Change Your Brain Every Day - Frontal Lobes: How Do They Shape Your Behavior? with Dr. Earl Henslin

Episode Date: August 27, 2019

Thirty years of brain SPECT imaging has clearly shown us that disfunction in different parts of the brain require different types of treatment. One of the most often affected areas is the brain’s frontal lobes, which are responsible for things like forethought, judgement, and impulse control. In this episode of The Brain Warrior’s Way Podcast, Dr. Daniel Amen and Tana Amen are joined by Dr. Earl Henslin for a discussion on how to identify if you have frontal lobe problems (and other common areas of the brain), and what you can do to treat them.

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.

Tan and I are here with our good friend, Dr. Earl Hensland, psychologist, author, trainer, coach, who has, outside of us at Amen Clinics, has ordered more scans and used them in clinical practice with literally thousands of patients, from little kids to old people, everybody in between. Before we get back to talking to Earl, I want to read one of the podcast reviews. And don't forget that if you leave a review at brainwarriorswaypodcast.com

or on Apple iTunes, we'll enter you in for a drawing for a free cookbook from Tana. So this is from Kathleen. I absolutely love listening to you guys. Thank you. I became a brain warrior and lost a hundred pounds and got off nine medications, went to Amen Clinics after mold exposure and got the bachelor's and master's degree I was told were impossible for me. 2.8 GPA in high school in 1995.

Five failed attempts at college over a 20-year period. I'm about to start a degree program I never dreamed of, my doctorate. I'm 47 and it's never too late to change your brain, making me cry. I'm also doing our brain coach certification course through Amen Clinics. When my mental health miracle happened, it was basically because my chiropractor had read research done at Amen Clinics and taught me what he knew about diet and exercise and supplements like vitamins and fish oil, we just talked about that, to change your brain. Prior to Amen Clinics, I'd been wrongfully diagnosed with bipolar disorder, obviously with anybody not looking at your brain. It was worth the trip to get that off my record and find out I really had

two forms of ADD, mold toxicity, and an adjustment disorder, not bipolar. No wonder the bipolar meds didn't work and fish oil, chiropractic, et cetera, work. Thank you a million times over for all you guys do. That's awesome. So I know you've heard stories like that a lot, and that's why you've referred so many patients to us. But what I want to talk about in this podcast is how you use the scans in psychotherapy. Yeah. And what kind of therapy do you use? Do you find most effective and how does that sort of correlate to the information you get back with the scan? That's what I'm curious about. Yeah. To me, it's always important to match the model to the person and

what their needs are and so on. So I do anything from inner child work to deal with trauma to EMDR to thought field therapy, which is using acupressure points and dealing with different emotional issues, even to some psychoanalytic work. Because at that very first seminar with Dr. Amen, what struck me was that I knew if we could get a look at the brain, it was going to help change relapse rates for alcoholics, drug addicts, and sex addicts. And so far in these 25 years, only 100% of the time, and I referred somebody for that type of scan, did it show up with some injury in the frontal cortex and the temporal lobes. And so

there's an area in the frontal cortex called the orbital frontal cortex that has to do with impulse control and conscience. And so when a person gets a craving for alcohol and drugs or for sex, then they don't access that belief system. So where it fits with therapy, and just about every addict I've ever worked with, there's some history of trauma. They grew up in an alcoholic home and there was physical verbal abuse or emotional abuse of some type that, you know, in my field, the model is if you work enough on those issues, somehow you're magically not going to want to you know x fill in the blank you know

turn to porn alcohol drugs or whatever but what i found out is the left and right basal ganglia that anxiety part of the brain if i could calm that down and help improve the blood flow in the front part of the brain then when i did like an emdr intervention or even an inner child kind of an experience because you got to have good perfusion or blood flow all the way through here to actually connect with the feeling and then articulate it interesting because if that basal ganglia gets too high then the perfusion so the basal ganglia for people who don't know these large structures deep in the brain that are responsive to dopamine and when it's too high you feel anxious and when it's too low you have add symptoms and you can be unmotivated and you're one of the few psychologists

in the world that really believe i need to balance your brain because therapy will go better. It will go faster if your brain works right. And without that, you're not going to be as effective. And so you will often tell your patients, I love this, that this is going to save you money in the long run because we're going to be able to do therapy with a brain that works better rather than trying to do software programming on a brain that has hardware problems. Right. That's what I was going to say is that we often refer to it as hardware and software. So the brain is the hardware and the soul and what you're trying to accomplish with therapy is software.

Exactly. When people have low frontal lobe function, so you and I have both seen thousands of people like that, what are generally the things their partner says about them? Well, they get frustrated because they might start something, never finish it. They're going to have a hard time remembering. They might promise their spouse they're going to pick up flowers or something,

but they won't remember it because they'll get distracted to someplace else. And then particularly for the men I work with, they're just not emotionally available because now they're turning to video games or turning to staring at their phone or any number of things just to wake up the brain and improve that dopamine with those kinds of activities, which takes them emotionally out of the family. So they're not there for their son. They're not there for their son, they're not there for their daughter. And then for kids, you know, it's like they see dad going from one thing to another and feeling like he's so busy, he's got to do this, he's got to do that, and they're right there all the time waiting for the father to show an interest, take, stop, and take the time and spend it with them, listen to them, and so on.

Because a dad or a mom, really, they can't, unless that anxiety part of the brain is in balance and that front part of the brain is working, they're not going to be able to listen. They're not going to be able to empathize, you know, with that child or connect with them at an emotional level. And they're not going to recognize the signs in them, you know, that there might be some sadness or hurt or anger that they want to respond to. Because if they're in that ADD flurry of activity, or, you know, then there's the dad who's got some injury in the temporal lobes and can snap and just become explosive. In the first year of scans, there was 30 couples I had referred up to Fairfield. And every one of them, either the wife or the husband, had anger problems and addiction problems.

And they had been through rehab centers and treatment programs and so on. And as of probably last time I checked, about 15 years ago, 27 out of the 30 were still married. Wow. But, you know, couples and children are going from walking on pins and needles, afraid if I say or do the wrong thing, you know, couples and children are going from walking on pins and needles afraid if I say or do the wrong thing, you know, that dad's just going to turn it into a major issue. Well, and his low frontal lobes causes emotional trauma in the wife

and in the children. Exactly. And when we scan their brains, it has that diamond pattern. You were going to say something? Yeah. we scan their brains that has that diamond pattern you were going to say something yeah um so balancing their brain is so important let's talk about when their cingulate works too hard so cingulate is in the front part of the brain it's often thought of as the brain's gear shifter it lets you go from thought to thought, move from idea to idea.

What have you seen working with couples when their front part of their brain isn't low, that it's really high in activity? Yeah. The thing about the singlet to me that's so fascinating is, you know, like couples come in and they get into arguing and they throw in things that happened 25, 30 years ago. And so all those hurts and angers from back then are present and they will do that in a circular, cyclical way. And so what I noticed is when we got the cingulate, the basal ganglia, left, right basal ganglia, they calmed down and got more serotonin to the cingulate. Then that resentment might come up, but then they'd say, oh, internally,

they'd say, oh, I forgave them for that, and then I have to leave that in the past. But prior to that, it was just boom, you know, right there, and it was just as fresh as if they had done it. Because when people rehearse those resentments, they literally reproduce the whole body chemistry, the neurotransmitters, the hormones, and everything of that moment. And they have that same intensity going on. And then what can happen with the other person, you know, then it's almost like a constant PTSD battle back and forth where now one person's triggering the other and they're both out of control.

Right. You know, when I see it, I often think about in their head they have a little mouse on an exercise wheel. Right. And the mouse can't get off. No. And the mouse is mad. And it's huffing and puffing. And often they'll use marijuana or they'll use alcohol or they'll use pain medication to just get the mouse to shut up. Exactly.

And that's not helpful. There are other things to do that are more helpful. Because when they use those things, they'll drop their cingulate, but they'll also drop their frontal lobe. And then they'll make impulsive stupid decisions that don't help our um daughter chloe when we scanned her her front part of her brain was so busy and you could just see how she gets stuck it changed so much about how i was able to communicate with her and parents and i was like oh i've been giving her the wrong supplements i've been trying to stimulate her exactly but if you don't look at it you know no there's no way to know yeah i had one man came in his wife was ready to divorce him because he couldn't stay sober

and he was from his particular addiction and then he was having uh late 40s having memory problems you know he had put stickies all over the place. Now, normally when you see an anger problem, you know, you start to look at his background, which was filled with traumas. And from a therapist standpoint, it's so easy to look at it just in terms of trauma and then start working on it.

But, you know, I had him scanned right away and did some memory testing, and here he was headed for dementia because of, you know, staying in his addiction, not getting sober, and the multiple head traumas. And he was like in the 51st percentile and was almost looking at having to retire early. Well, we got the brain working, you know, and then he was able to start to actually deal with the trauma and actually heal from it. And he started to stay

sober. And one session he came in and he looked at me and says, okay, doctor, what in the world is going on with me? I said, what do you mean? Well, I sat down with my daughters and watched a Disney movie with them. Now, see, before that, his intensity and anxiety was so much he wouldn't even sit down and do that. I sat there and I watched that movie and I cried. What's going on with me?

I said, are things better with your wife? And he says, oh man, are they ever. But that's what I mean. Get your brain right and your mind follows. Get your brain right. You know, you actually had one of my favorite sayings I stole from you, which is no forethought equals no foreplay. It's right if your frontal lobes don't work or they work too hard and you're not present

you can't imagine what's going on with your partner then you're not going to get lucky well one of the things i saw from you you know is that you don't need to say everything that comes to your mind. Because in my field, it's like expression is everything, being able to articulate it. No one says, oh, don't say that. It's only going to have this effect. And so there are many therapists, by not intending any harm, of course, I mean, but they don't stop people i mean because i've learned i've had there's times i have to act like the frontal cortex for the patient when they don't have any right and they're just being impulsive what is the benefit of that going to be exactly are you going to get what you want right jerry seinfeld once said the brain is a sneaky organ we all have weird crazy stupid sexual violent thoughts that nobody should ever hear.

And your frontal lobes, it plays it out. It's like, if I say that, is that a good thing or not a good thing? When we come back, we're going to talk about some stories of transformation that Dr. Henslan has been witness to. So what did you learn? Post that. What did you learn in this podcast or the one before? Post it on any of your social media channels and go to brainwarriorswaypodcast.com or on iTunes, leave a review,

and we'll automatically enter you into a drawing for a free book. And be sure to share this if it was helpful to you at all. If you know someone suffering, if they're having family dynamic issues, or they've had a head injury, and you know they're having problems, share this with someone. And also, Earl, how can they learn more about you? What books would you recommend? What's your website? Well, the Brain on Joy book is the one that I really like the most. And anytime anybody reads that, they seem to be motivated to get scans. It puts it into understandable language. And my website is drhenslin.com. So D-R-H-E-N-S-L-I-N, DrHenslin.com.

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