Change Your Brain Every Day - Killing The ANTs and Little Lies with Orlando Vargas

Episode Date: June 24, 2021

Dr Daniel Amen talks with special guest Orlando Vargas about how the little lies we tell ourselves can justify actions that will damage brain and body health.

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. I'm here with Orlando Vargas. We're talking about ways to beat an addiction. Orlando's the director of research at the House of Freedom in Florida. How long has the House of Freedom been around? Since 1991. So close to the time where you started dealing with brain spike damage and according to to the book. Yeah, no, that's the year I started just had our 30 year anniversary. So I guess House of Freedom did as well. Yeah. And one of the things I learned a long time ago is the quality of your thoughts really matter.

And thoughts come from all sorts of places. They come, they're actually written in our genes that fear can be transmitted generationally. Thoughts come from how your parents talk to you, what your siblings said to you. You know, if you grew up in church, the messages you got there. Thoughts come from the news, from music, from your friends, from your enemies, from your co-workers. And just because you have a thought has nothing to do with whether or not it's true, whether or not it's helpful. And so many of my patients are infested with what I call ants, automatic negative thoughts, the thoughts that just come into their mind automatically and ruin their days. So at House of Freedom, how do you get people to have their minds healthier? Well, you'd be surprised. We do a lot of psychoeducative therapy. And when we were researching for a curriculum that would target a lot of the

things that you talk about, we couldn't find one. So what we did was we actually implemented the on chain your brain, the 10 steps into our treatment program. And every single person that comes here, they get exposed to that curriculum. And step number seven, it's X. And it's funny that you say that, because I always tell my patients that if that's the that's the one step that if they can conquer that step they're way ahead of the competition you know they're way ahead of that that journey because you know our battle a lot of times it's in our mind and when we're constantly thinking negative and those automatic negative thoughts are infested in our brain, I always tell them that, you know, the more you do something, the better you get at it usually. So if you're

constantly thinking negative, negative, negative, well, guess what? You're going to be really good at thinking negative. So we have to, you know, number one, identify the different types of ants, which we have, you know, like the fortune teller or different ones that, you know, we have been able to identify in the book. And, you know, once they start putting two and two together, they say, well, these are irrational thoughts. You know, it's true. I don't have to believe every single stupid thought that comes to my mind, because a lot of those thoughts are not true. So once we start changing those thoughts, then the associations, okay, because associations in recovery are really, really crucial, right? I mean, if you always associated one thing with substance use, then we need to sort of like change that and allow you to

practice and enjoy sobriety without that counterproductive behavior. Okay. So utilizing the Unchain Your Brain curriculum that we sort of like, you know, you use here from your book, we've actually been able to teach clients about step number seven, about the ants and the importance of changing that. Because, you know, I always tell my patients, when you have a negative thought or a positive thought, it's not magic. There's actually a neurochemistry behind that. And, you know, you can't continue thinking that way. If you are going to be a new version of yourself, you know, we have to work on

the thought pattern, so that this person can start, you know, again, learning forgiveness, learning how to love, learning how to obtain dopamine and reward in a healthy manner. And that's really a fundamental aspect of recovery. And along with the ants come the little lies that we tell ourselves, like everything in moderation, which I actually think is the gateway thought to relapse. Or I want what I want when I want it, which is the four year old that often runs the addict's life. Or it's Friday, I deserve it. Or Saturday or Sunday or Monday or it's Christmas or it's Easter or it's Halloween or there's just

always a reason to hurt yourself if you're not serious. Drew Carey, the comedian that lost a whole bunch of weight and kept it off for a long time. He just said it perfectly. He said, eating crappy food isn't a reward. It's a punishment. And when I read that, I'm like, oh, he's going to stay well. Because when I first got healthy, would like miss rocky road ice cream or brownie or a donut and it wasn't until i saw the little lies and like i deserve it and i began to see those things as weapons of mass destruction that that I was able to stay healthy. So what other little lies do you think you've heard from your patients? Well, you know, one of the biggest ones that we, you know, they talk about it. Well, I don't have an addiction issue like they have it. You know, I only drink alcohol.

You know, I don't do cocaine or I don't have an addiction issue like they have it. You know, I only drink alcohol. You know, I don't do cocaine or I don't do, you know, opioids. And that's one of the ones that we hear a lot because they always try to minimize, you know, their addictive behavior. And, you know, it's funny. I talked to my patients just this last week about a study that recently came out from Spain, if I'm not mistaken, about alcohol use. And basically, the outcome of the study was that there's no safe amount of alcohol use. Those participants who drank a little bit during the week had less white and gray matter in their brain. And as we know, when it comes to brain, the size matters. So we want to have know, gray matter and white matter as possible. So, you know, minimizing their negative behaviors to justify them.

It's one of the things that we see most often for people to give themselves permission to engage in these behaviors. Size matters. Send me that study. Okay, I will. And you know, I've been fighting against the alcohol is good for you for a long time. Last year, the American Cancer Society came out against any alcohol. And I wrote a blog was our best blog last year. It was called I told you so. And I start the blog with when I dated Tana, my wife. 15 years ago, she told me I'll never tell you I told you so. She lied. It's her favorite thing to say. And yeah, I told you so. I've been saying for 30 years, ever since I started looking at the brain,

alcohol is not a health food. And then to have the American Cancer Society come out against any alcohol because they said any alcohol increases your risk of seven different kinds of cancer. That you just got to go, why is it so popular? Do people really feel so bad that they can't find another way to calm their anxiety. Diaphragmatic breathing, meditation, hypnosis, GABA, magnesium, theanine. There's so many ways, you know, the right music, smelling lavender, looking at relaxing images, getting a massage, taking a sauna. All of these things work.

It's just people develop habits and we are habitual creatures. And the question really is, do your habits serve you or do they hurt you and the ones that hurt you identify them work to break them um orlando it's been such a joy to talk to you how can people learn more about you and the house of freedom well yeah i mean they can certainly go to our website our website which is hofrehab.com uh also we have houseoffreedom.com as a website and they can also call us you know at 407-957-9077 but the best way again it's going through our website houseoffreedom.com we have have a YouTube channel, a Facebook channel as well, and Instagram.

And we always are uploading a lot of good content and educating the community in English and Spanish, which there's a large population of Spanish speakers also suffering from all the things that we talked about today. And sometimes there's not enough resources for that community. So that would be the best way to be able to reach us. Thank you, my friend. You're listening to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. If you're enjoying the Brain Warriors Way podcast, please don't forget to subscribe

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