I've spent a lot of time in my life thinking something was wrong with me. Not in a dramatic way. More like a low-grade background hum of “I know better than this, so why do I keep doing it?”
That question followed me through a lot of years. And for most of them, I filed the answer under discipline, or character, or just being a work in progress. Which — fine. But it also meant I was always kind of waiting to become the person who finally had it together.
Dr. Izzy Justice has done over 22,000 functional brain scans. And his answer to that question isn't what I expected. Your worst decisions, your worst moments, the times you said something you'd never say if you were thinking straight — those aren't character flaws. They're brain state. That's not a way of letting yourself off the hook. It's actually more demanding than that, because it means there's something real to understand and work with.
What Brain Noise Actually Does to Your Decision Making
Your brain runs on electricity. That's not a metaphor — it's literally the same type of electricity that powers your phone. And Dr. Izzy measures it on a scale from zero to a hundred. Zero is sleep. A hundred is the moment you're yelling and want to throw something. Every higher human ability — creativity, memory access, real presence — happens around 10.
When your brain climbs past 40, 50, 60 hertz, your access to the hippocampus starts dropping. The hippocampus is where your memories and learned behavior live. All the therapy you've done. The values you actually hold. The person you've been working to become. At 80 or 90 hertz, you have maybe five percent access to any of it. You're in survival mode. You'll say things you don't mean. You'll make calls that look nothing like you. Not because you're broken, but because your brain at that frequency is doing the only thing it knows how to do — protect you.
This is what Dr. Izzy calls brain noise. And most of us have normalized a baseline that's way higher than we realize.
Why We're All Running Hotter Than We Should Be
He said something in this conversation that I keep coming back to. He doesn't think it has ever been harder, in all of human history, to be mentally healthy than it is right now. Not because we're weaker or more broken. Because the volume of negative stimuli we consume on any given day has no historical comparison.
Every scroll, every news cycle, every text thread, every time you open an app and absorb someone else's bad day — it all goes into the same brain that's already carrying the electrical residue of your biggest traumas. And trauma, in Dr. Izzy's framework, isn't just a wound. It's an electrical earthquake. Anytime something in your environment echoes that original event — a smell, a tone of voice, a feeling that rhymes with something old — your brain surges. Automatically. Whether you want it to or not.
That's why you can do years of work on yourself and still get completely leveled by something that “shouldn't” bother you anymore. The brain isn't judging whether your reaction is proportionate. It's just protecting.
I recorded this episode about eleven weeks after having my third baby. Three boys under five. I'd recently let our nanny go — something I'd been resisting for a while, but eventually the conditions made it impossible to ignore. My life got a lot smaller and a lot louder at the same time. And I told Dr. Izzy I've been happier than I've been in years, which surprised even me. He explained why: when you're in survival mode caring for small kids, your sensory input is constantly occupied by immediate, physical, real life. There's no bandwidth left to marinate in other people's highlight reels or the ambient dread of news you can't do anything about. The noise just doesn't get in as easily.
I'm not saying the answer is to have more kids and delete the internet. But the research behind it is real.
About Dr. Izzy Justice
Dr. Izzy Justice has four degrees and has spent decades studying what actually happens in the human brain in the seconds before someone does something extraordinary — or falls apart. Not in a clinical MRI where you have to lie perfectly still, but in live performance moments: athletes right before a game-winning shot, executives before a high-stakes call. He's done over 22,000 of these functional brain scans. His book Life Explained: Chasing 10 Hertz became a bestseller, and his app Neuro580 puts dozens of his neurohacks in one place. He's the kind of guest who makes you feel like you got information that should have been part of every school curriculum.
What Dr. Izzy Actually Taught in This Episode
The Zero to 100 Scale Nobody Told You About
The brain's electrical activity runs on a measurable spectrum. Sleep is zero to five. The sweet spot for every higher human function — memory access, creativity, presence, performance — sits around 10 hertz. Most people are running somewhere between 30 and 60 on a regular day without realizing it. Dr. Izzy has the brain scan data to back this up, which is the part that makes it land differently than the usual “be more present” advice.
Brain State Is What's Actually Running Your Choices
Dr. Izzy has seen genuinely good people do terrible things. He's seen people everyone wrote off do quietly kind ones. The variable isn't their values. It's where their brain was on the electrical scale in that moment. When you understand that, it changes how you see your own worst moments — and everyone else's too.
Trauma as an Electrical Event
His take on trauma is different from what most psychology-adjacent conversations offer. Trauma is an electrical earthquake, and the brain records everything. Every time something in your current life echoes that original event, all those associated memories surge at once. This is why healing isn't always linear. The brain isn't deciding whether your reaction makes sense. It's pattern matching at electrical speed.
You Only Need to Be at 10 Hertz Twice a Day
This one was genuinely a relief. Dr. Izzy is explicit that trying to maintain peak brain state all day is not the goal and not realistic. The goal is to identify one or two moments in your day that actually matter — a hard conversation, a creative task, time with someone you love — and get yourself to 10 hertz in the seconds leading up to those moments. Your average is good enough for average moments. He actually says that out loud. That reframe alone is worth the listen.
The Neurohacks Don't Require Anything You Don't Already Have
The two techniques he taught in this episode use nothing but your hands and your attention. The 1010 — counting up to ten as fast as you can in your head, then back down to one as slowly as possible — took me about fifteen seconds. Afterward I used the words “floating” and “calm” to describe it. The finger crawl uses tactile sensory input to interrupt a spike. These aren't things you have to buy or schedule. They're built into you. You've just never been shown how to use them this way.
What Most Conversations About This Get Wrong
We've spent a lot of time in personal growth trying to fix character. More discipline, stronger habits, better values. And none of that is useless. But if your baseline brain state is chronically elevated, a lot of it won't stick the way you want. You can know exactly who you want to be and still not be able to access that person when it counts.
Dr. Izzy compares psychology to a road atlas. It was genuinely useful before we had GPS. It gave us language for things we were experiencing and couldn't name. But it's an observational tool — it describes what the eye can see. What's happening electrically in the brain is where the behavior actually starts. Not after. Not as a result. At the source.
That's not a knock on therapy or psychology. It's a different level of the same question, and they work better together than separately. But understanding the electrical layer means you stop treating every bad decision as evidence of who you fundamentally are. Sometimes it's just a brain at 85 hertz doing exactly what a brain at 85 hertz does.
How to Use This
Pick one or two moments in the next few days that actually matter to you. Not everything — just one or two. In the minute before that moment, notice roughly where you think you are on the zero to one hundred scale. You don't have to be precise. Then try the 1010. Count up to ten as fast as you can in your head, then back down to one as slowly as you can go. Do it twice if you need more.
The longer game is looking at your chronic inputs. Not to eliminate everything, but to understand that every piece of negative stimuli you absorb goes somewhere in a brain that's already carrying a lot. You get to decide how much more to add.
From This Episode
- Dr. Izzy Justice's website — drizzyjustice.com
- Life Explained: Chasing 10 Hertz — Dr. Izzy's bestselling book
- Neuro580 app — Neurohacks organized by brain state level
- Mind Love Episode 412 — The nervous system episode that pairs well with this one
- Mind Love Episode 388 — On trauma patterns and why the body keeps the score
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