Change Your Brain Every Day - Can Donating to Charity Help Your Brain? with Kelli Davis

Episode Date: June 25, 2019

In her work with The Children’s Miracle Network, Kelli Davis brushes shoulders with high-profile celebrities on a regular basis. These interactions have resulted in some surprising lessons about what makes people truly happy. In this episode of the podcast, Dr. Daniel Amen, Tana Amen, and Kelli describe what egoistic altruism is, and Kelli tells a heartwarming story of what happened when a famous superhero actor visited a children’s hospital.

Welcome to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. I'm Dr. Daniel Amen. And I'm Tana Amen. In our podcast, we provide you with the tools you need to become a warrior for the health of your brain and body. The Brain Warriors Way podcast is brought to you by Amen Clinics, where we have been transforming lives for 30 years using tools like brain spec imaging to personalize treatment to your 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 nutraceuticals to support the health of your brain and body. To learn more, go to brainmd.com. Welcome back. We're talking to Kelly Davis from the Children's Miracle Network. And this is Your Brain on Giving. And we've talked a little bit about purpose and how important that is.

And I know you work with many celebrities, as do we. It's an interesting endeavor, and we love them all. But celebrity all by itself is actually bad for the brain. It wears out your pleasure centers. And in my book, Feel Better Fast, Make It Last, I talk about the pleasure centers in the brain area called the basal ganglia that produce dopamine. And dopamine helps you feel happy, driven, motivated.

But fame, getting people screaming your name, being talked about, whether good or bad, it wears out your pleasure centers. And one of my prayers for my young celebrities is, dear God, please don't let me be famous before my brain is developed. Yeah. It's interesting. I love what you said in the last episode, Kelly, when you said the small things are miracles, right? Because I mentioned that I went through a really severe depression as well. When you come from a really dark place and you start to come out of it, I remember thinking, oh my gosh, the flowers are so bright. The sun, it feels so good. It's so beautiful. The small things were so amazing. And when life gets

really big and really busy, and not even at a celebrity level just at a busy like work level and family level you start to miss those things you start to not notice those things anymore um so it's interesting when you get bigger and bigger in that celebrity level you begin to not see it you need more and more for it to feel like a miracle but i love what you said if you step back and you just notice those small things, because I remember when those all felt super miraculous and we can always do that if we stop and we just choose to notice it and be present. It's just a really powerful thing to do. So talk about some of your work. I mean, my sense is if you're a celebrity and you get involved with causes you love, causes you believe in, that actually helps to mitigate some of the negativity that can go along with fame.

I work with hundreds of celebrities that want to use their platform to give back because I think on the other side of fame, it's a horrible thing you mentioned it's it's it's not healthy so they want to really make sure that they are making a difference in this world and so I want to share an amazing story of the most special day that I had with um Chris Pratt are you familiar with him from Guardians of the Galaxy and Jurassic World well Chris um I had read that he'd saved his outfit from Guardians of the Galaxy. And if the movie did well, he wanted to surprise the kids at Chilms Hospital, Los Angeles. So I reached out to his publicist. We go to CHLA.

And all the kids are in the Child Life playroom watching this movie, having no idea this superhero is going to come in. And he comes in with his costume. And these kids like are in awe they can't believe he's there but the cool thing about Chris that day is when he walked in the hospital he said Kelly I need to get this calendar on my calendar once a month because that's who he is it wasn't about oh I'm just going to go do this and I'm going to get some media around he knew what it did for him for his his soul, but for these kids, because he

said, I get way more out of it than these kids do. So after that, we go around for two hours and do individual room visits. And we visited a cute little kid who passes over 30 kidney stones a day who's in constant pain. And Chris just sat in his room. They quoted movies from the Lego movie, lines from the Lego movie. And then Chris went to a little girl who had cancer. She couldn't come out of the room and he just put his hand up to the window and they just had this moment of being present together. And it made a difference. It makes a difference. Those little tiny things that we do when we're thinking outside of ourselves matters. For sure. And so I'm so blessed to work with celebrities who care

and who want to help save kids' lives. That's so special. And it's amazing. That's really special. So the kids get the help, but Chris gets the healing. That's good. That's good. But I think the kids get the healing too,

and the parents get the healing, and the siblings get the healing because they get to be removed from their situation in that moment. And just be present. He was digging at me a little. I'm not digging. I'm supporting you. It's one of the things we talk about a lot here is when you help others it really and Hans Selye who's probably the father of stress research in the world um he has a term called egoistic altruism right and it's like what does

that mean it means when you give it comes back and helps make you a whole person. Well, I came up with that when I didn't want to do a project at all. I was being a selfish brat at the time, actually. It was with a group of addicts. And I have, because of my own personal story, I was being very judgmental about it. My childhood was very chaotic because of an uncle who was a heroin addict. And so I didn't want to do it. And I just told Daniel, I broke down and I was like, God picked the wrong person this time. I can't do this one. And so he's like, God picked the perfect person. Well, I ended up doing this project for over two years. It was amazing. It was one of the most amazing things that I've, like projects I've ever worked with.

These guys were incredible. The transformations were incredible. And so at the end, I realized I was praying about it and I'm like, oh, I get it, God. I was arguing with you, but really this was more for me than it was for them in a lot of ways. Like they got the help, I got the healing. So he likes to throw that at me now and then. I think it's just a beautiful way to think about life. Because he's always pushing me into these things that I'm not ready for.

One has to wonder why I married a psychiatrist. To be honest, I do love giving for the right reasons, but with, it really does help me deal with my personal struggles. And I was raised in the Mormon faith, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. And it's very big on families and purpose. It's all about family. Well, I'm not married and I don't have children. And so I felt completely less than my whole life because I don't have kids. And so I was able to step into my purpose of these kids are my kids. I wanted four kids. God gave me over a hundred. And that's my why. It's why I get out of bed every day because these are my children. And how can I make sure I'm serving them every day? That's very special.

Although I don't know if you know, there's actually new research that suggests women who do not have children are actually the happiest of all the groups. And it's interesting, you know, men who are married live longer than men who are not married in large part because we have wives who harass us. Like me. To go to the doctor, to not go speak in Cancun. Right, to not go someplace during hurricane season, yeah. Yeah, where the crime rate is out of control. But women who are married do not live longer because they're with irritating guys like me. That want to go places that are dangerous.

All right, back to the Children's Miracle Network and how do people get involved? So you have a podcast they can listen to. You have a website. Obviously they could donate to the cause. What are ways everyday people can be supportive of the work you do? Well, we are so blessed to have about 100 corporate partners who do fundraising campaigns for us throughout the year. So Walmart on June 7th is starting a six-week campaign that will raise $60 million. So if you want to help CMN,

just go to your Walmart and donate a dollar at the counter. You can do that at other corporate partners like Marriott, Delta, Walgreens, Rite Aid. But really, if you could just go to our website and donate $1, cmnhospitals.org, $1 helps create miracles. It helps save kids' lives. It really does. I mean, this $7 billion was grassroots, a dollar at a time. It matters. And one of the most powerful things you can actually do is teach your children to donate as well. So to take, you know, if they get $10 of allowance a week, to just encourage them to do a little bit of extra things and donate a dollar. Because when you do that, you are teaching them to get outside of themselves and into other

people. And I don't know if, well, I know you know that the incidence of teenage depression in girls has skyrocketed. 36% of teenage girls will have depression at some point during their adolescence. It's insane what's happening. And often what social media does is it teaches us to focus on ourselves rather than being purposeful and helping other people. So we have a 15-year-old that struggles with anxiety a lot, like really struggles with anxiety. But we've taught her from an early age to be purposeful. And so interesting.

So she was required as, you know, she was sort of a requirement to get involved with volunteer time, right? This is something that kids have to do now. But she, so a lot of the kids picked the easiest thing they could do. They picked, you know, clean, beach clean up, stuff like that, because it's just easy. But she's like, no, if I'm going to do this, I'm going to really do this. And she got involved with a couple of organizations where she was actually doing something that was meaningful to her and giving back to young girls. And all of a sudden, I watched this transformation happen.

It went from something that was a requirement to something she's doing double the hours she's required to do, and she can't wait to do it again next year. She's like, I'm not quitting. And all of a sudden, now she joined the Mayor's Youth Council. She's now becoming interested in local politics. They offered her a job. It was crazy. Like, this thing that started out as something

she had to do, she realized was so powerful in her own life that it just took root. And it was really a fascinating thing to watch for a teenager. So when we come back, we're going to talk about more miracles and the impact of miracles on your brain. Stay with us. If you're enjoying the Brain Warriors Way podcast, please don't forget to subscribe so you'll always know when there's a new episode. And while you're at it, feel free to give us a review or five-star rating as that helps others find the podcast. If you're interested in coming to Amen Clinics, use theCAST10 to get a 10% discount on a full evaluation at amenclinics.com. For more information, give us a call at 855-978-1363.