Change Your Brain Every Day - How To Break A Bad Habit Right Now – Part 3 of an Interview with Andy Ramage

Episode Date: June 23, 2017

Our habits are a result of our conditioning. When we slip up and do things we know may not be good for us, it’s easy to blame ourselves and give up, thus continuing the cycle. Luckily, there are effective and realistic ways to address these bad habits and pave the way for positive change. In the last episode of a series with Andy Ramage, he discusses these methods with Dr. Daniel Amen and Tana Amen.

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. So we're back. We're still with Andy Ramage and One Year No Beer. We're having such a good time talking about why he went alcohol free all the positive changes in his body his brain his performance but now we're going to talk about the habits why people do this because i love what you said you'd walk into a bar you told yourself you were going to

order water but then you ended up ordering the beer and that's a really important point because we get triggered by our by certain um anchors almost i'll call them like things that we are even unaware that we're being triggered by smell or sounds or uh you know the sight of something and with the best intentions in mind they go right out the window so talk to us about you know habits like how did you change that? And what have you learned about habit change and helping others? Yeah, just to delve into that point a bit more, it's really interesting, because what happens is, and this is when everything changed for me. This is when I started to get into NLP, started to get into positive psychology, and understand that actually,

a rational decision don't always play out. They're not always that rational, are they? Yeah, it's that limbic part of our brain, that primitive part of our brain that takes over. And it's so important to know because, for example, when I gave that routine now, I'd get to the bar and I'd order an alcoholic drink, even though I told myself I wasn't going to do that.

That is such a key moment because I started to doubt myself. You to think maybe I've got this problem maybe my genes are faulty I was embarrassed that I couldn't follow through maybe I was a willpower failure and I think at that very point so many people give up and what they do is they stay with the crowd it's much easier to keep drinking because then no one would ever notice that i was actually this willpower failure that i'd made up in my mind and it's such an important point and we really go into this within one you know beer to catch people in that moment to say actually do you know what you're behaving perfectly rational for someone who's been programmed as we said psychologically and socially for all of these years to do these things you are going to slip up every now and again.

You are going to order the lager or the glass of wine when you really wanted a sparkling water. If that happens, don't panic. Firstly, you don't have to drink it just because you bought it. You put the drink down and walk away where we can see your hand. And it's almost education. It starts right there. Tell people it's

not the end of the world don't let this be an excuse and there's lots of research behind this i think you said janet povey from the dieting world first discovered this it's called what the hell effect because people would reach that point where they'd say they're not going to drink they'd accidentally have a drink or a cream cake and that becomes this big excuse to let the floodgates open and drink 10 drinks or eat 10 cakes when actually do you know what it's just one slip you know you you know psychologically you've been programmed to do this stuff you've tripped up don't worry about it end it there learn from your mistake and come back stronger and that's this is a real fundamental part of what we're doing around habit change is to

catch those initial mistakes, learn from them, and start to come back stronger. So one of the things, you know, in treating addicts for many, many years, addiction treatment centers come up with this mnemonic called HALT, and I would add to that. But it's don't let yourself get too hungry because when you have low blood sugar, you have low blood flow to the front part of your brain, which is the brain's break, and it stops you from doing things you don't want to do. And so don't go too long without eating healthy food. Don't get too angry. Negative emotion tends to turn off the judgment centers of your brain. So don't get too hungry,

angry, lonely, because when you start to feel disconnected from others, then people go and medicate themselves, or tired, because if people get less than seven hours of sleep at night, they have low overall blood flow to the brain, which means they're going to make more bad decisions. And then we would add, and we joked on our first podcast about, you know, you're in London, the sun doesn't come out much, but low vitamin D levels also are associated with higher cravings, more depression, and more issues with judgment. So there's, I mean, some really simple things once you make the decision to change how you support it. And I loved what you said, which is if you slip, well, don't fall and crack your head.

Learn from it and go, well, okay. So whenever I have patients that slip and they slip all the time, we actually have somebody in our family who's had some serious problems. And when she slipped, the question is, okay, I want to learn all about it. You know, rather than judge someone as, oh, you're bad. It's, well, let's learn from it. So it doesn't have to happen again. Did you go too long without eating? Did you believe

every stupid thing you thought? Did you not sleep well? What? One of the things I want to push on a little bit, Andy, because it's so important. I've done a lot of work in NLP myself in the area of performance and just clearing some of the past triggers that I've had. And I think it's amazing. It's like this amazing shortcut. So I love it. And one of the things I love about NLP is that one of the things that Daniel talks a lot about and that I love from a brain perspective is how our template sometimes gets set. Our emotional brain, we have these patterns or these templates that get set at certain times in our life for whatever reason. And what I love about NLP is that doing that assessment, the way that you can step back and you actually can take a look at when did it get set? Why did it get set? How did it get set?

And you can actually fairly quickly break that pattern. Now that's not going to address the physical part of it, but it does address that part of it, like how did that template get set and how can I redirect that? How can I reset that? So I love that. Yeah, exactly. We incorporate a lot of NLP quite subtly.

Again, not necessarily so much pattern change interrupt, but we use it very much from a visualization point of view. So to go into the whole habit change, interrupt, but we use it very much from a visualization point of view. So to go into the whole habit change system now, so we start to look at the science of habit change, how they form, triggers. So we get people to find out what their triggers are. It could be 6 p.m. on a Friday afternoon. Then we look at their routines. What's the routine they're playing?

They might go to the bar and have a few drinks. And then what we're really interested in is what's the reward? What is it they're after? Is it, you know, the social camaraderie of being with friends? Is it a chance to relax? What is it? And that's so key because a lot of the time people are actually playing these routines, which is the alcohol routine, to get something that they could achieve without alcohol.

Right. And that's really important. And then what we we use then we couple that with with um visualization again it's a great technique you know from sporting world and from nlp to get people to rehearse in their mind what are they going to do that friday night trigger comes what's the routine what's the reward because obviously the beauty of visualization is such a key skill so you can do it a times in your head, but you can't walk into that bar 100 times and play that scenario. So I think it's a really important part, and it works.

It works extremely well. So he's talking about relapse prevention, which is predicting where the vulnerable areas are and then coming up ahead of time with a strategy for dealing with that. So this is a very different environment, but sort of an interesting kind of example. I was getting ready to take my black belt test and I didn't want to take it. And I actually told my master, I don't want to take it because where I train very high level athletes and I'm older and I had this whole list. I'm not as strong. I'm not as big. I'm not too old and whatever. This whole list of I have health issues. And I'm not as big. I'm not too old and whatever. This whole list of I have health issues. And, and I didn't understand why, cause I had my whole life been an athlete, but I just couldn't get myself in that place to, I couldn't see myself standing next to these people

with a belt on. And so when I did some NLP, what I, people don't even understand. So this is where I like what you said about consciousness. They don't understand and they don't pay attention to what they're really seeing in their head. So when I had someone walk me through this process, and this is so important, we stopped and slowed down. And what I was seeing in my head were these people who were much bigger than me, who were much stronger than me. I was smaller, I was weaker, and I wasn't performing the same. But when I became conscious of it, I literally physically shrunk them down in my head to my size, made them normal sized, made myself their size, and went through the visualization process of not only performing 110%, and then I visualized myself 15 minutes after the test wearing that belt.

And I can't even tell you what that did for me, but it was seeing them bigger than me and stronger than me and me weak. That just was, was holding me back the whole time. People don't see that they do that. Even in this situation of drinking alcohol, it's bigger than them, or the social environment is too complicated, or it's, you know, whatever it is, that picture that they've created, they make it bigger in their head than it needs to be. Yeah, that's a great example. And we have one, we call it the crossroads. It's not about sort of changing the sort of dynamic of the picture in many ways, but it's that visualization, a bit like what you said there where you come 15 minutes after you've achieved the black belt

how did you feel and we have one with the crossroad which is you can you know you meet the path and you can choose that path of continue with your old habits or you can take the path of this new healthy bright vibrant you and then we fast forward to that six months later how do you feel what are your emotions and these things are so powerful i love it again it's all the nlp stuff but it's so powerful to take people i think out of their current settings and those those those stuck mentality that they've got to give them that hope that like actually look this i can really achieve this and this is what it's going to feel like. And that's very powerful, I think, around habit change. Yeah, no, it's awesome because, I mean, who's going to possibly be able to succeed

if what they see in their head is that they're weaker or smaller or unsuccessful or that they can't say no to peer pressure or it's really hard to succeed. But if you just shift that picture a little bit and you see yourself in a different light, you see yourself as an athlete, you see yourself as an athlete you see yourself as this powerful person you know it changes it's a game changer i mean it just and then to to couple that as part of this challenge on the alcohol free challenge you're doing this visualization but then every day you're proving to yourself that actually you can do this so it's reinforcement self-confidence yeah and it and then it snowballs, and it links together, and you become stronger and stronger and more confident,

and everything starts to change, and that's huge. I love that. So how can people learn more about you and your work? Really simple, oneunobeer.com. If you go there, you can sign up. All the information's there. All the videos are there. Come and join in the fun. Again, this is all about not giving something up. It's about gaining a huge advantage. And just to be clear, this is not an abstinence program. This is very

much a prevention, label-free, stigma-free challenge. That's all it is. Come and enjoy it. Come and check it out. And if you enjoy it, carry on with it fantastic one year no beer andy ramage thank you so much so much fun time uh it was great fun and we will share this everywhere we can that's fantastic thanks guys thanks andy all right andy take care you're listening to the brain warriors way podcast thanks for being with. Thank you for listening to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. We have a special gift for you. It's an opportunity to win an evaluation at the Amen Clinics. All you have to do is subscribe to this podcast, leave a review and rate us on iTunes. To learn more about Amen Clinics and the work we do, go to amenclinics.com. You can also learn about our nutraceutical products

at brainmdhealth.com. Thanks for listening.