Science-Backed Secrets to Brain Health and Mental Resilience

0:28So, hey, guys, are you frustrated with where you're at right now?

0:33this is the admired show all right welcome back to the show everybody i have a real friend here today and somebody that i admire tremendously he's helped me he scanned my brain as a matter of fact and i have referred friends to him who were in need of his work because i believe in him interestingly i've also referred a few young people to him over the years that were the children of people that I love that needed help. And I'm really grateful that he's written a book that he has coming out right now called Raising Mentally Strong Kids, because of all the people that I've referred to him over the years, I felt the best about the children that he was able to help and catch whatever was going on there a little bit earlier and turn it around.

1:20He's only done about 160 ,000 brain scans from people from over 121 countries so i think he's just about ready to be qualified to talk about this topic today i think he's the foremost expert on brain health on the planet he's a great friend of mine i love him very much she's a strong man of faith as well dr daniel amon welcome back to the show brother thank you so much for helping me spread this message about brain health and mental strength. Kids are in trouble more than ever before. It's horrifying. There's a new study the CDC put out that 54 % of teenage girls report being persistently sad, that 32 % have thought of killing themselves, 24 % have planned to kill themselves.

2:08Just think of that. A quarter of teenage girls and 13 % have tried. These are statistics unlike anything in recorded history. Why? Well it's an interesting question but we're living in a toxic society so if you take the toxic food we feed them, the toxic products that go on their bodies, the toxic social media that creates this high level of self-absorption and self-absorbed people are never happy people and then the toxic news which really drives them to negative thinking patterns because you and I both know the news is no longer the news the news is like the crisis news network because if they scare you you'll pay attention and so you buy more copper underwear but the negativity and actually been studying negativity bias so does your mind tend to go to what's wrong or does it go to what's right and if your mind goes to what's wrong you're much more likely to be anxious to be depressed to have an addiction.

3:23And so I train kids to have a positivity bias and to take care of their brains. In the book, you reference the fact that they need to be working on their brains and their minds. Tell me, did I misunderstand that or is there a difference between those two things? Well, your brain, the physical functioning of your brain, moment by moment, creates your mind. And like all the parenting books on the bookshelf, nobody's talking about brain health. But it's the health of your brain that then creates your mind. So if you think of it like hardware and software, you have to get the hardware right first.

4:09And then you have to program it properly. Like in the book, we talk about brain health and brain reserve and how to have a healthy brain. but once you have a healthy brain, well, how do you have a healthy mind? And we talk about killing the ants, the automatic negative thoughts that steal people's happiness. I was 28 years old in my psychiatric residency before I learned I didn't have to believe every stupid thing I thought. The brain is a sneaky organ, right? We all have weird, crazy, stupid, sexual, violent thoughts that nobody should ever hear but there's nothing in school i'm friends with paul simon love paul simon especially his song kodachrome which starts off with when i think back on all the crap i learned in high school it's a wonder i can think at all and if you think schools really have not been redesigned in 120 years, we need to redesign them to create healthy people.

5:16Well, I was 48 years old before I learned about the ants, which was from you. And I remember leaving you that day and saying to my son, who was the first person I saw, I go, hey, Max, I just had a revelation. He goes, what's that, dad? I said, I don't have to believe everything I think. And one other thing I have a tendency to do, I want to know if this affects children, because really this book and today's conversation will be about mental health in general, but more specifically how it applies to our children. I do something when I have a negative thought, Dr. Amen, where I do what I call it like thought stacking.

5:49So I get a negative thought. I don't do this with my positive ones. I do it with my negative ones where I repeat it over and over and over, and then I stack it. If this happens, then that happens, and I create this entire almost narrative in my mind of what I determine. I coined thought stacking. Is that a common thing in people just like me? Or is that something that happens in children as well, where maybe they're being bullied at school, they have a thought, and then they repeat it and repeat it, and it gets bigger and bigger and bigger. And now you believe the bigger lie that's even worse than the original lie you were telling yourself.

6:24Thoughts stack the ants, the automatic negative thoughts. They link, they stack, they link, and then they attack you. and it's it's not hard to kill the ants but it needs to become a practice and i have my patients especially the ones that are anxious depressed or obsessive write down a hundred of their worst thoughts and then take them through a process to get rid of them and it doesn't work after you do it the first second third or fourth time but after you do it the 20th or 30th time pretty soon your brain is making new connections to attack and eliminate the ants and in the book i talk about nine different types of ants so let's go through three or four if you don't mind we want them to get the book but let's give fortune telling what's that what's i know what it is but you tell where you're predicting things are going to turn out badly even though you don't have evidence for it.

7:33There's mind reading where you believe you know what another person is thinking even though they haven't told you that. I have 25 years of education and I can't tell what anybody else is thinking. A negative look from someone else may mean nothing more than they're constipated. You don't know, right? It's like clarify it. Blame is the worst ant. It's a big red ant because when you blame someone else for the problems in your life, you become a victim and you become powerless. So I wrote my first book many moons ago. It was called The Sabotage Factor, all the ways we mess ourselves up from getting what we want.

8:17And the number one hallmark of self-defeating behavior is blaming other people for how your life is. turning out. There's guilt beating ants. And one of the worst ones that's happening, we're in a political year, is labeling. Whenever you label yourself or someone else with a negative term, you're liberal, you're conservative, you're a jerk, he's an idiot, you lump them with all the liberals, conservatives, jerks, idiots that you've ever known, and you can't deal with them. anymore because you're not dealing with them you're dealing with a group of them so here's the exercise whenever you're sad mad nervous or out of control write down what you're thinking and then identify what kind of ant it is and then we take them through this process that actually borrowed from my friend byron katie is like tana never listens to me so that's an all or nothing thought whenever you think in words like always, never, everyone, every time.

9:26It's usually wrong. So Tana, my wife, never listens to me. I've had that thought. And so you write it down. And then you go, is that true? And if you're really irritated, you go, yeah. And then you go, is it absolutely true? With 100 % certainty. I've written and produced 18 national public television specials about the brain. She has listened to all of the scripts. So it's like, no, that's actually not true. The third question is, how does that thought make you feel? Sad. How does the thought make you act? Mad. What's the outcome of the thought? Separation. So the fourth question is, how would I feel if I didn't have the thought?

10:11Happy. How would I act? Connected. What's the outcome? We have a better relationship. And my favorite question of all of them is five. Take the original thought, Tana never listens to me, and flip it to the opposite, Tana does listen to me. Now, don't go to the narcissistic opposite, which is she always listens to me, because that's not true either. And go, Tana does listen to me. And then I'm completely not bugged by my thought. And you have to understand, thoughts are creations of your mind. and they come from all sorts of places. Sometimes they're not yours. Sometimes they actually come from your mom or dad or from your grandparents because we know trauma, for example, gets transmitted epigenetically.

11:07So it actually comes through our genes. And so if my grandfather, because he had a big trauma when he was 19 years old. Wow, wow. That can actually impact my dad's genes and then impact me. So this whole thing of epigenetics is so interesting. So thoughts can come from a different generation. They come from the voices, obviously, of my mom. You know, I'll give you something to cry about. Or my dad, who told me, what did he say? I told him I wanted to be a psychiatrist. Why don't you want to be a real doctor? Why do you want to be a nut doctor and hang out with nuts all day long? So voices come from our parents, from our siblings, from our friends, our foes, from the music we listen to, the news we watch.

11:55And they lie. I mean, that's the one thing I didn't know until I was 28. Thoughts lie. Just because you have a thought has nothing to do with whether or not it's true, whether or not it's helpful. and you can learn to direct them or you can become a victim of them. And one great strategy I talk about in the book is give your mind a name. It's based on this concept of gaining psychological distance from the nonsense in your head. So I named my mind after my pet raccoon. When I was 16, I grew up in the San Fernando Valley. I had a pet raccoon. I loved her. But she was a troublemaker. would leave raccoon poo in my shoes, ate all the fish out of my sister's aquarium.

12:40And that's my mind. My mind will just like stir up trouble and I'll see, you know, everything's gone away and I died this horrible death. And, you know, my mind used to do the same thing you were talking about. It would stack and link and then attack me. Like if I almost got into an accident, I wouldn't go, oh, thank God I'm fine. I would see the accident play out. I'd then see the car burst into flames. I'd then see the ambulance driver probably had ADD and got lost to the accident and that I would be in the hospital and I'd be burned over 80 % of my body and the nurse was not cute. I was thinking two things.

13:22One, the separation from the thought. These exercises are separating you, that word that you use. And when you get distance or above your thought, you can begin to see sort of the folly of them and the ridiculousness of them. As you were describing it also, I'm processing because this is something that I really work on myself. You and I have talked about this. And the techniques that you just went through and more of them that are in the book, the lack of them, that pattern that we get in is like you truly become a prisoner of your thoughts. And the techniques on the way out creates what I was thinking when you're saying it is freedom.

13:56There should be some freedom. If you could actually flip that, that strategy that you talked about, you go from being a prisoner of your thoughts to freedom. I just talked about this in the last interview And there's this great quote that I mess up all the time from gandhi that says I will not allow you to Trample through my mind with your dirty feet And in my own life a lot of time i'm the guy Walking and trampling through my mind with my dirty feet and I don't have to believe everything. I think if we were to look at the scans of an unhealthy brain of one of these children or one of ourselves What would we see number one?

14:30Would we see this evidence if we looked at a scan? And two, the traditional world's prescription for that is literally a prescription most of the time, which is some sort of medication. And so I want your thoughts on that. What would we see if we looked at the scan of someone who's healthy versus unhealthy in these situations? And how do you feel about prescribing prescription medication to children for the most part as a general answer for these ailments or problems they think they have? oh two huge questions uh i did a study with noelle nelson uh who wrote a book called the power of appreciation and we scanned her when she was appreciating her life and then um and her brain was really healthy and i'm like we need to scan you when you're hating your life and she goes oh i don't want to do that that'll make me unhappy i'm like come on you have to suffer for science And so I remember it like it was yesterday.

15:31Right before I scanned her, her dog was sick. And so her thoughts linked. My dog is sick. I have to stay home. I'm going to lose my job. I won't have money to take care of the dog. The dog will die. And I'll be sad and I'll end up homeless in Malibu. I mean, like within five minutes. That was the trail. And then I injected the medicine that we do the scans with. And the spec scans we do are so cool because we're getting that moment in time of that couple of minutes. But that couple of minutes seems to be your brain over time. And healthy when she thought what she appreciated about her life. And when she thought what she hated about her life or her fear, her frontal lobes dropped.

16:27So the frontal lobes is the break in your brain. Her left temporal lobe dropped, which is often a source of really dark thoughts, like suicidal thoughts. And her cerebellum dropped. Cerebellum is the back bottom part of the brain that's involved in physical coordination, but it's also involved in thought coordination. So she's not coordinated. She's irritated. And she has less control. And when I saw that, I'm like, oh, this is negativity is the pattern that creates athletic slumps. because if you think you're going to strike out, you're a little less coordinated and you're more likely to strike out.

17:14Isn't that interesting? If I think I'm going to miss the free throw, then I'm more likely to miss the free throw. And so negativity is bad for the brain. And I'm doing this study now on negativity bias, and it's just associated with every bad thing.

17:37So, hey guys, as you know, I've partnered up with my good friend, Brennan Brouchard, who's created the greatest personal development system that has ever been designed called Growth Day. There's everything from journaling to accountability programs, live messages every Monday from myself and other influencers. There's an opportunity for you to get courses that would cost thousands of dollars completely for free. It's incredible. Go to growthday.com forward slash ed and check it out.

18:03Now, medication, that's a huge topic. and it's not the first thing I think about. I own a supplement company. So if you're depressed, I want you to be on a good multiple vitamin. I want you to take omega-3 fatty acids and I want you to take saffron because there are now 25 randomized controlled trials showing it's equally effective to antidepressants. But rather than knock off your libido, it enhances it and it enhances your memory. So the science of saffron, very exciting. Now, if nothing is working, generally with kids, I don't give them antidepressants because they have black box warnings and can increase the risk of suicidal behavior.

18:54Now, if I'm really stumped, I might. The issue with ADD is different, though. And I know everybody thinks all the kids are overmedicated, and they are. But there are a lot of kids that aren't medicated that should be because having untreated ADD, right? Whenever the doctor says, oh, I think maybe we should treat him for ADD, you want to go, I want to know the side effects. And the gentleman can lose their appetite, can develop tics, can have problems sleeping. I mean, it has side effects. But you have to ask the other question. What are the side effects of having untreated ADD? which are things like school failure, friend failure, incarceration, bankruptcy, divorce.

19:37It's a lot. Identity and confidence starts to stack the wrong way. If you really have ADD and you're not diagnosed by the age of nine, your self-esteem generally is problematic because you try and it doesn't work. You try and it doesn't work. And my first thought is not medicine. have natural solutions like decrease their time on gadgets, get them to exercise, more sunshine, simple supplements like multiple vitamin, fish oil. Rhodiola is one of my favorite supplements to help with focus and decrease stress. But if those things don't work, I'd think about a stimulant. Okay, you would. Is it saffron?

20:22Is that how you said it? Saffron. Spelled half, so everybody knows. S-A-F-F-R-O-N. So the spice. It's the world's most expensive spice. But if you just look at the science, it's stunning. Okay. That's crazy. And when I learned about saffron, it was 25 years ago, I'm reading the studies and they're pro-sexual. And that's the thing that got me because all the SSRIs I've prescribed, people don't want to have sex or it takes longer to have an orgasm. Now, if somebody has premature ejaculation, that can be really helpful for them. It's like one of those little tricks with Prozac. I'm like, you'll last longer.

21:02Sometimes you'll last forever. Wear your partner out. Very bad. But I saw it was pro-sexual and I'm like, pay attention. And then, so there's five studies showing sexual enhancement for females and males, but 25 studies on mood. Interesting. So small thing. Well, not small. One thing you emphasize with me was caffeine. And I'm just curious if you still feel strongly about that because I'm thinking about kids in general and I'm thinking of all these energy drinks. Everybody drinks coffee at about age three, it seems like nowadays, right? And I remember in my case, you were saying, hey, listen, this may seem insignificant and small and yeah, I have omega threes, but also like your caffeine intake is making an impact on your brain health.

21:48And I just want, if people have children right now that are pumping them full of caffeine and soft drinks and all these other things, there's got to be an impact on brain health for them as well. And why would you do that? It's clearly a drug and it's just a bad idea. Caffeine. And the reason, you know, I pick on lots of things. I pick on alcohol, I pick on marijuana, but I pick on caffeine because it constricts blood flow to the brain. And what we've learned is neurons, brain cells, don't age. It's blood vessels that age. And so what you want, I often talk about brain envy. You know, you want to want to have a better brain.

22:28Freud was wrong. Penis envy is not the thing. You want to have blood flow envy because you want to keep their blood flow, your blood flow, right? Because to have mentally strong kids, you have to model that, right? So it always starts with parents being mentally strong. But you want to lose the caffeine and sugar, right? I mean, energy drinks are just a disaster. I have one sitting right over there. That's probably why I'm doing such a bad job in the interview. No, they're not good for you because, I mean, one, the sugar is pro-inflammatory. Brand you study out today on inflammation damaging the dopamine circuit in the front part of your brain so kill the sugar and whenever it comes to food you just want to ask yourself this question do i love it and does it love me back gotcha uh and so with kids when my daughter was two we played this game called chloe's game is this good for my brain or bad for it and so i'd go avocados and she'd go two thumbs up god's butter if i said blueberry she'd put her little hands on her hips and go are they organic because non-organic blueberries hold more pesticides than almost any fruit i'm like no of course they're organic she'd go oh god's candy oh god's candy i love that hitting a soccer ball with your head oh very stupid brain is soft skull is hard skull has sharp bony ridges right and i's playing these games i talk about this in the book playing these games with kids just to get them to love and think about and care about their brain.

24:08And a lot of parents, especially parents of teenagers, go, I just don't have any influence. It's because you don't have a good bond with them. And in the book, I talk a lot about attachment, or Dr. Faye and I I talk a lot about attachment because my dad and I weren't not bonded. We didn't really like each other. And when I was 18, another political year, it was 1972, my dad told me if I voted for Senator McGovern, the country would go to hell. I voted for McGovern because I was not bonded to my dad. And the country went to hell, but it had nothing to do with McGovern, right? It was all Richard Nixon and Watergate and all that craziness.

24:49If you want influence, you have to be attached. And for the kids that are attached to their parents, they tend to pick their values. And what does bonding require? Time. Actual physical time without your phone. And listening. And there's one exercise in here that's so good. It's gold. It's called special time. 20 minutes a day with your kids doing something they want to do and during that time no commands no questions no directions it's just to be in their space and i don't know if when you were a kid that would have been special to you for me i'm one of seven that was so much i mean not so much for my dad because he was harsh but with my mom i just craved so did i in fact it's so special and profound i can think of the only two or three of those moments i had with my dad and i can picture them right now right when you said it i flashed i know literally at a park playing catch with my dad he was the catcher i was i was just literally i was it was like one of these very rare you imagine that i'm 53 years old this month and those moments are so special i can recall the only two or three of them that i remember as a child they're that big of a deal i want you to say more about that okay that's so important well i i'm so you know so here i sit here and i can picture really only two or three of them in my life and by the way even when i picture them too my whole internal state i can feel changing when i say it there's another part of me that's sad that my recollection is only two or three of these moments and the reason i think i recall them which i want to ask you about that in a minute is because they were so unique and stood out emotionally for me that they they they are they appear to be um more from a neurological standpoint connected to me in my brain than other experiences of my life because my emotions were so high during those moments and that's how memory is formed it's anchored with emotion so the higher that is true then dr am so the higher the emotional state during a moment the more likely the memory is anchored to us yes good or bad and so you know if it's really bad when i was six i my mom said i told a lie i don't remember it but i do remember her starting to cry and say i never thought i would have a son who's going to hell i'm like i think that imprinted wow that you're bad it's at some level and overall my mom was great and overall my dad was but you know they made mistakes right and so being forgiving is important but when you're not bonded it can create all sorts of unconscious mischief in your brain so for example our big goal as babies and small children is to be attached because they feed us, they protect us, they house us.

28:04It's life-saving. And when the bond becomes broken, we develop this internal rage. But then, because we need them, we feel guilt about the rage and we suppress it. But then we start attacking ourselves because we feel guilt like we actually did something awful, right? The brain can often not distinguish an action from a thought. And we live with this sort of chronic sense of being bad. And it comes out in physical symptoms like back pain or neck pain or your gut's not right. And often healing people, you have to get in touch with the broken attachment and the rage, but more importantly, the guilt about the rage.

28:58So you answered one of my next questions, which says that do thoughts have physical manifestations in our bodies? And clearly you're saying they do. Well, if I hooked your body up, and when I was a young psychiatrist, I was a biofeedback therapist. So I would hook up your hand temperature, how much your hands sweat, your muscle tension, breathing rate, heart rate variability and then i would ask you questions i just say father and if your dad was like mine which was um an ambivalent stressful concept for me now we fixed it when he was 85 thank god but immediately if you would have said father my hands would get colder they would start to sweat my muscles would get tense, my breathing would become faster and more shallow, and my heart rate variability would go down.

29:51And it happens immediately. So whenever you have a negative thought, it impacts your physiology. Virtually every cell in your body responds to that. Whenever you have a positive thought, a hopeful thought, a happy thought, And for the most part with my mom, not that, but for the most part, my hands would get warmer. They'd get drier. My muscles would be more relaxed. I know you can't answer this definitively, but I'm curious about it. So I've never asked anybody this, and I'm not putting you on the spot here, but I want to take that to a level maybe even beyond what we just talked about. In our bodies, we all have some genetic predispositions.

30:33Could be to a particular cancer. Could be to heart disease. Could be to Alzheimer's, et cetera, et cetera. whatever it might be, is a hard one. When my dad got sick, you ever just have an overwhelming sense of something? You know, in your life, you just sense something. And in my dad's case, my dad was my favorite human being. He got sober. He was not my favorite human being when he was a drinker. Once he got sober, my favorite human, my best friend in the world. But my dad was a worrier. he inherited worrying thoughts from his father and from his father's father what you said earlier so profound that even from a neurological standpoint i mean genetically we're inheriting some of this trauma that's fascinating to me but my father lived with his father who was a worrier a good man but a worrier and i live with my father i became one and i just had this sense my dad got cancer what i still think is young which is in his late 60s and i have believed this is just is a layman i have not a scientific bone in my body that perhaps the way that my dad lived with just chronic worry and concern may have flipped that gene on prematurely in his body and i know that sounds like kind of a a reach of shorts do you believe psycho neuroimmunology which is your brain and the mind it creates uh can either increase cortisol in your body's stress hormone or decrease it.

32:03And if you're putting yourself with your undisciplined mind, the worry habit that was also modeled for him and modeled for you, you're more likely to have an immunological disorder like an autoimmune disorder or cancer. In my work, I talk about it in the book, if you want to keep your brain healthy or rescue it you have to prevent or treat the 11 major risk factors that steal your mind and then we talk about them and the mnemonic is bright minds i think in our last podcast we went through some of it well the g is for genetics but people don't think about genetics right i'm like i'm overweight because my family's overweight i'm like no you're overweight because you're eating too much uh but you have the genetic vulnerability like that's one of my vulnerabilities.

32:56I have family members that are morbidly obese, but I'm not. Why? Because every day of my life, I know the risk factor and I'm on an obesity prevention program. I also have heart disease in my family, but I don't have heart disease because I'm on a heart disease prevention program every day of my life. So if you know your vulnerabilities, I adopted my two nieces because they had massive trauma, and both parents were alcoholics and drug addicts, and I'm like, if you never drink, you're never gonna have a problem. And you need to be on an addiction prevention program every day of your life. And I'm like dead serious with them.

33:47And they're doing awesome. That's awesome.

33:53Speaking of kids, in the book, one of my concerns that I see is, by the way, I sound like an old man, get off my lawn when I say this, but what I worry about for the generation that I watch now is a resiliency deficiency because this last generation overall was everybody got a trophy, everybody won, everybody's okay. I don't think they've experienced it. A lot of helicopter parents have come in and fixed things at school. And I don't feel like there's a resiliency that maybe has come with previous generations. I certainly don't mean that critically because there's an innovation in this generation that's never existed before.