trauma, it's like we put this weird spin on the ball, and it was still shot out of the cannon, pointed in the same direction, but as the spin affected the ball. Right. And it started to curve and go in the other direction, and it just curves more and more and more. And when we Fast forward those 30 years into the future, the intended trajectory might have been straight ahead, but maybe you ended up over here and left field. Yeah. And, you know, go, how do we get back closer to the intended. Or at least how do we straighten the trajectory from here forward so that things aren't so difficult? My physical body can repair itself. I can reduce the disease process that's happening, reduce the inflammation, and the answer is always nervous system regulation. That's where it starts.

It all comes down to that.

So I find it really just so interesting and so significant, that ongoing process of reinforcement and Perception that causes us to get farther and farther into either a trauma response or a protective mechanism. And then when you, when you finally meet with someone like your institute or you meet with us and you're like, okay, I want to do something about this. Like, well, there's a lot of experiences that we're going to have to regulate through because your brain has learned. It's been conditioned at this point to view things in a certain way. And we want to help you to change that so that you can start to have a different perspective.

Right. It's like I say, if you grew up and you're in math class and somehow that you heard that one plus one equals three. And then you go through life and an equation comes up and you go, it's three. And everybody else is like, how could you be so wrong? Everybody knows it's two. No, I swore it was three. You're convinced. They're not going to be able to convince you because you're so convinced that you got the information right and you don't even know it's on a subconscious level and you'll never get it right. So you have to go in and get that reprogrammed.

Yes.

And to change the equation.

Exactly.

And then it answers it. Right. But most people don't realize that there's a thing called the time slice theory. And the time slice theory states that the subconscious mind processes everything that's coming in 400 milliseconds faster than the conscious mind gets the information.

Right.

So your subconscious mind has already calculated and done everything and responded to it before your conscious mind gets the information. But your conscious mind cannot override the survival brain. So the conscious mind doesn't get involved. It responds. Your conscious mind doesn't respond. It can use reason and logic, but your subconscious mind just reacts.

Yeah.

So I use that analogy when I talked to a professional baseball player I was working with and I said, do you know that you can't think and hit a baseball? And he says, why can't I think it hit a baseball? They says it's too fast. The university did a study that said it's impossible for a major league baseball player to hit a major league fastball. How are they doing it then? They've coded it. They have seen so many pitches come in from that height, with that speed, with that spin that they approximately know where that ball is going to end up. On average, that's thumb conscious. It takes 400 milliseconds to do that. It takes 350 or 250 milliseconds for the ball to reach the plate.

Exactly.

They're not thinking, they're responding. And they're responding through their subconscious mind. You take Michael Jordan, who's the greatest basketball player, and you say, and he goes to play professional baseball, he can't make it. Why can't he make it? Because at that level, he hasn't got enough codes. He hasn't developed the codes. So he can hit 200, 250, but that's not going to make it in the major leagues. And the reason the best baseball players are the best baseball players, they've got the ability to process faster and more information.

Exactly. Wow. That's a great example of that. It reminds me of documentary movie that was produced back in 2011 called People vs. The State of Illusion, done by a guy who used to be a trial attorney litigator, turned his, you know, his vision, his career more toward mindset and psychological awareness.

Right.

The gist of the movie is that you're actually fighting a battle inside your own head. You're not fighting against the real world. But in the film, they go to the extent of showing how strong our subconscious mind is, that it can actually affect the path of machines and robots that don't have a thinking brain of their own per se, but one of the. One of the sets of numbers that they produced for that film that is very similar to your time slice theory that you talked about. At any one second, they say there's about 400 billion pieces of sensory data that are floating around your environment. If we added up your visual input, your auditory input, your smell, your taste, your tactile sensation of touch, plus the signals going on inside your own body, your interoception.

Right.

About 400 billion pieces of sensory data are happening each second in your subconscious brain. It will go through 4,000 to 5,000 isolated processes where it's taking those data points and putting them together and processing and integrating and working with these codes that we just talked about in the conscious brain. If we were just being aware, like conscious awarenesses is like, I'm hot, I'm cold, I'm hungry. Did I leave the tea kettle on? I have to go to the toilet. We could do about 40 per second at our fastest pace. And then they compare that to how many cognitive thoughts can you actually hold in your mind at one time? And the. The older number was seven plus or minus two. That's like from the 1950s. The more modern numbers, like maybe four. Yeah, maybe. And what that I tell my students, that's like, you know, if you were going to the grocery store and you were going to get milk, bread, eggs, and cheese, and then someone calls and says, hey, can you pick up a chocolate bar? And you get home and you're like, oh, I forgot the cheese. Because you put one thing, you drop something else off.

Yeah.

So we go from 400 billion possibilities to when we finally reach our conscious brain, we've got 40 awareness or maybe four cognitive thoughts. each of those levels that we went through, there has to be some kind of a filtering effect. There has to be a filter of. We could ask the question, how does the brain choose which pieces of data or which information it's going to pay attention to? And the answer, of course, is, number one, survival.

Survival is the number one.

Number two, expectation. What am I predicting of that moment? Right. And then number three, perhaps at the bottom of the hierarchy might be something that unexpectedly catches my attention. But we're setting the tone for how our brain filters and parses through information every single second of the day. And so much of it is running at that subconscious level. But even there, I find this fascinating. If I do the Math and take 400 billion and divide it by the 4000 things that my subconscious brain does, that's only one process for every 100 million possibilities. And I was like, the math is not in our favor.

No, no.

There's so much going on around us that we literally miss, don't pay attention to in any given second, that it means that what we do catch is we can understand that our brain thinks it's of utmost importance. Right, right. And so the programming behind that is what's so fascinating to me of, like, what is the programming that's causing me to latch onto this piece of information, say, like, from a conversation with someone, but it would cause someone else to latch onto that piece of information from the very same sentence.

Right.

And it comes down to our programming.

That's right. Yeah.

You know, so it's like, if there's so much going on and my conscious brain can only handle such a little amount of processing in real time, what we do on a daily basis, how we train our brain and nervous system, how we do deal with the trauma from our past, create nervous system regulation, those things become so important to creating the life that we want, because we tell our clients all the time, if I don't engage with that process, the truth is everybody in the world is doing neurology every single day. They're just doing it on accident.

Yeah, yeah. People tell me, oh, I sabotaged Myself and I say it's impossible.

Right.

And they say why? And I say your brain is protecting you. It is perceived some. It's done that calculation of what does this mean? It goes in a certain direction, uses its life experiences and changes your trajectory. Yeah, that's a survival threat. It's not sabotaging you. It would never sabotage you.

It met its goal perfectly in that situation.

But it's dealing with faulty intelligence. So you have to update that intelligence. And trauma in particular is stored as a high definition file. So it comes to top of mind all the time. So if anything looks like, sounds like, feels like, smells like a trauma, that traumatic event comes up and the mind says how do we get out of this? And then produces a response. But that response isn't always in your best interest and is dealing with an old trauma that is looking at in real time.

Right.

And your subconscious doesn't know if you're five or 50.

Exactly.

It does everything that way. So it's going to respond with the most appropriate response based on your experiences.

It reminds me of people who say they're not motivated. Sure you are. You're just more motivated to sit on the couch than get up and exercise. You're more motivated to eat the food than to change your diet in this, whatever the case is.

Yeah.

Motivation doesn't waver, it just gets redirected. But what you said reminds me of a question, if you don't mind. Last year I was looking through some research that was published on why some people get PTSD and others don't from a traumatic experience. And what the article did focused in on is really the work of the hippocampus of being able to take that experience and encode it as long term memory.

Right.

So the folks who did not get PTSD had a greater ability to isolate the traumatic experience on the timeline of their life. And say that's a thing that happened in time, it happened in the past. And they were talking about acute trauma in this case, but they're saying it's, it's an event or a thing that happened, it's in the past, it's not necessarily going to continue to happen again. While those with who did develop PTSD weren't able to isolate it on a timeline because their hippocampus couldn't do that in coding. And so the potential for the trauma to repeat stayed current, it continued to be an emergency situation like it might happen again or continue to happen at any moment. And so when you, a minute ago when you said, you know, if it Smells like, looks like, sounds like it triggers that trauma response. Again, it reminded me of that research study we were talking about reprogramming, Right. And so some just general thoughts on this idea and reprogramming from someone who's stuck in that hyper vigilant, there might be trauma state. If you don't mind, let's talk about how to regulate that and reprogram that.

Yeah, My, my wife grew up in that traumatic household. So she was always responding to everything. I would say something like, no, I don't really like that. And she would respond with, why are you mad at me?

Right?

And I would go, I'm not mad. I'm just, I don't like that she's. But why are you getting mad? And I said, I'm not getting mad. She was convinced I was getting angry. That was because her mind filtered through her father's experiences and she was responding to her father's trauma. Not what I said exactly. And I always kept thinking it was what I said. So I tried to change my words, I tried to be very careful how I said things and I would still activate her nervous system. And it drove me crazy because she's a great mom, a great wife, but she was living in fear, constant fear, and I couldn't address it. There was nothing that I could do. So I could change the way I said things, I could change the tone, but I was just basically avoiding it. I was staying away from it. It wasn't till I learned how her nervous system was working, it would filter through what I call atmospheric conditions. Her childhood had very stormy atmospheric conditions. So it filtered through that to create a response. And as long as that high definition traumatic response was still filtering, it would respond differently. And I couldn't understand it. So I was always trying to figure it out, never could figure it out until I understood how the memory is stored. And it's all coming down to memory. So why do some people get post traumatic stress and others don't? Their childhood, it's a direct reflection on their childhood. So two people, two veterans could be in the same battle in the same situation. One gets it, one doesn't. If you look back at their childhood, the other developed more resilience and had more ability to respond to that. The other guy had a lot of trauma that would just take them down. And my wife would have been in that category. She would have experienced a lot of post traumatic stress from events. And I don't respond at all. I just categorize it and that's fine. And it's an event. Right. But I'm over it. And she couldn't do that.

Yeah. Interesting. How do you work with people to reprogram that?

So what I do is you have to get the brain into optimal condition. So you just can't say, well, this is what it is. They go, oh, yeah, that's what it is. Yeah, okay, that's good. We're going to change it.

If only it were that easy. Right.

So I do a four hour process and I take the first two hours giving the science and education behind how the brain works. During that time, I'm getting them into alpha brainwave state so they're very relaxed, very focused, feel very safe. Then I introduce the trauma, and again, I only ask for a 60 second, 2 minute highlight reel of it. And during that time I do certain techniques that while they're in that very calm, relaxed state, their mind then does the repairs, but it won't do it. That's why traditional therapy doesn't work very well because they never get the person safe enough in order to heal the trauma. And so why I use four hours is I found that I can generally get them into that alpha brainwave state. Then they take a look at the trauma. And while they're doing that, I do a technique that basically clears it and I take it from high definition into low definition. And then it's a low definition. And people are saying like, how can I respond so differently Now I look at that event and I don't cry, right. And I says, because it was in high definition, your subconscious thought it was happening now. And so it's going to protect you. So anytime you have an emotion, a feeling or a sensation, your mind's calling for an action. So what's the purpose of fear? To escape a threat. What's the purpose of anger? To attack a threat. So if you think about an event that happened 10 years ago to you and you feel fear or anger, it's a glitch. Your mind is looking at it in.

Real time, still in high definition, high definition.

So I take out a high definition, move it into low definition, then when your mind sees it, it can look at it and not respond.

Right.

It's really that simple.

Yeah, we, we, we've not distilled into such a process as of 4 hours, but we walk clients through, regulate. First you have to optimize the brain. We regulate, we use tools to look at the trauma. And then once that's done, depending on the client, sometimes it seems like they, this might sound a little weird, but sometimes they want to go through some graded exposure to build their resilience a little bit.

Right.

Other folks are like, nope, I'm done with it. It was so far in the past. I don't need to pay attention to that program anymore. But it's interesting that both of those different perspectives, they're trying to firmly set it into like that low definition state, let it go into the background, rather than being the lens by which we view every event that occurs.

Yeah. Because the brain is going to pull up the most immediate response to it. And it stored all this high definition. So those are the first responses it goes to. But then when it does that, it starts looking at the event and responding to it. Yet there's nothing you can do. So those atmospheric conditions are responsible for the mind producing the response. So an animal can't do that. Animals don't have explicit memory the way humans do. Animals learn through repetition and association. So they learn that something is safe or not safe. They don't remember the details of it. They just know that it's safe or not safe. A zebra cannot feel fear of a lion unless the lion is present. They're not imagining lions not thinking about the lion, you know, killing Harry. Right. They don't store that information. But if a lion shows up, they go into an autonomic nervous system response. They don't know why, they just do. But then when the lion goes away, they don't. They go back to eating.

And our human brain is so skilled, it can throw us into the autonomic response even when the threat is not present.

Yeah, well, it's an old threat. And it's being seen in real time.

Yeah, exactly.

Causes it. And people don't know that. So the sensation of hunger. Everybody knows what the sensation of hunger feels like. What happens if you don't eat right away? It gets stronger. You may even get shaky. You may even get a headache. Right. What happens as soon as you eat? It goes away.

All of that goes away.

You solved it by an action. Right. Trauma is looking for a solution. You're not solving it because you can solve it. It happened 10 years ago or 20 years ago. And so the sensation, the feeling or emotion keeps coming in because of that. So it needs a resolution to it. That's what our program does, is it goes in, provides a resolution that clears it up.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's super. We, we often describe emotions as motivators.

It's calling for an action.

Yeah. And often when we use the word emotion, people think about their feelings. But an emotion can be, I'm hot, You know, seek shade. I'm thirsty. Seek water. I'm hungry. Seek food. Those are also emotions. And it's a helpful definition to introduce in the conversation. Because if we can understand an emotion as seeking to drive an action, or it's seeking a solution, like you said, it lets us reframe the trauma experience and go, yes, it's a glitch, because my brain is still looking for some resolution and some solution to that.

Yeah, yeah, there's nothing wrong with anybody. There's nothing wrong with anybody's mind. It's basing its response on your atmospheric conditions. You just need to clear up the atmospheric conditions, and then you can stay present and focused in real time. That's what everybody wants, right, is to stay present. But that's the only way to do it. You've got to go in and do an intervention to then fix that, and then it heals. Then it heals itself.

I think that's one of the first ideas I was exposed to from your work. Probably three or four years ago, you did an interview at Genius Network that I happen to be there for that meeting and use some of that similar language. And I'm like, that's the same thing we tell our clients. And that idea of your brain's not broken, right? It's doing exactly what it's meant to do. It's doing it successfully. It's meeting its own goals. You just might not be aware of them. And then, you know, how do we reshape that or redirect it in order to create that healing? And neuroplasticity is really the key.

So Rebecca Gregory, she was a Boston Marathon bombing survivor. She lost her left leg. So she came into us with five and a half years of post traumatic stress. And she said, I heard about what you're doing. It sounds too good to be true. Her testimonial on our site, and she says, but I'm desperate because I have a terror nightmare. Every night when I put my head down, I'm going to have a nightmare. So that was happening for five and a half years. She goes through our program, and in four hours, we clear it up. And she said, it's unbelievable how you could do that. And then on the sixth anniversary, she called me up and she says, I'm going to go back to the sixth anniversary of the Boston Marathon bombing. I'm going to walk the same route I did. I'm going to stand where I was right when the bomb went off. She says, what do you think about that? Will it come back. And I says, no, it's not going to come back. And she sent me a picture of her standing there. She says, no fear. This wouldn't have been possible without you. Right? And it was her own mind that did it. I don't take credit for it. I just say, we're just going to update, reboot, refresh, and adjust your mind.

There's a similarity that we utilize when we're working with clients and practitioners, both who are a little more focused on the physical side of things. They're, you know, they're therapists, they're trainers, they're coaches. They're like, why does my client keep having pain despite the fact that, you know, maybe their doctor says everything's normal. Imaging doesn't show anything. Nothing comes up on X rays, nothing comes up on mri. There's no disease process happening that they can detect, but they still have pain. And we go through a similar conversation and go, well, the nervous system is responding to something that pain is an action signal. In our conversation that we've been having today, we might call it an emotion. It's trying to drive you to a certain action. It's saying, hey, stop doing what you're doing or do something different. Because I don't like this 90% of the time or more. It's protective in nature. It's not indicating tissue damage or injury. It's saying, I don't want to keep going down this road because if we do, I believe something bad may happen. And so we basically walk them through the process of how do we regulate the nervous system first? Super great place to start, regardless of what's going on. But in the physical world, we also have to address fuel. And we maybe talk about that in a second, but we go, the brain has to have enough resources to be able to do its job. If it's running on fumes or running on adrenaline, you're probably not going to get a great response because adrenaline is more or less your survival hormone, not your performance hormone. And then we go, we also need to address the sensory inputs that their body is currently receiving. Because, yes, there may be some misinterpretation coming from previous experiences. But if they're continuing to get bad input, say, from their ankle or from their hip or from their vestibular system, which helps them balance, right? So everything. They go down into that squat when they're at the gym, their balance feels off. But the inner ear can't feel pain. It doesn't have any nociceptive or pain nerve endings within it. So the brain has to find a way to give you a signal to make you stop doing the squats. Because if you do the squats and you lose your balance and you fall and hit your head on the ground, that's not a good survival strategy. Your brain ends up talking to your knee, giving you the signal through the experience of knee pain. They're going, hey, I need you to stop doing the squats. It's not safe. But in the physical world, those professionals kind of need an assessment process to go. What's causing the threat signal to occur? Is it a bad input? Is it a dysregulation? That's an ongoing problem. Is it a fuel issue? Is it a brain integration challenge where they're getting the signals, but the brain isn't able to put them all together and then create the appropriate output? Right. And so we break that down and teach them how to do that so that they can take their clients and put them through more of a strategy that's similar to what you were describing of like, regulate first, give the sensory inputs that may be missing. There might need to be, like, some training or some recalibration, and then let's introduce that misinterpretation so that the brain can untangle it and not have it continue to run as an ongoing threat in the system. So it's just super interesting to me how the same process kind of translates into different realms. We're still dealing with the one brain, the one nervous system.

It all comes down to that. When you. When you mentioned that the fight or flight response addresses the adrenals, right? So the. So the adrenaline goes up. That's cortisol. That's everything. So that's your fight or flight, right? So when that goes up, your inflammation is going to go high and your immune system goes low. So that's the response to the trauma. If the trauma gets resolved, it comes back into balance and the cortisol, you know, comes down and the inflammation goes down, and the immune system comes up and cleans everything up. It's a process. It does. But what happens if it keeps going off? Autoimmune is that keeps going off, so the adrenals get drained. So cortisol goes high, the immune system stays low, but then the adrenals can't produce anymore. So what happens is the immune system comes up at the same time inflammation is up, and nothing is stopping it from coming back in. So then it attacks its own self. And that's what people don't realize. I think autoimmune is a disorder. It's just a dysregulation of the nervous system and is burnt out.

Yeah, exactly.

So you have to address that or you're never gonna solve the problem. So my daughter's situation was exactly that. She had two autoimmune disorders. We resolved the trauma. Right. Then everything went into balance. Her immune system went down.

Right.

As opposed to going up. It didn't have to come up to balance. Had to go down to balance, and it went down to balance, and then the inflammation comes down with it. And that was the. The answer to the problem. I found that out through all the research.

Yeah, yeah. There's really interesting research on that last year as well, that was published on the role of the hypothalamus and. Right. With the adrenal fatigue and then the adrenal burnout that happens. That's coming from that HPA axis driven by your hypothalamus. And the immune regulation as well, is driven by the hypothalamus. So, like, it's. It's like the little miniature control center for that process that you just described. You know, and one of the things. What the research was showing is that one of the things that's most triggering for that hypothalamic, let's call it survival activity is when there is a discrepancy between the signals that my body is sending to my brain, My interoception signals. Those signals are different than what my brain expected to receive. When there's a difference between reality and expectation. If the brain essentially views that as a threat, it goes. I don't know why this is off. Maybe there's an invader, maybe there's a pathogen. Right. Or maybe there's a survival threat in my body that I wasn't aware of. I need to jack up my adrenaline and cortisol and at first lower my immunity. And. Just like you were talking about. But over time, as we burn out on the.

And it can't regulate the immunity.

Can't regulate immunity. And we. It. It is a big driver of autoimmunity, is that hypothalamic dysregulation, which is driven by discrepancy between expectation and reality in the physical signals of the body. But I think where these come together, which is why I wanted to bring it up, is the expectation. Because the trauma is what sets our programming, like we talked about earlier.

Yes.

To. To allow us to build the expectation of, how do I perceive what's going on in my physical body? How do I understand it or interpret it? What does it mean? Those are all clouded by the trauma. If it's still in high def.

Yeah, because it's going to override the system.

Exactly. So I find it fascinating. I'm kind of a research nerd in all of these.

Yeah, I am too.

But I always find it fascinating how time and time again, there are thought leaders and teachers who are sharing wisdom with the world, like yourself. And then research comes along that reinforces and supports. Yep, that's exactly how it works, right?

That's right.

It's always a little bit of a feel good moment, if I'm being honest.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, that's what I kept on researching. I was saying it doesn't make sense that they don't know why this happens. There's gotta be an explanation for it, right?

Yes.

So they told us there's no cure for Crohn's. They don't know what causes it. As soon as I hear those two things, I know that they're talking about trauma. Yeah, it has to be. And they didn't get any education on trauma. They're not stupid people. They just never learned it. So of course there's no answer because they never learned the answer. If they would learn the answer, they would solve the problem, you know, and they would work on the trauma, but they don't get it. And so when my daughter's Crohn's cleared up, they said, well, must have been an error. We must have made a mistake. And I said, well, it's impossible, because what I did is I just regulated her nervous system. And her doctor said to me, if that was true, you'd have a Nobel Peace Prize. And I said, well, tell me what. What Crohn's is. He goes, crohn's is a lifelong disease with no known cure. And I said, I disagree. Crohn's is just inflammation. It's so simple, it sounds too hard to believe. They've got to make it complicated because they have all these years of experience, but they're learning the wrong thing.

Yeah. Reminds me of a quote by. I think the author was Van Goeth. He said, some people don't have the imagination for reality.

That's good, right?

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that is. That's our mission, is to tell people everybody has a nervous system, and you need to know how to use it. You deserve to know how to use it.

Yeah. And if you don't, you're going to suffer through years and years of therapy and physical therapy or mental therapy. So what also happens is I. I say it affects the Mitochondria in the cell, the energy in this cell. So much of that energy is going to resolve the trauma loop, which it can't resolve. So I always ask people to give me an idea of how much energy it feels like is being drained away when their mind's not staying present. And people will say 50%, 80%, all that kind of stuff, but the mitochondria gets affected. So when I work with athletes, I say, you have another gear. When we resolve the trauma, that mitochondria releases that energy to performance. And so I had Marco Giussetto, who was a double amputee. He lost both his legs to frostbite, and he was a marathon runner from Kenya. So, you know, the Kenyans are phenomenal marathon runners. So they taught him how to walk again on the prosthetics and then taught him how to run again. But he built from the blades. So they called me up and they said, he's not improving anymore. He seems to have plateaued. We think it's in his mind now. So I took him through the program and nine days later he ran in a marathon and took 15 seconds per mile off his time. And then he ran in the Boston Marathon a month later and broke the world record. He's now the fastest man on blades. And then he ran in the Chicago Marathon two months later and broke his own world record by another five minutes and got signed by Nike. And I said, marco, I didn't make you any faster. You were always that fast. I just released the energy.

In the physical training world, there's a well known kettlebell instructor named Pavel. He's, he's always said, you all have the strength within you to pick up a car. You just don't know how to do it right. And he, he means that quite literally, that the muscles of the body have that ability for power generation. But there's a. Yes, there's a lack of knowledge. But my interpretation on it is the nervous system is always putting the brakes on, right?

It doesn't want you to get injured.

It doesn't want you to get injured or dead. It is kind of the governor of your movement and your strength and your athletic ability. Governor in the sense that it sets the pace, but also governor in the sense of a limiter. We had a friend of one of our students who was a high wire electrician a few years ago and unfortunately had an accident at work, was electrocuted, fell out of the bucket, landed on the ground, and he sustained like 55, 60 different bone fractures during that accident. His friend Initially was like, you must have hit the ground really hard. Like. No, it was the electricity, not the impact on the ground. Because when you run high voltage electricity through the body and it activates all of your muscles all at the same time, the muscles are strong enough to snap your bones.

Right?

Yeah. The only reason that doesn't happen on a daily basis is because your nervous system is limiting the muscle activation that can occur so that you don't break yourself.

Yeah, yeah, that makes sense.

And so even when you look at the world's best, like Olympic level powerlifters, they may use up to 90%, maybe, maybe 95 at a world championship level, but they're not getting to 100. They never do because that governor is always in place. And so it's like an important idea to go. Your governor may be set so that you can get 80% recruitment, which would be amazing for an amateur or recreational athlete. But if you're having ongoing dysregulation or trauma or an ongoing threat response, your governor may be set back down here at 35 or 40%, where the same way that we've talked about inflammation shows up and fear responses show up. This ongoing level of protection is also still running, where even in your day to day activities or your hobbies, your exercise, you don't get your full human potential because the nervous system is always tamping down and limiting what it's going to allow you to do.

Yeah, it's just like when somebody trains, they get better. They just train the nervous system to release more power.

Exactly.

So repetition. Think of, think of repetition as research for the brain. I'm telling you that I can run faster. Well, prove it. I'm not going to give you the power to run faster unless you can prove to me it's safe.

Exactly.

And that's what repetition does.

That's a great way to frame that for our athletes. Yeah, it's exploring and understanding what is safe.

Well, this has been fascinating. There's been really, really a good discussion. So did you have any other questions for me or how can people get a hold of you?

No, this has been awesome. Thank you. And I love the depth that we get to go to and get to kind of round out a little bit on all of this. Folks can reach us on Instagramxtlevelneuro. All one word is our handle. Our website is nextlevelneuro.com and then we put together just a free introductory training for your audience. And it's intended for the general public. It's not too deep, just for practitioners but everybody can get some value out of that, of taking the same concepts and principles that you teach and thinking about how do we apply them to the physical body as well. So bridge the gap with that.

Very good. Well, Matt, it's been a pleasure. I've really enjoyed the conversation. I hope you too, as well the listening audience. And thank you for listening to another podcast of you must be out of your mind. And there it is.