SHAWN STEVENSON: Welcome to the Model Health Show. This is fitness and nutrition expert Sean Stevenson, and I'm so grateful for you tuning in with me today. You are in for a real treat. So much of our health, the quality of our relationships, our success in life has to do with the health of our brain. Now in this episode, you're going to discover that our brain is not only located in our brain, you are gonna learn about the three. Interconnected brains and our bodies. And this information is so powerful. We have a community of trillions of cells. And I remember in my university biology class, and even in high school, we talked about all the different parts of the cells. And we talked about the brain, the "brain" of the cell being the nucleus.

But the crazy thing is you can take the nucleus out of a cell, enucleation, take that bad boy out, and the cell can still survive. It could still function, it can still run automated programs. If we take your brain outta you, you can't do none of that. And so relegating our definition of the brain to this one pithy thing is very sketchy waters for us to swim into. And so we're going to expand our understanding of the brain and to keep in mind that our community of trillions of cells are all working together in this synchronistic fashion to deliver us adaptation, survivability, and health. But there are certain key conditions required and there are certain things in our environment today that many of us are inundated with, we're constantly exposed to, that are disrupting this synchronistic nature of all of ourselves.

And if we wanna look at it in one way, we can look at all of our trillions of cells operating under what we can consider to be a hive mind. Alright? All of our cells instantaneously, every single thought that you have is affecting every cell in your body. And that is so powerful. It's changing the chemistry and the signaling that's getting produced in our bodies. It's changing what's happening with our receptor sites and where stuff's getting delivered. It's changing our neurotransmitters, our hormones. If we engage in thoughts of stress, of fear, doubt, worry, disconnection, it's altering our chemistry. And at the same time, if we're choosing thoughts of love, of compassion, of gratitude, of joy, it's changing our biochemistry instantaneously as well.

But how do we program that in so that we're doing it automatically, even if we've been acclimated to having what my friend and colleague, Dr. Daniel Amen calls ants, automatic negative thoughts, right? If we're just overrun with ants a lot of time, we still have some positive thoughts, some positive affirmative thoughts, right? Some pats that come in as well. And so how do we shift that ratio to where we're experiencing and automating more positive affirmative thinking? Knowing that it changes our biochemistry and thus changes our health outcomes, it changes our activities. It's so much easier to do the things that we want to do in our lives and to go after our goals when we feel good.

And so we're gonna look at how do we stack conditions in our favor? And we've got somebody who is a pioneer in this field of brain entrainment, of brain training, and his newest project is focused on brain fitness. Dr. Patrick Porter is an award-winning author. Educator, researcher and speaker. During a career spanning more than three decades, Dr. Porter has been on the cutting edge of brainwave entrainment technology. He's the inventor of BrainTap, which is designed to activate the brain's neuroplasticity to achieve brain fitness, overcome stress, accelerate learning, enjoy superb sleep and other lifestyle improvements. BrainTap is being utilized by some of the highest performing companies in the world like Google, Superstar athletes like Tom Brady and everyday folks who are wanting to improve their overall health and wellbeing. You're about to discover why our brains are in crisis and how we can reclaim our brain health, starting now. All right, Dr. Porter, so good to see you today. 

DR. PATRICK PORTER: Hey, it's great to be here. Thanks for having me. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Let's start off by talking about our three interconnected brains. 

DR. PATRICK PORTER: Yeah. A lot of people think our brain is just this three to five pounds of jealous material between our ears. That's really, I call that the Google tablet. You know, when you have a Google tablet, you have to connect to the wifi to do anything, and that wifi is actually starting from your heart. So you have a heart brain that has 40,000 neutrino cells. These are, these act just like a brain. That's why when they did a heart transplant on a person that had the guy was a health nut because he was trying to keep his heart, but then he got a transplant and he started craving Kentucky Fried Chicken and they found out the guy, they got the heart from, loved Kentucky Fried Chicken.

You know, I don't know if that's the best heart to get, but, but he, he got it. But they, they, this is going over and over again because that is a brain that you have. That brain actually sends twice as much information to the body as the body does to the heart. So think of it as the orchestra leader, but then the, the third brain, or what a lot of people call the second brain is the gut is more neuron connections in the gut. And when you think about mental health and, and people wondering, I don't think we have a mental health crisis. I think we have a physiological crisis. People are sitting too much. They're not moving, they're not breathing, they're not eating right. You know, it's, it's a lifestyle problem. It's not, it's not all in their head.

Because our brains are not designed for this day and age, you know? So when you think about our gut, the, if your gut brain isn't right, then you have what's called leaky gut. A lot of people talk about that, but I can guarantee you if a leaky gut, you have a leaky brain. That means also you have a leaky heart because these are all connected and so you're not getting the right information. So it's, it's all about information for the body. And, and so these three, if they coordinate and work together, you've got a powerful force for good. Now, the heart projects a frequency of magnetic frequency that can be measured up to 18 feet away from the body. So we can measure heart rate variability, not, you don't, we don't have to be on the body to do that.

Now with EEG, the brain, we have to measure it with, with probes and, you know, EEG technology, they've never figured out how to really measure the gut brain. But what we know, it's there because it makes 95% of all the neurotransmitters, you know, so the, the, the brain of course instructed, Hey, I need these neurotransmitters. Let's do it. And we're supposed to get those during sleep. But, but two thirds of the world not sleeping, which you're an expert at, you know, they're, they're, they're basically not building up their neurotransmitter bank account. So they get up in the morning, they're fine. By two o'clock when your temperature drops two degrees.

I know you had Michael Bruce on the call, he's one of our doctors too. When, when that temperature drop happens, the biological system goes into chaos and they're chasing sympathetic drive the rest of the day. And now they're, they don't have any energy. By the end of the day, they're crashing on the couch eating potato chips and drinking a Coke or something. You know, when, because they're low frequency. I always tell people frequency is what you frequently see. So if you don't have high frequency, high frequency people look for high frequency foods, high frequency activities, high frequency books, high frequency people, you know, we need to get people's really, their frequency up and that, that starts with number one, with the diet.

And of course, and these brains when, when we're, we're not eating for our brain, right? We're, uh, I still remember in the seventies when, uh, I got a track scholarship. So I had to train in the summer and I was visiting my parents, my grandparents, and I put on my. My shoes and everything. I'm going out running and my uncle said, what are you doing? I said, I'm going for a run. What the, you know, he's like, what are you doing that for? He goes, you wanna get in shape? Let's go out on a farm. You know, obviously Yeah, you could. These guys were strong. My relatives were 90, a hundred years old. Playing cards. Counting cards, really smart. There's nothing, no, no such thing as dimensional Alzheimer's.

That was like a, every once in a while there'd be an outlier that had it. Now 30 year olds are getting it because of our diet. It's, we're not feeding our brain, we're feeding our body and the body doesn't need as much as we think it does. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Yeah. Oh wow. This has already blown my mind. Just this, the sentiment. It's not all in our head. And so often, obviously, you know, kind of our command center, for many of us, we just are existing from the neck up.

DR. PATRICK PORTER: Yes.

SHAWN STEVENSON: And to understand that our, so let me clarify this. Our heart and our gut has essentially brain-like tissue. It has neurons that are associated what we used to just associated with the brain, exist in our heart and in our gut. 

DR. PATRICK PORTER: Yes. There's more in the gut than anywhere else. You know, so when you, when you think about it in, when you think about what the, the standard pro quo is, I'm gonna give you an SSRI, well, they've only been a proof of 14 days of use. 

They've never been tested beyond 14 days. But the doctor will tell you they won't even work for 28 days. So is it the placebo or are they getting the body dependent on it? Because the brain is a energy hog. If you can off, if it, it can offload its work, it's gonna do it. And we can talk a little bit about, and what happens is you pay Peter today, but you know, Paul's gonna ask for his money later.

You know, sooner or later you're gonna pay the piper. The body keeps score. And so when, when we think about the, the, the brain and body and what's going on, a lot of people are looking for the pill. Without the skill, you've gotta have the skill. Just one example I'll give the listeners. We did a study down in Brazil with, uh, because our device was actually designed, when we talk about brain fitness, back in the eighties, we designed it for pain clinics because there was no opioids and they were looking for solutions. So we were doing biofeedback, we were looking at skin temperature, respiration, heart rate, and all those things. That's what's got us into like heart math and places like that. And so we, what we noticed was when we got people to calm down and get into what's called the alpha brainwave state, pain went away.

If we could get 'em into theta, they had no pain. And myself, I had painless surgery on my shoulder without any aesthetic. My dad hypnotized me and I had, they, that doctor cut up my shoulder, took a piece of bone from here, put it here, screw it down. I didn't have any, me any 'cause I have adverse effects to the drugs, you know, that they would give you to put you to sleep. So, but I did it, no pain and I healed faster. And so the, the thing is that the, the body knows what to do, but we're interfering with it with, with all the, our lifestyle really is interfering with our brain function. So we have to change our lifestyle to match today's conditions. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Yeah. And in today's conditions, this is why we have emerging fields of like neuro cardiology, neuro gastroenterology. This is well established at this point, but the expertise is so far beyond where you're at, and this is why I'm so grateful to have you here. One of the things that I've talked about over the years, especially recently, is the emerging field of psycho neuroimmunology, psycho neuro endocrinology, and how our thoughts deeply impact, for example, our immune system or deeply impact what our hormones are doing. We have this very powerful, and I've said this before, the most powerful pharmacy in the world is the human brain. 

DR. PATRICK PORTER: Yes. 30,000 chemical neurochemicals was just a thought. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: I mean, and the, the reason why it is so powerful is because it's tailor made for you. Right? So it's made for your receptor sites. We've got wonderful innovations where we have these outside hormones and different things that we can utilize, but it's made for you. And one of the most powerful things that we can do is understand how this stuff works. 

DR. PATRICK PORTER: Yeah. When we work with the body, we won't be feeling like it's working against the body. One example, I'll give the listeners, A lot of people get up in the morning and they have a cup of coffee. First thing, worst thing you can do for your brain, because your brain is already creating norepinephrine, dopamine, cortisol. But as soon as you drink that coffee, the brain goes, you know what? I don't need to do that anymore.

They're doing it for me. So the cortisol trough, which is supposed to be high in the morning, it starts out a little bit lower, a little bit lower. Pretty soon you gotta have coffee to even boost your cortisol, but it's supposed to be naturally up high. And then by two o'clock it crashes, then it resets. And then if you do another brain fitness exercise, whether it's breathing or doing a brain tap session, whatever it is, you do some kind of physical workout, whatever to get BDNF going, now your brain's back up. The problem is they sit through that whole time and they're drinking coffee the whole time, and the brain never gets a chance to use its own, its own internal pharmacy, like you said. I mean, we're not allergic to those things. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: I want to ask you about this because one of my favorite, and I actually sent this to a friend of mine, I, I copied the, because I got an advanced copy of the book, which is wonderful. But I copied this section and texted to him because it was so relevant to something we've been talking about. And you made this really great analogy with neuroplasticity and a wheat field. 

DR. PATRICK PORTER: Yes. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Let's talk about that. So, first of all, talk about what neuroplasticity is and share this analogy. 

DR. PATRICK PORTER: Yeah. So there's three things you need to think about with neuroplasticity. Neuroplasticity being one of them. One is neurogenesis and neuro pruning. This is happening all the time. When you were born, you actually had a brain that was at 18.1 volts. You were fully operational. You learned a new language. You learned how to walk, you learned how to talk. You learned how to use this whole biological system, and you did it without thinking about it. You didn't get textbooks, you didn't go to class.

You learned it by absorbing it. Because we learn through experiences, right? So what happens as we age, as we start doing the same things over and over again, the brain goes, you know, we don't need that neuro prune. So think of your neuro network in your brain, like a field, and it's summertime and you're going to the store and it's the grass is low then. You know you're 18.1 volts. You're just cruising across it. No problem. You can go anywhere you want because you've got all these different neuro pathways. But eventually those weeds grow up. So now you're in a wheat field that's up to your shoulders, but somebody tells you, you know, you can get to the store five minutes faster if you go this way.

But I gotta walk through all those weeds. But if you start doing it, it's gonna be hard at first because it takes energy. Now, when you're about 21 years old, that brain is gonna start to modulate about 10.1 volts. If it drops below seven, you're gonna have dementia like symptoms. If it drops below four, you're gonna have Alzheimer's. We've proved this in our study in Florida. We did a Saving Your Brain Study. It's in, it's written in a book called Saving Your Brain. And we showed that as soon as we got every person in that study above seven volts of energy, they no longer demonstrated dementia symptoms. Now we couldn't diagnose them.

They had to go back to their doctor, but their doctors were blown away. What are you doing? Oh, it can't be that. It can't be so simple. No, it is because man is complex, spirit is simple. You know, the body knows what to do, you know, so as we're, as we're doing these things, so what neuroplasticity is, is how do we bring energy to the cells? So I'll give the listeners a few ways to do that. How do you get the energy? One is you can, when you get up and exercise any kinda movement. Movement is life. Movement creates that brain derived neurotropic factors, bDNF. That is now, most people know about yoga now, Tai chi and those things. They don't realize why they were created.

They think they're exercise. They're not, they were all designed to get the person to be able to meditate, because when you close your eyes or you go to sleep, you're doing 50% more neuroactivity than you are when you're awake. Your brain is on fire. When you're asleep, you need energy to sleep. Most people don't have the energy to sleep. They think, oh, I, they don't need a Snickers bar or a Coke. What they need is ATP. So how can we get a TP in the body? First thing you can do is change your thoughts because if you, they, they've proven overall, there was a study done during COVID that actually showed mitochondria, which, which we can measure with the, with the neuro check too.

But we can measure that energy output of the body. If somebody lives their life in fear, like they did this with COVID, if you looked at COVID as a threat rather than a challenge, you produce two, 200 times less light energy down your mitochondria, your me, your metabolism that keeps you healthy is actually your body absorbing light energy codes from the sun. And from your environment, from everything, because they now, and, and that is then projecting those codes back down into the body. So imagine you turn it off, 200% of that, you're, you're gonna lower. And then, then what they found out, and this is what blows my mind in 2018, they found a part of the body that they didn't know existed before because in 2003, they said, Hey, I'm at the human genome.

I know all about you. I know your eye color, your hair color, your skin color, but I don't know, 99% of it. So let's call that junk, right? Well, God didn't make any junk, but what they found out in 2018, because we now have the technology, is those cells, those DNA pairs change at an average of every 40 seconds. So every part of you changes every 40 seconds. You are adapting when you talk about thinking immune system or thinking this neuroimmunology, neurophysiology, you are a thinking machine, but you're doing it all unconsciously because on a unconscious level, you're gonna only do so many things. So we, we rely on our subconscious.

So, and then this is the good and a bad thing for the brain. When you think about neuroplasticity, if you, if you live near a junkyard or you, you live near an airport or a train station, you, those sounds, those smells, those experiences, you kind of learn to forget them. You might go over to a friend's house, how can you stand at those? Airplanes are going over all the time. I don't even hear 'em anymore because the brain is really good at basically filtering out things. So somebody could be in a mold home and they start getting a runny nose and they get flu-like symptoms, and they go to the doctor and the doctor says, take this pill.

They take the pill and for a while they feel good. And the brain goes, I guess it's not a problem. So you just sit in there and cook like the frog in the boiling pot in psychology 1 0 1, where they, you know, they have the frog just doing the backpedal and he dies before he knows the water's too hot. But if you took that pot to a boil, it would never jump in there. So you take somebody from the outside, goes into that home and goes, you got mold in here. What? Nose blind? That's every census like that. Yeah, because we're a sensory based system, right? We're, we're looking around the world and every time we in the, in the olfactory sense is the first one that's created in the brain.

So that's the strongest one. So if you start turning that one off, you start turning 'em all off. So just kinda wrapping up, neuroplasticity. So one way we can do it is exercise. The other is breath. There's three different breaths during the day that I recommend people do for exercise. If you don't own the brain tap equipment, you should wake up in the morning and do some kind of psychological breathing. You can do breath of fire if you want, or you can do the psychological breath. We do this naturally, like you might be fed up with something, go and somebody runs, you goes, what was the big sigh about? Well, they call it a psychological sigh because our body naturally does it all, all pets do it. You know, dogs, when they get nervous, they'll start shaking.

Well, they're trying to get rid of all that nervous energy. Kids with autism do it because they're stemming. They have too much beta activity going on and too much energy in the system. Your body works like a capacitor. It's, it's always absorbing and transmitting energy. So if it doesn't have a root for that energy, then that's why breathing's important. All, when you talk about mental health, all negative emotional states have one thing in common. Lack of breath. You can't be depressed and breathe. You can't be angry and breathe. You can't be de distressed and breathe. When you start breathing, you start thinking about solutions. You start moving. But as soon as you hold your breath and so many people don't know how to breathe, so in the morning you get up, do that psychological breath.

It's just a, and you might wanna do it away from people 'cause they might think you're crazy, but do it in your bedroom before you leave the bedroom and that'll reset your sympathetic system because we're, we, some people wake up in the morning already stressed. They used an alarm clock, which is one of the other bad things you can do in the morning. You know, if you have, if you have to wake up to some sound, it should be some beautiful sound that welcomes you to the day, not something that blares off the hook. Because immediately what happens is you have something called the liver that most people don't think is connected to the brain, but it has 300 functions that it connects to the brain with, and that liver hold houses 25 grams of sugar.

And as soon as you get that alarm goes off and the average person hits the alarm three times. So they get this three times, three hits of five tablespoons of sugar. They get outta bed and they've already eaten breakfast. But it's not the good sugar because they think there's a bear after them or a tiger or something like that 'cause the body doesn't discern what the stress is about. Now they're chasing that the whole day. Then they go out and have coffee, and then they go have a bagel and, and a banana in coffee and think, wow, I'm great. I I'm eating healthy today. You know, they don't realize that sugar is the number one killer of the brain, you know, at least in today's market.

And then at two o'clock in the afternoon, we need to do a breath that, that I call, that they use in the Navy seals. Use the, the four breath, the box breath. And it's very simple to do. You just breathe into the count of four, hold to the count of four, breathe out to the count of four, leave it out for the count of four. And you can do this at stoplights. You can do this when you're waiting at the doctor's office. When, anytime you have three or four minutes, start teaching your nervous system. This is brain fitness because your brain's not just up here. Remember, it's everywhere. I just say the three brains, but really every cell is not only a pharmacy.

When you have muscle, you have the pharmacies that make you feel good. 'cause we all know people that were negative and then they went and they started exercising. Now they become this positive person. That's because they're now generating the hormones and the, the neurochemicals. They need to feel good. If you, if you wanna see the Statue of Liberty, you can't look out here in Santa Monica. You gotta go to New York. So we gotta take 'em to the right state of mind to, to get there and get their body producing those things. And then it in the evening, which is the most important thing for sleep, is to unwind the body.

Most people think you're supposed to close your eyes, go to sleep. And there is sleep routines. And I know those are really important and I believe in all of those things. But what's really super important is that you do something like the four eight breath before you go to bed. And what I mean by that is you breathe into the count of four, you study any tension in the body, because remember, your body's holding onto that tension. If it doesn't, anybody will release it. That's why people will no their teeth and they'll wake up with their hand in a fist or their cramps while they're sleeping because their body is trying to get rid of that energy. But you can do this for it. So you breathe into the mental count of four, breathe out to the count of eight, and as you breathe out, you do body scan.

Just check out your body. And when you get really good at it, you breathe in. Whatever problems are happening to the day, you don't wanna solve them. You just wanna give it to the subconscious, it knows how to solve them. And then you breathe out to the count of eight and you think about all the things you're grateful for. Because when you start, start thinking about things, you're grateful for the brain. There's something called the reticular activating system in the brain, and this is in the best example I can give, is you just bought a new car. You thought, Hey, and I still remember my wife when she bought a van. She said, I got this van.

Nobody has it. I started laughing. She goes, what are you laughing about? I said, count how many vans you see on the way home. She counted 11 vans from the dealership to the house, and she thought she had the only van like that because those vans were not in her reticular activator, so she didn't notice them before. Now when you buy it, it's there. So we wanna keep in our reticular activating system grateful things, things we're positive about building up that positive momentum in the day. And every time you think of one of those, you've just downloaded 15 to $18,000 worth of neurochemicals that you can't buy at the pharmacy, and they're encoded for you, like you said, they're encoded for your body, for you at this time.

And you start, you start setting up the sequence that says, Hey, this is a great place to be. I'm in a great place. I'm, you're on high energy people. You're eating high energy food, you're doing high energy activities. Your body says, this is where I like to fly. I don't like to fly down here with all the muck. You know, you can be down there if you want, but the, the results are up here, but you've gotta make the switch. It takes action. That's why they like in the Bible, they say faith without works is dead. You gotta do the work. You can't, you can't just think about it. I mean, there's a lot of people out there.

You just meditate about it. Well, if you never leave the bedroom, you're never gonna make a dime. You know? If you wanna make the money, you gotta get out there and do the hard stuff because then that's the walking through those field. That's the hard stuff. But pretty soon that becomes the easy stuff because the old path grows back up. The new path is now easy. But you've gotta do it enough times to make it easy. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Yeah. This is so powerful. So, to just take one step back really quickly and I'm thinking about the movie signs with Mel Gibson. Shot out. This a pretty good movie. But, you know, if we understand what we're doing right now, you know, our thoughts, so much of our health and our results in our lives are a result of our thoughts, right. And those paths that are already kind of carved out in the wheated field, we just, it, it's easy, it's automated at this point. And so when we wanna do something different, that's when we're starting to go where the, where the, the weed is higher. Yes. And it's a little bit more difficult to get through, not.

Sometimes a lot more difficult, but as you do it repeatedly, you're gonna create a new path. Yeah. And the old path, especially in, in kids, it kind of withers away. And I wanted to ask you about that. This pruning, this neuro pruning that you talked about, it can kind of just kind of dissolve and go away. For adults it's a, it's different. It can happen for sure, but what it really is based on, you know, what I'm learning from you is that those paths that we carve out as we do it repeatedly and really create a clear path, it becomes stronger, and easier, and the path, the other path just becomes less attractive.

DR. PATRICK PORTER: Yeah. It's an energy equation. You have the energy. I mean, if you have good night's sleep, you wake up, you can make those changes. But if you don't have a good night's sleepy wake up, you, you, you fall back to default network. So you've gotta be real willing where Mike Tyson said, everybody has a plan till they get hit. It's not just about boxing, it's about life. Hmm. It's never gonna be, today's not gonna go like it's planned. You know, you're gonna have a plan, but you should plan on something not going right. And how are you gonna adjust? It's how do you recover? That's the, the secret in today's world is how do you recover?

And Tom Brady, who's one of our users, he said, every minute of exertion takes two minutes of recovery. So you can count sleep in that. So during the day when you're having all this stress, how much sleep do you need? And this is the, the sleep equation that, that blows people's minds to, to win any, or ring or whoop, watch any of those things. You need one hour of deep sleep, two hours of rem sleep, and you will beat, you'll beat any score because it's not an hour of deep sleep all at one time. The, the body goes through these cycles. So that's why you wanna unwind at night, because most people, it takes four hours to get to that first sleep cycle.

If we can cut that down to 20 minutes. Now you got all this, the rest of this time to get all this other Delta activity and why people have increased Delta that's gonna detox the brain, right? I'm sure Michael Bruce talked about it on your podcast about the glial lymphatic system. That's another part of the body. In 2015, they didn't know about. If you went back in time to every physiology book on the planet, the lymph system stops at the neck. But during a sleep study, someone noticed, Hey, what's the system of the body that's OP operating like the X-Men? What else is inside of us right now that could be activated at the right moment, at the right time with the right sequence of events, the right activities?

You know, we don't even know what we could be superhuman. We don't, we don't know that because we're limiting ourselves based on our past beliefs. But there's a future out there for us that I think if people are willing to live up to the challenge, eat the right foods, be around the right people, take care in the right activities, they're gonna, those opportunities are gonna show up.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Yeah, got a quick break coming up. We'll be right back.

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SHAWN STEVENSON: You mentioned the Delta sleep. This is a great opportunity to talk about the different stages or or brain frequencies. Because in the book, you know, when I was in school, there were basically, there were four yes. That we talked about, that we learned in college in a, again, a, a costly university. But now we know that there's more. So let's talk about these different brain states. 

DR. PATRICK PORTER: There's 16, but I'm gonna talk about six. That, that are really important. So, right now we're talking at a beta, alpha level. Hopefully, you know, in a perfect brain, perfect brain world, we'd have 45% beta, 30% alpha. That means that we have access to our reactionary mind. 'Cause we want, if somebody throws a ball at me, I wanna be able to catch it or swerve away from traffic. And, but I want my alpha mind because that's gonna be, that's going to, that's the intuitive bind. You're always predicting the future. When Deepak Chopra said 97% of what's gonna happen to you tomorrow, you know about today, what are you pretending not to know?

A lot of people pretend they don't know what's gonna happen tomorrow. You know, they go buy a six pack and they're gonna stop drinking tomorrow. Well, that doesn't equal or they buy a pack of cigarettes. I'm gonna stop smoking. Non-smokers don't buy cigarettes. People who don't drink alcohol, dope. Buy six packs. You know what I mean? You, you gotta start living your life as if those things are already happening. Then the neurology fi figures it out. So that beta brain is really important. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: It's gotta 'cause beta faster than alpha. 

DR. PATRICK PORTER: Yes. Beta is between anywhere between 12 to 40 cycles per second. And this is the only place in the brain where fear, frustration, anxiety, all negative emotions reside. If those negative emotions drop into alpha, you have psychosis and you have, you know, somebody's gonna be trying to help you out to, because alpha is a place of timelessness, and that's your creativity. And what we've noticed in our scans is when, when people think about all autism and why one out of every 43 boys are now getting autism, well that never happened before.

That was, I didn't have anyone in my whole school that had autism when I was growing up. Now one out of 43 boys have it and they're missing the alpha brainwave. That's why they can't speak. We did a study right here in California in Orange County with Jaquita Handy, and we took these kids that were disqualified from a magnetic resident therapy study. They paid $5,000 to do it, and they said they didn't qualify. They disqualified 60% of them. Well now they only had the, the placebo group. What are they doing? So I said, what are the, I said, I'll take those kids, I'll give 'em a headset. Let's see what happens. Within six weeks, we got them up to 23%. Alpha, 90% of them were speaking with no speech pathologist because the brain already knew how to speak.

But it's like the, uh, think of each of these brain brainwaves, like wifi networks. Like if you open up your phone right now, I'm sure we got about 30 wifi networks coming into this room, right? We don't have the codes to get into those others. So even though they're there, we can't access them. You have to change your physiology to get into those. Now we call it a symphony of brainwaves because they're going on right now. Now between beta and alpha, there's what we found in neuroscience is the most important brainwave for cognitive thinking is called SMR Sensory Motor Rhythm. And this is where exercise comes in. But what we showed in the lab was we can actually get you better balance by doing brain tap or using lights on and vibration audio visual entrainment than you can by exercising.

Now when you combine the two, you got a powerful force. 'cause now you're moving the physiology at the same time. You're, you're basically changing your psychology. When that happens. There's a flip, it flips a switch those because you're moving the neurology and you're thinking about it. Now you've got these powerful brainwaves that are happening and this is the one that when you drink too much coffee in the morning, or too much caffeine a little bit is okay.

You know, like a lot of biohackers will take caffeine and all that. I don't think you need it. But if they, they wanna have this little high level thinking, you also, nicotine in small doses is good. You know, they're, they're finding out all these things, but anything in high dose isn't good. So SMI that's, that really is really active in the morning. That's why exercise in the morning is so much better for the body. They say 20 minutes in the morning is 40 minutes at night because your brain is ready for it. Now, when you drop out of alpha, which is your intuitive mind, where your, where all your creativity is, where your solutions are, where your speaking patterns are, that's why when people used to, used to be the biggest fear in the world was public speaking.

That's because when you get, when you're in stress, that brainwave collapses. You can't be creative if you're being chased by a bear or a tiger. You gotta just be reactionary. You gotta just get the heck outta there as fast as you can. That's why we either have to freeze, flee, or fight, you know, whatever's going on. So what we wanna do, but if you can just, if we can just teach people to pause, break and breathe, their life would change tremendously. It's the reactionary mind that's causing all the problems. 'Cause it's that we're, we are, this is something that usually blows people's minds, but the Navajo Indians said seven generations are, are helping them because they, they didn't know about gene genealogy.

But now neuroscientists are telling us that in our genes, seven generations of your family are inside you right now. Seven, they can, they, they did a study with sandalwood and they took mice and they taught these mice. Every time they smelled sandalwood, they would jump. Then they waited five generations of mice and they introduced sandalwood to them. They jumped just as if they were trained in that. So how is that possible? Because we're, we're encoded. We come out of the womb with a personality, with a, you know, we, we are formatted, but then we get reformatted, you know, with brothers, sisters, teachers, preachers, and everybody else that's telling us what to do.

So this brainwave of beta. There's no training that happens there. In fact, if you had to, if you wanted to do training at the beta level, it takes about 16,000 times of doing something, right? So going through that field, it would take 16,000 times. Now you drop into Alpha, you just reduced it in half. But now the key is how do we get to Theta? Because my dad was a Sylva instructor, Sylva Method, mind control. And we would go to Alpha and we'd use this self alpha sound. That's how I got into all this. And somebody says, why'd you get into this? Well, in the seventies, Jose Silva had something called the Silva Sound. Now we know it as Isoc chronic tones, but he didn't let out the secret.

You know, he, it was something he created. But in the room, you could play this music. It's like a isochronic tone generator, like a mountain that resonates at 7.8 hertz frequency. You just get up there and you start producing theta waves, which is the next brain we're talking about. When you, when you drop into these brainwaves, your body, there's 64 neurotransmitters, so we're not gonna go through all of them. But in alpha, you start to create acetylcholine. Start to feel good in beta, you create dopamine, which is an agitant. It never, you never get satisfied. I don't care who you are. It's, that's why you have to start, you have to say no to that part of your brain, because it always want, it doesn't matter. You get it.

You don't, you want more. It, it doesn't satisfy you. It just agitates you. And that's what dopamine does. It's, it's a, it's supposed to get you outta bed, get you moving in the morning because you're part of the food chain. You know, get up, move. You know, if you're not moving, somebody's gonna get you, you know? But then when we drop into Alpha, we start to be more relaxed, more comfortable. We start to see the world more in a 360 degree view. We start to be creative. We start to think outside the box. But when we get to Theta, that's where the, these great inventors, like Tesla, Einstein, Edison, they would do all these, they would do these exercises where they'd sit in a chair like this and they'd have an iron ball in their hand, and as soon as the iron ball fell, all the tension outta their body, right then now they would get a spontaneous breakthrough because the body's energy was gone.

All the tension was gone in the body. They all did something like that. One held a spoon over a plate, one held a ball. They all had different techniques, but they were little catnaps. And basically as we, as we go through the day, these things happen. But in theta, when you, you're producing gaba, the key thing about GABA for this day and age is GABA is a precursor to something called DMT. So if you've ever thought about a mountaintop experience and somebody says, wow, that was a mountaintop experience that was outta this world, well, they probably tapped into GABA because then every cell of your body has that God molecule in it. It's gonna activate. Now you're gonna start thinking way outside the box because you're not this physical body.

Everybody at a funeral believes there's something after that. Now, a week later they won't. But at the funeral they go, oh, he's in a better place or she's in a better place. They know, but they've done studies where they actually have measured bodies. When they die, they lose three quarters of an ounce.

What is this? Three quarters of an ounce. That's you. That's the energy that animates this body. So when we think about the brain and the body, this is an interface. It's not us. It's an interface to this reality. If we don't take care of this interface, then if we have a bad TV and we can't pick up, when I was growing up to watch the Tigers Games in, in Detroit, one of the brothers had to hold onto the antenna, you know, act like the antenna because we're, we're transmitting and receiving information all the time.

We are conductive. When I'm with you, there's conductive information coming back and forth. It's beyond what we're talking about. And that happens in every group because that's why we have gainers and drainers, you know, the, the gainers are the people when we leave them, that we feel energized. Wow, this is great. And the drainers are like, man, that person wears me out. They got on my last good nerve. What? I hope they don't come back, you know, because they, they drink, there are energy vampires because our mitochondria is craving that energy. So when you, when you think about it, so now all that's happening when you're awake, these, these brain waves I'm talking about now, when you drop into Delta, Delta is when your body gets to repair.

You're out of the way. You can't be there. So think about you're at the Ford Motor Plant and you're, you have to clean the line. They're not gonna keep building the machines. You gotta get off the line so they can clean the line. That's what's happening in the nervous system. So think of the Glia lymphatic system, the glia lymphatic system of this bodies. Like, we're at a networking party and we're all a little ggl cells and we're shaking hands and we're doing everything at the end of that party, we're gonna wanna clean our hands. Whether you're paranoid about that or not, you just, you just touch everybody's hands. You're gonna wanna clean your hands. You just, so every night when we go to sleep, those, the, the spinal fluid actually comes up through the spinal cord into the brain and flushes out the body.

But it only does this during level four sleep. This is something they only discovered in 2015 too. I mean, could you imagine that they didn't know that existed? And people go, it used to be when I was growing up, sleep's for the dead, you know? And then you'd brag how much you didn't sleep. 'cause you could, but when you're younger, you can get away with it. When you're older, you pay for it, you know? So Delta sleep is so important. Sleep is the number one superpower generator. And, and whatever you're going through right now in your life, whatever, a health crisis or business crisis, whatever, that's your proving ground for your superpower. If you can meet the challenge, you will have a superpower that other people will pay you for because you've made it through it.

And you should always be thinking about that because we're not here alone. Nobody gets outta here alive. So, you know, let's, let's figure out how we can work together and make it happen. And then we go to the higher states. Now, just, just five years ago, actually, if you'd have told me about Gamma, I'd have said nothing happens there, Gamma's nothing. But I got a call from Dr. Rosenthal in Dallas, Texas, and he said, I wanna do A-P-T-S-D study on the brain, and I wanna use a psilocybin. But we had some vets that didn't wanna do it because they were afraid that they might cause them to become addicted to o psilocybin, which they take people off addiction.

But we said, okay. So I said, David, let's measure their brains on eeg. Let's see what, let's map their brains while they're doing o psilocybin. The ones that were doing it, we didn't do the first session 'cause sometimes it can get a little wild for people, but the second session they understand what's gonna happen and they, they do all right. And what we found was there's a region of the brain just to the right up here in that region of the brain lights up big time and creates high level gamma brainwaves. So I said, let me create some, a series with brain tap, my brainwave entrainment device that does brain fitness. And let's see what happens with that.

Well, what happened was David called me, me up, he says, I had, he said, I've never done a psilocybin, but I had the trips just like you're talking about. I got to talk to my parents and do all these things. I said, yeah, because it's not the psilocybin that's doing it. It's your brain doing it. Whatever pill you put in, it's not the pill doing it, it's your brain interaction with it.

That's why they call it practicing medicine. Let's see if this works. That does work. Let's put this one in there. It's your body's reaction to it. If your body can react to it, you can intuit it, you can get your brain to do it. So how do we trigger gamma? You can do that by, by doing high level activities like exercise. We'll do that high level. When we do athletes, professional athletes like pro boxers and things like that, when they're in the zone, when you, you know, you're kind of in a timeless place. It's like a higher level of theta. It goes from 40 to whatever. They've, they've, they've registered amongst brainwaves at 300 cycles per second.

Now I only train to 88 because I like that number, but the, but from 40 to 88, and what we find is, think of that, that gamma is the bass drum for the brain, and it keeps everything in rhythm. It's like, it's like the in a band, you know, the, the drum that just boom, boom, boom, boom. And what we find as we age, that gamma rhythm goes away and disregulates the brain. In our study, we showed that when I talk about voltage, we have two hemispheres. They should both be matched. If it's 10.1 here, it should be 10.1 here. If it's nine, it should be nine. What we find with dementia and Alzheimer's is this could be nine, this could be six. And we usually find the left hemisphere slows down before the right hemisphere.

So we had to create brain fitness exercises to get them going and, and get them doing some planks. And it's amazing what you can get people to do. Once you start, give 'em a little bit at first, get their body to do it, get 'em eating the right nutrition, their brain will follow suit. The brain knows what to do. The brain is designed to heal. You know, it's, but if you keep doing the same things you're doing and wishing and praying and taking some pharmaceutical, it's not gonna happen. You can't have a pill to do this. Yeah. You have to have, have a skill. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: You just said the brain knows what to do. And I wanna talk about now what are we doing, what's going on in our lives today that's disrupting our ability because our brain knows what to do to be able to shift from these different states to really present and create the best life for us.

DR. PATRICK PORTER: Yeah. I think the biggest thing is we do can. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Hold, hold on. Before, before you, before you say that, 'cause I wanna ask you about something very specific. I want to ask you about the three T's. If you could talk about that. 

DR. PATRICK PORTER: Yeah. Okay. So we're talking about the three Ts. There's thoughts, traumas, and toxins. So if, if you have a trauma, obviously you're gonna go to a doctor, get it fixed, whatever needs to happen. But most people don't realize the only way your brain detoxifies is through deep sleep. So if you're not sleeping. You're never gonna win. You know, the, the toxins are gonna build up. You're gonna get leaky brain, you're gonna have brain fog, you're going to get irritable, those kind of things. But your thoughts are the key because if your thoughts aren't right and you're stressed out and angry, you could take the world's greatest nutrition. Guess where it's going? Because when you're stressed out, the all the blood and everything goes out to the extremities. When you need to be digesting digestion's, put on hold, you don't have to digest that meal.

You gotta live your life. So the body's saying, Hey, you gotta protect yourself, so we gotta calm down. That's why even Virginia Hunter used to be over here at UCLA, she passed away now, but she showed that by saying a prayer before you eat, your digestion works better. There's a physiological benefit to that. She actually showed that your energy actually increases when you slow down brainwave activity on something called carilion photography. You can, we can measure the emissions. In fact, if you go to the NIH website today and type in biosphere, NIH, in 1994, said all illness starts in the field, in the bio.

But why are they giving us pills? They're dropping a 55 gallon drum into a pond and saying, fix the pond. When it's the environment of the pond. We need to fix the environment of the pond. We don't need the drum because they're trying to, what they're doing is they're masking the symptoms. I still remember a client coming in and saying, and this is part of the whole thing. She thought, we ask a question in the, in the interview from zero to one, are you healthy? She said, 10%. She was a 10. She was healthy. But I looked and she was taking over 11 prescriptions and I said, you're healthy a 10, but you're taking, oh, that's why I'm a 10. I said, no, that's not why you're 10. You're here because those aren't working.

You put a black tape over your idiot lights on your car. It said The engine needs fixing. You said, I don't wanna see that. I'll put a black tape over it. Medicine does not fix you. That's why I really wanna get Robert Kennedy to change our healthcare. There is no healthcare. There's sick care there. Healthcare is all the other people. That are, because you go to a doctor, I, I mean, I've had so many people tell me, they said, come back when you're sick enough that we can work with you. You're not quite there yet. When you're, when you're this bad, we can start treating you. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: You're pre-diabetic.

DR. PATRICK PORTER: Yes.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Not diabetic yet.

DR. PATRICK PORTER: Yeah, no, you, you have that problem, right? Because, but they don't know what to do because they're never taught about it. That's why I have all these like functional neurologists now and nutrition experts that are talking about health, because health is different than sickness. I'm glad we're here in America where we have the greatest sick care in the world, but it's not gonna help me be healthy. No pharmaceuticals gonna make me healthy. There's no pill that can gimme the skill of health. There's a lifestyle that can do that. That's what we're talking about. So, when we think about those things, then I forgot the last, the other, the other end of the question after the thoughts, traumas and toxins.

SHAWN STEVENSON: So I wanna dig a little bit deeper on. One of those Ts, which again, you go into all this stuff in the book. Brain Fitness Blueprint, alright. Brain Fitness blueprint. And I love this because it's giving, when you, when we hear about fitness, this for us psychologically, I think it's something that's more malleable and changeable. Versus like you have a state of health, like you have your state of mental health. Right. Which can be a little bit harder to move. Fitness is is more approachable. Right. So I love that approach, but I want to ask you a little bit more about traumas. In the book, you call them unseen scars. 

DR. PATRICK PORTER: Yes.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Let's talk a little bit more about that. 

DR. PATRICK PORTER: So think about when I was in school and I went to electronic school, we could take a potato and we would put a speaker on it and then we'd find the crystal, like it was Keener 14. So we could go down to Radio Shack, which was a store. You could buy all these things and you put that crystal in the potato, you'd have a radio because that without that crystal in the potato, you got nothing. Those thoughts are like that crystal. Now you've got, now it's broadcasting through the body. You don't see the scars. That's why they say sticks and stones can break bones, but words last forever because the psychological scars are more energy scars. They crystallize in the, in the energy system of the body.

And so they run the patterns like, and when my kids were growing up, they used to say, dad, you're making me angry. And I'd say, I take out the remote and I'd say, thanks, I got your remote. I'm gonna put you to sleep. 'cause I was teaching them that nobody can make you ri or happy, but everybody's thinking the outside world's gonna make you angry or happy. But these, what they're doing is they're, these are triggers. They're just laying their dormant, not doing anything. It's like the old A OL CDs they'd send you for free and they say, Hey, if you wanna activate it, pay 79.95. They didn't have to download anything. Then it would just unlock the cd. The same thing's true with our brain.

We have all these hidden codes, like a game that somebody says some word or they look at you some way they go, don't gimme that. Look, you know, whatever. You know, we have all these triggers. If we know their triggers, we can control them. They don't have to control us. We can desensitize those triggers. But if we just let 'em lay dormant, like that thing, that fear that you fear like Job says, what if fear has come upon me? 'cause if you dwell on that fear, it's gonna manifest it. The emotion of that experience is gonna manifest not what you want. You get what you rehearse in life, not what you intend. So you have to rehearse it.

That's where visualization, relaxation, guided imagery, changing your thought patterns, being more present, those are all really important things for the brain. Because if not, you go into default. When you asked earlier, what's the, like the perfect day laid out for brain fitness, that's why you have to get up in the morning. You gotta get ready. Just like a game. Today's a game. What are we gonna do? Could you imagine going to a movie and they never rehearsed. This is just an ad-lib movie. You know, pay $15 to go see it. No, you're not gonna do that. They rehearsed. They rehearsed, they took 'em two years maybe to make that movie.

SHAWN STEVENSON: There's a couple movies that are like that. 

DR. PATRICK PORTER: Yes. Yeah. But people live their life like that. They don't ever plan their future. They don't ever plan what to do differently. They don't ever do, but they wanna complain about it. Now their brain thinks that's what they wanna do. That's what they bring about because they're thinking about it. So that's why you have to, one of the techniques I teach is called the stop sign technique, because you're talking about this, these scars, when they come up, you say, stop, visualize a red stop sign. And you say to yourself, stop giving it energy. Stop giving it time in my mind. And then you think of three different ways it would happen.

Because if you only have one way, you have a phobia, you have two ways, you have a dilemma. If you have three ways, you have choices. And I always tell people that third way can be as crazy as you want. Because if you can think of a crazy way to respond to that situation, it doesn't hurt anybody, but it's just crazy. Your brain had to create all the ones between that because the brain is analog, not digital. I mean, yeah, it's analog, not digital. It doesn't just jump from here to here. It's gotta think of all the different scenarios. But you have a 100 billion NBE processor. It can do it in a heartbeat. It can solve your problems in a heartbeat.

While we've been sitting here, not only has every DNA period changed every 40 seconds, you've changed 50 million cells per second, and your body kept track of that. You didn't have to do it. You were breathing over 21,000 times a day. You didn't have to think about that. You blinked 20,000 times a day. You don't think about that. You're digesting your breakfast. You didn't have to think about that. All those things are being controlled by a power far greater than you, but it's inside you right now, ready for you to tap into and use. But you have to be in the right emotional, physiological state to do that. And when you, food is not only medicine, ISCR said, but it's also a drug.

It moves. You know, I love it when parents say, sugar can't be that bad. I said, go to a birthday party. Kids are acting really good. They're all playing. And then break out the cake. Now you're gonna have people fighting, screaming, pulling hair. You know, the kids are gonna go crazy because you just gave 'em a neurotoxin. Their brain went offline. It, it's just the same as having a drink. But in this, in this case, it's stimulating them. So they have to act out and then they go, that's a bad child. We need to put 'em on Ritalin. No need to get 'em off the sugar and dies like my mother did to us when we were kids. That's how I got into this.

And she went to an ologist and she said, your kids aren't spas. They're being fed the wrong foods. My dad worked for the cereal companies. We were eating the box cereals. And then, and one of the studies I love is that I always talk to my, my clients was there was a study done where they took the cereal, like corn flakes, and they took the box, the corn flakes were made in, and they fed it to rats. Guess which rats lived longer? The box, the ones that ate the box lived longer than the ones that ate the cornflakes. That's how much value there is in cereals. So, so, I mean it's, it's crazy. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: In kind of pivoting from this conversation about trauma, which we all experience traumas. This could be Big T or little t Microtraumas are big things that happen in our lives. And you shared a sentiment when I was watching one of your talks and you shared that there's a value in those hardships oftentimes. Can you talk a little bit about that? 

DR. PATRICK PORTER: Yeah. If we look at our hardships as our liabilities, then we gotta carry 'em around like an anchor. They weigh us down. I call 'em dragons of the past because we drag 'em on, drag 'em on, drag 'em on. It's just to play on words. So we don't want those dragons, we wanna slay those dragons. So what I did is I reframed it. I was blessed to be the son of an alcoholic. 'cause my dad didn't have a chance. Both his parents were alcoholics. One was a drug addict 'cause she was a nurse and it was pharmaceutical drugs.

But she could dispense her own medication. And she got, she got sent home from the hospital at 56 to die and she lived to be 93. 'cause she got off all her pharmaceuticals, you know. And so my, my, my grandfather's an alcoholic. Now, obviously I could be a really good alcoholic. I have the genetic propensity for it, but I choose not to drink. So am I an alcoholic. Somebody goes, well, you're not drinking 'cause you're an alcoholic and you're afraid. I go, if that beer helps me, then it's good. But anything that's happening to you, and I said it earlier in the show, this is your dike night of the soul. No super, no marvel comic superhero didn't go through the dark night of the soul.

You don't just get no saint, didn't have to be a sinner first. You know, there's, there's always a dark night. But if you stay stuck in the dark night, you'll just keep cycling through it. Cycling through it. You've gotta say, you've gotta rise above that again. You can either be in the muck, you know, in my, my one book, awaken the genius side where that, that statement is too, I have a story about Caleb and he is walking in the mud and he's praying to God, God, God, get me out of this mug.

Get me out. He says, he says, I keep calling to you. I'm over here where the shore is. But you keep walking in the muck. You know, there's signs every day. You can't be. I mean, if people get help with aa, great. If whatever helps you to do it, but you need to figure out that you are not a behavior. That's the number one law of psychology. But we are given labels at birth. He's a smart one. He's a dumb one. I was a dumb one. I was held back in second grade, but my dad taught me differently and that's why I was blessed. He got the help. You could be that help to your family. You could be the one that breaks the chain. You know, when you think of third generation welfare families in Chicago, what they found was they were doing the study with third generation welfare families, and the kids were literally being conditioned to be a welfare recipient because hell, I'm smart, grandpa's smart, great.

Grandpapa was really smart. Look at, they're on welfare. Well, being smart doesn't make you successful. I know a lot of successful people that aren't smart aren't successful. You know, they still have all the same problems. It's about taking action. What are the little micro things you can change today? To make a difference in, in my case, because my dad was an alcoholic and he knew we needed help, the worst thing parents do is send their kids to the room and say, think about what you did. That's our prison system. In a nutshell, the biggest business in the world today is prisons. There's a problem with that. Why do we need to keep building prisons? You know, it's because they're not pro, they're not training them. Right. My dad would send us to the room with a book and the first book he sent me to was, as a Man Thinketh, I'd have to read that book and come out.

At first I was just BSing him, you know, dad, I'm gonna do this. Because I had to tell him how he's gonna take that knowledge and apply it, because knowledge is not power. Knowledge applied is power. So anything you've heard from this podcast, if you don't apply it, it's just information. It's nothing. But if you start applying it, and, and one of the things my, my dad taught me too was when he'd have somebody coming into the clinic, he's a psychologist as well, and they'd say, this isn't working. Let's say it's weight loss. I'll just use that example. He'd say, he would say to them, if I ask you to gain weight, could you do it? And they'd say, yeah, how would you do it? And they'd start saying what they would do. He says, oh, wait a minute. You mean you'd do something? So you can either do something to stay stuck or you can do something to stay, to be free.

You've gotta be willing to do the hard things. I always say you have to do the things you have to do until you can do the things you wanna do. Everybody just wants, because we live in the quick fix. Facebook, click happy. Everybody's having their greatest life ever. You know, we don't wanna go through that pain. But that pain's there for a reason. And you made it, whether you believe it or not, it's your making. You know, I, I had the chance of talking to the group that was in the Hanoi Hilton they called it, where these were prisoners of war. And they're, they're written about all the time. But I was able to, I had 'em on an interview, the one, the one guy, and he said they played golf every day.

They left there and they were all, none of them had a problem. They just spent, they spent every day playing golf on different courses and they would explain, they'd take out the clubs, they would hit the ball, they would keep score. Their mind was occupied with something positive. They weren't thinking about the torture and the lack of food and lack of water and all that. They were focused on what they could do to get, when they get outta there, what are you gonna do When you get outta there, what is your life gonna look like? And this is where affirmations kind of fall down, even though I love affirmations. Hay House published my book. So, but, but they need to be upgraded because let's say that you say to yourself, you go in the mirror and say, I'm healthy.

I'm healthy, but then you're, you have a health crisis. And you're feeling that health crisis, you're gonna amplify that health crisis by saying that because it's not these words that get that resonate out into the universe and bring back your reality. It's your emotions. Energy drives behavior. But what if you said, what would life be like if I was healthy? What? What would I do? What would I be seeing? How would I be seeing it? Who would I talk to? You start using the what, where, when, whom, and how often questions at the beginning of your affirmations, you transform 'em into energy, because our brain likes energy, it likes movement. So our thoughts have to be that way too.

And we're gonna get stuck states. And when somebody says, you know, I'd go to Altine growing up because my dad was an alcoholic, but then eventually I, I, what am I gonna to these meetings for? My dad's not an alcoholic anymore. I'm not an alcoholic anymore. You know, why don't you live a life of a non-alcoholic? Well, that's the way everybody should be living. If there's no alcohol, we wouldn't have this problem. It's not like a, like you don't really have an inherent alcohol gene or non-alcoholic gene. You have genes that either respond to sugar or they don't. Because it's not the alcohol, it's the sugar content that your brain can't handle. You get the same thing with Candy Bar. You know your brain's gonna derail. There's never been a shooting where the person, they didn't find candy bar wrappers all over the place. The guy was a junk food junkie. His brain was off offline. He wasn't thinking. Right. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: This is so good. Okay, so obviously this is transformative and a lot goes into fitness, A lot goes into brain fitness specifically, and you outline all these pieces in the book. You talk about nutrition. We've already kind of dug in on some really important tactics with our sleep health, and I want to ask you about something that I feel might be one of the greatest leverage points, and I'm so grateful that you talked about this in the book. It's a big part of why I do what I do. You talked about the essential link between human connection and brain health. Yes. Talk about why that matters with our brain fitness. 

DR. PATRICK PORTER: Well, they've, and all the Blue Zones studies, they've shown this too. But if you isolate, all addiction is isolation. When people start doing negative things, they don't have a connection, they don't have community. We are community people. We need to interact. And it's not just on Facebook. I mean, you can have a 5,000 friends, but do you have a friend? You can pick up the phone and say, Hey, I got a flat tire out here on the 4 0 5. Can you come help me out? If you don't have a friend like that, you don't have friends, you know?

And that connection is, it, it, we feel something, you know, if when we're around people, we get energized with the right, with the right tribe. Right. And thinking about brain fitness, just so the users know, back in the seventies, they didn't think physical fitness was gonna be anything. In fact, at our high school, they said they, they had a petition to stop us from putting in a weight room because they thought it was gonna stun our growth. Now we know that's ridiculous now, but that's how people think. So brain fitness is the same way. People, we now realize we're living longer. We're we're exposed to more toxins. And so one of the things that I really believe every person I know should be taking is niacin. B three. It's very inexpensive. And niacin is a, that's how aa, the bill, the founder of AA, stopped drinking.

Not by going to AA meetings, by taking niacin. It was a nutritional problem. And why is that important? Because when you get a blood test, they're only checking 23% of your blood, the others in your capillaries, you need that niacin to flush it out. So don't, don't start with a lot, just start with a little bit. You get that flush and then find the mouth that's right for you. But every morning, that's the next thing you, when you do that, you'll have a clearer mind. You're, you're detoxing your body and you're getting the capillaries. 'cause where there's blood flow, there's nutrition, and there's oxygen. You could be eating the greatest nutrition, but if you're clogged.

Because your arteries, you know, the, the, the biggest study I can quote is the one they did on peanut oil. They thought it was a new health food, and they went to the market with it because all these monkeys, they, in their, in their 23% of their blood, they're circulating. It didn't have any peanut oil. It says this is a miracle oil. All those monkeys died within three months. Because that, that fat was deposited into their capillaries. And right now seed oils are probably the, the second thing behind sugar as far as damaging to the brain. So we can clear those out. With niacin, we're blowing it out with sending energy through those systems.

So think about it like a big fire hose going through the system, and now you have clearer thoughts, you have more focus, and your body needs it anyway. B vitamins are important for the brain and the, and the body. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Yeah. You've got some incredible tips like this and so much more in this book. I'm so grateful that you put this together. Can you let everybody know where they can pick up a copy pre-order? By the way, you've got some bonuses right now for people that are listening right now to take advantage of. Let people know where they can get that. 

DR. PATRICK PORTER: Yeah. Any, any bookstore you can get it at, online or whatever. But if you do, then go back to brain fitness blueprint.com. If you pre-order it, we have a really great list over nine, $900 worth of value that we're giving you. If you buy that book, tell us you bought it, we're gonna send you a course, a, a brain fitness course that I developed that's a sick classes where I'm gonna teach you, go into detail and all these things. You get that for free just by ordering the book at any, any retailer. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: That's amazing. So this is a video course? 

DR. PATRICK PORTER: Yes. It's video and audio. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Awesome. Awesome. So again, go to brain fitness blueprint.com right now. Take advantage of this incredible gift as well. So pre-order the book, take advantage of this gift. And one other thing before I let you go. You know, in talking about the importance of community and relationships for our wellbeing, and also just again, defending and kind of warding off some of the common culprits in our society, right? So whether this is depression, whether this is addiction, and you talk about in the book the connection with oxytocin. Oxytocin is getting a moment right now. Yeah. But it's one of the most powerful things to help us to metabolize stress. So, in closing, can you talk a little bit about oxytocin and how it relates to our relationships? 

DR. PATRICK PORTER: Well, it starts connecting those pleasure syndrome, the pleasure centers in damp, in basically the amygdala that gets hijacked during stress and starts, you become more animal nature. It subsides that. So think about it like you're, you're putting the beast down, like with music, you know, the brain because they, they can't have both going at the same time. You can't have the high stress hormones and, and neurotransmitters and the, the relaxing ones and, and oxytocin and all of these ones, they, they all get when you're around.

We've all done it. We've been in the mall and we see a friend coming at a distance and we start getting happier and happier. And by the time they were all smiling, and then we hug them, you know, and say, oh, it's been so long since you've seen him. Because all the memories start queuing up. And we start getting all the uh, all those flashbacks, the positive things. That's why during that sleep cycle I was talking about when you're breathing out, you wanna remember those. My grandma had a great memory till she, she died at 93. She would remember her favorite vacations. I remember walking in and she's talking, I said, are you on the phone? She goes, no, I'm just reviewing all my favorite vacations.

And she had a great memory 'cause she would, she would use it. If you don't use it, you lose it. You know? So there's just little practical things you can do every day. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Amazing. I appreciate you so much. And also you are the inventor of BrainTap. And even my guy here in the studio, one of our team members mentioned that his roommate is utilizes BrainTap. He heard your voice. He was like, this sounds familiar. You get into Ubers and people know like, oh, are you Dr. Porter? You know, you guys are impacting so many different, especially like. Some of the data coming out of professional sports, the athletes that you're working with, with BrainTap. Talk a just a little bit about BrainTap.

DR. PATRICK PORTER: Yeah, we have a lot of the almost every boxing champion you'll see they have BrainTap on their shorts or their shirt because they're BrainTap users. We have Alex Guerra, who's with TB rx, Tom Brady doing it. He's one of our, of course, biggest proponents. A lot of people in the NFL you would know are using it. A lot of the coaches are using it 'cause I get get went and met with the, like the Detroit Lions and things like that. So I, and a lot of our doctors, we have 3000 clinics out there doing it. So a lot of our doctors are already in with the professional sports, like hockey and things like that. And, and the Swiss Performance Institute is the biggest group.

We're working with 40,000 Olympic athletes under contract. So, they're working to get them. They don't all own the headset, they have the app, but the, the headset is something you can add to it. So you have an app that you can just use the app and when they, when they go to that site, brain fitness blueprint, there's a link there where they can get the app for free for 14 days too.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Amazing, amazing. Can you give a brief summation of what BrainTap is? 

DR. PATRICK PORTER: Yeah. We use light, sun and vibration to mimic nature and get the mirror neurons in the body to respond. So like when you walk near an ocean, it's 10 hertz frequency, that's alpha. We can mimic that with light, sound and vibration. We can mimic sunrises and sunsets, which reset the gut biome.

We can, we can, we can balance and train any brainwave. And we have a lot of science around that. I mean, we have, we have 30 published studies and we are, right now, as we're sitting here, there's six published studies. There's six studies going on around the world right now, from India to Brazil, to Italy to United States. We, we have studies going on just to show that the brain can change at any age. You're not fixed if you're ever have a problem right now. It's a blessing. Get it wherever you're at, this is the time to start changing your brain right now. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Yeah, man. Thank you so much. I feel like my cup has been filled today. I'm excited. The founder of BrainTap, founder and inventor of BrainTap. Author of Brain Fitness Blueprint, the one and only, Dr. Patrick Porter. Thank you so much for tuning into this episode today. I hope that you got a lot of value out of this. There's nothing more important than being able to really address what's controlling our behaviors, right?

Our thoughts are determining our actions and our behaviors, our actions and our behaviors are determining our results, and our results are determining the quality of our lives. We've got to address what's going on with our thinking, what's going on with our beliefs, and Dr. Patrick Porter is one of the foremost experts in helping us to do this. So definitely take advantage and go to brain fitness blueprint.com. Pre-order the book. As of this recording, it's still in pre-order, so you can take advantage of this and get access to, again, over $900 worth of free bonuses, including a free. Video course. And again, stuff like this doesn't come along very often.

He's an incredibly brilliant inventor and it's so amazing. Like I wasn't expecting from my guy here in the studio to say like, he has exposure to brain tap. Right? He. He's one of these guys that just so, he's so impactful. He's helping so many different people and you can't stress enough like people like this today. For me, it was really just great for my spirit. You know, he showed up, he's got a lot going on, but he showed up here to provide us with incredible insights and value and you can hear the passion in his voice. And we have the opportunity right now to write a new story for our society. And we've got to learn.

We've got to plug ourselves into incredible insights like this on a regular basis. And as he shared, we've got to start to carve those new pathways in our brains wheat field so that we can put these behaviors on automatic, right? We wanna automate good health, we wanna automate healthy decisions, and we have the power to do that, and it's time for us to take back control of our minds. I appreciate you so much. We've got some. Epic masterclasses and world-class guests coming your way very, very soon. So make sure to stay tuned. Take care, have an amazing day, and we'll talk with you soon. And for more after the show, make sure to head over to the model health show.com. That's where you can find all of the show notes.

You can find transcriptions videos for each episode. And if you've a comment, you can leave me a comment there as well. And please make sure to head over to iTunes and leave us a rating to let everybody know that the show is awesome and I appreciate that so much and take care, I promise, to keep giving you more powerful, empowering, great content to help you transform your life. Thanks for tuning in.