Change Your Brain Every Day - Snoring, Sleep Apnea & Real Damage To Your Intimacy

Episode Date: February 16, 2017

There are many things that can dilute the intimacy between couples. In this episode we'll talk about how sleep apnea and snoring can be detrimental to your intimate relationships and your brain's role in it.

Hi, I'm Donnie Osmond, and welcome to The Brain Warrior's Way, hosted by my friends Daniel and Tana Amon. Now, in this podcast, you're going to learn that the war for your health is one between your ears. That's right. If you're ready to be sharper and have better memory, mood, energy, and focus, well then stay with us. Here are Daniel and Tana Amen.

I'm wondering, is there any study done on the tie with sleep apnea and possibly affecting Alzheimer's or any other brain disorder? Untreated sleep apnea doubles your risk for Alzheimer's disease. With sleep apnea, what we see on scans is their parietal lobes, top back part of the brain, and temporal lobes start to drop in activity. And a lot of people don't know that sleep apnea can clearly affect intimacy because with sleep apnea, it usually comes snoring. So people are often not sleeping together, stop breathing multiple times at night.

So you freak out your partner because they think you're dead or you're on your way to being dead, and you have lower overall blood flow to your brain, and that means you're chronically tired, you're more depressed, you're more impulsive, you say stupid things that if you had good blood flow to your brain, you would have inhibited, right? Like when your wife says, how does this look on me? Not that good. It's not the thing to say. See, one of the things I've learned is when she goes, how does this look on me? My first thought is, my first comment is, well, how do you think it looks on you, sweetie? So at least I know her position before I take one. Getting sleep apnea evaluated

and fully treated. There are people here, there are guys here and women here who have been diagnosed with sleep apnea, but have then blown it off. And it also impacts. I'm wondering what the impact might be possibly for the spouse who's also having her sleep. Do I sound like I'm trying to help myself here? Her sleep's being interrupted. It's terrible. When no one's getting sleep, there's more irritability, there's less sex, there's less money because people don't make good decisions. As before, you always want to protect the blood flow to your brain and everywhere else. Thank you. Thank you, Debbie. One of the things in my practice I never used to screen for were head injuries. It seems like there's a lot of problems of intimacy that

happened after a car accident, after being knocked out, did you allow kickboxers, obviously. But the head injury seems to be many times a breakdown in intimacy from that injury. And following up to that, what do you think about the use of hyperbarics and oxygen treatment to treat those kind of injuries? If you ask me, what is the single most important thing you've learned from doing all these brain scans? I would go mild traumatic brain injury changes people's whole lives and no one knows about it. When I first started doing scans, I had no clue of this. And then I'd ask people, do you ever have a head injury? They'd say, no, I'd scan them. They have a big dent in their left frontal lobe. There's not that many thing

that gives you that scan pattern. And then I'd go, are you sure? And they go, I don't think so. And then I would ask them five times, have you ever fallen out of a tree, fell off a fence, dove into a shallow pool? And you cannot believe, well, you can, because I know you know this, the number of people who say, no, no, no, no. And then this first guy that did this to me, he said, oh my goodness. He said, I was seven years old and I fell out of a second story window. Do you think that counts? Maybe. Hyperbaric oxygen treatment is very interesting. Well, we know it's actually approved by Medicare, not for the brain, that was stupid, but for 14 wound healing indications. And what we've seen, because we've done many before and after scans with hyperbaric

oxygen therapy, is it boosts brain activity? And that's what you want after a head injury is you want to get some of the brain activity back. So because, you know, it's my contention that when your brain works right, work right. And when your brain has trouble, you have so much trouble in your life. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks for listening to today's show, The Brain Warrior's Way. Why don't you head over to brainwarriorswaypodcast.com.

That's brainwarriorswaypodcast.com, where Daniel and Tana have a gift for you just for subscribing to the show. And when you post your review on iTunes, you'll be entered into a drawing where you can win a VIP visit to one of the Amen Clinics. I'm Donnie Osmond, and I invite you to step up your brain game by joining us in the next episode.