Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
This week on Culture Leaders, I sat down with Dr. Don Wood, the founder of the Inspired Performance Institute, and creator of a trauma reprocessing program that’s helping people heal in ways traditional therapy never could. Don’s work began as a personal mission to save his daughter’s life, but what he discovered in the process was a completely different way of understanding trauma, not just as a psychological burden, but as a neurological glitch that impacts health and decision-making and performance, and obviously therefore leadership as well. He explains why anxiety, addiction and even autoimmune diseases are often symptoms of unresolved trauma, and he shares how he’s using a four hour e-learning program. Yes, it is an e-learning you can do in the privacy of your own home, on your own time, and it is only four hours long to rewire your brain and reduce inflammation and help people unlock new levels of peace and performance and potential. I’ve done this e-learning and it totally changed my life. We also talked about how this applies to the workplace, especially for leaders trying to support younger teams and create cultures where people feel safe, focused, and resilient. It’s a groundbreaking conversation that could shift the way you think about mental health and leadership. Please welcome to the podcast Dr. Don Wood. Don, thank you for joining us. So what is your why?

Dr. Don Wood:
What is my why I did this is really because to save my daughter’s life is that she had been dealing with two autoimmune disorders, and that’s what got me into researching and figuring out how do I help her, which in turn helped a lot of people.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
So tell us what it is.

Dr. Don Wood:
Well, what I discovered is that she had an autoimmune. The first one she got was Crohn’s, and they took out 24 inches of her intestines. They said, there’s no cure for Crohn’s. We don’t know what causes Crohn’s. And then her second autoimmune was called idiopathic pulmonary hemo acidosis, which is a long word for or long term for basically the iron and the blood gets dumped and so dumps into the lungs and she could have choked to death on her blood. And again, they told us no cure for it. We don’t know what causes it. What I discovered when I started doing the research is it was coming from trauma and trauma that we didn’t know that she had when she was six. So I kept running into all these people who had autoimmune disorders and they were all dealing with trauma earlier in their life, and it’s showing up now in all these physical conditions. And I believe Jessica, that 80% of the illnesses were seen in this country are psychological based, not physical based, but they keep treating it like they did with her. They thought Crohn’s was her problem, Crohn’s was the symptom of her problem, but they were treating the symptoms. So they cut out 24 inches of her intestines and said she’ll eventually end up with a colostomy bag. They didn’t understand it and didn’t know what it was caused by.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
So I have an autoimmune disease, and I remember researching this when I first found out, and what I remember was that autoimmune diseases generally they’re caused by first a genetic predisposition to having an autoimmune disease and then secondly, a trigger of some kind. Is that what you’re talking? You’re saying the trauma is the trigger?

Dr. Don Wood:
Yes, the trauma. So the genetics, what I found is that the genes that regulate inflammation upregulate the genes that regulate the immune system, the response to the trauma, the problem is, is it stays in that condition. So because the trauma keeps running in the background, it’s supposed to be a temporary pause to protect the system. Everybody says inflammation’s the problem, but inflammation is just a symptom again. So if you have physical or emotional trauma, inflammation will show up. It’s a cell danger response to protect the system from the attack. So if you were punching me in the arm, my arm would swell up. The purpose of that is while it’s under attack, it’s got a cell danger response. The cells become hardened and inflamed to stop anything from penetrating the cell while it’s under attack. When you stop punching me, my swelling’s going to go down, the inflammation drops and the immune system comes in and cleans up. So that allocation of resources, more to inflammation, fight or flights survival less to maintenance. Because the most important thing when you’re under attack is survival, not maintenance, and then it gets stuck in that position.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Okay. And so what did you create? What is the inspired performance program?

Dr. Don Wood:
So what I did is I realized if what I had to keep doing research because even that was sort of interesting. Everybody knows that inflammation shows up, but nobody really knows what to do about it except they had my daughter on steroids and anti-anxiety meds, antidepressants, painkillers from the operations. Everything was all about pharmaceutical solutions to it. What I realized as I kept doing the research is that this is coming in from memory and just like you said when you talked about the genetics. So we have an explicit memory system that all humans have. We store details about events and experiences in our life in explicit detail. So the high definition, the way I explained it is if I asked you what you ate for dinner last night, can you tell me what you ate for dinner?

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Yes.

Dr. Don Wood:
What’d you have?

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Burger and eggs.

Dr. Don Wood:
Burger and eggs. So you saw pictures right of what you ate last night, maybe where you ate it?

Speaker 3:
Yeah,

Dr. Don Wood:
That’s how you stored the information about dinner last night. Now, that wasn’t threatening or disturbing, so it’s stored as a fairly low resolution file. If that was a traumatic event, all your senses are heightened sight, smell, hearing, so it’s going to record that memory in high depth. So now that high definition memory keeps activating the nervous system and keeps turning it on because your subconscious survival brain operates in the present. So when you access that memory, it’s seeing it as if it’s happening now turns on the system, the nervous system, it’s a glitch. But if that nervous system keeps getting turned on, it burns out. It’s not supposed to be your fight or flight response is an emergency management system and it’s now an operating system. So now you’ve got weakened immunity, high inflammation, perfect recipe for disease, autoimmune.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
But what you got to tell us, I’m trying to get

Dr. Don Wood:
You to tell us what you created. So what I created, just one other thing I wanted to say about the genetic as well. So the genetic predisposition is coming in from generational trauma. So as long as you never received any trauma, it would not have activated that genetic response. So it becomes a second memory system besides if you experienced it yourself, your mind will use that experience. But if you’d never experienced trauma and then experience it, it will go into the genes and say, what do we know generationally about this and respond, if that makes sense.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Yeah, no, it definitely makes sense.

Dr. Don Wood:
So what I did is I created a way to reset that memory from high definition into low definition. But the key in what makes it work is I create the optimal conditions to do that. Traditional therapy, you’ll sit for an hour with a therapist and you’re going to be talking about this traumatic memory that you have, but you’re never going to get into optimal condition. The key was to get the mind into a very relaxed, focused state. And if you remember going through the program when you go the first two hours of science and education, then the third hour we start talking about trauma. But by the time we’re two hours in and the whole program’s designed to sort of bring the system into that alpha brainwave state, then we bring in some specific memories, but very short clips and the mind will start to reset them from high definition into low definition, feeling safe. And then the fourth hour is designed on performance. Now we want to get you performing at your highest level.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
So I want to break this down for people who are listening because I don’t think they quite understand yet. And this is what blew me away about it. You created an e-learning.

Speaker 3:
That’s

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
All it is. It’s e-learning, essentially a class online that I can take in the privacy of my own home whenever I want. And it’s a four hour program. And at the end of that four hours, you’ve accomplished everything that you just said you’ve accomplished. You’ve moved those high definition traumatic memories into low definition, and you’ve set the stage for your brain to rework itself, so to speak, to remove those glitches, remove that sounds insane. I mean, it sounds almost like not possible. And that was my impression when I first heard about your program from a friend of mine who recommended it to me, it sounds too good to be true. And so can you speak to that because how are you going to rewire people’s brains in an e-learning to the degree that you have just described in only four hours?

Dr. Don Wood:
So I do it one-on-one as well, but I also do it in groups. So I can put 25 people in a room and take them through the program, and no one has to share their trauma. The e-learning side of it is the same four hours as if you were with me. I created, basically, it’s a formula of how to set the brain to get ready to heal. So if you came in with a broken leg, we’d reset your leg and then let it heal. It’s the same thing with this. Once we reset the system, we allow it to heal on its own. Our minds and bodies are designed to heal. The problem is is we never create the optimal conditions to set the healing. So if you’ve had trauma, your brain has never been relaxed enough to do any healing, it’s in a constant state of fight or flight.
And so how are you going to heal that memory if you never get into optimal condition, if that is what I’m showing you how we do, and I can do that in really two hours. So I had the gentleman who went through, he had the AA ring on, and what he said to me, he says, my AA ring tells me I’m stressed. He says, but I don’t feel like I’m stressed. He says, so either the AA ring is wrong or I don’t know what stress is. And he says, and I really haven’t had any real trauma that I can think of. And so as I was taking him through the program, two hours in, he says to me, we had a quick break. And he comes back, he goes, now I don’t understand what you’re doing. He says, my aura ring’s now telling me I’m in Restore State. He says, we didn’t talk about trauma. How did you get me into restore state? It’s the process that I developed. So it’s all the stories and the information that I’m presenting and the way I’m presenting the tone of my voice, the cadence and the messaging. So by two hours he’s ready to start. The mind is feeling safe, and now we’re going to introduce two or three of these memories that have been stored in high definition and we can then move them into low definition. And then it just continues to run that data.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
And then you follow up, there’s these eight to 10 minute audio clips that you’re supposed to listen to every day for the next 30 days after you do it, right?

Dr. Don Wood:
Correct.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
So that is

Dr. Don Wood:
Continuing to retrain and re

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Momentum.

Dr. Don Wood:
Right? So what it’s doing is basically we build up codes, what I call codes. You can call ’em habits or behaviors. And so those codes have been designed to protect you, even though they may not be beneficial to you, your mind will create a pattern because the number one fear for the human mind is uncertainty. So habits and behaviors get set because it creates certainty, but they may not be beneficial and they’re actually being created by the traumatic memory. So you may do things like drinking, taking drugs, eating, whatever it is. Your mind has built up a code to feel better. And so we then want to start working on those codes to start creating new codes. But your mind will create the new codes when it feels safe, it won’t make changes to those codes as long as you’re under stress.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Yeah, I, so I did the program and it totally worked for me. Everyone that I sent to go do it also said, holy man, it totally worked for me. And the person who recommended it to me was basically saying the same thing. So here’s the metaphor I would use to describe what it was like. It’s as if my brain is a snow mountain, and I have been skiing on my snow mountain in certain ways for many years. And so those paths that my brain has followed to ski down the snow mountain are pretty solidified. And it’s hard for me to ski down a different path than how I typically go down. Your four hour program basically creates a fresh coat of snow on the mountain so that those paths are now under a fresh coat and all paths are available to me, and then those six eight minute clips help me create new paths that are maybe more healthy and more appropriate coping mechanisms then what I had previously been used to. Is that fair?

Dr. Don Wood:
I like that. That’s very good. Same kind of thing, because we build those pathways coming down the mountain as a way to protect ourselves, but they may not be beneficial so that you may be going down the steep side of the mountain. And so what

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
I was previously on the doom scrolling path and the Netflix path, and then I moved into the yoga and meditation path, and it was just easier to do those things than it had previously been.

Dr. Don Wood:
And your mind will do whatever it thinks it needs to do to protect you, even though it may not be beneficial. When people say to me, well, I sabotaged myself and I say, it’s impossible. The brain can’t sabotage you. It’s a survival brain, but it’s dealing with faulty information. So it’s creating those paths based on some faulty intelligence. So we have to reset that information that is being used to create those paths. So it’s like you got this information about this is the safe side of the mountain to go down, and it was actually the rocky, steeper, more dangerous side, but your mind doesn’t know that it’ll work with whatever it has, and it’ll try to create a way to protect you.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
So speak to this idea about trauma, because a lot of people that I talked to about the program after I did it said, well, I’ve never had trauma, so that’s not for me. And didn’t, it’s hard to describe. It feels like, I mean, if you’ve got a cell phone, that’s enough trauma for this program to be relevant to you because it just creates this entire reality for us. That is not the way that we were built to be. Right? Can you speak to that?

Dr. Don Wood:
Yeah. I wrote my second book, and I called it Emotional Concussions. It’s not the big T traumas. It’s those bumps that you got along the way. The overly critical parent, the teacher that told you, you’re stupid, right? It could be one incident like that.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
That feels like big trauma to me. If my teacher called me stupid, what would be?

Dr. Don Wood:
Well, it may be, but a lot of people who are growing up in a really traumatic household, that would sound simple, but it could have been even without, with the best of intentions. So for example, this one wasn’t necessarily a trauma that you’d consider trauma for my wife, but she’s already got trauma in her house, and then her teacher brings her up in front of the class and starts firing multiplication questions at her to sort of test her. Well, she froze. And so from that experience, when I met her, she told me I’m not very smart. And that didn’t make any sense because I thought she was pretty smart, but she didn’t feel smart, and that came from an early experience in her life. And so she’s my best researcher now. She’s amazing. She remembers things. She always said, I don’t remember anything. Well, as a child, what did she hear from her teacher?
You can’t do it. And so she built up that image in her mind that she’s not very smart. Was the teacher intentionally doing that? I doubt it, but so again, that can be with the good intentions, even for a parent, you’re critical of your kid because how many times I’ve heard my parents toughened me up and they made me really hard, and that was really good for me. And I go, no, it’s not. I had parents that never criticized me, never yelled at me. They would teach me without critically putting me down and saying, there’s a better way, and let me show you another way. And have you thought about this? Those kinds of ways as opposed to, no, you’re wrong. You need to get this right. They were very positive in the way they taught me.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
And so you’ve called your company the Inspired Performance Institute. Can you break down that name?

Dr. Don Wood:
Yeah. The reason I did that was because just like you said, you talked to people and they say, I don’t have trauma, or they don’t identify with trauma, but everybody can identify with performance. So if you want to perform at a higher level, what’s interfering with you getting to that level is this trauma running in the background. So what I discovered is that it actually, so for athletes, for example, when I work with them, the unresolved trauma actually affects the mitochondria and the cells. So you’re actually got less power now it seems like. How could it have that big an impact? But I’ve got all kinds of evidence of people breaking personal best breaking world records, winning world championships, all after going through the program.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Tell us a story or two.

Dr. Don Wood:
Sure. So Marco Chito was a double amputee, lost both his legs to a suicide attempt, and he was a marathon runner from Kenya. And so his cousin and him got recruited to the University of Alaska from Kenya. So you can imagine the culture shock. His cousin did not acclimate committed suicide. Marco got so distraught, he attempted suicide, woke up in the snow two days later, and they had to amputate his legs below the knees. So they built him prosthetics and then built him blades to start training to run marathons. But he had plateaued. So his coaches called me and they said, we think Marco has great potential, but he can’t seem to get past this one level. We think it must be in his mind now. Can you take him through your program? So I took Marco through the program. Nine days later, he runs in the marathon and takes 15 seconds per mile off his time, which is big. And then a month later runs in the Boston Marathon and breaks a world record. He’s now the world record holder for marathoners with amputations. Two months later, runs in the Chicago marathon, breaks his own world record by another five minutes and gets signed by Nike

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
By another five minutes,

Dr. Don Wood:
Another five minutes. I mean, that’s Incredibles.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Enormous.

Dr. Don Wood:
Yeah, and what I said to Marco, I said, Marco, I didn’t make you faster. You were always that fast. You just didn’t have access to that power. It was restricted. And so lots of examples like that. A gentleman bought the program, the online program for his daughter who was a division one collegiate swimmer, and she didn’t really have a lot of trauma, but he thought it would be good for her to sort of go through. Anyway, afterwards he asked her, he says, did you like the program? What do you feel? She goes, I liked it. She goes, I can’t tell you. I feel different. She goes, I think I feel different, but I don’t know. And then during the next month, she comes back home and shows him that every day she was making personal bests and she competed in a tournament and blew the competition away. She had no idea what had changed, but that power increased.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Tell us how you got connected with the Green Berets.

Dr. Don Wood:
A gentleman, former retired Special Forces, green Beret, Scott Mann, you see him a lot. He’s very well known. He came to me, he heard about me and he talked about, I’ve been through all kinds of trauma programs at Green Berets, get the best of the best. And he says, but nobody really had stopped it. The post-traumatic stress he was dealing with. And he talked very openly about it. He said at one point he ended up in a closet with a gun in his mouth. He was going to take his own life. And he said, and after his testimonials on our site, and I love the way he explained it, he says, after going through the inspired performance program, I felt like my toes uncured. I mean, what a great way to explain it. He says, I felt this sense of peace and relief I’d never felt before. And he says, and it’s continued. So then he put us in touch with the Green Beret Foundation and said, this is what they need.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
And then they signed a contract with you that any Green Beret in their family can go through the program for free and they’ll pay for it,

Dr. Don Wood:
Even the family members, which is pretty amazing.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
It’s pretty remarkable. That’s what got me to give it a go, because I mean, the Green Berets are the best of the best, and they get the best of the best treatment. So the fact that they signed on at such a broad scale convinced me, and I think Toes uncured, I wouldn’t have used that phrase. To me, it just felt like it was easier to be in my body. It was just easier to be still. I feel like I spent my whole life trying to be busy, and this just made everything still easier.

Dr. Don Wood:
I had another example, which I think is really good too, is a gentleman who had 45 years of panic attacks and we eliminated the panic attacks. And then a few months later, he called me up and to share something. He said My son couldn’t find his headphones. And he says, and he was upstairs and I could hear him yelling and throwing things. He was so angry he couldn’t find stuff, he says. So I went upstairs, I helped him find his headphones. I came back downstairs, and as I walked in the kitchen, he says, my wife comes up and hugs me. And he goes, well, that’s nice. What are you hugging me for? She says, because of how you handled that. She says, when I heard their son yelling, she says, and I heard your footsteps going up the stairs. She says, I sat in the kitchen just bracing. I knew what was coming. This is going to be a knockdown screaming match. And she says, and I hear you walking around going, have you checked over here? What about over here? She says, my still yelling, and you’re talking to him that calmly. She goes, that’s not what you would’ve done before.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Yeah, I totally can relate to that. It also made me deal with difficult emotional moments better when my daughter was crying about having lost her house in Minecraft to lava, she just really was having a serious emotional moment in the car. And old me would’ve freaked out because hearing your daughter cry is the worst thing on the planet. And so it triggers me to then have this emotional response, and I have to walk myself through that moment to stay calm. And I just noticed that it was easier to reach back and say, oh, I’m so sorry, honey. That must be really hard. And I wasn’t necessarily triggered. I was just aware of what I could do to show her some compassion and empathy. Whereas before I would’ve been probably panicking. What do I do? I’m driving my daughter’s freaking out.

Dr. Don Wood:
Yeah. Well, what would’ve happened before is your mind would’ve done a Google search about what do you know about that kind of frustration and pain? And yours would’ve come in, and now you’ve got your own trauma running as you’re trying to respond to her, and that’s activated your whole nervous system, and you would’ve been flooded with a whole bunch of old data about what you experienced, and then how good are you going to be handling her?

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
And it also helped me do the same thing with my colleagues, frankly. Right? I mean, in the workplace when there is conflict or disagreement or negative feedback or issues, that was very triggering for me. And I think I’ve found a way to be a lot less emotionally impacted by moments that may look the same on paper, but my reaction is very, very different. I would love to talk about that a little bit more, the impact on workplace performance. You gave some examples of athletes. Where have you seen this done in the workplace and how has it impacted performance of a team?

Dr. Don Wood:
We worked with a real estate company that were pretty successful, sold high end real estate. And so the president of the company asked if I could come in and work with some of their people to see what the results were. Their number one rep, she was doing about 20 million in revenue at that time, but she said to me, I don’t really have any trauma, she says, but she had some more emotional concussions and a couple things like that. And within two years she went up to 60 million. Much of an increase. The company went from, I think it was 40 million to 160 million within three years, and it was a different around there. So people were getting along because what the number one real estate agent told me, she says, I’m a woman and I’m operating in this. There’s a lot of men inside this company. She says, I feel like I’m surrounded by sharks.
And she says, and I don’t feel safe. And she says, and not just on a sexual basis, but just overall, right? There was that. And she says, I’m really a very nice person, but she says, I put on this very tough hardened exterior because that I feel is protecting me. And then what she said to me, which I thought was so amazing, she says, so I’m with one of my clients, an older gentleman who his wife had died three years earlier. He was getting remarried, and the new wife wanted to get rid of everything, the house and everything he says. And so he’s at the closing, and the closing agent said, I need the death certificate from your wife. And he says, well, I sent you a copy of it. She goes, well, I need the original. And she says, and he got really, really upset.
So she says, I said to everybody, listen, it’s almost lunchtime. Why doesn’t everybody go to lunch? And she says, I’ll drive you home and let’s go get the original. We’ll bring it back after lunch and finish up. So she says, I got with him in the car, and he was still really upset. And he goes, I don’t understand why this is happening. I keep getting all of these things happening about my deceased wife. And she says, and I reached over, I held his hand, and I said, maybe she’s just letting you know she’s okay. And he started to cry and he said, I really needed to hear that. Thank you so much. And she said to me, he says, I never would’ve done that before. I didn’t feel afraid to be who I truly am. That brought me back to who I am. And she says, and that’s one I wanted. And look at what happens to her sales. So she was always good. She was a great agent, but now she’s back to her true self and she just accelerated.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Yeah, I mean because when those emotional concussions and those triggers aren’t holding you back, it allows you to lean in more and drive better performance to be more yourself, which ultimately has got to drive more performance, right?

Dr. Don Wood:
Yeah. I had another gentleman he went through and he wanted to come through for the performance side of it. He had some stuff, pharmaceutical rep, and one of his goals in the performance part of the program is he says, I want to be an entrepreneur. But he says, it scares me. He says, even if I think about owning my own business or starting my own business, he goes, I quit. He says, because I like my mortgage paid. He says, and my wife likes our bills paid. So he says, I just avoid it. Never think about it. After he went through the program, that’s one of the targets that he set was to maybe own his own business. Six months later, he is sitting in a restaurant with his family and he hears a conversation behind him about these guys starting a microbrewery. And he says, I got up from my seat. I went and I sat at their table and I said, are you looking for a partner? And they said, yes, he invested in that business. He’s a multimillionaire now. Now he says, I never would’ve done that before. I would’ve ignored that conversation. I would’ve just tuned it out because his mind wouldn’t have felt safe. It would’ve protected him because in his mind that before going through the program, he doesn’t want to be a business owner. He doesn’t want to take the risk. It would’ve protected him from getting involved in that conversation.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
That’s so interesting. I mean, how much do we avoid taking risk in business every day because we’re afraid of something going wrong, drawing the wrong kind of attention to ourselves, suffering in some way? I mean, that is what holds us back ultimately, the fear of suffering, the fear of a misstep. And so when you release that fear, you unleash your potential. It’s really about unlocking potential,

Dr. Don Wood:
Unlocking potential. Give you another great example. A guy now here’s a very successful entrepreneur. He is making 2 million a year selling options, derivatives, stocks. And he came to see me. He said, I sabotage myself in the fourth quarter every year he says, my anxiety gets so bad in the fourth quarter, I just can’t go into the office. He says, it’s like a meltdown. When I go to the office in the fourth quarter, he says, I don’t know why I’m sabotaging myself. I’ll take vacations, I’ll go golfing. He goes, I feel bad because my two partners have to carry the slack of me not working in that quarter. So I said to him, I said, well, let’s tell me about growing up and let’s see where we can identify where this started. And he said, I had a great childhood, great family. He says, in fact, my dad is my hero.
He’s my mentor. He says, very, very successful. He says, and the most resilient man I ever met. And I said, tell me about his resiliency. And he says, well, he went bankrupt four times and rebuilt every single time. He says, I remember we’d fly in private jets and then in the middle of the night we’d have to move because we’re getting evicted, and then we’d be back in private jets. So what was his mind trying to do? He gets to the 2 million and it shuts him down because it’s saying, don’t take any more risks. And so he had no idea what, and his dad wasn’t doing anything wrong, but his mind as a child said, my dad’s a huge risk taker. I’m going to get to my comfort level and stop risking anything. And fourth quarter is very risky in the stock market. And so he didn’t know why. So then he called me on December 15. Well, he sent me a message the next day saying I drove back home. It was about an hour drive from our office. And he says, I’ve never felt that sense of peace in my life. He says it was an incredible feeling. And then on December 15th, he called me to tell me today was his last day. He’s taken the last two weeks off, he says, but I had my best year ever.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
That’s incredible. So do you work with, so I know that you have this e-learning, that’s the way I did it. Then you can also work with people one-on-one in the office. You do the zoom version of it as well, right? And then you do group sessions, you mentioned that. And people don’t have to talk about their trauma because That’s right. Actually, it’s not like therapy. You’re not unwinding the past. Actually, can you talk about how it works? So it’s about the alpha brainwaves and how you get people into a resting state.

Dr. Don Wood:
Yeah. We have four brainwave states. We have beta, alpha, theta, Delta, beta is operating about 15 to 30 hertz, pretty active cycling. So if you’re in a very stressed out mode, you’re going to be in a very high active beta brainwave state. So the mind’s taking in tremendous amounts of detail. When you move into alpha alpha’s between seven and 14 hertz, that’s where the mind is very focused and relaxed. So when I work with athletes, I say, I want you performing an alpha because when you’re focused and relaxed, you’re going to accomplish a lot more. And so theta is between four and seven hertz, and that’s the processing state. So when you go to sleep at night, you’ll go into a dominant theta state, your mind’s processing what you experienced during the day filing it basically. And then when you go into Delta, delta is the maintenance sleep and is below four hertz.
So the more delta sleep you get, the more maintenance you’re getting done. So a lot of people who are not have a lot of trauma, don’t get much delta sleep. So those are the four different brainwave states. So if you’re in a traumatic event, you’re going to be in a high beta state. So now how’s the memory being recorded in high beta? So when you sit in a typical therapy session and you start talking about your trauma, what brainwave state do you think you’re going to be in when you’re talking about this beta memory, you’re going to be in beta because you’re going to be stressed out talking about it. So if you remember going through the program, we don’t even talk about trauma for two hours. We haven’t even asked you to think about a trauma event. So by the time you’re two hours in your mind is very relaxed and focused.
I’ve educated you on the science of how your brain works. And then when you get to it, then we’ll say, let’s bring in a particular event that you had experienced. And I said, if that event was going to be made into a movie, I want the trailer, I want a 62nd to two minute highlight reel of it. While you’re in that state, we have you processing it, and then it goes from a beta memory into the dominant brainwave that you’re in now, which is alpha, takes out all the intensity and calms it down. Then it restores it into the memory system without all the intensity. So I can do that, like I said, one-on-one in groups who I’m in a group, I’ll bring one person up and show them the technique that we use and you actually watch the person on stage go into that shift. And a lot of times, especially when we’re in a group, they know everybody. So everybody knows each other. So they know it’s real. They’re seeing somebody, that colleague that they know going through this and seeing the shift. And then I’ll say, now the whole group’s going to do that same exercise, come up with a memory that you want to do that with. And I take them all through it and nobody’s sharing it. They’re just seeing it visually.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
So with this increased focus on mental health at work, have you seen companies reach out to you more to address the underlying causes of whatever’s holding people back?

Dr. Don Wood:
We’re just starting to now. It’s really interesting. It seems to have become just in the last few months, starting to get a lot more inquiries about how would this work? Where could we do this? So I think it’s going to be a big area for us coming up.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Yeah, I mean it makes perfect sense to me. I get it. I mean, to give you an idea, the memory that one of them that I worked through was the memory of my dad dying, which was sudden and traumatic, and he was taken away in an ambulance. And for years, hearing an ambulance siren made me panic and I would freeze up. And the day after I did your program, the siren didn’t affect me anymore. Isn’t that amazing? I was still thinking about my dad, right? So it’s not like you

Dr. Don Wood:
Don’t forget it disconnected,

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Right? I didn’t forget it, but it wasn’t panic anymore. It was just, oh, look at that. The siren doesn’t freak me out. That’s new. It was shocking really,

Dr. Don Wood:
Because before the siren would’ve activated the memory. The memory then would’ve created the emotion. And the purpose of the emotion is to get you into an action. So the purpose of fear or anger is to cause you to either run or fight. So if you hear that siren and you feel fear, what your mind was trying to get you to do was to do something about your father dying. It was seeing it in real time, but you can’t do anything about it. But it’s going to keep creating the emotion to try to fix the problem. It’s trying to call you into an action. It no longer realizes there’s no action necessary. So it stops using the emotion. When people say to me, I have depression, I say, tell me what you’re angry about. They’ll say, well, I’m not angry. I’m depressed. And I go, well, depression is anger.
So your mind has been trying to get you into an action by making you angry. Every time I think about what happened to me, I get so angry. What is your mind trying to get you to do? Stop it from happening because your subconscious survival brain operates in the present. So it sees memory in real time. So it thinks there’s an action possible because it’s in such high definition. And so if your mind keeps calling you into an action by making you angry about something that happened to you, but you don’t answer the call, how does your mind protect you? It stops using any emotions, depression, the absence of emotion. It didn’t get the action it was calling for, so to protect you, it shuts you down. Very D way of looking at depression,

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
A very different way of looking at depression. It’s really interesting. So tell us about the research that you’ve done on your program and its effectiveness. What have you learned?

Dr. Don Wood:
This is so exciting. You’re a research person. You get this is, I said, I need the science behind it to prove what I’m saying is actually accurate. We have tremendous testimonials and people like yourself, very credible people who are saying, yes, this is what it did for me, but people still want some science. So I started to use DNA to show because my theory all along was inflammation rises, immune system goes down, neuroplasticity goes down. That’s the response to trauma. So we do a pre DNA test, take them through the program. They go through all the audios for 30 days, and then we retest ’em to show what changes. And so we just published the first people who have gone through the study and we are getting 50 plus percent reduction in inflammation. A hundred plus percent increase in immune system response. Phenomenal. Totally validates what I’ve been saying.
And then we did a brain mapping study. We haven’t published that one yet. We’ve just published the DNA results. The brain mapping shows that we’re getting an average through the study of a 45% increase in brain plasticity, which is huge because that’s showing that as long as you’re in a fight or flight state, you’re in a constant stressed out state. Your mind is not going to do maintenance, which is immune system. It’s also not going to focus on learning anything new and expanding and adapting because it’s in a constant fight or flight state That’s not good conditions to heal.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
That’s really interesting because I was just reading the State of the Nation report that was published by a committee that a professor out of Tulane University put together, and he was looking at all of these different data points to measure how our nation is doing and from a productivity standpoint, economic prosperity standpoint, we’re doing very well, but we are actually worst in the world when it comes to young people, mental illness, depression, overdose and addiction, suicide anxiety for young people in particular. This is what this particular report was pointing out. It is bad and getting worse. Cut to a couple days later. I’m interviewing the CEO of Denny’s for this podcast, and she’s talking about that. That is top of mind for her because her workforce is young people. The wait staff at Denny’s is 18 to 24 year olds, and she’s seeing these issues play out in her workforce, and it’s something that she feels she can’t ignore because of the impact to her business results. It feels like organizations that in particular have that workforce, I guess that’s retail, maybe hospitality, that would be particularly impactful to them driving results to be able to get their people to unlock their potential by removing that mental block that’s holding them back.

Dr. Don Wood:
Oh, just thinking about productivity, absenteeism, all of those things. A lot of these people who have these anxiety and panic attacks, I mean, it’ll shut them down for days and then they don’t show up or they lose their jobs and they go on to somewhere else or they’re not performing well with the customers. So if the customer comes in and they’re dealing with anxiety, the customer could say, well, that person was so rude to me, but they don’t understand that that young person is freaking out. They’re not comfortable in their own skin. And then if that person says something to them that activates them and then all of a sudden they’re not going to perform well and then the customer has a bad experience because the customers are coming in with their own trauma. Right.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
And we’ve seen that in our work too, because a lot of what we encourage and teach is around giving feedback and people with anxiety when they receive negative feedback that can trigger a trauma response and they receive the feedback poorly, which then someone who doesn’t know any better says how unprofessional of them.

Speaker 3:
Exactly. It’s

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Just viewed as unprofessional behavior when in reality, something much deeper is going on that can’t be talked about. And the mental health at work issue that we’ve been hearing about and reading about for the last few years, people say, bring your whole self to work, be your authentic self. But really we haven’t equipped leaders to actually know what to do with that information. When people bring their whole self to work and say, I’m suffering from depression, anxiety, and addiction managers sit there stunned and confused, and then probably with some bias that will negatively impact that person’s career most likely. Right?

Dr. Don Wood:
Exactly. And the problem is they don’t know what it is. So they’ll say, oh, they’ve got anxiety. Well, they’re just typical young person. They’ve got anxiety, they don’t understand it’s coming from trauma. That’s why I say 80% of these issues that we’re dealing with are trauma based. And so if you don’t address the problem and address the root cause of the problem, you’ll deal with the anxiety. Anxiety is a symptom of the problem. Depression is a symptom. I even say addiction is the symptom. But they treat the symptoms the same way they were treating my daughter’s wasn’t the problem. Crohn’s was the symptom of the problem. The Crohn’s was created by the trauma creating inflammation, and until we got the trauma resolved, she would’ve ended up with colostomy bank because it just kept cutting out pieces of her intestines and that wasn’t solving the problem. It was a nervous system dysregulation constantly turning on and activating the nervous system, which if the nervous system gets activated, its immediate response is inflammation, we’re in danger. We need to protect the system. So everybody says inflammation’s at the root cause of all these diseases, but what they missed is it’s not the inflammation, it’s the chronic inflammation that’s at the root cause. Acute inflammation is fine because it’s there to design to protect you, but it stays turned on. That’s the problem when it becomes chronic.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
So what happened to your two daughters? Autoimmune diseases

Dr. Don Wood:
Both gone once we resolve. We didn’t know that she had trauma when she was six, between six and eight. She had never disclosed it to us as typical sexual abuse was part of that. So a lot of people with dealing with sexual abuse never talk about it. My wife dealt with it as well. She didn’t tell me about it until right before we got married. So sexual abuse is the number one pandemic in the world. So a lot of these kids are dealing with it, and sometimes they don’t even identify with what it is. They don’t know what it is. But if they do know what it is, it’s going to show up in their health conditions. It has to because the system’s constantly trying to protect you. And if you’ve got a system, your survival brain, your subconscious mind is brilliant, but it operates in the present.
So everything to your subconscious is now and memory is seen as now. And if your memory comes in high definition, it’s going to do something to protect you and put you into a fight or flight response. You describe that to your doctor as anxiety, panic attacks, post-traumatic stress. And so they immediately go to their manual, say, post-traumatic stress, Xanax. That’s what they go to. And they say, and all they’re doing is blocking the memory. And so now you take your Xanax, now you don’t feel anything, and then the memory comes back in because the Xanax wears off. You need another one and you need another one, and you need another one because they never got to what was starting the problem.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Well, this has been such a joy to be able to chat with you in this way and to help our listeners learn about what it is that you’ve done. It gave me a lot of value. I couldn’t recommend it enough. So if it’s something that you’re interested in or for your organization, I would definitely check it out. My last question is always my favorite one, which is I would love to know what’s something that you don’t get asked about very often in these types of interviews that you wish you were asked more often?

Dr. Don Wood:
Wow. Great question. It’s not a gotcha question either. It should be an easy one.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Well, it’s not an easy one. People struggle to think of something, but it’s intended to give you a platform to talk about the thing that you wish you could talk about more often.

Dr. Don Wood:
I think probably I’ll go to addiction because I think addiction is really misunderstood. Is addiction a disease? And I go, no, it’s not a disease. It’s a code. It was a code as a resource to stop a problem. And the problem is, is the more you repeat it, the stronger the code gets. And so the way I explain it, people say, well, they’re just going out to get high. And I say, well, no. So Jessica, if you and I were standing together and I was shaking your hand and I was squeezing it so hard that you were in so much pain. And I said, if you just take a drink of this, I’ll let go. So you take a drink in so much pain and I let go. What’s going to happen? You’re going to get a dopamine hit because you feel good. But is that why you took the drink?
You took the drink to stop the pain, but then everybody will want to shame the person saying, oh, you just did it because you want to go out and party and get high. They’re trying to cover up their pain. And so that’s where it’s coming from. So I wish people understood that addiction is a solvable problem. I just had a young lady in who had been in addiction, her parents brought her in. They spent two weeks here. We took her through everything. And when she was leaving, I said to her, I said, okay, now you’ve got how we treat addiction, how we’re going to talk about addiction. When somebody says to you, oh, I heard you’re an addict, what are you going to say to them? And this is the words I gave her. I experienced the symptoms of addiction, but I’ve recovered.
I’m not in recovery. I recovered. I never liked that I’m in recovery. You mean for the rest of my life I’m in recovery and I can never get out of recovery. That doesn’t make any sense. There’s no other disease in the world that they talk about like that. So I said to her, I said, if somebody asks you that, you just say, have you had covid? And they’ll say, yes, I had covid. Oh, so you have covid. Well, no, I had covid. But you have it though. No, I had it. And you recovered, right? Yes. So you still don’t have covid because you got it doesn’t mean you still have it. Right? Your system’s designed to heal you and it healed me.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
So does that woman drink normally or does she just not drink anymore because she doesn’t desire to drink?

Dr. Don Wood:
So right now, she’s probably not going to be drinking at all, right? But eventually once she gets, I say to her, I said, you can go back to drinking at some point if you want to because now you understand what addiction is. Addiction was as a solution to pain. As long as you’re not having pain, you can go back to drinking. Drinking was never your problem. The pain was the problem. So again,

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
We don’t, drinking was the solution.

Dr. Don Wood:
So drinking can be a social thing and people like to do it, but where it became a problem is when it was solving their pain, and then it became got coded in that this is the solution to my pain. And then it keeps repeating it, and then they can’t control it. But as long as you don’t have the pain, and I’m not saying I want them going back immediately, I want them to rebuild some, like you said, your past coming down the mountain, you got to start building some new neural pathways to make sure you got healthy pathways. And then once you feel like you’re in that situation and you want to start drinking again, now heroin, no, if you’ve got a heroin problem, we’re not going to say, well, you can healthily in a healthy way, take heroin. No, that’s not good. But drinking if you want to, but again, I say you don’t need it.
Here’s something that’d be really fascinating. I want to explain, and this is what I talk about with the veterans, is the veterans now are using THC. That’s the big thing. Put ’em on TH, C because that’s going to help them feel better. So when I ask people who take it, I say, when you have THC, how do you feel? They say, well, it chills me out. And I said, so THC has almost the exact chemical structure to the molecule inside your own brain called anandamide is an endocannabinoid. And so that is the natural bliss molecule inside your system. So whenever you run or exercise or do something, you’ll produce that endocannabinoid because now it’s chilling you out. They call it the runner’s high, right? It’s a natural way to calm your system down after a stressed event. Even running is you’re stressing your system. So now you need to chill it out so it will produce that anandamide to chill you out. I was reading this research article, and they said a lot of these veterans, they realized who have post-traumatic stress cannot naturally produce the endocannabinoid. That’s why they’re using the THC because it mimics it and chills them out. But what they missed in the whole thing is why is the veteran with post-traumatic stress not creating anandamide? Because they’re still being chased by the lion.
There’s still in a stress response. So if you’re being chased by a lion, what are the chances that your system’s going to try to chill you out? Zero. It thinks it still needs to run, so it’s not going to naturally produce it. You take the post-traumatic stress, which is the memory running constantly. We reset the memory, the endocannabinoid system will turn back on. That’s

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
What they, and then you don’t need the THC anymore.

Dr. Don Wood:
Nope. You can naturally do it. And that’s what the veterans are seeing, because now they can naturally calm down. They don’t need anything artificial. And the only reason they couldn’t do it before was because as far as their mind was concerned, they’re still in battle. We don’t want to chill out this veteran who’s in a gunfight. We want to get him high and alert in a high beta state. Keep him alert, keep him motivated, right? Driven. You’re not going to, the system is so smart, it’s not going to naturally do that until it feels calm in the alpha brainwave state. That’s what we do.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Well, thank you so much for doing what you do. Where can people go to learn more about tip?

Dr. Don Wood:
So come to our Inspired Performance Institute website, inspired performance institute.com, and you can find out all about it. There’s a ton of testimonials on there. You can call in as well if you want to. The numbers are all on there. Or send in an email and we’ll send you information or call you and talk to you.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Awesome. Thank you so much, Dr. Don Wood. It was a pleasure.

Dr. Don Wood:
Thanks so much, Jessica. I appreciate it.