The Balanced Brain Neurofeedback Training Center

01/09/2026

Many parents tell me the same thing:

“My child can focus better now…
but they’re still anxious, still reactive, still struggling with sleep.”

This is a very common pattern.

For many kids and teens, stimulating medications help with engagement and attention.
Sometimes calming medications are added to reduce emotional intensity or help with sleep.

This combination can be thoughtful and effective.

And yet, families often notice that something is still missing.

That’s because medication supports the nervous system while it’s active —
but it doesn’t teach the nervous system how to regulate itself.

When anxiety, emotional volatility, or sleep problems persist, it’s usually not a motivation issue or a parenting issue.
It’s a regulation issue.

Neurofeedback works differently.
Instead of managing symptoms, it helps the brain learn how to settle, recover, and stay regulated under stress.

Over time, parents often notice:
• easier sleep
• less “always on edge” behavior
• faster emotional recovery
• greater day-to-day stability

Medication and neurofeedback aren’t competing approaches.
They work at different levels.

Medication helps the system function.
Neurofeedback helps the system learn.

If this sounds familiar in your family, I wrote a longer piece explaining how these approaches fit together — and why regulation matters more than labels.

👉 Link in the comments.

01/06/2026

I keep seeing wellness posts claiming the gut “controls” mental health — sometimes even invoking the FDA to sell supplements.

That framing is misleading.

Yes, the gut and brain communicate.
Yes, nutrition matters.
But support is not the same as control.

No supplement — natural or pharmaceutical — teaches a brain how to regulate itself.
If it did, mental health wouldn’t remain such a persistent challenge.

When we oversimplify brain regulation, we don’t become more holistic — we become less accurate.

I wrote a longer piece unpacking this, including:
• why “psychobiotic” claims are overstated
• why supplement sourcing actually matters
• and why regulation is a learning process, not a product

Full piece on Substack (link in comments).

12/27/2025

You can’t cut food-safety surveillance and still claim you care about health.

This STAT article explains how funding cuts are weakening FoodNet — one of the systems that detects food-borne illness early, before people end up sick, inflamed, or struggling with unexplained symptoms.

🔗 https://www.statnews.com/2025/12/22/american-food-safety-funding-cuts-foodnet/

At The Balanced Brain, nutrition is foundational — not because it’s trendy, but because the brain is exquisitely sensitive to inflammation, blood-sugar instability, and immune stress.

We see it every day:
• Gut issues showing up as anxiety or brain fog
• Poor food tolerance disrupting sleep and mood
• “Clean eating” failing when the food system itself is compromised

Nutrition doesn’t start at the plate.
It starts with safe food and early detection.

When surveillance systems are weakened, the cost shifts downstream — onto families, clinicians, and already-stressed nervous systems.

Health isn’t built on slogans or suspicion.
It’s built on measurement, feedback, and prevention.

Cut the instruments, and you don’t get freedom.
You get blindness.

More Americans will be exposed to foodborne illness as a result of this year's funding cuts, food safety experts predict

12/21/2025

I recently read an article in **Psychiatric Times** that openly challenged something many people quietly suspect about modern mental health diagnosis.

The article explains that the **Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders** doesn’t identify diseases the way medicine does for diabetes or cancer. Instead, it groups people based on *clusters of symptoms*. That matters—because symptom labels often drive medication decisions.

One line from the article is especially striking:

> *“Now fully one-half of psychiatric referrals in the primary care clinic where one of us works are self-referrals from individuals who want to have the ADHD diagnosis and then receive stimulant and/or amphetamine medications.”*

This doesn’t mean ADHD—or any other diagnosis—isn’t real.
It does raise an important question:
When diagnoses are symptom-based and treatments are primarily pharmaceutical, how much does the system itself shape what gets labeled, prescribed, and reinforced?

In everyday practice, DSM diagnoses often function less like explanations and more like **prescriptions in waiting**. A label frequently implies a medication pathway—even when there’s no clear evidence of bodily disease or structural brain damage.

What’s often missing from this conversation is another possibility: many people aren’t broken, chemically deficient, or biologically ill. Their brains may be **stuck in patterns of dysregulation** shaped by stress, trauma, injury, inflammation, or long-term overload.

This is where **neuroregulation approaches** come into play. Techniques such as **neurofeedback**, **biofeedback**, **heart-rate variability (HRV) training**, and other nervous-system–focused methods aim to help the brain *learn* more flexible and stable patterns of regulation—rather than suppressing symptoms or overriding them chemically. These approaches don’t depend on diagnostic labels to work. They focus on how the brain and nervous system are functioning *right now*, and how they can become more resilient over time.

Instead of asking only *“What diagnosis fits?”* a neuroregulation lens asks a different question:
**“How is this brain regulating itself—and what conditions would help it do that better?”**
For many people, that shift alone changes the trajectory of care.

If you’re curious, you can read the original article here:
👉 [https://www.psychiatrictimes.com/view/the-concept-of-mental-illness-and-why-the-dsm-approach-is-wrong/](https://www.psychiatrictimes.com/view/the-concept-of-mental-illness-and-why-the-dsm-approach-is-wrong/)

11/23/2025

A little behind-the-scenes moment from today: updating one of our core software tools. Not glamorous, but it’s the kind of quiet upkeep that keeps our workflow—and our clients’ sessions—sharp and reliable.

11/12/2025

What is neurofeedback — really?

At the Suisun Conference, Santiago Brand and I dove into how the brain can learn to regulate itself — and why that’s a game changer for emotional and physical balance.

The process isn’t about forcing change. It’s about teaching your brain how to find its own rhythm again.

💬 Have you ever noticed how your state changes when you finally feel regulated?

11/11/2025

Big Food. Big Pharma. Big Ag.
They’re not plotting in secret to keep us sick — the incentives just work that way.

Cheap calories. Quick fixes. Lifelong prescriptions.
A system that profits when we stay dependent.

But we play a part too.
Every shortcut, skipped night of sleep, and “I’ll start next week” keeps the same pattern alive.

At The Balanced Brain, we focus on awareness, not blame.
When you understand how your brain regulates stress and attention, you start making better choices — naturally.

Real health isn’t about outrage.
It’s about agency — knowing how to shift your own state.

👉 Learn more at www.thebalancedbrain.com

11/05/2025

Ever felt like your brain just zoned out after a rough night?

New MIT research reveals that when you skip sleep your brain actually initiates cleansing waves of fluid — the same process it uses when you’re asleep — and during those moments your attention suffers. https://news.mit.edu/2025/your-brain-without-sleep-1029

At The Balanced Brain we help you build the sleep foundation so your neuro-regulation, coaching and nutrition work are effective — not fighting a brain that’s on autopilot repair.

Ready to support your brain & body as a whole system? Contact us.

11/02/2025

You wouldn’t skip oxygen before a big meeting. So why skip sleep?

This Forbes piece by Daisy Auger-Domínguez captures something we see every day at The Balanced Brain: high-performing people running on empty, trying to think, lead, and create from a depleted nervous system.

Leadership, focus, and emotional steadiness don’t come from pushing harder — they come from recovery, regulation, and rhythm.

That’s why we partner with our colleagues at EmpowerSleep.com to help clients understand what their brains and bodies are really doing during rest. Their data-driven sleep analysis pairs beautifully with our neurofeedback and coaching approach — giving clients not just more hours in bed, but deeper, restorative sleep that fuels clarity and leadership from the inside out.

Because in the end, sleep isn’t downtime. It’s strategy.

Read the full article on Forbes: “Sleep and Leadership: The Most Overlooked High-Performance Advantage” by Daisy Auger-Domínguez.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/daisyaugerdominguez/2025/08/25/sleep-and-leadership-the-most-overlooked-high-performance-advantage/

Sleep and leadership performance go hand in hand. This piece explores how sleep, often dismissed as indulgent, is an undervalued high-performance leadership habit.

10/26/2025

What is neurofeedback?

Santiago Brand and I discuss this at the Suisun Conference.

Watch the full video on our YouTube channel.

https://youtu.be/gxOFSx8Rhvk?si=15xfyiyHEMKIZZ45

10/19/2025

Coming from The Balanced Brain!

We had the privilege of sitting down with Santiago Brand at the Suisun Neuroscience Summit — one of the world’s leading voices in qEEG applied psychophysiology.

We talked about how neurofeedback and self-regulation training give the brain a chance to heal and perform at its best.

🎬 The full interview drops this week on YouTube — stay tuned!

09/05/2025

OK, it's rat brains but still a remarkable feat!

Showing how complex decision making is, just how many brain areas are involved, some were unknown contributors.

We in the neurofeedback field know this from experience but wonderful to see some data.

Science marches on.

https://interestingengineering.com/science/first-mouse-brain-decision-map?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email