Change Your Brain Every Day - Can Neurofeedback Help Anxiety & Depression?

Episode Date: January 25, 2018

In this episode of The Brain Warrior’s Way Podcast, Tana Amen is joined by Dr. Jay Gattis to talk about neurofeedback. This process is used to address the brain’s focal abnormalities, especially ones that can’t be helped using supplements or medication. It can help with anxiety, depression, traumatic brain injuries, epilepsy, and even those who don’t have the ability to talk.

Welcome to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. I'm Dr. Daniel Amen. And I'm Tana Amen. Here we teach you how to win the fight for your brain to defeat anxiety, depression, memory loss, ADHD, and addictions. The Brain Warriors Way podcast is brought to you by Amen Clinics, where we've transformed lives for three decades using brain spec imaging to better target treatment and natural ways to heal the brain. For more information, visit amenclinics.com.

The Brain Warriors Way podcast is also brought to you by BrainMD, where we produce the highest quality nutraceutical products to support the health of your brain and body. For more information, visit brainmdhealth.com. Welcome to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. Welcome back. I'm so happy today to be talking about neurofeedback with one of our experts, Dr. Gaddis, who's at our Costa Mesa Clinic. And this is a topic that we don't spend enough time talking about because we actually recommend it to a lot of people. So I'm really happy that you're here explaining what it is.

Yeah, what we're doing. Okay. Neurofeedback is so fantastically exciting because what I love about neurofeedback is that we can address focal abnormalities in the brain. So, you know, with our nutraceuticals and our medications, we can support the brain in its general function. You know, we can help move it one way or another in its function and self-regulation. But so, for instance, when people have an injury, you know, a TBI or a concussion, right,

and they have, you know, a slow focus, which I see all the time on my QEEG brain maps, right over here, well, there's no particular medication that's going to improve the function just right here. So when you say a slow focus, you're talking about sort of almost like just a little targeted spot. That's right. Okay. Right. There's a decrease in the blood flow to this region right here because it was bruised. It's healed a little bit but it's not fully recovered. Right. Right. These really smart guys I have to like make sure that we're... Right. I know I totally am guilty of talking in jargon. No it's okay. Thank you for catching me.

So we have a little decrease in blood flow. And so what we can do is we put the sensor on, the neurofeedback, which picks up the electrical activity in the brain, and we feed that into the computer. And what happens is I'm creating a brain-computer interface, which is actually used to help people, for instance, who can no longer speak to communicate. Oh, interesting. It's the same technology, right? So they can use their brainwaves to select letters, to create words and sentences to

communicate because they're called, it's called locked in, right? They literally have lost all control of their body. And so they can use their electroactivity to select words. But we can do the same thing with, for instance, watching a movie. So you're watching a movie, and it gets dark when that lack of blood flow happens. And the movie gets bright when your brain increases the blood flow and so we encourage the brain like a gentle exercise and it was one of my main metaphors for neurofeedback it's really like going to

the gym for your brain okay well maybe more like physical therapy right so it's because it's very targeted, particular exercises for your brain based on a map, you know, correcting the abnormalities. So I know when my daughter was really young, she had extreme anxiety. We thought she might have ADD. It turned out to not even be anything close to ADD. And now that she's older, it's obvious it's not ADD. She's the extreme other end. Right. She's like very anxious and like everything's got to be done ahead of time and perfect. Right.

So she's like not ADD at all. Right. But when she was little, it manifested. The anxiety was so intense that it would sort of shut her down. Right. And so we didn't know what was going wrong. And yeah, it was almost crippling. So it was recommended that she do some neurofeedback.

In fact, Daniel wanted to do an EEG and do some neurofeedback with her. And it was helpful. So I know anxiety is one of the reasons. You mentioned TBI. Who are other people that would benefit from neurofeedback? You know, one of the less well-known applications of neurofeedback was the original application of neurofeedback, which is epilepsy. Interesting.

Yes. It was a coincidental discovery that it inhibited seizures when people trained a particular stabilizing rhythm on the top of the head. Oh, interesting. That it would decrease the number of seizures that epileptic had and then what happened was they coincidentally discovered while training people for seizures that their depression got better and their anxiety got better and their attention got better and then Joel Lubar and University of Tennessee started applying

it to ADD children and found that got their attention better and it began to spread in its application. So interesting. So when I walked in and my daughter was doing neurofeedback, it looked like she was playing video games. Right. Explain to me. Well, that's the brain-computer interface.

So we can use the brain-computer interface to control any particular kind of feedback. I mean, the earliest neurofeedback was just a little light would come on. That was it. Okay. If you achieved an alpha brainwave, just a little light would go, you know, and you would know you were making alpha, all right, of a particular amount. And it's only in this personal computer age that now we have really infinite options of what we want to use for feedback.

Sometimes I train people with, you know, a little number that's a representation of how much of a brainwave they have, and they're watching that number and looking for it to increase or decrease. And that's a very basic kind of neurofeedback, where you can train with a tone or music or video, or they have 3D video games. Right. Some even with controllers where the kids can, you know, can steer the car but their brain's controlling how fast it goes. Interesting. Yeah.

Or a spaceship or whatever. So fascinating. So it's really can seem almost fun to kids and not like they're doing something weird. Right. Not like there's something

wrong with them. Right. And it can actually seem interesting and fun. Absolutely. I mean, thanks to the new kinds of feedback that we have,

particularly watching videos, what kid doesn't like watching videos? Exactly. It's like a digital age. We have very little difficulty getting them to come in and sit down for a session when they get to watch their favorite video. Right. And so you get, what kind of results do you get with? Well, I mean, it's really quite amazing. So we can target these particular abnormalities and as they correct, they find that I can concentrate where I used to fall asleep. Or approaching that task that used to seem so overwhelming, well now it doesn't seem so overwhelming. My brain is functioning the way it should.

I'm calmer or I'm more activated depending on what my brain needed or more connected depending on what it needed and things are better. It's so interesting. Yes. It's really exciting. So do you work mostly with children or with adults or who do you work with? A mixture? Well I would say I work mostly with adults here because I find that a lot of the kids who come are coming from so far away. And so we end up giving them referrals. Right. Okay. Right. And locally, it tends to be the adults who are coming in and doing the neurofeedback. Very interesting. How many sessions does it take? It's one of the hardest questions I deal with, Tana. I really have to look at the brain

map, see how many things we're dealing with. You know, I used to have a rule of thumb, but this is with the older traditional neurofeedback, which was 20 sessions per kind of major problem you want to address. Okay. The new kind of neural feedback we're doing, it's called Loretta, which is super exciting because we try to put on a full cap of 19 electrodes. But then what we can do with that cap is we can trace the actual source of the signal. So instead of, we used to put a single sensor on and pick up some surface activity well the EEG travels in all directions from wherever it's coming from so that's not as specific when you're telling the brain to change that then when you use the cap and you can tell it no I want you to change this

particular activity in this little three-dimensional region over here you're being much more specific of what you're asking the brain to do so it can learn much faster. Oh, I like that. Right. And so we get the same response that we used to take 20 sessions in like five sessions. Okay? So my rule of thumb is adjusting from 20, it's moving down, I'm not sure exactly where

it is, maybe it's 10. Sort of not sure exactly where it is maybe it's 10 sort of depends on the person yeah it depends on the person and again the more complex the case you know generally the more sessions okay yeah so what I love is that we you know when people come here it depends on what you have what's going on with you it's why I have so many experts on the show we have experts in different, you know, to deal with so many different things at our clinics. And I love that because we're really about skills, not just pills here. And so we want to be able to be sure that we can offer people

a variety of different treatments depending on what they're going through. I love that we have hyperbaric oxygen, that we have EMDR therapy, that we have neurofeedback, that we have all these different modalities that are not just typical traditional Western medicine. We've got an integrative medicine doctor who tests for Lyme and hormones. And, you know, so it's just such a unique place. And I have to jump in and say, I love being a part of that, Tana, because so often when treatment would fail in my private practice, it was because I didn't have access to all these specialists with all these additional resources. And I would know, like, man, I really think there's something biological going on that I need to integrate a medical doctor for, but I don't even know enough about that.

Well, and all of those things affect the brain, and your brain can affect all those other things. Like when I had thyroid cancer and no one explained to me, oh, by the way, you might get a little depressed. Well, I didn't get a little depressed. I got really depressed. No one told me. So no one bothered like sending me to any expert. They just let me sort of suffer through it until I thought I was going to die.

I wanted to die. You know, it's like silly. So we really try to like look at the person holistically and we make sure that we've got experts that are all here. It's like your body is not a bunch of individual organs. It's all connected. Yeah. And it all makes a difference. And I love that.

Yeah. I mean, our chances of success are so much higher when people have this comprehensive program. Right. You know, they're addressing nutrition. Right. You know, which is so, so important. Huge. You know, do they have systemic inflammation because they have an infection or because

they're eating Taco Bell every day? You'd be surprised how many people don't actually want to deal with that. Right. They're like, give me a pill. I don't want to know. That's right. I don't want to know. I just want a pill.

It's crazy. Yeah. So, well, I thank you so much for joining me. Dr. Gaddis is in our Costa Mesa office, and he does neurofeedback here. So contact us if you think you might benefit from this, or if you're not sure, we'll have someone in our call center reach out to you. You can leave me a message below. If you're going to leave contact information, please leave it in my private mailbox.

Thank you so much. Thank you for listening to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. Go to iTunes and leave a review and you'll automatically be entered into a drawing to get a free signed copy of the Brain Warriors Way and the Brain Warriors Way cookbook we give away every month. Thank you.