The Healing Power of Drumming | Jeff Strong of the Strong Institute

I was shocked that after doing, you know, half an hour of these syncopation exercises that I could focus and my grades started going up. And I thought, wow, there's something to this. I put it in the back of my mind, Graduated school, went on the road for a decade, touring with different groups, taught at the local music store, you know, played in the studio, did all the things that, you know, working musician would be doing. And by then I had been playing one on one for people kind of in more of a therapeutic context. I'd go to their living rooms and play for them, kind of calm them down. And a friend of mine worked as an aide for a company in Minneapolis that works with families with kids with autism. She worked as an aide in one of the family's houses. And she had me come in to play for this young seven year old girl. And this girl calmed down.

Welcome to the Mental Health Entrepreneur Podcast. We are here to inspire creative ideas and connections for entrepreneurs and advocates working to address our mental health crisis. As you listen, I hope you will experience new ideas and motivation to innovate in your business, your community, and in your life. Welcome back, everyone, to the Mental Health Entrepreneur Podcast. I'm your host, Rachel Harrison, and I am eager to introduce my guest today, Jeff Strong. He is an innovator in mental wellness, creating drumbeats to provide therapeutic benefits for all kinds of mental health needs, from focus to mood to sleep and cognition. We're going to dive right in. Welcome, Jeff.

Well, thanks.

Tell me how your journey with drumbeats started. Where did that all begin for you?

Well, going all the way back, I was a very hyperactive, very impulsive, very uncontrollable child. Got in a lot of trouble. Elementary school was just horrendous. I was the kid that was always doing everything wrong. And then I discovered the pots and pans in the house, and that helped a bit. This was the 70s. Back then in the Midwest, there was a really robust music education program. Fifth grade, I think it was. I was 10 years old, I applied to play in the band and all these kids wanted to play drums. So I started, and within four years, I was playing professionally. By the time I was 16, I was playing pretty much full time. Two weeks out of high school, I was full time on the road as a musician. Starting the drumming really got my behaviors under control. I stopped getting into trouble because I had an outlet. And so that was part of it is just realizing that a, I could channel some of that behavior in ways that was a little bit more appropriate. But what really did it is when a couple years after I started touring, I decided I needed to go to school and get an education in music. I knew the path I was on wasn't where I wanted to go. I was. I was touring with groups that weren't really doing anything innovative. I won't tell you the names of these bands, but they were singers who had had their heyday. And I would be in the backing band. And as a side musician, you can't really get anywhere. It's, you know, almost poverty level income and it's unpredictable. So I decided to go to the Musicians Institute in Los Angeles and really study studio drumming, really get into the. The world that I didn't have to travel number one, and I could really learn a craft at a high level. And one of the things I had to do at music school is I had to dig deeply into music theory, which, you know, of course you have to do, but drummers don't generally do that. Percussionists in high school, if you're in the percussion program, you're not having to do as much theory because you're. Yeah, you're playing mallets a little bit, but you're not playing it enough that you have to worry. So I get to college and I'm realizing that I'm struggling trying to learn some of these, the circle of fifths and all this stuff that are just more esoteric. It's not playing. It's all book reading and memorization.

Yeah.

So I made a deal with myself. My favorite class was sight reading because I wanted to be a studio drummer. And there was this one exercise in sight reading, which was this book called Syncopation by Ted Reed. And what it was is a book full of musical notes, broken 16th notes and 8th notes, so syncopations. Whereas you're not playing downbeats, you're playing split rhythms. And the way you would practice this is you'd play, you know, across the page, you know, left to right, top to bottom. And then my teacher said, well, if you really want to get good at this, start going diagonally. Start going in different, direct. What you're teaching yourself to do is not only recognize very quickly the rhythms that you're seeing and the music you're seeing, but also to read ahead, so your eyes are always scanning two to three measures ahead of where you're playing. And I said to him, I said, well, okay, this is great. So how fast do I need to play in order to be able to pick up anything when I go to a studio? And he said, well, I guess if you played, you know, March Tempo, 120 beats per minute, 16th notes, you'd probably be in pretty good shape. And I took that to heart. I had this little thing called a Dr. Beat, which was a metronome that I could set the tempo and then I could set the subdivisions. So it would click off at 120 beats per minute, which is two times a second. Click, click, click, click, click. And then you could fill it in. So I've got this going in my head. I'll play these syncopations and they're all broken notes, right? And they're really quick and I've got the fill going into my head and I'm playing these. So at some point I decided that rather than do what's the logical thing, which is to study my book theory work and then reward myself with the syncopations, the sight reading, I decided to switch it around and say, okay, reward first and then I'll go into the book work. And I was shocked that after doing, you know, half an hour of these syncopation exercises that I could focus and my grades started going up. And I thought, wow, there's something to this. I put it in the back of my mind, graduated school, went on the road for a decade, touring with different groups, taught at the local music store, you know, played in the studio, did all the things that, you know, working musician would be doing. And that still stuck in the back of my head. And by then I also had brought in this drum circle class that I was teaching. It was less of a drum circle class than it was African hand percussion. I started as a drum circle and I decided that I was going to teach technique too. Well, one of my students in there happened to be a psychologist. The local school district that had a very intensive, very elaborate, forward thinking autism program.

Oh, okay.

And he and I got to talking and by then I had been playing one on one for people kind of in more of a therapeutic context. I'd go to their living rooms and play for them, kind of calm them down. And a friend of mine worked as an aide for a company in Minneapolis that works with families with kids with autism. She worked as an aide in one of the family's houses and she had me come in to play for this young seven year old girl. And this girl calmed down. So the psychologist was talking to me, and he happened to be the school psychologist in this program and he said, you know, we could see if it would calm down a larger group. You want to come in and do a study? So he Talked to the program director, and she was so well respected in the state. She was on the board of the state Autism Society. She ran this program and the school board liked her. So we presented this to her. She presented it to the school board. We got the consent form signed by the parents. There were 16 kids in this study. We had them listening to this recording once a day over the course of eight weeks. And we tracked their anxiety before and after. You know, what is the anxiety level on a scale of 1 to 10? Yeah, play the music. What is it now? You know, and then we did an intake just looking at broad behaviors. And then we did a four week follow up and an eight week follow up. And we saw some really astounding results. Most of the time when somebody listens, they calm down. And then long term, we started seeing some other things. And I thought, well, that's cool. Carl, the psychologist and I put the data together and we were trying to figure out what to do with it. And I was going to head to Australia to do some research. And then he called me a couple months later and said, the woman in charge of the program is really excited about what we saw. She wants you to come speak at the Autism State conference in September. And I said, wow, okay, well, so much for Australia. So I head back. I was at the time here in Santa Fe and headed back to St. Paul. I hadn't even spoken at that conference yet. I was, you know, on the schedule, and I got a call from a woman who wrote a book called the Autism Treatment Guide. And she said, listen, there's. There's a researcher here, Steve Edelson. He had done the largest research project on an auditory intervention for autism back in the early 90s on a program called Auditory Integration Training. And he had a conference he did, which was 300 professionals would come in from around the world. These are researchers. And he would present, you know, his research and have other experts come in and talk about their stuff. And he wanted me to come and speak. And I'm like, I just did one study. I'm a drummer, right? So I go in and so that gets on his schedule. And before you know it, I'm doing, I think I did over 20 conferences that first year. In 94, I spoke at.

Wow, okay.

And over the course of the 90s, I spoke, spoke at well over a hundred autism conferences, presenting the research we were doing, talking about what I was doing, and just really getting to know the landscape. And we ended up developing a program around it, which became the REI custom program. We do now it wasn't until 2004 that we really understood enough about what we were doing. And at that point my ADHD book was coming out, the first edition of ADHD for Dummies was coming out. I'd done a bunch of research and we decided at that point that we were going to train providers. And we put our first conference together at the end of that year and trained just a few people here in Santa Fe.

Okay.

And then the next year I think we trained 300 and then 500. And by the time I stopped traveling 2009, cuz my daughter was young enough yet that I wanted to be home, I was traveling every weekend. Uh, we had trained 2,500 providers in our therapy. And basically what they did was they did the intake, the client care, and we built a pretty strong network at that point.

You were teaching them to do the drum beats as well or. No, they were just supporting that therapeutically.

They were doing the intake primarily, which was a rating scale we developed. Which one of our rating scales ended up becoming used to diagnose with quite a few clinics because it's pretty comprehensive. Um, there's up to 200 questions. Rating scale. We're looking at rating behaviors and, and

these are behaviors that indicate what exactly?

Well, they're across the board. We, we, we cover 10 symptom areas.

Okay.

So we, we look at anxiety, we look at focus, we look at sleep, we look at sensory processing and cognition. The rating scale just simply be a statement, you know, has trouble falling asleep. And then you're rating it is not relevant, slightly relevant, pretty relevant, or very relevant. We'll look at an area of, for instance, sleep and we'll ask a series of questions from a bunch of different angles to get an idea of what are the characteristics of that person's sleep. The questions are really geared to different age groups. So you know, we break it down according to, you know, age ranges. Sometimes you need to step a little further sideways to get the answers you need, but. And so from there we make our recordings. So our original providers, that's what they did, is they did the intake, they sent it to us, we make the recordings, send them back to them. Ah, these were CDs back in the day.

Yeah, yeah.

And then 2011, we put the program online and put the intake process online and the interaction online, which kind of was a challenge because now our providers were not really doing anything. They could follow what was going on, but they weren't doing the intake anymore, they weren't doing the follow up. And Beth, my Wife, who's also my business partner, and I took over all that. She does all the client stuff and she's really good at connecting with people. I'm not. So I do all, you know, the non people music stuff. It works out perfectly. But we had that in the Strong Institute and then put out Brain Shift Radio, which was a streaming music site we launched in 2012, which has the seven categories of music for episodic use. So somebody can listen to it. You can listen to a sleep category, for instance, to fall asleep. You can listen to a focus category while you're focusing. You know, a calm category to calm down, things like this. And then a couple years ago, we rolled out the new version of Brain Shift Radio to Brain Stem Audio, which was brain stimulation audio kind of. And we put the custom program in there. And so now it's all wrapped up in one place. Even though we still have quite a few clients in Strong Institute's custom program, they just don't get the benefit of the extra stuff that BSA has.

Yeah, I'm so fascinated because early on as you were telling your story, you said you were playing drums for some people and then you started this group. So even back before the group with the psychologist and kind of all of this took out. I'm just really curious you would go and play for people. Like, how did that even come to be? Because as a studio drummer, I would think you would be more, you know, recording things. And so I'm just, I'm still fascinated. How did this playing for people and noticing them calming down come to be?

Well, that's a very good question. And it came strangely, organically. That sight reading stuff really stuck in the back of my mind while I was playing as a regular musician. But anybody who knows a regular musician knows that their career is filled with a lot of space. You know, there's times when you're not working, there's times when you're not touring. The only way to make it as a musician is to diversify. And so when I was teaching, I taught at a music store called Nude Coupe, which was the coolest store in Minneapolis. All the really famous musicians went there. So I taught there and it was kind of cool. But I also taught at another. I don't want this to sound really weird, but it was a new age bookstore kind of thing.

Okay.

Yeah, yeah. So I taught there, doing the drum circle thing. And one of my early teachers in hand drums also happened to play for his church. And he played one on one for people to help with behaviors because this was part of the church that he was with. And so I thought, okay, well, I'll do the drum circle thing, but if somebody's kind of really stressed out, let me play for them. There was a place in Minneapolis called Pathways for people with chronic illnesses. And I went and volunteered there once a week and played for people who had chronic pain, you know, just any kind of chronic illness. And I would just play for them and just see if I could help them calm down. And that's where that started.

Okay.

It was just a way of saying, listen, I need to take my music. I've got time. I'm interested in this idea. If somebody didn't want to play the drums, could it have the same effect focusing wise, for instance, that it had for me while I played? Because my theory was it was the novelty of it. It was the non predictable nature of the rhythms that would activate the brain. Because ADHD is characterized by certain parts of the brain kind of shutting down.

Turn off, right?

Yeah. And so if you can activate those parts of the brain, a lot of people do it through fidgeting. I did it through sight reading. I wonder if hearing the music would do that. And then a friend of mine who was a psychologist turned me on to a study paper called Fidget to Focus. It was a master's thesis from some student in some unknown college that spread around organically because no one had thought of this. Why is it that kids who have ADHD fidget?

Need to fidget? Yeah.

Well, it's because that's the way they focus. Oh, okay. Well, that all kind of wrapped together in my off time and I kind of just took this idea and kind of ran with it. And then it became really. By the time I did that study at the school and once I was asked to speak at the first conference that became my career, I had no time for anything else. We were selling our first calming cassette tape in the classifieds in the back of the Autism Society of America magazine starting in 94 that also spread the word on what we were doing.

Now, are there other people that do this? Like, do you train people to do this?

This is it. I do have some courses where I teach people how to play therapeutically.

Okay.

And I talk about the neurology of it and all that stuff. But no, I haven't been. I haven't trained anybody else how to play these rhythms because they're bizarre, they're really strange rhythms because if they're predictable, the brain won't engage.

Interesting.

Even for calm. You would think the calm when we think about calming music, we think in terms of soothing. Right. We find something that's going to make us relax. That's not what this is about. This is a neurological calm. It's not a psychological calm. We're trying to shift the brain into a certain brainwave state, which in the case of calm, is around seven to eight beats per second as the drumming rhythm. That's fast, that's the same tempo that my teacher told me I needed to play the syncopation rhythms in order to be a good drummer. 8 beats per second in the brain is. And this is going to sound mathematical, but it's really not complicated. Setting a metronome to 120 beats per minute and playing 16th notes. Okay, because you're basically playing eight 16th notes every second.

I see.

And so eight beats for every second puts the brain into an eight beat per second pulsation, which is called relaxed alert. So we're still outwardly directed, but we are calm. Right on top of that, it creates a synchronization in the brain. Most of the time, our brains are kind of asynchronous. The activity is in one region more than another. You know, it's all based upon the stimulus that we're receiving or the thoughts we're having. And when you bring somebody into this neurological calm, what you're doing is you're creating a bilateral synchronization in the brain so that both sides of the brain end up being oscillating at the same tempo. So not only are you bringing the brain into a relaxed brainwave state, you're also creating a continuity across the brain which creates this relaxed state. If you take that and then you start looking at the other things. Now it's a matter of if the brain can respond to that simple concept. It's called brainwave entrainment, by the way. And there are other people doing that, but they're doing it differently. They're not using drumming rhythms. They're using what's called binaural beats.

Oh, yes, I have heard about that.

Yeah. And binaural beats are basically an interesting phenomenon that you play two different frequencies through headphones. Let's say that the left ear is 400Hz and the right ear is 408. Okay, so now you've got an 8Hz 8 cycle per second, different frequency that the brain is hearing. And what'll happen is the brain will perceive that as a pulsation. You'll actually hear the same beat as you would like a drum beat. And that's why it's called a binaural beat because you're hearing binaural frequencies. That creates a beat. It's also called beat frequencies, depending on who you talk to.

Okay.

So those. So that's basic brainwave entrainment. Very useful. We use it with drumming because there's a lot of things we can do that binaural beats can't. And then if you take the concept of the novelty and the unpredictability, there is another way of doing this, which is two different therapies that actually use frequency modulating prerecorded music. One is called the Tamatas method, and the other one is called auditory integration training. And those both come from the tamadas method, by the way, this both developed by a man named Alfred tomatoes in the 40s, came with this idea that people don't hear all the frequencies equally. And if you can help fix that, their behaviors will get better. And the theories have changed. But basically what they do is they take classical music and they start filtering it, and they'll filter frequencies out, and they'll do this in a way that is random, and that creates the novelty that the brain can respond to.

And that makes sense. You're waking up certain parts of the brain to make this all sort of work together, if you will. Right, Interesting. Let's talk a little bit about your, it seems, special interest in ADHD. You have the ADHD for Dummies 1 and 2 now, first and second edition.

Yeah, because I have ADHD.

Okay.

That was really the impetus that came. At the same time I got diagnosed with adhd. At the same time I was playing around with the syncopation stuff. And so that's part really why I got involved in all that, because I was trying to deal with my own. And I got diagnosed with adhd. They put me on medication, and I hated it. Yeah, I could zone in and focus, but I couldn't create. I couldn't improvise. And more than half of what you do as a musician is improvise. Unless you're touring with the kind of guys I toured with, then you're just reading music that's the same every night. But that spark was gone. And I thought, no, I can't do this. What else can I do? Because clearly I have some issues focusing on certain things. Keeping in mind that ADHD is not necessarily the inability to focus. It's the inability to control how one focuses. A person with ADHD can focus really well if it's something they're interested in.

Yes.

But we can only control so much of what we're interested in, you know, So I came up with this little game for myself. I was interested in this syncopation and it helped.

So that is so fascinating. So what is next for the Strong Institute for Chrome Beats? What do you see in the future?

We're Building out Brainstem Audio.com, the greatest joy for me, to create the custom recordings for our clients. Each one of those is handmade. You know, I go in and do it and all the rest of the music on bsa. And if you've been in and dug around, you're going to notice an awful lot there. So every week I add a bunch of stuff. This week I added a hundred new tracks for what's called ambient instrument. Over the last couple months, I think I've added five or six hundred more tracks. So that's a lot of my time. I'll keep adding more music, we'll keep building the infrastructure. The other plan with BSA is right now personalized music and custom music. So you can go into our personalized section and you can choose a category and intensity based upon, you know, like, I want to sleep and I've got insomnia. It'll choose music for you. We still have quite a few providers who are recommending our custom program that we try to loop in on, but they're not necessarily in the loop because there's no place for them to be. So right now we're building in a professional's admin section, a place they can have an account.

Okay?

They can go into their account and they can see what their clients are doing. They can recommend tracks to clients. It doesn't have to be somebody doing the custom program. For instance, this could be a psychotherapist who has their person in there to be able to fall asleep or calm down. They're not doing the custom, they're just doing the personalized. They can go in and say, hey, you know, I recommend that you listen to this mix and put it right in their account.

Interesting.

And they can see the feedback that the custom people are putting in. And so it's going to be a portal for professionals to be able to use that as a place to enhance their practices, aside from the people who are just using it, I was going

to say, but that's part of the beauty is you don't have to be working with a therapist or anything to utilize this and try it out for yourself.

Right.

So if people wanted to test this, if they are like, I don't know if this is for me. But maybe what would be the best way to kind of check that out?

Just go to Brainstem audio. Com and sign up for a free trial. You know, most people can figure out how it's working for them in that amount of time. We have three basic levels of Brainstem Audio, and one is you can choose from curated playlists, which are hour long playlists that are designed for, you know, specific purposes. You know, the one might be soothe to sleep, for instance, or afternoon energy or something like that. Then we have our personalized section, which allows somebody to have personalized mixes chosen for them based upon what they're asking for. And there's seven categories, and there's five levels for each of those. So you can go in and choose calm, and you can say, I'm agitated, or you can say I'm anxious, or you can say, I'm fine, but I'm just a little stressed. And it'll choose an hour worth of music that is appropriate for that. And you can also go in there and really choose your own by choosing according to category, intensity, instrument, mix, things like this. And then we have Sensory Processing, which was a buildup of a CD set we had years ago for sensory integration. Because a lot of our providers are occupational therapists. Those layers are all available on a free trial.

Okay.

And then there's a custom program, which is not because that requires intake and personal care, but most people can see what we can do with either the sensory or the regular personalized and curated stuff pretty easily.

Fantastic. Yeah. So we are about out of time, but I'm wondering if you have maybe some final words or inspiration. It sticks out to me that you took something that worked for you and what you needed, and you made that available to all kinds of people over the years that have seen a benefit. So what would you say to somebody that maybe has an idea or something unique that they want to sort of get out to the world?

Well, number one, I mean, this thing, there's nothing that beats persistence. This year marks our 30th year with this company, and I started my research before that. So we've been doing this a very long time. It's taken a lot of shapes and forms over the years, but the biggest one, I would suggest, is to really allow yourself to ruminate about how to take what you've been taught and take it your own way. When I started this, like I said, I was teaching, you know, regular drum set stuff, but I also was teaching drum circle, which was what everybody was doing. Everybody wanted to do a drum Circle, Right. If you played hand drums and you wanted to do something therapeutically, that was the only thing you could do. No one thought you could do anything beyond that. And I was always saying to myself, okay, what is it that really drives me? What sparks my interest? What part of this do I like? And I always came up to the fact that it was being able to play and watch somebody respond. Part of this didn't like was what all drum circles were about, which was to get a bunch of people to play together. There are people I know that are phenomenal at this. I'm not. I don't like the rhythms that we have to play for everybody to play, because they're really boring. And I don't command. I don't have that stage presence to be able to direct people. I am not a leader that way. And so I took what my personal personality was, which was I was a really good player. I liked seeing what I could do with one person. And so if I were recommending to anybody who's in the healing arts of any sort is to really look at that one little piece that is unique to you and say, how can I create a path that is even more unique with it? And how can I develop it into a way that becomes my thing? And like you asked earlier, is anybody else doing this? Several thousand people have gone through our drumming courses. You know, some of those people are fairly decent drummers. Not a single one of them has chosen this path. And partly because in the course, I say, listen, okay, we're going to find your voice, because you're not going to play like me. And, yeah, I could teach you these rhythms, but you're not going to play like me, and you're not going to build an infrastructure that I've been able to build. So let's find your voice. And so that would be my recommendation for anybody. Whatever style of healing you're doing, I love that.

Find your voice. Well, Jeff, thank you so much for taking the time. It is truly inspirational to hear what you've done and your unique journey. So thanks for being here.

Oh, thanks, Rachel. It's a pleasure to talk to you.

Hey, everyone, before we go, I wanted to mention a podcast that I am loving right now. It is the Back Porch Bestie. I love this podcast because it gets pretty real pretty quickly. There's a lot in there that Kasey and Kelsey share about their own personal growth, and they have such great guests on there that really share their own journeys as well. Listen to the trailer now, then head to the show Notes to find the show's link and subscribe. I think you'll like it too.

So, Kelsey. So, Casey, serious question. Did you ever think you would be here?

No, I didn't. And by here, do you mean, like,

literally right here in this moment, recording a podcast about a book that you are in?

No, absolutely not.

Like running this business in the way that you are. Building a house, having seven people in the house we're currently living in. Oh, and a new pottery business and doing consulting. Did you ever think that you would be here? No.

I think that there's pieces of me that always have wanted to be here, but I didn't know. I kind of just stumbled across it back two years ago. Our conversation. It just unraveled a thread.

Yeah. So you think you had the potential all along you just needed.

Yeah, I just needed somebody to believe in me.

Oh, well, I think I'm the opposite. You know, like, always out looking for more, looking for the next thing, like doing this, doing that, and, you know, all of. All of it. And then I met you, and you slowed me down substantially.

Yeah, you're a cliff jumper, and I'm more of like, a puddle jumper.

I don't even think you're a puddle jumper. I think you're like a puddle viewer. Let me see where the rocks are. Oh, there's a minnow. See it?

But it protects me. Yeah.

What?

I don't know myself.

What? Are you going to hurt yourself?

Maybe jumping off that cliff. I might break my neck.

You'd be like a little roly poly. Like, just curl up in a ball and roll down the hill.

Pew.

Oh, God. So for real, how does it feel to be a little bit more like maybe a heel jumper now?

Yeah, I mean, I like it more because it makes me more confident and feel competent that when I do jump off the hill, that I land on both feet, and if I don't land on my feet, I figure it out, Right?

Yeah. And I think you've helped me, because now when I am jumping off things, I'm not just jumping off cliffs just to say that I did it. I'm jumping off because there's joy there. Hi, I'm Casey, and right here beside me is Kelsey. We are licensed professional counselors, mothers, entrepreneurs. Oh, and besties. We know firsthand what it's like to wake up one day and think, how in the heck did I wind up here?

Through our own journeys of self defense, discovery, we found that joy is something that has to be pursued through internal work. Now we are on a mission to help women from all walks of life understand themselves more so they can have real, lasting joy.

Join us every Thursday to hear fun and insightful interviews with experts who can point you toward self discovery and fulfillment.