Help Sleep Problems and Anxiety using qEEG and Neurotherapy with guest Mindy Haukedahl

About this Episode

On this fascinating episode of the Brainy Moms podcast with Dr. Amy and Sandy, psychotherapist Mindy Haukedahl shares details about assessing and treating anxiety and sleep problems in kids, teens, and adults using qEEG and Neurotherapy.From depression, anxiety, sleep problems, and misophonia,her work with non-invasive in-person and remote qEEG and neurotherapy has significantly improved her clients’ lives by using real-time brainwave activity to help diagnose and treat a variety of conditions.Mindy’s use of brain mapping, grounding and meditative techniques, and psychological interviews has helped her patients understand and regulate their emotions, sleep, and overall well-being. If you’re curious about the use of qEEG and neurotherapy for anxiety and sleep problems, you won’t want to miss this episode.

About Mindy Haukedahl

Mindy is a licensed marriage and family therapist, licensed school counselor, licensed school principal. She has worked in the field of mental health for 18 years and is a full-time Director of Counseling at a private K-12 school and owner/psychotherapist/neurotherapist at Afton Therapy. Her areas of specialty are working with teens and adults who experience unwanted symptoms associated with anxiety, depression, sleep disturbances and relational issues.

Connect with Mindy

Website: www.AftonTherapy.com

https://www.facebook.com/aftontherapy
https://www.linkedin.com/in/mindy-haukedahl-ma-lsc-eds-lmft-bcn-6b7ba846/

https://www.instagram.com/aftontherapy/

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Read the transcript for this episode:

DR. AMY: Hi, smart moms and dads. Welcome to another episode of the Brainy Moms Podcast, brought to you today by Learning Rx Brain Training Centers. I am your host, Dr. Amy Moore, and I am joined by my co-host, Sandy Zamalis. And we are excited to welcome our guest, Mindy Haukedahl. Mindy is a licensed marriage and family therapist, a licensed school counselor, and a licensed school principal and she’s certified in neurofeedback through BCIA and a certified brain professional through Amen Clinics. She’s worked in the field of mental health for 18 years and is a full-time director of counseling at a private K through 12 school, and an owner, psychotherapist and neurotherapist at Afton Therapy. Her areas of specialty are working with teens and adults who experience unwanted symptoms associated with anxiety, depression, sleep disturbances, and relational issues. She’s a leading specialist in overcoming troublesome symptoms by improving brain functionality through neurofeedback. Welcome, Mindy. 

MINDY: Thanks. Thank you, Dr. Amy and Sandy. Good to see you. I’m excited to be here today. 

SANDY: We’re so glad you’re here. And we get to talk about our favorite topic of all time, right, Amy? The brain! So we’re super, super stoked to have you. So let’s get us kicked off and started. Why don’t you tell us why you got interested in mental health and more specifically neurotherapy?

MINDY: Yeah.  The topic of mental health, I would say goes back way long ago, when I was in high school, you know, I graduated high school in 1998. So it’s been quite some years. And I saw students and classmates that were struggling with mental health and I saw at that time how there wasn’t a lot of support in the schools for their symptoms or really encouragement to go to class. And so originally, as Dr. Amy shared a lot of my education or my background, I went into school counseling and I love school counseling. I am extremely passionate about it. But what I am most passionate about is mental health. I feel that if you are not feeling good mentally and emotionally, obviously you can’t optimally perform at school. And so a lot of my role at the school I’m at right now is around mental health counseling, spiritual development, and just making sure teenagers are in a good place to be successful at school. And so I always had a dream to of opening a private practice. I want to do more than just school counseling and I want to reach more individuals than just the students who are in my school. And so I got my marriage and family therapy license and opened Apton Therapy. And through that, I just started doing a ton of research and a ton of additional classes and coursework to see where my niche was. You know, the whole world of mental health, there’s so many different areas of specialty with different treatment modalities, different diagnosis, and so I kind of discovered that teens and adults, they’re kind of my jam. Like they’re my favorite.  I think that the teenage years, the brain is still growing and developing and so many teenagers have a hard time making a decision and sometimes get hard on themselves because they might make a poor decision when in reality, sometimes their brains aren’t taking that pause to let them process before making a decision.

And as an adult myself, I love working with adults and I know that if you can understand how your brain works and really calm down some of the unwanted symptoms that go on in your brain, it improves your relationships. And by improving your relationships, your whole system of life is so much more happy. It was kind of a long answer, but I just, I feel like I’m doing what I’m supposed to do. And I love, love therapy and love counseling and just want to help as many people as I possibly can. 

DR. AMY: So most of the time when we think about going to a mental health therapist or a psychologist  to get our teen diagnosed with whatever’s happening, right, we know that the clinician is going to give some tests, maybe ask us to fill out some surveys, the parent might fill out a questionnaire, the teachers might fill out a questionnaire, but you go a step further. You use something called a brain map too, to kind of dig in a little deeper. Talk to us about that, why, why you use that, why parents need to know about that, how does that benefit helping people.

MINDY: Yeah. So I do something called, I gather QEEG data. It’s kind of a long word. It’s electroencephalography. And what that means is I take images in real time of brainwave activity and how it works is an individual sits with me, I put a cap on their head and I have four different electrodes and I have them at the frontal lobe, right at the limbic system and the occipital, at the back part of the brain. And clients sit and all they have to do is sit with their eyes open and then they close their eyes and they do a cognitive math task, which is actually quite difficult. It’s counting backwards by seven, starting at 391. But it wants to see what does your brain do at different locations while you are trying to think, while you are trying to perform, and while you’re trying to rest. Because you want to see differences in these areas between when you’re using your brain and when you’re not using your brain. Can your brain rest and repair while you close your eyes? Or are you high strung and when you close your eyes, you have ruminating thoughts and a lot of erratic behavior going on in the brain. And what I love most about it is sometimes clients will come in and they honestly might self-report that they, they don’t know what symptoms they feel. You know, they might say, “Oh, I have some sleep issues.” Or “Maybe I have some anxiety. I’m a little overwhelmed.” When I do a brain map, it’ll show me if there’s past trauma. It will show me if there’s current trauma and current stress. It’ll show me depression. It shows so many things and it shows it because the research says that these inconsistencies in speeds that are not optimally what your brain should be running in, or if your left hemisphere doesn’t have symmetry with the right hemisphere, all these inconsistencies can lead to these symptoms of mental health. So I love using it as a diagnostic tool because it’s also visual and I can show a client. Here’s why you feel the way you feel. And I feel that then it’s not really like a soul or a person issue. It’s a, “Okay, I could get better. It’s my brain isn’t doing what I want it to, not so much that I’m in a situation or I can’t handle stress. It’s my brain doesn’t know how to heal or do what I need it to do. 

DR. AMY: All right, so to clarify, when you are recording this electrical activity in the brain of a client that comes to you for a diagnosis,  the reason that you know, “Okay, this particular pattern of activity that I’m seeing is consistent with something like anxiety or trauma,” is because researchers have done this with thousands of other people and identified those patterns?

MINDY: Yes. Hundreds of thousands. The normative data pool is so, so large. And I also use it in comparison to what they’re reporting as their self-reports of what symptoms psychomatically they’re feeling, you know. Are they experiencing sleep problems? Do they have brain fog? Do they feel anxious? I wouldn’t just do the brain map. They would come in, tell me their symptoms and then we would do it. And the brain mapping actually only takes about seven minutes. So it’s nice because in a whole session with me for an hour, I can do a detailed psychological interview with them and understand their symptoms of express traits. I can do the brain mapping, QEEG data, and then we can look at it all together and formulate a personalized treatment plan right away.

SANDY: So, I’m processing everything that you’re saying, and it’s really interesting to me. I’ve never actually known anybody who’s done the QEEG or neurofeedback. So I’m trying to think about this from a parent perspective and what they would want to know, because this is relatively new, right? This isn’t something that we’ve been doing as a therapy for very long. 

MINDY: Right. It was developed in like the 1940s, but it is a newer type of therapy that, you know, you have to go through extensive training and certification. And some people just don’t offer it as often. 

SANDY: One of the things you said earlier, and maybe you can clarify this, because I thought this was super interesting. You said that you see a difference when a client’s eyes are open versus when they are closed. What is that about? Why is that?

MINDY: Yeah, so when somebody is sitting and they have their eyes open, you can see the electrical activity in the brain that it is starting to think. It is starting to get into a faster speed because the brain is expecting you to do something. It’s expecting maybe somebody to come in the room, the phone to ring, a task is probably approaching. And so the brain is like on alert. It’s ready to go. When you close your eyes, your brain wants to start getting into those slower speeds so that it can rest and repair. And when we close our eyes, our brains naturally think we might be getting ready to sleep. And so you can see that in the data and you can see the different speeds between the eyes open and the eyes closed. And on the brain map, it actually shows up in different colors. That if it’s deficient, it’s going to be more blue. If it’s in, if it’s in excess, it’s going to be more red. And so it’s really easy to tell, okay, when your eyes are open versus your eyes closed, here’s what’s going on. And I’ve had a lot of clients lately who they don’t even realize that they’re not getting adequate sleep. And the data will show that they are actually more drowsy when their eyes are open, or when they’re doing that difficult math task, they have more slow speeds going on than fast speeds, which shows that their brain just is not doing what they want it to, which can help them to understand why they have more difficult time at work or school.

DR. AMY: Fascinating. So we’re actually running a clinical study right now where we’re using brain mapping to show what happens in the brain during cognitive training exercises. And so the psychologist who’s doing the brain mapping actually does an eyes closed recording and then an eyes open recording and then the active tasks. And so I always thought it was just so that we could see the difference more delineated, right, between an eye, just sitting there with your eyes closed. I didn’t realize that you can use that diagnostically, especially with sleep. And so, let’s talk about sleep because that’s an issue. We know that’s an issue for teens especially, right?

MINDY: Yes, sleep is a huge issue. Even when I scan and I do a brain map on somebody, even if they’re coming in and they have symptoms of anxiety or depression, if I see dysregulated sleep, that’s going to be the first area that I’m going to target. And they’re going to start with a sleep training because if you are not getting adequate sleep, you are not fully resting and repairing from yesterday. And you know, this it’s if I didn’t sleep tonight, then tomorrow, it’s almost—like I tell clients, think of all these little cleaners in your brain. And when you sleep, you have them sweeping and dusting, and you’re waking up to a clean house ready for the new day. Well, if you haven’t cleaned it up, you’re waking up to clutter, to mess. You’re more emotional. You just can’t seem to function because your brain is it’s exhausted. And so sleep is, it is huge. And I see it in almost every client that I have scanned lately, I see sleep disturbances. And especially in teens. They have such a hard time making a routine to do before bed. They’re scrolling on their phones before bed. They are .. I have a lot of clients who, when they wake up in the middle of the night, they will look at their phone. Well, if you are in a slow brainwave state when you’re sleeping and now you go and look at your phone, well, what have you just done to your brain? Now you’ve sped it up. How are you going to fall back to sleep? Because your brain isn’t going to know how to go from fast to slow again without taking time. Therefore, you’re just not getting that adequate, good restful sleep. 

DR. AMY: All right. So two questions related to that. When you look at your phone in the middle of the night, is that a blue light thing that’s creating the fast waves? Or is it just because you’re engaging your brain in something?

MINDY: It’s both. Mostly, though, it is because you’re engaging your brain. Because when you start looking at your phone, you’re looking at an email, which is a conversation. You’re thinking about how you want to respond to it, or you’re seeing a picture that makes you start thinking. So anytime you start thinking again, that is where your brain is going to speed right back up. 

DR. AMY: Okay, and then the second thing is you mentioned sleep training. What is that? 

MINDY: I love sleep training. So I do sleep training on myself every single night and I actually don’t have problems with sleep. But when I program something for a client, I’m one that I want to research it and I want to try it on myself before I will ever say like, “Hey, this is amazing and you should try it.” So I do sleep training every night. And what I do is I put the headset on and I, for 20 minutes, I listened to a sleep soundtrack and it’s pre-programmed through my app. And what I’m doing is I’m turning down my beta speeds. So my thinking speeds, I’m focusing on getting those to be inhibited. And I’m increasing my slow waves, the theta to get me into sleep and delta to keep me into sleep. And so what’s fascinating is as I’m listening to this, when I am in the zone of what I’m training through operant conditioning, I can hear it. It sounds peaceful. I can hear the waterfall. I can hear it, all of it. The second I get distracted, or I hear one of my children in the background talking or my dog barks, it goes quiet because I’m distracted. And now I’ve gotten my fast speed picking back up because I’m thinking. So I do this for 20 minutes. And because I do it on my phone, right before I do it, I set my alarm for the next morning so that when it, when the bell rings and saying, I’m done with my training, I just put my phone right away. I don’t look at it. I don’t start looking at what my score is. I will look at my score in the morning, but I go right to sleep. And I’m telling you, I have the best restful sleep. And even though I don’t necessarily need it anymore, the data shows that I’m doing really well. I don’t want to stop. 

SANDY: So are you scoring like the process of the sleep training? Are you scoring your sleep at night? Or a little bit of both?

MINDY: So it only scores the training because I don’t hear it when I’m sleeping. So I take the headset off right when I’m done and put it on the floor next to my bed. But you get rewarded. So what I’m looking at is how much I was rewarded for being in the trained frequencies of my brain that I want to be in. The goal is about 50%. And so like I said, if my daughter’s talking, if my husband’s making noise, it could affect it. But then I also run reports that will show me each session. Did I get my high speeds down? Did I get my low speeds up? Was I distracted last night? Was I thinking about something? And it’s great conversation pieces for when I meet with clients and we go over it because I can say, “Hey, this one day, you didn’t have a very good training. What was going on?” And they might say, “Oh my gosh, you know, the situation happened in my marriage,” or “I was really overwhelmed with this.” And then that’s a great opportunity for psychotherapy to really process and work through that so that that issue doesn’t arise again.

DR. AMY: So how young can you be trained? 

MINDY: Research says about four years old. And so what we would do is the younger an individual is, we just would do shorter rounds. So typically with sleep training, it’s 20 minutes and it’s just one round. So you’re just laying their eyes closed 20 minutes. With a lot of the day trainings for teens and adults it’s 18 minutes, but you do six rounds of three minutes each. So you get to retry and beat your score from round to round. Younger kids with their attention span, you know, you might do two sessions, three minutes. And then maybe a week later at a third session and hopefully get up to 12 to 15 minutes. But it depends on also what their schedule is like. Because what I also see is that if you are going to be training for peak performance, you don’t want to try speeding up your brain at night. Right? So if you’re going to be doing this, my daughter does neurofeedback and she’s nine and she does it in my school office before school starts. Because I’m trying to get those slow speeds to diminish out of the frontal lobes.

I’m trying to get her to be able to focus and pay better attention and be able to sit still easier. And so she does that during the day. But if I was to do that before bed, she’s not going to fall asleep because I’m speeding up her brain versus slowing it down. So it’s kind of one of those things too, with a lot of my teenagers, we have to create a new routine of you have to get up a little bit earlier if you truly want to feel better and have a great day at school, you’re going to have to make it a routine to get up and do this before you go to school.

DR. AMY: All right. So I’m hearing parents say my kid would never do that at night. What is your response to that? And what it is, what is it about the program that makes it engaging? I heard you say that you do get a score. So does that gamification help? 

MINDY: Yeah, the program that I’m using currently is a newer platform and so they are coming out with games that people can use for their training. But again, if you’re doing sleep training at night, you’re going to be training with your eyes closed. So it’s more so, It’s very individualized. So I will ask clients, “What do you want to listen to?” And then I will program the songs or the videos for them and they will just listen to it. But they, after about two weeks of doing it, it becomes their new norm and they just get used to it and they start to really enjoy it. If it’s day training, they can tell me what it is that they’re interested in watching for documentaries, anything on YouTube that they’re really fascinated with. And I will pre-program those. And during the day training, when your eyes are open, when you’re in the zone that I’m training, you can see the screen, you can hear it. Again, when you get distracted or you’re not, you’re getting a little worked up, it goes dark. And you don’t even have to really focus or like try to control it. Your brain wants to be able to see it and your brain seeks that reward. And so all you have to do is devote 20 minutes to sitting and thinking of it as exercising your brain. I tell clients all the time, it’s like, if you wanted a new weight loss program and you went to a gym, if you went to the gym once every week, it’s going to take you a pretty long time to hit your goal, but if you consistently will put in 18 to 20 minutes every single day, your brain is going to do remarkable things and it’s usually about four months and they’ve reached that goal. And then they’re either done with neurofeedback or they might say, “Okay, I worked on my sleep. Now I want to work on improving my sports performance,” or, you know, all sorts of different things. I have artists, I have students, I have professional athletes. So many of them are just finding just different protocols that are working really well for them.

DR. AMY: Okay. So then how can you use that same technology for anxiety? How does that work? Because we think of, “Oh, well you need to go to therapy and talk about your fears.” How does this help?

MINDY: Actually, one of my very first clients was, he was a police officer and he had seen so much trauma in his life that he became agoraphobic and he quit his job and he wouldn’t leave his house even to go to the grocery store. And he came in and he had severe anxiety. Everything just made him so nervous and he was worried and doom and gloom constantly. And when I scanned his brain, the back part of his brain that is supposed to be the calm, I like to think of it, the amygdala back there is almost like that little red man from the movie “Inside Out.” His amygdala was like on fire. This like red “Rawr!” It was just so hot and it didn’t matter if his eyes were open or eyes closed. So a lot of times when somebody has anxiety, you see in the back part of the brain where it’s supposed to be calming, it’s running really, really fast. You also see all across the frontal area, the limbic system, the temporal lobes on the side, all of it is in like a high beta state. And high beta is like that, that constant, like, “Oh my gosh, what’s going on? I’m nervous. I can’t sit still. I have ruminating thoughts. I fear the worst.” And so all of that looks very red and very fast in the brain. And so with neurofeedback, we can calm that down. And so this client that I mentioned, he has totally recovered. He was very dedicated. He had a lot of suicidal ideation and all he wanted was to get better. And he would train twice a day. He did a sleep training and he would do a day training. And his day training was just to calm it down, especially his limbic system, because he was just so dysregulated. And after so many months, he did psychotherapy as well, but his brain now can do what he wants it to do. And he even will say—he’s actually was interviewed on a podcast with me—he is in a state of like calm focus all the time. Like he’s getting married and has a new job and he went skydiving recently. I mean, he’s like a totally different man because he was able to take control of his brain.

DR. AMY: So it’s an interaction with something on a screen.

MINDY: It is, yep.

DR. AMY: Okay, so for, for him, for example, like what was on the screen? Like how does he know that he’s calming down the limbic system?

MINDY: Yep. So he was watching all sorts of documentaries. He was about to travel international is what his long-term goal was once he got better. So he was watching all these documentaries and he, he would sit, um, and he put a weighted blanket on his lap at the same time. So it gets some oxytocin going in the brain and just start feeling that sense of calm. And he would just really focus on his deep breathing. He would work on controlling his heart rate variability, just like really being in a sense of calmness. We did a lot of like relaxing your shoulders, and it just took him a little bit to get in that rhythm and same with sleep. But then I’m able to look at reports and see how good he’s doing. And just seeing that data encouraged him to keep going. And then his symptoms just started getting better and better. He would do self-reporting. He would track his symptoms and with each day or few days he was feeling a little bit better. And he was one that was also he’s allergic to a lot of medication. So, you know, he was hospitalized for his anxiety and they tried a few different meds and nothing would work for him because he’d break out into hives. And so this was kind of, he knew this was kind of his only other option, was therapy and brain training and he was devoted.

DR. AMY: And so are you teaching those somatic techniques, those breathing and grounding techniques in real time, or are you spending time ahead of time saying, “Hey, once you get this unit on your head, I’m going to be prompting you.” What’s the order in which you do those things?

MINDY: Yeah, since it’s remote neural feedback, which we’ll get into, I usually teach them ahead of time. So when we are going over their protocol, they do their first protocol with me or through Zoom, but I tell them to relax their shoulders. We focus on grounding exercises. We focus on the deep breathing. And I’ve had a few clients that will reach out to me because maybe when they put the headset on they are like, they’re having a hard time connecting it and having it pick up their electrical activity. And it’s because they’re tense. And so I’ve had a few clients that will reach out to me and say, “Hey, I can’t get it to connect.” And I’m like, “Okay, let’s take some deep breaths. Let’s focus on relaxing your shoulders.” Because you might not even realize that your face muscles are tense or you’re clenching your jaw or your heart rate is a little bit faster, and so it’s kind of things that we talk about prior to them starting training on their own.

SANDY: So I’m going to recap a little bit, cause like I said, I’m following along as a parent here. So if someone were to come to your center, they’re going to do a, you’re going to do a study with them. You’re going to do surveys. You’re going to talk to them about symptoms. You’ll have a plan. Neural feedback is something that you do. And I’m, from what you’re saying,  there’s the sleep training and the day training, and that falls under the banner of neurofeedback. Am I I getting it right?  All right. So with that,  last year you had a post about neurofeedback training of brain frequencies alpha and beta being proven to drastically enhance cognitive creativity and dancers, including your own children. Share more about that for our listeners. Cause that was really interesting.

MINDY: Yeah. So my daughter is a competitive dancer and there’s a lot of research around that if you want to access that creativity, you need to be in more of that theta state. And so the theta state is, it’s a meditative type of state. It’s slower than like the calm focus state, but it just enhances the creativity. It enhances strength. It, it enhances just the flow and like the fluidity of the body. And so there’s a lot of research that shows if you can get somebody into an alpha theta state. It’s almost, like I said, it’s not meditative, but it’s a step calmer than that. And so these individuals, their brains aren’t like going fast and getting riled up about, did I point my toes? Did I do this right? You know, and the perfectionism isn’t kicking in. It’s more of, “I’m creative. Oh, I want to do this in this dance.” Or artists. “Oh, I’m thinking of this new color scheme that I want to apply.” And so alpha theta training has been used widely. In dancers, especially ballet dancers, just because when you get on that stage and that also causes some anxiety, they’re just in that calm, ready to perform, creative flowing state.

SANDY: Very cool. I think of like, I know there’s like meditation apps and, you know, just even from a personal perspective, when you meditate, it does sort of unlock that creativity. And so that’s what you’re saying is that if you can’t hit those brain waves you’re in. That’s, you can unlock where you’d be stuck. Writer’s block. 

MINDY: And when you said, you know, I’ve talked about day training and night training and what I want you to understand is they’re all personalized. So really there’s over like 200 different training protocols that you can do based on what the data shows. I call it “day training” or “night training,” but depending on what time of day you’re training. But I mean, depending on which area of the brain is not running the way you want it to, where the discrepancies are, there’s so many different protocols and it’s all personalized in where you put the electrode, which part of the brain you’re going to train, and all of that based on like your symptoms and what the data shows.

DR. AMY: Okay.  So we’re going to take a break, let Sandy read a word from our sponsor. And when we come back, I do want to talk about a couple other topics. I want you to hit a little bit on digital media and social media, just in general, mental health routines. And then I want to talk about misophonia when we come back.

SANDY:  Being pulled out of class for reading help in 3rd grade through 6th grade really hurt Joshua’s confidence. He regularly referred to himself as “dumb” or “stupid,” and he often rushed through work just to get it done. His parents enrolled him in LearningRx personal brain training, something they referred to as a “complete game changer.” At the 7th grade parent teacher conferences, Joshua’s teachers were so impressed with the improvements that they asked when intervention had created such drastic changes.  Now entering eighth grade, Joshua has not only been thriving academically, but also enjoying learning and even reading for pleasure. His parents are proud to report that Joshua is feeling so much more confident that he even performed in the school musical. While your child may or may not achieve these same results, LearningRx would be happy to work with you to get answers about your child’s struggles with learning. Get started at LearningRx.com or head to our show notes for links for more helpful resources. 

DR. AMY: All right, we are talking to Mindy Haukedahl about neurofeedback and brain mapping. And so I wanted to ask you about misophonia. So we know that misophonia is kind of under that sensory processing umbrella and it magnifies the auditory processing. I will be fully, full disclosure here. I have a wicked case of misophonia. I can hear my husband swallowing from across the room. Not just chewing something loud. He is a retired fighter pilot and he learned how to clear his ears just by kind of moving his jaw. And I can hear it from across the room and it creates these negative emotions that I’ve had to learn how to use grounding and breathing exercises to process. But how do you treat misophonia? 

MINDY: Yeah, I just recently had a client. She was 12 years old and she had misophonia as well. And she, what’s fascinating about that is that it’s not at school. She can sit and have lunch in the cafeteria at school and she can be okay. But when she is at home with her safe people, the people who are closest to her, if her mom or dad chew at dinner, she loses it. Like she is so overwhelmed. She has to like get in a cold shower, cold bath. She can’t breathe. It’s almost like a straight on panic attack over chewing. And so with her, I scanned her brain, and similar to anxiety, but even more so extreme, she was, her brain was running way, way, way too fast. And so when it’s that fast, so  when your brain is just go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, and it’s not able to regulate and calm down, the misophonia kicks in because you just, it’s almost like an explosion. Like you just cannot take any more. Your brain has no more capacity to take on anything else. And it’s like, “Boom, done. I can’t breathe. I got to remove myself from this situation.” And so we did a lot of calming training with her where we slowed down her brain. And she would do it every morning and then she would do it in the afternoon. And she’s actually a basketball player and the first thing that improved, even before the anxiety component, was she was a different girl on the basketball court. She wasn’t anxious anymore. Her coaches were complimenting her. She was giving speeches in front of people. All these things that were going on. And then slowly the misophonia went away as well, because she just was able to get in that calm state. And she was able to start to feel— it’s almost like clients can start to feel their brains and they can feel their heads. And so if she’s in a situation where she already feels a little bit hypervigilant or a little bit uneasy or on edge, we have practiced that. She will just remove herself and she will take the deep breaths and she will calm her brain down through her breathing because now her brain knows how to run optimally. She’s trained it long enough to have a new norm and so she doesn’t go into the state of panic that she went into for 12 years of her life. Now she has trained these new pathways and that’s what her brain wants to do. 

DR. AMY: Yeah, I need that. And I just have a quick story. So I was at the Society for Neuroscience convention a few years ago with my best friend, who is a neuroscientist, and she was walking through the exhibit hall and there was a Misophonia Institute nonprofit who had a booth in the hall, and they had produced this book on it. And along with the book, they were also giving away rubber ball swags with Misophonia Institute label on them. So we’re in the hotel room she hands me the book, “Look what I found you today. You need this!” And while I’m looking at the book, she is tossing the ball against the window in the hotel room. Bam, bam, bam. And I lost my mind from that. So the irony that they would even give away rubber balls at their booth was not lost on me.

MINDY: Yeah, I can picture you like, I like to picture like almost like a cartoon character with like just flame coming out the top of the head.  That’s what misophonia is. Yep.

DR. AMY: Yep. That, that happened. That was me.

MINDY:  Yeah. Yeah. Oh, I’m sorry that happened. 

DR. AMY: We laugh about it. And anytime I complain about the little noises, my husband just goes “misophonia.” And I’m like, “Yeah. Yeah.”

MINDY: And I’m wondering, does it happen with other people or is it mostly just your family members?

DR. AMY: Yeah. It’s just with people I love. That’s fascinating. I mean, obviously like your amygdala is in overdrive,  more so when you’re around people that you love.

MINDY: Yep.  And then the people you love take it offensively because they’re like, but why do I make you feel like this? I should make you feel safe and love secure. 

DR. AMY: Wow.  Yeah, that’s an “Aha!” moment for me, Mindy. Thanks. Just send me the bill. What you got, Sandy?

SANDY: So you, Mindy, you said that we’re discovering that excessive usage of digital media had a concrete relationship to almost all forms of mood dysregulation, including anxiety, depression, OCD, et cetera. Would you talk more about this a little bit, including any advice you have for parents on this topic? Because it’s such a hard issue.

MINDY: It is such a hard issue and I have a 12 and a 9-year-old. And so I get it. Parents, it is hard. It is, we’re at a college prep academy and so everything is digital at our school. And so even if I want my son to take a break, sometimes it’s difficult because I know he’s on a screen all day and then he’s doing his homework at night. And then when he wants to relax and have a break, what does he turn to? He wants a device. And what I have seen, and what the research says—I’m actually reading a really fascinating book right now and it’s called, i-Minds” and it talks all about the damage that is happening to the brain from too much screen time. It actually increases your alpha state across the frontal area of your brain. So again, when you have a slow speed in the front, that can easily lead to depression because it can become, you know, more on the left side than the right. It causes when you have too much alpha, you’re drowsy, you want to sleep. You’re not engaging in conversation. And then comes the emotional component. And I’ve seen this and I’ve tried this out on my child. You know, if he has too much screen time, he is so impulsive to react and not even in an effectively communicative way. It’s almost like he gets angry. And I told him like a couple of weeks ago, I said, give me two weeks with no more like Fortnite. We’re not gonna play Fortnite. You could do your homework, but we’re taking a break from all these games you want to play. And I know it’s your, your way of communicating with your friends and socializing, but let’s just take a break. No joke. He had a competition last weekend and he was a different kid. He could handle, he’s into martial arts. And he was so calm and so focused. And he actually got seven out of eight first places. And then one second place. And he was so proud of himself. And I said to him, I was like, “Remember what I told you? I told you that we were going to try this for two weeks and see how you performed and look at how you performed. You perform better than you ever have.” And so it’s really, it’s just important. It’s, you know, we all know this. It’s important to be outside to disconnect and to not be constantly feeding our brains with all this like electricity and social media and communication. It’s just, it’s not healthy. And the book I’m reading, I was just looking at it earlier today, and it talks about how if you go sit on a city bus, every single person, even adults, they’re all sitting on their phones. They don’t even know how to socially engage and interact with people anymore. And it’s sad. It’s just devastating that that’s the world we come to. But from a brain perspective, I can see there are three specific markers on the QEEG that if somebody is on a device too much or too much screen time, it will show me. Their peak alpha, which means how high up their alpha actually gets is off the charts. And they are constantly in this alpha state, which makes me nervous for possible depression in the future. 

DR. AMY: Wow.  Alright, so you offer remote neurofeedback. What would that look like for someone who is interested in connecting with you? 

MINDY: Yeah. Remote neurofeedback is, it’s new and it’s amazing for clients because like I said earlier, you want to train every day or at least every other day. But back in a few years ago, people would have to go to the clinic and they would have to train. And then you’re paying a therapist, their hourly rate every time you’re going in and training. It’s not convenient for you if you’re working or if you’re a parent to just have an hour to go to a clinic every day. So remote neurofeedback, individuals buy the headgear, they buy the headset, they can, if they are not local, we can go on a Zoom call and I walk them through the QEEG. All they do is they get the app on their phone. I instruct them when their eyes are open, their eyes are closed. I do the psychological interview remotely and then you do all the training on your own. So individuals, whether they live here locally with me, whether they’re out of state, they’re doing all the training at home anyways, or at the office. So it’s remarkable that they can do so much without having to come in, or they can do it right before going to bed. Because there’s no way somebody could do sleep training if they had to come into my clinic and then drive home and speed their brains back up. 

DR. AMY: So this does not your, the units you use don’t require conductive gel it sounds like. So you can’t really do that to yourself. 

MINDY: Yes. So I actually, it’s interesting. I actually was with a different company before moving over to this new platform and the different company I loved because it was a smaller headset. It just was like a band. If you watch on Netflix. If you watch “Quarterback,” it’s a series on Netflix, episode number four has Kirk Cousins on it. And it shows him using my first headset, which is just the band. And then the second headset, which is like the full cap. With the first headset, you had to put paste in your hair. And that was extremely difficult for my teenagers or adults who work or had to go to school. They didn’t want to put paste in their hair and then have to wash their hair and it’d be sticky and just a big mess. And so I don’t use that one anymore. The new one I use, it’s actually more sensitive and picks up a lot better electro waves and electrical activity, and there’s no more paste. And so it’s great because I have a guy who is in sales and he used to train at his office and he’d be so embarrassed because he’d have this chunk of paste in his hair and he’d be rubbing it. He told me he thought he’d go bald from rubbing it so hard. And now he can do it at the office and nobody knows. He takes it off. He doesn’t have junk in his hair. And he’s doing great. And the first headset you could only train in one location because there was one electrode with paste. The new system, you can train up to 10 locations and there’s no paste. And so you can get the whole brain with one training.

DR. AMY: And it works through curly hair, thick hair.

MINDY: Yup. Yup. Sometimes if people have really thick hair, I might give them a little like a little eyedropper. And if you put a little bit of water right next to the electrode, it just picks up that electricity even better. But yeah, it works with any type of hair. 

DR. AMY: And parents, just to clarify, this device is recording the electrical activity of the brain. It’s not putting electricity into the brain.

MINDY: Correct. You don’t feel it. It doesn’t poke you. It’s no- invasive. It just simply records and your brain does the work. 

DR. AMY: Fantastic.  Mindy, is there anything that you did not get to talk about today that you want to leave our listeners with? 

MINDY: I don’t think so. I just had such a great time talking with you and Sandy about my favorite thing to talk about, the brain. And I just appreciate that you had me on your show.

DR. AMY: Well, we’re excited that you took time out of your busy schedule to join us today. So listeners, thank you so much for being with us. If you like our show, we would love it if you would leave us a five-star rating and review on Apple podcasts, you can find us on Instagram and Facebook at The Brainy Moms. If you would rather watch us, you can find us on our YouTube channel at The Brainy Moms. And if you want even more additional fun insights and tips on being a mom, you can find Sandy on TikTok at The Brain Trainer Lady. And so that is all the smart stuff that we have for you today. So we’re going to catch you the next time.