Change Your Brain Every Day - COVID-19 Long Haul, Fatigue & Fighting Negative Thoughts in a Pandemic

Episode Date: April 13, 2021

Death toll statistics can have a negative impact on brain health and make way for harmful thoughts. Dr. Amen and Tana Amen sit down to elaborate on how to change one's focus to practicing mental discipline and how the benefits of these exercises help maintain a healthy body weight during a pandemic. 

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 are talking about COVID bad habits this week. And before we get started, we want to ask you if you would please share this episode, tag us, tell us something you learned. We would love to hear from you. Also, if you leave us a review, we will actually enter you into a drawing. If we read your review, it'll enter you into a drawing for one of our books, a signed copy of either the Relentless Courage of the Scared Child or Your Brain is Always Listening. You get to choose. But as we go into this week, we want to talk about more COVID bad habits. We talked about substances in the last one, particularly marijuana and alcohol, but those aren't the only bad habits. Well, and I have something to read. I just got a text from the chief of police for Newport Beach, John Lewis, who's a friend of mine.

We've been working with the Newport Beach Police Department to create a brain healthy police department actually in May, I'm going to do an all day training, we're going to start training trainers, police officers to create brain healthy police departments. Best things we really excited. So John sent me this text, the best April Fool's Day prank. A pink donut box was put out in the break area with a veggie plate inside. A little police humor for you. That's great.

I love that. I love that so much.'s hysterical it's great and i'm just so proud of them because they're like getting it and being able to have fun yeah it's awesome with with it i remember when i first went to the police department and I said, so is it true? You guys are sort of famous for getting free donuts and eating them. You saw, Oh no.

And then you, what we do is war and there was donuts. What? There were donuts in the meeting. Yeah. Um, all right. So,

um, other bad. So I'm going to, I'm going to name a few of my pet peeves during COVID that are bad habits. Reading death tolls every day. It's a bad habit. I don't like it. I don't like hearing about death tolls, death numbers every single day because it focuses you on negativity. So focus on some of the positive things. For me, turning the news on and focusing on all the craziness because you know it's not real. Even the headlines, even when the content, some of the content might be real, the way it's spun

or the way it's read on the news is not accurate. So focusing on that for me just spins me into craziness. So I stopped listening to the news. Those are bad habits, allowing yourself to get out of check, allowing your mood to like be dictated by numbers, by news, by, by, by you not having control of how you respond and react to something. That's a bad habit. Sitting around too often watching Netflix, you know, um, moving like a slug instead of moving with intention and purpose. Those are things that are COVID bad habits because they affect your mood, they affect everyone in your family. So news consumption, that I guess social media would go along with that.

I mean, it's been a double-edged sword because it's how people have stayed connected with other people, which is critical. Not being intentional with the food you eat. And this is often people have ADD have a much harder time. With their diets, there's actually a higher incidence of obesity and people who have ADD, because they're more impulsive. They're not planners, right? They often start thinking about food when they're hungry, as opposed to planning it out throughout the

day or throughout the week. And so if you have ADD, get it treated it treated and you know i just always say just see it as a problem solved because it can be so helpful because bad food habits um have caused 40 of the population to gain significant weight yeah and that affects your mood and the average in millennials will horrify you yeah it's above the 19 we said covet 19 initially it's about way above that 41 pounds yeah um so 20 of the population has lost weight often because some people when they get stressed stressed, stop eating, but 40% of people have gained weight. And the ripple of that effect is going to be found seen for years and years. And one more that I think is really important is watch your language. Your language matters.

Your brain does not have a sense of humor. It sort of lives out what you tell it to. So if you use language that's disempowering, that's going to matter. So when I hear people saying, oh, it's a pandemic world, that really bothers me because it's like, and then they'll go on to talk about all the negativity with the pandemic. We've had pandemics in this world over and over and over many times in the past. Yeah, not in our generation, but we've had many of them. It's not a pandemic world. It's a pandemic we're living in. It's going to end. We're going to move on.

Think about your language and how you use it. Is it disempowering or is it empowering? And be careful with it. Put some discipline around it. Words matter. Words matter. Yeah. No, we often, when our nieces first came to be with us,

there was a lot of negative words about themselves, about their family. We hear a lot less of that now. There's a lot. Well, we discipline it. And discipline, we don't beat them. No, no, no. Discipline means to teach. Is we just help them correct it. Right. We don't beat them. No, no, no. Discipline means to teach. Is we just help them correct it.

Right. We live around here. So today, it's the first time on the set, you've actually seen the anteaters behind us. Ant stands for automatic negative thoughts, thoughts that come into your mind automatically and ruin your day. And you don't have to believe every stupid thing you think. And you absolutely should not say everything you think. I get a lot of comments on this on,

well, if I'm drawing boundaries and I'm using my voice, then how do I not say everything I think? There's a big difference. Okay. Drawing boundaries and using your voice to protect yourself. That's protecting yourself in situations that are harmful, that where you need to stand up for yourself in order to protect yourself. Saying every dumb thing you think is going to ruin your relationships. Those are two very different. Yeah. Those are different things. So be clear that one will ruin your relationships. The other one will save your life. Well, and I always think of these words, then what? If I say this, well, then what happens? And do this, then what happens? And just because you have a thought has nothing to do with whether or not it's true

or whether or not you should say it. And thoughts come from all sorts of places. They come from your genes. You talked about in The Relentless Courage of a Scared Child, you were preparing for the pandemic for three generations. And I'm not going to stop. But thoughts come from your mom's voice, your dad's voice, your stepfather's voice, your schoolmates, your friends or enemies, the news, movies. Just because you have a thought,

it's important to evaluate it before you let it out of your mouth. And I often get crazy thoughts. And most of the time I don't say them because it's like, well, will this get me what I want with Tana or will it get me what I want with the girls? Yeah. I have a funny example of this. So I didn't really notice it. Um, but Chloe picked up on it. She noticed it. So our, my daughter's getting ready to go to college and we've been preparing for this. And I'm just nervous as can be that she's going to be. And she noticed something. She's like, you know, I noticed something. She goes, you're actually a pretty cool mom with most things, except for driving. You have some weird hangup about me driving places. And I never really

caught onto it. And she's like, you, she said to me, she goes, you need to go get therapy because you're reliving your trauma through me and you're affecting my life. And I was like, what? But you know what? When I thought about it, not only did I get into a really, really bad car accident when I was 25, that should have, could have for all intents and purposes killed me. Um, I was a trauma nurse. I mean, I watched this day after day after day scraping, you know, people trying to put them back together, watching them die. And my best friend's daughter was killed in a car accident. And so I, it never occurred to me, but she picked up on it. She's like, you need to go do therapy because you are taking it out on me

and you're affecting my life. So you have to think about that. But that's also part of that is her trying to make you feel bad so she can get what you want because she's really bright because the fact is I don't have those same traumas and I didn't let my kids drive until I thought they were ready.

And for one of them, it was 17 and a half. Right, but you actually had said she could go somewhere and I was freaked out about it. Yeah. And you were like, that's not rational. You're the one who made the comment that it's not rational. You're often not rational.

No, I, that's... So that was where it came from, where she's like, even Daniel knows, like you're not rational with your thoughts around driving for me. Well, I think we should be protecting our teenagers. Anyways, what did you learn? COVID bad habits from marijuana, alcohol, overeating, staying up too late, not sleeping, death tolls, watching the news. Correcting your thinking. Yeah. Allowing the negative thoughts, the ants to come and stay.

You need to move those bad boys on. So write it down, post it on any of your social media sites, what you learned, hashtag brain warriors way podcast. We would be so grateful. Leave us a comment question or review it. Brainriorswaypodcast.com. We're going to read questions coming up in the next session. We're going to do Brain in the News, brand new study out that got me walking even faster this morning. 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.

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