Change Your Brain Every Day - The Brain in Love & Lust, Can You Choose Your Love?

Episode Date: February 13, 2017

Since we are on the love month and only a day away from Valentines, we're starting a series called The Brain in Love. So today, we're going to talk about, what if you can choose the one you love?

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 hoping my question might lead to some good dating advice. Based on your brain scans that you've seen, what would you consider like the high risk issues that maybe aren't treated or harder to repair when there has been damage versus maybe the low risk issues. Tell me more of your thinking behind this question. Like, is it more the harder ones to treat, obviously brain damage, but maybe like a long history of abuse or trauma or... So if you could choose who you fall in love with, how would you screen them? Yes, exactly. In my book, The Brain in Love, there's a whole chapter on this.

Because I think it's very important for people to be thoughtful about the people they fall in love with. You know, I always say, you know, use your head before you give your heart away to someone. And so, you know, I recommend you actually ask them a number of questions like, tell me about the people in your family. Now, you're going to take a psychiatric family history, but you're not going to phrase it that way, right? Because nobody would like that. But you're going to want, you know, tell me about your mom. Tell me about your relationship with your mom. Tell me about your dad. Tell me about your relationship with your dad. And then you watch their behavior. So before you hop under the covers with someone, you know, you might get to know them a little bit

and see how they are and how their people are. If they get drunk on their first date with you, you know, if you're really lonely, you can find all sorts of excuses for that, but it's a bad sign. I call them seeing the dead animals around the oasis of love. So the analogy is, is when you're not in love, you're sort of in a desert and you don't like that. I mean, as humans, we are a pair bonded species. And so you meet someone, okay, now you're at the oasis. So you completely don't see the dead animals around the oasis. Are you with me? Remember the analogy? So, and getting drunk on your first date is a dead animal, right? Hating their ex-spouse is a dead animal. You should be paying attention to that because they chose that spouse. You know, being disrespectful to their parents, being,

you know, sort of chronically negative. Now, I have to tell you, family history does not always disqualify people. My beautiful daughter married someone whose mother has paranoid schizophrenia and his father killed himself. Now, it made me very nervous. So, but as the tendency is in my family, if you date any of my children, you have to get scammed. Dr. Amen, some of us are reluctant to take a lot of prescription medications. Are there nutritional supplements can be taken in lieu of prescription medications? And if so, are all the supplements the same? So do we just go buy the cheapest one available? You know, Paul, that's a great question. I'm a classically trained psychiatrist. So in my program, they did not talk one whit about alternative things to do

for treating psychiatric illness. And it was just by listening to my patients and they'd go, you know, I tried St. John's wort. It made a big difference for me. And then I'd like go look at the literature. And what I found, there is a huge scientific literature on using natural vitamins, herbs, supplements to help enhance brain function. And also as a psychiatrist, I would always think, if this was my mother or this was my wife, how would I treat them? You know, how would I treat the people I care most about? And I have to tell you, I'd almost always start with natural supplements because they have fewer side effects.

They tend to work, they're less expensive and they don't affect your insurability. Now, they're not all made equal. There are some brands that are reliable and that you can trust. And there are others that are totally unreliable. And, you know, my biggest concern is most people's consultant is the teenage clerk at the grocery store. And that's just crazy. You know, some of you know, I, you know, the Amen Clinics has their own line and, you know, people like, oh, why do you have that? You know, it's just to make money. And that's not true at all. In fact,

I resisted it for a long time, but it was so hard. You know, we treat a high ADD population. If they didn't get it when they walked out of our office, they would never get it, right? Because they get distracted. Plus, we knew who were the best companies that had the best track records that, you know, they did the right lab analysis on the supplements. And so we partnered with some of the best companies in the world, and we have very strong confidence in the kind of supplements that we sell. There are a lot of great companies. And in my book, Magnificent Mind, I talk a lot about this issue. I have a question specifically about the hormones in relation to menopause for females. And I know we have chemical hormones that we can

take supplementally or bioidentical hormones that we could take supplementally or nothing. And my question is, which of these types of hormones or no hormones would you recommend? And for how long would you recommend that someone take them or not take them? You know, that's a great question. Angie, come and join us. Let me introduce you to, this is Dr. Angie Meeker, who is a doctor of pharmacy and has spent the last 10 years working with women, helping them to balance their hormones with synthetic hormones and bioidentical hormones and so on. So help me answer this question. Well, the major hormone that has been studied in the brain as far as estrogen goes is estradiol, which is a bioidentical hormone. So to answer the question about what would be

the best hormone to take for the brain, all of the studies that have been done that have looked at the effects of estradiol on the brain have been very positive. So I think your answer is yes, a bioidentical, meaning an identical molecule to the human body. For how long to take hormones, it's a very individual question, and it really depends on a patient's history, a patient's family history, and a patient's specific situation. So it really, really is so highly variable. I don't know that there's one single answer for that. Although our bias, my bias, would be bioidentical hormones because the studies on the synthetic hormones are not all that great and they're fraught with more problems. If you don't have estrogen, we know, say a woman had a

hysterectomy, didn't have any estrogen replacement, she now has double the risk for Alzheimer's disease. So I often recommend hormone replacement unless you have a family history of breast cancer or uterine cancer. And even then, they're really working hard to try and answer the question, can these women take hormones as well? Because what we see is the blood flow to their brain is better because without estrogen, and a lot of people know this, your skin's not as good, you wrinkle more, your bones are not as good, your heart is not as good, and your brain is not as good. So I've been encouraging a lot of my patients to really look at this issue in a thoughtful way. Yeah. And it's more than just the menopausal

symptoms that we see. With estrogen in the brain, we see an increased capacity to deal with pain. So it's not just the typical hormonal menopausal symptoms we're thinking about your entire life. And as you age, you tend to experience more pain. And so few psychiatrists ever think about hormones as being related to behavioral problems or emotional problems or cognitive problems. And it's a huge area that's important to deal with so that people can have their best life. And I have to say, I just resent the fact when someone, you know, they'll go to a physician and they'll be, you know, whatever, 60 or 70 or 80, and they'll go, well, you're just old. So, you know, there's nothing we should do for you. And I resent that. You know, my grandma died the last year and she was what,

99, 98. And, you know, it wasn't until she was 92, we scanned her and, you know, I gave her some things that just made a big positive difference in her life. You know, I want someone taking care of me till the end, wherever the end is. Yeah, that's exactly true. And we were talking about earlier with the drugs, you know, I can't tell you how many women come to me that have a need for hormone balance and they're on an antidepressant. They're on a sleeping medication, an anti-anxiety medication, all three together. And I just think, what do these drugs do to the brain? So they don't have enough hormones, right? So that's going to affect your brain in a negative way. And we're giving drugs on top of that to sort of falsely suppress parts of the brain. So they don't have enough hormones, right? So that's going to affect your brain in a negative way. And we're giving drugs on top of that to sort of falsely suppress parts of the

brain. So it's sort of like, to me, a double hit. Do you agree? Absolutely. When you look at the anti-anxiety medicines and the sleep medicines, they are not brain healthy. They decrease brain activity. So where if you could have given her progesterone, for example, which is the brain's own natural anti-anxiety hormone, it could have made just a huge difference by itself. So this is a very exciting area of clinical practice and research. Thank you so much. 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.