Change Your Brain Every Day - Do Your Thoughts Have an Impact on Your Physical Health? With Dr. Caroline Leaf

Episode Date: May 20, 2020

You may be aware that stress can have a negative impact on your overall health, but what exactly is the connection between what you think and how you feel? In this episode of The Brain Warrior’s Way Podcast, Dr. Daniel Amen and Tana Amen are joined by author Dr. Caroline Leaf for an extensive discussion on how your emotional state influences your body to promote either health or illness.

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 here with Dr. Carolyn Leith, communication pathologist, cognitive neuroscientist, worldwide teacher, the author of

Switch on Your Brain, Think, Learn, Succeed, Think and Eat Yourself Smart, which we're just huge fans of. And we're talking about trauma and what you can do. And first step I'm hearing, Carolyn, is one, you've got to calm yourself down. Because if you're physically freaking out, you are not going to make a good decision. The second step is get appropriate information. And I suspect, I don't know this for sure, but I don't trust the medical establishment. I don't. I haven't trusted anyone.

I've been a doctor for 40 years. Too long to know. And I've been a psychiatrist and making diagnoses based on symptom clusters with no biological data and then prescribing medication, I'm just not a fan of. And in the pandemic, no one's talking about, at least you don't hear it at the president's briefings or from the CDC, that the United States is 4% of the world's population. It has a third of the COVID cases. Our death rate is completely unacceptable. And everybody's talking about medicine and vaccines, and no one's talking about, well, why is the U.S. hit?

It's because we are unhealthy. Exactly. Thank you, Daniel. Our incidence of obesity is out of control. Brand new study, 42.4%. That's insane. The incidence of diabetes or prediabetes is 50%. Hypertension or prehypertension is 60%. No one's talking.

We're going to spend these trillions of dollars and really not focus on the underlying cause, which is our immune systems are weak because we are unhealthy as a society. And so to just go, oh, I'm going to stay at home until there's a vaccine is a bit insane because what we should be doing is really optimizing our health and the health of those we love. And so I don't think I'm a conspiracy theorist, but, you know, I've been imaging for just about 30 years. And, you know, my colleagues go, you shouldn't do that. Why would you want more information? And so it's made me suspicious yeah as a trauma nurse I dealt with a lot of gunshot wounds and bandages only hold so long so you gotta treat the actual

wound or it's not gonna hold oh I totally agree with you it's going to explode somewhere in you and I just when you're saying that I'm leaping inside with joy because that's why I love you too because you I agree 100 if we don't change our internal environments and recognize how important that is we alongside doing all the medical research for antivirals and vaccines obviously and and finding the best way to reintegrate back into society and keeping our hands washed and social that we've got to do all those basic things while we find we've got to put the build the army while we find, we've got to put the, build the army tent. You remember the old battles, build the army tent, you being a nurse, you know, put them in there in the temporary

until you can actually sort out the whole issue. Put the bandaid on in a temporary state, but we still have to deal with the festering wound. And I think you've hit the nail on the head is that it's internal environment. And I've been saying this as well for weeks now, that we've got to address, as you talk about the physical, we've got to eat properly and all that. We that and this country is a modern american diet 60 years ago when the modern american diet came in at the same time the whole psychiatric change happened

so the way people managed mind the simplest way to explain this is 60 more or less 60 years ago we started eating processed junk food and And then also at the same time, we started forgetting about the mind and we started focusing on brain, brain, brain. Now, you and I are totally in love with the brain. I mean, the three of us agree brain, but brain is controlled by the decisions you make with your mind to eat healthy, to exercise, to capture those thoughts, to do the ends, to do all which is mind work. So the brain is reliant on how we actually look after it. And that changed 60 years ago. It was all reduced down to, as you said, Daniel, biological components. To say my amygdala made me angry is the most stupid thing. Your amygdala

can't do anything. Your amygdala just responds to what you are doing. So what are you doing with your internal environment? And that's been a huge part of what I've been trying to help people do is understand that your mind and the theories I developed, the work that I've done for 38 years has focused on the non-conscious mind largely. And the non-conscious mind, not subconscious, non-conscious is 90% of who we are. It's our spiritual nature. It's you. It's your power that you have within you to think and feel and choose. And as you think and feel and choose, that moves to your brain. You can't do that without your brain. Your brain is your responder.

It's holding all your thoughts. It's where the memories are. So you've got to have the mind and brain are separate but inseparable. So like you say, we've got to look after our brain. So the mind, you think and feel and choose, and that moves to your brain. Your brain is going to respond. Your body is going to respond your body is going to respond so in other words we have huge responsibility to make decisions about what i eat and put into my physical brain is and my body is going to impact how i'm thinking while

i'm eating is huge we we know the research shows that if you are your digestive system is controlled by your thought process so if you you are, a simple example, totally anxious and you're eating that organic farm-to-table sustainable food, you're eating the right food, but if you're in an anxious state, your pancreas, which is only one part of your digestive system, is not going to secrete all the neuropeptides required for assimilation simply because your emotional state has affected the functionality. Same thing with your mind. If your mind, the 150 years of integrative medicine has shown us that the mind impacts your stress system and impacts right down to the telomeres. I've been doing research with telomeres, cellular aging, your effectiveness and health of your cells.

The way you're thinking is affecting all of that. So the 90% mind stuff is not being addressed sufficiently. What we have, and I listened, especially because I've been in this podcast today, I was listening to an interview yesterday by mental health experts who were talking about what is going to be a pandemic in mental health, which I agree, but I think they've approached it wrong. What they want to do is set up a whole lot of more labeling, more medicating, making people ill, giving them a label of illness, and lumping mind issues and giving mind issues the validation of an illness. In other words, they're saying you have to make mind problems into an illness in order to validate them, which is insane because when you throw mind

out the door, which they did 60 years ago, and you just focus on brain and you try and treat anxiety from a pandemic as though it was an illness like diabetes. You've missed the boat because then you want to put it in a little box, wrap it up, give it a label, give it a medication, and now you must get better. But it doesn't because we're dealing with a 90% to 99% of this huge individual response that each of us has and the collective response that each of us is having to this massive change in our lives. And that's very anxiety provoking. And we can't just say that everyone's now ill. So the pandemic that's coming after this, like you so rightly say, is one of how are we going to teach the humans to manage their mind so that they don't freak out?

Are we going to have over-medicated people or people living under another label. There's no logic to saying to you, you have a clinical depression because you've gone through COVID. No, you've gone through COVID. You don't have a clinical depression. You're depressed. It's so important.

It's the 90 to 99% who you are. It doesn't need a medical label to validate it. Let me validate the depression you're feeling right now. Let me validate your anxiety. And what worries me with the approach that's coming up is sticking people into the box of you have an illness. We're not going to treat it properly. We're going to tell people that we don't have enough resources.

Meanwhile, we can help each other. Collectivistically, we can help each other process through. So we shift the whole view and see us as humans collectively going through this trauma, some are going to experience it this way, some that way. It's all individualistic, but we can come together. Big pharma is going to win all the way around. Exactly. Not only the medicine, the vaccines, but from a psychiatric standpoint, you're going to get a label anxiety, depression,

and then end up on an anti-anxiety drug that is increases the incidence of Alzheimer's disease, a depressant that you won't be able to stop. And I'm not opposed to medicine. I'm just opposed to it's the first and the only thing people do. And in that way, they don't do the work of really learning how to manage their minds. Once again, to go back to what we were talking about before, one of the things when the kids freaked out when this first happened, they just freaked out. I mean, you know, their lives

came to a screeching halt. Our daughter was 16, you know, just got her driver's license, her first job. It's like the end of the world. The sky is falling. And one thing that we did with them right off the bat, and it's what works for me, is they have to have something to do that's empowering. Exactly. So you've got to have, put your energy into something empowering, focus on something that you can do that gives you at least a sense of control. Do you know what I mean? You've got to have a sense of control.

So over something, your own life, your own actions, your own decisions at least. I love that because that's what we're talking about right in the beginning, that the uncertainty that we need to accept, that's the first step in getting control because as soon as I'm aware of my uncertainty then I'm on the path to empowerment because now I can start controlling and I love what you said because you can do little things get some purpose we know from Dan Butner's work we know from global work that as soon as you have a purpose and a passion yes you're going to be more in control you're going to handle all these wobblies and the connection,

that deep, meaningful connection that happens with each other can then grow as well alongside the passion and the purpose. Absolutely. No one likes certainty better than I do. I mean, I'm like literally the epitome of a person who loves certainty. So put me in the middle of a pandemic and there goes certainty, right? Exactly. So shut down the whole world and there goes certainty. It's an illusion. What's gleaning is the illusion of a pandemic and there goes certainty, right? So shut down the whole world and there goes certainty.

It's an illusion. What's leaning is the illusion of certainty. There's no certainty. No, there isn't. I love this piece that C.S. Lewis wrote in 1948 about the atomic bomb. And if you just replace COVID-19, he said, you know, basically the scientists have figured out yet one more way for you to die a painful death when you already have thousands. Right. Exactly. Yeah. That's such a good quote. If the virus comes, it should find us doing sensible human things. When we come back, we're going to

talk. And Carolyn, what I would love for you to give our listeners are just the most practical tips you have learned over the last 38 years of helping people have better brains and better minds. 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.

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