How to Rewire Your Brain for Energy, Focus, and Longevity After 50

If you are walking outside while you are listening to this, you may have the urge to take off your shoes and walk barefoot. If you are driving in your car, working out in your gym, you may have the urge to go home and make sure that you get barefoot today. Outdoors if possible. We're talking about so many things, but really about the brain and yet bringing it home to why this is so relevant to women and talking again about a topic we've touched on before, second brain, in the gut and why, of course, for women whose hormones have changed and gut has changed, that changes everything right there. But really we're talking about you, your brain health, dementia, Alzheimer's, of course, but also what is happening to us based on screen time and poor sleep and what can we do about it and how can we rewrite the messages in the, 8-track tape— did we just date ourselves?— that might be playing over and over in our brains to become more positive. And not just in a positive affirmation and read the post-it note on the bathroom mirror, but in a far more powerful way. This one is really all about brain, and I think you'll be fascinated. So my guest today is a recent new author, but he's been totally indulged in brain health for his entire career and long before that. I think you're really gonna like this one. Stick around. Well, if you're looking for energy, one place that you may look regularly is your exercise, your nutrition, and maybe your sleep. But you may get a new sense of how you can actually improve on your energy level and what actually gives you and what might rob you of energy. Today we talk about recovery in a whole different way. And we also talk about the benefit of the reset and what that actually means. So if you're curious about the most important pose in your yoga practice, tune in. If you want to know and be reminded about the importance of recovery from exercise in order to seal the deal on the fitness and results that you want from exercise, listen to this one as well. So even though it's may sound far from the content teased in this title of Rewire Your Brain for Energy, Focus, and Longevity. They are very related, and we talk fast. You may find you want to listen to this one again because my guest today is Dr. Patrick Porter, PhD. He's the founder and creator of BrainTap, and as you might guess, he's quite intelligent. He's pioneering in brainwave entertainment technology designed to optimize mental performance. Reduce stress and improve sleep. Yes, please. So with over 4 decades of experience in neuroscience and personal development, Dr. Porter has authored multiple books. A brand new one we will talk about that you could get your hands on, the latest is called The Brain Fitness Blueprint, and it explores how to train the brain for clarity, resilience, and sustainable energy at every age. Stick around to the end because I asked a little bit about you know, where we are in time, you and I, maybe 40-something, 50-something, or 60-something like me, and or beyond. We know you're here too. And what our lives have looked like and time in front of screens or with technology and the effect on us in addition to our aging and what's going on with our brains. But I asked too about the exposure that, say, 30-somethings, which might be your kids, my kids and their kids, what it will be like for them if they're raised in front of televisions or computer screens and interacting with them. Certainly they're used in schools now, so at least there, but for many, sometimes they become babysitters, do they not? And some of the toys kids are given now include technology. So I think we have to look at all of it as Is this a pro or is it a con, or is it a risk-reward ratio? And what role do we as midlife women play in it, not just for ourselves, but for those loved ones that we have? So I think you're gonna love this. You will learn a lot, and he talks fast, and I think you may want to replay it, but you'll also want to potentially get your hands on that book, and/or you may be interested in the brain app that he's got. All right, let's dive in. Welcome to the show, Dr. Patrick Porter.

Hey, thanks for having me, Debra. It's great to be here.

Well, I'm so— we're always into the dirt here. We want to know the background. I can't wait to open up and talk about your book, the brand new book as we're recording this, but I'd love to know the backstory and how you got into looking at brains and brain health, and where did that evolve? Or was it something that you always knew you wanted to study or something that came later?

Yeah, well, it kind of came later because what we were doing at first was my dad was a very chronic alcoholic, and the church came and said, hey, you need to take the Silva Method, and he stopped drinking. I was a troubled youth. I mean, I got help back in second grade and I was really struggling in school. And he said, well, if I'm going to learn it, the whole family is. So all All 9 of us learned how to do it. None of us are alcoholics. It helped us all. And so we used the Silva Method, which is a— they use a sound called the Silva Sound, which I learned later was an isochronic tone, which balances the hemispheres of the brain and causes you to go into a state called alpha. And alpha is a super learning state. So when we're in that state, we learn better, we perform better, things of that nature. And then I went to school for electronics because obviously I wasn't going to do what my dad did. This was crazy. And then, but what happened was I kept doing what my dad was doing because I kind of liked that he started letting me and my other brother Michael kind of share the stage with him. And I kind of like being in front of people, teaching them. And, you know, it was a little bit different when I was 19, 20 years old in front of people. I wanted to look older. Now I want to look younger, you know, because I'm 64, you know. So, but in the— in this journey, what happened was I, as fate would have it, I started working with a company called Light and Sound Research, and we developed the very first portable light and sound machine using biophotonics and sound to harmonize the brain using brainwave entrainment. And then, so we've been studying that and doing studies since then, and I— we have 13 different research studies going on right now as we're speaking because we have universities around the world, because we've, we've shown things like, uh, we've reversed dementia in 100% of the people within 6 weeks by increasing their brain voltage. It's all a voltage equation. When you're brain voltage drops below 7, you have dementia symptoms. If it drops below 4, you're gonna have Alzheimer's. So, but with photobiomodulation and what we use with our BrainTap app and the algorithm, we actually increase that energy in the brain. And then the brain knows how to heal itself. You know, the whole thing is get the interference out of the way and the brain and body knows how to heal. So, and then we also have studies on sleep, stress reduction. There's over 32 studies on PubMed. 13 that we proved out. Most of the yogic treatments around the world with, with Ames Bhopal, they're our partners. They actually changed their neurocenter to the BrainTap neurocenter because we proved out all the ancient sciences using a piece of technology I helped to create called NeuroCheck, where I can measure 9 different parameters of the nervous system in 5 minutes. And it's been validated through all the sciences, but it only takes 5 minutes and it's portable. So instead of having to do EEGs and all the blood tests and all of these things, we can do it through energy medicine. So that's kind of my, you know, and I'm always learning and growing. I feel like it's my first day at work because this world of neurophysiology and the brain, I mean, back in the '80s when we first started, nobody knew you could change the brain. You know, they thought you had this fixed brain. In 2000, they said, hey, we have this neuroplastic brain. And now we're finding that there's technologies, not just the ones that I created, but there's other technologies that actually help to support brain health. And we're very supportive. I have a 6,000-square-foot lab here in New Bern, North Carolina, North Carolina that we do all sorts of research on, that people come and we prove out most of the biohacking equipment you see out there in the world is here because we, we were part of the testing team that showed that it actually did something to your physiology.

Uh, amazing. I'm going to ask you to go way back to square one, given you've been doing this for so long, but I don't want to step over for anybody listening a couple of things that they may be— they probably nodded like, oh yeah, that sounds right. But if I asked a listener to define this, they may not be able to, and I'm sure you can. So first of all, I'm— my first question was going to be, who needs brain harmonizing? But I want you to go back and even say, what is— when you say brain harmonizing, what do we mean?

Well, we, we have two hemispheres in the brain, and if they're out of— if they're mismatched our memory won't function as well, we won't sleep as well, we won't perform as well. So when we're in— this happens when we're in a state of fight or flight. So when you think— and so that's why a lot of people use things like vagus, vagal nerve stimulators and things like that. Breathing, humming, breathing techniques will do it. There's, there's a lot of ways to do it. So what, what we found was that through, like, binaural beats, for instance— for the listener who doesn't know what that is, if I put a 200 Hz frequency in one ear and a 210 Hz frequency in the other, the brain doesn't hear either of those. It hears a phantom sound of 10 Hz and will start resonating at 10 Hz because every cell of your body has something called a mirror neuron. And that mirror neuron, while we're sitting here talking and everyone listening, your mirror neurons are evaluating your environment. And it's actually— there's a viscous substance in your body called DNA. If I was to take yours, Debra Atkinson, staple it to the ground and put it— it would stretch to Pluto. And what it's doing right now as we're sitting here, it's it's actually absorbing codes, information as codes from your environment, like the smells, the touch, everything, sunlight. They actually— MIT said that we're actually absorbing codes from the center of the universe. So, and what's happening is our DNA is changing every 40 seconds. So that means if you look at life as a threat, you're downregulating your DNA. But if you're looking at it as a challenge, they've proven that it's upregulating. So all of this is happening in your— when your brain's out of balance, it can't regulate those, those functions. And that's only one function. I mean, there's trillions of things going on on your subconscious level that you don't know about consciously. We think our, our brain between our ears is controlling the show, but that's actually like a dummy brain. I would consider it like a Google tablet. It only transmits and receives information. Your gut brain is controlling the whole show. If somebody has a spinal cord injury, the body still functions. So it's not the brain in our head that's doing it. But it's also, we have a brain in our heart. So there's 40,000 neutrino cells in our heart that broadcast information as codes that they can actually measure. It's called HRV, heart rate variability. And in between the RR function, there's actually codes that tell it what's going on. It even tells us how much brainwave activity you have is being sent to the heart so the heart can then respond because the brainwaves actually control neurotransmitter production. And when that brain's out of harmony, it can't make the right neurotransmitters. When, when somebody tells me that we have a mental health problem in the world today, I say, no, we don't. We have a physiological problem in the world today. People are sitting too long looking at screens. They're not breathing right. They're not eating right. It's a lifestyle problem. It's not a mental health problem. Because if we took sugar off the table, we took seed oils off the table, we had people eating healthy foods and thinking healthy thoughts and getting sunlight and getting out and grounding and doing the things that our ancestors our ancestors did, we wouldn't have mental health issues. We might have a few here and there, but not like today. I mean, there's a tsunami of mental health problems, and it has to do— it starts, first of all, you cannot think a bad diet, you know. And so there's, you know, you got to eat right, and then you've got to move and breathe for the brain to function, because movement is life. And if you don't move and breathe, the nervous system doesn't move. And then when you, when you think about brain fitness, You can do mindfulness, you can do these things, but what we proved in the lab, which might be frightening for the listeners, is that most people do not know how to meditate. I've scanned 30,000 brains in the last 10 years, and actually people are stressing out their system when they meditate, because when you close your eyes, you actually shut down 30% of the neural activity in the brain, and it causes the brain, the body, the nervous system— 30% is in the brain— goes into fight or flight, so their monkey mind takes over. You know, and they start thinking about the bills they have to pay. Did they shut the door? Did they shut off the furnace? Did they— or the stove? And so the reason we have the light in the eyes, and we've shown that, is they call it retinal flashing, is because we have specialized cells in our eyes that actually connect with blue light. When somebody asks, why do we use blue light? And it doesn't upset the circadian rhythm. It's only 8 LEDs. This computer screen we're looking at right now is a million, so it's only 8. But we just need a little bit of a flicker to signal the brain to stay awake because it's an awakened brain state for meditation, not a sleeping state. And most people can't do it because they're, they're doing it on their own. They've not been trained. Now, if you have a professional and you're learning and you're doing breathwork, that makes a big difference. But when I, when I'm talking about the people that we've measured, these are people that are coming in for studies that have never meditated. They don't know anything about this. We're— because we have to have a blank kind of a blank canvas to do this, do the research.

Yeah. Oh, so interesting. So you said this, you said it a couple of times. I just want to circle back to it because I think there's so much thought about, uh, mindset. And, you know, is that, is that active or is that passive? When you say you can't think, you have to be thinking certain thoughts, where do we, where do we get there?

Well, I think that it becomes ingrained as we practice it. You know, certain people just, you know, they say there are people that run from fires and people that run into fires. Those are firemen, you know. So, you know, there's a different mindset. They don't look at it as a threat. They look at it as a challenge. They've got to put the fire out. They got to save the lives of the children or the dogs and cats. You know, they're not even thinking about that they could get killed, you know, because if they did, they'd probably get killed, you know. So it's a mindset. And one of the things they did during COVID which was exciting, They did a study because your mitochondria, actually your metabolism, is actually a function of absorbing light and transmitting light. Every person listening to this podcast is an infrared light generator. You're generating 810 nanometer light, which just happens to be healing light. That's why when you're around the right people, you feel good, you're healing, 'cause that person is actually beaming codes out of their body in the cells from the mitochondria. What they found was the people that looked at COVID as a threat actually produced 200 times less light at the mitochondria level. So they actually stuffed out the fire. So what we call it is a cell danger response. So the cells actually created a protective, like a protective coating around them so that the light could not shine. But when you, when the people that looked at as a challenge, they were producing more light, they were generating more energy in other words, and that energy is part of your metabolism.. And it doesn't have to do with the food you eat, because if you have HRV, you eat a meal, check your HRV before, check it afterwards, you lose energy when you eat. You don't gain energy. You know, you gain injury energy through the recovery of the eating. The body metabolizes, digests, and then moves it into— that's why they call it the electron transport chain. We are electronic beings. We are energy beings. Or we can say we're light beings, because at the most cellular base point Everything we do is converted into light in ATP, which is the currency of the body, which heals and maintains all regulating functions of the body.

So speak a little bit— you said also something about your second brain, the gut brain, and how it controls everything. And, and for every woman here probably listening, gut changes in midlife that make digestion, elimination, gas, bloating, you name it, kind of suddenly hit her where she potentially never had them, or if she did, now they're amplified and less predictable. So talk about that.

Well, when you're— you should have, if I could take 100% of your brainwaves and measure them, which we do here at the lab, you should have 45% beta, 30% alpha, about 10% theta, and the rest should fall into gamma, into delta. But what happens as we age, unfortunately, if I was to measure most people listening, 90% of the people we measure in the lab, they're over 70% delta when they're awake. That means they have a lot of inflammation or they've had a traumatic brain injury, and that means that the whole system is going to dysregulate. So you're going to have those— like, people who wake up in the middle of the night and say, I'm going through menopause, that's not true. Every person on Earth, their temperature increases 2 degrees at 2 o'clock in the evening because the circadian rhythm of the sun— the sun is beaming codes to our body to tell it what to do. 2. At 2 o'clock in the afternoon, you're going to drop 2 degrees. It happens to every person on Earth. But if you're dysregulated, you'll think you're hungry and you're having blood sugar problems. It's not that. It's your nervous system. At night, it's not you're sweating because your temperature increased maybe 5 degrees instead of 2 degrees because you didn't have the right brainwave activity. And sleeping is not about just hitting the pillow and going to sleep. It's an unwinding And there's a cycle of sleep. So for these people that are doing this, the problem is two-thirds of the world isn't sleeping. And I always tell people, sleep is when you incubate your superpowers. You know, if you're not sleeping, you don't get to have the nice day that you want to have. You know, we've all had that day where we slept really good and felt like we could conquer the world. That's because there's more neurological activity done during sleep than when you're awake. You know, we don't, we don't think when we're awake. We react, we interact. But during sleep, our brain actually compartmentalizes and organizes during REM sleep, and during deep delta sleep, it actually purifies. And imagine this, Debra, you're 2014, you're at college, you're going through physiology class, and they take you to the lymph system. The lymph system stops at the neck. Everybody on earth believes that. But then in 2015, during a sleep study, a doctor finds out that during level 4 sleep, a part of the brain called the glial lymphatic system opens up and you detox the brain. They didn't have any clue before 2015. So imagine that they found a new part of the human anatomy in 2015. Amazing. Now, the other thing that's exciting about science right now is that in 2003, remember they mapped the human genome and they said 99% of you is junk, right? They said, we know 1%, so the rest must be junk. But in 2018, they actually have technology now that can measure the, the coding of the DNA up to the second. And now they know that that DNA is regulating itself every 40 seconds or so. So it's changing so rapidly. That's why the ancient teachers would say you can't step into the same body twice. Like, they use the analogy of a river. I'm standing here, Neuse River is out here. I look at it, wow, it looks just like the Neuse River, but that's a different river than there was there yesterday. That's different water, different fish, different settlement. The same thing's true with your body. So once you start to recognize that you, you're never there, like there's no graduation, you've gotta work on yourself every day and you gotta look at every meal, you have an opportunity to burn fat or store fat. Every day you have an opportunity to breathe life into your cells, systems, and organs. You have the ability to build energy in, you have the right to have an exciting and powerful life, or you can say, oh, poor me, life's happening to me instead of through me. And so, with the mindset we're talking about is when you have the right training, you start looking at life and saying, "Life is conspiring with me, not against me." That even if it's a negative thing, I always tell people, "Imagine this, Debra, you're Superman and you're Superman or Superwoman and you know kryptonite's going to hurt you. So, you carry your kryptonite around and you show it to everybody. This is my kryptonite." And everybody's, oh, kryptonite hurts them. This is what people do with their problems. Oh, my dad was an alcoholic. Oh, I have— I'm going through menopause. Oh, I'm going— they tell everybody they're kryptonite. No, Superman doesn't do that. Superwoman doesn't do that. They put it in a lead box, they put in the backyard. You don't talk about those things because nobody needs to know you— what makes you weaker. You want to tell people what makes you stronger because we want to be around gainers, not drainers. And the reality is that people will drain your energy. It's been a proven fact because that mitochondria that I was talking about that absorbs light and transmits light, it's always seeking balance. So when you get around those friends that when you get around them, you're sparked, you're just smiling and the energy's going. And then that Debbie Downer shows up and you go, when they finally leave, you go, wow, that's like, she got on my last good nerve. She just drains us because she was an energy vampire. Or he was, you know, usually it's a family member at holidays you didn't want to show up, but they show up. It's a big to-do and the big showboating, and they want to tell you about all their problems and everybody's got, oh, poor Billy, you know, or whoever it is, you know, and the reality is that they're just sucking the energy out of people. So you've got to learn to, with a positive attitude, you just got to, you got to, that's why you got to have compassion, but you got to say, that's their life. That's not mine. Don't internalize it. And keep your energy up. And that's when you have that positive attitude I'm talking about, you know. So it's not that you're not going to be caring about those people, but they got to care about themselves first, you know, and then I'll, then I'll care about them.

So good. And so with your, with your history, you know, it would have been really easy to kind of take a different mindset, right? So I, I just want to say that for everybody here listening, that it, it— because of history doesn't mean that it has to go forward. And I think there are a lot of women here who might have had a tendency to be glass half empty as opposed to glass half full. But again, it doesn't mean that you can't change that at this point. This episode is sponsored by the Flipping 50 Menopause Fitness Specialist. It is the framework that we designed our entire membership and program based on. Since 2013, I've been developing that after 30 years of working with women in midlife. That was born, and in 2018, we rolled out the Menopause Fitness Specialist to train other fitness and health pros on how to actually prescribe exercise. Here's where we're going next, in case you wanna get started now, that we're actually training physicians. On exercise prescription, knowing they get very little of it in medical school, and hoping that it also bridges the gap for you who may be a fitness or health professional or want to be, who works with women in menopause, because there is so much demand and so much room for you right now. If you are working with women in menopause but not getting all the results, don't have a reliable, predictable framework that gets you results over and over that people know, like, and trust, come and talk to us. We'll put the link in the show notes for today. That's the Flipping 50 Menopause Fitness Specialist. And if you want to head on over to fitnessmarketingacademy.com, it's where we have all of the content dedicated to you, health and fitness pros. So if somebody wanted to and they're listening and they want to make some changes in the way that they think and the patterns that hit them, you know, how can they flex?

I'll tell you how my dad did it for me because I was the most negative kid on earth. I really believed God's only job was to screw up Patrick's life, you know, growing up until what my dad did, which was really good in parenting, was when we got in trouble, we didn't get sent to our room to think about what we did. That's probably the worst thing you can do to a child. They already know what they did. What he would do is say, he had a row of books that were all self-help books. He said, "Go pick out a book. You got to read it and then tell me how you're going to apply that today." And if we could convince him that we were really going to apply that in our life, then he'd let us go out and play. So, at first, you know, we're just pretending, you know, we're doing it. And there was one book that shifted my whole behavior. It was called As a Man Thinketh. And there was one called As a Woman Thinketh now. And basically, it says what you own in your heart, you'll have in your life. So, you know, if you can think about that. So, I think the first thing is like listening to podcasts like this are going to do it. What are you spending your time? Are you watching Stephen King? You know, are you reading Stephen King novels? I always tell people, if you're too happy, just turn on CNN. You're going to be depressed in 5 minutes or less because they search the whole world for bad news. So, are you seeking out things that are going to make you feel worse because you're used to that feeling? Sometimes, you got to do something that's uncomfortable before it becomes comfortable.. And my, one of my trainers, Richard Bandler, who is, who founded NLP, he always used to say, anything worth doing well is worth doing terrible at first. But we're in a, we're in the social media world, so we can't ever let anybody know that we're failing. You don't have to let people know that, but just know you're not going to be perfect at everything you do. If you can catch those thoughts, and I'll just give one tip to the listeners so they can do it, but there's a bunch of them in the book. But let's say that you have a negative thought that comes up. You've got to catch that thought just like you'd catch a butterfly. So, what you do is you say, "Stop," and you visualize a stop sign. And you say to yourself, "Stop giving it energy. Stop giving it life. Stop giving it time." And just for a moment, you think, "What would be 3 alternative thoughts?" One could be crazy, but they should be different thoughts. So, you're retraining your brain. And the reason for 3 is if you do it once, that could be an accident. If you do it twice, it could be a coincidence. But when you do it 3 times, the brain does something amazing. It starts to create new neural pathways and circuitry. And Hebb's Law says those neurons that fire together wire together. So as you get these brainwaves firing together, I tell people it's like cicadas in the summer. One starts and then the rest of them begin. You want to have— once you do that for a while, what will happen is your subconscious will say, you know what, he or she doesn't like those negative thoughts. So it starts doing it automatically. And so you just start with small things. Don't try to change your whole life. Get up in the morning, the first thing to do is to stop drinking coffee first thing in the morning because this crushes your cortisol trough. But drink that 2 hours after you awaken. When you first wake up, have a large glass of water or 2 with Celtic salt in it because your brain has shrunk 3/4 of an inch while you slept. It's dehydrated, and coffee dehydrates. So you're, you're putting your brain behind the 8-ball right away. But if you do it 2 hours afterwards, you're fine. And then try to do some kind of physical activity, hopefully to exhaustion, you know, some kind of physical resistance training, because you get to trigger something called BDNF, brain-derived neurotrophic factor. Think of it as Miracle-Gro for the brain, you know. So, and then After your workout, if you don't have BrainTap, now if you had my equipment, you'd do that, but if you don't, sit down, relax, and do at least 2 to 3 minutes of psychological breathing, which is you breathe in deeply, and the reason you do that, that's gonna reset your nervous system, and then set and just relax for 1 to 2 minutes. That's when the neuroplasticity sets in. And I'll give you an example. When I go to India, I ask them, what is the most important yoga pose? And they said, everybody knows that. And they said, it's the corpse pose. It's the Yoga Nidra when you're at the end of yoga. But a lot of people think it's the yoga. The yoga was designed to get your brain ready for meditation. The same with Tai Chi and that. So people do the exercise, but they don't do the neuroplastic change. The change comes in the recovery phase, not in the doing phase.

Oh, mic drop right there. Yeah, that's very good. Yeah. Everybody here needs to hear that one for sure. I also want to go back before you go on. I want to make sure that we say this because I think this— we've heard it, and yet I think we let it go through because, number one, we can't really grasp it yet. But that whole idea of you may actually be seeking out negative experiences or negative messages because that's what you're used to, it's what you're comfortable with. And I think that is— it's such an easy thought to reject because none of us wants that to be true. But I think, how could you, if you were going to help somebody become aware that they might be doing that?

What would you do? I think that's why you have to sit and don't be concerned about meditating. Just let your thoughts flow because your thoughts will tell you what you're thinking. You have— they say we have a 60,000-word tape loop that plays in our head. And if we listen to it, we would never listen to it again. Because it's most people, it's like 90% negative, you know, but that's because we're the genetic inheritance of a bunch of paranoids. Our genetic ancestors made it. They didn't fall off the cliff. They didn't get eaten by the lion, you know, but we don't need all those protections now. We can liberate our mind and be more creative. We need to be more spontaneous and creative. Do things that are spontaneous. You know, Leo Buscaglia wrote the book Love a long time ago in the '70s when I read it. And he said it's important to have a great leeway in behavior because then people give you the greater leeway of behavior. But if you act so strict and rigid all the time, then you don't get to act out. We need to express ourselves in many different ways, like turn on the radio or your phone. You have the ability to play any piece of music you want at any time. Set the soundtrack to your life. It shows that if you do that, you reduced your dementia symptoms by 40%. But if you let life tell you what you're listening to and you get all mad because they're playing the wrong music, well, that's up to you. I don't know anybody who doesn't have a phone. And then get up and move. If you don't know how to do yoga, don't know how to do tai chi, then just dance. Just get your nervous system going. And you can close the shades, you know, just don't let anybody see you. But it's, it's, it's important that we let loose. Because our nervous system gets locked. And when you said it's like we don't want to think those thoughts, but what happens is those thoughts are thinking through us. You're not your thoughts. Who's thinking the thoughts that you're thinking? It's not you. It's repetitive. It's your subconscious just reminding you of all the things that mom, dad, brothers, sisters, preachers, and teachers, everybody who programmed you up to this moment in time, thought was important for you to know. And they were trying to protect you. Trying to hurt you. Maybe some were trying to hurt you, but most were trying to protect you. But the reality is that you're big now. You're grown up. Change your thoughts just like you change a channel on a television. Those thoughts are just thoughts. They don't have to act on them. You know, a lot of people think, I think a thought, oh God, I got to have that cake. No, you don't. It's just a thought. Let it go. Think about if you ate that cake, the guilt, the shame, the resentment, then you say, I don't want to eat that cake now. 'You ruined it for me.' You know, if somebody tells you all the bad things about it, right? So start ruining it for yourself, and what will happen is the subconscious will stop bringing you the message to have the cake. But you've got to take action. You know, they have a saying, 'Faith without works is dead,' right? So you can't just think about something, you've got to act on those things. And once you start acting on them, if you, if you meet your brain halfway, your subconscious will do the rest. And because What'll happen is when you do it often enough, the brain will say, this must be important. And so then it starts marking it out.

Tell us a little bit about that, the technology like BrainTap, and what does it actually look like to work that into your routine?

Yeah, yeah. It's a headset that has lights in the eyes and in the ears. And the reason for that is we want to bring light energy into the brain.. And what we know in science is if I bring light energy in, your, your hemoglobin absorbs photon energy, photonic energy. So it's absorbing the light energy, and then it circulates through the bloodstream until it finds a cell that's about to die. Now, the eyes are brain matter, so that means we're delivering light to the brain, to the frontal lobe, which is most important. And then the ears— all the blood in your body moves through the ears. So now we can move, we can move this really blood doped with light into the brain. And that's what regulates your temperature in your brain, by the way. So the light energy goes into the brain. And now what happens is when that cell receives that photon, it starts the Krebs cycle again. And it remembers, the cell remembers exactly what it was at the moment of creation. So it goes back to being a new cell. But the most incredible thing it does, it starts spitting out 32 times the ATP that it did before. Wow. So imagine when you use photonic energy. So what we know is that you've probably heard the expression, my kids are too tired to sleep. Most adults are too tired to sleep. They're too tired to meditate because when— if their brain doesn't have the energy. So the first thing we have to do with BrainTap is we have to deliver energy to the brain so you can stay awake because that's when you're going to get the maximum change and you're going to get the brainwave training. And then what we're going to do is we're going to— that That light, by the way, is not just light. It has frequencies to it, and everything in the universe has a beat and a frequency. Like if we go to the ocean, you and I were to sit down near the ocean, we'd start to relax just unconsciously because that ocean has a 10-hertz potential, which means that ocean is actually broadcasting an alpha frequency. If we walk through the forest, it'll be between 10 and 12-hertz frequency. That's why forest bathing is so important. If you and I went to the mountaintop, we would, we would go to 7.8 Hz frequency. Now, the neat thing about this, these are all brainwaves that trigger neurotransmitter activity, like that theta one I was talking about. It produces GABA. GABA is a precursor to DMT. We have a natural propensity to want to get outside of the stress. So now we can, if we go, so we can have those mountaintop experiences. So BrainTap can do that. It can guide you through. So we're, We're using light, sound, and vibration to mimic nature. So when you go on your journey— now, along with that, we use words in some of the sessions and we use music only in the others. Music is important because music will synchronize and harmonize. There's something called the Mozart effect, which they proved that this kind of music that we use actually just makes you smarter. I don't have to teach you anything, just get your brain working the right way and you're smarter. And then, so we have that music as the carrier, but then we have words positive psychology, so we can start to change that tape loop. Because if you don't change it, it's going to keep doing what it's always done. And so when you actively change it, and it's not about affirmations as you might know them, even though Louise Hay's group did publish my book and really strong on affirmations, I believe you need to ask questions of the brain. And I'll just give an example to the audience so that they know. If you were to say to yourself, I'm thin and attractive, and you're not, you might start feeling emotions of shame and guilt, even though you said you affirmed that in front of the mirror and you were really proud about it, but your subconscious didn't believe it. But what if you said, what would my life be like if I was thin and healthy? How would I live my life? What would I do differently? So the hows, the whats, the whens, the how oftens, you're not there yet. Once you get there and you own it, you can say, I am, because you did it. But until you get there, you have to have transactional I always say not transactional, but transformational language, because your brain thinks I am is a transaction. It doesn't work. But the other is transformational. You have to think in order to do that. And your brain has to go to work solving that problem. What's it going to be like when I'm healthy and fit? What's it going to be like when I'm able to say no to chocolate cake? What's it going to be like when I'm a nonsmoker? What's it going to be like when I'm alcohol-free? The brain acts totally different. Than those I am statements that are not true. And I will challenge anyone because I can show in the brain. We've done studies and shown how people using I am statements actually lowers their brain energy because they don't believe it. Yeah. We've used kinesiology too to prove that their body is weaker when they— so you want to say things that are motivational to you and transformational.

Yeah, totally agree with that. Yeah, I've never, never loved that whole, you know, just positive affirmation. Well, I think where you loop right back to meditation when you learn that it is not that, it's connecting the emotion, putting yourself in feeling it already before it's ever happened, a gratitude if you will. Talk to me about— so all of this time that we are all spending in front of screens of various kinds, what is that doing to us?

Well, It's downregulating our nervous system because we're in— now with me, I have a grounding mat I'm standing in front of. So as long as you ground yourself, and you can buy these online at Amazon, they're not very expensive. If you— what I know is if I was to come to your house, Debra, and I was to measure you and you weren't using a grounding mat, you'd have between 2 and 4 volts running through your body right now. You should be zero. But if I took that, I took that same thing and I put a grounding mat or took you outside You're barefoot, you'd be zero. So these are beaming energy to us, just like an X-ray. In fact, when you fly, one hour in the air is like getting one X-ray. Standing in front of the computer screen for a year is like having an X-ray. Wow. You're getting this radiation because it's radiating light, but it's not, it's not coded for health. They could program these to be emitting like Rife frequencies or Solfeggio frequencies frequencies, but they don't because they're stupid. You know, they think that frequencies aren't hurting people, but if you go to those 5G towers, look at the bottom, it's like a pack of cigarettes. All the warnings are right on the tower, but they put it right by a school or they put it by a park because that's what's happening is your cells— when I was talking about beaming codes like from the sun and telling us like if you don't get to bed by 10 o'clock, you don't make as much melatonin. If you don't, if you're not in bed by 11, you don't clean your liver. These are all codes that are sent from the sun. How does your body know it's 10 o'clock or 11 o'clock? But what happens is the radiation comes in the form of pulsing energy. But in the spectrum of frequencies, our body is used to, if your computer screen was all the frequencies in the universe, we're not even one hair. That's what we're used to experiencing. So they introduce another frequency like 50 million pulses per second. Second. Earth frequencies are 0.5 to 100. So they introduce a 50 million pulse blast of radiation from a tower so we can have better cell phone service, which I don't think that's what it's doing. But that's, you know, because I don't have better cell service and they put these towers everywhere. So, but whatever it's doing, whatever it's doing it— no, whatever it's doing, it's harming people. Some people are so compromised They have— it says right on the tower, you'll have flu-like symptoms, you know. And if people— if somebody's not feeling well and they just put up a tower in your neighborhood, walk over to the tower barefoot, by the way. So you're not getting— when you're barefoot, that tower won't hurt you. But when you're wearing plastic shoes and you're not grounded— now leather shoes are okay, you know, or moccasins or something like that— but if you're, if you're not grounded, you're going to keep collecting that energy. And some people like at least 25% of the people are compromised by these frequencies. They can't even sit in front of screens.

Say a little something about that. So here we are, we're 60-something and we've had the kind of life we did and maybe we were luckier and we could, you know, between 5 and 15, we could just say, I'm going outside. And we played outside, but that doesn't happen anymore. Kids are on screens when they're infants anymore. What's, what's going to come in the future?

What's going on? This is going to be bad unless they do something about it, because when we scan people playing computer games, I don't, I don't, I let my grandson play a little bit, but I say you got to do BrainTap afterwards because it looks like his, when I, I showed him his brain when he played these computer games, any computer game, because it's a dopamine rush, right? Even the little bells and whistles, everything, so much going on. The brain has to organize all that in the brain. You probably remember the movie Rain Man where Dustin Hoffman said 1,243 toothpicks. Well, we're doing that with the computer. You don't know it consciously, but your other-than-conscious mind is interpreting, is it red, green, or blue, every pixel and making this picture. That's a lot of work, and it's changing every second or every millisecond. So that's, that's why when people sit in front of the computer, go, I don't know why I'm so tired, or why they get sucked, because the computer is robbing you of your energy. Now we have to do it if you have jobs like I do, you know, I have to stand in front of the computer, do these kind of things, but I'm going to go reboot my brain afterwards. The problem is, and we've wanted to, one of the things we want to create, and my science officer, Dr. Sidral, who's a pretty famous guy in photobiomodulation, and this is what we're talking about here, and I said, we should have straps that they wear with HRV, and when their HRV drops to a certain point, the application doesn't work anymore. They have to go do something to raise their energy level because it's not about the stress. We can handle that stress. The problem is there's no relief from that stress. Like, they play those games for 3 hours or 4 hours, or, you know, they become the babysitter. And what happens eventually— in fact, when I go get my grandkids when they were little— now they're 16 and 13, so I don't get to say much. You know, they do what they want. But when they were little, I said, Alex, I'm going to come get the kids. No TV. When they said TV rots your brain, it does, because it's a 10-cycle rhythm with nothing but bad noise. And so what happens is it dysregulates the brain. We've shown it in the lab. So I said, you can watch TV, but you need to, you need to know what you're, what you're getting into. It's not, it's not that it's, you know, we were exposed to negative things all the time. It stresses our body out, but we need to have the recovery of that stress. Like Tom Brady says, for every 1 minute of exertion, you need 2 minutes of recovery. So, you know, I don't watch a lot of TV, and the average person watches, I guess, my 8 hours a day or whatever, you know. So, but it— that's, that's why they become droid-like, because they're not thinking for themselves.

They're just getting input. Okay, so because you said that, I have to ask this follow-up question. Uh, when you say they're not thinking for themselves, it certainly begs the explanation of What about AI?

Well, I think AI can be good and bad. If you interact with AI and you're creative and you're doing something, they did a study actually that I was on Fox News talk, 'cause I'm a Fox News person. They come to me all the time for different things about the brain. And they did a study with graduate students and they let them use ChatGPT. And they found that the group that used ChatGPT, ChatGPT, that they actually lost neural activity. Really? Because all they did was— it'd be like taking your homework on a copy machine and making a copy of it. They didn't read it, they didn't look at it, they just used it to answer the questions. But if you interact with it and use it as it was intended, you know, a lot of people think it's sentient or something, like it knows something. I think it's great. If you use it correctly. But if you think it's going to answer your life problems, I mean, it's been telling people to actually kill themselves, you know, when people are doing it. So people are using it for their own psychological needs. It's just, it's only going to feed back. And remember, it's everybody's garbage out there. It's not just your garbage. It's everybody's garbage. So you might not be getting really good information. But I think if you use it to be creative, like you could, you could say, hey, I want a letter written to my aunt and these are the things I want to do. And put it in the voice of whatever, you know, somebody you love, then it will write a nice letter for you. You know, but if you're going to ask it to give you life advice, I think you're going in the wrong direction. It's not quite there yet. I mean, you got to— everyone needs a mentor and it shouldn't be a digital mentor.

It should be a real person. Totally agree. Thank you so much. This has been very insightful. Thank you so much. So first, Tell us where we can get the book. I imagine everywhere books are sold. But beyond that, yeah, tell us about Brain Fitness Blueprint.

Yeah, you can go anywhere that books are sold. It's called Brain Fitness Blueprint. My co-author, Rashika Sikri, was the head of Google Wellness. So we put together, not only, we wanted to put together a book. Google has a lot of wellness, or they did. COVID, they got rid of all their wellness people. It was crazy. So she retired. She did pretty well. I'm not feeling sorry for her. She got a really big paycheck. I'm sure. But what they did they used to have a program called Search Inside Yourself, and it was really good. And they measured a lot of things about the brain and function because they wanted to squeeze as much out of every employee as they could, right? But so she's adding that into it as far as from a business perspective. And then I'm adding in my 40 years of being in the public sector with— we have 3,000 clinics using BrainTap right now. So we have a lot of data to teach people. It's not just my data. I mean, a lot of my doctors are really good at gathering information and sharing it across the network. I have a saying about, I call it the group IQ. We're all smarter together than separate. So we, what I've done is I've condensed that all into the Brain Fitness Blueprint, and we've given at the back of the book, there's a 30-day plan. So when you read the book afterwards, if you haven't implemented the things, it gives you 30 days. And if you do that 30-day plan, they're all simple, easy tips, and you don't have to have my equipment to do it. I've made it in a way that you can do it with just the book. Book, because there's a lot of ways you can do the same things that I do with equipment. Technology just makes it easy.

You just press play on the app and put the headset on and you're ready to roll. So, so easy. Thank you so much. This has been fantastic. And I think, listeners, I'd love to hear your questions on this because we opened up a lot of things. And the brain controls so much, but the gut controls so much. And, you know, being a woman in menopause listening, you know the mission statement we live by here. There's no more powerful health influencer in the world than a midlife woman. And you're watching these kids and grandkids, you know. So it's all going to come back to how much can we help and what can we do, not just for ourselves so we're around a little bit longer, thriving a little bit longer, but also can we help them have a better, longer life, no matter what technology is doing to them or for them. So thank you so much, Dr. Porter.

Awesome. Thank you. Thanks for having me.