Change Your Brain Every Day - Discover- Is it PTSD or Traumatic Brain Injury?

Episode Date: December 26, 2016

In this episode of Brain Warrior's way podcast, we're going to discuss this landmark research paper on brain imaging and behavior where we can distinguish between people who've had been physically traumatized versus those who've had emotional trauma.

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. I'm here with my beautiful wife, Tana. We are so excited to be able to share this moment with you of Change Your Brain, Change Your Life. So today we're going to teach you about the connection between post-traumatic stress disorder, PTSD, and traumatic brain injury, or TBI. I'm so excited to tell you that our research department just got a landmark paper accepted for publication in Brain Imaging and Behavior, a really wonderful scientific journal, where we can distinguish between people who've had emotional trauma

versus whose brains have been physically traumatized nearly 94% of the time. So I thought this was so interesting. So when we first met, you scanned me after two weeks, a lot of people have heard the story now. So he said before he got really serious with anybody and we got along really well, he said he wanted to see my brain naked before he saw any other part of me naked. So a little tidbit there. But when he scanned me, he said, wow, you have this diamond shaped pattern in your brain, which means there's been some trauma, some emotional trauma. And I'm like, no, I've had no emotional trauma because I like have this very tough facade. He's like, really? And he does his little psychiatrist thing. I'm like, don't shrink me. So, but as he started talking to me about my history,

my childhood, I was amazed. It was very fascinating to me that that connection, he could see that pattern in my brain from unresolved childhood issues, which now he never lets me live down. I'm not like that, trust me. But what we saw in our patients who have... I was not a patient here. That's not how we met. Who have post-traumatic stress disorder. So if you grew up in an alcoholic home, if you had been in a fire or an accident or robbed or raped, or we know a lot of soldiers coming back who have post-traumatic stress disorder. What we see in the brain is your emotional brain becomes significantly overactive. And so when I looked

at yours, it's a pattern we call the diamond pattern. It's the emotional brain we see too active. It's like your brain keeps reliving things from the past and it won't let go of it. And so when I saw yours and you said, no, there's no emotional trauma, but her uncle was murdered in a drug deal gone wrong when she was four years old. Her mom had to work two or three jobs. So she was often left home alone. There were many things and some of you might relate to some of this. So I was attacked at 15 years old walking to high school. And so there were a lot of things growing up because of the environment that I grew up in. I was poor. We were poor when I was growing up. And so in those environments, some of you may have experienced some similar issues. And what I find interesting, I chose a career where it was also very stimulating and

there was a lot of trauma. In fact, I worked in a trauma unit in the hospital. So I worked in a level A trauma unit where day in, day out, that's all we saw was level A traumas. Believe it or not, doesn't that keep that part of your brain stimulated? Well, it does. And first responders, police officers, firefighters, emergency medical technicians, trauma nurses, They see horrific things over and over and over again. And it can take your emotional brain and fire it up so you have trouble sleeping. You feel like your life is shortened. You feel you're always waiting for something bad to happen. You might actually relive the trauma and nightmares, or you just begin avoiding places.

Now, why the study's important is a lot of people also have traumatic brain injuries. So they've had concussions because they played football, they were in car accidents, or again, if you think of soldiers, yes, they may have witnessed horrific things, but they may also have been exposed to blast injuries. And why it's important to separate those is the treatment for emotional trauma tends to be psychological to calm down the brain. The treatment for traumatic brain injury or physical trauma is usually ways to heal it and to increase activity. So even though they may look the same, they may both have trouble sleeping. They may both be irritable. The treatment's radically different. And if you never look at their brains, you might actually never know. And of course, using you as the eternal example, when I looked at your brain initially, I went, well, did you ever have a brain injury?

Right. And you said no. Because to me, a brain injury meant you were in the trauma unit with a serious brain injury. Right, like somebody shot you in the head. Right, you're in a coma. And I'm like, well, have you ever, you know, fell out of a tree, off a fence, dove into a shallow pool? She's going, no, no. You ever been in a car accident?

She's like, well, my sister did fall asleep at the wheel going 70 miles an hour and the car flipped over three times. But I thought I was fine. I walked away, so. Which is what people think. Right. Right. They don't connect that your brain is really soft.

It's housed in a really hard skull that has many sharp bony ridges. Your brain's a consistency of soft butter, but it runs your life at 70 miles an hour. So imagine your brain's going 70 miles an hour. All of a sudden, boom, it stops and flips. Clearly bad for the function in your brain. So being your best, getting as, you know, optimized or well, you know, you went and had EMDR, very powerful treatment for psychological trauma. So it stands for eye movement, desensitization, and reprocessing.

I thought it was very helpful. There's specific treatments for people who are storing emotional trauma and specific treatments for people who've had physical trauma, but you want to know where you start. That's why the imaging work we do here at Damon Clinics is just so important. And I want to point something out before we, because we're going to give you some really great tips, but I want to point something out as well. So I think that it's not too hard for some of you to understand who are listening. You're going, oh, this is my life. And you know what impact it has on you. But I want to talk for a second about the impact it has on relationships, because first of all, if you're with someone else who has a lot of trauma and you are suffering from

this sort of trauma yourself, it can be very chaotic in those relationships. Now I'm with someone who's not, who's very calm, very soothing for me. I often say he grounds me. So he's like my rock, which is wonderful. But even there, I have to be careful. So like, for example, my brain automatically goes to feeling unsafe. And that's just something because of how I grew up. I'm always looking for ways to be safe. So I practice karate. I'm like, I'm very driven. I have an amazing alarm system in my house because I didn't grow up in an environment of safety. So my mind is never thinking, oh, I'm perfectly safe. I don't need to worry. That's just not how I'm wired after all those years. Whereas you never think anything bad is going to happen.

So, you know, Daniel's very comfortable in his environment. And so I can drive him a little crazy with my fear factor. And so while he settles me down, I can stir him up sometimes and make him nervous. And so now, fortunately, he's psychologically minded enough to be able to point this out and we work on it. And I have some great tools. But you want to be aware of these things because, you know, and I'll often say to him, you know, you grew up in the American dream. I grew up in the American nightmare. So we have to be aware of those things so that we're not constantly at odds and creating chaos. Well, there's no question. Emotional trauma can

really hurt your relationships. You might always be looking for the other shoe to drop. Absolutely. Negative is going to happen. So your mind is always predicting fear and trauma. In fact, I did that with Daniel when we were dating. I was waiting for the other shoe to drop. Nothing is this good. Nobody's this nice. So you want to be careful and watchful of those things. Learning about it was the number one thing I did, just understanding. Well, and then really understanding the bridges to the past. So what is it in this moment? When's the first time I ever felt like that? So if I'm feeling unsafe, when's the first time I ever, and then all of a sudden you might get this flood of episodes. And then you just ask yourself, is this now, or am I reacting to something that happened

in the past? Now, the other thing that also goes on is people have had traumatic brain injuries. They've had falls. They played football. They've been in a car accident. That can actually lower the function in some parts of your brain. You could be more irritable, your judgment's not as good, you say things you shouldn't say, and that can then have a very negative impact on relationships. So often,

you know, if you grew up in a traumatic environment, emotionally traumatic, and you're married to someone who had a concussion, that can then start to cause these problems that can be devastating to relationships, to how you feel and so on. So ultimately at Amen Clinics, it starts with, well, we should look at your brain. Let's see where we're at and then work to optimize it. I mean, that's the most exciting thing that we discovered is you're not stuck with the brain you have. You can make it better. So diet, exercise, supplements, and then learning not to believe every stupid thing you think. Because when you've been emotionally traumatized, a lot of the answer, the automatic negative thoughts can come in your mind and ruin your day.

And while a lot of people find unhealthy ways to self-medicate, you know, there are some really healthy ways to self-medicate. Fortunately for me, one of the things I found when I was really young was exercise. And I may have gone to an extreme early on, but exercise is actually really good for people with anxiety and that have suffered from trauma because it increases dopamine, serotonin, and endorphins and really settles the brain down. And I know a lot of people will say, but I don't have time or this or that. I'm telling you, I'm just going to be really frank, find time. I'm standing here in front of you. Fortunately, you can't smell sweat because I'm sweaty. I always bring makeup, a change of clothes, and I just run in the bathroom and clean up a little bit. But I will

always find time to exercise. There's just no excuse. Well, an exercise is also good if you've had physical trauma to your brain. Another really important thing to do is begin to disconnect some of these bridges from the past. One of the most powerful exercises I do with my patients is tell me what you're thinking and feeling, and then tell me the first time in your life you're ever thinking or feeling that. And we see if there's not a bridge. And then I want you to ask yourself, is this what's really happening now? Or are you being triggered by what's in the past? And just the recognition it may not be now, it may be from before, helps to disconnect that bridge.

Well, and one thing that you really helped me with, you got me started doing guided imagery and hypnosis before bed. And so what that does is that really not only helps me sleep, like I sleep really well, but it sets you up to have a more positive mindset when you wake up. So it really gets me set up for my next day and I feel amazing. And the sleep, the quality of my sleep is just so much better. Well, and it's one of the most powerful things you can do.

We have hypnosis CDs. One's called Magnificent Mind at any age. It's got tracks I record for you on sleep and weight and pain and anxiety. And high performance. And high performance or optimizing your performance. You just want to begin to train your brain to go in the right direction because where you bring your attention, where you bring your attention determines how you feel. So if you go back to that trauma place, then you're going to be feeling pretty anxious. But if you can go, oh, that's in the past, and you go to gratitude or

appreciation, all of a sudden you feel so much better. Brand new study, just read it last night, that people had heart disease, which is actually very common. People have had emotional trauma in the past. It broke their heart in some ways, literally, that if they just wrote down three things they're grateful for every day, their heart function within just a few weeks was better. So disciplining your mind, training your mind, physical exercise, diet, disconnecting those bridges, all very powerful. So let's not gloss over. I'm not going to go too deep into diet because we do that in other segments and that's a big piece. But very simply, just eliminating

sugar because sugar causes this irregular firing of brain cells. And not only that, it increases inflammation. Those two things alone are going to cause an increase in your symptoms. Well, let me just jump in just a little bit. A lot of people had emotional trauma. Their brain works too hard and they seek ways to calm it down. So alcohol will do it. Pot will do it. Sugar will do it because it's simple, high glycemic. So carbohydrates, so carbohydrates that quickly turn to sugar, bread, pasta, rice, potatoes, boost insulin, which then causes serotonin to go up in your brain. So you feel better, but the cure will ultimately make you sick with things like diabetes and obesity. But you also only feel better for a very short time.

Well, but the same thing's true with alcohol and pot. You know, short-term pain versus long-term pain, because eventually you actually feel worse when you get the hypoglycemic effect, when you get the inflammation, when you get the irregular firing of the brain cells, then you don't feel better. Right. And we're going to talk about this some more in upcoming segments, but you are not stuck with the brain you have.

You can make it better. So last thing, give them three simple supplements that calm the brain down. So some of my favorites are 5-HTP, boosts serotonin in the brain, calms things down. GABA is something called an inhibitory neurotransmitter, but calms things down. And another one called ashwagandha, Indian ginseng, it's called an adaptogen, calms you, but also helps you focus. And I'm going to give you one last one. It's my secret weapon for sleeping because a lot of people with trauma don't sleep well. I take a time-release melatonin along with 300 milligrams of magnesium. Bam. I call it the hammer. Well, and 80% of the country is low in magnesium. I think all of us should actually

take some. I do every day. So many things that can change your brain, change your life. Stay with us. 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.