Change Your Brain Every Day - Has Your Teenager Lost Their Mind and Blown Yours?

Episode Date: March 13, 2017

Today's episode is a milestone for us here at Brain Warrior's Way Podcast. We have officially reached our 100th episode and we are just thrilled with this new achievement. So before anything else, we just want to say thank you for all your support.    What we're going to talk about today has something to do with our children, our teenage children to be exact and the reason why we're doing this is simple, we love them and they are the hope of this nation, they are the future generation. 

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 Amon.

Hi, I'm Dr. Daniel Amen. And I'm Tana Amen. Welcome to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. Today, we're going to try to answer this one question. Has your teenager lost their mind? So it seems that we get a lot of questions about this. I mean, a big part of our business is based on this concept. And we think that if you really understand some simple things about development, it can really help not only for you to understand what's going on, possibly help you intervene and help you bond to your teen through these very challenging years. Well, and for those in psychology or psychiatry, you know that there actually is a task of adolescence, which is independence and separation. A little like

two-year-olds, right? They go through it again in their teens. Well, they do that, but the task is different. It's about who am I independent of my parents and can I separate and be okay, which is why they're often difficult. But as you know, what's happening in their brain is wild. It's dramatic. And their brain is not done when they're 12 or 13. Well, and it's complicated because they have this huge hormonal shift. The hormones are affecting the brain and the pruning in the brain is affecting the hormones, right? The brain changes are affecting hormonal shifts as well. So it's complicated. So some of the main hormones that are affecting this during this time are the sex hormones

like testosterone and estrogen. Then there's also- Some guys are only thinking about sex. Well, they're also, not only that, they're also, their motivation and drive goes up, but not necessarily the motivation for the right things, right? Aggression goes up. So motivation for, yeah, things like sex. But estrogen goes up, but with girls, their cycles are wildly, they're shifting. So unlike boys, which they get a steady,

they say that testosterone can go up by 10 times during this phase of adolescence for boys. So it's obvious, but it's more consistent. With girls, what happens is they get this surge of estrogen, but it's cyclical. And that's what's dangerous for girls. That's why they're so vulnerable. Because when that estrogen surges, it affects the availability of serotonin. And that can make girls very, very vulnerable to depression and mood swings, more so during that age than other ages. Well, and it's also worry and getting stuck on negative thoughts and negative behaviors.

And so they could get stuck on, I'm too fat, I'm too fat, I'm too fat. And they are gaining more weight, but they see themselves even worse than it is. So more negatively than what's going on. Oxytocin goes up. So the bonding hormone. So that's very interesting. They often look for bonding in the wrong way. So the bonding hormone. So that's very interesting. They often look for bonding in the wrong way because of the other hormones. So you have to be very careful with

that. But dopamine, something interesting, I want you to talk about this because one of the things I learned, so you have raised three before our current teen, three teens. Now we're raising our fourth, Chloe, who's a pretty good teen. And one thing I love that you say is that there's no rule that teens need to be bad, right? And we're finding that to be true. If you have a troubled teenager, that is not normal. So the idea in society is all teenagers are troubled. And that is absolutely not true. There was a study in Chicago where they looked at 10,000 teenagers and a third of them never had a problem. Another third, every once in a while, they had a problem.

Which is sort of normal. And another third, they were problematic. Temper problems, runaway, school problems, drug problems. And what I always think is if your teen is consistently troubled, you need to get them help because it could indicate they have ADD, they have bipolar disorder, they have a mood disorder, there's OCD, PTSD, and addiction, something that is going on. And that something could also be traumatic brain injury. As we know here, so many of the kids we see who have temper problems,

mood problems, have had a concussion playing football and cheerleading, gymnastics, falling off of a horse, and it can literally change the trajectory of their life. So I like that. And one of the neurotransmitters that shifts a lot during this age is dopamine, right? They get these big surges of dopamine, but their frontal lobes aren't fully developed yet. And so one of the things that I read, and I'd love for you to clarify this, is that teenagers, they become excitement-seeking. They like that dopamine rush.

They become excitement-seeking, but they actually need more stimulation to feel the same thing that adults feel. They don't have their frontal lobes developed, so they can't make really good decisions yet. But their rational brain, developed fairly quickly by their teens, is fairly well-developed. Their rational brain, meaning, do you know right from wrong? Yeah, I know right from wrong. But under pressure, can you make the right decision? Their emotional brain's not fully developed yet,

and so they don't even always know why they're not making the right decision, but they don't always make the right decisions under pressure. So I would actually flip that, that their emotional brain is developed and they have these very strong emotions, but their prefrontal cortex, focus, forethought, judgment, planning, impulse control, learning from the mistakes you make is not fully developed until they're 25. So that part of the brain does not finish becoming myelinated. So myelinization is a very important process in development. And that is where nerve cells get wrapped with a white fatty substance called

myelin. And once the nerve cells become wrapped with myelin, they're much more efficient. They're much more effective. And myelin starts to develop in the back part of your brain when you're about two months old, which is why your vision becomes better. But it doesn't finish in your frontal lobes till you're 25 in girls and more like 28 in boys. So you have these powerful emotional surges without judgment, without forethought. So it's like you get these emotional surges without your brain's break. So what happens is you ask a teen sitting at the dinner table, so if this happened, if you're in this situation, what's the right thing to do? And they'll answer

you perfectly because they know rationally or they know what the right thing to do is from a rational standpoint. But when they're put into a situation with their friends under pressure without supervision, and they sometimes don't even know why they're making the wrong decision, and later they feel bad about it, they know they made the wrong decision, and they're not even exactly sure why. Well, and then if you add on top of that, so their brain is not fully developed. If you then add on top of that, they had a simple carbohydrate meal, which drops blood sugar and blood flow to your frontal lobes. And they only got six hours of sleep the night before because they were studying for a test or they were texting their friends at midnight, which is not uncommon now.

And they had a glass of beer. You put all of those things together, it's the prescription for disaster. And as parents, both you and I, we always talk about when things aren't going the way we hope they would go, to be curious about it and never furious about it. Because our job is, and this is like the most

important thing you're going to hear on this podcast, your job for teenagers is to be their frontal lobes until theirs develop. And theirs don't develop until their mid-20s. And so supervising them, knowing where they're at, who they're with, what they're doing, and checking, I think is one of the most important things you can do because that's why God gave you parents. Right. So I think part of it, if you know developmentally and emotionally what they're struggling with, it helps you to be a little more empathic and listen better. We're going to do our entire next podcast on what to do for these strategies to help your teen. There's one more hormone I want to talk about that really affects the way we see teens and

how teens function, and that's melatonin. This one's a big one because it affects so many things in their lives. Melatonin shifts. The melatonin surge shifts during the teen year. A lot of people have this attitude. It's like, teens are so annoying because teenagers want to stay up all night and they want to sleep all day. And we think that it's like this cultural choice that they're making. What we now know is that it's because melatonin surges several hours after it normally does during other times in your life. So they're not getting their melatonin surge until later in the night. Then what happens, they don't go to sleep until late. Then they get woken up to go to school, which a lot of experts think that school starts too early. They get woken up to go to school. We think that. So they get

woken up to go to school while the melatonin is still going on. They're still foggy, hazy, and tired. They're making bad decisions early in the morning. They're more likely to get in trouble at that time. And also car accidents, which we're going to talk about later as well. So phones. Their retina is being flooded with blue light. So they're making it later. Put it off by another hour or two. Right. They get to bed at three sometimes. Putting blue light blockers on your kids' phones, on their computers is really important. Plus, if you can't trust your teenager to have their phone off when it's bedtime, you should take it from them. People go, oh, that's so harsh And it's because you love them. These objects are made to be addictive. I actually read a book called Hooked. So companies like Google and Microsoft and Yahoo and all the other ones that are making

these devices, Apple, they hire neuroscientists to trigger the addiction centers in your brain. There's actually a new psychological distress syndrome, which is called no mobile phonia, where I can't live without my mobile phone. It's funny. I find it rather refreshing when I forget mine. Which is helpful, right? But because our brains have been addicted to these things, they're saying that's actually more addictive than sex. I know.

You have to be cautious because a younger brain is more likely to be addicted than an older brain because the younger brains don't have forethought, judgment, impulse control. Well, and it's also how they've learned to communicate. This is our primary form of communication. We grew up having to talk to people and write, right? They didn't. So let's talk about, for a second, we talked about what happens in the brain. Let's talk about some of the challenges during this phase as a result. So some of the effects that happen, believe it or not, during this time in a teenager's life,

teens are far more at risk for things like accidental death, homicide, suicide, binge drinking, conflict, obviously, depression, and addiction. Talk about that. Well, no question. We see these kids. Many of the major mental illnesses start during adolescence, often late adolescence, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, major depression. And definitely addiction. I've seen that in my own family. So we just have to be thoughtful and get them the help you need. In our book, The Brain Warrior's Way, we talk about it's a war for the health of your brain, but also for the brains of your children like never before.

So the good news is we just probably freaked a lot of you out, explained what was going on, but didn't really got you a little bit scared. This doesn't have to be a scary message. We're going to talk about solutions in the next one. You know, we've, well, you've had three teenagers before I even came along and now we've got our fourth teenager in the house who's amazing. I mean, honestly, amazing. And part of it is understanding all of this, knowing what changes are going on, being curious, not furious, and having some simple strategies, which we're going to talk about in our next chat. So stay tuned.

You now know what's happening. Now we're going to give you the tools. 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. you