An Interview With Candice Georgiadis
Sleep/Recovery — I mentioned this earlier, but focus on improving the quality of your sleep by improving daily behaviors and habits. We all know the basics but life frequently gets in the way. Go to sleep and wake up at a consistent time every night, avoid caffeine and stimulants after lunchtime, no late night snacks or meals, alcohol absolutely destroys sleep architecture — I know this one makes me unpopular but alcohol consumption is awful for sleep. Once you hit a cadence and recognize how much better you feel well slept, you’ll never want to go back.
As a part of my series about the “5 Things Anyone Can Do To Optimize Their Mental Wellness”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Dr. Erik Won.
Dr. Erik Won is the President & Chief Medical Officer of Wave Neuroscience, a biotechnology company developing innovative solutions for mental disorders like PTSD.
Dr. Won served as a U.S. Navy Flight Surgeon for Marine Medium Helicopter Squadron 268 and became CTO of Medical at Boeing, a Fortune 50 company, for nearly a decade before joining Wave Neuroscience. He holds an MBA from USC Marshall School of Business and an MPH from Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Dr. Won has been published in numerous peer-reviewed journals.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you share with us the backstory about what brought you to your specific career path?
Sure, my clinical career started in the military as a Flight Surgeon who deployed with a Marine Expeditionary Unit. We had the unfortunate distinction of sustaining some of the first casualties of Operation Iraqi Freedom and as a byproduct I spent the next stage of my career looking for something that could help my brothers and sisters who were struggling with the signature injuries of that conflict — TBI and PTSD. After completing my residency at Harvard I moved on to the Boeing Company as their Chief Physician for the Southwest Region and eventually got promoted to be the Chief Technology Officer for Health Services where I interfaced with the technology we utilize at my current organization, Wave Neuroscience. I was intensely skeptical at first, but over a few years came around to realizing that this represented a true inflection point in the way we could care for brain injuries and optimize brain function. It’s been an enormous privilege to work with the team and I’ve enjoyed every minute of it.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you started your career?
Kind of a funny story,I really enjoyed my work at Boeing and was perfectly content to stay there for the rest of my career. It’s a great organization and I loved my job, but as I was visiting these centers seeing a bunch of veterans improve and experience these remarkable changes, the stakeholders started recruiting me to join the leadership team. One day I was kind of confronted by a Navy SEAL Master Chief who challenged me and said “WHAT DO YOU STAND FOR BROTHER????” He was putting his finger in my chest, “ARE YOU GOING TO TAKE CARE OF SNOTTY EXECUTIVES AT BOEING THE REST OF YOUR LIFE OR JUMP BACK IN THE TRENCHES AND HELP YOUR BROTHERS AND SISTERS?” The military is known for its no nonsense direct culture and this was no exception. While it upset me at the time, I went back home and spoke to my wife who said, “He’s right, this is all you think about and talk about.” At the end of the day, what really drew me in was purpose and mission, this was something that was so important on a global level, to help vulnerable populations with what are currently believed to be intractable conditions, all we needed was some data and academic discipline. And so, I joined the company and it’s been a full sprint ever since.
Can you share a story with us about the most humorous mistake you made when you were first starting? What lesson or take-away did you learn from that?
This is a long and painful list! The story that comes to mind is when a special operations veteran swore to me that his vision and marksmanship scores got better after a week of treatment with neuromodulation (we customize brain stimulation protocols for every individual). We were friends so I kind of poked him a little that this sounded like science fiction and was just his imagination. Not to be outdone, he brought me a letter from a neuro-ophthalmologist advising that there were indeed objective gains in visual acuity, contrast enhancement, and kinetic perimetry testing. I was humbled, had never even heard of these terms before, but I had to extend a mea culpa (in fairness to myself, the specialist was as surprised by the findings as me). Lesson learned and take-away is to always remain open to what’s possible, listen to your patient, particularly when innovating a new technology, nobody knows their bodies as well as the patient so if they’re giving you honest and candid feedback you better listen.
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?
I’m grateful to so many people it’s hard to narrow it down. On a personal level, of course it’s my wife, Amy. She puts up with my craziness and constant travel, does an amazing job taking care of our kids and somehow stays sane. She is my source of inspiration and joy. Professionally, I’d have to say Wave Neuroscience’s CEO, Fred Walke. He’s just an amazing guy to work with and has somehow found a way to accelerate our company’s velocity and trajectory. He’s brilliant, a relentless worker, but most importantly a high character guy who has been a joy to work with.
What advice would you suggest to your colleagues in your industry to thrive and avoid burnout?
Find a way to protect your sleep. It’s foundational to so many short and long-term health benefits and avoiding burnout. To be more specific, remember to honor your biology and circadian rhythm — get blue light in the morning, which means getting outside for at least 30 minutes. Glass can filter out blue spectrum light (450–500nm) so we need to get outside. Early morning light (low angle and low horizon) is the richest in blue spectrum light so morning is the ideal time to be outside. There are photoreceptors in our eyes called melanopsin retinal ganglion cells that, when saturated with blue light, send a signal to the pineal gland to release a sleep hormone (melatonin) 15–16 hours later. If you think back to our neolithic ancestors, our first biological cue to wake up and start our circadian rhythm is exposure to sunlight. The second part of that is listening to your body late at night when it’s time to sleep. At the first sign of night-time somnolence we have to get into bed and sleep.
We’ve developed all kinds of ways to sabotage that process, whether it’s binge watching Netflix, overusing our phones/tablets late at night, not getting enough blue light in the morning, or getting too much blue light at night (through artificial lights and screen time), it shouldn’t be a surprise that sleep drugs are among the best selling pharmaceuticals of all time. These frequently don’t work as intended though, or have harmful unintended consequences. While sleep drugs might help you to fall asleep faster, they appear to be detrimental to sleep architecture, blocking people from getting deep restorative sleep. It’s really hard to cheat mother nature, rigorously conducted studies have shown that you really need the endogenous process to occur to get deep, restful, and restorative sleep.
What advice would you give to other leaders about how to create a fantastic work culture?
This might sound obvious, but to create a positive culture you really need to cut out the bad. It sounds simple but it’s not easy if you’re too close and have established relationships in the workplace with people who might be toxic. If there are destructive personalities within a team, there are guaranteed inefficiencies and lost productivity as a byproduct. Our role as leaders is to eliminate roadblocks and allow our teammates to accomplish their missions as quickly and efficiently as possible. It’s a lot harder if there’s a malignant person who stands in the way. That’s not to say that we want “yes” people in the boardroom, far from it — we want diverse experiences and rich backgrounds who are willing to collaborate and work together, disagree openly and professionally, but intuitively most of us have a sense of when someone is dragging people around them down. Our experience has been that when we cut out the bad, everyone else takes flight and flourishes. I’ve been astonished at the talent that blossoms when good people are given a chance.
Ok thank you for all that. Now let’s move to the main focus of our interview. Mental health is often looked at in binary terms; those who are healthy and those who have mental illness. The truth, however, is that mental wellness is a huge spectrum. Even those who are “mentally healthy” can still improve their mental wellness. From your experience or research, what are five steps that each of us can take to improve or optimize our mental wellness. Can you please share a story or example for each.
1. Sleep/Recovery — I mentioned this earlier, but focus on improving the quality of your sleep by improving daily behaviors and habits. We all know the basics but life frequently gets in the way. Go to sleep and wake up at a consistent time every night, avoid caffeine and stimulants after lunchtime, no late night snacks or meals, alcohol absolutely destroys sleep architecture — I know this one makes me unpopular but alcohol consumption is awful for sleep. Once you hit a cadence and recognize how much better you feel well slept, you’ll never want to go back.
2. Nutrition — The fuel you put in your body really does matter. Diet and nutrition is such a provocative topic, people are passionate about different approaches and macronutrient profiles. I’m a big believer in customizing programs to the individual, avoiding “one size fits all” approaches, and that certainly applies to diet and nutrition. Best advice would be to find a program that works for you and something you can stick with long term.
3. Exercise/Activity — This one is obvious but there are few more universally beneficial things for physical and mental wellness than exercise. Do something you love and enjoy, try to get out and do something vigorous 3–4 times per week (minimum). Find a workout partner that will keep you accountable and committed, but most importantly commit to your health and longevity.
4. Connectedness — This one is a little more difficult to measure, but genuine and authentic connection to friends and family has profound implications for our health and there’s academically rigorous and robust science demonstrating it’s vital importance. In fact, there’s an emerging area of science dedicated to this called “social determinants” — who you surround yourself with has a profound impact on long term health end outcomes so pick your friends wisely. As an illustration of the importance of social determinants, a CEO of a large insurance company once advised me that they save money by paying for transportation to send an elderly patient to a senior living center, where they have a community of friends and connection. This is the most effective medicine for combating loneliness and depression; they use substantially less antidepressants and psychopharma, and the benefits extend well beyond mental health as it helps with cardiovascular and cerebrovascular endpoints like heart disease and stroke.
5. Electroencephalogam (EEG) as a “braincare” self-monitoring tool — The EEG is a magnificent tool, the American Neuropsychiatric Association endorsed EEG as an adjunct for diagnosing depression highlighting studies that demonstrated sensitivity as high as 93% and specificity of 88%. The American Association of Neurology recommends qEEG to assess learning disorders (90% sensitivity and 96% specificity for ADHD). As a frame of reference, the electrocardiogram (ECG) used around the world to detect cardiac disease has a sensitivity of 51% and specificity of 66% for detecting coronary artery disease. The EEG should be part of everyone’s annual physical and health assessment, it’s woefully underutilized as not enough physicians know how to use it properly. Wave Neuroscience’s contribution to the science is making this a very simple study (10–15 minutes) with easy to understand reports and biometrics. Similar to the evolution of genetic testing, where 3 billion base pairs is now converted into a simple and easy to interpret report, we’ve taken complex neuroscience and made the EEG accessible and easy to understand for both the patient and clinician. (For readers interested in receiving the EEG experience mentioned above, visit www.waveneuro.com to find a credentialed center.)
How about teens and pre teens. Are there any specific new ideas you would suggest for teens and pre teens to optimize their mental wellness?
It’s important for parents to understand that teens and pre-teens do not yet have a fully developed pre-frontal cortex and, as a consequence, they’re particularly vulnerable to addictive mechanisms at play in video games and social media. I know this advice isn’t popular but social media has a significant detrimental effect on everyone’s mental health. Perhaps to better illustrate this, the reward center of the pain is called the anterior cingulate gyrus or ACG. There was a recent discovery that the pain and pleasure centers are co-located in this area and are normally in balance. Historically, you had to work to receive a reward, delayed gratification was built into everything we did whether it was farming, hunting, or mating. In our current digital world, it’s all about immediate gratification, we’re always looking for the next dopamine hit. The artificial intelligence algorithms in social media, while brilliant in their own right, are engineered to provide constant rewards with ever escalating precision and minimal user effort. We don’t have to work for it anymore, and this actually works against us. In short, we have to put down our phones and tablets, and re-engage with real social interaction, human to human.
Is there a particular book that made a significant impact on you? Can you share a story?
My initial thought is “Bad Blood,” the story of Elizabeth Holmes and the Theranos debacle, essentially a manifesto on everything NOT to do with a biotech startup. But perhaps the more impactful book for me was an autobiography on nobel prize winning physicist Richard Feynman. I received this book as a gift from my older sister when I was eight years old, perhaps to make sense of that I should mention that my sister went on to be a cardiothoracic surgeon who specializes in heart and lung transplants, she was an extraordinary role model, but the story from that book that really impacted me was called “Ode to a Flower.”
I’m paraphrasing a bit but the story is about an artist and scientist who are walking in a garden, and the artist holds up a flower and says “look how beautiful this is, as an artist I can appreciate natural beauty but you as a scientist take it all apart and it becomes a dull thing.” The scientist finds this curious. The beauty that the artist sees is largely available to everyone, although he may have a more refined aesthetic sense most people can appreciate the inherent beauty of a flower. But science allows us to appreciate much more about the flower than the superficial aesthetic. One can gain a deeper understanding for nature’s majesty even at a cellular level, the complicated actions inside, it’s not just beauty at the visual dimension, at one centimeter; there’s hidden beauty at smaller dimensions, the inner structure, the processes. The fact that the colors in the flower evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting; it means that insects can see the color. It adds a question: does this aesthetic sense also exist in other life forms? Why is it beautiful? All kinds of interesting questions arise, scientific knowledge only adds to the excitement, mystery and awe of a flower. It only adds. I don’t see how it subtracts.
The book and the lessons shared by Dr. Feynman sold me on the value of science and was part of what drew me to medicine, the discipline of translating science into meaningful evidence based ways to help communities and populations live better, healthier, and happier lives.
You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
I’d like to move the conversation away from “mental illness” and move towards a healthier discussion of “mental wellness” and neuro-optimization. This is such an exciting time in medicine and neuroscience, there’s so much innovation and knowledge being gained every day, every week. There’s a deeper understanding emerging with cognitive neuroscience, neural networks and biological models. I believe that future generations will look back at this time as an inflection point in our understanding of how the brain and mind work. We’ve gone from the dark ages of exorcisms and witch hunts to explain mental health disorders; to the development of psychological mechanisms with giants like Freud, Skinner, and Pavlov; to the discovery of neurotransmitters like serotonin, dopamine, and norepinephrine and important pharmaceutical interventions; to the modern day understanding of the brain as an infinitely complex electrophysiologic organ combining multiple disciplines. Our hope is that there is a greater public understanding that the perception and stigma of “mental illness” is simply incorrect, this is not an issue of will power, determination, or “suck it up”; on the contrary, these are physiological issues that deserve no blame or shaming. Let’s work towards a common and universal understanding of mental wellness, finding ways to optimize brain function, and becoming the very best versions of ourselves. It’s a much healthier and productive conversation to have.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Do you have a story about how that was relevant in your life? We’re here to put a dent in the universe. Otherwise why else even be here?
This is a tough one but I’ll quote Steve Jobs, “We’re here to put a dent in the universe. Otherwise why even be here?” He’s one of the greatest innovators of our generation and somehow found a way to balance daring bold audacious ideas and impeccable execution. At Wave Neuroscience, we’re disrupting an industry and creating a new market for mental wellness and human performance, the weight of what that means is not lost on our team. It’s literally about saving lives, alleviating suffering, and helping large populations in a radical way. If you spent a day with us I believe you’d walk away feeling like this was a fiercely passionate group working towards a common goal and purpose with their hair on fire. The way I look at it, even if we lose, we win, because it will mean somebody else has forever changed humanity for the better… but I firmly believe we’re going to win, and when we achieve our goals we can look back and know we made the proverbial dent in the universe.
What is the best way our readers can follow you on social media?
Please follow “Wave Neuro” on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.
Thank you for these fantastic insights. We wish you only continued success in your great work!
Thank you so much, I truly enjoyed this and wish you great success as well!!
Dr Erik Won of Wave Neuroscience: 5 Things Anyone Can Do To Optimize Their Mental Wellness was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.