The Rusty George Podcast

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Rusty George
As a pastor or staff member of a church, it is common to experience compassion fatigue and find that you spend so much time caring for others, you're not caring for yourself. Saga wants to help foster healthy churches by facilitating the support of the emotional, mental and relational health of their leaders. As a partner of Saga, pastors and staff can confidently and easily begin their journey by being uniquely matched to a therapist that best fits their needs.

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Rusty George
To learn more about our church partnership with Saga, go to sagacenter.org. That's Saga Center dot org.

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Intro/Outro
Welcome to Leading Simple with Rusty George. Our goal is to make following Jesus and leading others a bit more simple. Here's your host, Rusty George.

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Rusty George
Hey, welcome to episode 257. My name is Rusty George. And today we get to talk to a brain scientist. His name's Bryan Hixson, and he leads an incredible research organization that helps make sense of the way and the way we do things. Bryan Hixson is going to help make the brain simple for us. Have you ever wondered why some people are able just to break various habits easier than others?

00;01;16;15 - 00;01;40;23
Rusty George
Why some people struggle with OCD and other anxiety issues. Why you, by chance, just can't let some things go? A lot of it comes right down to our brain, the physical part of our body that keeps us from moving in the right direction. It's sometimes a whole lot more than just willpower. I went into this conversation with some questions that I came out with my mind blown.

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Rusty George
I guess it would be a bit of a pun there. But Bryan Hixson is an incredible individual. Got some great stuff for us today. And I know you're going to be fascinated by what he has to say. I want to thank Saga Counseling, speaking out of helping out our minds. Saga Counseling does so much to help out you and your marriage and your family and providing great therapy and counseling.

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Rusty George
So make sure you check out Saga counseling dot com and they can help you out. Well, here's my conversation with Bryan Hixson. Bryan Hixson, great to have you on the podcast for our listeners. Tell us who you are and what it is you do.

00;02;17;00 - 00;02;36;24
Bryan Hixson
Yeah, I am a neuroscientist and really my my job is to look at the brain and really understand the brain, understand what's going on. We really look at a lot of things from concussion. And in some of the top pro athletes and how that kind of affects the brain all the way down to dementia side of it and how that affects the brain.

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Bryan Hixson
I do a lot of work with the AARP or any of their dementia prevention programs and stuff, and then we do all the way down to local things that we really look at people for attention, deficit and anxiety disorders and a lot of the the brain side of mental health. You know, I think for so long we've called it mental health.

00;02;54;28 - 00;03;02;23
Bryan Hixson
I will love it one day when we call it brain health. And that's really what it is. It's fixing the brain, the behavioral calm when you fix the brain.

00;03;03;18 - 00;03;05;16
Rusty George
Why do you think we only call it mental health?

00;03;06;13 - 00;03;34;21
Bryan Hixson
You know, it's because it's it's it's the symptom, right? It's the symptom that comes out. So that would be like calling everything pain. You know, it's the symptom that comes out okay. And the problem is we haven't had enough tangible evidence of understanding what is causing the symptom. So once we do, you know, I always tell people that if you went to your orthopedic surgeon and you told them, Doc, I've got all this pain in my back, it hurts every time I do this.

00;03;34;21 - 00;03;52;11
Bryan Hixson
And when I've been this way and do these things, it hurts. It tells me what's going on. And they took down a bunch of notes and then said, All right, I got it. What you have, your diagnosis is pain. You had probably fire that person, right? I mean, it sounds funny because you tried efforts, but in the mental health field, that's a lot of what we do.

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Bryan Hixson
We take these clusters of symptoms. Oh, you're telling me you have all this anxiety? Okay. What you have is generalized anxiety disorder. And what we're going to do to treat that is an anxiety medication, which means we're basically going to treat everybody with anxiety exactly the same, regardless of what's causing it in the first place.

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Rusty George
Okay. Before we get into all that, you said a couple of things that triggered me as far as I have questions about you deal with concussions a lot. Do you work with a lot of football players?

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Bryan Hixson
We do.

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Rusty George
Should For all of our parents out there that have kids that are beginning to play Pop Warner and play football, should they not allow their kids to play football?

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Bryan Hixson
That's always the big question, right? And everybody asks, do you let your kids play football? Right. And here's the thing is that football is going to increase the risk of injury. But I can tell you, we work we have a whole center at a local school called Oaks Christian School, a large private school. Oh, yeah. And and we do that work to them.

00;04;51;04 - 00;05;12;27
Bryan Hixson
We've got that center since 2013 on campus. So we work a lot with their students. And I can tell you, we have just as many injuries from cheerleading, from dance, from girls soccer as we do from football game. So anything will have increased the risk of injury. The problem with concussions is that we can't see it, so therefore we let it go.

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Bryan Hixson
It would be like getting a broken arm and just saying, why a pain? Well, just wait till the pain just barely starts to go away and then play again. Right. Okay. So introducing things like brain mapping where we can actually take a quick brain scan and understand is the function changing? Are those neurons changing? Compensating because of what's going on, or did they reset correctly and go back to normal?

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Bryan Hixson
If you repair the injury, you will not have long lasting results from concussions. Concussion becomes like any other injury. You get it, you repair it, You go on.

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Rusty George
Wow. Okay. That's fascinating. How long till we have soccer players wearing helmets?

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Bryan Hixson
Well, here's the thing, is that, yes, when you compare the injuries of football versus rugby, where rugby, you're not wearing a helmet, we're football. You are the problem with the helmet is it gives you a sense, a false sense of security. Yeah. Now I can slam into that person. Yeah. And I learn to do that versus rugby. They learn how to tackle without hitting head on.

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Bryan Hixson
Yeah. So there's problems with that too, right?

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Rusty George
I think that you're on to something there. If football was played with the old leather helmets like they used to have or no helmets we wouldn't have near the targeting we have right now, right? Not at all.

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Bryan Hixson
Not at all. You would not be going head on to someone that gives you that false sense of security. And the problem with the helmet, too, is that concussion occurs when the inside battery form of the brain slams against the inside of the skull. So this is the impact brain against the inside the skull. If I have a helmet on and I slam into someone, my brain still slams into my skull just as much as if I didn't have a helmet on.

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Rusty George
Wow. That's fascinating. Okay, now I sound like a hypocrite because I love football. I don't want it to go away. But I'm just thinking about the kids out there.

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Bryan Hixson
You just need to treat it like any other injury and repair it. Right. And once we have objective tools to be able to do that, which we're getting there, we're going to be able to have the game, enjoy it and treat it just like any other injury, repair it and get right back in the game and play great.

00;07;14;26 - 00;07;25;04
Rusty George
Okay, So I've been told to ask you this question and if you can't answer it, I understand. But who have been or are some of your clients so.

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Bryan Hixson
Well, I can't give individual names that we've worked a lot with. A lot the Seattle Seahawks to the Dallas Mavericks, to the U.S. Olympic team. We've worked extensively with U.S. Army Special Forces. Wow. Colorado Rockies and then pretty close to a thousand pro elite level and Olympic level individual athletes as well. It's interesting when you when you're introducing brain mapping to especially a team, most of especially the football players don't want to do it.

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Bryan Hixson
Yeah. Because they're like, you're not taking a look at my brain. Yeah. I don't want my GM, my coach to see my brain too. Even if I've had concussions, I don't want them to know. And I don't want to know because without football, I don't have much. Right. That's that's my life, what I do. And so a lot of them are scared to see.

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Bryan Hixson
And what they don't understand is that you can repair these things. These are neurons that are compensating. It's like having a physical injury. You'd go to a physical therapist, they would repair that balance. They get rid of that limp in your leg, you know, and and you can repair these things. So it's it's a long ways. Once they really understand, you can fix it.

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Bryan Hixson
It's not just well, you have a concussion. You have to stop playing.

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Rusty George
Right. Oh, that's good. Okay, so let's get down into this. What exactly is a brain map and how do you do one?

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Bryan Hixson
So a brain map is a functional. It's looking at the function of the brain. So think of it very much like an EKG on the heart. You place all these leads on the heart. You're measuring for six, 8 minutes of that heart activity. It's measuring all the electrical function. And really what we're looking at with the brain and we have an EEG cap on the brain.

00;09;06;23 - 00;09;23;07
Bryan Hixson
It has 19 sensors on it. And you're sitting there staring at a wall for 6 minutes and have your eyes closed for about 6 minutes. So you've got 12 minutes of eyes open, eyes closed. Sitting there, a nice, big comfortable chair, big open room. This isn't a tube. There's no magnets. There's no electricity being put in your brain.

00;09;23;15 - 00;09;43;15
Bryan Hixson
It is literally like 19 stethoscopes recording your own brain electricity. The worst thing is it messes up your hair a little bit because we put a little bit of gel through that that sensor to attach to the skull and make sure we have a good connection. So for 6 minutes of eyes closed, 6 minutes with eyes open, it's recording the resting state of your brain.

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Bryan Hixson
Now, the resting state is so important to understand because just like your heart rate and I always give analogies to heart rate because most people understand that more when you have a nice resting state that's important on your heart because there's a threshold up here that when you get it, maybe around 200 beats per minute, there's a threshold that everybody has symptoms.

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Bryan Hixson
You're going to feel like you have a heart attack. You can feel shortness of breath. Things occur at around 200 beats per minute or more where the met the heart's maxing out. So if you're resting, State is down around 60. You've got plenty of reserve to run, to stress your heart, to live life, to do everything you need to do.

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Bryan Hixson
But if your resting state is at 120 to high, that's where you're starting places. When you go to run, I can tell you you're going to have those symptoms very, very quick. So the resting state shows us how much reserve you have to handle stress. And that's really what a brain map is doing, is it's looking at those neurons.

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Bryan Hixson
Is your brain coming down to a nice, calm resting state where those neurons are coming down to an idle or are they staying up too high, which means you're going to run out of reserve with just a little bit of stress in certain areas of your brain.

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Rusty George
Wow. Okay. So that explains so much of well, let's take the pandemic, for instance. Most of us already had stress, and now you add that to it, whether it's isolation or the loss of income or just the fear of the unknown, that just put a lot of us over the top. Is that right?

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Bryan Hixson
Absolutely. Absolutely. Huge amounts. Socialize, elation is horrible for the brain. You need the connection with other people. You need that connection. You need that physical connection to not just zoom. Zoom doesn't it? It's a step in the right direction. But, you know, these you know, the other thing is how much stress it is when you have even a mask on because you've got your right side of your brain in the frontal portion, your brain is analyzing all your social non-verbal cues.

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Bryan Hixson
So it's watching you know, do they care about me? What's their look? What's their facial? Are they falling asleep or they mad at me? All those things. The left side of my brain is listening to your actual literal words and getting my words back to you. Now, both those go into one conversation that you cannot separate. So do you ever notice, like when you're, you know, during the pandemic, when you're trying to order food and you've got a waitress or so with the mask on and you can't understand them?

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Bryan Hixson
Yeah, yeah, you can hear it. That volume is fine. Yeah, but that right side of the brain is struggling so much to understand. You don't realize how much we read lips, how much we look at these facial expressions. Right. And to block that off adds twice the amount of stress just in a communication.

00;12;22;13 - 00;12;42;13
Rusty George
Okay, so this is a bit of a a rabbit trail, but I'm just thinking about what you just said about Zoom is not enough. You don't even have to get into the the biblical or spiritual side of it. But the value of church in-person versus online, what does the brain tell us about that?

00;12;43;12 - 00;13;06;10
Bryan Hixson
Well, from the brain side, when you're in person next to each other, first of all, when you're in person, communication does nonverbal communication is so much stronger than on Zoom. Zoom has a limitation to what you can read for people and what you can see and step. It's hard to pay attention to those verbal cues or nonverbal cues versus when you're in person.

00;13;06;14 - 00;13;27;00
Bryan Hixson
When you're in person, there's a sense of energy that goes on there. So there's a lot of studies that can show through, you know, even electromagnetic fields and stuff. You know, your heart produces an electromagnetic field around you. There's a lot of energy around you. And when you are next to someone who has that same type of electrical activity, there's this is all science.

00;13;27;00 - 00;13;49;24
Bryan Hixson
This isn't something else. So you can actually measure these things. Your energy actually combined so that the people. And so when you're when someone is kind and putting off a loving spirit towards you, it actually physically influence is that person and their brain activity. They can be very sad and down and someone that is very peaceful, that energy actually physically comes across.

00;13;49;24 - 00;14;10;07
Bryan Hixson
It actually changes some of the way the brain actually works. It can actually condition the brain to respond to that. Now, some of that is through the the understanding, all those nonverbal cues of what's going on, some bits through a little bit of energy that transfers back and forth. You know, again, I'm not talking about weird stuff. I'm talking about just actual electricity that that can start to come through there.

00;14;10;13 - 00;14;39;02
Bryan Hixson
So you can change, you can comfort someone. But then there's the whole side of nonverbal cues that's not just reading someone's face, that's a physical touch, right? Being able to touch, put your hand on someone and feel some kind of hug, closeness, seeing their staring at someone, you know, it's it's such a different thing to the brain. It's probably if Zoom was a one on a scale of social connection in person to ten.

00;14;39;02 - 00;14;47;09
Bryan Hixson
Now no, Zoom is a zero. So, you know, one is better than zero, but it's tenfold to be in person with people.

00;14;48;09 - 00;15;15;28
Rusty George
Okay. So in light of the pandemic and everything that we saw go on with that, we just talked about how that raised our our resting rate a little bit higher and certainly made things difficult for us. But here we are three years later. What do you see as the reason why the and correct me for this phrase or pardon that the mental health epidemic that people are sensing right now?

00;15;15;28 - 00;15;28;23
Rusty George
Is it just now we're talking about it, or is it a combination of pandemic and social media and everything else, or are we all just so much more stressed than we ever have been?

00;15;29;25 - 00;15;47;22
Bryan Hixson
Well, there's there's definitely the we've always been stressed. It's like you said, it's always been to a certain level. If you if you get to say, you know, again, it's you know, I know a lot of people aren't seeing this. So we're talking about, you know, more audio here. You know, say a scale of 100, you feel intense anxiety, maybe a panic attack.

00;15;47;22 - 00;16;18;17
Bryan Hixson
We've always been, as a society, getting close to like 50 on that. And that's our starting point, right? We're already our brains already wired to just go and achieve things and get things and productivity. Even those things become stressful, right? So but then you throw a worldwide pandemic. And with that, first, the fear that happens. The problem with the brain is you've got you know, I wish I kind of had some more visuals to kind of show this, but imagine the very center of your brain right in the middle of your brain is something called the limbic system.

00;16;19;11 - 00;16;39;02
Bryan Hixson
The limbic system is where all your survival center is in an outside of that, the outside layer is called the cortex. Now, the cortex grows with every new thing you learn. So as you learn how to ride a bike, as you learn languages, you learn how to move and coordinate yourself, you grow all these connections in your cortex.

00;16;39;08 - 00;17;01;28
Bryan Hixson
The cortex gives you a sense of control over your life. The limbic system is a sense of run, fight, freeze. That's our fight or flight freeze type mechanism. That is, think of it almost like triggering a wild animal and they just react to things. Now what happens is like a newborn baby is born with almost all limbic system and hardly any cortex.

00;17;01;29 - 00;17;24;00
Bryan Hixson
They have not learned anything yet. They have enough to support their, you know, their function and stuff, their their general functions. But they are almost all limbic. That's why they cannot smile. They cannot have happiness. A newborn baby, they cry out of a sense of survival. When I'm hungry as a newborn baby, I cry because I think my survival is at stake.

00;17;24;00 - 00;17;48;05
Bryan Hixson
Right? I'm going to die. Mom, get over here and feed me. Okay, Now what happens is, after about 3 to 4 weeks of crying, being fed, crying, being fed, crying, being fed, the cortex starts paying attention to those associations and it starts growing enough neurons in those areas, enough connections between the neurons that actually says, hey, it looks like crying equals being fat.

00;17;48;15 - 00;18;07;09
Bryan Hixson
And all of a sudden the baby, after 3 to 4 weeks, moves from crying out of the limbic system, the sense of survival to crying out of the cortex now again before of a sense of survival. The cortex is a sense of manipulation. This baby is now maybe not even hungry, but they are going to try this crying thing to see if they can get mom to come and feed them.

00;18;07;19 - 00;18;30;07
Bryan Hixson
And they do. And all of a sudden when mom comes, they smile and they have a sense of happiness. Now, most moms think they're happy because they recognize mom. And this is wonderful. I'm sorry to break it to moms, but it's not okay. It's a sense of accomplishment. I just did my very first accomplishment. I figured out and I have security now, I figured out how I can be fed.

00;18;30;07 - 00;18;51;17
Bryan Hixson
Any time I cry, I get fed, and I have this huge security. To me now that gets me out of my limbic system into my cortex. And I have a sense of control over my life. So when there's a lot of fear, when you've got 24 hours of news bombarding us with fear, all that's doing is activating our limbic system and we have no idea what to do.

00;18;51;18 - 00;19;15;03
Bryan Hixson
There's no solution out there. There's no one telling us what to do, where confused. So the cortex starts shutting down, and when the cortex start shutting down, you start getting atrophy in the cortex. So we start losing our ability to think. We start losing our ability to problem solve for ourselves. We start just submitting to whatever anybody says, and we start increasing our fear center in the middle of our brain that says, What if this happens?

00;19;15;03 - 00;19;24;28
Bryan Hixson
What if that happens? What if? What if we start losing our ability to be happy, to be in control, to be secure? And that's where our brains are left at this point?

00;19;25;07 - 00;19;47;22
Rusty George
Wow. I'm going to need to rewind that and listen to it again. That was that was profound. So this it seems to me, from my lack of education of this area, that we lost so much control. And this is back to your, you know, crime, be fair crime be that none of us could control the events of 2020.

00;19;48;06 - 00;20;12;28
Rusty George
So we all did our very best to try to control whether it was through anger or riots or social media outbursts. But that seems to have lingered. It's like I just find more and more people that are I don't know if we would call them, you know, an OCD issue, but there is this desire to I have to control either you by you do what I say or my situation.

00;20;12;28 - 00;20;28;05
Rusty George
I think the even the the increase of of drugs and alcohol addiction and even pornography, we control that to some degree. I mean, do you think that that just kind of feeds this idea of I'm trying to find a way that I'm in control of this as opposed to everything else?

00;20;28;19 - 00;20;51;29
Bryan Hixson
Absolutely. Anxiety, the true definition of anxiety is the fear of being out of control. You might not even be out of control. It's the fear. I might be out of control. That's why anxiety can happen when something's not. Yeah, I always tell people it's not anxiety. If you wake up in the middle of the night and you look out your window on the middle night and someone's breaking into your house, you would never describe as well as weird.

00;20;51;29 - 00;21;10;18
Bryan Hixson
I had anxiety during that time. You know, that's a normal reaction. It would be anxiety if you woke up in the night, you looked out the window. Nothing's out there. Everything's safe, everything's secure, and your brain is in a state as if something was bringing someone was breaking into your house. That would be anxiety. When you're brain, it's the fear of being out of control, right, Right now.

00;21;10;18 - 00;21;34;23
Bryan Hixson
So what happens is, you know, OCD is a behavior mechanism whereby we try and control the little things we can control to give us a sense of outward control. We can't control everything happening to us. But if I micromanage this little thing, I at least have a sense that I'm controlling something because our brains hate having no control.

00;21;34;26 - 00;21;53;23
Bryan Hixson
It's one of the worst form of tortures. You know, we do a lot with the the Red Bull High performance team. And one of the things that we can do is we take athletes down there and we put them in a sensory deprivation chamber. So basically they lay down in this kind of tub of oil that basically heats the oil up to their skin temperature.

00;21;54;01 - 00;22;15;26
Bryan Hixson
And as soon as you get to that skin temperature, you lose the sensation of where all your limbs are, Everything. There's no control. The brain freaks out. And the goal of that, I mean, it's fun just to torture the athletes, but it's like all of that is to try and get them to be able to be calm and meditative in that situation, an extreme situation.

00;22;16;04 - 00;22;34;06
Bryan Hixson
Can you control what you can control? You can control your reaction to the brain freaking out. And once you learn to be able to do that, it's an amazing thing. You have control over so much in your life when you can learn to control your own reaction to the outside world that you can't control.

00;22;34;22 - 00;22;44;07
Rusty George
That's fascinating. Okay, so you do this with athletes. Is that something anybody can do? I mean, Well, under supervision, I'm not going to, you know, fill the bathtub full of olive oil.

00;22;44;07 - 00;22;54;06
Bryan Hixson
But you know that. Exactly. Now, we do a lot of fun stuff with doing the military and the and the athletes. We get to torture a lot of people for fun.

00;22;54;22 - 00;22;57;07
Rusty George
So somebody can sign up for that willingly, Is that right?

00;22;57;15 - 00;23;01;01
Bryan Hixson
Yes. So, absolutely. Okay. In chambers. Yeah.

00;23;01;13 - 00;23;03;29
Rusty George
Oh, wow. That's fascinating. Okay, let's get back to.

00;23;04;03 - 00;23;11;00
Bryan Hixson
Mix it all dark so you can't see, you can't feel, You can't. And you're just, like, floating. Yeah. And it's a weird sensation.

00;23;12;02 - 00;23;33;04
Rusty George
So a lot of us who listen to sports radio or are fascinated by sports, we've learned a lot about psychedelics, sensory deprivation and darkness retreats because of Aaron Rodgers. So is there any benefit to all those things? I'm not asking you to, you know, give your opinion on psychedelics, but just I mean, this is all working on the brain, right?

00;23;33;04 - 00;23;37;00
Rusty George
Trying to figure out the best way to make decisions. Is that what's going on here?

00;23;37;16 - 00;23;58;16
Bryan Hixson
Well, here's here's the problem. A lot of times, you know, again, let's go back to that limbic system. If you if you just could put the brain into two structures, that limbic system and cortex survival control, you know, limbic system, its goal is to survive today, just survive today. That does not sound fun. That sounds just like getting through, white knuckling getting through right.

00;23;58;16 - 00;24;18;23
Bryan Hixson
The cortex is job or its mission is to thrive in the future. So it would rather undergo some lack of something today, forgo some, you know, think today to have something in the future that the cortex would rather save your money today, to have money to pay your bills. It would rather not eat that today to be able to achieve your goals in the future.

00;24;18;24 - 00;24;49;12
Bryan Hixson
Right where the limbic system is all about how I feel right now, how I feel right. I see. So you know that the problem is that when people have traumas that happen to them, say a childhood trauma abuse, say a long term health condition that causes trauma and stuff with it, what we end up doing, especially like childhood things, they're so painful, like our limbic system is on high alert, all the time is something could happen.

00;24;49;12 - 00;25;16;23
Bryan Hixson
There's no happiness when you're being abused, when there's danger around you, especially a kid that doesn't have a lot of cortex already and their limbic system's on high alert like it should be. There's something going on. They've they need to assess that risk constantly. But the problem is that once that gets removed, say they get out of that situation and they go on in life, they start to produce so much anxiety in their brain that almost is like a wall to wall off that trauma.

00;25;16;23 - 00;25;40;24
Bryan Hixson
So I don't ever go there. I don't even want to think about. I keep busy, I keep doing things, and I create all this anxiety to really protect myself from that. Yeah. So what psychedelics can do is they can temporarily lower that anxiety around there and give you access a little bit to the limbic system. Now, there's a lot of things out there that people are talking about this kind of ceremony.

00;25;40;24 - 00;26;07;06
Bryan Hixson
I, I feel like I was one with the universe and all these things and I'm not going to at all talk about someone else's experience. What they felt like is what they felt like, you know, I wasn't there, so I can't say that. But what I think they probably are experiencing is this kind of release of control, release of their own biases, release of how their brain has protect them for so long.

00;26;07;12 - 00;26;27;16
Bryan Hixson
And it releases that down to where they say they feel this sense of love and connectedness. That's the limbic system has all those emotions in it. And the problem with anxiety, it builds a wall so we don't go in there. But it also walls us off from experiencing love, from experiencing, healing from and this is where, you know, mental health in the church.

00;26;27;22 - 00;26;45;06
Bryan Hixson
I would say it was anxiety was this off from experiencing fully God And when you lower that anxiety down now you know in the church again I was born and raised in the church. I love the church, you know, But the problem is a lot of times in mental health, in the church, people are like, you know what?

00;26;45;06 - 00;27;06;05
Bryan Hixson
You shouldn't have anxiety because if you were a real Christian, you would just release the anxiety to God says right in the Bible, release those anxieties. Right. Right now what they're talking about in the Bible is those anxious thoughts we get in our head that we can't control and thank God that we have a great God that is in control and we can release that to him right here.

00;27;06;13 - 00;27;24;17
Bryan Hixson
But when we have an anxiety disorder and we have those neurons firing away, causing us to overthink everything, when you take someone that maybe is running at it and 80 or 90 on the anxiety level all the time, and they are sitting there pouring their heart out to God to release this and they go from a 90 to an 80.

00;27;25;10 - 00;27;41;25
Bryan Hixson
What they just did, the amount of work it takes to go from a 90 to an 80 and to have that much faith that you're just trying to release us to God, God, take this from me so much. That amount of faith, I think, is a million times bigger than the average person that doesn't have anxiety disorder. It's just, you know what?

00;27;41;26 - 00;27;59;01
Bryan Hixson
I can't control it. So I'm just going to give it to God. Yeah. And really what they're saying is I really don't care. You know, hopefully God works this out for me. Right? Right. And it's easy to take that for granted when we start doing that versus someone with a real anxiety disorder is trying so hard to release this.

00;27;59;01 - 00;28;18;17
Bryan Hixson
And they they feel a lot of times like, you know, I gosh, I must not be doing something right to be able to, you know, have this this feeling still there. And so it's it's important to understand the difference between, you know, anxious thoughts and anxiety.

00;28;18;24 - 00;28;40;00
Rusty George
Right. A disorder That's that's a really good clarification because you're right. That was the kind of church I was raised in, which was, well, listen, you just got to pray it away. Yeah. You know, I mean, why are you obsessing about that? I was I've always been a very anxious person. And even as a kid, I remember having an ulcer in the second grade.

00;28;40;14 - 00;29;03;02
Rusty George
I mean, I was just high strung and I remember going through all of my adolescent years just feeling really bad that I was worried, you know, because I read those passages about worry. In fact, my I'm just living in sin, you know, just consuming Tums and Pepto-Bismol, just trying to make it through, you know, ninth grade. So I love that that classification there of those two things.

00;29;03;21 - 00;29;20;23
Rusty George
Hey, let me interrupt this podcast for just a second. To remind you, if you're not taking care of your mental health, nobody is. Step up and go check out Saga Center dot org to find out more. All right. Back to our show. Okay. Let's talk about the brain map a little bit. I mean, what does it show you?

00;29;20;23 - 00;29;34;29
Rusty George
What are you looking for? What's a typical brain look like versus one that's had high trauma or high levels of of anxiety or PTSD or those kind of things? Walk us through what you're looking for and what you typically see.

00;29;35;13 - 00;29;56;13
Bryan Hixson
Absolutely. So first of all, there is no typical brain, okay? And there is no typical physiology behind symptoms. And that's that's the first thing that I think science really shows us is that when we look at the brain, if I took ten people with anxiety and I learned about, they would probably have ten different types of physiology causing the exact same symptoms.

00;29;56;18 - 00;30;13;03
Bryan Hixson
Wow. So which is very different from the pharmaceutical model that we have right now where we diagnose someone and try to be on the same. And you wonder why some people will be like, you know, I got on this medication and I did so well, you need to try it. And then someone else tries it like, No, that caused me all kinds of issues and symptoms and stuff.

00;30;13;03 - 00;30;35;10
Bryan Hixson
But it's even worse because we didn't have the same physiology in the first place, right? So it's very important again to really start with a non bias and start with let's just look at the brain and see how it functions. I love my job because we don't have anybody fill out history why they're coming in. I will get one person that's there for sports performance.

00;30;35;10 - 00;30;56;17
Bryan Hixson
The next person is a 14 year old girl that's tried to kill herself twice. The next one is a 40 year old mom who has so much anxiety, she feels like she's going to harm her kids. The next one is a 50 year old guy that their memories just shot and they're thinking they have early onset Alzheimer's. Okay, so all different people and we don't take histories.

00;30;56;17 - 00;31;15;03
Bryan Hixson
We go I go right off the brain map. And I tell people before they say why they're here. I tell them everything I see in their brain. And most people are like, you know me better than I know me. Like, they sit there. They literally say, you know, this is like you're basically like a palm reader. I always tell them, it's not like palm reading.

00;31;15;10 - 00;31;32;29
Bryan Hixson
It's like if you went to a doctor and they X-rayed your arm and they saw a big break in your arm and said, Probably when you go to lift with your left arm, you probably have some pain. You're like, How did you know that? Right? We looked at the arm. We know what each region of the brain does and we know how those things affect it.

00;31;33;03 - 00;31;47;24
Bryan Hixson
So I can say when you go to this, you're going to have this problem and you do this. And these are general things. These aren't like your thoughts. These are more like you can have more of a propensity to have more headaches and stuff in certain areas. You can have more where your brain doesn't turn off. You know, you can have a harder time with memory and things like that.

00;31;47;24 - 00;32;09;29
Bryan Hixson
You can see those things in the brain. So the first thing to understand is that you have different neurons fire up at different speeds. So you've got these neurons and they fire off electricity. If they fire off very slow, like two times per second, those are what's called delta waves, which are different preferential rate. And those are going to handle the slower waves, less than four times per second.

00;32;10;07 - 00;32;37;28
Bryan Hixson
Those regulate your sleep cycles, your digestive system, your immune system, your circulation, all those things, hormonal regulation, all those things, those are very slow neurons that are firing up throughout the day. You produce very little amount of those throughout the day. They're just regulating digestion, hormonal regulation. But at night you start producing huge amounts going up when you go into deep sleep and then it comes back down, you have this huge amplitude and down every 90 minutes it goes up and down.

00;32;37;28 - 00;32;58;15
Bryan Hixson
When you produce the most of those, when you're at the very top of that 90 minute sleep cycle, that deep non-REM sleep, that's when your brain cleanses out all the metabolic waste, the plaques and the toxins. Everybody thinks sleep is for, you know, just recovering and getting energy. It is the detoxification cycle. You do not have a lymphatic system in your brain.

00;32;58;15 - 00;33;25;21
Bryan Hixson
Your lymphatic system in your body cleanses everything out throughout the day. Imagine if our lymphatic systems only worked in deep sleep, then that deep sleep we get nowadays, you probably would all be dead, right? I mean, it would just be you wouldn't wow you. And yet. So at night, in those deep stages, sleep is when it's cleansing. If you're not cleansing that out, you're building up plaques, you're building up toxins, you're building up metabolic waste in your brain, and it's getting all inside that membrane and clogging it up.

00;33;25;21 - 00;33;41;06
Bryan Hixson
And it lowers the ability to shoot neurotransmitters from one cell to the next. So those slow waves, we can look at how much you're producing. Are you getting through good detox cycles at night or not? Someone could be. A lot of people come to me and say, you know, I tell them they have a sleep problem. They're like, Are you kidding me?

00;33;41;06 - 00;33;57;10
Bryan Hixson
I can sleep 12 hours. I'm always like, If you can sleep 12 hours, you have a sleep problem. You should not be able to sleep. However, you should not want to sleep at 12 hours. And most of the people you ask them, can you sleep 12 hours and still be exhausted? Yeah, totally. Well, then you're not getting the quality of sleep.

00;33;57;16 - 00;34;25;15
Bryan Hixson
You're getting these very shallow sleep cycles and your brain's trying to go longer and then you have a little bit faster sleep, say, or a little bit faster brainwave That's called alpha weights. There's theta in between those two, but we won't really touch base on those. But alpha is 8 to 10 times per second and this is like your brain's idle time, This is when your brain is fully awake, but you are very present, you're in the moment and it's when you're producing these alpha waves, you're not thinking about the future.

00;34;25;15 - 00;34;51;23
Bryan Hixson
You're not about the past. You are in the moment right now, present. Okay. Now I can tell you that very few people have adequate amounts of these waves because you only grow these waves and these braids. These are actual connections in the brain when you practice it. Our society does not practice being present at all. We always practice going and we practice trying to stop and go to sleep.

00;34;52;06 - 00;35;18;16
Bryan Hixson
But being present in the moment from a neuroscience perspective, and I would argue from a biblical perspective is where all happiness occurs because being present is really being content. I am content and present right now. I'm not trying to always achieve something. Achieving things are good. We want to achieve things, but then we need to take a break and be present and really just enjoy what we just achieved, right?

00;35;18;22 - 00;35;37;07
Bryan Hixson
We need to enjoy being with our families. You know, I, I have a 18 year old, a 24 year old, both boys and then my wonderful wife at 39 years old decides we need to have another baby. And so now we have a six year old. Okay. Wow. So six year daughter got my daughter and then we got the two boys.

00;35;37;16 - 00;35;53;13
Bryan Hixson
Now, when you're young and when those boys are younger, it seems like it's all about if I just get them to the next stage, if I can just get them out of diapers, we'll be good. We can just get them into school. We just give it to school full time all the way up to when they're 15. It's like, if they just could drive.

00;35;53;18 - 00;36;11;28
Bryan Hixson
I'm not running them around everywhere, right? Everything's about if we just get to the next stage. The problem with that is always thinking about the next stage is we are throwing away the stage that we're in right now. We're always thinking it's going to be good, then it's going to be good then. And it loses our ability to be content and happy with where we are right now.

00;36;12;10 - 00;36;29;19
Bryan Hixson
My wife and I, with our six year old, even when she's throwing a fit, we are trying to be present. We are trying. And it's amazing when you just change that mindset and think about it when she's throwing a fit, it's almost humorous. Instead of getting out of bed, it's like she is throwing a fit because like her one Barbie doll didn't stand up the way she wanted to.

00;36;29;19 - 00;36;45;25
Bryan Hixson
It keeps falling over, and that's like her whole life spending because of this. Right. And it's kind of funny. It's kind of humorous. And you can laugh and you can be present and you're taking in all these memories versus like, did you stop being that way? Stop crying, stop doing this. Just, you know, go on. You're driving me crazy, right?

00;36;46;09 - 00;37;13;06
Bryan Hixson
And so being present is so important. I think this goes a long way. It did a lot of work a long time ago with that book called The Daniel Plan. Yeah, with Rick Warren and step two and John. And we talked a lot through that about how our quiet times with God tend to be a check off. Like, okay, I got to spend 10 minutes in my Bible, you know, like grandma by real quick and just read through it, boom.

00;37;13;06 - 00;37;27;13
Bryan Hixson
Kate That's done. Good God, you're done now. Can go on to my life. Right? And the problem with that is that's like, you know, in marriage, it's the same way. It's like, okay, come in. Right. I talk to you for a few minutes. We pass by, we exchanged information about our schedules. Now let's keep going, do our things we need to do.

00;37;28;00 - 00;37;55;26
Bryan Hixson
You don't get relationships in that more anxious mood. You get relationships in being present. When you sit there and open your Bible and you kind of just meditate for a few minutes. You just concentrate on your your brain producing these slower alpha waves and you become very present. You're reading the Bible. It's totally different. This is a state where God can communicate to you and you can listen, you know, versus you just, you know, throwing up all over everything.

00;37;55;27 - 00;38;13;05
Bryan Hixson
All right? Just in our in our verbal conversations, just throwing up everything you want to say and then getting out when we're with our spouse and we are listening and we're present, it's a totally different thing when we're with our kids and we're listening in our present, you know, and with God or listening with our present, it changes everything.

00;38;13;05 - 00;38;26;29
Bryan Hixson
So these alpha waves, I always spend a lot of time on them because this is the key to happiness in our society today, is throwing that all away and pursuing these baby to get things done. Waves as a way to happiness.

00;38;27;24 - 00;38;48;29
Rusty George
You know, that's fascinating because we tend to think that, you know, the goal is just to be present for the sake of enjoying the moment. But you're telling us there's actually some some, you know, physical and brain stuff going on there that's actually making us healthier in our brain. That is incredible.

00;38;49;14 - 00;38;52;06
Bryan Hixson
Absolutely. Absolutely.

00;38;52;06 - 00;39;11;25
Rusty George
So, you know, you mentioned several things that can help our brains sleep good sleep. That is, you know, being present. You know, meditating on God's word, those kind of things. Anything else that could be really good, healthy stuff for the brain. Are we supposed to eat more almonds? I heard that's good for the brain. Is that right? Now?

00;39;11;25 - 00;39;35;09
Bryan Hixson
Absolutely. Nuts are definitely good for the brain, for sure. Yeah. All those things, you know, help a little bit right there. It's not like get attention, you know, eating nuts can help a little bit, right. And certain things can do and, you know, omega threes are super, super important for the brain. 40, 30 to 40% of all the dendrite connections of neurons and stuff in your brain are made of omega threes.

00;39;35;15 - 00;39;52;28
Bryan Hixson
Think of omega threes are to the brain basically what protein is to your muscle. You wouldn't go to the gym and work out without a certain amount of protein and imagine what our muscles would look like if we said, Yeah, eat, pray, you know, one serving of protein maybe once every two weeks, pray the average of what people eat fish, right?

00;39;53;05 - 00;40;17;23
Bryan Hixson
And 30, 40% of all those connections are they're essential fatty acids, which means that your body does not produce any of them. You get what you're born with from mom and you get what you eat. Now, the interesting thing is that you only get it from fish. And here the two omega three fatty acids that come from fish, fish eat algae, which is ala a form of omega three, but ALA doesn't get processed in the brain.

00;40;17;23 - 00;40;43;22
Bryan Hixson
The brain is not made of it has to break down into DHEA to get through the brain and help the brain. But fish eat the algae and they convert it to EPA and so then we eat the fish and we have the high amounts of EPA, DHEA. Now, you want to talk about, you know, the miracle of babies, the miracle of God, and how he creates all brain stuff is your body typically converts about 3% of ALA to DHEA.

00;40;43;29 - 00;41;02;07
Bryan Hixson
So I always tell people you'd have to eat about, you know, £5 of flaxseed oil, about one teaspoon of fish oil. So if you want to eat that much of those things, that's fine. Okay. However, we only time in the human body that it actually converts more is the third trimester of pregnancy. At that time you excrete an enzyme.

00;41;02;14 - 00;41;21;21
Bryan Hixson
That's right. When the baby's brain is being formed, when it needs all that your skin enzyme that breaks down up to 30% of ALA converts to EPA, DHEA forms the baby's brain. And as long as you continue breastfeeding, you continue to produce the enzyme which breaks it down. When you stop breastfeeding, it shuts it off and you go back down to the 3%.

00;41;22;04 - 00;41;38;05
Bryan Hixson
Okay. So that's right. When the baby's brain is being formed, you know how anybody can think all this occurs on accident? You know, it's it's just crazy. I mean, it just right during that time, breastfeeding is done, stops, goes right back to normal conversion of it. Wow.

00;41;38;19 - 00;41;50;27
Rusty George
So I would imagine that after all your study on this, it's led you into a deeper R and wonder and appreciation for God, is that right?

00;41;51;09 - 00;42;15;27
Bryan Hixson
Absolutely. Absolutely. The science, when you dig deep into the science, the science proves the creator. There is no possibility the science can lead you to a non creator, whether you want to believe it's God or not. That can be up to you. I firmly believe it is. But either way, if you don't think there's a creator, you're not looking at the science.

00;42;15;27 - 00;42;38;05
Rusty George
Wow, that's fascinating. Can the brain, can it heal? Can it be retrained? These these difficulties that we have? We already talked about concussions a little bit, but what are some ways we can kind of, you know, retrain our brain from some of those? You know, I heard the phrase think holes at times where we get stuck in these patterns and all of that.

00;42;38;26 - 00;42;45;07
Rusty George
Some of that is just, you know, a little bit of self-talk and all that. But sometimes it's deeper than that. What have you seen? Is it just sleep and diet?

00;42;45;28 - 00;43;14;17
Bryan Hixson
So, no, it's not. It's it's very much what you just said. There's there's so many the brain think of the brain. It's not an exact analogy, but it's very similar to a muscle. You either use it or lose it in certain areas of your brain. If you're not practicing things like being present, then you're not producing. Your brain's not firing off those ten, 11, 12 hertz alpha waves, which means that you're barely producing anymore.

00;43;14;23 - 00;43;30;15
Bryan Hixson
The more you fire off certain waves, the more they wired together and the more they grow together. So that when you fire off a little bit, a bunch fire off together. So that's why when you practice something, you become better at it. When you practice language, you become better at it. When you practice anything, you become better at it.

00;43;30;22 - 00;43;52;11
Bryan Hixson
Athletes, when they practice things, they become better at the coordination needed for kids playing video games. When they practice, they get better at they get to it's automatic, and that's because the neurons have been wired together. So your brain wires, based on what you do. So if you are in a job that is always pushing you to get something done, you have to get something and you're going, going, going.

00;43;52;17 - 00;44;12;10
Bryan Hixson
Your brain is wiring to stay in that state. That's why I do a lot of work with the Special Forces, with the U.S. Army. You cannot take a soldier, put them in a high threat life or death situation for two years. Expect their brain not to change. Their brain starts to stay in a fight or flight. It's been in a fight or flight all the time.

00;44;12;15 - 00;44;34;11
Bryan Hixson
You know, if you're in that war zone situation, even on your day off, you're in town and you're walking through, you know, areas that could have bombs, people you're constantly watching for things. There's no relaxation, really. So years they're starting to condition up and then they start staying there and be like me, keeping my arm in a flexed position for so long.

00;44;34;12 - 00;44;51;27
Bryan Hixson
If I put my arm in a cast and flex position for a year, I lose my range of motion, my ligaments tighten. All the same thing happens in the brain where those things start conditioning. And so now I can't undo that. Or it's very, very hard right to do. To do that, you have to practice for a long time.

00;44;52;04 - 00;45;13;27
Bryan Hixson
That's what we do is we do something called neurofeedback. Once we find an area of the brain, we can put a sensor. If a certain area the brain is staying like see my right, see my left prefrontal that staying up high. That causes a lot of OCD, overanalyzing over thinking. And you know, maybe because I just mean my personality leans towards that I've I've just done that over and over and over.

00;45;13;27 - 00;45;36;23
Bryan Hixson
Now you're so strong that it's just staying up. And now I can't stop analyzing even on things I don't want to write. So I can put a sensor right on that area of the brain and I can look at those beta waves that's producing and I can see that I'm producing huge amounts when I'm at rest, when I'm trying not to do anything, I'm still huge amounts of those beta weights which force me to think and overthink constantly.

00;45;37;00 - 00;46;09;08
Bryan Hixson
You know, someone that has that they can think about not thinking and they'll have anxiety about not thinking. You can't even sit down. We put a sensor there and what we do is we can put it through a feedback response. It looks like a video game. Now, what's so cool about that is now you have this sensor on your brain and whenever your brain produces a little bit less, whenever it relaxes a little bit, even 1%, we can make a video game, start going forward like a car, start racing, and you're getting this reward of, well, my car is going, the music is going, this feels good.

00;46;09;12 - 00;46;28;00
Bryan Hixson
And then every time the brain goes back up to a little bit of anxiety over thinking the car comes to a stop, the music goes down. So this is just operant conditioning. This is like taking a dog and giving a treat. Whenever they sit, put away the treat. When they stand, you do that enough and you can do that now to specific areas of the brain and we can train that part of the brain way down to a relaxed state.

00;46;28;09 - 00;46;34;05
Bryan Hixson
And when it does, it stays there. And now you're relax. You can still come up when you need to, but it goes back down.

00;46;34;29 - 00;46;58;09
Rusty George
Wow. So that is so cool. Well, I know we could talk about this for hours and I so appreciate you being on the show because you're really making the brain a little bit more simple for the rest of us. For most of us, it's just a big control center of our of our body. We have no control over or no idea what to do with it other than saying that if somebody is a brain surgeon, they're a genius.

00;46;58;09 - 00;47;07;05
Rusty George
So, hey, so how can people find out more about what you do or what what sources do you recommend? Or is there a website we should check out? Where can we find you?

00;47;07;16 - 00;47;31;12
Bryan Hixson
One thing I want to just say, I think I think that the enemy uses the fact that we think we don't have control of our brain. God designed us to be able to have control of our brain. We should be able to shift our brain naturally should be able to shift back and forth and respond to things. And we should be able to go into this present state when we need to just calm down our brain.

00;47;31;17 - 00;47;53;26
Bryan Hixson
We should be able to go in this kind of acute, anxious state when we need to get something accomplished and done. We should be able to shift into these deep sleep cycles and get good recovery. That's the way God designed our brain. And I think the problem with a lot of mental health now today is that it's become just okay to throw some medication at it and say, you know, that's just how I am.

00;47;54;02 - 00;48;21;15
Bryan Hixson
I don't have control of my brain. If you don't have control of your brain, it loses. You lose control of everything, you know, really understanding that when you can control your brain, when you can get in the right state, there is nothing you could not give me billions of dollars in the place of having control of my brain and being able to get into the state that I need to get to, because the the amount of you can be you can live on purpose.

00;48;21;15 - 00;48;47;23
Bryan Hixson
You know, I always say that, you know, I think that marriages today are to people that are drowning in an ocean trying to save each other. They have no reserve at all. They have so much anxiety that they are basically trying to survive themselves. And now my spouse's problem just becomes more problem for me. And I'm already drowning and I have no reserve for her and she has no reserve for me.

00;48;48;13 - 00;49;12;04
Bryan Hixson
And so now we have two people that are better off by themselves because you can't have two people drowning in themselves trying to save each other. But when you practice things like meditation being present and again, I'm not talking about some Buddhist thing with meditation, I'm talking about being present, being present in your being there, being in the moment when you practice that it lowers your stress and it gives you reserve.

00;49;12;15 - 00;49;32;28
Bryan Hixson
Now I think when that's how God designed marriage, to have two people that have enough reserve for each other, two are when I have a lot of stress, my wife has some reserve for me to help me. When I when she has stress, I have reserves. Now you have a relationship where to people become ten times stronger than any individual by themselves.

00;49;32;28 - 00;49;53;23
Bryan Hixson
Wow. Right. But we don't practice those things at all, you know, And that's why we're having such a high divorce rate and so many issues. And that transcends down to parents now having no time to be present with their kids. They're yelling at their kids constantly. They have no reserve for themselves, let alone raising kids and stuff. And it's just it's causing a problem.

00;49;53;23 - 00;50;13;20
Bryan Hixson
So learning to be able to shift down in control. I love the day when you know, when you walk in and you're upset and your wife is like, Hey, little more alpha waves would be nice right now because it becomes a physical thing. It's not like, Hey, you idiot, settle down, you being rude. It's a little more alpha waves, you know, that's something someone can be like, Okay, yeah.

00;50;14;07 - 00;50;14;19
Rusty George
I can do.

00;50;14;19 - 00;50;34;27
Bryan Hixson
That. Deep breath. All right, good. So just want to throw that last part out. But yeah, our web is brain performance dot com. So just performance dot com. Okay, You can check that out. There's some cool videos and testimonials and stuff there. And you know, if someone wants to get a brain map or anything, we've got a few centers throughout Southern California that can help.

00;50;34;27 - 00;50;53;29
Bryan Hixson
That's very inexpensive, quick and easy to do. It's really cool to see your brain. It's cool to see your spouse's brain. It's cool to see your kids brain. I love it when a family comes in and they all know how they're there. Their brains work because it gets rid of the stigma of you're just doing that to kind of tick me off.

00;50;54;05 - 00;51;10;08
Bryan Hixson
And it's more like how I understand how your brain works. Your brain naturally goes there, right? And my brain naturally goes here. So we start to understand each other, how each other works, and there's a little more empathy that comes into that versus just your, you know, you know, you're different than me and that ticks me off.

00;51;10;25 - 00;51;20;11
Rusty George
So if I drag my wife and two daughters in there and the four of us get a brain map, you'll walk us through exactly why I'm right and they're wrong.

00;51;20;24 - 00;51;30;21
Bryan Hixson
100%. That's my job. Just give me, okay? Everything you want me to say about your wife and your kids ahead of time. And we just got that perfect.

00;51;30;25 - 00;51;40;22
Rusty George
Just perfect. Well, this has been fascinating. Thank you so much for coming on the show and being a part of what we're doing. This is going to really help out a lot of people. So I really appreciate it.

00;51;40;29 - 00;51;42;14
Bryan Hixson
Awesome. Great talking to you.

00;51;43;22 - 00;52;11;25
Rusty George
Well, I hope your brain got a lesson from that. That was incredible stuff. And maybe you want to check out his organization and their work and get a brain scan. I think I might do that as well. Hey, next week we're back with a friend of mine who is part of the reason why you said yes to that piece of cheesecake, why you said yes to the extra large Pepsi, why you went to Universal Studios and so many other things.

00;52;12;03 - 00;52;26;19
Rusty George
He's a marketing officer. His name is Mark Mears. He's going to share some marketing secrets with us. Make sure you check that out next week with us. Until then, thank you to Saga Counseling. Make sure you check them out. Saga Counseling dot com. And as always, keep it simple.

00;52;27;06 - 00;52;50;06
Intro/Outro
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