Welcome to the high performance health podcast with your host, Angela Foster, the show where we talk about everything you need to break through limits and achieve a high performance, mind, body and lifestyle.
Hey, have you had an amazing Christmas, hopefully you're not kind of like suffering from cabin fever too much. And you've managed to get out of bed and also had some time to yourself because I know stress, Christmas can be a little bit of a stressful time as much as it is also fabulously enjoyable. But as you're looking ahead, I find this time between Christmas and New Year a really good time to really focus our minds on what we want to achieve in the coming year. And part of that is obviously optimising your mind and body for high performance. And as part of that high performance protocol, we want to be thinking about how can we optimise productivity, sleep and also flow states. When you're in flow, you've been shown to be actually five times as productive as when you're not this was some interesting research that was done by McKinsey. So in theory, if you could find this when you're working life in flow, you'd only ever need to go in on a Monday and you wouldn't have to go to work for the rest of the week, which would be amazing. Sadly, doesn't work quite like that because flow states are actually very demanding on the brain and so we can't be in it all of the time. But what we can definitely do is learn how to optimise our brainwave states and this is so important not just for productivity and performance, but also for sleep. And specifically training different brainwave states including theta brainwave states is important for really optimising sleep. Many of us as you're about to hear about live our lives in a very high beta brainwave state. And actually, there should be a really good balance between beta brainwaves and alpha brainwaves. If you're wondering, oh my goodness, what on earth is Amazon talking about here? What are all these brainwave states? And what do I need to learn? And what do I need to do? Then? Don't worry, because in this bite size bio hacks episode, I'm going to be sharing a clip from my interview with Dr. Patrick Porter, who is the founder of brain tap. And in this he explains exactly what the different brainwave states are, what we should be experiencing on a daily basis, how we can optimise this and how that will impact not just our performance, but our sleep as well. So let me introduce you now to this clip from Dr. Patrick Porter.
Where the brainwave state known as beta, and we're in all the brainwave states, hopefully so I'm going to explain how they work. We call it a symphony of brainwaves, because there's a lot of misconception out there about one brainwave being more important than the other. All of these brainwaves are important in the right context. So kind of think about a state dependent brainwaves. So we need beta to interact with life. And we call this the reactionary mind because most people have too much beta. Now beta. Also, when you're in a beta, too much beta brain, you overproduced dopamine. And that's why most of our addictions are dopamine addictions, like whether it's gambling, alcohol, drugs, pornography, whatever it is, all of those are actually tricking the brain to get more dopamine and dopamine is an exciter. So that means that it's it's meant to get you up and moving. But if you're sitting in a chair, like playing a computer game, it's going to your brain is going to fry. You know, in fact, some of the studies we've done with computer brains, I mean, when people do in computer games, I would really limit time on those. Now that when you drop down below beta, there's a brainwave called alpha. Alpha is when most people are really familiar with because it it actually is one where you're when you're with family or friends, people you love being with time seems to fly, you know, the, there's a Jim Croce song, you never have enough time to do the things you really want to do. Because when you're in that zone, there's no time, time only happens in the domain of beta. So there's no time. So like, if you're doing if you're a creative artist, and you're sitting behind the easel and you wonder where did the day go, you know, that's why they have to get artists to eat, you know, somebody has to make sure they're being fed. But it's a creative place, we should have 45% of our brain should be in beta when we're awake. 30% of our brain should be an alpha. Now those two working together actually create almost an infinite amount of energy. Because we get energy when we get out of beta. Beta robs us of energy, like if we're doing our taxes, or we're exercising strenuously. That's why our body burns out because beta uses a lot of energy. Alpha is almost you're getting into a flow state. Now alpha also triggers the neurotransmitter acetylcholine. So when you get into that alpha state, you're going to be producing that your brain is going to be telling your gut Hey, it's time to produce acetylcholine. Now, when we get into the next brainwave, which is called theta. Theta, by the way, is the one that most adults around the world that we measure with our neuro check technology that they're missing. You know, we've done 30,000 scans. And I would say that at least 90% of them have less than 3% data. And that's a problem. That's why two thirds of the world isn't sleeping. It's data that has to be trained not delta, although I will get into that in a moment. Data is the inventive mind. It's a very small Brainwave bandwidth that most of the inventors they associated with, like if you have a problem in your lab, like whether it's Edison or Einstein, and, and Tesla, they all had a method of going into their subconscious and retrieving a solution to their problems in what neuroscience is saying that happens through like an epiphany, but it happens in the brainwave state called theta. So think of infinite possibilities and theta, that's where you're super creative. If we dropped down one more into delta, delta is deep sleep, and you were talking about your aura ring and measuring deep sleep, every biohacking technology has a different way of measuring, I would say that aura is probably the easiest to master BIOS draps is not as not as friendly, you have to do a lot more deep sleep to get the scores, you know, so we've done a lot with that with the Delta needs to be triggered, because delta has to do with the subconscious healing getting into the real deep parasympathetics. But also, it's the only time the brain opens up the glial informed system. So what's important about that, especially for biohackers, is you while you're building up this great body, and exercising and breathing and all these things, if we can't get the toxins out of the brain, we're going to have a leaky brain. So most people have heard of leaky gut. So if you have a leaky gut, you probably have leaky brain because there's a there actually is a brain biome as well. Now, the newest brainwave on the block is gamma. And a lot of people are doing a lot with gamma now. And we can talk a little bit about that if you if you'd like here today for gamma is a higher level of creativity and problem solving. We used to think it was only about, you know, anxiety, stress, and all these other disorders, because between a brainwave of 22 cycles per second and 40, it can be a little chaotic, you know, you can get anxious and stressed out. But once you reach that 4040 beats per second, that's the gamma bass drum. Think of that like the like in a band, we have the bass drum, keeping the whole band together and the rhythm, that's the gamma. And now we know that gamma is super important for helping people overcome whether it be dementia or Alzheimer's, because that that gamma actually breaks down amyloid plaque, which of plaquing happens in the brain, mostly because of inflammation. And I would say primarily because of sugar addiction, you know, people eating too much white sugar and things in their brain is stressed out or any other foods they're eating. So these are the five brainwaves. They're all important. The two main ones while we're awake are beta and alpha, the but we need to go through all of them. So at night, when we sleep, we actually go through Alpha Theta Delta, we keep cycling through them. And that's what builds up our neurotransmitter bank account. So if we don't get the deep sleep that we need, we don't build up those neurotransmitters. And we can't think as clearly as precisely or show up as our best self, you know. So that's where the energy in the reason for sleep is so important. And what happens in brain tap is we compress a sleep cycle and as small as 10 minutes, or as long as 30 minutes. We actually have some that are 40 minutes, depending upon, I have a journey to Egypt, that's 40 minutes. So that's a deep Delta recycle. So a lot of people use that for jetlag so that they basically get back on the right timezone. So those are the five primary brainwaves that we talked about.
So I hope you enjoyed that clip with Dr. Patrick Porter, if you want to go back and listen to the full episode, it is episode 171. And if you're interested in trying out the brain TAP device, then Patrick very kindly gave a free offer to listeners of this podcast. If you go to Angela foster.me, forward slash brain tap, you can get a 15 day free trial. And if you want to go fully in and get the headset like me, which I highly recommend. Then he's also given $100 off you just go to Angela foster.me forward slash brain tap 100 that Angela foster.me forward slash brain tap 100 Thanks again for listening and I'll see you in the new year for more bite sized bio hacks.
Thanks for listening. Remember to review and subscribe. You can grab the show notes, the resources and highlights of everything Angela mentioned over at Angela Foster performance.com You can also snatch up plenty of other goodies including the highly helpful Angela recommends page which is a list of everything she personally recommend to optimise your mind, body and lifestyle
