Change Your Brain Every Day - How to Calm Your Brain, with Dr. Steven Hayes

Episode Date: December 14, 2020

Though they’re amazing organs, our brains can be difficult to control. Processes such as epigenetics, which are deep-seated neural pathways passed down from generation to generation, sometimes give us instincts that are outdated or even potentially harmful. In this episode of the podcast, Dr. Daniel and Tana Amen are joined by “A Liberated Mind” author Dr. Steven Hayes for a discussion on how to tame those unconscious instincts and bypass obsolete brain functions.  For more info on Dr. Hayes book, visit https://www.amazon.com/Liberated-Mind-Pivot-Toward-Matters/dp/073521400X

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, everybody. We actually have a very needed week for you on the Brain Warriors Way podcast. We have Dr. Stephen Hayes, one of the most cited

psychologists in the world. And we are going to talk about cognitive flexibility. And he is the author of, I had it. A Liberated Mind. A Liberated Mind. And has been involved in something called Acceptance and Commitment Therapy Act, which is a popular evidence-based form of psychotherapy that uses mindfulness, acceptance, and value-based methods. Stephen, welcome. Welcome. I'm glad to be here with you. I'm looking forward to it.

So tell us about you and how you got involved in creating ACT and thinking about ACT and studying ACT. Well, I came into psychology because I was interested in aspirational goals, and I'm kind of a Maslow person originally. But then I really thought Western science ought to be able to do something experimentally to speak to that, and I ended up being a behavior therapist. But more in the wing of sort of the way I say it is from rats to Walden, too, that you can maybe understand processes that will tell you how to relate

to your spouse or raise your children or organize your business. And then I had the good fortune of developing a panic disorder as a brand new assistant professor. And all that kind of crashed into a thing of, you know, can I even talk to five undergraduates without, you know, having to be the point where I literally can make sound come out of my mouth. And there's a TEDx talk that walks through that, and hitting bottom and really feeling as though I have no way forward. And somehow in that moment of hitting bottom, thinking I'm having a panic attack, a heart attack, but I'm actually having a panic attack at 2.30 in the morning after three years of struggle, I realized that what I was trying to do is run away from myself.

And that old kind of, you're looking at an old hippie, all those kind of Eastern, sitting on hippie hill, consuming things you probably shouldn't. I mean, just living on a religious commune, Eastern things, all that kind of stuff, had way more traction than behavior therapy, CBT, and all the things that I had learned in graduate school. And it was instant. I mean, I turned in a five-minute, well, probably 20-minute period and stood up off the floor in a different state and went back to my lab the next week and said,

we've got to study this. And I've spent 40 years trying to hack the human mind to understand how could a successful young professor be spun down to the point where I can't do anything and yet could turn and kind of see a whole other alternative. And if I could express what it is, instead of trying to get out of my anxiety and run from that, I learned a way to turn and run towards that scary spot. To run in instead of out. And that was transformational. You know, that really kind of just the fog lifted. To run in instead of out.

I love that. So I want to hear more about this and is this i mean i'm assuming there's some meditation or meditative component to this obviously where you um you know you're able to get into and try to figure out what are the processes we spent like 16 17 years but just invisible nobody even knew we were doing it because hardly I was interested. This was before mindfulness was central. I mean, it's before people, I mean, you're talking about somebody out of the CBT and we're even talking about

mindfulness. That's crazy. And so, and I had seen the fights going on. I didn't want to touch that part of mindfulness where monks hit each other over the head with sticks because they're defining differently. I mean, it has a long history of being contentious between different little sex and wings. But what I tried to do is figure out a way to get the space that's inside contemplative practice and link it up to what our wisdom traditions are trying to do in a bottom-up way that you could maybe put on the factory floor in two-minute exercises.

It just didn't seem to me that 10-day silent retreats were going to reach Joe's six-pack. It's just not. The educated elite and the young people can do that. But normal folks, I mean, they need many ways into this flexible, open, aware, values-focused space where you can take on your history, show up in the moment, focus on what's important, and get your feet moving. And, you know, if you don't do that, you're going to have all kinds of mental health problems. If you do that, you can step up not just to that, the challenges of physical disease, diet, exercise, sport, high performance. And, you know, we're sitting on 415 randomized trials in all of those areas showing that act as a set of techniques, but really, what's more important psychological flexibility as a focus is transformation on human lives so i wrote a book change your brain change your life

based on the brain imaging work i do and there's a chapter called getting stuck or getting unstuck yeah the ocd literature which is sort of the classic, you're stuck on something, is associated with hyperfrontality, where their frontal lobes tend to work too hard, which is what we see with the brain spec imaging work we do. And looking at that goes with people who are worried, rigid, inflexible, things don't go their way, they get upset. They also tend to be argumentative and oppositional and things don't go their way, they get upset, which now the pandemic and the election and the societal unrest, there's so many people that are stuck. And they found that psychotherapy can actually settle the front part of the brain. So how exciting is that? Just because there's a physical manifestation, It doesn't mean medicine.

What it means is perhaps a new set of techniques. So I'm really curious about this with kids. So we have a daughter who she borders on OCD. She can be pretty inflexible. So as a child, we used to put flexibility on her chore chart. So we had to work with her on being flexible because she was very rigid. And so then she started to get much better, you know, in her middle school years, the pandemic sent her over the edge. She became extremely panicked, not flexible, frozen, depressed, you know, all of those things we worked with her on. I'm curious what, what act is like compared to what we did with her. Um we worked with her on a handful of supplements, meditation, yoga, and journaling.

And it really did help her get unstuck. So tell me, first of all, can it be done with kids? What are you doing? Let's have him explain. Yeah. I want to know, how does it compare to some of the traditional things? Well, I think it's an awesome kind of hook on the way in. And it's a personal relevance. My mom was clinically OCD, I

wouldn't leave the house any day as a child without her reminding me not to eat the oleander right outside our door. I mean, every single time I left the house, and, and I have a little bit of in myself, I've had spaces where I've struggled with the, you know, odd thoughts, like the odd thoughts like throwing my kids out the window and things like that, especially when my anxiety was really roaring. I think a lot of us have had that during the pandemic. Yeah, well, that's a little different.

I've got four kids ages from the 50s to 15, so I've lived that. I understand that, but no, no, this is different. This is that little spinny, scary, oh, my God, what if I did that? Oh, you know, what's happening on it? What's happening is we're taking something that evolved in the last 200,000 to 2.8 million years, symbolic language that you and I are doing right now. That's part of the hack that's underneath act. We have a whole basic science of cognition with several 100 studies as to what happened to the human species because what the birds are doing outside the window, what you're doing is different.

It's harnessing parts of the brain that are a thousand times older. That rigidity, I think, comes from the way that cognition lays down a particular structure of all the possibilities and then grooves it and grooves it and grooves it and current including neurobiologically around the stories of self the worries that you have about the future rumination about the past and if you don't have a little bit of a break on that it'll go down to all the parts of the brain that are sort of kicking up this almost alligator brainstem level emotional response where you don't even know why you're feeling what you're feeling or being pushed

in the way or have the urges you have so i'll give me i'll give you a couple of things because there's a lot of work on act of ocd including with children we might do something like come down to a core thought and sing it or say it in a funny voice. Oh, interesting. Or distill it down to a single word and spell it backwards or say it repeatedly until it loses all meaning. So we've developed what we call cognitive diffusion, a made-up word, techniques that allow you to take thought when it comes up like this and is harnessing all those parts of the brain that are flooding in emotion and sort of you're losing

your center and put your thoughts more like that so that you can notice the process of thinking without being entangled with it. That's what contemplative practice does. But I think it's kind of cool that we could have little micro things like, I'll give you another one. Say I'm the third person. Steve's having an odd thought now. Give your brain a name. George is saying, you know, all of those things take thought that automatically doesn't announce itself as thought.

It just is the world structured by thought, but it doesn't announce itself. That's up here and it puts it out there so that you can see you have alternatives. And then you can make some choices. Do I really need to engage in that ritual or do I really need to, you know, undo that scary thought or do I have other things that would be more useful to me right now? That's so interesting. So it's almost part of what you said sounded to me like instead of sort of fighting the thought, which it seems to me like a lot of people do, you're almost submerging yourself in it and dissecting it or looking at it.

It's a kind of exposure, but in a different way. We're not where, you know, is it gone yet? Is it gone yet? Not that kind of exposure, but the kind that allows you to behave differently in the presence of things that usually command a narrow range of actions that are not going to be helpful to you. Right. And so the rigidity is part of it is the response rigidity.

If I can do anything different, anything different, in the presence of that thought or that feeling or that bodily sensation or that image, I'm increasing my alternatives to have a choice about what I can do in this situation. And that's a key element of psychological flexibility. It's one of the six core processes. That's so interesting. So when we come back, we're going to get into some examples of how you can use ACT in your daily life. We are here with Dr. Stephen Hayes, author of Liberated Mind.

You can learn more about his work at Stephen with a B, stephenbhayes.com. 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. and while you're at it feel free to give us a review or five-star rating as that helps others find the podcast if you're considering coming to amen clinics or trying some of the brain healthy supplements from brain md you can use the code podcast 10 to get a 10 discount on a full evaluation at amenclinics.com or a 10 discount on all supplements at brainmdhealth.com.

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