Resilience Development in Action

E. 230 What If Healing Trauma Starts By Quieting The Story In Your Head (Part 1 of 2)

• Steve Bisson, Tony Crescenzo • Season 12 • Episode 230

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Ever wish you could quiet the story in your head without having to relive it? We sit down with Marine veteran and defense-tech CEO Tony Crescenzo to explore a practical, science-backed way to downshift the nervous system using neuroacoustic entrainment. Tony opens up about the years he spent running hot—rage, hypervigilance, and fractured sleep—and how a targeted audio protocol shifted his sleep from barely restorative to deeply replenishing. The conversation gets real about why so many first responders and veterans avoid talk therapy, and how culturally aware approaches can make all the difference.

We break down the sleep architecture behind feeling human again. Slow wave sleep restores the body; REM sleep stabilizes emotion and consolidates memory. Tony shares research showing meaningful gains in both, along with a 9% boost in threat recognition—vital for police, fire, EMS, dispatchers, and military communities where seconds matter. You’ll hear how suppressing the prefrontal “rumination engine” while opening the anterior cingulate, parietal, and occipital regions enables somatic processing: the body digests stress so the mind can stand down.

Then we zoom out to cognitive resilience—the brain’s ability to adapt quickly under pressure. Using EEG-guided and AI-personalized protocols, entrainment builds coherence front-to-back and left-to-right, easing brain fog and improving metabolic efficiency. The result is a steadier baseline, faster recovery after spikes, and sleep that actually repairs. If you’ve been stuck between white-knuckle coping and sterile clinical answers, this is a credible path you can start at home, including free app tracks for power naps, rumination relief, and sleep support.

How to reach Jonathan:
1) https://www.IntelligentWaves.com
2) https://www.PeakNeuro.com
3) https://www.linkedin.com/in/tonycrescenzo/



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SPEAKER_00:

Welcome to Resilience Development and Action with Steve Beast Home. This is the podcast dedicated to first responder mental health, helping police, higher, EMS, dispatchers, and paramedics create better growth environments for themselves and their teams. Let's get started.ai.

SPEAKER_02:

You heard me talk about it. I'm gonna keep on talking about it because I love it. I've had about a year and a half, 18 months practice with it, and I still enjoy it. And it saves me time and it saves me energy. Free.ai takes your note, makes a trans what you're talking about a client, just press record, and it does either transcript, it does a subjective, and an objective with a letter if needed for your client and for whoever might need it. So for$99 a month, it saves me so much time that it's worthwhile. And if you do it for a whole year, guess what? You get 10% off. More importantly, this is what you got, because you are my audience that listens to Resilience Development in Action. If you do listen to this and you want to use free.ai, uh put in the code Steve in the promo code area. Uh D50. And you will get$50 off in addition to everything we just talked about. Get free from writing your notes. Uh get free from even writing your uh transcripts. Uh use that to your advantage. Uh free.ai, a great service. Go to getfree.ai and you will get one of the best services that will save you time and money. And I highly encourage you to do so. Well, hi everyone, and welcome to episode 230. If you haven't listened to episode 229, it was with Stephanie Simpson. We talked about coaching, we talked about grief and changes and how law enforcement have to always kind of adapt to that and the techniques that she offers. But today is someone um I know that Veterans Day isn't a few days. And I really honor my veterans. And one of the things I learned from my first year of doing this podcast is I had a veteran on for Veterans Day, and he says, Don't say thank you to me on Veterans Day, say it on any other day, but so I'm not gonna say thank you for your service to this individual for that purpose. But Tony Crescenzo, uh, he's the owner of Peak Neuro, and we're gonna hear about that. And I can't wait you guys to hear about this because it's very important. But uh, Tony's someone that uh was presented to me through you know, people know me, so they present me like, oh, this is the perfect guy for my my audience. And then they they told me he was a Marine. I'm like, oh, I'm not sure anymore. But anyway, I decided to go against my best judgment and have a Marine on. And for those of you who are Marines and know me, you're gonna laugh. And those who don't know me, chill. It's a joke. But Tony Crescenzo, welcome to Resilience Development in Action.

SPEAKER_01:

Thanks. It's great to be here. Thanks for having me.

SPEAKER_02:

I and again, I literally will not say that today to you because I know that Veterans Day is coming up. I will say thank you on any other day, but that's the reason why I don't say thank you on Veterans Day for most of my guys. But I kind of told a little bit about you, but I think my audience would like to hear more about you know who you are, where you come from, and where you're doing right now. So can you tell me a little more about that?

SPEAKER_01:

Oh, sure. I'll give you a quick history. So I grew up in uh in South Philadelphia during the 70s. So if you've seen the movie Rocky, the neighborhood where Rocky runs is the neighborhood I grew up when Rocky was made. Wow. So think uh think Rocky and uh Rocky meets the Sopranos was my childhood. When my parents divorced when I was relatively young, uh my mother remarried a naval officer, and I spent uh most of my my youth traveling. Uh, went to five high schools, lived all over the world. When I um when I graduated from high school, I went to college in New Jersey, made a wrong turn on the way to a Charles Carrot lecture, and found myself in the United States Marine Corps, where I spent uh eight years in total, some of which were really fun, some of which weren't so much fun. Once I got out of the Marine Corps, I was uh recruited actually to work for a technology company on Wall Street, spent three years there in the late 80s and uh with a company that turned out to be the largest mergers and acquisitions transaction of uh 1989, worked for three really crazy, brilliant, outstanding people. Uh, and that really launched a career in technology for me. I uh left that company, came down to Washington, D.C. Uh for a short time. I worked for a small management consulting firm around technology, uh, competing for customers with the world's fourth largest software company at the time. And I uh irritated them so much that they wound up hiring me. I wound up there as the uh uh technical director of their federal division. So I've been in and out of government service for most of my adult life. From there, uh the German company asked me to spend some time in some other places. So I've been to, I've worked in uh Hong Kong, Italy, France, Germany, and the UK, as well as the United States internationally, federally, and now in the last 20-something years, I've been in the national defense industrial-based market. After I sold my second company, I became what most people think of as a CEO in residence, where private equity firms or venture capital firms sort of have you there evaluating companies, uh, eventually dropping into them. So I've I've been uh a venture capital CEO, I've been a private equity CEO, and I've uh now I'm what I I think most people would call just a really expensive janitor. I'm the guy that you hire when things aren't going so well and you need the mess cleaned up. Now, having said that, the company I work for now is not a mess at all. Intelligent Waves is a very interesting national defense industrial-based company, is started by a gentleman by the name of Jared Shepherd, an amazing individual. Uh I think I think he has a GED. I don't think he ever went to college. Got out of the army, uh, invented some amazing technology that defeated IEDs. So the entire company was founded on uh on the joint IED defense program in Iraq during the war. And we've grown since then. We are about 65% of our company are veterans. Half of those, I'm sorry, 80% of those are combat veterans, half of those are special operators, Delta Force, Navy SEALs, Marine Raiders, uh, Marine Reconnaissance. We are essentially people who wore green suits for most of our careers and then put on blue suits. So we're very focused on mission, uh, mission-only work. Most of our work is done in a classified environment. About 90% of our employees hold extremely high clearances. They work in copper rooms that are sealed, 26 states and seven foreign countries. If you go to Monster.com and you look up uh best companies for veterans, I think Boeing or Lockheed is number one, we're number two. Uh it is a very military-friendly, veteran-focused, veteran-owned, veteran-run organization that specializes in mission work. We do things around the F-35 program, we support operations overseas on in both hemispheres. Um, we have a quantum resistant technologies for secure communication. We're the defenders of the U.S. judiciary system. We have the cyber contract to defend all of the U.S. courts and the U.S. Marshall Service. So very, very high-tech, uh uh mission focused and critical infrastructure kind of an organization.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, and you were talking about all the specialty and the Green Berets and uh everyone else. That gives you a lot of clearance, but it also gives you a lot of high-functioning, high achieving type of people, which might be an interesting environmental organ, I'm pretty sure.

SPEAKER_01:

It gets a little intense. It's uh the only company where you know water cooler conversation is not like any place else you've ever been. Uh people have conversations about uh, let me put it this way when you're establishing your bona fetis in our company, if and by the way, if you're a veteran, you may have you might understand this, uh, and someone might ask you which hand you carried your hatchet in. And that's uh not a conversation you're gonna have at a at a Google or a or a uh or a uh Microsoft, right? So it's a very interesting uh crew of people, but I would have to say uh with the exception of the Marines, almost all of our employees have a four-digit IQ.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah. Well, it sounds like they're also specialized, very, very specialized, and that IQ is even higher because of their specialty.

SPEAKER_01:

They are, yeah. They're uh our chief strategy officer is a former Delta Force operator who uh ran the Joint Special Operations Center Innovation Lab for years before he got out of the army. Now he does that for us. So we our our our job really, our our role in the National Defense Industrial Base is what we call flash to bang. If you look up here at Intelligent Waves, right? Anytime, anywhere, any domain, that's that's our tagline. But what we tell people is we do hard shit in bad places, which is essentially what we do. We fix problems that others can't solve.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah. Well, I I'm just impressed by a whole lot of different things. And then makes me think about this little podcast. And you're like, hey, I want to be on this podcast. What made you decide to come in on this podcast? I mean, uh I I just feel like uh very impressed by what you're accomplishing and what you guys are doing. So I'm wondering why you wanted to come on to this podcast.

SPEAKER_01:

Well, you know, I've um uh I I served in some interesting places in the in the Marine Corps, um uh not the least of which was Beirut and Lebanon, and then in uh in an undercover capacity working for what you know as NCIS. Uh back then was known as NIS. I spent three years undercover in a fraud and drug investigation that um was much more dangerous than anything I had done in Beirut. I was a I was uh temporarily assigned to Beirut. I wasn't part of the permanent personnel, so I was back and forth every couple of weeks for a week or two. Uh not the same as working undercover when you walk in a room for three years and don't know if you're gonna walk out of it alive. And I had some some interesting fallout from my experience there. The Marine Corps is very small, everybody knows everybody. And at one point I was uh uh sequestered in a hotel room with uh a sergeant who is a friend of mine, and I think we we went when we went to the men's room, we stood back to back just to make sure that nothing happened. So, you know, you don't realize, and by the way, this was all before the age of 25. So that kind of you know, that kind of responsibility you don't really see very much, except in first responders and in military folks. And you don't realize what it does to you. I I went 30 years without really understanding just how much it had impacted me. Um, my first wife, my second wife, my daughter, most of my friends could tell you how it impacted me. I'm sure everyone listening to this podcast knows a first responder or a veteran who you don't want to get in a car with. Right. Um, thinks bar fights are fun and sport. Uh maybe their wife told them once that they'd been in more fights than all the men she'd ever dated in her life combined. That was me. Uh, you know, and in my in my work in technology and in leadership in companies, uh, you can keep that in check, right? You're the boss and you don't show people as much as you might show uh in other places, but it was something that I didn't even realize how bad it was until I got into my 40s and 50s. Um I went to the VA, I had some uh I actually met a VA counselor I thought was going to be great for me as a Vietnam veteran, three tours in Vietnam, saw a whole much more, you know, a lot more uh bad things than I had ever seen. And three uh three sessions in he told me he couldn't treat me, I was triggering him. So I just sort of went quiet and dealt with it by talking to friends and keeping it all inside. And then I found uh I found Peak Neuro. I found the technology, not necessarily the company Peak Norro, but I got to experience the technology that was developed by one of my co-founders, uh Bob Holbrook, who spent 31 years developing neuroacoustic entrainment technology with a little bit different focus, more on things like altered states and meditation. But in six days, it changed my life, and it changed my life so completely we formed Peak Norro as an organization to take this out uh commercially. Uh, Intelligent Waves, the company that I run, is a national defense industrial-based company, and we do this work with uh the United States Air Force. We do it with some classified customers. We're very focused on things like post-combat down regulation, PTSD treatment, uh, anxiety and stress, and cognitive resilience, along with sleep. Sleep is an amazing challenge across the board. If you're a, you know, if you're a cop, you're undoubtedly working shift work. If you're a fireman, you know, you got a lot of days off, you got a lot of days on, but your circadian rhythm gets killed and your sleep suffers. And when sleep suffers, uh, that creates all kinds of physical problems. Uh slow wave sleep, the deepest sleep that we get, is what's most physically restorative for us. And that's typically what gets impacted the most when you have sleep issues. Uh REM sleep, where you dream, that's you know, that's your emotional regulation and how your memories get implanted. So if you got brain fog and you're angry all the time, you're probably not getting a good amount of REM sleep. And so I went from using the technology uh getting around 18 to 22 percent of my sleep is restorative to into the 53-54% range. That it really changed the way that I interacted with the world, it changed the way I saw the world and really made me feel like I wasn't broken anymore. And so the goal here was to make this available as widely as possible to as many people as possible, as quickly as possible. And part of the, you know, part of my experience as a Marine and as a Marine veteran is I have um uh I have some uh philanthropic things that I do. I'm on the board of uh an organization called Warriors Ethos. Uh, it's a nonprofit focused on moving veterans through transition. We'll pick you up 18 months before your end of service, all the way through 18 months after you get out of the service to help you make that transition. It's a very difficult period for most veterans. Um I'm also on the advisory board of the Sumperfying Americas Fund, which is started by five ICU nurses and Camp Pendleton during the Iraq War. They put$500 together, and if I'm not mistaken, we're up to about$200 million that they've given directly to veterans. So looking at those kinds of organizations and working with those kinds of organizations, I've been able to establish relationships with, for example, uh Carlton Kent, the uh retired sergeant major of the Marine Corps. And not unusual for him to call me or me to call him several times a year to say, hey, I have an employee, uh, they're an Air Force veteran standing on a runway at uh Elmendorf Air Force Base, they got triggered and now they're in crisis and they need a program. And the problem with that is there are not a lot of programs. Um it's very hard to find something, so it's sort of a network to put uh you know, to find a place to put veterans into something. And it's typically a dedicated facility away from home for several weeks at a time. And there was a study done by uh an Air Force colonel several years ago that looked at the uh success rate for PTSD treatment. And the farther away you are from home, the lower your chances of success. So we were looking for a way to bring this type of relief closer to the veteran's home, in fact, in their home. So there's less of a stigma, you're not traveling somewhere, you can do it when it's convenient for you. Um and so that you know for me, why did I want to be on the podcast to make people aware of it? I think it's an important uh alternative treatment to psychotherapy. And if you just give me a minute to talk about what's different between that and psychotherapy, and I know I'm talking to a therapist, so this ought to be fun. For for most people. Oh, I it's I don't think you'll take it personally. I'm just curious what your uh what your uh perspective would be. Uh my my daughter is uh is a therapist, and we we work with uh we work with some cognitive behavioral psychologists at major universities like Columbia. When you experience trauma, forget about PTSD for a minute, let's just call it trauma. I mean put PTSD is a disorder based on your trauma. Trauma, stress, anxiety, all of those things have an impact on your neurological system, on your on the the brain and how the brain functions. Um when you go to talk to someone, when you want to get treated or work through your trauma, you typically will go to a psychotherapist, and a psychotherapist, 99% of the time, works in uh narrative building. It's it's talk therapy. And how that works for most people is you've got this autobiography, I was born, I had all these things happen to me, and today here I am. And within that autobiography, I've got to figure out how this thing that happened, whatever it was, uh a fist fight, a gun fight, I got blown up somewhere, my you know, my wife left me for Jody down the street. Uh, all of those things have to be they have to be assigned a meaning, right? So talk therapy is about meaning making. The problem for many veterans, I would say most veterans, is that nobody wants to relive that, especially with someone who hasn't chewed the same kind of dirt that you've chewed. If you haven't worn that uniform, you haven't been in that situation, it's very hard for someone to want to open up. Um so that makes it even harder. And then you have people who have uh they might be on the spectrum, they're neurodivergent, they're not necessarily capable of talking about something, either physically or emotionally incapable of it. So how how peak neuro works, and uh just very quickly for your clarification, are you talking about people who are uh on the spectrum?

SPEAKER_02:

Are you talking about the therapist or the client?

SPEAKER_01:

Well, sometimes it's both.

SPEAKER_02:

Right, correct. That's all I wanted to say. Go on, I apologize.

SPEAKER_01:

Uh so you know, at the end of the day, it's really about narrative building. Psychotherapy is about narrative building, creating a narrative where you can inculcate the experience into your your autobiography. And like I said, that's very difficult, can take weeks, years, months, and it's also at times hard to find someone that you can do that with. So uh Pete Nora is not a replacement for that. I think it's an adjunct. So we just talked about how narrative making and meaning making are part of the psychotherapeutic process. But what we do neuroacoustically, that is, you put on a set of headphones all by yourself, sit in a quiet room 30 minutes. What we do is we entrain your brainwaves to suppress the uh dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the executive network in the front of your brain, where narrative and meaning making happen. And by the way, so does anxiety happen there in high beta, high gamma wave uh neurophysiological expression.

SPEAKER_02:

And so what we do on a loop, but anyway.

SPEAKER_01:

Exactly, the rumination loop. And you know how I love to describe that? Anybody who's ever walked out of a room and said, Why did I say that? And they can't get it out of their mind. Or why did that person say to me? What did he mean? What was that all about? Was it a good thing? Was it a bad thing? That's a rumination loop. And that is your brain stuck in the prefrontal cortex, running this script over and over again that you cannot get out of. Um, so neuroacoustically, what we do is we suppress your brain's ability to even create narrative, to create meaning, to create anything that looks like an A, B, C, D, E, F, G kind of a narrative-building structure. We suppress that in the front of your brain and we open up the what's called the antigular, I'm sorry, uh anterior cingulate cortex and your parietal and occipital cortexes. And your occipital cortex, by the way, which is kind of interesting.

SPEAKER_02:

By the way, for those who are not on YouTube, uh it's behind your head.

SPEAKER_01:

That's the way your eyes are in the front of your head, your occipital cortex is in the back, and you've got to run that connection.

SPEAKER_02:

Correct.

SPEAKER_01:

Um, so when we shut down your ability to create narrative, we open up your ability to create what's called symbolic admission. And if you've ever, as you're falling asleep, uh had a flash of a person, a memory, a movie, uh, something that sort of comes into your consciousness that's already fully formed and not a narrative. That's what that feels like. So when you when you process trauma through talk therapy, you're doing it semantically. You're talking about it. When you process trauma this way, you're doing it somatically with your body. You're virtually digesting it. So what happens there is over the course of literally a couple of months, you can see major trait level changes in your neurophysiology that suppress this anxiety response and open up what we call the equanimity response. Uh, I'll give you a great example. If you're if you're uh Amazon Prime subscriber, in the, I think in the spring of next year, there will be a show coming out called Leapfrog. Leapfrog is based on a book written by Mark Green. Mark Green is a 24-year U.S. Navy SEAL, uh, eight years in the Teams. I'm sorry, 13 years in the Teams, eight as enlisted, five as an officer, 21 TBIs and a PTSD diagnosis. Uh, in two months of using the technology at home, um, with every two weeks getting an EEG to see how his progress is coming, he has about 80% resolved his TBIs and uh went from sleeping three hours fragmented every night to six hours in a row. And the only reason he doesn't sleep more than six hours is he's got this old dog uh that keeps waking up and has to pee. It's a great dog, by the way. I've met her. She's awesome. Uh but the difference has been stark, and the reason why I'm telling you his name is because he's given us permission to do that. Mark is Mark has had such a great experience with this, and he's one of several uh veterans that we're working with currently that we have worked with, where we see these uh 31-day, 42-day trait level changes to people's neurophysiology where they just feel better. And that's really what it's it's not so much even about what happens to your brain, it's what happens to your subjective experience. Do you do you feel better? Are you calmer? And I remember, you know, I went through a six-day program um that was sort of a prototype for what we're doing now, and this was just after the pandemic, and people who hadn't seen me for a couple of years, just 100% of them would comment and say, You seem so different. You know, you're not as uh you're not as activated, you seem so calm. Um the very, very, uh, very stark uh difference between when you start and when you end. And it's self-paced, you can do it at home. By the way, you can you can try this for free, experience it yourself. Go to www.peakneuro, onework.com. You'll see a download link for the app store and for uh Google Play. There's uh uh an app there that's gonna have four files on it. One's a power nap, one is something called Let Go, which was built for the military, which is also, by the way, used by professional athletes and division one athletes today. Uh Let Go is a pretty interesting one. It um if you're it's made, it was made for two things. One, post-combat down regulation. You have to just let things go. And for athletes from unnamed college football teams who get their butts kicked on a Saturday and can't stop thinking about it. And so LEGO is a rumination loop breaker. Those are the two I would recommend people to try. If you're having trouble sleeping, try the sleep one. It's we we have one uh that's on the on the app that you can purchase that's a 10-hour uh uh sleep uh sleep induction technology. And I'll I'll tell you about that. We ran a six-month random controlled trial at a research institute here in Virginia with a professor from Virginia Tech who was writing the uh the protocol for it. Uh 161 participants in six months. People's slow wave sleep increased by 16 percent, their emo their REM sleep increased by 22 percent. For veterans and first responders, their threat recognition time increased by 9%. And when you're in the military, 1% is the difference between living and dying. It's not a question of uh of uh um performance uh for those folks, it's a question of survivability. Yes. Um the one of the unintended consequences that we noticed, which we're now working with some uh some universities and research on, is that over the course of six months we saw people's neuroplasticity increase. And if you're not familiar with that term, neuroplasticity is simply your brain's ability to adapt, to create new neural connections, to learn. So uh if you think about what that really means, the ability to adapt is what your brain is all about. Each of us, it's kind of funny. I I can group uh I you know I can group Steve and I into the into a cohort, we're probably around the same age, uh similar background, similar education, that's one cohort. But our neurophysiological systems are as different as our looks. Your brain is the sum total of the adaptation of your neurological system to the life that you've lived, which means the entire thing is plastic. So if you don't like where you are, you can change it. And Mark Green and May, perfect examples. And there are more, but uh, I think Mark is a great one. He's uh written a book called Unsealed, it's available on Amazon. Uh talks about his transition and the difficulties that he underwent. Uh and that show on Amazon. Uh, show on Amazon will be interesting. Both Warriors Ethos and the Sumper Five Fund get checks every time that show runs. I'm really proud of that.

SPEAKER_02:

Uh yeah, I'm gonna put that in the show notes. You you know, like I gotta stop you here because I let you talk, and then I already wrote, and for those on YouTube, you'll see that I wrote all these notes already that I want to follow up on.

SPEAKER_01:

Sure. Well, I'll then I'll shut up and let you ask questions.

SPEAKER_02:

Oh, don't ever shut up. First of all, I didn't know you work with uh the UMass Minutemen because you said teams that get their asses kicked uh regularly. Um yeah, shut up in UMass. Uh but I there's a few things. Let me uh share something from a therapist standpoint first and foremost. Yeah. When you talked about, you know, this is different than psychotherapy, you you'll hear this, and again, we're about the same age, and I feel like I've learned that in reality in life, you gotta adapt all the time in order to survive. You can't, you know. Charles Darwin never said survival of fittest, he said survival of those who adapt the fastest.

SPEAKER_01:

Most adaptable, yep, absolutely.

SPEAKER_02:

So I tell people that I did online therapy before it was cool. I started in 2015. Now suddenly the pandemic hits, everyone told me I was a fraud and cheating clients and blah, blah, blah. And then in two 2020, I was getting 10 to 20 phone calls a day. Hey, Steve, can you help me set this up? So for me, I always think about adaptation. If you're gonna crap on any type of treatment, I think that you're disturbing people around you. So when you said to me, you know, I want to hear it from a psychotherapist's standpoint, I'm gonna tell you as a 50-year-old therapist doing this for over 26 years at this point, if it works, I'm all for it. It's not psychotherapy, it's not for everyone. And that's okay. There's nothing wrong with that. And for some people, like you mentioned something, and this is what I really want to address. And this goes to my all my first responder and all my military personnel. When you don't have someone who's culturally competent in order to treat you, it always backfires. Not, I shouldn't say always, most of the time, it's going to backfire. I'm very culturally competent because of the knowledge I have with working with first responders, but I've never been a first responder. I work with the military personnel since 2003. I am not a military person, I have never served, but I certainly respect their work and I do that. And I think that that's how I picked up my knowledge. But I'm also not for everyone. I'm not for, you know, and I joked around before the interview, and I'm going to be serious for a second. I've worked with a lot of Marines. That doesn't mean I work with only Marines, and that doesn't mean all Marines like me. There's nothing wrong with that, by the way. I think that one of the things that I want to hear about you're more about, and we're going to keep on talking about this, that peak neuros seems to take that very seriously, is that we adapt to the person, and this is a way for them to not to have a creative narrative, or like you talked about, I call it a subjective narrative that we created. And sometimes it's up to the client to say the right thing, and sometimes it's right, it's up to the therapist to ask the right question. And for me, this is just you know, at best, a lucky guess. Um, and that's not because of my competency. It's sometimes when do you ask the right question at what time? So that takes that away by doing a little bit of that work. And for me, I almost see it as complimentary because maybe perhaps doing you know, peak neuro and doing that the the sound waves and everything else, you are able maybe to communicate more effectively in therapy and you're maybe able to ask more what you need. But to me, there's no such thing as psychotherapy or death. It's whatever works for people. I'm not a fan. The only thing I will say that I'm not a fan of is just medication that I am not a fan of.

SPEAKER_01:

Uh ask anybody who's ask anybody who's been to the VA.

SPEAKER_02:

Right. And that's what I mean. My my VA guys, I mean, I remember a guy coming in who was uh we'll we'll I don't I I'll save that he was a marine, I won't tell anyone, but he was on like seven different meds, and he was literally a zombie. And he's like, Steve, what do you think the problem is? I said, at best you should be on three meds because at one point you don't even know what's doing what, and is it a side effect versus actually helping? So that's the only one I will say that I do not want singularly medication, and I really like to talk about the frontal cortex and talking about the occipital uh cortex because that's very Important when people talk about PTSD and trauma. And so I can go to so many places here. But what I like to do is just finish off maybe on talking about one thing, because I I thought that was interesting when you mentioned about cognitive resilience. This for me is the first time I've heard that term. So I again I don't pretend I know stuff I don't know. But can you tell me more about cognitive resilience? Because I have a sneaking suspicion as to what that means. But I rather ask someone who knows than sounding stupid.

SPEAKER_01:

Sure. So I'll give you uh I'll give you two um a two-part definition and a couple of examples. So cognitive resilience is your brain's ability to adapt to change and fast change, right? So I didn't expect to see uh the house fall down. I didn't expect to see lightning hit the person next to me. That's a that's a significant change that interrupts what's happening neurophysiologically in your brain, and along with uh chemically as well. Um the the second is whether or not you're as we talk about cognitive resilience, can you learn at a speed that is necessary to adapt to your environment? And that so that's adaptation at scale. So in in a situation where, for example, you're uh you're uh uh a soldier, marine, a sailor, you're deployed somewhere and an event happens, an IED goes off, uh one of your friends gets injured or killed. If you if you've been working on this and you have cognitive resilience, you don't get PTSD. You don't get trauma. It doesn't traumatize you because your brain is capable of absorbing that impact. Uh so cognitive resilience is really around being able to pre-plan and absorb stress as stress occurs because your neuroplasticity is very high. We do this, I'll give you a great example of sort of how this works. So I just I just gave your listeners a link to an app that's got four exercises. They're real exercises, they're production grade, they're just something that you can see if you like it, then you can buy the full app. But that's at the very low end of what we do. So typically, when we work with, for example, fighter pilots, we will take a baseline physiological and neurological uh uh profile of that fighter pilot. Neurologically, it's an EEG, and they'll go out and they'll fly five training missions and we'll correlate the best training mission to the best baseline, and then we'll reverse engineer their their brain signals, literally their EEG, into an entrainment program so that every time they climb into that aircraft, they're at their cognitive best. And this is built on an AI back end that allows us to look at your personal neurophysiology and adapt all of the entrainment and signals to you as an individual. So think of it as tuning an engine or tuning an instrument over time because your brain changes all the time too. Your brain is not static. So as you get to one point where let's say you're resolving, uh, I I I think when we got cut off, I was talking about how TBI and PTSD look alike on a on an EEG. There's a lot of uh asynchronous alpha, beta, way too high on one side, way too low on the other, and that creates on one on one end anxiety, and on the other end, depression, you know, basically manic depressive. Uh things like hemispheric synchrony come into play. Are both sides of my brain working together? Are they working independently?

SPEAKER_02:

Right.

SPEAKER_01:

Uh, and frontal temporal coherence. So, what do I mean by that? If you if you if you've been in a traumatic event, if you had a concussion, if you had a traumatic brain injury, oftentimes we hear people talk about how they have brain fog. I can't remember names. I remember a face, I can't remember name. You remember the face because occipital cortex, right? That's where memory gets implanted. When your coherence breaks, which is up here in the anterior anterior cingulate gyrus, which modulates uh emotion.

SPEAKER_02:

Middle of the when you have give or take, just for those who are not video.

SPEAKER_01:

When you have um uh when you have brain fog, what's happening is your front to back coherence in your brain is essentially disconnected. And so you can't you can't run uh you can't save memory to the place where you should. And so building coherence, uh, that is front to back, left to right, hemispheric synchrony, creates whole brain synchrony. And whole brain synchrony allows you to be metabolically a lot more efficient. What do I mean by that? Well, and on average, it takes about 12 watts of energy to form a thought. If you're solving a math problem, I can I can measure that with uh with various devices, not necessarily on any EG. And that energy takes glucose and oxygen, and that's delivered by blood and it's delivered uh through your venous uh uh structures in in your brain. When that happens and you have that thought, if you can you think about um uh something uh that produces anxiety or trauma, that we just talk about anxiety, something that aggravates you and you can't get it out of your mind. Imagine what that's like. That rumination loop has high metabolic cost. You're spending glucose and oxygen, resources, and energy that you would otherwise not have to use, and that creates headaches, migraines, uh, it makes you tired, sleepy. But when you can train your brain to return to uh what I would call a state of equanimity where it's 12 watts up and goes right back down, you become much more metabolically efficient, you sleep better, you think better, you react less because you're not already in a heightened state of awareness, not a lot of hyperviligence, uh, hypervigilance. As we as we suppress, and not always, but for certain people, we suppress that prefrontal cortex. We really prevent you from getting to the point where you get into these anxiety and rumination loops. And once you get to the point where you can do that, this becomes over time, over about a month's time, it becomes part of your neurophysiological traits. So you don't you don't have to use the technology anymore. It's funny, I mentioned earlier, I think uh I get I started getting 18 to 22 percent of my sleep was restorative. And in my age category, that's about average. And last night I had a bad night, it was 47%, which means I sleep half as long with twice as much restorative sleep. And if you know, if you want to know uh for listeners who are curious about what that really means is things like Alzheimer's and dementia, they're you know, that's a lot about the plaques that accumulate in the in the folds in your brain. And when you engage in slow wave sleep, that dreamless deep, deep sleep, what happens is that the glial cells in your brain, they actually shrink. And what happens when they shrink? They pull cerebral spinal fluid up over the top of your brain. It soaks in there, and the longer you you sleep in slow wave sleep, the more they shrink, the more that that cerebral spinal fluid soaks in. That when you wake up, the cells expand and they push amylase plaques, broken proteins, down your spinal column, into your liver and kidneys, and your lymph system will clean what was going on. If you don't do that, if you don't get good sleep, we find that that becomes in the long term things like dementia and Alzheimer's. So the ability to get good sleep really is the base of the mountain that everybody wants to climb from a cognitive and and neurophysiological standpoint.

SPEAKER_02:

Well, Tony, I'm just gonna end this first part of the episode because this is fascinating because I want to continue talking about per a lot of different things. I like the neuroplasticity conversation, and I know that lithium also starts playing a role with memory and everything else, and I have a lot of people working on that that I know of, but I'm gonna tell everyone coming back uh Friday for the second part, and for those of you who are not listening on our order, just the next episode.

SPEAKER_00:

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Steve Bisson

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Courtney Romanowski

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Jonathan Crescenzo

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