Your 3 Interconnected Brains, Neuroplasticity, & Building Brain Fitness – with Dr. Patrick Porter

22:29And you start setting up the sequence that says, hey, this is a great place to be. I'm in a great place. 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 results are up here. But you've got to make the switch. And it takes action. That's why they, like in the Bible, they say faith without works is dead. You got to do the work. You can't just think about it. I mean, there's a lot of people out there. You just meditate about it.

22:58Well, if you never leave the bedroom, you're never going to make a dime. You know, if you want to make the money, you got to 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 got to do it enough times to make it easy.

23:14Shawn 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. Shout out this is 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 weed field, we just, it's easy. It's automated at this point. And so when we want to do something different, that's when we're starting to go where the, where the, the, the weed is higher and it's a little bit more difficult to get through.

23:48Shawn Stevenson:Not sometimes a lot more difficult, but as you do it repeatedly, you're going to create a new path. and the old path, especially in kids, it kind of withers away. And I wanted to ask you about that. This pruning, this neural pruning that you talked about, it can kind of just kind of dissolve and go away. For adults, it's different. It can happen for sure. But what it really is based on 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 other path just becomes less attractive. Yeah, it's an energy equation.

24:23You 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 sleep, you wake up, you fall back to default network. So you've got to be willing. Mike Tyson said, everybody has a plan until they get hit. It's not just about boxing. It's about life. It's never going to be. Today is not going to go like it's planned. You know, you're going to have a plan, but you should plan on something not going right. And how are you going to adjust? It's how do you recover? That's 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.

24:57So 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 sleep equation that blows people's minds. To win any aura ring, whoop watch, any of those things, you need one hour of deep sleep, two hours of REM sleep. And you will beat any score because it's not an hour of deep sleep all at one time. The body goes through these cycles. So that's why you want to 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've got all this, the rest of this time to get all this other delta activity and why people have increased delta.

25:32That's going to 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 operating? Like the X-Men. What else is inside of us right now that could be activated at the right moment, the right time, with the right sequence of events, the right activities? You know, we don't even know what, we could be superhuman.

26:03We 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 of the right activities, those opportunities are going to show up.

26:19Shawn Stevenson:Got a quick break coming up. We'll be right back. As you know, our nutrition today here in the United States, over 60 % of the average American's diet is made of ultra-processed foods. And for children in the United States, according to the Journal of the American Medical Association, our children are now eating about 70 % ultra-processed foods. And many of these foods are designed to have this vanishing caloric density engineered into the foods to make them quickly dissolve. You get a crunch or two and then they turn into liquid. This gets me in the mindset of the cheese puffs that I used to eat, Chester Cheetah, the Doritos, the Cheetos, all those kind of things.

26:57Shawn Stevenson:You get a couple of crunches and then it just completely dissolves, whether it's just pop tarts or even into the realm of mushy meats. One of my favorite things to eat regularly had in my household, we had the microwave dinners. We have the Salisbury steak, this mushy steak that requires little to no chewing. Now with all of that said, we know that organic foods, grass-fed foods, and foods without all of the newly invented synthetic ingredients in our food supply can sometimes come at a premium price tag, but it doesn't have to. If we're talking about traditional foods, let's just take a look at the comparison between grass-fed beef and grain-fed beef, where grain-fed beef is now the dominant form of beef that you'll find at grocery stores.

27:42Shawn Stevenson:Research published in the British Journal of Nutrition found that beef from animals fed an abnormal diet of conventional grains contains up to five times less omega-3 fatty acids than what's found in grass-fed beef. Abundant omega-3s are a crucial factor for our metabolic health. As cited in the European Journal of clinical nutrition, reporting that omega-3 fatty acids have anti-obesity effects and improves levels of our satiety hormones. If you choose to eat animal foods, you'd better know the difference. And that's what I love about the company Wild Pastures is the heart and transparency that they put into their food and making it affordable.

28:23Shawn Stevenson:Wild Pastures delivers 100 % grass-fed and grass-finished beef, pasture-raised pork, pasture-raised chicken, and wild-caught seafood. All born, raised, and harvested entirely in the USA. Raised on regenerative family farms and raised on pastures free from pesticides and other chemicals. There are absolutely no antibiotics, no added hormones, and no feedlots and absolutely no genetically modified organisms. Fast delivery from their farms straight to your door. And right now with the Wild Pastures subscription, you're going to receive 20 % off for life plus free shipping. And on top of all that, you're going to receive $15 off of your first order.

29:10Shawn Stevenson:Just go to wildpastures.com forward slash model right now to take advantage. That's W-I-L-D-P-A-S-T-U-R-E-S.com forward slash model to take advantage of this incredible offer from the amazing folks at Wild Pastures. Enjoy, upgrade your nutrition, and now back to the show. You mentioned the Delta Sleep. This is a great opportunity to talk about the different stages or brain frequencies because in the book you know when i was in school there were basically there were four that we talked about that we learned in in college and again a costly university but now we know that there's more so let's talk about these different brain there's 16 but i'm going to talk about six 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 percent beta, 30 percent alpha.

30:09That means that we have access to our reactionary mind because we want to, if somebody throws a ball at me, I want to be able to catch it or swerve away from traffic. And, but I want my alpha mind because that's going to be, that's going to, that's the intuitive mind. You're always predicting the future. When Deepak Chopra said 97 % of what's going to 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 going to happen tomorrow. You know, they go buy a six pack and they're going to stop drinking tomorrow. Well, that doesn't equal or they buy a pack of cigarettes.

30:36I'm going to stop smoking. Non-smokers don't buy cigarettes. People who don't drink alcohol don't buy six packs. You know what I mean? You got to start living your life as if those things are already happening. Then the neurology figures it out. So that beta brain is really important.

30:50Shawn Stevenson:So it's beta faster than alpha. Yes. Beta is 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 going to be trying to help you out 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.

31:33That's why they can't speak. We did a study right here in California in Orange County with Joquita 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 have the placebo group. What are they doing? So I said, I'll take those kids. I'll give them 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 think of each of these brainwaves like wi-fi networks like if you open up your phone right now i'm sure we got about 30 wi-fi 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 brain waves because they're going on right now.

32:30Now, between beta and alpha, what we found in neuroscience is the most important brain wave 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 light, sound, vibration, audio, visual entrainment than you can by exercising. Now, when you combine the two, you've got a powerful force because 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 brain waves 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 want to have this little high level thinking you also nicotine in small doses is good.

33:21You know, they're finding out all these things, but anything in high dose isn't good. So SMR, 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 all your creativity is, where your solutions are, where your speaking patterns are, that's why when people 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.

33:54You can't be creative if you're being chased by a bear or a tiger. You got to just be reactionary. You got to just get the heck out of 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 want to 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 because it's, we're, we are, This is something that usually blows people's minds, but the Navajo Indians said seven generations are helping them because they didn't know about geneology.

34:29But now neuroscientists are telling us that in our genes, seven generations of your family are inside you right now. 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.

35:04So 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 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 Silva instructor, Silva Method Mind Control. And we would go to alpha and we'd use this alpha sound. That's how I got into all this. And somebody says, why did you get into this? Well, in the 70s, Jose Silva had something called the Silva sound.

35:35Now we know it as isochronic tones, but he didn't let out the secret. It was something he created. But in the room you could play this music it's like an 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 brain waves your body there's 64 neurotransmitters so we're not going to 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 adjutant 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 wants, it doesn't matter.

36:12You get it. You don't, you want more. It doesn't satisfy you. It just agitates you. And that's what dopamine does. It's, it's, it's supposed to get you out of 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 is going to 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 these great inventors like Tesla, Einstein, Edison, they would do these exercises where they'd sit in a chair like this and they'd have an iron ball in their hand.

36:45And as soon as the iron ball fell, all the tension out of 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 go through the day, these things happen. But in theta, when 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.

37:22That was out of this world. Well, they probably tapped into GABA because then every cell of your body has that God molecule in it. It's going to activate. now you're going to 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 on to 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.

38:23That's why we have gainers and drainers. You know, the gainers are the people when we leave them, they feel energized. Wow, this is great. And the drainers are like, man, that person wears me out. They got on my last good nerve. 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.

38:51So think about you're at the Ford Motor Plant and you have to clean the line. They're not going to keep building the machines. You got to 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 system of this body. Like we're at a networking party and we're all little glia cells and we're shaking hands and we're doing everything. At the end of that party, we're going to want to clean our hands. Whether you're paranoid about that or not, you just touched everybody's hands. You're going to want to clean your hands.

39:18So every night when we go to sleep, 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, sleeps for the dead, you know, and you'd brag how much you didn't sleep because you could, 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.

39:52And whatever you're going through right now in your life, whatever 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 out of here alive. So, you know, let's figure out how we can work together and make it happen. And then we go to the higher states now, Now, just five years ago, actually, if you'd have told me about gamma, I'd have said, nothing happens there.

40:21Gamma's nothing. But I got a call from Dr. Rosenthal in Dallas, Texas. He said, I want to do a PTSD study on the brain and I want to use a psilocybin. But we had some vets that didn't want to do it because they were afraid that that might cause them to become addicted to a 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 a psilocybin, the ones that were doing it. We didn't do the first session because sometimes it can get a little wild for people. But the second session, they understand what's going to happen and they do all right.

40:52And what we found was there's a region of the brain just to the right up here. In that region, the brain lights up big time and creates high-level gamma brainwaves. So I said, let me create a series with BrainTap, my brainwave entrainment device that does brain fitness. And let's see what happens with that. Well, what happened was David called me up. He says, I had, I see, he said, I've never done a psilocybin, but I had the trips just like the trauma. 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.

41:26It'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 uh 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 monks uh brain waves 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 gamma as the bass drum for the brain.

42:14And it keeps everything in rhythm. It's like in a band, you know, the drum that just boom, boom, boom, boom. And what we find as we age, that gamma rhythm goes away and dysregulates 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 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 get them doing some planks.

42:53And it's amazing what you can get people to do. Once you start, give them a little bit at first, get their body to do it, get them 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 going to happen you can't have a pill to do this yeah you just said the brain knows what to do yeah and i want to talk about now what are we doing what's

43:19Shawn Stevenson: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 I want to ask you about the three T's. Okay. If you could talk about that. Okay. So we're talking about the three T's. There's thoughts, traumas, and toxins. So if you have a trauma, obviously you're going to 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 going to win. You know, the toxins are going to build up.

43:49You're going to get leaky brain. You're going to have brain fog. You're going to get irritable, those kinds 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, all the blood and everything goes out to the extremities when you need to be digesting. Digestion is put on hold. You don't have to digest that meal. You got to live your life. So the body's saying, hey, you got to protect yourself. So we got to calm down. That's why even Virginia Hunt, who 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.

44:25There's a physiological benefit to that. She actually showed that your energy actually increases when you slow down brainwave activity. On something called Karelian photography, 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 biofield. 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.

45:01I still remember a client coming in and saying, and this is part of the whole thing. She thought, we asked a question 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 said the engine needs fixing You said I don't want to see that. I'll put a black tape over it Medicine does not fix you.

45:34That's why I really want to get robert kennedy to change our health care There is no health care. They're sick care Health care is all the other people that are because you go to a doctor 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 you're pre-diabetic.

45:53Shawn Stevenson:Yes diabetic Yeah, no, you have that problem, right? But they don't know what to do because they're never taught about it. That's why I have all these 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 is gonna make me healthy. There's no pill that can give me 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, and then I forgot the other end of the question after the thoughts, traumas, and toxins.

46:29Shawn Stevenson:I wanna dig a little bit deeper on one of those T's, which again, you go into all this stuff in the book, brain fitness blueprint, all right? Brain fitness blueprint. And I love this because it's giving, when we hear about fitness, 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, which can be a little bit harder to move. Fitness 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. Let's talk a little bit more about that.

47:08So 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 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 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.

47:48Like 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. I said, thanks, I got your remote. I'm going to put you to sleep. Because I was teaching them that nobody can make you angry or happy. But everybody's thinking the outside world is going to make you angry or happy. But these, what they're doing is these are triggers. They're just laying there dormant, not doing anything. It's like the old AOL CDs. They'd send you for free and they say, hey, if you want to activate it pay$79.95. They didn't have to download anything then. It would just unlock the CD.

48:19The 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 give me that look. You know, whatever. You know, we have all these triggers. If we know they're triggers, we can control them. They don't have to control us. We can desensitize those triggers. But if we just let them lay dormant, like that thing that you fear, like Job says, what a fear has come upon me because if you dwell in that fear, it's going to manifest. The emotion of that experience is going to manifest, not what you want. You get what you rehearse in life, not what you intend.

48:52So 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're going to default. When you asked earlier, what's like the perfect day laid out for brain fitness? That's why you have to get up in the morning. You got to get ready, just like a game today's a game what are we going to 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 going to do that they rehearsed they rehearsed they took them two years maybe to make that movie there's a couple movies that are like that 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 want to complain about it now their brain thinks that's what they want to do that's what they bring about because they're thinking about it.

49:37So that's why you have to, one of the techniques I teach is called the stop sign technique because you're talking about 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, doesn't hurt anybody, but it's just crazy.

50:06Your 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 got to think of all the different scenarios. But you have a 100 billion neurobit 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 pair 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.

50:33You blink 20 ,000 times a day. You don't think about that. You're digesting your breakfast. You don'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 food is not only medicine, as Hippocrates 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 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 them a neurotoxin their brain went offline 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 them on ritalin no need to get them off the sugar and dies like my mother did to us when we were kids.

51:30That's how I got into this. And she went to an hydrologist and she said, your kids aren't spazes. They're being fed the wrong foods. My dad worked for the cereal companies. We were eating the box cereals. And one of the studies I love is that I always talk to my clients was there was a study done where they took the cereal, like cornflakes, and they took the box the cornflakes 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, I mean, it's crazy.

52:02Shawn Stevenson:In kind of pivoting from this conversation about trauma, which we all experience traumas, this could be big T or little t. Micro traumas 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? Yeah, if we look at our hardships as our liabilities, then we gotta carry them around like an anchor. They weigh us down. I call them dragons of the past because we drag them on, drag them on, drag them on. It's just a play on words. So we don't want those dragons.

52:35We want to slay those dragons. So what I did is I reframed it. I was blessed to be the son of an alcoholic because my dad didn't have a chance. Both his parents were alcoholics. One was a drug addict because she was a nurse and it was pharmaceutical drugs, but she could dispense her own medication. And she got sent home from the hospital at 56 to die. And she lived to be 93 because she got off all her pharmaceuticals. You know, and so 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?

53:05somebody goes well you're not drinking because 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 dark 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 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 got to say you got to rise above that again. You can either be in the muck You know in my one book awaken the genius I where that that statement is too I have a story about caleb and he's walking in the mud and he's praying to god god god get me out of this He says he says I keep calling to you.

53:45I'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 people get help with a a 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.

54:24and the kids were literally being conditioned to be a welfare recipient because hell, I'm smart. Grandpa's smart. Great grandpa was really smart. Look at their own welfare. Well, being smart doesn't make you successful. I know a lot of successful people that 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 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.

54:58The 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 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 going to do this. Because I had to tell him how he was going to 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.

55:28It's nothing. But if you start applying it, and one of the things my dad taught me too was when he'd have somebody coming into the clinic, he was 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 asked 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 do something? so you can either do something to stay stuck or you can do something to stay to be free you've got to 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 want to do everybody just wants it because we live in the quick fix facebook click happy everybody's having their greatest life ever you know we don't want to go through that pain but that pain's there for a reason and you made it whether you believe it or not.

56:17It's your making. You know, I had a chance of talking to the group that was in the Hanoi Hilton, they called it, where these were prisoners of war. And they're written about all the time, but I was able to, I had him on an interview, 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. 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.

56:51They were focused on what they could do to get, when they get out of there. What are you going to do when you get out of there? What is your life going to 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 have a health crisis and you're feeling that health crisis. You're going to amplify that health crisis by saying that because it's not these words that resonate out into the universe and bring back your reality.

57:22It's your emotions. Energy drives behavior. But what if you said, what would life be like if I was healthy? 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 them into energy because our brain likes energy. It likes movement. So our thoughts have to be that way too. And then we're going to get stuck states. And when somebody says, you know, I had to go to Alateens growing up because my dad was an alcoholic, but then eventually I, what am I going to these meetings for?

57:53My 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-alcohol 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 going to disrail. There's never been a shooting where the person, they didn't find candy bar wrappers all over the place.

58:22The guy was a junk food junkie. His brain was offline. He wasn't thinking right.

58:26Shawn 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 talk about why that matters with our brain fitness 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 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 405 can you come help me out if you don't have a friend like that, you don't have friends.

59:27You know, and that connection is, we feel something. You know, when we're around people, we get energized with the right tribe, right? And thinking about brain fitness, just so the users know, back in the 70s, they didn't think physical fitness was going to be anything. In fact, at our high school, they said they had a petition to stop us from putting in a weight room because they thought it was going to 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 exposed to more toxins. And so one of the things that I really believe every person should be taking is niacin, B3.

1:00:05It's very inexpensive. Niacin is, 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 other's 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 amount 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 because where there's blood flow, there's nutrition and there's oxygen.

1:00:38You 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, in their 23 % of their blood they're circulating, they didn't have any peanut oil. It says, this is a miracle oil. All those monkeys died within three months because that fat was deposited into their capillaries. And right now, seed oils are probably the second thing behind sugar as far as damaging to the brain. So we can clear those out with niacin.

1:01:11We're blowing it out with sending energy through those systems. So think about 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 body.

1:01:24Shawn 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. Yeah. Any bookstore you can get it at online or whatever. But if you do, then go back to brainfitnessblueprint.com. If you pre-order it, we have a really great list, over$900 worth of value that we're giving you. If you buy that book, tell us you bought it. We're going to send you a course, a brain fitness course that I developed that's six classes where I'm going to teach you, go into detail and all these things.

1:02:02You get that for free just by ordering the book at any retailer.

1:02:06Shawn Stevenson:That's amazing. So this is a video course? Yes. It's video and audio. Awesome. Awesome. So again, go to brainfitnessblueprint.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 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 well it starts connecting those pleasure syndrome the pleasure centers in damp and 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 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 we see a friend coming at a distance and we start getting happier and happier by the time they were smiling and then we hug them you know 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 all those flashbacks of positive things.

1:03:37That's why during that sleep cycle I was talking about, when you're breathing out, you want to remember those. My grandma had a great memory till she died at 93. She would remember her favorite vacations. I remember walking in and she said, are you on the phone? She goes, no, I'm just reviewing all my favorite vacations. And she had a great memory because 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.

1:04:01Shawn 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 utilizes BrainTap. He heard your voice. He's like, this sounds familiar. You get into Ubers and people know like, oh, are you Dr. Porter? 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 just a little bit about BrainTap. Yeah, we have a lot of, almost every boxing champion, You'll see they have brain tap on their shorts or their shirt because they're brain tap users.

1:04:39We have Alex Scuera, who's with TBRX, 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 because I went and met with the Detroit Lions and things like that. And a lot of our doctors, we have 3 ,000 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 the Swiss Performance Institute is the biggest group of working with 40 ,000 Olympic athletes under contract. So they're working to get them. They don't all own the headset.

1:05:10They have the app. But the headset is something you can add to it. So you have an app that you can just use the app. And 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.

1:05:22Shawn Stevenson:Amazing. Amazing. Can you give a brief summation of what BrainTap is? 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 balance and train any brainwave, and we have a lot of science around that. I mean, we have 30 published studies, and 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.

1:05:56We have studies going on just to show that the brain can change at any age. You're not fixed. If you're having a problem right now, it's a blessing. Wherever you're at, this is the time to start changing your brain right now.

1:06:09Shawn 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.

1:06:51Shawn Stevenson:And Dr. Patrick Porter is one of the foremost experts in helping us to do this. So definitely take advantage and go to brainfitnessblueprint.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 is 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'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 We've got to learn.

1:07:53Shawn Stevenson: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 brain's wheat field so that we can put these behaviors on automatic. We want to automate good health. We want to 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 I'll talk with you soon. And for more after the show, make sure to head over to themodelhealthshow.com.

1:08:32Shawn Stevenson:That's where you can find all of the show notes. You can find transcriptions, videos for each episode. And if you've got 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.