[00:00:00] Hi, Steve here again, and we're continuing the future of personalized medicine summit. And I have with us for this session, Collin Adams. He's a brain health coach from the Brainnovation Network based in Vancouver, British Columbia. Collin's based out of San Francisco there in the Silicon Valley.

And this is a special deal for me because he's also my son. And but he's here because he's earned it. Not anything gift from dad here. He's got a really cool story and he's got a lot to offer people. So let me tell you a little bit about him first. He's a functional medicine certified health coach with over six years of experience developing brain health programs for executives, entrepreneurs, and athletes of all levels, teams, and corporate corporations. His expertise spans neurofeedback, biofeedback [00:01:00] I'm sorry, his expertise spans biofeedback modalities, including HRV, biofeedback, and neurofeedback with over 1, 000 hours of self training and coaching others through neurofeedback programs. Collin specializes in cognitive performance training.

Collin helps individuals enhance focus, manage anxiety. reduce chronic stress, improve and improve sleep quality. He holds multiple certifications, including functional nutrition from the Kresser Institute recode and Bredesen protocol certification from Apollo Health, and certified brain health professional from the Amen Clinics.

Collin's passion for brain health stems from his own journey navigating ADD. As a student and overcoming performance anxiety as a college baseball player. His personal experience fuels his commitment to empowering others and optimizing their brain, function, and overall well being. Beyond his coaching practice, Collin is a former high school varsity [00:02:00] basketball coach and nine time published children's book author.

Outside of work, he enjoys cheering on his favorite sports teams, reading, exploring the beauty of San Francisco with his wife, Michelle. Collin, welcome to the Summit. Thank you so much. It's good to be here. Yeah. We talked a little bit about in your bio about that journey of navigating ADD can maybe help the audience understand how did you get here, basically as a 30 year old from 13, 14, 15, when some of the challenges were hitting.

Yeah. One of the fundamental parts of my story when I share about ADD. Is to go all the way back to third grade. And I remember coming home from class from school one day. And mom let me know that my teacher had called and he called specifically to ask if everything was okay with me, because I was the only student in the class who was still reading picture books, whereas [00:03:00] during reading time, the rest of my classmates were reading chapter books and more advanced.

So that was the first Oh, I think something might be going on. Then never had anything against school necessarily, but always struggled didn't really pay attention in class. Not necessarily because I had bad intentions just because my mind was just. Yeah. And then, that continued into college struggled in school.

My first semester, I think I had a 1. 9 GPA. So it was really bad. If you remember that flight back from the baseball ranch, when I was failing a class and didn't let you know That was always accounting for five hours. Yeah. And I was sick. So that was another part, but really where everything came to a head was actually in my career as a college baseball player, I was a pitcher and I had one very specific outing my sophomore season where you and mom were actually in town for this.

My first inning, I came in [00:04:00] relief and first inning. I'm not sure how many people on here are familiar with an immaculate inning, but essentially it means you throw nine pitches and strike out all three batters. So I had one of those. Everything was great. I felt good. My arm was good. My stuff was moving fast forward to the next inning and nothing had changed.

for me mentally, nothing changed in my approach. Nothing changed in the environment. And I was even in a deeper part of the order in the batting lineup. So it was not necessarily lesser hitters. It was lesser hitters, so came out there and I walked the first four batters and I got pulled out of the game.

And I remember sitting at dinner that night just Nearly in tears with frustration over the fact that I just had no idea what was going on for me mentally or physically and I had no idea what was causing me to be so high level at one moment and then so not high level at the next. Through a family friend we [00:05:00] got connected with.

Can I interrupt just real quick there. Yeah. So just, from the perspective of your dad, we were really trying to find an answer all through the last couple of years of high school. You were willing to work hard and that's how you overcame things, but it was so hard. It was just hard.

And we were using all kinds of tools like mind maps and all these different things to help prop you up and and you got through and you pass that test so that you weren't ineligible. So you knew how to rise to the occasion, but clearly there was something wrong. And this is where, you, as a parent for an idiot, because 20 years old to figure out you have this issue.

That we should have known about earlier, but but I remember that dinner because that was like me and your mom were like, we have got to do something like you. We could see it in you and you were ready and fortunately, we had a friend who knew somebody in [00:06:00] Michigan who was a very high level neuropsychologist take it from there.

Yeah. So we got connected with him and within, it was less than a week, within less than a week, I had all of this neurofeedback equipment with me there in my college apartment and went through a full 18 point Q E G. With this guy over a phone call, he was telling me the different locations on my brain to put the lead in the electrode.

And I just remember as I started going through that process I felt like I was finally able to take control of something or an area where I had really been struggling and felt like I was really moving forward. I, I just attacked it. I would do over an hour feedback training with heart rate variability training seven days a week.

I didn't miss for boy well over two years. And by the way, to the audience, we will explain all of these things he's saying, but go ahead. Yeah, for sure. [00:07:00] I would say I think it was the two and a half week mark. I remember that I called you and we stayed on the phone for over an hour. And that was one of the hallmark changes or first things we noticed was prior to this, it was hard to.

Stay on the phone for more than 30 seconds with me because either I would just get uninterested or annoyed. Emotional regulation was a big problem. So that was the first step and then continued. And the second thing that we noticed was I went from someone whose room you, you couldn't step on the carpet.

You couldn't see it because my clothes or things were just everywhere. My, my book bag, my textbooks, everything was spread out to. The next year, my. My room was like military style organized. Everything was placed. My bed was made and tucked in every day. And it didn't, for me, it didn't necessarily feel like something had changed.

It [00:08:00] just felt like I was finally myself. Yeah. Your grade point went to a 3 4 that next semester from like a 2 0. Right away, we noticed a big change in your grade point. Now it was a junior college. Those aren't the bastion of the hard academics, but it was huge progress, but it also laid the foundation for what came next at the next school.

Yeah. Yep. And at the next school all of that continued and Was able to get on the Dean's list, had a 3. 9 for the final semester, my college experience academically. But then also, back to the baseball front, I went from being someone who had a a very physical manifestation of stress and anxiety.

You're throwing the ball. I couldn't throw the ball 10 feet to my throwing partner without worrying that I was going to throw it 10 feet over his head. To now [00:09:00] I could stand back either on the mound and throw to my catcher or 200 feet back throwing long toss. And I could pick out a dot on my throwing partner's glove and hit it just because everything was working in sync.

Yeah, finally. And so the people that are listening here, you may have kids that are challenged and struggling in school or with anxiety, but you also may be an adult who never had this addressed other than through medication. And it does affect performance. When talk about that Collin in terms of the people you've worked with over the last six years, it affects how they run their companies, their practices, their relationships, everything, doesn't it?

It absolutely does. Yeah. So just to continue on the story yeah, because of my own fascination with brain health in this specific Avenue was able to get an internship with this psychologist. And I worked with him specifically working with pro [00:10:00] athletes which was a blast. I'm a sports fanatic.

So for me to be able to work in that arena was great. But. You get into the, these rooms with these pro athletes and you think they just must be the cream of the crop in every way. Their brain must be operating perfectly efficient all the time. And what you recognize is. That's actually not the case.

There are so many ways where when you just look at what's going on with your brain, which has been for so long overlooked you're able to find maybe that missing piece for performance or even health it's interesting how. If you are working out and you tweak your knee, the first thing you go do is go to your doctor's office and either get an MRI scan or you get an x-ray to look at what's going on with the knee.

And for whatever reason, with brain health, for the longest time we have specific to a DD. You go into your doctor's office, you fill out a very subjective [00:11:00] questionnaire, and then you're handed a medication. And that could be effective, but it's just amazing that we haven't looked. And so when you actually look at the brain, you're able to learn and understand what the actual need is.

And then you can take that need and match it with the proper intervention. And that's, that was my story, neurofeedback training were my interventions. That's amazing. Before we go any further, talk about the, let's do brainovation network at the end. We'll close it up with that.

You got a 45 or 50 year old that's watching this and they're they're running out of gas and they have a lot of responsibility, a lot of stress. Talk about how let's start with HRV. Let's talk about what's the primary way to improve heart rate variability that everybody can do and maybe talk about what is it and then how do you do it?

Yeah. Lead into that is your [00:12:00] brain is essentially its own power plant and at any given moment, your brain has enough electrical activity and it's a power, a light bulb, and it needs four things to create this electricity, food, water, sleep, and oxygen. And of those four things, oxygen creates up to, or more than 70 percent of the electrical activity that's.

Created in the brain. So the way that I think about it as far as cognitive goes, and then I'll lead that into HRV is your brain. If you picture your brain, like an orchestra, a symphony orchestra, when your brain has these four things. Enough of them. It's able to operate and it's playing this beautiful, harmonious music and all the members of the symphony are playing together in sync.

That's called parents. And when the brain is in coherence, [00:13:00] it's when you're feeling and performing and recovering at your absolute best. So that's what we're trying to get here when you're not something that ADD does is. essentially takes multiple members of that orchestra and has them start playing something else, which is organized ADHD, hyperactivity disorder, or for ADD, you're getting someone who no one in the orchestra is playing anything.

It's just complete silence. What what developing all of this does is puts the conductor in place. And creates the symphony and keeps it going all throughout the day. And at night while you're sleeping HRV is simply the time between successive heartbeats. So often we think of the heart beating on through life, like a metronome one after the other, after similar cadence, every single time for your whole life.

When in reality, it actually has quite a bit of variability to it. And that's a good thing. The [00:14:00] 45 to 50 year old that you explained that's just crystal clear symptoms of burnout. On who's probably been in an elevated state of stress or chronic stress or sympathetic tone for a very long time.

And one of the. Hallmark ways to get out of that and you experience this is through diaphragm breathing. So diaphragm breathing simply done is instead of breathing through your chest, you're breathing through your stomach or your diaphragm allowing more oxygen to get in to then get up to your brain to allow your brain to do what it needs to do.

Diaphragm breathing can be done for five minutes. It can be done for 20 minutes. It could be done for an hour. It could be done for one deep breath. Yeah, the way that I like to coach it is based on circumstances. So for instance worked with a lot of lawyers and dentists in the past. And these two categories of careers are [00:15:00] insanely busy. Insanely busy. So my dentists were 7 00 AM to 3 PM. They had zero breaks. It was patient to patient. And so one thing we worked on was how can we create this stress and rest balance throughout the day. And so we had them in between patients, literally as they're walking from one to the next, they're taking three diaphragmic breaths, even as they're walking.

And that was serving as a recovery break or. Or even a break in their sympathetic tone to get some parasympathetic activity in there to help them recover. And the results of doing that, the result of going with Evan flow of stress and rest is now when you're going to sleep, you've prepared your mind and body for sleep.

If you go through your entire day and just stress. Now, when it's time for bed, you're up here. Instead of down here and you're expecting without any preparation for sleep to happen. And that's just not, that's not how it [00:16:00] works. You don't prepare for a sales call by doing nothing.

You prepare for a sales call by understanding and learning about the client or the potential client. And then you put together the materials, you put together the offer, and then you have the meeting for sleep. Everything that happens all throughout your day needs to be done with mindfulness around sleep. And so breathing and sleep are the two quick ways to improve heart rate variability fast. Yeah. And working with people where they are, they don't have time to do 20 minutes at once. Maybe they can do 10 minutes at bedtime, but if you got them to do five minutes or two minutes, when they were turning the coffee maker on in the morning, brewing and then do those little three breaths every, cause think about it.

If they do that between. 80 percent of their patients throughout the day, they've really done a nice thing for their body that they didn't do before. And it helps them build sleep pressure all day because that's part of that circadian rhythm. [00:17:00] Yep. Yeah. All right. So now the core here is neurofeedback.

And what I like about the way you do it and the way we, when we used to do neurofeedback at Tiger, we don't. We use others like you now. You integrate HRV because they're really important to do together. Maybe talk about why that's important and also jump into neurofeedback. What is it doing?

Why? Why does it help people? Yeah. Doing HRV work prior to and in accordance with neurofeedback training just helps to prep the brain so that the training is more effective. At typically will encourage clients to go three to five minutes of deep breathing or meditation or heart rate variability work prior to their session, just so that their brain is more ready for the learning it's about to go through. And then neurofeedback is simply a form of operant conditioning. It's a form of biofeedback where your [00:18:00] brain learns to operate in a more optimal state. The way that process starts is through a QEEG assessment where we look at different regions of the brain to see what the electrical activity looks like in those areas.

And then From there, we set a protocol for the person to do a training program. And it's specifically designed for their unique brains needs. For the person who has. Racing thoughts. This is a big one racing thoughts when your head hits the pillow. Typically from an EEG standpoint, what we might see there is an excess of high beta brainwave activity, which are these fast moving brainwaves that are associated with your fight or flight response.

It's a great brainwave to have, but not when you're trying to go to bed. So we might develop that one when I was younger. Yes. So we might develop a protocol around [00:19:00] lowering high beta brainwave activity, increasing theta activity to create a more balanced brain state. It's very much results of the assessment paired with symptom based protocol setting.

So I want to make sure I don't just look at the assessment and see the brain, but I also get the context of the human being. That's. Being assessed, develop the protocol and then training is amazing. This is the best part. You're going to watch your favorite show on Netflix, no matter what, at night.

So you might as well let your brain become better and more healthy while doing it. While you do it, yep. The coolest thing about neurofeedback training the way that we do it with Brainovation Network is through a headset that connects to an app in your phone. That you can use to stream pretty much anything from Netflix, HBO Max, Hulu, Amazon Prime, YouTube, [00:20:00] whatever you'd like to watch.

And during training, you just sit there and watch. That's it. You don't have to. Just real quick as an aside, I did it. I did over 10, 000 minutes. And one of the challenges people like me have that are, have a lot of responsibility trying to perform at a pretty high level is. You get older middle age like that and your brain actually in many ways is working against you at cross purposes with you because you got all these deregulated, dysregulated brainwave activity.

And so your own brain is fighting you. And you're trying to do everything right. You're breathing, you're sleeping and everything, but your brain's working against you. And I just encourage people make this investment at least one time, do it for a period and correct this stuff. Because it was incredibly relaxing cause I did breathing for 20 minutes while I watched the session.

And, I have to check and make sure I can watch spy games again. I watched that [00:21:00] movie like a hundred times. I have the whole thing memorized. I don't know. I just love the movie. But anyway, yeah, it, it will, it'll it for people that are trying to get that last two, three, 5%, 1%, this will get it for you.

Yeah. And the idea of neuroplasticity is that your brain is capable of change and your brain operates as it does today. By how it's been conditioned over the course of your life. And the beauty of that is that you can recondition it to operate a different way. So if you're operating in a state of burnout or chronic stress, or you can't sleep, or you can't control your emotions or whatever it might be, whatever it could be, we can take a look at what's going on in the brain and address that through heart rate variability, coherence training.

And if you're a parent and you have a kid, this is a great way. [00:22:00] There's so much research on the efficacy of neurofeedback training to vastly improve a child's ability. To maintain focus when they have ADHD and ADHD. And so anxiety is another big one. They have, there's a lot of good literature research on those two.

And so anyway, yeah, keep going, Collin, anything else on that? Yeah. And I would just say for parents it's a holistic approach to brain health on a developing brain. So introducing prescription medication is sometimes what's needed. And sometimes you need to combo neurofeedback and prescription medication.

I don't in any way want to go against what prescription medication can offer for brain health, but I will say you do have options for holistic approaches to improving brain health. in a way that kids enjoy. Like kids love watching TV. My nephew who's two years old is if a screen is on in the room, it's like his eyes are immediately [00:23:00] glued to it.

Yeah, he's gone. Yeah. And so it's the thing too, is people have to understand, you don't have to do anything. You just watch and try to focus in the game, the show, the software will teach you what to do, because basically when you're off in another land, it will. That the screen won't move or something, and you'll want the screen to play the show, and so you refocus, and so it just teaches you what to do, which isn't much.

Yeah. And I can explain that part. Anytime your brain gets outside of the parameters that we've set for it in the program, the screen will get darker so you can barely see what you're trying to watch and the volume will turn down so you can't really hear it as well. And your brain recognizes that as a negative feedback cycle and works to correct.

The firing that's happening in the brain so that it gets more of the positive feedback, which is the bright screen and the full volume. Yeah, pretty cool. And your brain just [00:24:00] does it on its own. It's an amazing thing. Yep. Collin, tell us about the Brainnovation Network that you, that's where you do your work now.

Talk about that. Yeah. So the Brainnovation Network is a really cool thing that started very recently. It's Essentially creates access to affordable and evolving technology stacks in the brain health space, and then pairs those with services that are tailored to our brain innovation partners specific client populations.

So the way that I can explain it is in two different ways. Let's say that you have Urgent cares over here. And the urgent care wants to find a way to create more offerings to diversify their offerings, drive more opportunities towards cognitive health while also improving client engagement between visits and their outcomes.

This is where our brain health coaching [00:25:00] service could fit in. We tie a brain health. Brain Innovation Certified Brain Health Coach to that set of urgent cares. And we're able to either train their staff or a few of their staff members on different things, tech stacks or services that we offer so that they can deliver it.

Or we just white glove. Deliver the services for them and what we found is that it's a great way to, like I said, create more engagement between visits, create more visits because people are interested in getting their brain reassessed more often. To see the efficacy of their intervention and also just creates more of a profit for that center because it's just a new segment for them on the other side are these really cool things that we're developing called neuro labs or neural lounges, depending on the setting.

In a senior care facility, this would be determined to be a neural lounge because [00:26:00] it's more of a relaxing environment, whereas with a sports team, it'd be a neural lab. And essentially what that is we set up. A physical space, whether it's at a senior care facility or with an athletic team, pro sports team, where there are, there's a tech stack.

So there's a number of different brain health specific tech devices that the team members can use. to improve cognitive performance, brain health, whatever the issue might be. And we customize those tech stacks based on what the need is and are able to improve outcomes that way. And then we also usually will plug in a brain coach with them as well, just to service ongoing engagement and treatment.

Okay. So for you what are the couple of the devices you like for measuring and helping with sleep and with HRV, what would you recommend people if they want to buy those? So that the two [00:27:00] devices that we really like to use in our specific neurofeedback program are the Muse headset with MindLift software.

Yep. We found that to be a very accessible and easy tool for people to use at scale. Yep. And then we also really love heart math, anything heart math Institute for heart rate variability, but specifically their coherence plus device. It's inter balanced tool that I have one, it just clips on your shirt and then it's on your phone, right?

Yeah. Super simple. And that's what we're trying to drive at because people that are busy don't have. Have this bandwidth to add more. So we try to find ways to improve brain health while not creating an extra burden on the schedule. And then working with them over time on, on lifestyle habits for brain health.

And do you like the Oura Ring for sleep measurement? Yeah, I would say in my opinion, Oura Ring is probably the most accurate sleep measuring [00:28:00] device that's on the market. And I, but as far as devices go, I just like to say, compare like with so if you like to use an Apple watch, don't compare your Apple watch data with our ring data for you, because it might produce slightly different results.

If you like Apple watch, compare it with Apple watch. If you like oura ring, compare it with our ring. Yeah. Yeah. I like aura. We use it at tiger and it's I like it cause it gives us the oxygen saturation levels. That can help us determine if we need to do sleep studies with people. I like how it measures HRV.

Throughout the night. That's like a baseline when you're resting at rest keeps you over time. You can see the trend. So in addition to all the sleep architecture stuff. Yeah, great. Collin, how does someone find you if they want to learn more about how they can work with the brain innovation network to get brain health coaching neurofeedback?

Yeah, our website is under reconstruction they're more than welcome to visit brainnovationnetwork.com. That's an easy way [00:29:00] to get a base understanding. If someone's interested in neurofeedback training, I would just encourage them to reach out to me directly and email you. Yep.

Yeah. What is your email at Brainnovation? Email is C Adams. So C as in Collin Adams at neuropeak. ca neuropeak. ca. Yep. Cause they're based in Vancouver, British Columbia. That's right. Yep. Yep. Okay. Good. Collin, thank you. I really appreciate you being on here, as your parent, it's really exciting to see how you have gone on this journey.

And I wanted you on here Not because I'm your dad, but because you have lived what we're trying to help people believe they themselves can do in this summit. And that is you don't have to accept where you are today. You can lean into this. You can reinvent yourself, reinvent your narrative of your health future.

You've done that. And you've been through that whole discovery journey with me, with Tiger Medical at one point. [00:30:00] And what we're trying to do with the summit is give people a shortcut and go, Hey, here's a, here's 30 experts. You can cut to the chase really quick. So thanks for being on today.

Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me.