Dr. Abbey Houde

Dr. Abbey Houde DC, MSc Neuro | Brain Health & Rehabilitation Educator | Public Speaker | Helping you understand, regulate, and rewire your brain.

Everyone is looking for the next hack and supplement stack… but don’t even have the basics covered.Biohacks, supplements...
09/02/2026

Everyone is looking for the next hack and supplement stack… but don’t even have the basics covered.

Biohacks, supplements, devices, therapies, etc. can be incredible tools, especially when someone is dealing with chronic illness, injury, or needs more targeted support.

But we have somehow made optimizing the nervous system way more complicated than it needs to be.

If you are looking for the next hack to fix how you feel, but you are barely getting sunlight, moving your body, spending time outside, sleeping, eating enough, or connecting with other humans… you might be chasing the wrong thing.

Your brain evolved around light.
Movement.
Nature.
Food.
Sleep.
Connection.

They are not always exciting . They are not new. And you probably can’t affiliate-link most of them. 😂

But they are some of the most powerful inputs your brain and nervous system receive every single day.

Use the biohacks. Take advantage of modern tools. Just don’ let optimization distract you from the things your brain has needed all along.

Become extraordinarily well at the basics first. 🧠

Start whatever IT is today!No excuses.Make the time.Have discipline.Because you deserve itIf you followed along with thi...
09/01/2026

Start whatever IT is today!

No excuses.

Make the time.

Have discipline.

Because you deserve it

If you followed along with this last month, I would love to hear in the comments the changes you’ve made✨!

If this is your first time seeing this, what will you focus on this month?
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A young child’s brain is still building the networks involved in impulse control, emotional regulation, flexible thinkin...
08/30/2026

A young child’s brain is still building the networks involved in impulse control, emotional regulation, flexible thinking, and inhibition. Their prefrontal systems are immature, and those skills develop gradually through childhood and adolescence.

So when your child is overwhelmed, you’re often asking a developing brain to do something it quite literally isn’t very good at yet.

And this is where our nervous system comes in.

Children learn regulation through repeated experiences with regulated adults. Before they can consistently self-regulate, they rely heavily on co-regulation: our voice, facial expressions, body language, predictability, boundaries, and responses become part of the sensory information their brain is using to understand what’s happening and what to do next.

Meanwhile, our adult brain has a much greater capacity to pause, inhibit an automatic reaction, shift perspective, and choose a response.

Does that mean we will do it perfectly every time?

Absolutely not. 😂

Sometimes half of parenting feels like watching your child’s developing nervous system activate every pathway in your fully developed one.

But that is kind of the point.

The work is not controlling every emotion your child has.

It is learning to tolerate their frustration without immediately needing to stop it.
Holding a boundary while they are upset about it.
Not turning their overwhelm into your overwhelm.
Repairing when you do lose it.
And modeling, over and over again, what regulation actually looks like.

They do not need us to regulate their nervous system for them forever.

They need enough repeated experiences of regulation with us that, little by little, their brain learns how to do more of it on its own.

And honestly, I think that’s one of the most humbling parts of parenting:

While we are helping build their brain, parenting has a way of showing us exactly where we still have some learning to do, too. 🧠🤍

What do you mean I’m the one who has to do it??? 😂We can learn all the nervous system tools, understand our patterns, re...
08/28/2026

What do you mean I’m the one who has to do it??? 😂

We can learn all the nervous system tools, understand our patterns, read the books, listen to the podcasts, and know exactly why we are the way we are.

But at some point, we still have to make the choices.

Set the boundary. Go to bed. Move your body. Change the environment. Have the uncomfortable conversation. Ask for help. Walk away from what is no longer working.

Your brain is incredibly adaptable, but it adapts to what you repeatedly do, not just what you know.

And that is both incredibly annoying and incredibly empowering. 😅

I think this is the part the internet forgets to mention when we talk about “getting out of survival mode.”It does not n...
08/26/2026

I think this is the part the internet forgets to mention when we talk about “getting out of survival mode.”

It does not necessarily feel like calm.

It does not mean you wake up happy every day. It does not mean you never feel anxious, overwhelmed, angry, sad, or triggered again. It definitely does not mean you somehow create a life where nothing hard happens.

Sometimes, getting out of survival mode actually means you feel more.

Because when your brain is focused on surviving, it prioritizes what is necessary to get you through.

You survive first.

You process later.

And when there is finally enough capacity to process, there can be a lot waiting for you.

Grief for the childhood you did not get to have.
Anger about what you tolerated.
Sadness over relationships that will never be what you hoped they would be.
Confusion about who you are when you are no longer operating as the version of yourself your environment required.

But there can also be joy. Excitement. Love. Curiosity. Hope. New beginnings.

All of it.

I think we have accidentally sold nervous system “healing” as this destination where you become an endlessly calm human who is unaffected by life.

That is not the goal.

A healthy nervous system responds to life.

It activates. It settles. It grieves. It gets excited. It feels disappointment. It experiences uncertainty. It adapts.

The goal is not to create a nervous system that never responds.

The goal is to build enough capacity to actually live your life, not just survive it.

I am so incredibly grateful for every single person who helped bring The Better Brain Experience to life.Getting to spea...
08/26/2026

I am so incredibly grateful for every single person who helped bring The Better Brain Experience to life.

Getting to speak about something I am deeply passionate about is genuinely one of my favorite things in the world. There is something about standing in a room, talking about the brain, sharing what I have learned, and hopefully helping someone understand themselves and their health a little differently that absolutely lights me up.

But getting to do it alongside my other half? That lit a whole new fire in me. 🔥

Joe and I talk about this stuff constantly behind closed doors. We challenge each other, learn from each other, see health through different lenses, and somehow always end up in ridiculously long conversations about the human body and brain. 😂 Getting to bring a little piece of that into a room full of people was so special.

A huge thank you to my team Boost Your Brand for all of the work behind the scenes that made this day possible. There are so many moving pieces that go into bringing something like this to life, and I am so grateful to have people around me who believe in what we are building. 🤍

And thank you to all of the incredible brands and people who helped make the experience so special:

Nataly | Bellyfull Boards for the beautiful bites
Eye Candy Bake Shop for the treats
Global Healing | Self-Healing Wellness
Koia
Cymbiotika®
for the beautiful gifted candles
Heather Holmes Studio
Beking Media for capturing the entire experience so beautifully

And most importantly, thank you to every single person who came, listened, asked questions, shared their stories, and allowed us to do what we love.

This day reminded me how much I love educating, speaking, connecting, and creating spaces where we can have bigger conversations about our brains and our health.

We have turned nervous system regulation into another thing we have to do all day long.Breathwork. Cold plunges. Meditat...
08/24/2026

We have turned nervous system regulation into another thing we have to do all day long.

Breathwork. Cold plunges. Meditation. Grounding. Supplements. Red light. Somatic exercises. Another “nervous system hack.”

And listen, I love a lot of these things.

But if you need to spend your entire day trying to regulate yourself from the life you’re living… maybe the answer isn’t another regulation tool.

Maybe it is looking at the life itself.

The constant stimulation.
The lack of sleep.
The schedule you can’t sustain.
The relationships that drain you.
The lack of movement, sunlight, connection, nourishment, or actual downtime.
The 25 tabs your brain is trying to keep open at once.

Your nervous system is constantly adapting to the environment you repeatedly give it.

So yes, learn tools that help you navigate stress. Build capacity for hard things. Do uncomfortable things. Life will never, and should never,!be completely stress-free.

But regulation was never supposed to mean spending your entire day trying to make yourself feel calm.

The goal is not to regulate all day.

The goal is to build a life you don’t constantly have to recover from.

I just understand that learning takes repetition, regulation takes development, and his brain is still under constructio...
08/20/2026

I just understand that learning takes repetition, regulation takes development, and his brain is still under construction.

He is going to test boundaries.
He is going to have big emotions.
He is going to need me to repeat myself.
He is going to get frustrated when I say no.
He is going to need help regulating emotions he does not yet know how to manage on his own.

And understanding all of this does not mean every moment is easy.

Two things can be true at once. I can understand why a behavior is happening and still find it hard. I can know something is developmentally normal and still feel overwhelmed by it. I can understand his brain and still have moments where I lose my patience.

But for me, understanding the why takes some of the pressure off.

It takes away some of that feeling that I should be doing something differently, that I need to “fix” every behavior, or that every hard moment means I am doing something wrong as a parent.

None of this means I stop parenting, remove boundaries, or let everything go.

It means I meet the behavior with an understanding of what his brain is actually capable of right now, and I teach from there.

Because so much of parenting is not expecting them to already know.

It is being willing to teach, model, repeat, hold boundaries, and co-regulate while their brain learns.

I do not expect a toddler brain to behave like an adult one.

And somehow, knowing that takes a little bit of pressure off both of us. 🧠

Sometimes we spend so much time analyzing why we are the way we are.Trust me, my husband and I stay up way too late havi...
08/19/2026

Sometimes we spend so much time analyzing why we are the way we are.

Trust me, my husband and I stay up way too late having these kinds of conversations. 😂 Why do I do this? Where did that come from? What experience shaped this part of me?

And I think there is so much value in understanding ourselves.
But if we constantly live there, analyzing our past, trying to figure out what made us who we are so we can somehow “fix” ourselves, we are missing such a big part of the picture.

Because understanding the pattern is not the same thing as creating a new one.

If we want to become different, at some point we have to experience ourselves differently.

We have to experience ourselves setting the boundary.

Handling the hard conversation differently.

Staying present when we normally shut down.

Choosing the new response when the old one feels automatic.

Doing something we did not think we were capable of doing.

Because your brain is constantly learning from experience.

You can understand why the old path exists, but neuroplasticity happens when we repeatedly start walking a different one.

Sometimes the next version of you does not need to be analyzed into existence.

Sometimes you need to experience yourself becoming them. 🧠

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