Change Your Brain Every Day - Holidays & Anxiety: Stress the Halls

Episode Date: November 28, 2017

There’s a reason polls have shown that a whopping 45% of Americans would rather chose to skip Christmas altogether. All of the stress of planning vacations, buying gifts, and spending time in potentially volatile conversations with estranged family members doesn’t exactly scream Christmas spirit. However, as Dr. Daniel Amen and Tana Amen relay in this episode, you can choose not to fall into those stressful holiday habits.

Welcome to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. I'm Dr. Daniel Amen. And I'm Tana Amen. Here we teach you how to win the fight for your brain to defeat anxiety, depression, memory loss, ADHD, and addictions. The Brain Warriors Way podcast is brought to you by Amen Clinics, where we've transformed lives for three decades using brain spec imaging to better target treatment and natural ways to heal the 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 nutraceutical products to support the health of your brain and body. For more information, visit brainmdhealth.com. Welcome to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. Well, hey, everybody. Happy holidays. But apparently not everybody thinks they're happy. 45% of Americans would prefer to skip Christmas, according to a survey from Think Finance reported on NBC News. It's a widespread problem. Nearly a quarter of Americans reported feeling extreme stress come holiday time. Holiday stress statistics show up that 69% of people are stressed by the feeling

of having a lack of time. 69% are stressed by perceived lack of money. 51% are stressed out about pressure to give or get gifts. So I have a lot to say about this. Seriously? Yes, because I have always felt like, well, I mean, maybe not when I was a little kid and I would run out and open gifts and I didn't have to be the one worrying and stressing about buying all the gifts. But from the time I was a young adult, I mean, like in my 20s, I did not like the idea of the commercial part of Christmas. Now, depending on your belief system, you know, for a lot of us, the holidays, we say that it's, we think that it's about service. We think that it's about gratitude, but it has not, it's really grown into something so much different than that. It's commercial. It's commercial. What do you buy? Who do you buy for?

And honestly, I start feeling stress around October, and it completely stresses me out. And for someone like me, who hates the mall more than just about anything else on the planet. I know. She's like a guy. You know, there's actually a study where when guys go to the mall, their bodies have the same physiology of soldiers in war. I understand that. I feel overwhelmed. You have a lot of guy tendencies.

Well, I feel completely overwhelmed. This feeling, I walk in. The second we pull into the parking lot at the mall, you know, the second we pull into the parking lot, I'm annoyed. I'm trying to keep it under my breath, but I'm kind of yelling at people. And I sort of like the mall. I like to stroll around. I know you do. It's irritating.

You guys, you and Chloe want to take me to the mall all the time. And you're like, for my birthday, you're always offering to take me shopping. I'm like, do you hate me? But we pull into the driveway. All right, we're here to help, not therapy. No, I'm trying to build this up. It's not therapy. No, I think other people, that's the whole reason we're talking about this.

Maybe it's therapy for them. Right? We're talking about this because this is the problem. The parking lots are crowded. People are blocking the aisleways. You don't know what to buy. Everything's crowded and it's overpriced. And it's stressful.

So if you have really good frontal lobes, you plan ahead. And you have your shopping done by October. Or? Or you don't buy. Or? Third thing. You buy online. I buy less because we've gotten to this thing where we, you know, we try to-

Well, you can sit on the couch and take care of Christmas. Right? Last night, you called me on the phone. You're upstairs. I was downstairs. You're like, where are you? Because I'm usually with you. I'm like, I just got half of my shopping done.

I'm like- All right. So you can do it online or, you know, neither one of us are gift person or that really matters. And now that Chloe's older, neither is she. So Gary Chapman has the book, The Five Love Languages, which is awesome. And it's like, well, what is your love language? And ours with each other is clearly not gifts. We don't really care. I think you are my gift every day of the year. And I'm eternally blessed to have you in my life. Right.

So if it's an understanding that you have. So we never really, you know, but you'll go, hey, I want this for Christmas. And I learned a long time ago, just buy her what she wants. But I'll say it like June. And we're all good. Right. In June, I'm like, hey, I saw something I really like. Do you want to get that for me for Christmas? You'll buy it in June. We're done. And so we're like done. So it depends on your attitude. And you completely have control over

the rituals that you set up during the holidays. You do not have to let Macy's be in control of what you do. People go, but they will be disappointed. And I'm like, who are they? Right. You know, I don't care about they. Right. And it's nice to be at my age,

not constrained by this idea that I need to be polite to everyone. Yes, I would say that is not a high value for you. But one thing that's really nice is that as a family... How do we help them? As a family, we have actually discussed it. We've done the five love languages together, and we were able to talk to Chloe, because when kids are little, they like to open gifts, but they can open a box and they're happy. But now we've actually sort of talked about this and Chloe would much rather us take her somewhere for a weekend or, you know, do something cool together. So we've just sort of worked it all out, you know, as far as like we get a couple of nice things and then we're done. Yeah. And we don't buy candy. No. And we don't,

don't put unhealthy things. And so why do we, cause January, you know, is going to be the big, you know, new year, new you lose the way you put on the,

during the holidays and neither you or I put on weight during the holidays because you know, Christ's birth or whatever you're celebrating. Isn't it an excuse? It shouldn't be an excuse to eat stupid, right? You should eat healthy all the time because you love yourself. And I know somebody's listening to the podcast and go, what a boring guy. I can trust me.

I'm not boring. I was just at the White House. I have two weeks in a row charted on Billboard with bright lines. Wait, that one little clip that someone actually got, someone filmed you speaking at Saddleback Church, posted it. It was six minutes long. What the heck happened to that? I know. It's got 15 million views. That's insanity. So yeah, I wouldn't quite call it boring. So yeah, having a good brain, being healthy, taking care of your life, you get to do cooler things for longer, like being married to you. And I have plenty of fun. But it's this idea, oh, everything in moderation.

Don't you want to live a little? And I want to live a long time, and I want to have my brain with me, and I don't want to be a burden to my children. So let's talk about some cool gift ideas that are healthy, that promote health, promote bonding, that are maybe less stressful. Memory Rescue just came out.

It's a great book idea. The Bright Minds Memory Rescue Music CD. And, of course, I'm biased towards my cookbook. Brain Warriors Way cookbook. The Brain Warriors Way book. Right. But we like giving gifts like that. Last year, I got Chloe... The ultimate brain box they can get online, which is

all of my public television specials, our specials. We're actually not just doing a commercial. We're just being a little biased. Well, but give the gift of brain health. Right. Because, you know, I'm working on my new book, Success Starts Here. And, you know, in it I talk about there are three ways people change their behavior.

Number one is they have an epiphany. And the scans we do here at Amen Clinics are an epiphany. When I saw my unhealthy brain in 1991, I'm like, no, it can be better. The second way they change is they change their friends, right? The fastest way to get healthy is find the healthiest person you can stand and then spend as much time around him or her as possible by giving away gifts of brain health, the Brain Warrior's Way cookbook, Memory Rescue, the Brain Warrior's Way. What you're doing is you're creating your own support group, making it more likely you're going to be a brain warrior. Right. And a couple of other ideas. I know, like we talked about the love languages.

I haven't said the third way people change. Little tiny habits, incremental changes. Ask yourself every day, whenever you come to a decision point in the day, like for me now, being nice to you, is that good for my brain or bad for it? Actually, what you're really thinking is that good for your love life or bad for it. I know the truth. Well, it's the same thing, right? I mean, are you saying the brains are in the same place? Right, yes. You didn't say that.

Okay, so let's give like a couple of other of my favorite ideas. So we did the love language thing. And for all of us, I think yours was acts of service and time, right? Chloe's- Touching. Touching and time, right? Touching. Touching, that's right. Physical affection.

Physical affection and time, I think. Mine was acts of service. Chloe's is time and acts of service. And so because I know that, last year I got her a gym membership with me to a place where we could take classes together. And she and I still go in the mornings and we take classes together. And we consider that part of our ritual of spending time together. It's not like a drag to go work out that way.

It's like, oh, this is our thing we do in the morning. So think of things you can do like that that keep you both healthy, that speak to the other person. I love that. Yeah. Anything else that you want to add? I like giving gift baskets that are full of healthy

things. Yeah, be careful with the alcohol. So when we have parties, we don't serve alcohol because that's when family stress goes up. Because when people drink alcohol, it drops their frontal lobes and everything they think gets out of their mouth, which may not be healthy. If you know you're with someone of a different political persuasion, don't talk about it. I know. What is up with that? The political divide is crazy. It seems like our family used to use the holidays as an opportunity to fight about politics.

And I hated it so much. It was horrible. And the other thing is when you're eating a lot of inflammation-causing foods, that definitely increases your overall stress because stress hormones are released. Which means you're not going to be making quite the good decisions, and that is going to increase the risk of fighting. Right, and heart attacks and strokes go up. And depression goes up, but not suicide. December is actually the lowest month of the year for suicide.

Do you know the highest month? April. Taxes. Not just that. Time change. I just discovered that. Time change is part of it. It's this chronic jet lag thing we've got going on that increases inflammation as well

and stress hormones. All of that combined is a problem. So we wish you happy holidays. We hope they are blessed, brain healthy. I remember we did our first class where we help people with weight loss, and we called the class Lose Weight Through the Holidays. And the week of Christmas, the average weight loss in our group was 2 1⁄2 pounds. There is no rule. You need to be stupid during the holidays. Or you could be like Jason, our Marine, who lost 26 pounds during the holidays,

and he was never happier or more grateful and said that he had never felt more abundance. Wishing you a blessed Brain Healthy Holidays. Thank you for listening to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. Go to iTunes and leave a review and you'll automatically be entered into a drawing to get a free signed copy of The Brain Warrior's Way and The Brain Warrior's Way cookbook we give away every month.