Neurofeedback: How the Brain Rewires Anxiety, PTSD & Healing (Dr. Josh Hersh) | Part 2

What if your brain could see itself in real time… and self-correct?

In Episode 2 of 3 with Dr. Josh Hersh (Transformative Medicine, Utah), we go deeper into neurofeedback — what a session actually feels like, how the brain responds to real-time EEG feedback, and why this approach can shift patterns like anxiety, PTSD, sleep disruption, and chronic stress without forcing someone to “think” their way out of it.

Dr. Hersh breaks down the patient experience (EEG setup, relaxed viewing, auditory/visual cues), the science behind operant conditioning and brainwave targets, and how advanced clinical tools (like multi-lead EEG and sLORETA-style mapping) can pinpoint imbalance and train the whole brain toward coherence.

You’ll also hear powerful clinical stories:

• A high-pressure dad with severe anxiety + multiple daily panic attacks who improved dramatically over weeks
• A cancer patient whose nervous system shifted from fear to optimism — and why mindset + nervous system regulation matter in healing

In this episode:

• What happens during a neurofeedback session (what patients feel + see)
• How the brain “learns” without conscious effort
• Why neurofeedback may help PTSD without re-living trauma (vs. EMDR)
• Brain mapping: over-excitability, standard deviations, and what “too activated” can look like
• Why Dr. Hersh believes brain training supports the body’s ability to heal

Listen to the full episode here or watch it on YouTube: https://youtu.be/kRo5GHFMFFo

Visit UltraBotanica.com to learn more about us and how you can get a free sample of our products.

Transcript

0:00:00 - (Dr. Josh Hersh): We did the treatments, we did the neurofeedback and her mental outlook completely changed. She was very, very optimistic. And she knew, she absolutely knew that her cancer was going to be completely gone. She went from worrying about her scans and thinking about it's going to spread to thinking about her scans in a way that she was excited about them. And she went in for a scan and she was so happy about her scan, looking forward to it so much. She was actually doing a little dance and they had to tell her stop moving.

0:00:39 - (Dr. Josh Hersh): And she got her scan back last October and there is no evidence of cancer anywhere in her body.

0:00:56 - (Josh Bellieu): Foreign welcome back to Ultra Life today. I'm Josh Bellew. This guy Adam Payne. Yeah. And we've got Dr. Joshua Hirsch. I know many of you are like joining us again for week number two because you're blown away by a story of a three year old that they started doing neurofeedback with who was probably labeled with cerebral palsy. And by the time he left the clinic the first time after one session, he was high fiving his mom and reaching out and holding her hand. Behavior that hadn't been there before.

0:01:28 - (Josh Bellieu): This is neurofeedback. This is Ultralife today. Dr. Joshua Hirsch, transformative medicine in Utah. Really cool toolbox. Bastyr graduate, naturopathic guy. He's so inquisitive. And we love innovators, Adam. We love people that are pushing the envelope. You know, we talked about neurofeedback and kind of what it was in the last episode and you know, we're going to move on into this. You know, how does the brain observe itself in real time through neurofeedback? How does it self correct so quickly like that 3 year old?

0:02:01 - (Josh Bellieu): And so, you know, I read a little bit, Adam, you know, it's like the whole EEG. NASA's been using neurofeedback for years and years and years. But we're kind of want to dial into the patient experience, what's actually happening. Joshua, during a neurofeedback session, kind of sit in the patient seat for a second and let us know what their experience is, what you're doing, what this equipment is like and what a typical session is like for a patient.

0:02:32 - (Dr. Josh Hersh): So it's actually pretty relaxing. So you sit in a chair, we have a recliner, you put an EEG on your head, a little bit of gel to make contact and get good signals. Takes about, I don't know, 10 minutes or so to set up. And then the patient watches TV during a training. So we want their conscious brain relaxed so their subconscious brain can pick up on the auditory feedback and the visual feedback and then make the changes necessary.

0:03:06 - (Josh Bellieu): Well, you said make the changes necessary. Now I'm like, what?

0:03:09 - (Dr. Josh Hersh): How?

0:03:10 - (Josh Bellieu): What changes? Yeah, what are they doing to cooperate with this process? Because I'm sitting back watching my favorite TV show and relaxing and laughing right now. How does this happen?

0:03:22 - (Dr. Josh Hersh): Yeah, so that's a great question. One way I can illustrate it is I had a 36 year old male come to see me. Six kids, high pressure sales job, super anxious. Had been anxious for years and years and years. He was on three different medications for anxiety. And the medications would work for a little bit, but then stopped working. He was in an experimental trial for a new medication and, and same thing. Once he got it, it helped a little bit, but then it stopped working.

0:03:53 - (Dr. Josh Hersh): When I met him, he was sleeping two hours a night at best. Some nights he couldn't sleep at all. And he was having up to six panic attacks a day. So one is debilitating and then you have another and another and another. So it was making his life very, very challenging. And so we ran a lot of labs, we looked at neurotransmitters, we looked at what was causing some of the problems in his gut. We looked at his cortisol with rhythm, with his adrenal function.

0:04:27 - (Dr. Josh Hersh): And then I prescribed IVs, nutrient IVs, hyperbaric oxygen therapy, dietary changes, supplements and neurofeedback. But by the end of eight weeks of neurofeedback and the other treatments, he was sleeping eight hours a night, every night. Really? What? Panic attacks dropped by 95% and his self ready anxiety went from a 10 out of 10 to a 2 out of 10. So once again changed his life. And what's really interesting about that, he would watch Criminal Minds, you know, just really kind of dark stuff.

0:05:05 - (Dr. Josh Hersh): And I wondered if this is gonna, you know, he's watching this, he's getting really tense. It was going to help him, but it, it helped him. Yeah. So you can even watch scary movies and scary TV shows.

0:05:17 - (Josh Bellieu): All right, so, but again, how is the patient cooperating with what is going on? They're hooked up to an EEG device on their head. They're sitting back relaxing. What is the are you get? Are they cooperating in a way that they are doing something? What is the signal that's making them begin to think differently and form new neural pathways?

0:05:42 - (Adam Payne): Or are you providing some sort of stimulus that then you're trying to get a response differently?

0:05:50 - (Dr. Josh Hersh): So with the NeuroFeedback with the EEG, it's receiving real time information. So exactly what's happening in the brain moment by moment. And it has a program. So we've taken the assessment using the S. Loretta algorithms. It's actually processed by a supercomputer in Austria. So we can pinpoint where in the brain there's imbalances, is there overexcitability in the prefrontal cortex? Are there problems with the anterior cingulate?

0:06:21 - (Dr. Josh Hersh): Are there problems, you know, processing information to the occipital lobe? And we can pinpoint those areas by telling the neurofeedback unit that we want to focus on these regions of interest where there's the greatest level of imbalance. And then as the patient is just sitting there watching tv and their brainwaves are doing their. Whatever they're doing, they'll hear clicks and chimes, auditory feedback, and they'll see the screen get brighter and dimmer. Visual feedback, which will then signal to the brain that it's approaching their goals or reaching their goals.

0:07:01 - (Dr. Josh Hersh): And it uses dynamic adjustments so that the patient's always reaching their goals about 60% of the time. And it'll make the goals harder to reach or easier to reach and dynamically adjust to what the patient is doing that day. And that encourages the brain to keep trying. So you have your conscious brain, right, that's conscious of things we're focusing on. And then you have your subconscious brain that's always aware of its surroundings. So when you walk into a room, you make a 3D map of that room in your brain.

0:07:33 - (Dr. Josh Hersh): When a person walks in, you make a 3D map of that person. And so the subconscious brain, part of what it does is trying to find a way to both survive and thrive in its environment. And it's picking up on social cues, it's picking up on auditory cues, visual cues, and it's trying to figure out a way to survive and thrive better. And so when it hears those clicks and chimes, it only takes seconds for that brain to figure out, okay, if I lower my alpha waves in my prefrontal cortex, I will hear those clicks and chimes more often. I'll see the screen get brighter.

0:08:10 - (Dr. Josh Hersh): Even if a person's in a coma, they can do this type of subconscious processing.

0:08:17 - (Josh Bellieu): Okay, you said something at the end, and I'm just so blown away. Tell me if I'm interpreting this correct. Are you telling me that in a session that you're doing in neurofeedback, the subject is actually not consciously aware of what's taking place for their brain to make adjustments in the subconscious area. Is that right?

0:08:40 - (Dr. Josh Hersh): Right, right, right. And that's. Yeah, that's true. And we use this for PTSD as well. And EMDR is helpful for ptsd. Neurofeedback is helpful. With emdr, you have to partially, if not completely relive your trauma, which is difficult for the brain, difficult for the body. With neurofeedback, you don't have to relive it consciously, you just have to process it subconsciously and get the same results or similar results.

0:09:06 - (Josh Bellieu): Yeah.

0:09:07 - (Dr. Josh Hersh): Okay.

0:09:09 - (Josh Bellieu): You also shared with me that there's a company and I'm wondering, because I went out and looked them up, do you utilize a product? Is your system with the algorithm and the eeg, is it a Brain Master system? And my question is, is there difference between what a clinician does with Brain Master and is it a much greater opportunity? Because there's all kinds of brain gadgets as you know, out there, kind of trying to claim that they do this.

0:09:36 - (Josh Bellieu): But I'm talking to a guy. I mean, we're talking to a guy today, Adam, that's literally telling us about immediate results with individuals. So you use a Brain Master, is that right? And is it a clinical version of that? Give us an idea of what you got going on.

0:09:50 - (Dr. Josh Hersh): Right, right. There's a lot of different neurofeedback units out there. I prefer Brain Master and I have no financial ties to them at all, except that I bought their equipment, so they don't pay me to sell them. But Brainmaster uses up to a 24 lead EEG and I like that better because then you can train the entire brain at the same time. Some clinicians use one or two leads and they do see results. But I think it's in my experience, when you're treating the whole brain at the same time, especially using Sloreta algorithms, Z score protocols, that's where I see the best results personally.

0:10:35 - (Dr. Josh Hersh): And you can do your homework. There's lots of other systems out there that do that. So I don't know if it's the. In my opinion, it's the best, but there may be other ones that are very similar too.

0:10:46 - (Josh Bellieu): So, you know, you've mentioned this gentleman with massive anxiety, panic attacks, digestive disorders, of which you created some lifestyle opportunities for him to change. And yet it sounds like the Brain Master was a phenomenal portion of that. You talked about the young man with the cerebral palsy, the little three year old guy is there. Have you noticed when you're doing different segments of your patient population, is there one segment that responds much greater to your neurofeedback, such as autoimmune or cancer, or, you know, mental depression, clinical bipolar type depression, that kind of thing?

0:11:28 - (Josh Bellieu): Or do you see it just literally working across the majority of each segment of your patient population?

0:11:36 - (Dr. Josh Hersh): So I'll run assessments on most of my patients to see where their brain is at, if it's, there's imbalances, if it's overexcitatory, if it's, there's inhibition in certain areas of the brain. And I encourage most of my patients to at least do an assessment and see where things are at, because there's a big connection between the brain, the ability to heal the nervous system and the immune system. But for example, I had A female patient, 32 years old, she had triple negative breast cancer.

0:12:15 - (Dr. Josh Hersh): And she did chemotherapy, mastectomy, radiation, immunotherapy, and then she did some natural therapies like high dose vitamin C and hyperbaric oxygen therapy, some supplements, some dietary changes, and her cancer went away. No evidence of cancer. But then she'd lay in bed and worry about it coming back, super anxious. And she would play this, this story in her mind of her dying and her kids growing up without a mom.

0:12:49 - (Dr. Josh Hersh): And it was just like consuming her mental life. And so we started, and then I didn't see her for a few months and then she calls me and says, my cancer's back. And so we're like, we need to do something to address your mental health. So we did IVs, we did dietary changes, we did IV resveratrol and we did neurofeedback. And she went from laying in bed worrying about her cancer coming back to laying in bed thinking about her cancer disappearing and having a wonderful life with her kids.

0:13:29 - (Dr. Josh Hersh): By this point, it spread to her lip nodes in her neck, spread to her liver and spread to her groin. And we did the treatments, we did the neurofeedback, and her mental outlook completely changed. She was very, very optimistic. And she knew, she absolutely knew that her cancer was going to be completely gone. She went from worrying about her scans and thinking about, you know, it's going to spread to thinking about her scans in a way that she was excited about them.

0:14:06 - (Dr. Josh Hersh): And she went in for a scan and she was so happy about her scan, looking forward to it so much, she was actually doing a little dance and they had to tell her stop moving. And she got her scan back last October and there was no evidence of cancer anywhere in her body.

0:14:26 - (Adam Payne): Gone.

0:14:27 - (Josh Bellieu): And through what you did through neurofeedback. Now she doesn't have an expectation of that coming back. She's seeing herself as a whole person. Well, complete transformed transformative medicine. Amazing.

0:14:42 - (Adam Payne): So, Doc, I'm curious, when you, without breaking confidentiality, when you did the initial brain scan on that patient, did you.

0:14:51 - (Josh Bellieu): See.

0:14:53 - (Adam Payne): In her topology, were there areas that had lower than normal activity in her brainwaves?

0:15:03 - (Dr. Josh Hersh): It was actually just the opposite. It was higher than normal activity. So very, very excitatory. So when we get a neurofeedback assessment back, it'll put things in what they call voxels or three dimensional standard deviations, and we can see if there's one standard deviation, two standard deviations, or three deviations either above or below the norm. And for her, it was a lot was three standard deviations above the norm. So her brain was very, very excitatory.

0:15:34 - (Dr. Josh Hersh): Yeah. Very, very anxious.

0:15:37 - (Adam Payne): Way too triggered, I guess, in many ways.

0:15:39 - (Dr. Josh Hersh): Exactly.

0:15:41 - (Josh Bellieu): So maybe I'm reading between the lines because I asked the question segments of your patient population. I think you may have answered the question with the last. You see neurofeedback as being beneficial pretty much in any category of a patient, don't you?

0:15:57 - (Dr. Josh Hersh): You know, there's cases where we don't consider neurofeedback, but for chronic debilitating disease, and chronic disease in general, I think it can be very beneficial.

0:16:11 - (Josh Bellieu): Wow. Okay. You have been listening to Dr. Joshua Hirsch, UT Transformative Medicine. Adam, what are you doing this weekend? Can we get a cheap flight? Because I'm wanting to go hang out with this guy. It's pretty amazing. You know, we, we've talked about some really brilliant use case scenarios out of this man's own clinic. Transformative-medicine.com he'll do an initial consultation even remotely.

0:16:42 - (Josh Bellieu): He does have people that travel out to Utah. Great place to go. If you have to go see a guy to get well, Utah is the place to go. It's absolutely beautiful out there. We're coming back to do a final episode, another conversation with Dr. Joshua Hirsch. We, Adam, we are going to have to have him back again because I bet he's got a lot of other interesting things that he does as well. Right. But we've got one more. We got one more.

0:17:06 - (Adam Payne): We've only pulled out the top tray of the toolbox here.

0:17:09 - (Josh Bellieu): I think so as well. Yeah, but neurofeedback, it's training the brain rather than overriding the brain. I mean, a computer term would be you're actually overriding the way your brain is working in a way it's like you're putting a new program in there which I think is absolutely brilliant. You know, when we go into our next conversation with Joshua Hearst final episode, we're going to focus even a little more. I want to hear more real world outcomes and then I want to know what other doctors are doing or other people adopting this too. In your world, our function met is this. Adam, you and I have been at a bunch of conferences the last few years and you know the number one thing I heard as we would get in the rooms and the breakout sessions?

0:17:53 - (Josh Bellieu): It was this. Every single doctor that I've been around for the last five years said we've been ignoring the mental, emotional and spiritual component of these individuals lives. And when we begin to include that people that weren't getting well are getting well now. And this is a huge component of.

0:18:09 - (Adam Payne): That, I think you're right.

0:18:10 - (Josh Bellieu): Yeah. Well, Dr. Joshua Hurst is going to be back for conversation number three, Ultra Life today. Do you like us? Subscribe, share and also you can get us wherever you find podcasts. We'll see you again next time with Dr. Joshua Hearst part three.

0:18:27 - (Adam Payne): Thanks. See you soon.

0:18:42 - (Josh Bellieu): Sam.