Change Your Brain Every Day - The Amen’s ‘Resetting’ Strategies to Balance Your Life

Episode Date: January 21, 2021

In this week’s series of the podcast, Dr. Daniel and Tana Amen take an in-depth examination of the process of resetting yourself and redefining your goals. In the last episode of this series, the Amens discuss why it’s so important to strike a balance with all of the different aspects of your life, such as family, work, finances, and health. The strategies they give in this episode will help you to find and maintain that balance necessary for a happy, purposeful life.

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're so happy to be with you as we talk about resetting your life for 2021. Sort of the cool thing about being human, every day is a new day and you had talked earlier um that the past is the past and the present is a gift and we don't know about tomorrow but we can certainly set tomorrow up to be better by what we do the decisions you make today make a difference for tomorrow. And that's why I start every day with today is going to be a great day. I close every day with what went well today. And I just, I love the idea is the present is the gift. If you can learn how to anchor yourself to the present.

And when you, when you encounter challenges, one thing that helps me is like, what is the opportunity here? What can I learn? What can I teach others? What's the opportunity? That's something that really helps me. So write down anything you've learned this week. We'd be so grateful.

Post it on any of your social media sites. Leave us a comment, question, or review at brainwarriorswaypodcast.com, and we will enter you into a drawing to an assigned copy of Tana's new book, The Relentless Courage of a Scared Child, or The End of Mental Illness. You tell us which one. We'd just be so grateful. And we mentioned earlier that for the rest of January, anyone who tags 10 people and reaches out, takes a screenshot of it and tags us, will get a signed copy of the book.

It's awesome. So Risa, we hope you've enjoyed this week. What we've talked about is really defining for yourself what you want in a balanced way. And the reason I created this with relationships first, work, money, physical, emotional, spiritual health, is people get burned out when they are unbalanced. But by working on those four major areas of your life, which correlate really nicely to the four circles that we always talk about, biology, so physical health, psychology, your emotional health, spiritual, and social, which is relationships, work, and money. So it just really fits. What do you want for your emotional health?

What do you want for your mind? Do you want to be happy? Do you want to be less reactive? What is it you want? Do you want to be less afraid? Do you want to be less afraid? Do you want to make better decisions? Which I think is really, that's where success starts. I keep threatening to write a book called decisions you make over time, right? And so what do you want?

So for me, I want to be happy. Happy is so underrated. People think it's selfish to be happy. But if you're around unhappy people, you realize that happiness is a form of altruism. When I say that, what comes to mind for you? You know, it's funny. I've done so much work around these areas. I love my life. I would love for 2021 to be, especially in our home, for the kids to, for this to sort of resolve itself so that the kids have less stress. I think we've done a good, teaching them to have less stress is not, or taking away their stress is not my goal.

Teaching them to manage stress is really what's more important. I do feel bad for the youth right now that they've lost so much, but I do think it's important to teach them, look, these things are going to happen in life. How are you going to handle it? So I really, that's one of the big things for me with mental health is how do we handle the things that come up? And I think that's why- How do you train resilience? Right. And that's why those questions I said at the beginning, what's the opportunity? What can I learn? What can I teach others? What can I be grateful for?

Because there's, there's almost always something that you can, you know, if you can't feel grateful for it, you can learn something. What's the opportunity? How can you use it somehow? Well, and then spiritual health, what do you want? And some people go, well, I don't believe in God, but that wasn't the question. Spiritual health is why do you think you're on the planet? What is your deepest sense of meaning and purpose? And you can find that in your relationship with God. You can find it in your relationship with others. You can find it in meaningful work. But one of the things I've noticed is that when people don't have a sense of meaning and don't have a sense of purpose, they're much more likely to get depressed. Well, and science actually shows, some of the studies show that people live longer when they have a sense of purpose beyond themselves, something bigger than themselves that they

believe in. So it is an important thing for your mental and physical health to have something larger than yourself that you believe in. And one thing, you know, every kid goes through this phase, I think of, you know, it's not fair. It's not fair. you know, it's not fair. It's not fair. Um, you know, life is not fair. And I used to tell our daughter this when she was little, she would always, you know, it's not fair. I'm like, whoever told you life was going to be fair. Fair is a place with bad food and farm animals. It's, it's not fair life. No one promised you life was going to be fair. The better question is, why is the world a better place? Because you are a lot for you.

That's the better question. What are you doing to make it better? Because that just changes, that changes the question in your head. It sets you up to be more in control, to be more responsible, to be more empowered. There's actually the father of stress psychology. His name's Hans Selvier coined a term many, many years ago called egoistic altruism, which is we're altruistic giving to others without expecting anything back because it's good for us.

It actually lures our stress. As you said, it helps us live longer. When it's all about you, then it quickly will lose its level of happiness and level of meaning. Even small things, like we're stuck inside the house. Everybody's like, well, I can't go do volunteering. The kids even ask me, why do you spend so much time answering people's questions? What are you getting out of that? Honestly, it makes me feel good.

It makes me feel good to go on social media and see questions and help answer people's questions and just connect. Yeah. And ultimately the spiritual circle is about connection. And for me, when I describe it in lectures, I'll often draw on a board, a cross, and it's just a coincidence. It's a cross, but it's what's your relationship with God? What's your relationship with the planet? Because if the planet's not healthy, you're not going to be healthy. You need healthy water and healthy air, healthy food in order to thrive. What's also your relationship with the past? So for me me that's my grandfather who I was so connected to and what's your relationship with the future and for me that's my five grandbabies and my

grandchildren um I thought you didn't believe in coincidence and what coincidence why oh anyways um but you know those are sort of the major areas that help you be spiritually fit which people don't talk about spiritual fitness they talk about physical fitness they rarely talk about mental fitness, but they're connected or relationship fitness, and they're all connected to how your brain works. So reset, create a one page miracle for yourself. Look at it every day and then ask yourself every day is my behavior getting me what I want. I have a new book coming March 2nd called Your Brain is Always Listening. And there's a whole chapter on the addicted dragons and how to manage addictions. And I have a brand new 12-step program. And the 12 steps don't start

with the typical 12-step, my life is out of control. It starts with what do you want? And then step two, well, is the addiction causing you to not what you want? That's how you know, when your life is out of control. Yeah. I think, I think the why we underestimate why mindset. So, you know, we, we have all the, there's so many self-help books on getting, losing weight, getting healthy. I mean, it's like the shelves are loaded with them, but if you don't address mindset, if you don't address the why, why are you doing this? What is your purpose? It's very difficult to do the what if you can't connect to why so the why needs to be addressed first well we are grateful part of our purpose uh is serving you and helping you have a better brain and a better life that requires being a brain warrior being armed prepared and aware to win

the fight of your life so we're grateful grateful for you. What did you learn? Write it down, take a picture of it, post it on any of your social media sites, hashtag Brain Warriors Way podcast. We'll be grateful. You can also go to brainwarriorswaypodcast.com, leave us a comment, question, or review. We announced three winners this week and you may win one assigned copy of either Tana's book, The Relentless Courage of a Scared Child, or my new book, The End of Mental Illness. Stay with us. 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.