Change Your Brain Every Day - The 7 Types of ADD & How to Treat

Episode Date: February 14, 2019

In the last episode of a series on identifying and treating the 7 different types of ADD, Dr. Daniel Amen and Tana Amen wrap up the discussion by describing the final 4 types of ADD: Temporal Lobe ADD, Limbic ADD, Ring of Fire ADD, and Anxious ADD. They also give you tips for how to properly treat someone who suffers from each one of these ADD types.

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. We're talking about ADD type, brain type week, and how ADD impacts relationships, work, school. Tana said that we didn't talk about how classic ADD impacts relationships, work, school. Tana said we didn't talk about how classic ADD impacts relationships or an attentive. In my book, Healing ADD, there's a chapter called

The Games ADD People Play. And the first game they play is let's have a problem. So unless it's treated properly, they're looking for stimulation. And, you know, they can find it in scary movies. So, you know, why does Saw, the movie Saw, exist? But it's not just Saw. It's Saw 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 3D. No, it's odd to me that.

And why did your mother take you to scary movies when you were a child? The hills have eyes and silent scream. When I was like eight and nine years old. What is that? And she's like, well, I didn't know. So like they go after scary movies, they go to the edge in relationships. Yep. And they can be conflict seeking.

Which means they play this game, let's have a problem. And that wears out their partner. It's like, we're on vacation, we're having a great time, and why are you picking on me? And it just happens over and over again. And their partners get worn out. So they can find stimulation and, oh, this is the most amazing relationship ever. But then a couple of hours later, change it into you did this, you did that. So let me ask you a question.

Because this is, I think, a fairly practical thing people might be able to take away. So I know that was sort of my example growing up. And I think learned behavior also happens. chaos, you start to learn that. Maybe that combined with some ADD of my own or whatever. I thought that was normal. Like I thought that was just sort of normal in relationships. And I remember when I first met you, I thought, okay, this is ridiculous. He's like, he's lying. Nobody's that nice. And I kept waiting for the other shoe to fall, right? I kept waiting. It took me like a year and a half before I trusted it. Um, and then I remember I was, was going through therapy. I'm like, this just isn't like, nobody's that nice. Like he's trying to manipulate

me somehow. I remember thinking that. And so over time I like dealt with my own stuff and I realized, no, he's actually nice. He's not, there are nice guys. Like they're really nice. He's like, there are nice guys. Like they're really nice. And so I sort of dealt with that. Um, but the, the part that I want to point out is number one, you have to recognize it, right. And recognize if you've gone through that, if that's been your example, it's not a crime to just go, okay, it just acknowledge it because you can't make it better unless you do. But the other thing is you can, I mean, what having peace in your house is just so amazing. Um, but you can channel that energy. If you know, you've got that energy. I know I'm a little like one of those German shepherds that needs, you know, those working

dogs that need to be worked a lot. You always say, if I don't have a project, I'm dangerous. You'll come home and I'll have half of like the back half of the house torn off, or I will have ordered a new dog from Germany, right'll do something like shocking so um so I'm just like that I know that about myself I accept that so what I do is I make sure that I'm engaged and involved in something that channels that energy martial arts for me is the perfect thing right writing books doing things like this the podcast I just know that I need that outlet so that I'm not bringing that into a relationship, right? I mean, can't people do that and learn to do that?

Absolutely. And I think the older they get, especially if they're like you and they're introspective, right? I mean, for somebody like you, therapy is so helpful because you're bright and you think about it. I want to be better. And you want to be better.

For someone where their problems are always somebody else's fault, therapy is not that helpful. Right? So therapy doesn't help everybody. It helps a certain group of people. And I think you've taken full advantage of it. And when I've done it for me, I take full advantage of it. We often say therapy is not for the weak person. It's for the strong person.

Definitely not. You're going to see parts of yourself naked that you're just like, whoa. It's for the strong person. Okay. So classic ADD, the restlessness can really impact relationships. The interrupting. So the other person is not able to, because relationships require one, time, two, listening. And a lot of people have ADD, they're not good listeners because they're always afraid.

If I don't say what I'm thinking, I'm going to forget it because they get distracted easily. Classic ADD, I did an article once for Men's Health. I used to be a columnist for Men's Health and I actually wrote a couple of feature articles for them. And one was six women wrote about the best sex of their lives. And I did the psychoanalysis of it. I mean, that was like so much fun. Yeah. I was just going to say, that's just like something I'm sure you'd, yeah, nevermind. That was so much fun for me. Keep going. But as I was reading about these wild experiences, I'm like, oh, these are classic Asian women.

Right? It's fun to write about. These are not women I would ever date. Right. Because they would make your life a little bit better. They will make you crazy. Right. Because it's hard for them to be settled. Right. They're going to move on.

Relationship. They're what we call montane bulls. Right. You know, right? You need to explain what that means. People are like, what? What are you talking about? So they actually did this study on monogamy.

And they actually did it on bulls. Bulls are little furry things. They look like prairie dogs. They're little rodents. And they're prairie bulls, which if they mate with another prairie bull. That's it. That's it. 80% of the time. Even if their partner dies, they're the only bull they want.

And then. And they mourn, right? And they mourn. And then there's another one called montane bulls that are one-night stand artists. If they have sex- Love the one you're with. With another montane bull. It just doesn't matter one bit if that's the bull they have sex with the next time.

Right. And so you have to sort of know who you are. And your values need to line up with the person you're with. And stay with your species. Because that could be dangerous. And people with classic ADD are more likely to be... But maybe they don't want to be that, and maybe it's the ADD. Well, and if you treat the ADD...

They may be different. They can be so much better at work, more focused in their relationships. Because you just got done saying, talking about self-esteem. And maybe that person hates themselves for that, but they keep repeating the cycle because they don't know what else to do. So I'm just bringing something up that it just occurs to me. And they don't know the underlying reality.

Right. Because I know we see people who hate themselves, right? So let's go on to type four, which is, so classic ADD, inattentive ADD, over-focused ADD, type 4, and I described this very early on with our imaging work, is one I called temporal lobe ADD. So you have temporal lobes underneath your temples, behind your eyes. They're very large structures in the brain, and they house the amygdala and the hippocampus.

And when they're hurt, either from a head trauma or toxin, or you're born that way, mood instability, irritability, temper problems, learning problems, dark thoughts. And I would get all these kids who had rage attacks and people thought it was bad parenting. But when I scan them, they had trouble in their temporal lobes and I actually found that anti-seizure medications just balance them out. Now, I often had to treat their ADD as well, but this is a very important.

This is important because it's, I mean with with, with children, this is just tragic, but think about this with a partner of all the types of ADD you've talked about so far from a, from my perspective, from a female perspective, I don't know about from a male perspective, that would be the hardest one to deal with because the others are annoying, irritating,

might not put up with it. That one flat out dangerous. And that's just not going to happen. It can't temper that one. But, but if you, and that's just not going to happen. It can be. The temper. But if someone behaves that way toward me, it's not going to happen. Like the temper, the outrage, the violence, yeah, no. That could be a recipe for disaster.

So this one would be the hardest. And you tend to label them as bad. I think for anybody it would be. But you're going to label them as bad is my point. Right. When, in fact, they're hurt. Right. And making that shift is dramatic.

So how? Now, you often have to treat. So you treat the temporal lobes, and we often do it with an anti-seizure medicine. So Lamictal, Neurontin, Depakote, Trileptal, Topamax sometimes. And as it balances it, you often will then add either stimulating supplement or medication and it can help so much.

So if someone's dealing with this, what is, give them an idea, how long it would take to get this treated before they see some kind of result and what can they do in the process? Because that's kind of a scary one to me. So what can they do? Well, a couple of weeks. So get seen. If you have a scan so that you know you have a map, right?

That's why we scan people to have a map. And then get on the right treatment. The best diet is a low-carbohydrate, higher-protein and fat diet. The ketogenic diet has actually been found to treat seizure disorders. I think of these almost like a storm going on in someone's brain where they can be really great and then someone pokes them and they explode. And if they have it and they drank, it's really the prescription for disaster. So higher protein, lower carbohydrate diet, sometimes neurofeedback can be really helpful.

Sometimes hyperbaric oxygen put the brain in a healing environment. But so many of the best stories I have are temporal lobe ADD kids that are on the right treatment or adults. Yeah, because you see that transformation. Just saved their lives. Yeah, that's transformational. And it's a very important subtype. Type five is limbic ADD. That's a combination of both ADD and depression.

And they don't do well with stimulants. In fact, stimulants often will work, but then they'll rebound. It'll cause them, when it wears off, to cry. And they are people, classic ADD people often really happy. And, you know, once they get a bad thought, well, they got distracted from it, and they went on to another thought. Limbic ADD people see the glass is half empty. So it's almost like they always have this low grade depression., so tend to be more socially isolated, more lonely, negative, a little bit like Eeyore.

And they do better with SAMe, a stimulating supplement, or with Welbutrin. So Welbutrin, often miraculous for this type. And then early on, I actually didn't want to see this type. I didn't describe it for, I think, five years because I would see it, but it didn't fit my idea of ADD. So people don't see things they're not looking for. And it was, they didn't have low activity in their brain. They actually had high activity in their brain. The whole thing was overactive.

We call it the ring of fire. Oh, I've seen these kids. Yeah. And, you know, our friend Jared just transformed his life. Their brain is working way too hard. And you give them a stimulant. It's like an infection hard. And you give them a stimulant. It's like an infection, right? You give them a stimulant.

In fact, if you give type over-focus to stimulant, they get more over-focused. You give temporal lobe a stimulant, you may actually trigger the violence or trigger hallucinations. The limbic people can make them sad. The ring of fire people, they can just get more angry OCD at one boy who became suicidal on it and so the ring of fire it's ADD plus really bad sensory integration thing it's like the world comes at them way too quickly sometimes they have ticks often can go with Tourette's. And sometimes it's due to an infection, like a panda syndrome, which we can talk about. So if I could just describe Jared from the perspective of a mother who had a little

child, I didn't want my child around him, which is so hard for a mom to say, right? Because you have empathy for the other mother. You know that that's painful to another mother. But I was afraid for my daughter to be around him because she was younger than he was, significantly younger. And he was just this whirlwind that would come into a room and you just knew something was going to go wrong. He was just never very happy. And if he did go go into a rage he was going to like punch a hole in a wall or something so it's this like this sort of out of very out of control and it wasn't bad parenting I knew it wasn't bad parenting it was like what is happening and it's

like this like it almost creates the sense of fear in people around. And he'd been tried on six medications and they wanted to put him on an antipsychotic. Right. When your friend, Christine, saw us on television. I hadn't seen her for a while, but sort of part of it because of this. And then she reached out to us and we took him off all of his medication, put him on supplements, changed his diet, and it transformed his life. Like significantly. But it's a scary thing to see.

Now, the last type is, and so ring of fire affects you in school. You're in the principal's office all the time. You're not able to focus because the world's coming at you. He was always in trouble. No friends. You've been diagnosed with ADD. You've been on a stimulant and you failed it. And there's a good chance you don't have friends.

So that's the common thing. Yes. And so at work, you're often seen as a troublemaker. And in relationships, you tend to go through relationships because your partner is unhappy about your behavior. Now, the last type, and it's the type that gets diagnosed the least because they cover for it, and that's anxious ADD, where they have the ADD symptoms. But because they have a higher level of anxiety as opposed to most kinds of ADD, where they have a higher level of anxiety as opposed to most kinds of ADD where they have a lower level of anxiety, in fact, maybe not enough anxiety,

this type, their basal ganglia is really busy and their frontal lobes are sleepy. And so they have the core ADD symptoms plus they can be anxious and tense and predict the worst. And so their level of anxiety keeps them on track, but it's at a great expense. So these would be the ICU nurses, the emergency room doctors, the trauma surgeons, the anxiety kept them getting them through nursing school and medical school, but at a cost that it took them longer and with sort of greater effort. Okay. So I think I have the anxious ADD.

It didn't take me longer. That wasn't my problem. But when I went through, and we said this in a different podcast, when I went through that really severe depression, because no one knew what was going on in my brain, they put me on Prozac. And Prozac drops sleepy frontal lobes. Right. I didn't, I wasn't anxious anymore. You weren't anxious anymore. Disinhibited.

Which was not necessarily a good thing. No. Because we all need some anxiety. the anxiety is what was actually sort of keeping me on track. And so I think that if anything, that was when whatever ADD signs I had emerged, fortunately I took myself off of it pretty quickly, but I just knew I wasn't being me. I'm like, what is this? Like, I don't, that was never how I like thought or behaved.

Well, and that's why we really believe in first do no harm. What's the least toxic, most effective treatment. And for you, if they would have treated your thyroid effectively. Right. And then treated the ADD, you. Likely wouldn't have gone through that. Wouldn't have gone through that. But now you know that you can share this information for others.

So I have a book, Healing ADD. It's a great book. It's one of my favorite books of yours, I just have to say. Thank you. If you want to learn more about this, we also have a course that Tana and I did together called Healing ADD at Home in 30 Days. And we like it because it's like 35 to 10 minute videos on what are the things you can do right away. So you can get the book anywhere where great books are sold

or on brainmd.com. You can get the course at amynuniversity.com. Stay with us. Use the code PODCAST10 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 Warriors Way cookbook we give

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