Change Your Brain Every Day - Connection: How To Improve Your Relationships Today

Episode Date: December 15, 2017

Connection is the name of the game when it comes to relationships. But how do you know when your habits are wearing out that connection, causing problems in your relationships or even ending them? In part 6 of the Success Starts Here series, Dr. Daniel Amen and Tana Amen introduce the mnemonic R.E.L.A.T.I.N.G., which breaks down what you need to implement to ensure success with those you love. 

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. Welcome back. Success starts here and it's clearly involved your brain. And everything you do. Especially your relationships. For sure. And so this lesson is called Connect.

How can you use your brain to improve your relationships? And one of the most interesting things I learned from the imaging work is that when a person's brain is better, they actually become more thoughtful. They become more loving. I think that's true. They become better connected. And so many years ago, I had a patient from Sacramento named Red. And he came to see me after he tried to kill himself.

And he tried to kill himself by, you know, turning on his car in his garage with all, you know, the door and windows closed because his wife left him. And she left him, he said, because he was the anger broker of the Sacramento Valley. And when he first came to see me, he was sort of an ass. I mean, I know you're not like supposed to say that, but he was rude to my staff. I was like 10 minutes late. I'm the most on time doctor you'll ever meet. And he like starts chewing me out right away. At the end of the first session, I said, look, I'm going to send you for a scan because I need to get you better quickly because I am not going to treat you if you don't treat me with respect. And so I sent him over to the imaging center and then he called me from the

imaging center complaining about the technologist. He was just so awful. But his brain came back and it was damaged on the left side. From the carbon monoxide? No. Oh. He was an ass. That's why his wife was leaving him. That didn't help.

That couldn't have helped. It didn't help. But I'm like, did you ever have a head injury? He said, no. And I said, well, are you sure? I know this whole routine. You asked him like nine times i did and he had a bad bike accident uh going down a colorado mountain and and he had the cingulate from hell so he had damage to his left frontal lobe that's the happy side of your

brain happiness lives in the left front part of your brain if you kill that and hurt his left temporal lobe so short temper mood instability irritability dark thoughts and he had the cingulate from could never let it go just couldn't let it go and so i gave him some medicine to stabilize his temporal lobes to calm calm down his cingulate. And no lie, three weeks later, he's bringing flowers to the girls up front. He's so kind. I'm so sorry. I'm so grateful I have you. Please don't leave me.

Everybody leaves me because I'm an ass. And I saw him for, i don't know years and he just became the most consistently loving person because his brain worked better that's amazing but we see it all the time we see it all the time right we see it so um let's talk about some brain-based habits to elevate your relationship so obviously it's taking care of and balancing your brain so I came up with this little mnemonic because I like those things called relating so r is for responsibility we just talked about that in the last lesson we did and you know people say 50-50. You know, she's not doing her part, so I'm not going to do my part. It's 100-100. You have to do your whole thing. Right.

And what I found, so it used to be, so the common lore is it takes two to make a relationship. And so, you know, I was always thinking if I couldn't get the other person in and we work as a couple, that I would have no success with people. And then I realized there's ways to say things and there are ways to say things. And so as I empowered one person to be more focused, kinder, more purposeful, their partner became more focused, kinder, and purposeful. So I do this exercise with them and I love doing this. So, you know, so say it's a couple that's having problems or I recently had a 13 year old boy who was having problems with his dad.

And I went, so how do you make your dad mad? He's like, what do you mean? I said, I know you know how to make them crazy. How do you make your dad yell at him, yell at you? And he said, well, I won't talk to him when he comes in. Or I'll be disrespectful to him. Or I'll purposefully make noises when he wants us to be quiet. It's amazing, right?

Kids actually do this. They think it out. I know exactly how to make you crazy. You do. Right? You do. You don't, thank God. But I don't.

But I know it. And the reason I want you to ask yourself this question, so think of the relationship you want better. How do you make it worse? Because now we're talking about responsibility. Is you're a powerful person. And if you can make it worse worse how do you make it better right what are the things because i know exactly what would trigger oh yeah but you could walk in and tell me shut the hell up and do what you're told i take that dress off but i don't do that

no thank god i would not because and the reason i don't do that. No, thank God. I would not respond well. And the reason I don't do that, besides I love you, is I will never get what I want. You will get lots of what you don't want. Which is a kind, caring, loving, supportive, passionate relationship. Right. And so I am using my frontal lobes, empathy, purpose, goal-directed. So you can see, though, where this would be a problem. So you've got someone like me who has this cingulate, who can react to somebody who's aggressive. And then you've got somebody who's had a head injury.

You see the problem there. Someone who has low frontal lobe and maybe also has had their left temporal lobe damaged. And now all of a sudden that person's sort of mean, angry, comes in and just says whatever, you know, says some mean things. And you put that someone with someone like me, right. And I'm not the kind of person who will back down. And domestic violence actually happens when you have one or both brains that aren't working. Isn't that crazy? It's like, but you start to understand. That we have learned. So R is for responsibility.

What is it I can do today to make this better? And get rid of blame because it's just not helpful. E is for empathy, which is a frontal function. It's beginning to see things from their point of view. L is for listening. So important. And we so suck at it as a society, right? People are talking over each other and I love active listening. So, you know, this family member of ours that we're coaching and she's like, my daughter won't talk to me. And I'm like, well, it's because you talk over her and you don't listen. And well, she won't

talk to me. I took her for a walk a couple of days ago and she's just like a little chatterbox. Well, and it takes practice. Because when I first learned this, you've really helped me with this with our daughter. When you first learn, as moms, we're often, we think our role is to just tell our kids what to do and to do it right. Like them the instructions right give them the wisdom as opposed to listening to what they have to say and then asking questions and letting them solve it themselves because then they develop a sense of right but it takes practice so active listening is whenever someone says something repeat back the last four or five words you hear and listen for the feelings of it and then repeat back what you hear and if you and then shut up right if you shut up yeah and then they will continue to talk and and then you can listen and listening is involved with bonding

yeah and if you don't if you talk over them and you don't listen they will stop talking well and now and now i mean like i said it takes practice but now it's so much fun because i'll start that process i'll take my daughter for a drive for some reason when we're driving is when she just like you know opens up and it's amazing so but i'll ask a question and she'll just like go on and on and then she'll sort of like stop and so i'll ask her another question and then she'll just go on and on and on but you learn so much about your kids so what's that's very interesting because as a child psychiatrist what we learned was to play games with kids because if you just had them sit on the couch and say okay tell me your pain they won't talk to you they don't even really. Because if you just had them sit on the couch and say, okay, tell me your pain,

they won't talk to you. They don't even really know. But if you start playing cards with them, they will begin to open up and share what's on their mind. So a lot of parents go, I'm not paying $400 for you to play with the child, but that's not actually, it's why art therapy works too.

Yeah. The a in relating is for appropriate assertiveness. So this is really important. I had to teach this to so many patients over the years. If you don't ask for what you need in an appropriate way, you will never get it because your husband or your wife is no good at reading your mind. And women are notorious for this. And their level of anxiety really gets in the way. Or they think, well, he should know

if he were really a good husband, he would know what I want and what I need. Except husbands are not good at reading your mind. And you need to tell them more than once because they have a short attention span. T is for actual physical time. Relationships and bonding require that. So, you know, you come home and you want sex and you've not called, you've not talked to her, you've not taken her out. You don't go for a walk. It's like, forget it. I is for inquiry. So that's correcting the automatic negative thoughts.

Ants. So if you have ants and your spouse has ants ants the ants mate with each other and you end up with super negative ants um n is for noticing what you like more than what you don't like uh that's how you shape behavior and g is for connecting in groups or social networks so i wrote uh you can help me with this, 10 ways to sabotage your relationship. So what is number one? Number one is a poor attitude. So you expect the conversation to go nowhere and you don't try to direct it in a positive way.

Negative assumptions about the other person feed into your poor attitude. And up front, you don't trust the other person. So you remain stiff and guarded when you're together. So you expect things are going to turn out badly. They're going to turn out badly. You are predicting the worst. Or you have unclear expectations and needs. Do you expect people to guess what you want and need

or do you communicate with them? People are not mind readers or they're not very effective at reading your mind. Number three is not to reinforce if you're not reinforcing body language. So no reinforcing body language. Body language is very important. It sends both conscious and unconscious messages.

Isn't it true that only, like it's like less than 30% of communication is actually verbal? Right. So you could be talking to me and I could be on my phone, rolling my eyes, grunting. Right. And the being on social media thing is what makes me crazy when people are not like paying attention to you so when you fail to make eye contact or acknowledge the other person with facial or body gestures he or she begins to feel lost alone unenthusiastic about continuing the conversation i mean just think about when you're talking to

someone and they're just sitting there looking at their email going uh-huh uh-huh you're like why am i even bothering right so i noticed um this is really interesting in martial arts they teach little kids they start them at really young it's like you have to make eye contact because kids today don't make eye contact like they used to right their heads are buried in their phones right um for competing with distractions So like what you just said, direct, um, distractions, frequently doom communication. Number five is never asking for feedback on what you're saying. So you, you can't assume that you're sending clear messages to the other person and think that they're understanding it. In fact, what they understand might be completely different from what you're saying to them. So you need to actually make sure they're understanding it. In fact, what they understand might be completely different from what you're saying to them. So you need to actually make sure they're understanding it. And that's why one of

the things you taught me about with the active listening is to also repeat back. So if like, I think what I'm hearing you say is, or I've heard you say, you know, and then repeat it back. It's really important. Um, six is kitchen sinking. This occurs in arguments where people feel backed into a corner. So they bring up completely unrelated things from the past to protect themselves or to stir stuff up further. So you want to stay on track. What are we really discussing? Right. Seven is what we talked about earlier, mind reading.

So you arbitrarily predict what another person is thinking and then react on the imagined information. It might not even be true. So mind reading is often a projection of what you think as opposed to what's real. Even after couples have been married for 30 years, it's impossible to know what they're thinking. Right. Because sometimes you'll go, oh, you're thinking this. And I'm like, I'm not. And I'm like, not lying to you. I just, I wasn't thinking that. And we know each other really well. Eight is having to be right. This destroys effective communication. When a person has to be right in a conversation, there is no communication. I've actually seen that become abusive. I've actually seen that be abusive in relationships where someone won't let something

go. They're yelling at you. They're screaming at you because they won't quit until you agree with them. Even if what they're saying is completely absurd.'re screaming at you because they won't quit until you agree with them, even if what they're saying is completely absurd. That happens a lot. It's horrible. That's abusive. Yeah. And I see parents do it to kids and it's terrible. Sparring using put down sarcasm or discounting the other's ideas erodes meaningful dialogue and sets up distance in the relationship. And lack of monitoring and follow-up. So often it takes repeated efforts to get what you need. You can't just say, well, I told you that three years ago and think that that person is going to really understand. I mean, when you are trying to teach your children something,

do you give up after one time if they don't get it right? Right. And I'm not saying that your spouse is like your child. I'm saying relationships take that constant attention. So it's very important not to give up. When you give up asking for what you need, you often silently resent or sometimes not so silently resent the other person. So which subverts the whole relationship. So better brain, better relationship, but it's still critical to put these habits in

your everyday life. And the more connected you are, the longer you live. Stay with us. Success starts here. 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 Thank you.