How Neurofeedback Can Improve Brain Health | Mary Ammerman of the Institute for Applied Neuroscience

Life is difficult again. The reason why I love neurofeedback so much is that it falls in line with all my personal beliefs about human nature and what helps people change. One of my heroes is Viktor Frankl. Basically, he said America was kind of on the wrong track in this belief about the pursuit of happiness because he believed, you know, life is very hard for all of us. It's hard. Life is difficult, period. And basically he ended up saying, period. People can withstand any how they are living if they have a reason why they are living. Again, kind of like we were talking about, sooner or later, everyone goes through difficult times in life. And the existentialists might call that the dark night of the soul. We don't have to be afraid of those things. I think those things actually come to us to teach us things we couldn't learn any other way. But if we are treating our life in this gift of consciousness that we all have as a learning laboratory, why not make the most of it? Why not make the best of it?

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. Welcome to the Mental Health Entrepreneur Podcast. I'm your host, Rachel Harrison. And with me today to talk about innovative options for mental wellness is Mary Ammerman. Mary is a clinical psychologist, board certified in neurofeedback. She is a clinician and trainer at the Institute for Applied Neuroscience in North Carolina. Welcome, Mary.

Thank you. I'm so happy to be here.

I want to dive into neurofeedback. I feel like it's a big word and some people know little bits about it, but how would you define neurofeedback?

So most people have heard about biofeedback. And just as a refresher, biofeedback refers to getting more intentional control over physiological processes that your nervous system usually just automatically takes care of for you. So neurofeedback is a specific type of biofeedback. It's brainwave biofeedback, or you might also see it referred to as EEG biofeedback. We like to think of it as yoga for your brain waves. And we are trying to help improve, improve the flexibility and stability of people's brain waves. When things are working well, your nervous system can just smoothly and flexibly shift your level of arousal or activation as needed for the task at hand. So we can fall asleep and stay asleep and get deep restorative sleep. We can wake up refreshed in the morning and have enough energy and focus to do the things we want to do. We can just be in the moment, enjoy things. We can have healthy forms of excitement and go back and forth between those states. But the problem is some of us get stuck in the higher end of arousal. Some of us get stuck in the lower end of arousal. Some people flip flop between those problems and some people have more than one arousal issue at a time. The good news is if that's going on, your nervous system can learn to shift it and get unstuck.

Yeah. Yeah. And so what does neurofeedback treatment kind of look like? What happens when you come in for a session?

We at our clinic, we are diagnostic agnostics. We don't care what label you put on a problem. We're trying to get at what is the underlying arousal issue that's contributing to your problem. We can pick an appropriate EEG yoga posture to use for your training to help you get unstuck. So our first couple of sessions are all about that. We'll do a regular narrative intake, we'll do an arousal assessment checklist, and then we'll do some baseline EEG recordings. We put all those clues together to determine what do we think is the arousal issue that's contributing to these symptoms. The person wants to change and then we start training them. And we really want to use the power of the mind to change the brain. Just so you know, just like any biofeedback process, we have sensors that measure the electrical activity on the surface of the brain and the type of neurofeedback I do. We're not putting any stimulation into the brain. We're just reading that activity, reflecting it back to the person. And then the computer gives auditory and visual feedback, signaling when the person naturally moves in the desired direction. More often than not, we're trying to find some type of presence where we're alert and awake, but calm and relaxed. And so the feedback helps the person find that place. While they're training, they're going to run into the same things that get in the way of them being present in their everyday life. And then we'll have an opportunity to help them practice responding to whatever that is, hopefully in a more skillful manner. And then we can see how that impacts their own biology. So it ends up being really empowering.

And I'm hearing it's almost a little bit like a mirror. Right. I think sometimes be afraid if you're hooking something up to their brain, it's like, ah, what's going to happen to me? But it's just to read the brain waves.

Yeah, it's just to read. And in fact, yeah, we could call them electrodes, but we choose to call them sense for that reason. We're just, we're sensing the electrical activity and reflecting it back. So like a mirror or even a speedometer for your brain.

That is so cool. Who is a good candidate for this kind of work?

Anybody that's wanting to change themselves. I mean, I will say that it does take effort to change. I mean, I think most of us have accepted if we want to be physically healthy, even if we don't do these things, we have accepted that we need to watch what we eat and exercise, among other things. But those are some basic. If you want to be physically healthy, you got to watch your diet and you got to exercise, you got to move. Well, if you want to be mentally and emotionally healthy, that also takes effort. I think sometimes in America we have this false belief that it should just magically happen and that there are some people out there that are living really charmed lives where, you know, things just magically go their way. But I will tell you that anybody out there, if they're feeling happy and content, they may not realize that they have practices that facilitate that. I guarantee you they've learned some skills and practices that help them come back to a peaceful place or a feeling of well being whenever life throws them a curveball.

I really love that piece because I do think that even the way that our mental health system is kind of structured is that everybody's good in this normal quote unquote place. And then if you start to fall out of that, then that's when you have something wrong. That's like mental illness. Right?

Right.

And I'm hearing you talk in such a different way that it's much more like we all struggle of getting dysregulated and having issues and we have to have most the skills and our brain know what to do to reset.

Yes, absolutely. I mean, neurofeedback to me is all about self transformation and promoting self regulation skills. And to me, good self regulation means being aware of your inner experiences without being controlled by them. We still have the freedom to choose how we're going to respond based on our own personal values instead of based on survival reflexes or old programming. But the catch is if you want to have a choice about how you're going to respond, your nervous system arousal has to Be in an appropriate range. If it's too high or too low, we're more likely to fall back on survival reflexes or just old conditioning. But if we are awake and alert, but calm, that's when our central executive skills can work. And that's where we have a choice about how we're going to respond. Mm.

So it's training almost in the same way that we might go to the gym and train our bodies or our muscles or our flexibility or those kind of things in the body.

Absolutely. It's like a hack for your nervous system. You know, we are spiritual beings having a human experience. And while we're alive, these nervous systems are our earthly homes. And we just want to learn how to become the best owner and operators of our own nervous system. Truthfully, we have these kind of primitive hunter gatherer nervous systems that evolved really well to escape or respond to external threats. Our fight, flight, freeze response. And those work great when the threat is coming from outside of you. But these days, especially here in America, our threats are more internal, vague and emotional in nature. And our fight, flight, freeze response doesn't work very well against thoughts or feelings. We have to develop different skills. You know, I don't think we fully, as a species kind of evolved past our survival skills, fight, flight or freeze. But if we have enough people intentionally practicing peace like the very wise spiritual leaders have recommended for thousands of years now, we can transcend those survival reflexes. And you know, the frontal lobe, which is the youngest part of the brain, that's what houses the most human of our characteristics. Our compassion, our impulse control, our good judgment, our ability to learn from experience and foresee consequences of our actions and inhibit our impulses. All that's housed in our frontal lobe. Well, again, we have to be practicing peace in order for our frontal lobes to be able to work. Well, if enough of us are practicing peace intentionally, I think we can advance the evolution of our species. And I think we need to kind of hurry up about that because the problems we're facing, yeah, things are, things are changing very rapidly, very rapidly. The problems that we are facing are complex. And I'm, you know, I keep waiting for us as humans to realize we're all part of the same family. We all live in the same home, this earth. We're going to have to find win win solutions of working together if we hope to survive. Wow. We all share a common genetic history. Our genes don't care whether or not we're happy. Our genes just care about us surviving long enough to reproduce. That's all, that's all they develop to do. But we, with our human consciousness, we want to be happy. We, we want to minimize suffering and spend more time enjoying our lives. Well, that's going to require some skills, effort and practice.

There's no magic pill after all.

Life is difficult. Again, the reason why I love neurofeedback so much is that it falls in line with all my personal beliefs about human nature and what helps people change. One of my heroes is Viktor Frankl. Basically, he said America was kind of on the wrong track in this belief about the pursuit of happiness because he believed life is very hard for all of us. It's hard. Life is difficult, period. And if people don't know who Viktor Frankl was, he was an Austrian psychiatrist who specialized in working with suicidal clients before he was incarcerated in a concentration camp during World War II. And basically he ended up saying people can withstand any how they are living if they have a reason why they are living. And one of his famous books was Man's Search for Meaning. He said people can create meaning in their lives in one of three ways. By taking some sort of creative action, creating something or doing something. By having an experience or an encounter, whether that's with nature, with another person, with an animal, with art or attitudinal value. By experiencing unavoidable suffering and choosing the attitude you're going to take in response to that suffering. Because again, kind of like we were talking about, sooner or later everyone goes through difficult times in life. And the existentialists might call that the dark night of the soul. We don't have to be afraid of those things. I think those things actually come to us to teach us things we couldn't learn any other way. But if we are treating our life and this gift of consciousness that we all have as a learning laboratory, why not make the most of it? Why not make the best of it? And there are things we've learned as a field that actually work. Like Daniel Amen said, a well regulated brain is a well functioning brain. He also said your brain is your best asset. If your brain works well, you work well. But if your brain has problems, you're gonna have problems in your life. So while you're living in this nervous system, why not learn the skills and the tools that help your nervous system function optimally, right?

It's interesting to me because I'm thinking about how we prepare kids, right for living on their own. And we do things like you have to be able to learn how to handle money and how to take Care of yourself and your laundry and all of, like those daily tasks and things. Right. And to me, this, this is a piece of that that maybe we've missed. Like, people also need to learn somewhere how to take care of their brains.

Yes. And nervous system.

And nervous system. Yeah.

Yeah. So Goldie Hawn actually has partnered with neuroscientists to create curriculums for schools. It's called the Mind up curriculum.

Wow.

It starts in kindergarten and goes all the way through high school. It has age appropriate explanations about your nervous system and how it works. So people have been working for a while now on systematizing these things so that we can teach them. Yeah. We can learn them by trial, by fire, or we can intentionally learn them. Right.

And so neurofeedback also is a way for us to do that, to teach our nervous systems.

Right. Because the type of neurofeedback I do is based on the arousal model. And the law behind that is called the Yerkes Dodson law that says your performance of any task will improve as your nervous system arousal increases up to a point. And then if your nervous system arousal continues to increase, your performance will fall off. And we've all had those personal experiences when our arousal has been either too high, we've been over activated for what we're trying to do. We've all had an experience where we've been under activated for what we're trying to do. If you can match your level of arousal appropriately to the task at hand, your brain has a better chance of performing it well. And if you think about mood, energy, sleep and focus, those are all brain tasks that again, if your arousal is either too high or too low, you're not going to perform those things well. If your arousal, if you can regulate your arousal well, then all those tasks will be performed better.

I love that. And so you've mentioned this, the type of neurofeedback that you do. So I do think there's some confusion about different types of neurofeedback. I've learned about many different types. Can you say a little bit about that for someone that's just wanting to figure out what might work for them?

Yes. I think it is hard, and I think that's because there are so many different models and, you know, consumers don't know the differences between the models. Some providers don't even know the difference between the models.

Yeah.

And the father of neurofeedback himself was Barry Sturman. He was a sleep researcher who first showed that you can get more intentional influence over your own brainwaves. But he one time said, the problem with neurofeedback is everything we do works. And that's true. You're going to find people that respond to every different approach for neurofeedback out there. But what we want to do is kind of look at the common underlying factors that unite all those things. And at our clinic, we believe that when you can train someone's awareness, arousal, and attention, no matter what type or model of neurofeedback that you're using, or even with talk therapy, if you want people to be able to transform themselves, they have to become more aware of where their arousal might be and where it might be getting stuck and how to get it unstuck. And as my mentor, Dr. Ed Hamlin, is famous for saying, the quality of your life is determined by the focus of your attention. And if you can't choose the focus of your attention, and you're not going to be able to do that. So, well, if your arousal is too high or too low. But if your arousal, if you're awake and alert but calm, you're better able to choose the focus of your attention, which is great, because if you can't do that, you're going to be at the mercy of your moods and your memories.

Wow.

You know, you're just going to get hijacked by those things, Right?

Well, and I'm just thinking of a lot of people are talking about things like workplace burnout. And as you're talking about focus and attention, I'm thinking about this from a task perspective. If you sit down to do your work, whatever that looks like, and you're not in control of being able to focus your arousal at that moment. Right on what you need to do, or your arousal, I guess, is not matching the task is maybe a better way to say that.

Yeah.

Then you're going to be pulled in different directions and it's going to be difficult to do the task.

Yes, it's going to be very inefficiently performed. And the truth is, right now we have so many things vying for our attention. I mean, we're living in an attention economy, and there are people out there that know how to capture our attention. So we do. If we want to keep kind of our own personal freedom and our ability to steer our own fates, we gotta be able to choose what we're attending to ourselves.

I mean, that is really powerful.

And we're kind of. We're all kind of trashing our attention spans. My sister is an elementary school teacher and she says it is so hard to get kids to read books today. And I would say that's not just kids. True of kids, it's true of adults as well. Yeah, we've gotten so used to these really short, quick sound bites. Or even in the New York Times they'll tell you how long it takes to read an article and if it's like 25 minutes, people aren't going to read it, they're going to read the five minute thing. But honestly, that's having an impact on our attention spans. The human brain loves novelty and it loves to be passively entertained. And the Internet is an endless source of novelty and sources of passive, passive entertainment.

Wow.

I bet when any of us get to the end of our lives, we're not going to sit there and think, I wish I spent more time surfing the web or I wish I spent more time looking at my phone.

Mary, you are dropping some, some good wisdom and knowledge here today. I really, I really like that.

And that's how I get myself to get off my phone personally, because I'm just as susceptible to it as anyone else. But when I notice, wow, I've been scrolling through this stuff for a while, I'll say, I know when I get to the end of my life, I'm not going to say, I wish I spent more time looking at my phone. So what do I really want to be doing right now?

Right, what's really important to me.

What's really important.

Yeah. So what is sort of your vision for neurofeedback? You've been doing this, I know, a long time. You're good at it, you're training, you're doing it in your clinical practice. What are you wanting to develop more of or what creative ways are you working to implement this?

Well, honestly, we really hope that the equipment will become more affordable and user friendly, but I think with the advances of technology that is already happening, I mean, there's going to be more and more personal devices with these advances in technology, which is great, but hopefully we'll have programs in place to help people use these tools skillfully and effectively and responsibly. You know, just like there's lots of personal gym equipment that people can buy and oftentimes they end up unused in a corner, in a room somewhere. We don't want that to happen with these neurofeedback devices. We want people to understand their value and how beneficial they can be to hacking your own nervous system and unleashing its potential so that you're better able to do the things you want to do. But that's where I think it's going to go with these personal devices. But hopefully, just like personal trainers haven't gone out of business because we often need accountability and coaches to motivate us. That's where I think therapists can take advantage of these devices.

Wow.

To help people have a more peaceful inner space inside their own nervous system.

Yeah. And that isn't accessible yet though. Is that true?

Well, I think there, sir. I mean, there's devices out there now. The muse, Neurosky, there's a whole bunch of personal training device and all these things are measuring some type of biological process. Whether it's brain waves, whether it's blood flow, whether heart rate variability. There's all kinds of things out there that people can use that are available now. They just might not. First of all, they might not be aware of them. Second of all, they might not know why or how they could be beneficial and what the best practices might be.

Yeah, definitely. And so other options is like coming in one on one. But are there any kind of group options or more extended time options for neurofeedback?

Well, it is possible to train in groups. I would never start someone out in a group. I'd always want to do some individual work first so that people understand what they're doing and what we're trying to do. Because I think the group training is beneficial in the sense that you can reach more people in a shorter time. It can lower the price of the participant but still help the provider make enough money to keep their lights on. But you lose a little something in group training because you can't do as individualized coaching. But if you have a really skilled technician and if you've done proper preparation beforehand, then I think people can transition to a group and train very well. We had a colleague that specialized in working with autistic children and he trained them in groups.

Okay, very cool. Well, this is amazing. So there's one thing that you would like to leave our listeners with today. Whether that's something about neurofeedback or something about their own growth or anything along those lines. What would that be?

I would like to say that nobody is in charge of the cards they get dealt in life, but everybody can learn skills to play whatever cards they got dealt to the very best of their abilities. I just want anybody listening to this to know that's true of everyone. No matter how bad your early childhood might have been, that doesn't have to define you and you don't have to stay stuck. You can use the power of this wonderful human mind and human consciousness to again train your own nervous system to work better for you.

I love that. Well, anyone who wants to find out more about Mary or neurofeedback, all of that information will be in our show notes. Mary, thank you so much for being here and taking the time.

Thank you for inviting me. It was a pleasure.