Change Your Brain Every Day - 7 Critical Reasons Not to Ignore PTSD Anxiety and Depression

Episode Date: December 28, 2016

Believe it or not, but growing up in a violent environment causes the same brain changes in children as soldiers in war.  When you grow up troubled, in a chaotic or an aggressive environment, it can actually change your brain, perhaps for the rest of your life. Join us in this episode as we discuss this topic on why you shouldn't ignore PTSD anxiety, and depression. 

Hi, I'm Donnie Osmond, and welcome to The Brain Warrior's Way, hosted by my friends Daniel and Tana Amon. Now, in this podcast, you're going to learn that the war for your health is one between your ears. That's right. If you're ready to be sharper and have better memory, mood, energy, and focus, well then stay with us. Here are Daniel and Tana Amen.

Hi, I'm Dr. Daniel Amen. Thanks for being with us. I'm here with my beautiful wife, Tana. Thanks for joining us today. So we are going to talk some more about post-traumatic stress disorder. It affects 7 million Americans. And we recently had a Facebook post that said growing up in a violent environment causes the same. It can actually change your brain, perhaps for the rest of your life. So talk to me for a minute. Does violent mean that you're just physically being abused or that you're seeing lots of chaos and yelling and drama? Explain that. Well, it can actually be both. And I did my research when I was child psychiatry fellow. So when I was learning to become a child psychiatrist on children and grandchildren who grew up in alcoholic homes, where it was just unpredictable. So sometimes there was physical abuse, sometimes there was

sexual abuse. What really was damaging, and those are damaging, but it's just never knowing when there's going to be drama and chaos, when the police are going to come to your house. And so your brain begins to overfire because you're always watching. So it's that feeling of not feeling safe. So you're always on guard. You're always on guard, which is what happens to soldiers when even though, you know, I was an infantry medic during Vietnam and then later I was an army officer. And so war is like 2% complete terror and 98% boredom because, you know, you're always preparing, waiting. but it's the waiting for terror that is doing just as much damage.

Because what we see is a person's emotional brain begins to overwork, overfire, because they're always watching, and then explode when some traumatic event takes place. So there's a very interesting neurophysiology concept called kindling. So kindling occurs if you take a nerve cell and you pass an electrical current through it, well, nothing happens. But as you raise the electricity, pretty soon the nerve cell will begin to fire up.

And if you keep the electricity or the trauma or the tension high enough for long enough, this nerve cell is said to become kindled, which means you can actually lower the electricity and it still fires off. So if you grew up in a traumatic environment and then say 20 years later, your wife gives you a funny look because she has gas. All of a sudden, boom, you feel traumatized and you overreact to the situation because when you're young, being hypervigilant or always watching actually causes your brain to be stirred up. And so we see, we call it the diamond pattern in the brain. On our spec scans, we actually see their emotional brain works too hard. So just a few weeks ago, I was in with a new patient. And when I looked at his scan, he had this diamond pattern or his

emotional brain was working too hard. And I said, well, have you ever had emotional trauma? And without any hesitation at all, he told me his dad was like, and I can't use the words, but he was like a flaming, you know, part of yourself. And it was so clear how he then went through moment after moment of terror in his family. And now he's 40. So the terror didn't happen for over 20 years, but it still left a lasting footprint in his brain of trauma. And that's where therapy can be so helpful. Just so you begin to disconnect these bridges from the past. It starts, in my mind, with actually getting a look at how healthy your brain is. Do you have emotional trauma in your brain? And I'm so excited. My research team and I just got accepted for publication, a brand new study saying we can distinguish between post-traumatic stress disorder, emotional trauma, and people who have TBI or

physical brain trauma 94% of the time on scans. And why is that important? The treatment's different. And if you don't start by knowing what's going on in your brain, you can go in a completely wrong direction, which can actually do more harm than good. So I actually did a study on six police officers who were involved in shootings and who then couldn't go back to work because they had emotional trauma. And after just an average of eight sessions where they did a treatment we do called EMDR, stands for eye movement, desensitization and reprocessing, all of them went back to work. And the cool thing was, is it calmed their brain down. I want to point something out about that. So I have a friend, he's been here and you know him very well, and he's a friend of ours, that is an LAPD SWAT officer who has been involved in

many horrible, horrific incidents, and in fact has received awards for some of the horrible things that have happened that he's been involved in. And I find it so interesting because he's a little bit different than most of the officers that we've seen or talked to who come in here with the opposite issue. He meditates every single day, exercises, has never drank alcohol in his entire life, eats very, very clean. And he believes that the meditation is why he doesn't suffer from any of these problems. And he has a little exercise he does. When he walks in the door, he literally takes off his uniform in the garage. And in his mind, he does an exercise. It's like, as I take this off, as I take my uniform off in the garage, I am leaving behind what I saw today.

When I go in and talk to my family, it's over. And so he does this exercise and he meditates. And that is what keeps him sane, literally. And from experiencing this PTSD type of experience. And he really tries to share that with some of the officers who initially laughed at him, but now it's catching on because of the suffering that they experience. Well, and the other cool thing he did was he also trains FBI officers is he got them to stop doing the fighting drills that were giving FBI officers head injuries. And traumatic brain injury

and post-traumatic stress disorder go together a lot because you can imagine if you're in a car accident where you hit your head, well, that's also emotionally very traumatizing. If you're one of the veterans, you know, where you experienced, you were involved in a blast injury, well, that's emotionally traumatizing as it is physically traumatizing. So one, knowing the difference is important, but two, then developing strategies. And I love that you brought up meditation because, you know, we've also published studies showing that meditation can actually help begin to repair brain function, calms down your emotional brain, but strengthens the front part of your brain, the most human, calms down your emotional brain, but strengthens the front

part of your brain, the most human, thoughtful part of your brain. So stay with us. There's so much we want to teach you on how to have a better brain and a better life. Thanks for listening to today's show, The Brain Warrior's Way. Why don't you head over to brainwarriorswaypodcast.com. That's brainwarriorswaypodcast.com, where Daniel and Tana have a gift for you just for subscribing to the show. And when you post your review on iTunes, you'll be entered into a drawing where you can win a VIP visit to one of the Amen Clinics. I'm Donnie Osmond, and I invite you to step up your brain game by joining us in the next episode.