#99 Upgrade Your Brain and Overcome Anxiety with Neurofeedback - Dr Andrew Hill

Andrew Hill (0:00)

Yeah, I mean, it's really useful for us to keep behaving, to keep performing.

Evolutionarily speaking, if we develop the tendency to sit down and stop doing things when things go a little bit difficult or when things are too variable in our environment, well, that's when we die. It's a huge amount of plasticity and change, so you should have no excuse for putting up with the brain doing what you don't want it to do or stuck in some way or injured or you have some stuck resource like anxiety or ADHD, you should really decide that you can figure out how to move beyond that. Because shift happens. These things are changing all the time.

Siim Land (0:34)

Body Mind Empowerment.

SPEAKER_3 (0:36)

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Siim Land (0:42)

Everything the body needs.

SPEAKER_3 (0:43)

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Siim Land (0:47)

Welcome to the Body Mind Empowerment Podcast. I'm your host Siim Land and our guest today is Dr. Andrew Hill. Dr. Hill is a cognitive neuroscientist, speaker and founder of the Peak Brain Institute. He's one of the leading neurofeedback practitioners in the world, and he helps people improve their cognitive performance and brain health.

Dr. Hill, welcome to the show.

Andrew Hill (1:09)

Thanks for having me, it seems nice to be here.

Siim Land (1:11)

Yeah, and I'm glad that we still have the opportunity to do a podcast across the world, although we've already met face-to-face a few times already, so it's fortunate.

Andrew Hill (1:22)

That's right, we're itinerant global biohackers by trade, both of us.

Siim Land (1:28)

Yeah, that's good. How did you get into the field of neuroscience?

Andrew Hill (1:34)

So, I, in my undergraduate, which was a couple decades ago now, I studied psychology and quickly got into the more biological end of it. I was sort of always interested in taking things apart and tinkering, and I had sort of a tech background at the time when technology was starting to become a little more accessible.

And in getting deeper into this aspect of neuroscience, I, for many years, been working inpatient psychiatric work and crisis work, and I work with people with multiple disabilities like language, cognitive disabilities, long-term, you know, residential facilities and things. And in many of these instances, I saw that there wasn't much change, you know. People don't really change a huge amount when you have profound mental retardation and cerebral palsy and language deficits from, you know, specific autism or something, or brain injuries. These things were really slow changing, as well as the more psychiatric stuff. I saw a lot of evolving door things in psychiatric hospitals where people came in for a few days, get sent away with meds that might or might not be working too soon to tell, and then would usually come back at a large cost to them, their lives, the system, the healthcare system, you know, the individuals providing healthcare were getting a little burnt out in that sort of inpatient environment, which was very grinding. So I was working in those environments, and I had an undergraduate degree in psychology with a focus in neuroscience. I got into the bio a little bit, and then I got injured. I blew out a couple of disks in my back and couldn't do the work that I had been doing. So for a little while, I did case management work and worked more on the systems around people's mental health and performance and things like that. And eventually I ended up in neurofeedback working with populations of people with developmental issues, ADHD, autism, lots of other things and started to see something very, very different.

From what I've seen in traditional, if you will, mental healthcare, I was seeing change. I was seeing people develop language and eye contact and drop some fixations or sensory issues sometimes. And autism, I was seeing ADHD kinds of things go away sometimes in a matter of weeks and months. It was very profound compared to that backdrop of glacial change, which I had seen historically. I mean, I spent a year once teaching a young man to use a fork. He was about maybe 30 years old and had some cognitive difficulties and was blind. He spent a year working on a fork, so he could use a fork and then maybe have a little more fun out in public. It wasn't looked at, oddly, but it was a year of grinding learning to cause small change just in behavioral stuff. And then in neurofeedback, I saw sometimes just massive shift in a matter of weeks, really big resources. So that caught my attention. And this was about, I don't know, more than 15 years ago, 18 or something. And at that time, neurofeedback wasn't a new field, EEG wasn't a new field in terms of training the EEG.