Change Your Brain Every Day - The Art of Self- Accountability, with Joan Lunden

Episode Date: July 16, 2020

In this fourth and final episode in series with “Why Did I Come Into This Room?” author Joan Lunden, she and the Amens discuss some practical tips to keep your brain and body strong as you get older. Tactics such as scheduling appointments for yourself and reframing the actions in your life that are important to you can get amazing results and totally change the way you think and feel. For more info on Joan's new book "Why Did I Come Into this Room?' visit https://www.amazon.com/Why-Come-into-This-Room/dp/1948677296

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 are here still with the beautiful, ever beautiful Joan Lunden. And we're talking about her book. Why did I come into this room?

We are having so much fun. So we would love for you to post what you have learned, what you want to learn, what your questions are, your concerns. What's been concerning you about aging? Are you having trouble with remembering why you came into a room? Post it, tag us, go to brainwarriorswaypodcast.com, leave us a review. We would be ever so grateful. In fact, we will enter you into a drawing for either my cookbook or Daniel's book, The End of Mental Illness, whichever you choose. But we're just having such a great time. And I have to just tell you, Joan, you are magnificent. You're just so much fun and you are just so vital. I mean, obviously whatever you're doing, I'm glad you put it in a book

because you're just amazing. Well, you know, I remember when I was writing one of my first books, I had gone through this transformation from 39 to 40. I just decided, I decided one day, well, actually, I remember we had a representative from the American Heart Association on the show and they had this little quiz. And so I was, you know, we were going through all the questions in the quiz for people in the audience to assess their risk for cardiovascular disease.

And I'm like, inactive, eating the wrong things. Like I was like, Oh my god, I'm failing this test. And it was almost like it's funny, because it was the AHA, it was my aha moment. It truly was. And I said to myself in that moment, what do I want to be in 20 years, I want to I don't want to be watching from the sidelines, I want to be in the race. I still want to be vital. I still want to be fit. I want to be in 20 years? I don't want to be watching from the sidelines. I want to be in the race. I still want to be vital. I still want to be fit. I want to be in charge of my life. And I literally made a decision and I took it on as almost another job. I think that that, but what comes out of that is that you can't just let all these good things that we're talking about just maybe happen. Make appointments with yourself. Like I make appointments, I make sure I know when my

workouts are. I get up in the morning, I put on, I tend to like to work out better in the morning. I think there's some science behind that as well. But I'll put my workout clothes on. I'm way more inclined to work out if I'm in the clothes and my clothes are saying to me, hey, where are you supposed to go work out? Because what you're wearing says so. And I make appointments with myself to do things. I make an appointment with myself to clean out a desk. How about that one?

I shared that one on Facebook and then I really had to do it. But if you make appointments with yourself, I think that then, and then go to your appointments. And after a couple of days of doing that, I mean, I do that even like water. I mean, I just was a bad water drinker. And it's incredibly vital for how our body works, for how our brain works, for everything. And so I remember a fitness trainer of mine, she gave me these 10 little thin rubber bracelets that you get like on Oriental trading. She said, put these on in the morning and I want them all on the other arm by the time you go to bed because you're not being honest with yourself. You say, have I had enough to drink today? Oh, I think so. Uh-uh.

Like maybe a glass of water. So now I had credit. I had to have accountability with myself, I learned really fast, you better have half of a moment there by about one or two o'clock. Because if you try to move them all over at six o'clock at night, you're gonna be up all night. You know, but there's so much that if you learn how your body works, and you understand it, and you understand that if you learn how your body works and you understand it and you understand that, you know, are you really waking up at three o'clock in the morning to pee? Maybe not.

Maybe you're waking up at three o'clock in the morning because that's the time that your thyroid has its chance to do all of its replenishing. And it can't because you've been stressed out all day long. And I forget what it needs to run. But in order to do that, it has to create adrenaline. And that creation of adrenaline is way that's what's waking you up. And then you're awake, and then you have to go pee. Instead, find ways to manage your stress. And don't just power your thyroid with bad fats and sugars. Be nice to it.

I literally, you know how they say, talk to plants. Now I could talk to a plant and it'll still die. But Maria Marie Kondo, who wrote the book that says how to organize your whole house and you talk to your underwear. And I thought she was such a cuckoo. And then I thought, well, wait a second. Let me see if it works. I started going around the house and I'd say, do I use that anymore? Not really. I haven't used it for the

last three years. And then she says, thank it for its service and then get rid of it. It's because clutter clutters up your brain. So, I mean, I just found that if I had all if I started telling myself and talking to myself, and I literally sometimes when I'm having my warm water with lemon in the morning, and I get before coffee or anything else, I'm saying I'm being nice to you thyroid. I'm being nice to you. I'm massaging you. I'm giving you a good start to your day. I mean, it just it's like what you always say, Dr. Amen, it's bringing if you're saying it, it brings your consciousness there. And so you live your life throughout the day, not wanting to clog up your thyroid. And I just found that by starting to put

my attention to some of my, even my organs in my body and say, I want them to work properly. And I think it helps you. It helps you whether you say yes to that chocolate sundae after dinner, it helps you when you say, yes, I want want the broccoli because i know that that's one of the things that can help my longevity and help my health it's it's just kind of getting your head in the right place well ultimately it's about love to you it's about love that you're doing the right things because you love yourself. You love your husband. You love your children.

You love the mission. And, you know, choosing the wrong thing. I mean, yes, short-term happiness, but long-term trouble. And both of you had cancer. So you know what it's like to come face to face with your mortality. And it's not what you want. Right. And so we all have to make tradeoffs.

Right. You know, I love Rocky Road ice cream, but it doesn't love me back. In fact, it's used to be in an abusive relationship with Rocky Road Ice Cream. And I'm just, I'm not going to do it. I'm going to break, you know. I was in a marriage that was terrible for 20 years. And I'm not doing that again. And I'm damn sure not doing it with food.

Right? I have someone I adore who adores me back. So I'm really blessed. But, you know, you have to work on it in order to have a great relationship. You have to work on it to have that relationship with your own body. And, and it's ultimately, it's not deprivation when you miss, oh, I can't have all this alcohol or I can't have these donuts. It's just the wrong mindset. It's, you know, I get to have the broccoli because it gives me what I want, which is energy.

Well, and the cupcake or the donut or whatever is depriving me of what I want, which is my mission. And you, I mean, like you've talked about, it's an amazing life. Yeah. You know, it's this that would deprive me if I feel tired or sick or, you know, if I just don't have the energy and you know, if I, if I,

if I just don't have the energy and the vitality to maintain, to be able to do all these things, it's deprivation. And then to live it, you actually have to give it. And by you writing, you know, why did I come into this room? It just reinforces, I don't want dementia like my mom got. And I always say, if you knew a train was going to hit you, would you get out of the way? And people don't really understand that Alzheimer's is not something that just happens to you. It's you often invited it into your life by how you lived, by what you ate, by the toxins you put into your body. And it's something we have way more control over. And it's also why we're never going to get one medicine to fix Alzheimer's, because it's not one thing. There's not one road. I like breast cancer. You know, I never realized

before I got breast cancer that it's not one disease. It's a lot of different diseases. And that's why now they've come to learn that by what's it's kind of it's personalized medicine, but it's finding out now we can actually test the tumor and find out which medicines will work and which won't work. And those are advances that have even come about since I was diagnosed. And I was diagnosed, I've now been, I was diagnosed six years ago. So and I had a very fast growing cancer. So fortunately, I now know that I'll never that cancer isn't coming back. If it would have, it would have. But that doesn't mean you can't still

get another kind of cancer. So we always have to be just really doing everything that we can to make sure that we don't get ourselves in a situation where we put ourselves at risk for cardiovascular disease or anything, any other chronic illness. Did you see the American Cancer Society come out with a position against alcohol? I was so impressed because usually societies like that don't take really big positions, but they're like any drinking is a risk factor for cancer. Well, if you look at, there's a wonderful book called the blue zones by a guy named Dan and he wrote another one that I love thriving in the blue zones, but he got a grant from the world health organization to go out into the world and find out what populations lived exponentially longer.

And he identified five. One of them is Loma Linda, California. That's where I went to school. Did you go to limit Linda university? Yeah. Oh, I worked there.

I worked at the university Medical Center for years. I gave the commencement address there to the graduating medical school about five years ago on the 75th anniversary of my father getting his medical degree there. Oh, that's fantastic. The best job offer I ever had. I loved doing that. But why is that one of the blue zones in the world, that one little place? Where it's smoggier than anywhere, right? But we know why. It's because of what they eat. They're vegetarians. It's because they don't smoke. They don't drink. They don't do drugs. They don't have- Life of temperance.

It's a life of not always kind of skirting the edges. And when you do that, you don't do drugs. They don't have- Life of temperance. It's a life of not always kind of skirting the edges. And when you do that, you don't have as much stress and you sleep better. They live a life that lets them live exponentially longer than the rest of the population. And we can learn from that. I have to tell you, I love that you brought that up because when I worked at the medical center,

so I'm not Seventh Day Adventist, but I went to school there. And so at first I was thinking, what am I getting myself into? I had no idea because I'd heard they don't drink caffeine, they don't eat meat. And I'm like, what are you out of your mind? So I used to show up to school with my thermos thing full of caffeine. And I'm like, yeah, this is not going to work, but there's nowhere in that town at that time you could buy coffee. I'm sure now you can. But I'm like, that ain't going to work for me. So these long days, you know, doing clinicals.

No, that's not going to work. So then I started working at the medical center. But keep in mind, I also had cancer. I wasn't all that healthy. I was a really unhealthy kid, like really unhealthy. So I start working at the medical center. And I'm working in the unit that is we have basically the sickest people in the hospital. It was neurosurgical ICU and trauma. And so we would get the overflow though, from the medical ICU occasionally. And I started seeing these 95 year old, 103 year old seventh day Adventists come in sometimes from their first medical incidents

with no medications or maybe one medication that they were on. And I was like, and they'd have no lines on their face. And I'm like, that's just creepy. Like, that's just weird. What's happening here? It was so odd to me to see these people look, and maybe they came in because they were in an accident or, you know, they finally had something happen at 103. But I was like, what is this is odd. Like this is weird to see. And that that's when it struck me because all through school, I kept hearing about this life of temperance. You know, we don't live a life of temperance where everything's balanced and we don't eat meat. And we, you know, we meditate,

we pray, we walk, we do all this stuff and we don't drink alcohol. And I'm like, that's just odd. And then all of a sudden it struck me, me duh that's why these people are living to 103 and you know they found that in a lot of the other places sardinia and some of the other places that were found to be blue zones it wasn't just that they ate a lot of the mediterranean style if you will kind of that kind of diet and that they walked instead of taking a car. It was also because they were a community. Family. Safety and comfort and love belonging to a community.

They were involved in the church. They had a real sense of family. They always ate together at night and talked and they didn't live this fast pace. You know, we don't have anybody home at the same time tonight because this one's got football practice. This one's got tennis practice and this one's got this. They all came together and there was this time that they smiled and talked about their day. That's one of the, those are some of the differences. It's not just because of what they ate. Well, one of the blessings from the pandemic for so many families, they're not running like crazy as they did before. And they have more bonding with their loved ones. Joan, what a joy. Thank you so much for being on the Brain

Warriors Way podcast. If you learned anything, hopefully some great things, write them down and post them on any of your social media sites. We'd love for you to go to brainwarriorswaypodcast.com and write us a review or questions. We're going to spend time answering questions. And we'll enter you into drawing to win the Brain Warriors Way cookbook, Tana's great cookbook,

which you should send to Joan. I should. And also the end of mental illness. Joan, thank you so much. Such a pleasure. Such an honor. It was absolutely my pleasure. Thanks. 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 considering coming to Amen Clinics or trying some of the brain healthy supplements from

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