How Brain Mapping Is Changing The Game For Mental Health With Angie Noack and Rachel Ragsdale

Discussions on mental health are increasingly becoming more open and destigmatized. With this, people’s knowledge of what they can do for their mental wellbeing increases. Here to talk about a more direct and biological solution for mental health issues are Angie Noack, VP of Business Development, and Rachel Ragsdale, founder of BrainCode Centers. In this episode, they sit down with host Stephen Jaye to walk us through their neurological methods that involve brain mapping, neurofeedback, qEEG, and more. They talk about attacking the root cause and giving you a chance to treat the underlying issues directly in the brain. Take this time to learn more about this novel approach by tuning in. --- Listen to the podcast here: How Brain Mapping Is Changing The Game For Mental Health With Angie Noack and Rachel Ragsdale Those of you who have been reading some of my previous episodes know that I like to talk quite frequently about mental health. It is a major part of the human experience that tragically until relatively has largely been ignored. I think the attitude used to be suck-it-up and do your job and not deal with whatever is bugging you on the inside or whatever's going on with whatever's wrong. That may lead to an existence that gets the job done. Sucking it up does not lead to a very happy existence. I love to hear stories about people who are taking new approaches and trying to help people out with mental health. My guests are Rachel Ragsdale and Angie Noack from Braincode Centers. Welcome to the program. Thanks for having us. Thank you so much. We're excited to be here. Thank you so much for coming onto this show. The first thing I want to know is Braincoad Centers use a technology called Braincode Mapping. Can you explain to our audience who may be curious about different aspects of mental health and how we can go about improving our mental health? How does this Braincode Mapping process work? I'll start us off here. I love that question, and I know Angie also loves that question because that is truly what our company thrives on is looking at the root cause of what's going on. Very much so classically and mental health, the two main things that people seek out when they're not feeling well are prescription medications or counseling. Both of those two are good things that you can get involved in. There are no problems with either of them, but we do believe firmly that misses the why, and it misses the root of what's going on. We look at the organ that we're treating, and we do that through that qEEG Brain Map that you were referring to. It tells us where there are areas of under or overactivity, which we know clinically are going to produce symptoms for people. That is where we start. That is the baseline that gives us the direction to everything that we do from a treatment standpoint. I apologized when I introduced you. I forgot to introduce your specific roles. Rachel, I know you're the cofounder of the organization and Angie, I know you're the Vice President of Business Development. Please feel free to answer whatever questions I follow up with, whatever pertains accurately to your specific roles with this organization. This Braincode Map you're saying can explain some of the things that a lot of people observe. What I mean is everything from the obvious schizophrenia, the ones that are diagnosed, to the people who more generically say, “I have anxiety, I have trouble focusing sometimes.” All types of ailments that people talk about. We treat anything from anxiety, depression, ABB, bipolar, trauma, PTSD, brain injuries and sleep issues. I would say more common. Some of the top things that we treat are the things that I mentioned but what Rachel was saying, rather than treating these mental health issues with synthetic substances, medication and things like that or even talk therapy, which we believe in. Rachel and I both have licenses in clinical mental health. We believe in looking at the organ and treating the underlying issue rather than masking it with medication. We believe there's a time and a place for medication, but for a lot of people, neurofeedback is an alternative route to solving what they're dealing with for a long-term answer versus a short-term solution. In neurofeedback, can you explain how that whole process works because that's after the mapping is done? I do truly believe that everyone is capable of taking ownership of their life and creating the best version of themselves. It just takes showing up and having the resources and also the knowledge to know that things like BrainCodeCenters are even…Share on X I will go into that. I'm going to give a briefer overview. We do 45-minute consultations, completely free to anyone, as neurofeedback is not necessarily something that's a super quick explanation, but it is operant conditioning of the brain. We know that operating conditioning is reward-based training. If you have a puppy, we're not going to try to train a puppy to sit without treats. We're going to do it with some type of reward. You tell it to sit, and you give it a treat. It's going to repeat that behavior because it wants the reward. I have people ask me all the time, “What are the brain treats?” So Brain treats are the reward that we're giving the brain while they're training are visual, auditory and tactile. People come in and they have electrodes on their heads. Is there any electrical stimulus going into the brain? Through a series of reward stimuli, we're showing the brain like a mirror, what it's doing well, what it can be doing better, and changing those neurological patterns. Rather than putting something synthetic in, we're teaching the brain to do it better on its own. With this reward feedback, how would this impact someone that's suffering from anxiety, and it feels like every little input overwhelms me, ”There was an election on the other side of the country, and somehow I'm still anxious about it type of thing?” Anxiety is probably the number one thing that we treat day in and day out. That's a reflection of our culture. Our culture is stressed out and anxious. We are so overstimulated with technology all the time. Anxiety can come from about 50 different patterns in the brain. A common pattern that we see is the overproduction of fast-wave activity, which is beta and high beta, which are the two fastest brainwaves. When our brain is utilizing all of its electrical energy in fast, we don't have anything leftover for slow. That's why people feel like, “My brain is racing all the time. It's buzzing. I can never slow down.” You get the sematic symptomology of anxiety, chest tightness, brain racing, physical tension, not sleeping or stomach issues. A lot of people experience a sensitive stomach. That’s a lot of times what we see. In Layman's terms, the protocols that we're going to create for a brain like that are to inhibit that fast-wave activity, teach the brain to produce less of that, and teach it to produce more flow. It’s not to make the brain slow, but so that the brain has flexibility. It's able to access that fast but also to be able to access that flow, giving their brain the ability to utilize what it needs when it needs it. One of the things I'm curious about is you talked about this idea of getting down to the root of the problem. Some people might hear that and think the root of the problem is what you'll hear in talk therapy will oftentimes go back to something from your childhood or people will talk about some issue with our culture. In our culture, you alluded to being one of the things responsible for why some of our brains can't go slow. We can't sit down and rest or the neurological equivalent of sitting down and rest. How does the feedback training relate to things like talk therapy or meditation, which is becoming an increasingly popular way for people to get into that slow mode into their brain? Mental Health: Look at the organ and treating the underlying issue rather than masking it with medication. The analogy that I like to give on that one is everything from supplementation, exercise, yoga and counseling. Those are all amazing software that we can upload or get involved in for a practical lifestyle. However, if you are trying to do all of these software updates on hardware that is not functioning properly or optimally, you're very much going to reach plateaus with that. Neurofeedback, in essence, works more as the software update or hard drive update. The software that you're trying to put on that new hard drive can be functional for you. We look at it as that piece of the puzzle. We oftentimes refer out to counselors who work right alongside other doctors, therapists, encourage people to work with their nutritionists that are functional medicine folks. We have a holistic approach from a neuro standpoint and a health standpoint. We are that brain piece of the puzzle. It’s different pieces of the puzzle. What you'd say is that a lot of people are trying to treat their mental health issues and first of all, I want to point out it's fantastic that we're even paying attention to this now compared to where we were several years ago. We're seeing a therapist even was seen as a sign of weakness, failure or something like that. It's great that even to this point where people are starting to actively acknowledge mental health issues as what they are, as opposed to some deficiency of something else. What I'm wondering is people who are working only with yoga meditation, something like that, is there something that's fighting against themselves, parts of their brain are being over or not active enough? I want to make sure I understand your question there. There are a lot of people that will say, “I have been practicing yoga for the last decade. It helps me manage my stress and anxiety.” We look more at that keyword manage and we challenge it with