Change Your Brain Every Day - NASCAR Driving & My Mental Breakdown – Pt. 2 with Chase Mattioli

Episode Date: October 2, 2018

When former NASCAR driver Chase Mattioli suffered a severe mental breakdown, he decided it was time to seek help. In the second episode chronicling Chase’s amazing story, he tells Dr. Daniel Amen about what led him to take a look at his brain, and how what he saw changed everything.

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. Welcome back here with Chase Mattioli, and we're talking about it's insane not to look at your brain. Let me read another review. I love these. This is MCRDWN from the United States. Just found this podcast and listened to 10 episodes. Help for stress, anxiety, gut health, diet, plus loads of skill for managing life.

Love your easy manner and honest sharing of personal stories. Thanks so much. You have a new fan, which we are grateful for. So Chase and I are talking about Chase's story. And grew up around the Pocono Speedway, race cars, did a lot of sort of thrill-seeking behavior. But young started to suffer with anxiety, depression, irritability, get diagnosed with bipolar disorder on multiple medications.

I think one of your other diagnoses was intermittent explosive disorder, which means your temper's really bad. Yep. And then you actually saw one of our friends, a chiropractor in Chicago, and Dr. Antonucci, and he recommended you get scammed. He did, yeah. So I had gotten to a point, I was working in Chicago, and I was working a job for a larger company doing data analytics like I do for you now. And it was very much like a financial-type industry where we're started at 7 a.m.

and we don't leave until 10 to 11 p.m. every night. So working those types of hours and I was eating crap led me to get super stressed out to the point where I had a breakdown. I woke up one morning, I couldn't get out of bed, couldn't really do anything and just couldn't process anything. And this is despite being on your medications. All my medication, yep, all my medication. And I was working out, which I thought thought was good taking tons of whey protein because i was trying to put on muscle and all this other stuff bad idea we'll get to that um so anyway everything i thought i was doing to help my

health was actually super bad and hurting me and i had this breakdown and luckily dr uh antonucci was able to basically identify and say, hey, you should definitely go to one of the clinics. And at the time when I was living in Chicago, you didn't have the Chicago clinic open. So the next closest clinic to me was New York. So I ended up going to see Dr. Rishi Sood and he was amazing. I really loved my experience there. Yeah. Dr. Sood's a triple Yeah, Dr. Soon's a triple board-certified psychiatrist. He's board-certified in general psychiatry, pediatrics, child psychiatry. When he first came to work with us, he was about 80 pounds overweight.

Okay. Because he'd spent so much time training but no time taking care of himself. Okay. And after you work with us for a while, you realize your lifestyle really does matter. The food you eat really does matter. And he's like, well, I can't tell people to get healthy if I'm not healthy. Oh, yeah. And so it was super fun for me to get the emails on a regular basis.

Hey, I'm down 20 pounds. I'm down 40 pounds. I'm down 80 pounds, and I'm exercising. It was really awesome. Yeah, he's one of our great young doctors. Well, and what you just said, young, that was the cool thing for me is most of my doctors that I worked with my whole life were probably 40 years older than me.

Not that that was bad, but Dr. Sud was closer to my age and we were just able to communicate on, I think, a different level because I was 80 pounds overweight and he was like, oh, I get it. He got it. So we were still pretty good friends. I talked to Dr. Sud maybe once every few weeks or so. He's just a great dude. Really enjoyed my experience with him.

And, you know, I got my scan, which was huge for me. So we went to New York in the process of two days. We did the full eval, concentration, and at rest. And what Dr. Sood was able to see was all of my concussions. It was basically a map of a lifetime of bad decisions. But what was cool is that he can say, oh, yeah, I can see all the head injuries. I can see where you probably had some toxicity from fumes and whatnot. But the best thing he said after that is like, we can fix this. It's not like you're broken. You're just kind of out of tune.

From a car guy, I understood that. A car's never broken. It just needs to be tuned up and fixed. And I guess that's what you say all the time. How do you know if you don't look, right? Well, in a car, how do you know if you don't open the hood? It's just the most obvious thing. And that's one of the analogies I've used almost from the time we started a scan is if your car smokes, uses too much gas, stalls in the middle of an intersection,

and you took it to a mechanic, and you just told the mechanic the symptoms, and he decided to do something major on the car without popping the hood, would you trust the mechanic? No. Absolutely not. You're like, aren't you going to look? How do you know unless you look? Yeah, you're suffering anxiety, depression with irritability, and no one's looking. They're assuming, based on a checklist, you meet six out of these nine criteria.

You have bipolar disorder, which is really a lifelong disorder, which you should be medicated for the rest of your life. Because there's a very high incidence of relapse and even suicide. And no one's telling you how to optimize your brain because no one has looked at it. So toxicity never comes up. Head trauma may come up once. When we saw your scan, one of the first things I learned doing scans is mild traumatic brain injuries ruin people's lives,

and nobody knows about it. And even though most psychiatrists go, well, you've never had a head injury, you'll go, no. And then we go, well, are you sure? Have you ever fallen out of a tree, fell off a fence, dove into a shallow pool, been in a car accident, played sports where you got a concussion? And then people go, I remember when I did it with your stepmother. She's like, no.

And then after I went, are are you sure she then told me about eight concussions yeah well it's funny um you know you're talking about dr suit and when you work here it's kind of hard not to get that healthy culture and then you learn so much because you're listening to the podcast you're reading your books took the brain health coaching certification course and now i'm like doing histories on myself and my mom all the time what happened when i was six six? Like, did I do this? Did I fall out? Like, what was I eating? What did you eat when you were pregnant? Cause I need to know. Um, yeah, they hate me, but it's so much fun. And now that I'm conscious about it, it's kind of, I think you say this a lot too. If you get one person, you probably get 10 cause you're going to get their family and you're going

to get everybody else. And, um, one thing you do say is be around the most healthy person you can stand. Luckily, my family can still stand me. I think they're kind of on the cusp on it right now. But it's been really cool because now I get an education from you and I'm able to share it with them. And if 20% of it sticks, I'm kind of stoked on it. It's harder to change everybody, but it's helping. Well, it happens over time.

The longer you live the message, the more influence you end up having. Like one of my favorite stories is my dad. It was difficult for me. And his favorite word when I was growing up was bullshit. His second favorite word was no. And he was just hard for me. And when I told him I was going to be a psychiatrist, he asked me why I didn't want to be a real doctor, why I wanted to be a nut doctor.

And I went nuts all day long. And then when I got really healthy after my own brain, he's like, oh, great, now you're a health nut. What's with you and the nuts? And I can't live without my bread and my dessert and then when he got sick i'm the first person he said i'm sick of being sick what do i do and then he completely transformed his life i mean it's like one of the best stories of my life so if you live the message and that's the whole brain warrior's way because you're in a war for the health of your

brain you know that now right people are easy to give you psychiatric drugs they're it's easy to give you bad food it's easy to encourage you to do behaviors that put you at risk for trauma and damage if you are not armed prepared and you lose. And then it affects your relationships. It affects your ability to work because you're really bright. But if your brain's not right, you never live your potential. And then you're unhappy, right? Because self-esteem really comes from the difference between where you think you should be and where you are. And if you're not close to where you think you should be, you get into self-loathing.

And so, but you go to New York, you see Dr. Sood, he sees the trauma in your brain. And did he put you on more medication? No. He took me off of all medication. That was the number one thing. He was like, you're not bipolar. And he was the one that backed up the intermittent explosive disorder.

So what he was able to see in my scan were holes or depressions in my prefrontal cortex and then also my temporal lobes. Temporal lobes obviously being emotional type control and then your prefrontal. So the people listening don't know that. So your temporal lobes are underneath your temples. They're behind your eyes. They're large structures in the brain. But they have this very important part of your brain. Some of you have heard about it.

It's called the amygdala. It's Greek for almond because it's an almond-shaped structure. And it's called the amygdala it's greek for almond because it's an almond shaped structure and it's involved with anxiety and emotional reactiveness and it sits right behind a very sharp bony ridge and is easily damaged from concussions i always say if god used me as a consultant i said please put a bumper guard there because it just is so easily heard. And when you heard it, then a small thing will happen and you'll have a big negative reaction. There's actually, it's called Kluver-Busse syndrome. When you damage both of them, when they do this in monkeys, they have this thing called sham rage.

It's like for no reason, they, you know, get very aggressive. Yeah. And when you look back and you're like, why did you do that? How is that helpful? Right? I mean, did that really get you what you want? And almost everybody, almost everybody who's been diagnosed with intermittent explosive disorder has trouble in their temporal lobes. And so sometimes anticonvulsants help. Sometimes brain rehabilitation helps.

Like we talked about hyperbaric oxygen. Yeah. So when you stay with us, we're going to actually talk about the steps that Chase used to rehabilitate his brain and get healthy. Stay with us. Use the code podcast 10 to get a 10% discount on a full evaluation at amenclinics.com or on our supplements at brainmdhealth.com. 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 Warriors Way and the Brain Warrior's Way cookbook we give away every month.