Change Your Brain Every Day - A Simple Practice to Let Go Of Negative Thoughts

Episode Date: August 30, 2017

Did you know that the types of thoughts you have can cause a physiological reaction in your body? That’s why it’s crucial to banish those Automatic Negative Thoughts (ANTs) when they infest your mind. With the help of Captain Snout, the title character from Dr. Daniel Amen’s new children’s book, children and adults alike can ask themselves the “Superpower Questions” to stop negative thinking.

Welcome to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. I'm Dr. Daniel Amen. And I'm Tana Amen. Here we teach you how to win the fight for your brain to defeat anxiety, depression, memory loss, ADHD, and addictions. The Brain Warriors Way podcast is brought to you by Amen Clinics, where we've transformed lives for three decades using brain spec imaging to better target treatment and natural ways to heal the brain. For more information, visit amenclinics.com.

The Brain Warriors Way podcast is also brought to you by BrainMD, where we produce the highest quality nutraceutical products to support the health of your brain and body. For more information, visit brainmdhealth.com. Welcome to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. So we're back talking about Captain Snout and the superpower questions. So much fun, how transformative it has been for our family and our daughter. And let's talk about why. Well, the subtitle is Don't Let the Ants Steal Your Happiness.

And if you've been listening to this podcast or you've read any of our books, you know, we talk about ants. Ants stands for automatic negative thoughts, the thoughts that come into your mind automatically and ruin your day. And what I learned a long time ago as a psychiatrist is there's a form of psychotherapy called cognitive behavior therapy. And Aaron Beck from the University of Pennsylvania is thought to be the father of it. It's actually in the New Testament. In the book of Philippians, the apostle Paul wrote, think on whatever is true, right, lovely, worthy of praise. Let your mind dwell on these things. Where you bring your attention determines how you feel.

Now, this is information that should be taught to small children because too often adults have undisciplined minds that quite literally are filled with ants, with automatic negative thoughts. And research shows that these negative thought patterns are major drivers for anxiety disorders, major drivers of depression, major drivers of obesity, of violence, of job dissatisfaction, of divorce. And the coolest thing is you don't have to believe job dissatisfaction, of divorce. And the coolest thing is you don't have to believe every stupid thing you think.

Thoughts aren't true. They're just thoughts. And it's our uninvestigated thoughts that ruin, that steal our happiness. Absolutely. And I'm not okay with that. And so I'm about stomping out the ants. And so I developed the term ants.

I think it was around 1991, 92. Funny, about the same time I was doing the imaging work, and I remember I had a really bad day at work, which was not an aunt. I had two teenagers that had ran away from home. I had four suicidal patients. Now I know how to deal with suicidal patients, but that four of them in one day, that was a lot. and then I had two couples who hated each other and I'm like I'm stressed and I went home and I don't drink but I wanted to that night and I came home to an ant infestation in the house and there were thousands of the little guys. And they were in the kitchen and they were crawling out of the cereal. I guess it means I shouldn't have been eating cereal. And I mean,

they were just everywhere. And as I'm cleaning them up, I mean, literally by the thousands, I'm thinking to myself, because, you know, when you go to medical school, you have to learn 50,000 new terms when you're a freshman medical student. And so I'm always making up mnemonics as a way to remember lists of things. And so I'm cleaning up the ants. And then I start thinking about cognitive behavior therapy and automatic negative thoughts. And I'm like, A-N-T, automatic negative thoughts, ANTS. This is what I dealt with all day at work today. I was dealing with all these people who were infested with negative thoughts.

They were infested with ANTS. And so I'm beginning to think of my patients and I see, this is just how crazy I am, but I'm a psychiatrist, so it's okay. I begin to see ANTS coming out of their eyeballs I see ants coming out of their ears I see ants crawling all over their head making them mad right sad suicidal wanting to run away right And the next day I brought ant spray to work. And I took the ant spray and I put it on my coffee table. And I started talking to them about, we need to kill the ants. Yeah. When I met you, you had ant eaters like all over the place.

Well, and then I realized that ant spray is toxic, right? It's toxic to brain function. And so I'm like, you know, I'm a child psychiatrist by training. You know me. I'm a sweet, kind, thoughtful, caring, loving person. I can't, the ant spray didn't fit. So I was at Pier 39. So at the time, I was working in our office outside of San Francisco.

And on the weekends we go to Pier 39 and I found an ant puppet. Oh, that's cute. And so I bought the ant puppet and I started playing with it with the kids I saw. And then with the adults, because, you know, it's the same thing. And then later I got an ant eater puppet. with the kids I saw and then with the adults because you know it's the same thing and and then later I got an anteater puppet and you could actually take the tongue of the puppet and make it go in and out of the anteater's long snout and I'd put it in the ears of my patients and and I remember this little boy I saw he had a panic disorder, especially when he'd get around dogs.

It would just freak him out. And so I taught him how to kill with ants. And three weeks later, he was playing with dogs. And he came into my office. He was so proud of himself. And we were drawing. And he drew a little town. And and he said this is an ant ghost town that's awesome i don't have any more ants in my head that's cute and he was powerful and so

captain snout and the superpower questions really comes out of this research because you know whenever you have a thought your brain releases chemicals right whenever you have any thought like right before the podcast i come in came in and i saw how beautiful you are and my heart went faster and i mean I just, whoa. And even though we've been together 12 years, that still happens to me a lot. So what happens, though, when you have, say, an opposite thought of that, anxiety or sadness?

Or anger. Whenever you have a negative thought, an ant thought, a hopeless thought, a helpless thought, a worthless thought, an ant thought, a hopeless thought, a helpless thought, a worthless thought, an angry thought, your brain releases a set of chemicals. So like cortisol. That make you feel bad. Adrenaline.

So stress hormones. Stress hormones. Right. And every cell in your body reacts to them. Every cell. So immediately what happens? Your hands get colder because your blood vessels react to them and they constrict. Right.

Your hands start to sweat because your endocrine glands become more active. Your muscles get tense. So that's why we call them tension headaches. And your gut actually is lined with smooth muscles. So the 30 feet of intestines you have clamp down, your breathing becomes shallow and not very efficient so let's talk a second about because i thought this was really interesting i did a video um and a blog on forgiveness and there is one of the most popular ones you did right there's an in fact we did a podcast on it so there is an entire area of medicine opening up and study research on, not medicine, but research on forgiveness.

And in fact, there's a surgeon, there's a burn specialist, you know, works with the grafting and skin and things like that. And he studies forgiveness and the effects on how people heal. And it's exactly what you just said. People who do not forgive in his studies, what he showed was people who don't forgive either don't heal as well or don't heal at all. And they get much sicker. So they're more, more prone to other like secondary infections and illnesses and things like that. People who learn to forgive and there's actually a practice

to forgiveness. So let's talk about that. But let me finish this. Whenever you have a thought, so bad thoughts make every cell in your body feel bad, right? It's like pollution. And having grown up in the San Fernando Valley, both of us did, right? I mean, there were smog days. Well, having negative thought days are like you're producing pollution inside your body. I mean, it actually begins to kill off the gut bacteria that are supposed to help you. In the Brain Warriors way, when we did our course and you did that beautiful illustration of Larry Leakey, it was hysterical. But when he was stressed, it's killing gut bacteria right but the opposite is also true whenever you have a happy thought a hopeful thought a loving thought uh wow she's beautiful thought um your hands get warmer. They get drier. Your muscles become more relaxed.

Your breathing is more efficient. And your heart rate variability, which is a sign of heart health, actually gets better. So your body and your mind respond to virtually every thought you have. So that's actually what happens physiologically. What's also interesting is that because of that reaction, you become more able to problem solve. You become more creative and you become more attractive to people. That's so true.

Really interesting. It's so true. In fact, we actually did a study on appreciation versus negative thinking and the negative thinking scan um her frontal lobes dropped right which means you're not creative you can't solve problems you can't think her executive function is going to go down and her temporal lobes drop which means her memory is not going to be good and she's going to be more likely to strike out in anger and her cerebell to be good and she's going to be more likely to strike out in anger. And her cerebellum dropped, which means she's going to be less coordinated.

So this applies to sports. It applies to relationships. I mean, literally applies to everything in your life that you don't have to believe. And again, it's not positive thinking. It's accurate thinking. It's accurate thinking. And I really think of Captain Snout in the superpower questions. Anytime you feel sad or anytime your child feels sad, read it to them them anytime you feel mad or they feel mad read it to them anytime they feel like they can't do something or they feel anxious because odds are at least part of what's going on are the negative thought patterns that are driving their unhappiness or ineffectiveness and getting

that right is absolutely critical well it's an awesome book i think it's darling and it's just the perfect tool for oh it's super cute so for those of you that aren't listening you know you can also watch these uh podcasts on youtube on our youtube channel but the illustrations are just yeah they're darling super cute you want to get rid of the ants don't let the ants steal your happiness captain snout and the superpower questions if you're listening to this before September 12th, 2017, you can pre-order the book at Amazon and BarnesandNoble.com. We'd be so grateful if you did. After September 12th, it'll be available everywhere where great books are sold. Thanks for listening. Thank you for listening to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. Go to iTunes and leave a

review and you'll automatically be entered into a drawing to get a free signed copy of the Brain Warriors Way and the Brain Warriors Way cookbook we give away every month.