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Exploring Peak Performance with Neuroscience Expert Louisa Nicola

I am excited to connect with one of my favorite neuroscience experts today! Louisa Nicola is at the intersection of neuroscience and athleticism. She helps to bring a fresh understanding of what it takes to achieve peak performance through science-based tools and methods. She is also the host of The Neuro Experience podcast, which focuses on brain health, neuroscience, longevity, and athletics. Louisa knows how to take complicated subjects related to brain physiology and hormones and explain them so that people can fully understand and appreciate them. In this episode, she and I dive into her background. We speak about her three pillars for peak performance, alcohol, and how sleep impacts the glymphatic system. We get into strategies for better sleep, the perimenopausal brain, how chronobiology impacts sleep, how to address jet lag, and how exercise improves brain performance and health. We also talk about the best foods and supplements for brain health and how creatine improves performance. I hope you enjoy listening to today’s conversation as much as I did recording it!

Connect with Louisa Nicola

On Twitter and Instagram The Neuro Experience Podcast
Book mentioned The XX Brain by Dr. Lisa Mosconi

Transcript

Cynthia Thurlow: Well, Louisa, I’ve been so looking forward to this conversation. Welcome to Everyday Wellness.

Louisa Nicola: I’m so excited to be here and likewise, I’ve been really looking forward to it.

Cynthia Thurlow: Yeah. Share with the listeners a bit about your background because I know that you started as a competitive triathlete. You were this incredible nationally, internationally recognized athlete, and then you had an accident and the trajectory of your life really shifted.

Louisa Nicola: Yeah, no, that’s correct. Back in my younger days, I always say, that was 40 pounds ago, I was a triathlete and it was my first love. At the time, I was doing an exercise physiology degree, so that’s what I thought I was going to do. And I just loved the body. Four weeks prior to going to Beijing, I had an accident. I was hit by a car and I was hospitalized and had a few broken bones, which I had to get fixed up. Because of that, I had to forfeit my title. During that recovery phase, which I was first told, you may not walk again, then I was told, okay, we’ll get you up and running, but you’re going to be in a critical condition. I never let that get me down. I spent a lot of time, obviously, in rehab and in hospital, got myself back up, and requalified for the Championship Series in Auckland.  I ended up qualifying, obviously, and then coming 13th. That’s when I really understood that you don’t have limitations. The only limitations are what is within your mind and in your brain.

Cynthia, so I had done exercise physiology. I’d gone through and done a master’s degree. Funnily enough, my master’s degree was in mathematical modeling. So, it was a pure mathematics degree. During that, I was writing about neurons firing because I fell in love with the brain. That then led into medicine and neurophysiology, which is rightfully so what I am today and what I do today. But I wanted to marry the two. I was an athlete and I used to look out and think to myself, okay, there’re amazing tennis players out there are amazing footballers and soccer players, why isn’t anybody looking after their brain? That’s when I realized that there was a niche for Neuro Athletics, which is my company. I kind of married the two elite performance and neurology put together and that’s where we live now, at the intersection of those two.

Cynthia Thurlow: Well, I think it’s such a beautiful combination of two areas of interest of yours, and one of the things I love about you and your podcast and the information you share is that you take complicated subjects, but you put it in such a way that people can fully understand and appreciate brain physiology, hormones, all of these things that come together. You speak quite a bit about these pillars of brain health. I think starting from a place talking about sleep is of particular interest. Most of my listeners are north of 35 years old and sleep in many ways can suddenly become elusive. But let’s unpack the physiology of sleep and better explain things. Because, as an example, I was speaking to a patient earlier this morning who used to get by on 3 to 4 hours a night of sleep, and 12 years later she’s wondering why she’s having some of these issues of metabolic health, insulin sensitivity and trying to explain to her that the research as I know it is we make our brains in our 60s, 70s and beyond in middle age. If we’re not taking care of ourselves, it can have a profound net impact on the way that our brains age and the degree of inflammation we experience.

Louisa Nicola: Yeah, you’re completely right. We do make our brains, our 60, 70-year-old brains in our 30s and in our 40s. So, that’s quite scary, right? Because when you look at the human brain, it starts to atrophy. Atrophy just means a decrease in cell size and it starts to decrease in cell size at the age of 30. The wonderful thing is it doesn’t have to be at an alarming rate. We can slow the progression of this atrophy through various lifestyle interventions. The three pillars that I speak about, which slow the progression of this atrophy is sleep, exercise, and nutrition. We’ll go into all of them, obviously, starting with sleep. But I have to tell you that if you aren’t in your 30s, and if you aren’t looking after your brain in these ways and taking these three pillars into place, you will be up for a challenge, and one thing that was really prominent to me, I was just flying around the world, literally. I went to Australia, and then I went to LA, Sacramento, Vegas. I was on a little podcast tour myself. It just wreaked havoc on my circadian rhythm, on my hormones. Sorry to all the men listening, but when you get a disruption in your circadian rhythm, the menstrual cycle gets put on hold. For somebody who tracks it avidly like me at every day, it then becomes like you get it a week later. So, many things are just disrupted due to circadian shifts and sleep deprivation.

One really amazing thing about sleep is the way you want to think about it is we are going through a replenishment and repair process when we close our eyes and go to sleep if we’re doing it well. Unfortunately, around 70% to 80% of the US population isn’t doing it too well. Some of us that 70% to 80% is sedating themselves through THC or through alcohol, which they think they’re sleeping through, but they’re not, it’s just sedation, and they’re not getting sleep. The reason why sleep is so important, and I’ll try and break this down really easily, is for these two reasons, we go through different cycles as we sleep. We have four cycles or four stages. When we’re falling asleep is stage one, stage two is when we’re in light sleep, then stage three and four are the most important. We cycle through these four literally all throughout the night. We really want to focus on stage three and four. So, stage three is our slow wave sleep or deep sleep. It’s called slow wave because on an EEG, and this is out my primary tool of use as a neurophysiologist, an EEG, which is that cap that you put on your head, there’s all these leads coming out of it, but assesses the brain wave activity. When you’re in deep sleep, the waves on the EEG are really big and long, and we call them slow wave sleep. When you’re in this stage of sleep, two particular things happen. One, we have the release of all of our hormones. I’m a female and so are you and so most of our hormones during this stage is estrogen, which we need, it’s evidently linked to the menstrual…

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