Dr. Patrick Porter, founder, and creator of BrainTap shares the science behind sleep and meditation. He illustrates how BrainTap aims to evolve humans' sleep cycles and patterns. Dr. Porter shares strategies to increase sleep time & quality and helps people to have more effective sleep cycles to allow greater outcomes on a physical, spiritual and mental level. What Dr. Porter brings to this week's podcast is how understanding the science of the brain can actually serve as a new form of dealing with sleep issues. A new era in effective sleep technology lies in the brain. 🧠 Brain Fitness 🧠 Waves of Wellness 🧠 Tech Assisted Meditation 🧠 Sleeping Pills/ Prescription Medications do not entirely resolve sleeping problems. They cause adverse effects on the brain and body. 🧠 Morning and Evening rituals that are more health-conscious 🧠 As humans we regulate certain amounts of energy 🧠 Energy can be brought into the body by light, sound, and vibration. 🧠 Having a balanced energy regulation from morning to night 🧠 Grounding and Minerals Salts can help in energy-efficient regulation within the body 🧠 Lack of sleep or body regulation causes short sleep cycles or not enough sleep 🧠 Sleeping is a way to re-evaluate if your lifestyle is right 🧠 Fourth Wave of Wellness is realizing we are more than physical beings 🧠 We need to watch the light we work in. 🧠 Reframe all negative memories or emotions. 🧠 Train the brain to accentuate the positive GUEST BIO Dr. Patrick K. Porter, PhD, is an award-winning author/speaker and the founder of BrainTap, the leader in technology-enhanced meditation. Dr. Porter pioneered the use of brainwave entrainment to improve clarity, sleep & energy, and remains at the forefront of scientific research. He founded BrainTap with the goal of making this technology accessible to everyone. BrainTap offers over 1000 original audio sessions in 12 languages and serves a worldwide user base with its mobile app and headset. Dr. Porter has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, People, Entrepreneur, INC and on ABC, NBC, CBS as an expert in brain health & wellness, and in 2020, Dr. Porter received the IAFNR lifetime achievement award. EPISODE LINKS Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/DrPatrickPorter https://www.facebook.com/braintaptech Twitter: @braintaptech Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/drpatrickporter/ https://www.instagram.com/braintaptech/ Websites: www.braintap.com www.drpatrickporter.com Email: support@braintap.com You can download the BrainTap app for free here: https://braintap.com/15-day-gift/ This podcast is sponsored by SoulCBD. They've given our sleepy community a 15% discount by going here to test out CBD/CBN to help support your sleep!: https://www.mysoulcbd.com/pages/sleepisaskill
🧠 Brain Fitness
🧠 Waves of Wellness
🧠 Tech Assisted Meditation
🧠 Sleeping Pills/ Prescription Medications do not entirely resolve sleeping problems. They cause adverse effects on the brain and body.
🧠 Morning and Evening rituals that are more health-conscious
🧠 As humans we regulate certain amounts of energy
🧠 Energy can be brought into the body by light, sound, and vibration.
🧠 Having a balanced energy regulation from morning to night
🧠 Grounding and Minerals Salts can help in energy-efficient regulation within the body
🧠 Lack of sleep or body regulation causes short sleep cycles or not enough sleep
🧠 Sleeping is a way to re-evaluate if your lifestyle is right
🧠 Fourth Wave of Wellness is realizing we are more than physical beings
🧠 We need to watch the light we work in.
🧠 Reframe all negative memories or emotions.
🧠 Train the brain to accentuate the positive
GUEST BIO
Dr. Patrick K. Porter, PhD, is an award-winning author/speaker and the founder of BrainTap, the leader in technology-enhanced meditation. Dr. Porter pioneered the use of brainwave entrainment to improve clarity, sleep & energy, and remains at the forefront of scientific research.
He founded BrainTap with the goal of making this technology accessible to everyone. BrainTap offers over 1000 original audio sessions in 12 languages and serves a worldwide user base with its mobile app and headset.
Dr. Porter has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, People, Entrepreneur, INC and on ABC, NBC, CBS as an expert in brain health & wellness, and in 2020, Dr. Porter received the IAFNR lifetime achievement award.
EPISODE LINKS
Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/DrPatrickPorter
https://www.facebook.com/braintaptech
Twitter:
Instagram:
https://www.instagram.com/drpatrickporter/
https://www.instagram.com/braintaptech/
Websites:
Email:
Mollie McGlocklin 0:00
Good. And welcome to the sleep as a skill podcast. My guest today is Dr. Patrick Porter, I could not be more thrilled to have this conversation because actually, both of us are just on the heels of a excellent conference that we just attended. Over in Orlando, the biohacking conference and I had the opportunity of listening in, as Dr. Porter spoke really eloquently on the brain and got really nuanced with the group and really provided so many gems and also led us in various meditations in between different parts of the conference that he had, you know, brain tap all set up there, I got the opportunity to use that and kind of revamp in the midst of a very busy conference. And it was impressive the difference it made. So I could not be more thrilled to have him in the midst of his busy schedule to take the time to share more on not only just what he's, you know what he has to share in this world of understanding the brain, but also how we can utilize that to our advantage for this conversation around improving our sleep. So without further ado, thank you so much, Dr. Porter, for taking the time.
Unknown Speaker 1:14
Oh, thanks, Molly. It's good to be here.
Mollie McGlocklin 1:17
Excellent. Alright, so I know we were speaking beforehand, on this topic of sleep, and how you also your number of pieces of work for people as it relates to the book, the brain tap app, and then the brain tap itself. And many of these, you know, the the work that you have been behind you also speak to sleep a lot. So one, just, you know, give us a little background on how you came to create all that you've created in this area, and how that aligns in a world of sleep optimization.
Unknown Speaker 1:50
Right? Well, I think it started a long time ago, of course, in a planet Far, far, not just the when it started, I was only 12 years old, my dad was a chronic alcoholic, and he got help doing a meditation practice. And he found out that he could relax without alcohol. And I changed the history of our whole family. Our whole family learned how to meditate using something called the Silva method. And then he became a silver instructor, one of the first 20 in America. So I grew up learning to meditate using that method. And a lot of the speakers at the conference, were talking about civil methods. My dad trained directly with Jose Silva. So we we grew up with that tech assisted meditations in the natural side effect there. The reason it's so important is that it helps regulate the nervous system, and I'll get more into that later. So that's what goes into sleep. So through through history, I of course, I was helping my dad do seminars and things like that, but I was never actually going to do this for a living. I went to, I went to you know, that's what dad does. I was gonna go to school for electronics, which I did. So my undergraduate degrees in electronics, and I've always been a tinkerer, somebody who creates things so through the history so long story between that but didn't have much to sleep. So in the 80s, I became the researcher for a company called lightened sound research out of Scottsdale, Arizona, and we developed a technology we took in miniaturize something that was the size above. You know, it was probably about this big it was the size of a microwave. And it would do wouldn't do any automatic readings. There was no neurofeedback back then, like we have today. It was all biofeedback. So we were looking at breathing, respiration rates, Hampton pitcher, different things like that some of the things I actually did in the meditation, the meditations, I can't say those techniques, but we would, we would monitor them and then we would, we would change the light side of vibration, so that the brain would continue to go into a state near sleep. There wasn't sleep at the time, but it was near sleep, because our nervous system gets locked. What happens is when we have chronic low level stress, the limbic brain gets hijacked this primitive brain which some people call the default mode network, it's some people also call it the subconscious. So when you think about it, when Bruce Lipton talks about 95% of what runs your life isn't your conscious mind. So why are you running around trying to change that doesn't do much. It's the subconscious that changes it. So what happens is when we get stressed out and we learn to be stressed, some people whether they believe it or not, they actually get addicted to be the feelings of stress when they don't have stress they actually created in their life, they they create the strife, this anxiety, the fear in of course, if they're not able to down regulate. That's why when we were talking before about people wearing or rings or bio straps or all these different monitoring systems, yes, that can if we look at our monitoring systems, if we're stuck in a high state of beta, which is a brainwave, that has to do with fear, frustration, anxiety, but also we need because it's what keeps us alive. You know when in these our brains really have any bubble at all, in 100,000 years, we still have the same brain, we sell the same physiology. What's changed is our environment in our psychology, right? We've learned a lot more, we're a lot smarter as, as humans, I would hope. But the problem is that we've never done anything to really evolve our sleep. Over the years, what's happened, and it all started with a guy named john. JOHN is the first one to create the light generator. Yeah. And it's not red light, it's full spectrum light. And we're actually in the middle of doing research with that light right now the newest version of it. Because we're, we were talking to the people that took on his work after that, because that's where when people say, why do we use light, we went right to the source, not from somebody who's making money off it, but somebody who's done the research since the very beginning. And there's different our body needs light. And there's been a lot of talk out there in the world of sleep, that blue light is still bad, but it's not just blue light, it's actually any, any frequency of light, below, really 570 nanometer light, that's what's going to trigger the brain to stay awake. And that only affects 20% of the people. So that might be your audience. But it's not everybody. You know, some people go to sleep or their windows open lights blaring through the windows, their lights on and they suffer a good night's sleep. So it's not it's not everybody. But what we know is that there are certain things to do. So what we found was sleep, we're actually imitating what braintap does, is imitates a cycle of sleep in as little as 10 minutes, 15 minutes, 20 minutes up to 40 minutes. And the reason that it does that is when you go when you have a really good night's sleep, you're actually tapping into the world's greatest pharmacy. Because what happens is while you're sleeping, you move from beta, which is creating dopamine. That's why we have all these addictions and dopamine, these dopamine addictions like computer games, texting, coffee, all these things that people are addicted to is there really dopamine addictions there, they happen in the beta brainwave. When you know, when you drop out of beta, and you get into alpha, alpha is a relaxing state, you're going to go naturally into that when you sleep. If you don't have that, then you're going to have autism. That's what we find. If you don't have the alpha brainwave, you can't speak because that's why nonverbal autistic kids, when we work with them, within 30 days, they have 23%, more alpha 90% of them will be speaking because it's it's and we work with speech pathologists to do that. But also during that alpha, we start to build in what's called acetylcholine is just one of the 54 neural transmitters that is in that makes us that puts us into that dreamy, drowsy kind of drugged state that starts to put us into a state of sleep. Then when we when we start to go down again into the next level of the brain, we're going to go down into theta, theta produces Gabba Gabba is one of the when people look that neurotransmitter up, you'll see a lot of the sleep aids and a lot of the things that are out there will sit up dabbing them. The problem is, is that when you do one brain tap session, you're going to dump more gabin in your system than you could buy in a month. Because your brain is very efficient at creating it in. Just so we know. So people understand what we're talking about is this, the country of Brazil is paying $250,000 to do a research study on brain tap to prove that we're a digital drug, because we up regulate 54 different neural transmitters and we down regulate stress hormones. And so we're proving that out in the lab with so what I'm talking about is already been proven I'm just kind of talking about it. So people say How does he know that? Well, we actually have real tier one. Universities doing the studies with us all over the world from from India to Brazil to America. And so we're basically proving out that sleep does is your incubator for your superpower. If you don't have sleep, you don't have the you don't have the right information on a physical, mental, emotional or spiritual level to deal with your day. Right. So you have to do things during the day and of course at the biohacking conference are calling it biohacking. We didn't know that in the 80s. There's no term like that. Well we call it like health optimization, we want to optimize brain function. Now when you drop into delta, that's when you get serotonin. And a lot of people out there unfortunately are taking serotonin uptake inhibitors. These are Prozac, you know, we live in those books like Prozac nation. The problem is that those all those prescription drugs were only designed to be used for three weeks. That's what they were cleared for not forever used. It's kind of like mask, you know, it wasn't a forever thing. It was supposed to be temporary. But now and that's why people get their brain starts patterning after that. So I'm not saying run out today and get off your medicines, but get with your medical doctor, get with a natural medicine doctor, work together with both these teams and get off these as quickly as possible because they're trapping your brain in a cycle of despair. They do not help in fact, if they were to go out in the market today, they would not pass a placebo test. The placebo is now 40% so sugar pills have always beat out SSRIs The only difference is when you start taking SSRIs you can get you start to repattern your brain to need them, walk them and desire them, and you can't function without them. So but I believe, and this is what we're proving in Brazil, that the world's greatest pharmacy exists between your ears, that we can trigger 30,000 different neural transmitters with a simple thought. So we can set ourselves up to sleep really well and get our body because our body is always what braintap uses something called frequency following response. This happens with everything we do. So even when we get on Molly, we met at a conference, when we met, we talked we had a good time, you know, we had this conversation. Hopefully, I walked away, charged up, hopefully you were charged up. That's because we resonated right? We resonated together and there was something there, we both have a common purpose, helping people sleep longer get better health, these things like that. So but if we met somebody there that said, Oh, no, the only thing you can do is take Ambien, that's the only thing that helps. And we know ambient effect, the research shows that sleep drugs, only at four minutes of sleep to your night, four minutes,
Mollie McGlocklin 11:07
I'm so glad you addressed that because I was going to be one of my next questions of the hypnotics and benzodiazepines where a lot of people coming our way sleep is a skill have either experienced those there on those they're struggling with, or they're thinking about taking those or some of the other ones that you've already addressed. So I appreciate you sharing the problem
Unknown Speaker 11:26
with the sleeping pills, Molly is you're in bed, but your body is not going through those cycles. It basically you don't, we need to be going through these different cycles to produce and reproduce 54 different ones. So I'm only mentioning the main ones that people talk about. But there's a lot of others that we get all the neuro tropic effects of, you know, that make us neuroprotective that that heal our brain. We even trigger gamma during sleep. This is a high level sleep that usually is figured usually is more pronounced in in meditators or healers. But also each of these theta and gamma are the brain, the most popular neurotransmitter they produce is daba. That's a precursor to DMT. So if people are going I don't dream anymore, I don't do well, those those pills, you don't dream, because you're not producing gabbeh. In order to dream, you have to activate your own bodies DMT we produce that in our system. Just like we have cannabinoid receptors for CBD, we have receptors for psilocybin, these are all things, this plant based medicines are all working with our brain chemistry. And some people use CBD to sleep. And the reason that works and we get really good sleep scores when people take CBD is because it's a down regulator. You know, it regulates the body too. But I mean, taking a good bath is about a regulator, right?
Mollie McGlocklin 12:57
You're so out of pass.
Unknown Speaker 13:00
So all these things, you have to work out what is your nighttime ritual, so that your body is vibrating at the right frequency, when it's time to go to sleep, you can't turn off the news, right? You know, and then go right to sleep. I mean, if you can, that's pretty good. But usually what happens is, if you've ever fallen asleep on the couch, like most people have, and you're watching, let's say a movie about a war, you might even dream about being in that war, and you don't get the right amount of sleep because you're the fear factor is going on in your brain.
Mollie McGlocklin 13:30
Absolutely. Wow. Okay, so just closing the loop on that topic of, you know, gabbeh and many other times that you dress are really powerful. How do you feel about when people are leaning into a lot of these supplements that are Gabba specific and feeling like they can supplement their way into great sleep? Just curious, not because I know we've addressed certainly the prescription medications, but many of us will say, Oh, I don't do that, but then have a whole slew of different supplements that they're leaning into and envisioning that that will really save the day with their sleep.
Unknown Speaker 14:07
Well, of course, melatonin, all of these should be short term use. Yeah, because our body we want our body to do it, we don't want to, once our brain is very,
Unknown Speaker 14:17
let's say, I don't want to say lazy because that's not really the right word. But what it does, if something else can do it for the brain, your brain immediately offloads that data because the brain uses 25% of all the energy of the system. So if you start supplementing and start doing it that way, which is good for short term, like, if you wanted to do melatonin, let's say because you flew across time zones or something like that, get back, you know, those are all really good, but the reality is that, what if you don't take the supplement one day, or you run out, now if I tell people even in I do drink coffee, and I try not to drink it before 10 o'clock in the morning, just to continue to prove to myself I really don't need it. I just like to taste Yeah, but the The reality is that if you if people, some people say I can't function without coffee, you know, first coffee, then everything else, that's not good for the body, you know how we wake up in the morning actually is going to tell us how we're going to sleep at night. So the morning ritual is so important, because if we wake up, and our brain is dysregulated, which means the stress or fear or anxiety, or we did something that didn't harmonize the body, like that's why you see so many biohackers say, when I get up in the morning, I drink water, and I put a Celtic salts in it. Yeah, our brains shrinks three quarters of an inch every night when we sleep. So we should hydrate before we go to sleep at least two hours before we go to sleep with mineral water. And we should do mineral water in the morning, because that's what our brain needs. And then the brain will start to look forward to waking up, you know, and get outside or do something that grounds I sleep in a grounding mat. So it's like I'm sleeping outside. And it does make a difference, especially for those people that environmental toxins are really they're real. And depending upon the room that you live in. we've, we've done EMF tests on people's homes where they weren't sleeping, and they're generating our bodies should move around all day long at zero point energy, which means we should be grounding energy into the earth as we move through our day. Now we use rubber shoes or tennis shoes, and so we're not grounding. So we have to do something to ground that energy. Like where I'm sitting right now I have a grounding mat on my computer. So I can just reach over. And it's like I'm every once a while just crowded. Because we're collecting energy all the time. If we get in too much of that energy, it shows up as restless legs, it shows up as irritability, because it's influencing the The electrical information that's coming from our brain to our body. So some people may even have now Clint, Oprah has even a grounding pillow that people use. So it makes a big difference. If you don't know I would also one thing, since we're on technology, just for a moment, we've done a test, we've done a test with people where we've done eg scans with them, where we can pick up what their evoked potential is in their brain, which means when their brain starts to get alerted to something. So we put their phone 20 feet away in another room. They you couldn't consciously hear it. But every time their phone notification went off, they had a cortical response, there was quantum entanglement with their phone. So we showed that if you have your phone in your room while you sleep, and it's on now, if you have it on airplane mode, that's different. I think you have it on airplane mode, all notifications off, you're probably fine. But if you have your phone on notifications going, every time it goes thing being whatever, yeah, that is waking you up. It's causing the reticular activating system to say, hey, there's something to attend to. It could be something terrible, you know, because that's the way it works. You know, the limbic brain is there to protect you. It's not going Oh, something wonderful just happened. I I just got a call from Ed McMahon and I won the lottery. You know, that doesn't happen, right? Our brains usually Unfortunately, the first thought most people have is it's something negative happening, you know, if somebody is out, so we really want to watch that. And, of course, a lot of people they don't realize why light is so important when they sleep. But every cell of our body has something called Chroma forms. These Chroma forms are actually like solar panels for your home. But they're in every cell we actually bring energy into light, sound and vibration. In the biggest example I can give people or the closest to home Molly is let's say that you're at a party you didn't really want to be there but a friend talk to you into going, you get there and the party seems to be okay, everybody's moving but then they start playing your favorite music. Yeah, pretty soon your foots gonna start tapping your body's gonna start swaying, you're gonna want to dance because you converted that style into energy. That's how the body works and the energy it produces is something called ATP. So if you don't have enough energy, he won't sleep. Yes If you have too much energy you won't sleep so it's about having that balanced energy right so everybody knows what that is because when you're when most people when they retire a child when you say sleep is a is a skill. Right when we were babies we didn't have a skill we just turned over went to sleep you know and Tony said sleep like a baby didn't meet cried all night. And and you know, dirty their diaper. They met you know that they slept like the dead or whatever, you know, when we're kids. But as stress builds up, our psychology starts to interfere. And then we start to support that negative psychology with foods, let's say maybe you're stimulating all the way into the evening.
Unknown Speaker 19:46
If you if you have food in your stomach, for instance, your body will not convert to sleep until that food is in a digestive position in your gut. So some people that's why if you ever if you wake up in the morning, you have an upset stomach. You have what's called a sour stomach. So the reason that sleeping so well is you ate too too late. Now some people depending upon their gastric juices, they might have to supplement like hydrochloric acid if they're not able to digest red meat, even if they're digesting proteins that might need to take that. But there's different enzymes, you can take them to help you to digest the food to sleep deeper. Yeah, these are all things that can help you to set the body up. Now the best thing to do is to have two to four hours before sleep without eating, that's what but but if let's say you can't help it, then you want to eat things that you know will quickly go through the system. If you're not vegetarian, that'd be the time to be a vegetarian, because the fruits and vegetables go through the system a lot faster, you know, and you we've all probably had the experience where you had a heavy meal of meat, and then you go to sleep and just don't feel so good in the morning. So that all plays a part in to how it all works.
Mollie McGlocklin 20:53
Absolutely. So there's so much gold in there, I'm taking notes as you're speaking so a couple things one, I think you're pointing to some of the things that we're dealing with in our modern society and that's really our intention with this conversation of sleeping a skill because to your point, you know, when we're just coming out of the womb, things are working to a particular extent and we've got that sleep dialed in. And if we were to or you know, often our joke is if we were to go back 1000s of years and try to make this argument that sleep is a skill it might land very differently based on you know, when we're living with a nature we're grounding naturally we were connected with that sunlight we're having far less toxins we're eating differently, we're aligned with those rhythms so many things are just sort of falling into place and now in our modern society you're pointing to so many of these things that might have gone out of alignment we're eating at odd times we have instability we're flying cross different time zones you know, we're needing to bring in things like grounding mats and mineral waters is not in the water at this point, we're concerned about EMF and you know, there's a lot more to really get connected to so I so appreciate you speaking to all these things. Um, just a quick check in on a couple of things you mentioned when you mentioned both mineral water and the grounding mat are there particular things that you suggest like brands or anything for us to be aware of if people are looking to invest in some of these things and he just wanted to hear a little bit about that real quick.
Unknown Speaker 22:24
With the salt there's there's different salt you can take the colored Celtic salt is probably one of the best but you want to get a full spectrum salt, not Morton's table salt, that's only one mineral. So you want to get the full spectrum mineral in you just put a pinch in there, whatever you can handle. I actually found I found this bamboo salt on Amazon that it's still down 10 times. So like a teaspoon. A little pinch of that is almost like a whole teaspoon, but you can handle it. And it gives you the minerals you need. And also minerals before sleep. A good friend of mine wrote the book get off your acid in free which he'd probably be a good one for you to interview. Yes, absolutely. But he showed it I can even show it If I don't take his minerals before bed. Yeah, definite sleep score change that happens when that happens. The the other within I always like earthing calm because cleanup was the one who actually made Yeah, great the book or anything. And you can see the videos on YouTube if you want to buy the book. He did a nice documentary and you know, they're they have a lot of supporting science. It reduces inflammation, which is probably one of the reasons that you sleep so well. I mean, imagine if we were back in time, you're talking about what's happening in modern day. Yeah, 100 years ago, the average person slept 12 hours a day. So very different than today. But 200 years ago, if you were living out in nature, you would go to asleep at the end of the day, you'd have a fire you wouldn't turn on Netflix and stay up till three in the morning. You know you watch the good watch the fire and what most people don't know that it's that fire is flickering and crackling at 10 hertz frequency happens to be alpha. So what is it doing? We our ancestors naturally knew that if they started that fire, they start to calm down. We've all had the experience. We're with a special somebody and we light a fire and it becomes so romantic. That's because our brain starts to create a seem to Coleen. So we're in a chemical wash of all these positive wonderful neuro chemicals that make us fall in love with who was ever around, because that's the because we set the environment to that. So thinking the same way your home, you need to have an inviting thing. And when the fire went out, nobody ran to the woods and said, Let's get more wood and build this fire up. They said the fire is out we're going to bed and then because you were already an alpha, you could drop into theta and go to delta and go to sleep. And then usually at night you go through anywhere between six to nine cycles like that. The first cycle is always the longest That's why, you know, some people say well I sleep really well for three hours and then I wake up. That's because they don't know how to regulate their sleep and they've been they pop out of theta and alpha they pop into beta and then if most people just go back to sleep but if you have a sleeping issue or you have a lot of fear going on in your life frustration anxiety, all the psychological reasons you might wake up or if there's physiological like in your body, that might wake you up pain only happens in beta by the way, doesn't happen in any other brainwave. So if you can learn to modulate beta you will you can be pain free I had surgery with my shoulder without anything but my dad training me to use my mind they took a piece of my bone from here put over here the screw through it and I didn't use any anesthetic you know the body has a very beautiful way of creating natural analgesia but you have to do the breathing techniques you have to relax and in trust trust the process.
Mollie McGlocklin 26:00
Wow okay, so to that point I'd love to speak about brain tap for a second and the light conversation so um you know some of the things that we'll hear from people that come to sleep is a skill they want the tech they want to be tracking their sleep they want to know the supplements they want to know all these sorts of things right to improve their sleep they want often the quick sort of fix right? And yet when we talk about the importance of light for this conversation it can feel it can feel like a longer process to start you know really aligning with those rhythms six discipline What have you know you what you're bringing in with from this brain tap conversation. When I speak about meditation or breath work or things of that nature it can feel like that's gonna take forever and and yet they may feel a bit that's already handled, but that you know, headspace I've got calm I've got you know, I've been doing tm, what makes bringing in how did you combine these conversations, the light, the being able to calm your nervous system, tell us tell us the whole world of this.
Unknown Speaker 27:08
Yeah, one thing is there, there might be 1% of the population that actually knows how to meditate out of the meditators. We've not seen them. We've scanned over 30,000 brains, and we scan people that thought they had really good brains, and they were meditating all the time. Most people do not know how to meditate. It's not sleep, it's, it's basically an wise wrote the book called The Awakened mind. It's really about awakening to consciousness. So the difference between meditation what we do, we're more brain fitness. So let me kind of explain what we're talking about. Meditation is good. But we did a study just recently where we took music that people meditate to, and it was good music, we did a 45 minute recording, and we hooked them up to H, our HRV, which you saw there at the conference, the professional version, we also had them with EG like the Wahby. And we're measuring their brain and their heart rate at the same time. And we had we did a baseline scan for five minutes, then we had them listen to 15 minutes of this music that people meditate to they could do whatever they wanted. So during that music, the course of downregulated, they got relaxed, and it was great. But then at the end of that 15 minutes, their brain literally went right back to the stress response nurturing. That usually happens with every meditator we've ever done, it's always the same. They have an experience of meditation, but it doesn't translate into real world brain fitness. We took that same piece of music, and we buried the algorithm of brain tap into it the same time. At the end of the 15 minutes, it did everything the other one did, but deeper. And at the end of 15 minutes, it didn't go back in fact for 72 hours. So that meant the brain adapted, it became we we really call ourselves the brain fitness company. So if the listeners can just kind of bear with me for a moment, over 100 years ago in 1890s, actually Dr. Kellogg started the very first wave of wellness. That's what I call it, because he introduced supplementation, nutrition, and helping people to get well there's actually a movie called wellsville to kind of spooks him, but that's my hometown Valley Creek, Michigan, the very first health food store in the world was in our hometown. So we grew up around those crazy people that were it wasn't California, which most people think were you know, it was Battle Creek. And what happened was, that's great. You can but you, you can't out think a good diet. That's why I say nutrition is important. If you're eating poorly, or if you're drinking alcohol right before bed, you're wondering why you're not sleeping. Your body cannot metabolize, digest and sleep, you know, it has to do one or the other. It's probably going to metabolize that. Now even when you're passed on. Somebody say I have a couple glasses of wine because it helps me sleep. No, it doesn't. If you think it does, but it doesn't your body is still working a lot and it's using a lot of energy. That's why you wake up in the morning and feels like your car's been an idle in the parking lot all night. You know you don't have any energy. Yeah, then so now we let's fast forward to 1970s when I was in high school, We didn't have a workout room, nobody used physical weights. In fact, people thought if you lifted weights you'd become muscle bound. If you were asked somebody back in my high school days are you going to go work out they said are you going to run you're going to gym, you're going to go to to swim. You know, you got to play golf, that's that was working out. Nowadays, everybody knows it's physical fitness. because of people like Arnold Schwarzenegger and all that, we call that the second wave of wellness, you have to do something to get your body during the day moving and breathing, or you're not going to function, right, that means you're not going to sleep, right? Sleep is always the sleep as always a way to evaluate is your life working or not, if you're not sleeping, something you're doing, when you're awake is not happening. It's not about sleep, it's not about when you get into bed. And in fact, I still use the chilli pad, which is really nice. Makes it nicer. But that doesn't, that doesn't replace what you're doing during the day, you still got to do everything during the day. Now 2020s, we believe that brain tap is the decade of the brain, we are now in the third wave of wellness. That's where we have to look at all these because if you're still stressed, you still have anxiety, there's still a fear of your psychology, is that right? It will definitely affect your physiology. And it'll show up as officers anxiety, you won't sleep through the night that worry will basically paralyze you. So all three of these have to be used to really get to, and I call it the fourth wave of wellness, when you actually tune into your spirituality. start realizing that we're not physical beings, we're here having a physical experience, there's a much more at play here than just what we see with our eyes, ears and experience with our body. This is a very small percentage of who we are shows up here. You know, there's a much bigger self than what we see.
Mollie McGlocklin 31:47
Ah, I love that. Wow. Well, thanks for taking us through sort of the, the history of these waves of wellness and where we're at now, and this kind of kind of introduction to this conversation around the brain and really beginning to understand more and more about this topic. So with what you've created with brain tap and merging this light topic, what does this actually look like for people that are using I shared with you, I've only recently just started tapping into the power of brain tap. So I'm very excited. I've just got myself outfitted with one and gonna be exploring this. And I will certainly be discussing this more in our newsletter and podcasts. But for those that are just brand new, what does this look like? Why do we want to bring light into this conversation? I know you briefly mentioned that, you know, blue light had been is often villainized in in this conversation around sleep? What can we learn from bringing the
Unknown Speaker 32:47
blue light as much as it is energy? Yes, oh, even the bad light that we use is, is pushing energy into ourselves. You know, that's why we have to really watch what kind of lights we're under. Like. That's why they've outlawed to hide the halogen lamps and things like that, because they were basically causing problems. So but what if we get good light and good fatigue energy, the how we're going to, of course, our focus is all about the brain. So the brain cannot do the work without ATP. ATP is like the currency for healing in keeping our body Well, if if we don't have the energy to heal, then we age. So people were wondering how to people that have energy don't seem to ages quickly, their cells are able to duplicate and do these kinds of things. So what we're going to do, how do we deliver energy to the brain? Well, sound is one thing. So we listen to 25,000 pieces of information every second, in our body of space, our our hearing actually is more selective than it is precise. Because if we heard everything we were listening to every moment and our attention on it, we'd be paralyzed, we wouldn't be able to move because it's too much information. So we select what we're going to hear that that's why, you know, if we were sitting at a restaurant together, having a conversation, and then somebody three tables over says Dave Asprey, let's say, well, we would hear Dave Asprey because we're just at his event, we wouldn't hear the rest of the conversation because our reticular activating system when you bump it up, so we're listening to that with our sound. So we might get into that a little bit. So we did what sounds doing what if we did that with light? What if we created by normals for the vision portion? InVision is important because your brain our listening skills, 30% of our listening actually happens through our eyes. You heard me right, our eyes. So if you've ever been to a lecture, and you couldn't see the lecture, and you couldn't hear them, but as soon as you adjusted your line of sight so now all I can see the lecture now you can hear them. That's because this reticular activating system said out of all the noise we have in our world, I'm going to focus on that one. So what most people do when they meditate, they close their eyes 30% their brain goes dormant. We introduced light to the equation Guess what? their brain 100% of their brains, neurophysiology stays active. Because there's light available in the brain says I can't shut those circuits down because I don't know what's going to happen. And then we're going to flash at different intervals, just like we do with the tones, but we're going to do it with flashing. And this happened because we were looking at, there's something called a Jyoti meditation, which is where you position a candle just far enough that your breath moves the the flickering. And what we found out was that candle is just like the fires flickering flickering at 10 hertz frequency. So your brain is actually in tuning just like tuning forks, to the flickering effect of that candle. Now, we can't just put candles in front of people. But believe it or not, that candle has more light than braintap.
Unknown Speaker 35:49
braintap has less fatigue energy than a candle. So when you sit there in front of those, it's eight LEDs, they can even be lowered. I mean, we have we have some that some people can't use any light at all at night, I will say that 20% of the people should not use any light, doesn't matter what color it is red, white, blue, whatever it is, because their body can handle the energy. But when we do that the reason the eyes are not just attached to the brain, your eyes are brain matter. So when somebody looks at your mind says, Wow, your eyes are beautiful. What they're saying is your brains beautiful, because they're looking at your brain matter. Now the other thing is we're going to put light in the years, and this is what really freaks people out, they're going, why would you put light in the ears? Well, number one, all the the ears are a great place to bring light into the body number one because of something called photobiomodulation. What that means is, photons go into the bloodstream, the red blood cells absorb the photonic energy. So that red blood cell actually becomes a carrier for that energy. Now this happens every day. Remember, we're designed to be outside 18 hours a day, right? So if the if the light is absorbed, now it circulates in the body and it's looking for a cell that's about to die. As soon as it finds that cell that's going through cell death. It then exchanges it absorbs it basically acts like a negative pull on a magnet, and it pulls the photon out of the bloodstream into the cell. The minute it does that something called vasodilation happens blood flow circulation nitric oxide release. In essence, magic happens, healing happens at that point. Now that's just one cell. And with this vessel dilation, it uses something called the Fibonacci sequence. Because every time you do the brain tap session, the first time you build one, one, let's say you build one blood flow supply chain, the next time you build two because you reinforced one than the other, and it keeps going on the bonacci sequence of spirals. And it builds the neural network as well as the nutrition to feed those neurons. So that we start building more neurons in the brain. We can't save the neurons that we have. We can build new ones, they call it neurogenesis. But the body needs energy to do that. Now where there's light, they also know now that their stem cell production. So what happens is the body begins to use its own restorative powers. We have an innate intelligence in our body that knows exactly how to bring us back to homeostasis. But one thing that we're missing the most under prescribed nutrient and earth light. So people are missing out on the light, we use very specific light frequencies. Now there are other really good light frequencies for other things. But the reality is that our brain needs red and blue light, just like sunrises and sunsets. And one thing Molly I don't think people understand is that used to be a metaphysical concept when people say, I am light, you know, you see those bumper stickers and people think well that's the fruit, you know, running around, you know, a granola or whatever. But the reality is, science is proving that we are like, we are voltaic beings. Our science officer actually was the one who patented what they call ceramic clothing. And Tom Brady, which some people probably know he's a, he's a really famous quarterback, he came up with a clothing line called TV 12. That's actually our science officers clothing that he liked, really does every person on earth enough infrared light. So when you meet somebody the difference between doing this what we're doing here, you can see me only because I'm going off light, the but if we're together, we're actually sharing our light energy. Every person emits infrared light and we all if you're into the health field, you know what infrared light does, it's very healing to the body. So there's actually clothing and sheets that can reflect this back to us why we sleep so we can heal ourselves with our own light energy. Instead of just expelling it out of the world. We can reflect it back through ceramics. So we need that light to now the more light we have available, the more likely we have to transmit you know into you know, there there we all know people just kind of a metaphysical concept that when they walk in the room, the light gets a demmer you know, those kind of people they suck the energy out of a room you want to be the kind of person that walks in the room and it brightens it up you know people want to be there because you have this energy in this in this life force. And that happens when your body is healthy in doing what it's designed to do, which is to transact now, we eat a lot more than any of our ancestors ever did. I mean, they
Unknown Speaker 40:24
they might only eat on a good day they would be two meals, they would never eat three meals. I mean, that would just be out outrageous you know, so they were because they didn't know they didn't have a supermarket on every corner. You know, they had to watch those things. So we're we have a lot going against us and I mean when we get just in the in the 80s sleep eight hours a day in this and then in the 90s it went to seven hours. Now they're saying the average person sleeps less than six hours a day. It's almost like people wear a badge that says, I don't get to sleep. So look at me, I'm super cool. But one statistic I think I feel compelled to share to your with your audience was that they did a study with professional basketball players. And they had them sleep just an hour longer, just one hour longer to see what happened. Over 10% better free throw shooting over time. Over 23% better shooting from the field. injuries were reduced by over 60% just by adding one hour asleep to their data. These are professional athletes and believe me, because I always wondered You know, you're watching a show on television. They had a curfew last night thinking these are professional athletes, they have a curfew, because the owners know that their production if they don't get the sleep that they need, they're not going to perform the next day. And that's true for every one of us so we really do need sleep as a skill because it's going to help all of our other skills do their thing.
Mollie McGlocklin 41:45
Ah wow well preaching to the choir this one I love that that's amazing. You struck so much knowledge and on that point, one of the things that's come up on the podcast is people then say wow, they're blown away by people like yourself sharing all this information. So then the next logical thing is they want to know what are you doing for your sleep? So we do have three quick questions that we asked everyone at the end of our of our interviews around what are you playing with right now and I'm sure it evolves and it completely I get your passion and your energy and I love what you're bringing to the table in this conversation. So I'm sure this is not complete or done by any means. But our first question is, what is it looking like for you right now with your nightly sleep routine. And I know you've pointed to accept you know, that awareness that our sleep really begins when we first wake up to like the ability to how we're managing our life. Yeah,
Unknown Speaker 42:45
at night time for me and and my wife, we always go around the house with at least three hours before going to bed turning off all the lights because you'd be amazed at how the lights come on especially we didn't realize this until we moved from Arizona to the east. In in Arizona is so light we just returning all the lights because we're so used to being so bright and and we live in the forest now so it's kind of dark, but that darkness will start to tell our brains Hey, it's time to calm down. We personally never watch anything stressful or fearful at night. We have a routine of watching comedies you know, something like that, to get our brain to be a little bit lighter. We always do if you were to in the lights are very dim we don't have lights in front of us and we're using lighting as a mood to set the mood because they have so many different ways to do that now with lights. I know I love a Dave has he been in some pretty nice light of some light processes. But like the Jannat light that I'm investigating right now, we're actually having a tune to light from the sun. So if whatever the sun is outside, it gives the same light inside so it's really bright because that's what most legs don't even hold a candle of no pun intended. You know, within a minute night when I go to bed, I always have my I have a chilli pad that I love. I have a grounding mat that I sleep on in and my wife doesn't do all the same things I do but she's we always I'm always posting my sleepscore so people wanna go to my social media. They'll see him at at Dr. Patrick Porter. Usually once a week I'll post them you know, especially if I've just traveled to show people Hey, I did one when at the hotel I posted what mine was the day before I got there when chili didn't and I said the only sleep app I can't bring is my chili sleep mat. And then I had only a 67 score which is really low for me. Yeah, sure. Bio strap that's not too bad, but it's not what I'm used to getting. But the night I had the chili sleep at 97 sleep score in a 93% recovery. So I showed hey how that affects me and that's that's the temperature of the room. So it's kind of hard when you're in so I can set that to temperature to be cold, you know where I like to sleep. And then I set it to wake me up when it's working. So it kind of imitates the earth. You know what happened if you're sleeping on the ground, I don't use an alarm clock, one of the worst things you do you can do to yourself is set alarm before you go to sleep, we call this anticipatory stress. So you set the alarm. If you do set alarm, I always recommend you find some beautiful music to play in the morning. So at least you're waking up to something nice and pleasant. If it's a screaming alarm, that puts you're basically it's like taking a tooth that's got a cavity and putting a jabbing utensil in it, you know, the nervous then all depending upon how well you regulate, you might not be able to get out of that fear for four hours. So you really want to work on that. For me, I always go to sleep, and I do one of the exercises you saw me do there at biohacking, I usually do the one where I'm, I'm roll my eyes up, of course, to trigger the alpha activity. Because I get to tell my brain it's time asleep, I start breathing into the metal kind of for breathe out to the metal kind of ate. And I just basically do a gratitude with my body to thank my body for what it did for me today. And I think of the people that I spent the day with. And I always reframe anything that happened negatively. Like everyone else, some things are gonna happen, maybe I didn't act the way I wanted to act around somebody or do something, that's what I'm going to correct it. Because that's when the hippocampus does its work. The hippocampus is the part of the brain that goes gets those memories and replays them for you either when you need them or even when you don't need them.
Unknown Speaker 46:38
It serves up to you so but if you train the brain to accentuate the positive, and I have a success, real life play, just like you would see a sizzle reel when somebody comes out speaking, everyone, everyone listening should have their own sizzle reel their own success reel, what were your most, the biggest highlights of your life, you should play those out, go from today and then start thinking about tomorrow in start future pacing, the most positive outcomes and then I give instructions to my subconscious to give me the information I need to make it clear how I'm going to accomplish that goal, then I go to sleep. Sometimes I don't make it that far. You know, a lot of times I just bail out. But sometimes I'm there visualizing and having my own DMT trip without any without any without any external need because once you started producing gabbeh you're going to produce those, you're going to start to hallucinate, get those dreaming states and I love lucid dreaming. So I'm always looking for ways to incorporate into my dream states. And then for me, I never I sleep anywhere between six to seven hours depending upon where I'm at. I've tried to sleep longer, I just don't so everybody's got to find out what their sleeps. Their sleep needs are if I sleep six and a half to seven hours I'm I'm almost maxing out any sleep score study. So that's my sleep if I sleep longer, I actually get a worse score. So when I'm when I'm up in the morning, I'm up I'm not laying in bed trying to sneak out another 15 minutes of sleep that disrupts your brain function so you want to get up as soon as it's time to get up.
Mollie McGlocklin 48:09
Ah, that's amazing. And I haven't heard anyone speak to this conversation of you know, kind of creating your own success reel or sizzle reel of your life. I think that's fantastic. Um, and then the second question is what might we see on your nightstand or could be your proverbial nightstand if you're you know, traveling apps or any supplements or opinion pieces on Beyonce or anything that we should kind of be aware of?
Unknown Speaker 48:37
Well at night I do I stopped by my nightstand there's nothing there really that would be of any value. Yes. The lamp and things like that, because no EMF but I do. Yeah, in the but I have taken my minerals. Every night I travel with them. I also have a supplement routine. That is you've asked to go through right now but a lot of it has to do with enzymes. Because as we get older we don't have as many enzymes so I'm always taking the enzymes that I need. They actually us enzymes as a company I did they just came out with one that's for blood clotting because everybody's having blood clots. So I'm I'm predisposed that I have to get blood every two months. So I'm taking that just to help them out my blood naturally sure there's I do magnesium at night before I go to bed. All the things you might see other biohackers doing that are really good. But the main the main thing that that I do is that if I don't do anything else, I'm always doing the minerals because I really that actually is measurable and what happens next, the best time to take your minerals is at night before you go to sleep. So then some people will get cramps if they take their minerals in the morning or they didn't have a good experience. But at night It seems to metabolize, digest better and that's when your body's gonna need them to rebuild your body.
Mollie McGlocklin 50:00
Now that that's a great kind of tips for people to be thinking about and then the last question is what has made the biggest change to your sleep game or biggest kind of aha moment around improving your sleep
Unknown Speaker 50:14
I guess the chilli pad because that's the newest thing just three years ago I started using it and you know I think monitoring how you sleep and I we've spent so much money on different beds I mean we have a bed that's like $10,000 and yeah, it's crazy and it was really
Mollie McGlocklin 50:31
good oh sorry any brands that you recommend for the bed that you've found?
Unknown Speaker 50:35
Well I think the brand I can't remember the brand that was at the biohacking That was a good one the one that I was the designer Yeah, yeah the one that was on that I'm with is a guy who spoke at our conference. It's actually made by a chiropractor out of Indianapolis and he makes it out of all natural substances and fibers so makes a big difference it's very comfortable but it's still but once I put the chili pad on yeah a different game
Mollie McGlocklin 51:01
changer. I know shout out to Todd and Tara over at chili pad they also hooked us up with their chili pad during the conference too And to your point the first night and habit the second night I had it for the rest of the conference and it made all the difference in the world completely agree it's such a game changer for expensive I mean it's number two right? And they also I often share for people to if there's you know the price conversation is in the in the space they have some refurbish options to have you ever you know, so that there's different tiers of availability. So I think 110% no matter what bed you are sleeping on right now, the chilli pad or something like it can really help up level your sleep game. Wow. Okay, so thank you so much for sharing all of this amazing information and loads of notes. And I had to control myself to ask you more questions and I want to be respectful of your time. But having said all that, I'm sure people listening are going to feel similar to me that they'll want to know more about what you're doing what you're creating. I know you said there's, you're in the midst of clinical trials and all these things are happening right now. So how can we stay connected to you know what you're putting out there.
Unknown Speaker 52:13
If they if they go to Dr. Patrick Porter, Dr. Patrick Porter calm, there's all the links to all the things and then we'll get you set up with a link that you can share with them for free so they can download my thriving overdrive book, they can keep that book they can read it on their kindle fire or their any mobile device and then we'll give them 15 days free on the app they can try it out. And hopefully they feel like most of our other people we have we only have about 8% of the people at max ever stop using the app for a month a month is a typical monthly you know people use it 20 times a month so it's something people use to benefit from so hopefully you can try it for free even with just the headphones people are getting results so because sound therapy is really powerful to when you had the light that's the upgrade, you know, read the light to get the upgrade to the experience.
Mollie McGlocklin 53:03
Yeah, and so for anyone listening in case it's hard to picture definitely check out you know, the links that will provide and check out you know, what braintap actually looks like if you can envision sort of putting on you know, almost a mask if you will over your over your head and I did it during the conference again and and it was so cool because it does bring about the light and also the sound so while there was you know, 1000s of people walking around, I wouldn't have known the difference I was on any gravity chair, a little blanket, put that on and it was like I went on a little vacation away from there. So yeah, definitely check it out. If you're having a challenge of envisioning what that looks like, you know, give it a look. Wow. Well, thank you so much for providing all this information and for your passion. And I'm very clear that this is just the beginning of all the things that you're helping to provide to so many people to help make a difference in their life which as we know the how you're managing your life can absolutely impact and is the driving force of the type of sleep that you're getting. So thank you so much for your commitment and for your time. Okay, thank
Unknown Speaker 54:11
you Molly.
Mollie McGlocklin 54:13
You absolutely
Transcribed by https://otter.ai