The Shocking Truth About Physical & Emotional Pain: Get Out of Pain NOW! - With Dr. Daniel Amen

0:00You are now listening to The Model Health Show with Shawn Stevenson Stevenson. For more, visit themodelhealthshow.com. Welcome to The Model Health Show. One of the most common things in this human experience is the experience of pain. As it said, pain can be an incredible teacher. It can inform us about danger. It can inform us about making different choices. But sometimes pain is there for no good reason at all. In fact, whether it's physical pain or emotional pain, it can be incredibly detrimental, if not devastating in the lives of so many people. Right now in the United States, approximately 50 million people are living with chronic pain, just trying to make it through the day.

0:54And today's episode is so important and so powerful because we're going to be addressing the root of pain and how pain is actually expressing itself in our bodies. Today, you're going to discover why physical pain and emotional pain are actually deeply connected. it. They're so connected, in fact, that they can create what our special guest and renowned expert in this subject matter calls a doom loop of pain feedback. And in order to break that doom loop, we've got to create a more virtuous loop and utilize science-backed approaches so that we can start to ease into feeling better. And here's the thing, and this is the promise.

1:44In many instances, our chronic pain can be completely resolved. And many of us are searching for that thing to help us with our pain. And unfortunately, in our world today, where pain is of epidemic proportions, were sold this idea of a pill's gonna fix that, which has led to the opioid epidemic, which at this point, as of this recording, over 1 million Americans have died as a result of being prescribed or utilizing opioid drugs. And so these drugs, absolutely, even them, even as destructive as they may be, have their place. But as you'll discover today, we're often missing the point and missing the pain when we're utilizing these band-aid solutions.

2:39And so when you're in pain, you just want something to help you to feel better. I know this very well. And we have so many incredible tools at our disposal, but often we don't know what we don't know. And so creating a widespread education around pain and effective treatments and solution for pain are the order of the day. And our special guest is going to inform you on how if you change your brain, you can change your pain. And with that being said, let's go ahead and get to our special guest and topic of the day. Dr. Daniel Amen is a double board certified psychiatrist and founder of Amen Clinics specializing in SPECT imaging.

3:22The Amen Clinics have collected over 300 ,000 SPECT scans on patients' brains from over 155 countries. Dr. Amen is also a 12-time New York Times best-selling author and has published over 90 peer-reviewed scientific articles. His work has led groundbreaking brain imaging research on active and former NFL players, childhood trauma, negativity bias, reversing brain aging. His mission is bold to end mental illness by creating a revolution in brain health and teaching people how they can change their brain to change their pain. Let's dive into this conversation with the one and only Dr. Daniel Amen.

4:08I got a big question to ask you. Why do you think physical pain and emotional pain are so deeply connected? They run on the same circuits in the brain. And in the book, I talk about the three pain circuits. There's the feeling circuit. You cut your hand. It activates an area of the brain called the thalamus. It's the sensory gateway in the brain. And then it goes to your parietal lobes, they go, oh, I cut my hand. Oh, it hurts. So there's the feeling pathway, which then in vulnerable people, not in everybody, activates the suffering pathway, which is your limbic brain. And if you grew up, for example, with childhood trauma, which you and I've talked about before, well, that's already working hard.

5:02And then it triggers the calming pathway. And so if you have a healthy frontal lobe, what can sort of tamp down or break the pain? But if you don't have a healthy frontal lobe, maybe you have ADD, low frontal lobe function. Maybe you hit soccer balls with your forehead or played tackle football, low frontal lobe function. Maybe you had a car accident, often low frontal lobe function. You can't turn the pain off. And people go, no, it's in my back. It's not in my head. Well, it starts in your back, but did you know 80 % of people my age, I'm 71, 80 % of people my age have abnormal MRIs in their back and no pain at all.

5:57It's the fear you feel when you get the abnormal MRI with the arthritis, the slip disc, crushed disc, whatever, that triggers the suffering pathway. And now all of a sudden, whatever pain you have gets smeared with dread. And then that makes your muscles tense, which then keeps the pain going. And so in the book, the star of this new book is the doom loop. So that's what I discovered. I was constantly getting myself into the doom loop. And there's an acronym called pain, right? It's like, so you actually have pain for any reason that activates the suffering pathway, which then increases the ants, the automatic negative thoughts that steal your happiness and negativity, which then goes to nervous tension.

6:56That's where repressed rage hangs out, which then leads to harmful habits. And you just spin on the doom loop and getting out of the doom loop. Well, you have to have a healing loop. It was like pain. I was like, oh, I heard. Well, every day you win or you learn what's different about today that's yesterday. Oh, I had corn the day before. Corn? Yes, because it's pro-inflammatory and it can increase pain. Or you didn't sleep well. Or somebody really pissed you off, but you didn't say anything because you want to be nice. And then it's ease the suffering pathway. It's something we can talk about EMDR or havenane or saffron or curcumins or from a medicine standpoint, Cymbalta.

7:50Isn't that interesting? It's one of the reasons I wrote the book. SAMe supplement works for both pain and depression. Cymbalta is an antidepressant that is FDA approved for chronic pain. Why? Because they work on the same circuits in the brain. And then you have to develop a positivity bias, muscle relaxation, express your feelings, and then really focus on healthy habits. I love it. So we're going to deconstruct these acronyms, of course. And it's just fascinating because people who've experienced pain, which is the majority of people listening, chronic pain specifically, we don't talk about the fact that that often leads to emotional pain.

8:39and the reverse is true, right? Emotional pain, right? Chronic depression, anxiety, leading to physical symptoms in the body as well. And so we've had a firsthand experience of that interconnected circuitry. You know, I love the analogy. You talk about two lanes of a highway merging together in the brain with these two different paths. And so, but it's very real, You know, the emotional pain is very real. And that physical pain, it can be very dark and difficult for us to manage in our lives. And so to have a solution, change your brain, change your pain, it really puts a spotlight on some agency here.

9:19Because as you know, just getting stuck in that doom loop is very difficult to break. Like, can you talk a little bit about what happens? We'll say, you know, somebody does experience an injury. We'll just say a back injury. And their brain and their repetitive thoughts start to go to, this is always going to be my existence. It's so bad. It's so bad. It's so bad. So I opened the book with the story of a police officer, Sam. And Sam had been in two high-speed chases, accidents. and he had severe back pain. He had sick surgeries. He was on opiates. He was drinking too much. He felt like he was a shell of himself.

10:03He was irritable with his wife, irritable with the kids. And one day he was done and he went to his garage, turned on his Jeep in a closed garage and he was gonna end it all. And thank God his wife was a light sleeper, ran to the garage, threw it open, screaming, crying, took him to the hospital. And by random chance, if you believe in random chance, I was on call and he just looked hollow and she looked terrified. And my first thought was not to put him on medicine. My first thought was to look at his brain, because that's what I do, right, for the last 34 years. I do a study at AIMON Clinics called Brain Speck Imaging.

10:55Speck looks at blood flow and activity. It looks at how your brain works. And his brain was not working well. The accidents damaged his frontal lobe, so that calming pathway just wasn't working. Taking the opiates turned off his own internal opiate production module. His suffering pathway was on fire. And especially an area called the anterior, that just means toward the front, cingulate gyrus. And I think of the cingulate as the brain's gear shifter. It lets you go from thought to thought, move from idea to idea, be flexible, go with the flow. Well, his childhood trauma from an alcoholic dad had activated it.

11:50The injuries, very traumatic emotionally, made it worse. And he hurt, but he couldn't stop thinking about the hurt. It was like his brain was like an old vinyl record and it had a scratch in and he couldn't get away from it. And giving him supplements to raise serotonin and calm that, along with all the other things I talk about in the book, he did dramatically better. And he said, you know, sometimes I still hurt, but I don't think about it all the time. And then he went on to law school and now he's a lawyer. Amazing. It's such a great story. And there's a plethora of these great stories, these success stories, and you also share their brain results as well.

12:42And, you know, just keeping this in context as well, in that particular story, I remember his relationships being strained. He started to think about all the things that he couldn't do anymore. And he was more and more isolating and, you know, very snappy with his loved ones. And he just wanted to end it all. He wanted to get out of pain. And this is not unusual, you know, because one of the things that you share in the book, which is so eye-opening, is the landscape of pain in our world today, in our society here in the United States specifically. Can you talk about the landscape of pain? Like, what are some of those statistics look like?

13:21Even kids, a certain percentage of children are experiencing. 20 % of children have chronic pain. And I actually tell the story of Amelie. and made me cry. She was my niece who ended up with something called complex regional pain syndrome after she fractured her ankle playing soccer. But ever since she was little, it was her elbow, it was her knee, it was her wrist. She was always complaining of chronic pain. And her ACE score, adverse childhood experiences on a scale of zero to 10, how many bad things happened to you growing up, she's a nine, which is why Tana and I ended up adopting her. So 20 % of kids, 50 million Americans struggle with chronic pain.

14:17And it's devastating. It increases the incidence of divorce, depression, suicide. And they often end up on multiple medications, including opiates, you know, we're still in the middle of this big opiate epidemic because in the late 90s, some of the pharmaceutical companies were very effective at marketing pain. And they said, now pain is the fifth vital sign that, you know, it's not just heart rate and blood pressure and breathing. We want to know what's your pain. And if you have any pain, You should be out of it. But the problem with taking opiates is they piss off your white blood cells and actually increase inflammation and pain in your brain.

15:12And of course, short-term people benefit from them, but you need to be thinking about how to get off of them because if you don't, they're gonna steal your life. As you know, mental health challenges have skyrocketed in recent decades. And without addressing the root cause of this emerging change in our society, we're going to continue to see poor outcomes. We need to address, of course, nutrient deficiencies, our sedentary behavior, our lack of social connection, our poor sleep quality. All of these things are proven to contribute to these epidemics of poor mental health. Of course, medication can be helpful in some contexts, but most people are not educated about the science-backed natural supplement that has been shown to be as effective as many medications.

16:03So making sure that we're being mindful of our lifestyle factors, but also utilizing science-backed supplementation. An analysis published in the Journal of Effective Disorders found that the renowned spice called saffron was just as effective as conventional antidepressant drugs like Prozac, tofrenil, and Celexa. Additionally, and of the utmost importance, people who are utilizing saffron had none of the side effects that were seen rampant in those who are utilizing those conventional treatments. So something that is far safer, but equally, if not even better in effectiveness. That's what we get when utilizing something like saffron.

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18:06Upon trying these happy drops, I've noticed a mood improvement, energy that lasts throughout the day, aka no afternoon slump anymore, and improved sleep at night. I'm thrilled. These are just some of the incredible testimonials. You can check them out over on the website. Again, go to Organifi.com forward slash model for 20 % off right now. That's O-R-G-A-N-I-F-I dot com forward slash model for 20 % off. And now back to the show. You also talk about the economic impact as well. Like$650 billion is going annually to address pain. Health care, costs, disability, the list goes on and on. And then it leads to alcohol consumption, which just devastates families.

18:53or it leads to more marijuana consumption, which can be so harmful.

19:03We just need a better approach. Yeah. One of my favorite parts of the book was kind of setting the tone for why is it the way that it is right now? And we're not really doing well, let alone this epidemic of pain we're experiencing, but the treatment of pain. And you shared that the current mindset to treating physical and emotional pain is most healthcare providers are trained to compartmentalize physical and emotional pain, to treat them as separate entities. You are disclosing the fact that they are wired up and connecting in the brain in the same place and they're treated separately. And so if we're dealing with a physical issue, you go to the physical person and our conventional treatments, surgery, drugs, maybe some physical therapy might be thrown in there, but it's just attack the physical.

19:55And hopefully we get some results if the surgery is successful. But what most people don't know is that as you talk about in the book, most surgical procedures don't even change as far as like progressive outcomes and things getting better as non-surgical approaches. And so there's a place - Right, in big studies, they come out about the same as far as effectiveness, but surgery has 21 times the number of side effects. And because of my imaging work, I'm like, general anesthesia is not on the top of the list, right? If I have to have it, I will. And then I will go about repairing my brain, but it can hurt your brain.

20:40And now I'm a psychiatrist. Why do I know that? Because I have patients who I have their scan, then they went for general anesthesia and their scans were significantly worse. And then I went to the literature and it said children who have general anesthesia have a higher incidence of ADHD and learning problems. Adults who have general anesthesia, especially coronary artery bypass surgery, have a higher incidence of dementia. And so always looking to love and care for my brain, I'm like, what else can I do? And I'm a fan of physical therapy and Pilates. And, you know, sometimes if you need an injection to sort of decrease the inflammation in that part, but I think you got to always think about getting your brain healthy first.

21:34And I have a cardiologist who I love and we're out to dinner and he said, I'm going to have back surgery. He said, I've had chronic back pain for four years. And I made the decision. I made the appointment. I said, I have a new book coming out. I said, just read the introduction and then call me and tell me what you think. And he read the whole thing and said he loved the book. And two weeks later, his pain was 90 % less. He canceled the surgery. And then a month later, he said, I have no pain. And for him, I think in part, it was repressed rage. And when you repress emotions, they come out, but in other ways, maybe hypertension attention or back pain or headaches.

22:28Why is that? Because the energy is going to go somewhere. And so many of us, especially I'm a middle child, I wanted to please. I had a brother that beat me up a lot. I have reasons for rage. But you really couldn't say it because you get hurt or you feel guilty about it. In the book, I talk about in the rage section, ISTDP. It's a form of therapy called intensive short-term dynamic psychotherapy. John Sarno in his works often talks about repressed rage, but I didn't think he did a good job of, all right, I see that. What do I do about it? And in this book, there's a lot of what do I do about it?

23:16And the theory behind intensive short-term dynamic psychotherapy is when you're little, you want to bond because your parents keep you alive. They feed you, they clothe you, they shelter you. But something bad happens, especially people who have higher ACE scores. Something bad happens and you feel pain. you feel rage, but you can't express it. And so you feel guilty about it and you turn it on yourself. So it's rage and then guilt about the rage, which then gets buried. But you hurt and you have anxiety and you're more likely to have an addiction and you're more likely to have stress symptoms.

24:11And so the treatment is often getting in touch with the rage, always appropriately. There's a exercise in the book that I love called emotional freedom journaling. I do it with my patients. So however old you are, for every five years, one page in the journal. Draw a line down the middle of the page. On the left side, what awesome things happened in your life, because I always want people to remember their lives in a balanced way. On the right side, what awful things happened. And write them out with detail. And if you do that, you know, so 71, it's 14 pages, you very clearly get to where the rage is.

24:53From being beaten up to being belittled by my dad to being belittled by my colleagues. you know you can't just be Pollyanna with all of this in fact there's a section in the book where I talk about Pollyanna having to make friends with Hannibal Lecter that at least in your imagination you have to be able to recognize and imagine or express the rage Yeah, yeah. Are there any other, like, what about a physical expression of that rage? It's not necessarily directed at another person, which can be pretty terrible, obviously. I think breaking dishes could be really helpful. Going to rage rooms where you're, you know, breaking things or beating things with bataka bats.

25:47I think that can be really helpful. Tana, her A score is 8. She's had a lot of pain in her life, loved karate. And she goes, I just feel better when I hit things. Yeah. Yeah. Oh my goodness. And this is just speaking to, again, there's a lot of tools, many paths to the goal, but just holding that stuff in is toxic, toxic to our bodies. And I think it could be very insidious. Like we don't really know what's happening, especially if it's something from childhood. But today I think it's easy as well. even the most kindhearted and patient among us, you know, sometimes we can be a sounding board or a container for a lot of stuff.

26:30And maybe we're just like, well, I'm such a nice person. It's okay if this person is like expressing all this anger my way, you know, that's just, it's fine. I'm fine. And it can start to build up. Like you've got to be able to process stuff yourself as well. Well, I just love the idea of getting anger out, getting repressed emotions to the surface. And so many people that are just so afraid of them. It's like, oh no, I can't feel that because then I'm not a good person. So they haven't really worked through. And it's often the origin is often four, five, six, because emotionally you believe you're at the center of the universe.

27:16So if something good in your family happens, you sort of think it's because of you. And if something bad in your family happens, you think it's sort of because of you. And you end up holding this guilt that had, in fact, nothing to do with you. but you carry it throughout your life, really believing you're a bad person. Yeah. So what I'm hearing is that you just said it. A lot of us are afraid of anger, for example, but all of our emotions have value. I think that's why we have them, but I think we can get stuck on some of them, of course. And also sometimes we can put some of our emotions on mute, even though they're valuable for us in our need for expression?

28:02You know, I find, yeah, when I get people to be able to express it, perhaps at their mom or one of their siblings, you know, it's always appropriate. But at least in your imagination, be able to be honest with yourself. And the reason the Emotional Freedom Journal is awesome and awful, it's I don't want you getting stuck on awful because that's not going to be helpful. I want you to really see your life in a balanced way. I find it so helpful. And I talk about EMDR a lot in the book, eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, where you can bring up some of these very powerful negative feelings.

28:50You do it with a therapist, but as I have your eyes going back and forth, you bring them up and it just sort of sucks the energy out of them. It's so powerful. And sometimes in EMDR, I'll go, and if the feelings could come out at that person, what would happen? Where would they go? And, you know, sometimes in our imagination, people die. And, you know, if you've been sexually abused and you were a victim, getting the rage out at that person, at least in your imagination, is critical to healing. Yeah. It's breaking this doom loop, right? I haven't shared this before. 2020, terrible injury, terrible injury, sciatic pain.

29:41it's around the time I saw you at that Santa Monica studio and I'm just like it's just on fire hot leaning in my chair and I healed recovered better than I had ever been you know the things that I was able to do it was a it was a difficult process but I was training this is 2020 and as I was training to get well I had in my mind that I was fighting against the idiocy that was happening in the world at the time and all the infighting. And I was training with this aggression. And I was just, I didn't know this at the time, but I was just encoding my cells with this command of anger. And I'm a very, as you know, I'm just, I'm a very cool person.

30:25I'm very laid back. But this is, that was my mindset at the time. And cut to a very difficult year, right? Right. 2024 to 2025, we'll say. Several close people passing away. Changes in our household dynamics with one kid moving out, another kid going to a different school and just all these moving parts. And that's just some of it. Even a mentor that I met around that time who came and sat in this chair. And when my father passed, this person showed up and said the things that I would have wanted him to say. Right. And then he ended up passing away. So it was just like one thing after the other.

31:07And it was enough to, again, I felt like I was handling it all very well. And my wife was very upset during this time with all the changes as well. Her father passed. And as I was, you know, like the last kind of straw happened and I started to have that pain that I had in 2020 without any mechanical damage. And it was difficult. I ended up going to physical therapy and just doing all this stuff again for a psychosomatic issue. But I didn't believe it was psychosomatic, even after getting analyzed, because I couldn't believe the stress reactivated. Exactly. Your emotional brain. And it went to a vulnerable area in your body.