EP 178: Aging and Resilience | Kristen Willeumier

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Hi. Welcome to the Radical Responsibility Podcast. This is your host, Fleet Mahl. And today I'm having a conversation with Dr. Christian Willemeier, who I've been able to interview a number of times and developed a friendship, and I'm so impressed with her work and has been so personally helpful to me. She was director of brain imaging for The Amen Clinic. Dr. Daniel Amen, one of the world's leading authority on brain science and on healing various brain disorders and brain injuries. She knows about as much about the brain and about healing the brain and also setting up our brain for thriving as anybody I've ever spoken to. She's just an amazing thought leader in this field, and we get in some really practical conversations about how to set ourselves up and set our brain up for thriving throughout the lifespan in terms of things that we can do with our lifestyle that have a real impact and can help sustain our longevity and not only our life, not only in terms of our lifespan, but also in terms of our health. Spanish so Dr. Christian Willemeyer.

Dr. Willemeier, welcome.

Well, thank you so much, Fleet, for having me back. It's such a pleasure to see you. How are you doing?

I'm doing well and it's great to see you. And we really enjoyed your, as did our audience, your presentation for the best year of your life, and so really excited that you could be part of the Global Resilience Summit. And I'm going to share a bit of your background for our audience and then we'll jump right into the conversation.

All right, sounds great.

Okay, so Christian Wilmeier, PhD, is a neuroscientist with research expertise in neurobiology and Neuroimaging. Dr. Willemeier holds a BA degree in Psychology from Boston College and Ms. Degree in Physiological Science from UCLA College of Letters and Sciences. An MSN PhD in Neurobiology from the David Geffen School of Medicine at ucla. She was a postdoctoral scientist in the Department of Neurology at Cedars Sinai Medical Hospital, where she continued her research in the field of neurodegenerative disease. She was a recipient of a National Research Service Award Fellowship from the National Institutes of Health and has presented her work internationally. Having served as the Director of neuroimaging research for Amen Clinics, she led the efforts in utilizing imaging technologies to understand the neurobiological signatures of of underlying psychiatric disorders. In this capacity, she oversaw many pioneering studies, including a clinical research trial investigating the long term effects of repetitive subconcussive impacts in National Football League players. Subsequent work focused on therapeutic approaches to rehabilitate brain function in athletes with mild traumatic brain injury and the application of machine learning algorithms to neuroimaging data to improve the diagnosis and treatment of psychiatric disorders. Dr. Willemeyer is widely published in peer reviewed medical journals including the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease, Translational Psychiatry and the Journal of Neuroscience, and is author of the book Biohack youk How to Boost Cognitive Health, Performance and Power. She lives in Los Angeles, California. So I think people can understand now why we're interviewing Dr. Willemeyer and.

Thank you. I think we can have a really rich conversation today about the human brain and nervous system and resilience and all of that and what supports it.

So our theme today.

On this day of the summit is individual resilience. Throughout the summit, we're going to go on the relational and collective and systemic and the whole thing. But it really starts with how can we be more resilient to ourselves mentally, physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually. And so I'm wondering, to begin with, as a neuroscientist, a clinical researcher, how would you define resilience or how would you use that term, resilience? What does it mean to you?

Yeah, well, this is such a great way to start day one. Let's discuss resilience. So in a nutshell, resilience is really the ability for us to bounce back from life's challenges. Right? It's the ability to be able to cognitively and emotionally and physically handle the stressors that come into our life. And when I think about resilience and I think about brain health, which is why you have me here today, there's a concept that I would love to introduce to your audience. And it's the concept what we call brain reserve. Brain reserve is that extra tissue, we could call that increase in brain volume or increase in synaptic activity that can be gained through certain dietary and lifestyle habits, this kind of brain reserve or cognitive reserve, we can start to get really as early as our childhood. So when I like to talk to people about how do we develop a more emotionally resilient brain and how do we develop cognitive reserve and brain reserve, it can really start in childhood. And I wanted to ask, should I just dive in and give some indications of what that really means?

Absolutely, absolutely.

So when we are born, really from conception to birth, through the second Decade of life. Our brain is in this rapid period of growth and development. So again, from birth to about the age of 25 is when the brain is going through its maturation phase. And during this time there are certain steps that conscientious parents who might be listening to this resilience summit could do with their children to really help develop what we call this brain reserve. Sort of this extra reserve of neural tissue that will allow us to be able to emotionally regulate or be able to manage our emotions and cognitive function. So how do we do this? Number one, think about teaching your kids how to eat a brain healthy diet. What foods are good for your brain? What foods are bad for your brain? And I know we can dive into this a little bit later on in the discussion, but as we know, think about the Mediterranean diet. You know, the importance of berries and green leafy vegetables and fruits and nuts and omega 3 fatty acids. You can actually start to feed these kind of foods to your kids while reducing sugars in packaged foods and processed foods. So you're training them at a very young age how to develop this what we would call brain reserve. So there's the foods you eat, number two, they're the fluids that you consume. So again, hydration is so important to healthy brain function. When you start to have a slight dehydration, you can't think clearly, you can't focus, it impacts your cognitive function. So teaching your children about how to have healthy hydration habits, that doesn't mean drinking Red Bulls or monster energy drinks or sugar sweetened sodas. So really about teaching sort of healthy fluids that we can take in, like the waters, the coconut waters, the fresh green juice. Then we think about exercise. So exercise is one of the best ways to help improve brain volume. So it allows us to not only improve circulation to the brain, but it also helps us to release what's called brain derived neurotropic function factor. That's a factor that actually helps us to grow neurons in the brain throughout life. So kids, you can get them started on an exercise program that helps to build resilience. Now I will give the asterisk as we've talked about, at least in our previous discussion, I've worked with when it comes to sports, kids who participate in contact and collision based sports, that can actually start to disrupt the delicate neurons in the brain, the shearing and tearing and the biomechanical forces. So that's an example of a way that you could actually disrupt resilience, maybe not earlier on in life, but those repetitive subconcussive impacts can cause neurological or psychiatric issues later on in life. And when I say later on, third, fourth, fifth decades of life. So, okay, we've got sports, then think about.

Sleep. We've talked about the importance of getting a good quality sleep and being able to properly emotionally regulate your nervous system. When we sleep, we clear out unwanted toxins. When we sleep, we help to form and store memories, things that we've learned during the day. And when we sleep, we help to release some of the more sort of emotionally.

Challenging issues that you might have had during the day. So sleep is a wonderful time to sort of get balanced with emotional regulation. It's treating psychiatric disorders when kids are young. And so anxiety, depression, add, all of these issues can start at a very young age, maybe because there's a predisposition in the parents for the kids to have it. So again, if you help get them the treatment they need, go work with a psychologist or a psychiatrist, give them the tools, and you and I can talk about some of those tools to properly manage the emotions. Then as they age, they're going to have greater emotional resilience. There's more, but this is just a nice foundational framework. So, you know, in this sort of period of development, you can start to grow more brain reserve again, more brain volume. That will help as we age to better emotionally regulate. So go from your teens into, say, your 40s now, from 40, 50, and 60. That's the time. And you and I have talked about this before, when your brain, what we call normal brain aging begins to happen. And I'm going to put the air quotes in because I don't like to sort of think of anything as normal. I like to always think about how we can optimize our brain. But that's when we start to see brain volume shrink about 5% per decade. So you get smaller brain volume, you get cortical thinning, you get a reduction in neurotransmitter production. Oh, my gosh. So all of these things start happening now. You have to proactively do things to take care of your brain health, to take care of the physical structure of your brain, which you can do through diet and lifestyle interventions. But because you're now in this brain aging phase, if during your childhood you didn't develop that, what I call brain reserve or cognitive reserve, as you age, you may not be able to handle stressful events as easily. So is this starting to make sense then when you get into your sixth decade of life, which is when we start to see neurodegenerative diseases happen your sixth, seventh, and eighth decade of life. Now, if you haven't taken the time to really build up that cognitive reserve, you can actually start to have changes again in cognitive function leading to dementia. One of the things that I've mentioned in our previous discussion is brain aging starts. Should say brain aging. Degenerative diseases start in the brain one to two decades before you have a symptom. And they're starting at the level, cellular level. That's why in your 40s and 50s, it's so important to take care of your brain health. So if I now sort of hold the camera lens back and talk about resilience, you can see resilience and brain health go hand in hand. And the dietary and lifestyle interventions that you start doing as early as possible are going to help the trajectory of not only your brain aging, but your ability to emotionally regulate.

So for those of us who are already mature adults, or Even in our 50s, 60s, or later.

All these lifestyle things you're talking about, good nutrition, getting enough rest, good hydration, healthy fluid intake.

All the things that we know are good for the body are also good for the brain. So can we make a difference and continue to build up cognitive reserve at midlife or even later? And also, how about learning and challenging the brain? Doesn't learning and challenging the brain also build cognitive reserve?

Absolutely. So this is one of the most incredible things that I learned through working at the Amen clinics. I saw that we could change the brain at any age. And what does that mean? We can improve blood flow to the brain. We can improve neurotransmitter function. We can improve functional connectivity between brain networks. So the answer is a resounding yes and the new learning. So there are two ways that we can really continue to improve brain function throughout life. It's physical activity and cognitively challenging activities. And the more that you engage in both of those throughout your life, the better your chances of having a stronger, more emotionally resilient brain. And why is that? So if we kind of circle back to that emotional resilience we know with physical activity.

Anything from aerobic training to even power walking, say that you're older and in your 70s, and you're not quite into the HIIT training or CrossFit, you could still do that power walking. You want to get the blood flowing. As I've talked before, your brain has over 400 miles of capillary network. So you want to keep the blood flowing, the vasculature open, and through that movement, not only do you bring the Oxygen and nutrients to your brain and remove the waste and keep again the blood flowing. For healthy cerebral function, you are also helping to manage the neurotransmitters that are involved in mood. So you increase your feel good endorphins, you increase serotonin, which helps to make you sort of feel relaxed. You can increase dopamine, which helps with focus, and you can increase gaba, which helps you to stay calm. So there's that exercise piece and then there's the cognitively stimulating activities. Those can be anything that your heart's desire. So it can be anything from reading, from creative pursuits, from listening to a TED Talk.

Writing, any kind of painting, drawing, anything that keeps your mind cognitively active. We like to say anything that stretches your neurons, that's going to actually help.

So attending a summit like this, attending.

A summit like this.

Watch all the video, dig into it, take notes, like, really chew on the material that's being presented by 35amazing.

Experts and sciences and so forth. If we really try to absorb that, that is going to help increase cognitive reserve, right?

Not only will that help increase cognitive reserve, it is going to help with memory. So what I would say is watch all of the talks, take notes, and then teach it to somebody else. One of the. I don't know if I shared this with you on our last summit. I love this. She's such an inspiration to me. So the late Betty White.

She. I used to see her. Yeah, the actress. So I used to see her. She would come in the building that we live in, and she just glowed and radiated with positivity and vitality and happiness. So I happened to read an interview that she did with People magazine for her 99th birthday. So we know she didn't quite make it to 100.

But they were asking her, what's the secret to a happy life and great health? And she said, having an optimistic attitude, number one, not to sweat the small stuff, talking about emotional resilience. But number two, she was still getting scripts from her agent. So she wanted to thank her agent for the ability to continue to get scripts and work. And just think about this. At 99 years of age, she was memorizing scripts and doing work in television. And so sometimes when I'm working with people or I'm talking about, let's engage in cognitively stimulating activities. She's such a wonderful example of how you can keep training the brain and keep your memory sharp until you're 100 years of age. And I think the more that we see these role models, you see a Lot of it. In film and television, you see these older actors and actresses that are still doing theater, they're having to work their brain.

We see, at least I've seen this in the brain imaging clinic. When people hit retirement is when they tend to slow down in, stop doing cognitively stimulating activities. Now, you know, social media, you know, people are scrolling their Instagram, their Twitters, their TikTok, they're watching television. You know, those are more entertaining activities. Those aren't really cognitively stimulating activities. So it's really important as we age to find the things that bring us passion and joy. Hey, a cognitively stimulating activity could be learning to play a game of chess or for me, I actually love doing puzzles. So puzzles help me get out of my sort of thinking mind, get into my creative mind. I become more better able to solve problems, but I just find them a lot of fun. So it's like find the things that bring you joy. Find, you know, sort of pair those cognitively stimulating activities with joyful things, things that bring you purpose. That's going to help preserve your brain health and help you to be more emotionally resilient. Because I know that's, you know, that's the big key to this summit. You know, what are the things that we can do to help us be able to really manage emotionally stressful situations?

So as we've been exploring this idea of resilience from various perspectives, neurobiological, psychological.

And.

In terms of the individual. At any rate, one thing that seems pretty closely aligned with resilience is what you might call psychological flexibility.

And fluidity, which is both kind of a mindset and a capacity and a learned capacity. I would imagine that this psychological flexibility, the ability to be adaptable, to be fluid, to be flexible, to reframe things and to engage a positive mindset, or kind of at least a can do mindset, like I've got this right, that sense of that in terms of a neurobiological level that that is connected to this cognitive reserve and to kind of the level of neuroplasticity that we're able to encourage in our brain through lifestyle.

Yeah, so you bring up a good point. And I'm going to now sort of flip to the neuroimaging side. So what can neuroimaging teach us about cognitive flexibility? Having worked in a psychiatric clinic, I've had.

The experience in seeing the different neurobiological patterns that are associated with anxiety, depression, ocd, add.

And what's also associated with a healthy, emotionally balanced brain state. And in all of the states where people have more cognitively challenging issues or psychiatric issues like anxiety and depression. We start to see there are certain regions of the brain that are overactive as an anxiety. So we see an anxiety increase in activity in the basal ganglia for people with obsessive compulsive disorder, people who ruminate on thoughts. We see increased activity in what's called the anterior cingulate gyrus. It's in the prefrontal cortex. It's the part of the brain that allows us flexibility and thinking. As you were just talking about, when those brain regions are overactive, we don't have the ability to be as flexible as we might want to. Right. In an emotionally challenging situation. And to take that one step further, in post traumatic stress disorder, we see increased activity in the basal ganglia, anxiety centers, the anterior cingulate gyrus, as I was just talking about, as you see in OCD and the thalamus. Right. It's sort of that deep effect limbic structure, and it creates on brain imaging what we like to call a diamond pattern. So when we see these regions of excess activity, we know the individual is probably going to have a real challenge with flexible thinking and optimistic thinking. And that's where you have to go. What kind of tools do we have in our toolbox to help quiet those regions of the brain? And thankfully, with psychology and psychiatry, we have an abundance of tools. And those tools can be anything from nutritional supplements. And we've talked about that in.

Our previous talk. You can use nutritional supplements like GABA, magnesium, 5 HTP, lemon balm, passion flour extract. All of those are calming to the brain. It can help calm.

Those areas of excess activity, allowing somebody to have more flexibility and thinking. Or there's certain medications that you can use again to quiet the anterior cingulate gyrus, antidepressant medications, which will allow for more flexibility and thinking. You and I have discussed neurofeedback. That's one of my favorite ways. It's where you can measure the electrical activity of the brain. And then the brain is able to self regulate and actually teach the brain how to quiet those areas of the brain down. So you've got that.

You'Ve got the cognitive reframing that you were just talking about, so you can work with a cognitive behavioral therapist to just reframe your thoughts. But what I found is sometimes people who have excess activity in those brain regions.

It might be challenging to only do the cognitive reframing. You might have to do that, plus incorporate dietary and lifestyle interventions, nutritional interventions, I mean, something even as simple as omega 3 fatty acids, we've talked about this before, are anti inflammatory, but they also can help decrease clinical symptoms of anxiety and depression. So knowing that we have all of these tools in our toolbox to help with emotional flexibility and regulation, and I know, you know, meditation can help breath work can help acupuncture can help EMDR therapy. So it's again, we have all of these wonderful ways to help quiet the brain's activity so it can become its most flexible and its most efficient. And that's how you're going to be able to get through exceedingly stressful situations.

So you've been referencing basically neuroplasticity in many ways. The fact that we now know the brain continues to change as well into adulthood. With maybe three decades ago we didn't know that, but now we do. And that's both good news and bad news. Right. Because it basically, the brain is a learning machine and it changes based on what we expose it to.

Right.

So if we're constantly exposing it to threat and negativity and drama and the news and you know, social media and you know, all the stuff that's meant to get people's attention there, but it's basically triggering your threat systems all the time, you know, that's going to influence our brain function. Whereas if we're, you know, really exposing it to things that build cognitive reserve and, and so forth. So you mentioned, I think BDNF is it, is it brain drive neuro, neurotropic factor. And so that's one, you know, the presence of that is one indicator of neuroplasticity. Right. And we know exercise increases that. From what I understand, two of the things that are most kind of leveraged in terms of actually increasing neuroplasticity are physical exercise and then mindfulness and mind training. Now, I don't know, does mindfulness specifically also increase BDNF or are there other ways that it increases neuroplasticity? And I know that not only does mindfulness increase neuroplasticity, but it kind of nudges the brain in the right direction, helps to develop greater cognitive balance, emotional balance and so forth. I wonder if you could talk about that a little bit.

Sure. Well, what I love about mindfulness exercises in meditation with the brain imaging is shown and what we've seen is it helps to activate the prefrontal cortex and the executive attention network. So it's a really wonderful focusing tool. And what it also does is help quiet other regions of the brain that are overly active, so engaging in these contemplative, meditative mindfulness practices. And as you know, because you've taught a variety of them, there's many ways to get to the same end goal. The end goal being using your mind as a focusing tool, but focusing on not the thoughts, but focusing on the body, focusing on the breath, focusing on a sound. And I know this is something that you are highly skilled in teaching people how to become more internally aware of their physical state and not to be so connected exclusively to the brain state or what's happening in our external environment, as you have just said. You know, right now we're watching the news, we're seeing what's going on in Ukraine, which is horrifying. I mean, I'm watching this humanitarian crisis unfold for me, and my heart is heavy watching these kind of images on the news. And I. For me, I have to watch it because I feel a sense of responsibility and compassion to do so. But as you mentioned, as we get older, it's about. I call it tending the garden of your mind. What are you going to allow into your mind? How are you going to allow that information into your mind? And how are you going to let that information impact you? I think one of the beauties of getting older and becoming wiser is you learn the importance of not being a reactive human being. You learn the importance of being a connected human being, taking information and information that might be terrifying. The war in Ukraine, the COVID pandemic. Right. The loss of loved ones. I've lost two family members during COVID You have to take that information and process it. Right. But not let it impact you in a way that you can't function at your best. So it's. It's like being a yogi or the Dalai Lama, right? The Dalai Lama. I had the pleasure of watching him speak at one of our Society for Neuroscience conventions. You see this man sitting there just so peacefully speaking, you know, radiating this extraordinary light and energy out to all of these scientists, some who believe in spirituality and some who do not, but the peacefulness that he has and that presence of mind and that calmness, this is what I aspire to. This is what I, you know, when I work with clients and I teach and talk about meditation or talk about mindfulness practices, why it's important to be able to embody the ability to handle anything that goes on in your life, let it come through you, but not let it get held into the neural circuits that. That I was just talking to you about. Right. It's it's when we take the traumas in and they get locked into the circuits and we don't have the tools to help release them.

That's when, you know, the inability to control your thoughts happens and then the cortisol gets released and the epinephrine and the norepinephrine and then you get the high blood pressure and the cardiovascular disease and the digestive issues. So we want to really work on helping to give people the tools to learn how to manage their brain activity. I know this is something that you do without the instrumentation. I have the benefit of having the instrumentation so I can actually show somebody what's going on in their brain. And that is, tends to be the inspiration for people to then go, oh, wow, I didn't know that. When I think this way, this is what happens in my brain and this is why I'm feeling stressed.

You brought up, you know, the current terrible crisis that's unfolding in Ukraine. And you know, this is just, I mean we've been ever since 911 and going back, I mean, unfortunately war is very still much part of our human situation on earth. But you had 911 and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and Syria and so we're constantly flooded with this. And now I think Ukraine has really captured the world's attention for obvious reasons. And so we could be watching that and allow it to kind of throw us into hopelessness or despair or start to really get fearful and panicky ourselves or, or you know, get into a lot of blame based anger or, you know, and I do, I. We can't live in a bubble. I think we need to titrate how much news we watch and not become news junkies. But still we can live in a bubble. And like you, I feel responsibility to be aware of what's going on, to bear witness to these things. So we could be watching this and then think, oh, how can I maybe understand this at a deeper level, right? I mean, obviously these conflicts and wars, I mean here there seems to be a clear aggressor, there seems to be clear. But still the cycles of this kind of thing is going. So what's happening at a deeper level? Like, how could I, you know, really try to understand this more deeply and then how can I contribute? What can I do? Maybe it's contributing to refugee relief or support for people in Ukraine or how can I make it so, you know, if I take in the information but then find a way to be proactive about being engaged with it in a, in a, you know, in a In a, I don't know, a positive way, at least an engaged way, you know, a proactive way that makes a world of difference. And if we're just sitting there absorbing the news and letting ourselves go into constant triggering and fight or flight and then either getting over activated or getting full of despair.

No, you're right. And what I love about what you did is you were strengthening your compassion muscle. So you were figuring out what way can I be proactive? So I'm taking the information in and hey, we are watching the Ukrainians with, they have incredible resilience. I mean, I'm actually watching just thinking, wow, they're ready to fight for their country. Women. I was talking to my husband the other day, 22% of their armed forces are women. So you've got women fighting, you've got men standing up for their country and their freedoms. You've got the president who is not going to back down. That is extraordinary to watch just from the perspective of they're not going to be bullied. And so you can, you know, you can glean those kind of insights from watching the news. And I think that's where you can go, okay, well, how can I be a positive impact in the situation?

It is a wonderful example of collective resilience. And not in any way to make light of the incredible suffering that the Ukrainians are going through, but I happen to have colleagues in Ukraine and members of our community in Ukraine and Czech Republic and Poland and that whole area. And I've been on zoom calls and leading meditations and doing quite a few things with people in Poland, Czech Republic and Ukraine over the last couple of weeks. And you know, I think, and I'm sure there are a lot of people in our audience that have those connections as well. And you know, just feeling like, you know, any way that we can contribute to something then.

Because, you know, we're constant at this choice point. I mean, another thing that's impacting all of us is the climate emergency that we're in. And that can throw us into despair and hopelessness or we can figure out, okay, how can I contribute even in small ways to changing our relationship to the earth and moving in center direction. We need to move in, right? So, so again, it's beautiful, this idea of cognitive reserve you're talking about means engaging life, right? I mean, it's like often the decline happens in retirement because often, sadly in retirement, people often just kind of disengage. They were very engaged in their career and then they kind of start to disengage or don't engage so much on things that give their life meaning. And I think what I hear you saying is just on all levels, we need to stay engaged. We need to stay engaged in taking care of ourselves, need to stay engaged with the world, stay engaged with life, stay engaged with our relationships. And it's that engagement that really contributes to our brain health.

I think it contributes to our brain health, our overall health, vitality, wellness and wanting to be here. You know, it's really interesting. When I work with clients or patients, I can usually glean.

If they are sort of excited to be here. I'm talking on a sore level, like are they willing to go the distance? You know, what makes somebody a super ager? You know, somebody who lives past 100 up to 110 or 115. It's because they want to be here, right? They want to be here for their family, they're engaged and some kind of intellectual pursuit. I mean, I, I talk about back when I was at ucla, it was involved in a synaptic journal club and we had a 90 year old emeritus professor who would come and listen to us students present our data and he would, you know, exchange ideas with us. And I just thought, wow, I love this. It's just about staying present and engaging, engaged and find things that bring you purpose. So really I think that's secret. You, you know, if you're talking about, you know, what, what gives us resilience, what helps build cognitive reserve, it's actually the desire to want to be here. And you know, I'm going to quote Wayne Dyer and I'm sort of a big fan of Wayne, the late Wayne Dyer.

I was as well.

And he, you know, he talked about the stages of life, right? So you have those sort of in the early stages of life, you know, you're out there creating in the world, you're being and doing and sort of deciding what you're going to be. You have all this energy and it's part of the reason why I started our conversation about, you know, why are we Teflon when we're, you know, in our teens and twenties, right? We can go many nights without sleeping, we can be out partying, we can eat horrible food, we can, you know, drink alcohol. We do all of these bad brain habits that catch up with us right, in our 40s, 50s and 60s. That's kind of why I wanted to just start the conversation saying, hey, there's a different way we can do this. And I forgot to mention when it comes to addictions, because People have addictions, have more challenges being emotionally resilient.

90 might even be 95% of addictions start before the age of 21. Which is why again, building great brain habits in your kids is so important to their overall health and longevity and ability to self regulate. But that's an aside. Oh, shoot, I lost the point. I was actually onto a really good point and I got caught up in addiction.

Well, I'm sure we'll circle back to it in some way. I want to talk about, you know, at the intersection of neuroscience and positive psychology, we hear a lot of things, say like positive neuroplasticity or self directed neuroplasticity. And now we also hear terms like biohacking and brain hacking. And you've written a book called.

Biohack. Biohack your brain.

Right.

And so I'm curious about, what do you think about these? It seems like a lot of what you've been talking about is self directed neuroplasticity. Right. All the things we can do to keep our brain healthy and keep it becoming more complex, more differentiated, but also better connections. Can we increase myelinization in adulthood? I know that happens in adolescent early adulthood, but is that part of dementia where you lose myelinization, which makes our. My understanding is it makes our neural networks communicate more efficiently. Right, right.

Myelination helps our neural networks communicate more efficiently what you can do as you age. So here's.

Here'S, I think some of the wisdom that I want to share even from, in a minute, sort of step back into the research that we did with the professional athletes. And I think it's important to share it because people are going to understand when you do things that damage the brain at the cellular level.

In your teens, 20s, 30s, and that could be anything from, from again, drug use, excessive caffeine, alcohol intake, marijuana, toxic exposure, core diet. Right. Standard American diet.

Again, playing a collision based sport and sharing and tearing the neurons repetitively. The brain has these amazing compensatory mechanisms and that's why you're able to have this emotional, emotional and cognitive resilience when you're younger. As you sort of get the intersection between brain maturation and brain aging is when we start to see over time, you know, we haven't been taking really good care of our neurons and now we're starting to lose more neurons than we create. Right. 85,000 neurons per day lost. Well, you know, you've got 86 billion neurons. That's actually not a lot. But you have to really start being proactive around the age of 40 at doing things to, as you said, enhance neuroplasticity, enhance your ability to grow new neurons in areas of the brain. They're the really only two regions that you can continue to grow new neurons. One of them happens to be the hippocampus area of the brain, important in learning and memory, which is why we can get to 100 and still retain our memories if we're being conscious. It's about being conscious of your habits and having an intention. It's. I really think that's the key to really healthy brain aging and even healthy emotional regulation. You gotta pair the consciousness, the awareness, with the intention to do so. A lot of times we have habits that are sort of. We're not aware of them. They're kind of going on in the background silently, leading to damage at the cellular level. And again, by the time you're hitting your sixth decade of life, you've had so much cellular damage or accumulation of misfolded proteins at this point. That's the kind of stuff we can't reverse. Good things we can change the neuroplasticity, the growing new neurons, the improving blood flow to the brain. So I wrote the book biohack your brain because there are things we could do to change the physical structure of the brain. So growing brain volume, even in meditation, you and I have talked about a consistent meditation practice done over the course of months, even years, is going to help to maintain brain volume and structures critical to cognition, learning, and memory. Right? Like the hippocampus, the posterior cingulate gyrus, the cerebellum. So the biohack your brain book was really about what are the things that we can do, tangible dietary and lifestyle things that anybody who's watching can do at home, that can help to maintain the structure and function of your brain. Like you said, synaptic plasticity. So the growth of new neural connections, we. One neuron can connect with tens of thousands of other neurons. It can connect to 10,000 neurons. It can connect to 40,000 neurons. It depends on how cognitively engaged you are. It depends on dietary lifestyle habits. You don't want to eat too much sugar, right? Sugar causes insulin resistance and inflammation that kills burning cells. So there's a lot of things that destroy cells in the brain, and then there's a lot of things that we can do to help protect it. So it's really just like a mindfulness practice. It's about being conscientious your thoughts and quieting your mind, having a great brain. Health practice is about Being conscientious of everything that you're doing and is it helping to support your brain health or is it not?

We're getting kind of towards the end of our time. I wanted to explore, I know in your brain, in your book Biohacking the Brain, you talk about brain workouts and when you've been talking about brain workouts our whole conversation, everything you can do on a nutrition, but all the ways you can challenge your brain and continue to learn and build that cognitive reserve. I want to talk a little bit more about mindfulness and just kind of run something by you for a minute because you know this from an evidence based perspective. So.

You know, like many mindfulness teachers, meditation teachers today, I think I take a very embodied approach to my own practice and attend to guiding others in practice and really helping people enhance what's called interoception or interoceptive awareness, our conscious awareness of the internal landscape of the body. Not just external touch, but internal sensation within the body. And the body of course is sensory all the way down to our bones. And as we increase that interoceptive awareness and really kind of come into the body, we're getting a lot of data. Now you mentioned before neurofeedback, which you can do with a therapist and there's a machine and you know, it's registering your brain waves. You get a visual analog or digital, you know, feedback, you get that visual loop going and, and you can begin to, to manage your own brain and brain waves. And that's been a very successful mode of therapy. So my sense through my own practice and working with others, is that with this very embodied approach to mindfulness practice and meditation, we're starting to develop kind of internal neurobio feedback loops because we're aware of our level of cognitive activity as that goes up and down, we're aware of this kind of internal physical landscape and the levels of kind of coherence or flow within that. Between all the different periodic wave rhythms in the body, whether it's the heart or the breath or various glands, there's kind of this internal coherence you begin to feel. And so I believe we can sort of learn to.

Almost organically learn to manage our own brain and maybe make that shift from overactive part of the brain that's going to create a lot of discursiveness and a lot of anxiety and stress to letting that relax a bit and dropping it out, increasing executive function access. So it seems like we can both consciously and almost organically develop a greater capacity for self regulation because we're getting all this sensory feedback while at the same time, we're doing things like adjusting our breath rate or shifting our attention to different parts in the body and so forth. So I'm just curious about what you think of this idea of developing an internal neurobiofeedback kind of system that allows us to develop higher levels of self regulation.

I love it. And for somebody like you, who's been doing this for decades, you are so intuitively aware of your body because you've taken the time to develop the practice, to know that and make the shifts without me having to put you on a machine and show you the way your brain is currently functioning, take you through a meditation practice and then show you how it changes. So that's really. You know, I have a chapter in the book Biohacking youg Brain in Real Time is really about. It's that first step in conscious awareness for people. Here's what your labs look like. Here's what your sleep looks like, because we're tracking it. Here's what your brain waves look like. Here's what the functional activity is in your brain. And then I put people on a very targeted platform program, and then they come back three months later, six months later, a year later, get rescanned and go, wow. It's the Eureka moment. I actually made a measurable change in my brain waves or how my brain functions. And I think that's the first step. That's that sort of being conscious and having that aha light go on. You know, the brain mapping is. You know, we have this saying in the clinic. You can't change what you don't measure, but you have taken it to another level. Now, I know you've had the tools to do the biofeedback, and you've learned what those responses feel like, and you've been able to carry that on in your practice. I will tell you personally, for me speaking, you know, as somebody who is a meditator, I've, you know, been doing it for probably 20 years now. I used to tell people before I ever had my brain waves measured, because we can see meditation, we can see people shift into meditative states quite readily when you, you know, hook somebody up to quantitative EEG machine. It's pretty fun to watch that and show people how their brain can shift. I used to always tell people when I went into a meditative state, it felt like waves on the ocean in the front of my brain. I just. It was like a switch that flipped. And I knew that I could flip to Another state. So I think it takes people practicing and time to be able to figure out those states. But that's just an example highlighting exactly what you're saying. You can use the internal, your internal system as your guide to self regulate. And I think it's really extraordinary what you're doing so you don't have to have all of the machines and the equipment. You're able to actually figure it out yourself because you're so connected.

So that was. And if people can reach out to work in therapy or work with all these tools. There's so many tools available to us, I think. And what I'm hearing from you, I mean, it's a very hopeful message. It's one of the responsibility. It is up to us, right? It is up to us. And as we age, the ante goes up.

Right.

Because there is natural aging that affects the brain. And if we're not proactive, it will impact us. So. But we can exercise a lot of self agency and there's more tools and more information available to us than there has ever been about everything you've been talking about.

It's pretty extraordinary, isn't it?

It is really extraordinary. What we know today. It's really exciting and how the fields of.

Neuroscience and psychology and positive psychology and even, you know, things like interpersonal neurobiology, where they're bringing together all these different disciplines to really understand not just the brain, but understand what do we mean by mind and consciousness. And not just at an individual level, but the social mind and the interrelated mind.

Right. The one mind.

I mean, there's so much. And it's really exciting time to be alive in terms of that. It's a really challenging time to be alive. So we need all these things. We really need all the, all the support we can get. And a good place to start would be with your book so how to biohack your brain. So I encourage people to check. You also have a website, right, where people can learn more about you?

I do. It's www.drwillemire.com. and I encourage people to reach out, ask me any questions. I'd be happy to address them. And boy, this has been yet another fun dialogue with you for.

I really enjoy it and it's just so important because really the healthy functioning of our brain, or lack thereof, really impacts our life, every dimension of our life. And almost everybody knows someone or has a friend or has a family member that's experienced some kind of dementia or brain injury or Alzheimer's. And we know that the quality of life just really starts to drop like a rock when you're suffering that. And so it's really just important that we all take action to take good care of our brain. That old euphemism, use it or lose it, is probably pretty true, right?

It's true. And for all those who are watching who actually have really healthy brain function, it's having the gratitude. That's where you're at right now with so many people that are struggling with psychiatric and neurological disorders, you're one of the lucky ones. And so sometimes we take that for granted when we're younger. I've worked with enough people who not only had cognitive problems or who've passed away, you just. I think I've seen the trajectory of what happens. And so part of why I wrote the book is I just wanted to be a cheerleader for brain health. And I wanted to inspire people to know it's not too late to take care of your brain health. You could start this in your 90s. I'm telling you, you scan the brains of people who are in their 90s. We scan the brains of the people who've had dementia and have still been able to improve perfusion to parts of the brain. You know, your life is valuable, whether you're struggling with a degenerative issue or not. And everybody deserves the chance to have the best quality of life. And that's why I love the work that you're doing. These kind of summits to really help open people's minds to all of the great tools and techniques and find the one that resonates with you. Right. You know, where there are just so many things available now. And I think that's what makes this time really special.

Well, Kristen Wildemeyer, Dr. Christian Wildemeyer, thank you so much. This has been really fabulous conversation. I know it's going to stimulate a lot of thinking for a lot of people. And then that's a great starting point and really helping us get off, get to summit. Off to a great, great start here on day one. So thank you so much.

Thank you so much. And wishing you a fabulous summit.

Thank you. Thank you. Be well.

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