Change Your Life with Celebrity Brain Expert Doc Amen | E46
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The largest sex organ in your body is your brain. Most psychiatric disorders are not mental health issues. They're brain health issues. Because with a better brain, your life is better. Your relationships are better. Your money's better. Your health is better. You are not stuck with the brain you have. You can make it better and I can prove it.

Ladies and gentlemen, I'm super, super excited about this. I've been following this gentleman for so many years and just the sheer content, the knowledge, the information, and like just watching what he's done for so many people. It's inspiring. It's exciting. You can probably feel it right now the way I'm kind of like a little kid, super excited to do this interview. A lot of you guys have probably already seen him.

But if you haven't, I want you to do this one thing at the end of this podcast because you're going to be blown away. I want you to deep dive down the rabbit hole. Watch some of his old content. He's got a bunch of books that we're going to walk through. And it's just really important because I lost my grandma to Alzheimer's. My grandfather passed away shortly after that because, you know, once you're...

Thank you so much.

How did it get started? How did we get here? Like, when did you decide this is the path I'm going to go down to help people fix their brains? Well, it started when I was 18. Vietnam was going on and I became an infantry medic where my love of medicine was born. But about a year into being a medic, I realized I didn't like being shot at. It was not for me. I like helping. Don't shoot me.

And I got myself retrained as an x-ray technician and just developed a passion for medical imaging. As our professors used to say, how do you know unless you look? And then I got out of the army in 1975. And when I was a second year medical student in 1979, someone I loved tried to kill herself. And I took her to see a wonderful psychiatrist. And I came to realize if he helped her,

It wouldn't just help her. That ultimately it would help her children, it would help her grandchildren, is they would be shaped by someone who is happier and more stable. I fell in love with psychiatry 44 years ago. But I fell in love with the only medical specialty that never looks at the organ it treats. Think about that.

Last year, there were 337 million prescriptions written for antidepressant medications in the United States. And none of those doctors looked at their patients' brains. That's insane. And when I fell in love with psychiatry, I'm like, oh, imaging has got to be the future. In fact, everybody was talking about imaging is the future.

And in 1991, I went to a lecture on brain SPECT imaging. That's a study we do at our 11 clinics. SPECT looks at blood flow and activity. It looks at how your brain works. And when I started scanning people, I got this epiphany that most psychiatric disorders are not mental health issues.

They're brain health issues. If I get your brain healthy, then your mind will follow. And that created this revolution in my own life because when I

1991, I'm like scanning everybody I know. I scan my children. I scan my aunt who has a panic disorder. I scan my mother. She has a stunningly beautiful brain. Then I scan myself and it's not good because I played football in high school. And I was overweight and I wasn't sleeping and I was chronically stressed.

And I developed this term. Mom has a great brain, she's 60. I have a terrible, not terrible, but not a good brain at 37. So I developed this concept called brain envy. I always say Freud was wrong. Penis envy is not the cause of anybody's problem. I've not seen it once in 40 years.

But in 1991, I'm a double board certified psychiatrist. I was the top neuroscience student in medical school and I didn't care about my brain. I just really hadn't thought much about it. And when I saw the difference, brain envy, I wanted her healthy brain. I think everything I've done since then for myself and my patients and my family and the people I care about, our community,

i want to help them get a better brain because with a better brain your life is better your relationships are better your money's better your health is better because your brain creates everything you do right so typically on this podcast we talk about three core topics how to make money how to invest money how to give it away to charity i don't talk about any of that today i want to talk about why people should invest into themselves and especially into their brain

Why do you think people do not actually invest the money or time or energy into more brain study or brain research? Because you can't see it. See, that was a big epiphany for me when I saw my brain and I'm like, oh, no, this is not good. No, we're not having this. And, you know, I live in Newport Beach.

Where I often say we care more. We have more plastic surgeons than almost anywhere in the world. And we care more about our faces, our boobs, our bellies and our butts than we do our brain. And that's insane. That's insane. It's because you can't see it.

People don't care about it, right? If you see the wrinkles in your skin or the fat around your belly and people probably wonder what happened to my face. I fell playing basketball. It was a basketball incident. I was exercising. But they care more about the things they see. And because people don't look.

at the brain, they don't care about it. Even though it's not controversy at all, your brain's involved in everything you do, how you think, how you feel, how you act, how you get along with other people. It's the organ of loving, learning, and behaving. And when it's healthy, people tend to be happy. And when it's not healthy, people tend to be sadder, sicker, and poorer. So if we're talking about money,

money is basically about a series of decisions that you make. And if your brain's not healthy, you're much more likely to file for bankruptcy. You're much more likely to live paycheck to paycheck being chronically stressed. And nobody knows it was the concussion you had in third grade when you had a bike accident that damaged your frontal lobe so you don't have forethought.

Or as much as you need, forethought, judgment, impulse control. So for everyone out there that's focusing their surgeries on boobs, butt, and belly, the brain is actually really sexy. Have you ever thought about that? It's the largest sex organ in your body is your brain. If there's no forethought, there's generally no foreplay. I like that a lot. And you guys go on a first date.

The decision you make about your second date, some of it is visual, but it's really gonna be if they're funny or smart. That's from here. That's from the brain. Right? Looks fade away, looks come and go. You can also become numb. People date supermodels and become numb to them, cheat on them, etc. Like, "How could you cheat on them?"

that superstar supermodel sometimes it happens after 12 years 18 years 25 years etc people can become numb to it you don't become numb when someone's funny smart interesting intellectual that is always sexy that is always cool because it generates feelings inside of us when someone else is smart or funny etc it gets us excited and what we want to talk to that person right you want to text with that person you want to call that person

Okay, so you've built up now millions and millions and millions of followers with hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of millions of views on your content. Why do you think now over the last three, four, five years in particular, people are starting to take notice and want to learn more about it and want to share your content and want to dive into what you're doing with the brain?

I think the brain is in. It's hot. It's sexy. When I was growing up in the 60s, space was the new frontier and Star Trek and all of that. Well, now it's the space between your ears that people really see neuroscience as sexy and the future.

And people go, oh, but we don't know much about the brain. It's like, no, we know a lot. And you want to take care of it. And you mentioned you have Alzheimer's in your family. You want to know all of your risk factors and attack each one of them now, right? I believe that Alzheimer's is caused through a series of risk factors, right?

And almost all of them are preventable or treatable. And I have a mnemonic I talk about in my books called bright minds. You want to keep your brain healthy, rescue it. You have to prevent or treat the 11 major risk factors. So bright minds. And one of them is G for genetics, right? But genes are not a death sentence. What they should be is a wake-up call.

I have obesity and heart disease in my family, but I'm not overweight and I don't have heart disease. Why? I'm on an obesity heart disease prevention program every day of my life. I only love food that loves me back.

And I think people are beginning to get it now. There were some cool things that happened. Justin Bieber had me in his docu-series Seasons because I've been his doctor. And Miley Cyrus talked about me for 10 minutes on Joe Rogan's podcast. And so I have some influential friends. And I think that helps. Yeah, I saw it on the Kardashians.

Our mutual friend Steve Aoki is obsessed with you, which is great because I've been helping his charity for years, which is about brain research. I've been helping Aoki with all of his charity poker tournaments for years and years and years because how much he cares about brain research. And so every year we're we just had one recently. And I think it's so important. So what can people do when they're like, you know what?

the doc's right i i should look into my brain what are some of the first things that they can do to start to either research study figure out like how does it what's the first step to like saying yes you're right now what do i do well a couple of simple things i have a brand new book change your brain every day which is 366 short essays on the most important things i've ever said and you just read one a day so it's like a three minute a day commitment

to your brain. And after 30 days, you will love and start to take care of your brain. So that's simple. And then there's these daily habits I talk about in the book. Start every day with today is going to be a great day. So you have to train your brain to look for what's right, not just default to what's wrong, which so many people do, which

of years ago that protected you from being eaten by a lion, but now it eats you up inside. Whenever you go to make a decision in your day, ask yourself, is this good for my brain or bad for it? And don't lie to yourself because you're like, oh, wine, it's good for your heart, but it's bad for your brain. I'm not a fan of alcohol for so many reasons we could talk about.

Is this good for my brain or bad for it? Three seconds to just ask yourself that question. And quite honestly,

Seven-year-olds, if you give them a list of 20 things, good for your brain, bad for your brain, they'll get a 90% right. This isn't hard. Sugar, bad for your brain. Seven-year-olds know that. Fruit juice, they actually get that one wrong. They go, good for your brain. No, it's bad because it's too much sugar. Whenever you unwrap sugar from its fiber source, it turns toxic in your body. Okay.

My favorite brain exercise is when I go to bed at night, I go on a treasure hunt of what went well during the day. And I start at the beginning of my day and I'm usually asleep by the time I get to lunchtime. But I'm purposefully directing myself.

what I think as I go. So good habits, disciplined mind. We live in a society of undisciplined thinkers. And, uh,

I teach all my patients to kill the ants, the automatic negative thoughts that steal their happiness. It's like there was I was 28 years old in my psychiatric residency and I'm just in class one day and the professor, another psychiatrist said, you have to teach your patients not to believe every stupid thing they think.

And I'd never heard that before. I'm 28 years old. I have 25 years of education. And I believed every stupid thing I thought. And like no one ever taught me, thoughts can be really dumb. Question them. So many years ago, I coined the term, Ann's automatic negative thoughts after I had a really hard day at work.

And I came home to an ant infestation in my kitchen. And as I'm killing the ants, I'm like, my patients, they're infested with ants. And so the next day at work, I brought a can of Raid and I put it on the coffee table. And I went, I'm going to teach you to kill the ants. So here's the exercise. Whenever you feel sad or mad or nervous or out of control, write down what you're thinking.

And then ask yourself, is it true? Can I absolutely know this? And I have nine different ant species, like fortune telling or mind reading, focusing on the negative, all or nothing thinking, blame, guilt. So identify what kind of ant it is and then interrogate it, question it. And my favorite part, it's like,

Take the bad thought, my wife never listens to me, and flip it to the opposite, my wife listens to me, and then meditate on the opposite of the negative thought. It's so powerful. Are there any actual superfoods for brain? Like people talk about blueberries or almonds. Are there foods that people should be or could be eating more often?

that'll help their brain so omega-3 fatty acids your brain cell membranes in your 25 percent of your brain cell membranes are made up of omega-3 fats and so never go on a low-fat diet i'm not a fan of those and you probably should supplement with an omega-3 fatty acid um

that's at the top of my list. I'd love blueberries, but they need to be organic. Non-organic blueberries hold more pesticides than almost any other fruit. Um, nuts, uh, you're actually, if you eat, um, tree nuts on a regular basis, you're less likely to get Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease. Food so matters, uh, and, uh,

Of the 11 risk factors, diabesity is 10. It's where you're overweight or have high blood sugar or both. If you have that one, you have seven of the other ones. Because if you're overweight...

or you have diabetes, you have low blood flow to your brain, your brain looks older than you are. So B in bright minds is blood flow. R is retirement and aging. You have inflammation because fat cells produce something called inflammatory cytokines. Your fat stores toxins. That's the T. It's not good. So

How do you not be overweight or have diabetes? Is you significantly. You watch what you eat. Like I have obesity in my family. I have a brother that's 150 pounds overweight, but I'm not, right? Because I'm clear on the calories I consume and the quality of the calories, and I stay away from things that give me high blood sugar.

So recently this summer, we've seen a lot of these water fasts that have been happening and a lot of 48 hour fasts and 72 hour fasts. Does that impact the brain when someone does these intense fasts, especially if they haven't done it before? Or is it something that's okay for them to do? Well, it stresses their body and you don't want a lot of cortisol around. I mean, you need cortisol when you need it. It's a hormone that helps, uh,

manage inflammation. But when it's chronic, it shrinks a part of your brain called the hippocampus, which is the major memory center in the brain. And so I like intermittent fasting. That's not terribly stressful to your body, but going two days, three days without eating, yeah,

I know the research that says it increases something called autophagy, which helps you get rid of some of the trash that builds up. But I think you can do that in a less stressful way. Okay. The question I've been wanting to ask about alcohol.

So I'm obviously in an entrepreneurial lifestyle and running around with athletes, friends, nightclub people, models, influencers, et cetera. And pretty much everyone's drinking and some are doing drugs. Let's walk through both on the alcohol side. How bad is it? And are there alcohols that are okay or better than others? Cause I've heard things that are tequila might be better than vodka, et cetera. Walk us through like the alcohol situation with the brain. So like I have no dog in the fight. Uh,

but as a psychiatrist, probably half the people I see got into my office because of alcohol in one form or another, whether it's marital problems. And, you know, I always say you should never say everything you think, but when you drink thoughts get out. And the problem with the brain is it has memory. And then people remember the awful things you said. Um,

The American Cancer Society came out two years ago. In fact, in 2021, my biggest blog was I Told You So. Ever since I started looking at the brain 32 years ago, I'm like, alcohol is not a health food. And my first clinic was right outside the Napa Valley, so that was not popular. And I'm like, it's not a health food. It prematurely ages the brain and...

Think about it. My wife's a nurse. Why does she put alcohol on your skin before she gives you a shot?

Because it disinfects your skin. Well, did you know in your intestinal tract, in your gut, you have a hundred trillion bugs like bacteria and viruses and fungi. And they're called the microbiome and they make neurotransmitters and they digest your food and they detoxify your body. They're really important. So why would you pour poison?

down your throat to have a good time. See, this is not making sense to me. And did you know during the pandemic, Jim Beam, the whiskey company, turned their plants in a patriotic gesture into hand sanitizer plants? Because alcohol is a disinfectant. So why are you disinfecting your gut? It's just... Anyways, two years ago,

The American Cancer Society came out against any alcohol because they said any alcohol increases the risk of seven different cancers. So from a smaller brain to cancer to relationship disruption, not a fan. What about marijuana?

So marijuana is the big lie. The big lie is it's innocuous. Yet teenagers who use marijuana in their 20s have an increased risk of anxiety, depression, and suicide, and psychosis. In fact, one study from Norway, marijuana use increased the risk of psychosis 450%. So increased four and a half times. Is it helpful for some people?

Yes. If you have glaucoma, if you're dying and someone gives you marijuana, you're more likely to eat and it can sustain you. But the problem is, is everybody now thinks it's innocuous. And it's not innocuous. And it's not great. I published a study on a thousand pot smokers. Every area of their brain was lower in blood flow compared to healthy brains.

I then published the world's largest brain imaging study. It's on 62,454 scans on how the brain ages from nine months old to 105. So my database, which is now about a quarter of a million scans, has from nine months to 105 on how the brain ages. And it's fascinating. But then we looked at, well, what accelerates aging?

And if you have schizophrenia, which is a pretty severe psychiatric disorder, your brain looks 10 years older than the group. The second worst was marijuana. It surprised me. It was worse than alcohol. It was worse than nicotine. Yeah, I'm just not a fan. And then they looked at the lungs of smokers.

and the lungs of marijuana smokers. The marijuana smokers, they look significantly older than the smokers. So there's something in it that is not great. And people go, but, you know, we have cannabinoid receptors in our brain. That must mean it's good for us. We have opiate receptors in your brain. That didn't work out very well. You have benzo receptors in your brain, and that didn't work out very well.

All right. Last question about this topic. Psychedelics. When people talk about mushrooms, LSD, psychedelics, or going and doing an ayahuasca trip, and a lot of TV shows have now popularized ayahuasca trips. What are your thoughts about psychedelics? Like with alcohol, like with marijuana, can we try to get healthy first by eating well and not believe in every stupid thing we think? And using...

healthy strategies with no risk. See, the problem is I've been a psychiatrist for 40 years. I've seen people who do those things and have really bad experiences and have lasting negative effects. And my worry with psychedelics, I think for some people, is probably going to be really helpful.

But now I have a daughter who's 20 and she goes, Dad, they don't have alcohol parties. They have mushroom parties. And I'm very worried about... And, you know, as...

marijuana is a health food, or I'm sorry, alcohol is a health food, marijuana is innocuous, mushrooms are in, the incidence of mental health problems in our society, especially among the young, is the highest it has ever been, certainly in my lifetime, certainly since they've been tracking it. This is not how we're going to solve this. How we're going to solve it is we're going to get people to love and care for

for their brains and treat it right. I have a high school course called Brain Thrive by 25 that's in all 50 states. We teach kids to love and care for their brain, decreases drug, alcohol, and tobacco use, decreases depression, and improves self-esteem. It starts, I believe, by learning to love and care for the three pounds of fat between your ears.

Okay, something that people could do more of and if they knew how to do it better is sleep.

How important is sleep to the brain? What is the ballpark range of how much people should actually be sleeping? And if they can't be sleeping well, what are some things that they could do to improve their sleep? So the S in Bright Minds is for sleep. If you have sleep apnea, for example, it triples your risk for Alzheimer's disease. So if you snore loudly, if you stop breathing at night, if you're chronically tired during the day,

You need to get that assessed and treated. So the sweet spot's about seven and a half hours. So somewhere between seven to nine hours would be great. And why do you want to sleep? Why do you want to make it a priority? Because when you sleep,

autophagy, which we talked about earlier, your brain cleans and washes itself. And we've only known this for seven, eight years, that the brain has its own lymphatic system. It's called the glymphatic system or fluid system. So for many years, neuroscientists said, oh, the brain doesn't have that because it only opens up. You can only visualize it when someone's asleep.

And so it's like you sleep so your brain can clean and wash itself and get ready for the next day. You also sleep to consolidate whatever you learn from the day before. And so making it a priority, avoiding things that damage sleep,

Blue light before bed, so put your gadgets away. A warm room, a room with light or noise. So quiet, dark, cool.

tends to be the best. And then rather than put your head on the pillow and let every bad thought come into your head, start with what went well today. Start at the beginning of the day. Go hour by hour. I'm also a huge fan of hypnosis for sleep. I have an app called Brain Fit Life and we have a sleep hypnosis track online.

on there. I love that. People write to me. Love going to bed with you, Dr. Eamon. My wife doesn't like that at all. That's called brain fit life? Brain fit life. And then, you know, sometimes supplements can be helpful, but it's, I'm not a fan at all of ambien. Now, melatonin for some people can be really helpful. I like from a supplement standpoint, magnesium,

Melatonin, GABA, 5-HTP. If you're a worrier, 5-HTP can be helpful. So on a scale of 1 to 100, how useful do you think that meditation is for the human body and the brain? So I published three studies on a kundalini yoga form of meditation called Kirtan Kriya. It's a chanting meditation. Sa, ta, na, ma. Birth, life, death, reborn. 12 minutes.

activates your frontal lobes. That's a really good thing. And it calms down your emotional brain. There's also research on loving kindness meditation. One of my favorite ones decreases migraine headaches, decreases pain, um, can be very helpful to just take the chatter

and turn it off, which is the chatter that's causing so much stress for people because of the undisciplined mind. So there's millions and millions of kids that are in high school sports, middle school sports, and there's millions more that go on to play college, etc. When they get into, let's call it football or hockey, those type of extreme sports, and they're bumping heads together, how bad is CTE or concussions and things like that that can happen from some of the more extreme sports?

So CTE is a whole discussion by itself. And I'm not a fan of the prevailing wisdom. So it stands for chronic traumatic encephalopathy, football dementia, the dementia from sports where you get repeated blows to the head. The

academics will tell you it's chronic, progressive, and untreatable. And I think that's complete crap. I think, yes, concussions are a bad thing. In fact, if you tell me, if you go, hey, Daniel, what's the single most important thing you've learned from a quarter of a million brain scans? It's mild traumatic brain injury ruins people's lives and nobody knows about it. Because

Most psychiatrists never look at the brain. So it's a big deal. But why do I hate the current wisdom with CTE? It's treatable.

You need to know it. You have concussions. And then you need to put the brain in a healing environment. And if you put the brain in a healing environment, this is the big headline from Change Your Brain Every Day and actually every book I write, you are not stuck with the brain you have. You can make it better and I can prove it. And I have thousands of before and after scans showing...

significant improvement. So on my show, I do this show called Scan My Brain. One of the guys I saw was Troy Gloss. He was a 2002 World Series MVP. He was third baseman for the California Angels. And he came to see me suicidal, really depressed, memory problems, drinking way too much. And his brain looked terrible.

And he did what I asked him to do, stopped drinking, took the supplements. We worked on his thoughts. Two months later, I scanned him again because he'd lost like 30 pounds. I mean, he like drank the Stevia sweetened Kool-Aid. And it was so much better. 16 months later, his brain's better still, right? And the darkness is gone.

You're not stuck. Even if you've been bad to your brain, you can make it better. Now, I have six children. Are they playing football? Absolutely not. But if they want to play tennis, I'm all for it. They want to play golf, let's do it. Table tennis is the world's best sport. We revere football in this country. In fact, give it a day of the week. It's bad for the brain.

Now, I treat NFL players. I have active players that I adore. If you're going to do that, well, you better do everything else right. And, you know, a great example is Tom Brady, where if you read his book, TB12, yes, he's playing a brain damaging sport, but he does everything else right to make up for it. So in a world full of chaos,

People are bombarded by bad information, news, drama. The world's falling apart. There's a recession. There's 15 different wars. Everything is coming at our brains and we're bombarded. What can people do to try to stay calm within the chaos? Well, one, turn off the news because the news is no longer the news. The news is to get your eyeballs.

and if it bleeds it leads so i wake up every morning and i have an app called the good news network you know because i want to know what's right and people go but it's such a dark time and i'm like come on i grew up in the 50s where we had to hide under our desks routinely and like kindergarten first grade second grade because we were worried the soviets were going to nuke us

right the world's always sort of a shit show it just depends where do you look do you look at people like you who are doing amazing things or are you focused on the crime that happened across the street or somewhere in LA it's a matter of focus we can focus on war and there war is going on now but there are always wars

Going on from the beginning of time. Where do you look? Because where you look determines how you feel.

Last question. So we typically talk about how to invest money, how to make money and how to give away to charity. Why do you think that charity and philanthropy should be part of people's lives? Why is it good for their brain? Is it good for their family? Good for their heart? Why should it be important to them either in their companies or their personal life is to be part of charity? Well, because it's good for you because you begin to feel like you're part of something bigger than you are.

And it's good for other people, which has neurochemistry that's good for you, right? It boosts serotonin because you feel respect and you feel a sense of purpose. It boosts oxytocin because it's connecting you.

I always think of my patients in four big circles. It's like, what's the biology? And we've talked a lot about brain health. What's the psychology? How do you think the ants? The social circle, how are you connected? How's the health of your connections?

And the spiritual circle, just why do you care? What is your deepest sense of meaning and purpose? And giving helps feed all four circles.

Ladies and gentlemen, I could talk to the doctor here for hours and hours and hours and hours and hours. So hopefully I'll get him back here for another 40 minute episode. The reason we do the episodes for around 40 minutes is the average workout is 45 minutes. The average commute to work is 45 minutes. So I try to stick around the 40 minute range for you guys.

Thank you guys for continuing to like, share, comment, et cetera. We've been number one on the entrepreneur category for 34 weeks in a row. Thanks to you. So keep having these discussions with people about money. That's what I always say at the end of every episode is talking about money, bills, credit cards, loans, FICO scores, IRS taxes, and learn all those things. But today's episode, you heard about a topic that's mission critical. You have to learn about the brain. You have to have discussion about the brain with your parents, grandparents, friends, families, coworkers, et cetera. You can start off

by checking out doc amon's books how many books do you have 42 oh my god that's gonna say like 12 42 books so that's where you can get started check him out on social media he's got like three million instagram three million on tick tock and everywhere in between so follow him on social media and please have these discussions learn about your brain talk with your friends and families and we'll see you guys next monday on the money mondays