Change Your Brain Every Day - How to Disinfect Your Thoughts, with Dr. Josh Axe

Episode Date: January 28, 2021

Different types of stress and emotions have measurable effects on different systems in the body. Therefore it’s crucial to pay attention to your thoughts in order to keep them from wreaking havoc on your health. In this fourth and final episode in a series with “Ancient Remedies” author Dr. Josh Axe, he and the Amens discuss the phenomenon of disinfecting your thoughts, and how you can diagnose your emotions and learn to foster positivity to keep your body and immune system strong and healthy.  For more info on Dr. Axe's new book, "Ancient Remedies", visit https://www.amazon.com/Ancient-Remedies-Essential-Powerful-Medicine/dp/0316496456  

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. We are here with our friend, Dr. Josh Axe, having a great time talking about magic mushrooms, essential oils, and probiotics, and how to eat right and disinfect our environment. But now let's talk about disinfecting our thoughts and how we can become spiritual triathletes. But stress is everywhere. I mean, it's everywhere. You look the incidence of anxiety and depression has tripled in the last year, people lost their jobs, they've lost relationships, they've lost loved ones. And it's it's a monster stress.

You know, one of the reasons I wanted to talk about stress in relation to your new book, Josh, and all these natural remedies, we're talking about ancient remedies, is because, you know, I'm using myself as an example here, just for the purpose of using myself as an example, but our listeners often relate to it. So for people listening right now,

I mean, I just wrote about it in my new book, and you touched on it in the last episode. I was a frequent flyer in the hospital. I was on constant antibiotics. And I remember when I met my husband, um, we were talking on one of our dates, one of our early dates. And I was telling him about how my uncle was murdered in a drug deal gone wrong when I was four. It was a really scary time in my life. And two weeks later, I was in the hospital having upper and lower GIs as a four-year-old. And I mean, why would a four-year-old go in and need upper and lower GIs? And they didn't really find any connection. There was, they didn't find anything physically wrong with me. And so I was just put on more antibiotics and, you know, and

by the time I've had 10 medical surgeries. So my point being people endure traumatic childhood. They endure right now, one of the most stressful times in history that we've lived through in our lifetime. And we don't often make that connection between the stress we go through and what happens in our bodies. And you touched on it with cancer. You've touched on it with some of the other things that can happen when we go through these stressful events. So I want to talk to you about what those things do to our bodies and what you recommend in your book for remedies. Yeah. So to start off, I think it's important to recognize one, taking care of, and I mean this because I talk a lot about nutrition, right? But I think that our mental and emotional and spiritual health is actually even more important

than what they eat. I'm not saying a lot more, but I'm saying I think it trumps it in a lot of cases. And I can tell you in taking care of patients over the years, if I've had somebody, like if I had a patient with inflammatory bowel disease, what will cause them, if they eat dairy and gluten, they'll have a flare-up.

You know what will also have them cause an equal flare-up just as bad is if they have a flare up. You know what will also have them cause an equal flare up just as bad is if they have a lot of relational stress at home or they've had a bad week or they're stressed. So we know that emotions tax our organs. In fact, in Chinese medicine, they actually label different types of emotion affect different organ systems. And so they really believe, and I believe this as well, that like it's genetics affect our health but what affects them even more in terms of determining the condition you get you you that you have uh within your body is the emotion you experience so for instance why does one person get

breast cancer on their left side but not the right why does one person get thyroid another person colon another person uterine another person prostate it has to do with this if you somebody that has a lot of the emotion fear i mentioned this earlier fear affects the adrenals in reproductive words we know that is a fact right you're in a fight-or-flight state fear affects the adrenals it causes disease there if you live in a fearful state constantly and it could be fear of failure fear of disappointing the ones you love worry a lot, they'll say, oh, my stomach feels like it's tied in knots. We know that worry affects the upper GI, specifically the stomach and the pancreas is affected by worry. If somebody has, let's say something like anxiety, blood pressure, right? Nervous, blood pressure increases. If somebody has anger, that affects the liver gallbladder.

And if somebody has something that's happened in the past, they haven't dealt with yet, like it could be a divorce, it could be losing a loved one. It could be, hey, I wanted this thing to happen in my life and it never happened and you're living in the past. That's your immune system. That's your lungs and colon.

So your immune system's affected. If you have someone that you love or anything like that, that affects that organ system. And hey, there's a healthy, these organs are made to process this. But if you live with this day after day after day, it's building up disease in those organs. So what I suggest is number one, find, diagnose yourself. And what is that specific emotion? Is it fear? Is it anxiety? Is it anger? What do you feel? Write it down. Okay. And then what I would do is really focus on what is the opposite of that emotion? You know, fear is really, you know, the opposite of sort of something like, like hope. Okay. Those are both futuristic. You know, if you're talking about anxiety and fear, oftentimes those emotions are something bad is going to happen to me in the future. You're

thinking about it versus having, having hope in the future and building up your hope. And you could do that by, you know, reading positive quotes, reading the Bible, getting around, encouraging people, but focusing on that. If you worry a lot, that's actually more of an identity issue to where you have low self-worth or lack of security. You don't secure you feel unsafe it could be relational it could be something in your life so focusing on reading books that build your self-esteem that build your security but that's the thing i think really some of the most positive healing emotions are going to be faith hope love and a spirit of joy you know when my mom had cancer one of the things we did for her is i read research on happiness and how that affects

your immune system it's really profound so like today and you guys see this right there are so many dark tv shows like growing up there's a lot more fun you know funny tv shows and one anyway so like we went and watched all the comedies you know things like bill murray you know like what about bob like we just started watching all these funny movies and comedies. And that's what she started watching all the time. And you could literally see it making a difference. Belly laughs, good for her health. So all that being said, I think scheduling fun or scheduling times to build and foster these healthy emotions is really important. So it could start with that spiritual triathlon in the morning and then schedule lunch and also getting around the right type of people, right? People that are encouragers,

people that are lovers, people that lift you up. Cause we have those people in our life, right? Sometimes that are sabotaging our results and they're speaking negatively, hurting our self esteem, spending less time with those people, more time with those people. That's kind of like iron sharpens iron, improves our mental health. I think it's a big deal. Yeah. I like it. It's really interesting. I remember when I first told Daniel that story about being four years old and going in the hospital and he's like, well, that's interesting. It was two weeks after your uncle was murdered. There might be some connection there. And I'm like, no, that's ridiculous. Absolutely. But no one really thinks about how that affects you.

And not just the past, how much it's going to affect you going into the future. Well, it's one of the reasons we call this podcast the Brain Warriors Way. Because we believe, and this is before the pandemic, you're at war for the health of your brain. Everywhere you go, someone's trying to shove bad food down your throat that will kill you early. Someone's trying to put a gadget in your hand that will steal your attention. The news is negative and will scare you that you need to be armed, prepared, and aware to win the fight of your life. And now it's never more true than during COVID that I think, I was talking to my friend, Pastor Rick Warren over the weekend,

and he said, the grief that is happening now will affect us for a generation, but it doesn't have to. If you get your mind and your habits going in the right direction, you can counteract the negativity that is coming at us. But it starts with what you think, with how you behave, which is what you eat, and the people you spend time with. We often think about these four big circles, biology, so think of diet and exercise, the psychology, the social circle who you hang out with, and the spiritual circle, which is is I love spiritual triathlete. I just read an article on spiritual fitness in the journal of Alzheimer's disease. And it's,

are we spiritually fit or are we spiritually bankrupt? And people don't make the connection between food and stress. Um, it's, it's becoming more It's becoming more common knowledge, but really, your diet matters when it comes to stress. Because if you are eating foods that increase inflammation, that in turn is going to cause more problems with you feeling more stress. So people don't make that connection a lot. Or eating foods that damage your microbiome, coming back to what we talked about earlier, it's like protecting the warriors, the soldiers that protect your gut lining, that help you digest your food, that make hormones and vitamins, detoxify you. Just so important. I love the story about your mom.

So I love that. So ancient remedies and how you put that into play. Yeah. So in the new book, and one of the things that really go through that, like how my mom beat cancer naturally, I go through the supplements, the foods, the whole thing. But also in the book, I have over 70 prescriptions on what are the top remedies and foods for healing different conditions. So I have it for things like know, yeah, things like everything from Alzheimer's to hypothyroidism to depression and anxiety to autoimmune disease to chronic pain and go through, here's the exact foods, the remedies, the recipes. So I think people love the book. You know, we, I think of all the books I've read and it's the best in terms of helping people just see big

results and breakthroughs in their health. So anyways, yeah, I appreciate you guys. I always love, first off, you guys have such good chemistry. Like I just love, I love every time I get to talk to you guys cause it's so much fun. And I know we're all on mission together, right? We just want, we want to help heal the world. I mean, so many people today are living in a state of fear

and have bad health. And I just know like when my mom was growing up, she was sick and tired all the time. Like my mom had to take naps every day. She was so tired and exhausted. She was diagnosed with chronic fatigue as one of those conditions along with autoimmune disease. And like, I really saw when she started eating better when, and that anti-cancer diet and all the things we had her do, she's literally now, like my mom's in her late sixties, she water skis, she's ran a 5k. She

says she feels better now in her late sixties than she did in her thirties. And it was through, you know, using food as medicine, the stuff i teach in the book ancient remedies and from probably watching dr ayman's pbs special you know but i mean my mom is one of those people by the way she's like the biggest fan she'll watch like your show and my show and dr hyman you know like all of them and she's a health warrior you know as you guys are training people up to be yeah we're on a mission together and we're grateful for you and for your friendship, for your new book, Ancient Remedies. You guys can pre-order it now and let's help.

And it makes a great gift for people you care. This is something you want to do with other people in your life it's just easier when you get information give it away because what you're really doing is creating your own support group and when we did this big project at Saddleback Church the Daniel Plan we found people who did it with another person, double. They're small groups. I love that. Thanks, Josh.

Great to see you again. We wish you all the best. 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. If you're interested in coming to Amen Clinics, use the code PODCAST10 to get a 10% discount on a full evaluation at amenclinics.com. For more information, give us a call at 855-978-1363.