Change Your Brain Every Day - The Brain & the Mind: What’s the Difference? With Dr. Earl Henslin

Episode Date: August 29, 2019

Our society has developed a habit of using different terms to delineate between the organ that occupies our heads, and the collection of thoughts we experience moment to moment. But are these really separate entities, or are they manifestations of the same thing? In the last episode in a series with author and psychotherapist Dr. Earl Henslin, Dr. Daniel Amen and Tana Amen explain why it’s crucial for us to understand that the way we think about the organ between our ears shapes how we take care of it.

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 to our last day with Dr. Henslan. It's been wonderful this week having with you and Dr. Henslan talking about, you know, the brain and how you use the brain and incorporate it into psychotherapy. And he's our friend and he's our colleague and you're

involved in our foundation and it's been so wonderful hearing your stories. So today we want to talk about the brain and what did you want to, you wanted to incorporate that into the mind. Yeah. Cause people think of them as separate. When you do the work that you and I have done for so long, you realize they're not separate. Right. And that if your brain's not right, your mind's not right. Exactly. And you have a doctorate degree in psychology. You're also a marriage and family therapist. How much of your training to optimize and heal the mind, how much did you get about the brain?

Absolutely zero. Really? Yeah. There was one course on neuroanatomy. How is that possible? Neuroanatomy, which I did take, but the book was lousy and the professor was boring. Seriously?

I fell asleep, but now I read that stuff for leisure. But no, no emphasis. There's like one class on psychopharmacology, but then that's taught in a traditional way. And to me, it's useless. Yeah, no, this is no surprise. When I do lectures, probably you too, and I go, how many of you therapists, psychologists,

had courses on brain function, brain health? Nobody raises their hand. I'm shocked. It's insane that the organ they're working on is not the mind. It's the brain and the mind together. What's scary for me, and I saw this in the first seminar, was that I began to realize if I didn't change the assessments that I was doing, that really it was malpractice, you know, because the traditional testing and assessments,

there is a place for them, but they yield psychological or something we call psychodynamic kind of information, but they don't yield brain chemistry things and what to do to help each system of the brain. And to me, I always think it's kind of humorous when people try to separate, like you're saying, the brain from the mind. I mean, they're... Yeah, that seems odd to me. That your mother's mind was in pain because of her brain. Right. And when you helped her to balance her brain, she became the person she always wanted to be. Exactly. And that's why I hate the term personality disorders.

Exactly. Because it's like, well, what's the organ of personality? It's your brain. And, you know, we have shame. well, what's the organ of personality? It's your brain. Exactly. And, you know, we have shamed. Yeah, it feels so esoteric and like out there otherwise. We have shamed people. We've blamed people. And I'm embarrassed by it for my profession.

We need to do better. And what I love about you i mean many things but it's you actually take this and put it into a busy psychological practice where you help people every day and then you taught all the other doctors in your practice to do the same thing exactly yeah our you know to give you a like a specific example what we're talking about with that between the brain and the mind it'd be like you have wonderful material on all your books on automatic negative thoughts and those are those thoughts that pop out of nowhere just say you're i'm bad or i'm worthless or i'm a failure or whatever. No, cognitive behavioral therapy is designed to work with those thoughts.

The problem with looking at it strictly from cognitive behavioral theory and therapy is that when the basal ganglia, left and right basal ganglia is lit up and when that cingulate is way overactive, they can't make that shift from the negative thought to a positive cognition. And the ants beat them up. Exactly. I am so confused by this because as a neurosurgical ICU nurse, right?

So we deal with the brain. Right. People's behavior changes radically right in front of you. Right. So I'm having a really i mean maybe because it's so radical they're not counting that i don't understand but how do you not think that the brain and your behavior are connected i'm completely confused by that i didn't realize you guys you can try and kill yourself in every major city in the world and virtually no one will look at your

brain on a routine basis. But I mean, someone comes in, they have brain surgery. The next thing I know, they're singing La Cucaracha for three days straight and they won't stop. Right. Or they become incredibly violent or they're seeing things crawling on the wall because they've hurt certain parts of their brain or they scream nonstop. How can you not think the brain is connected to your behavior and what you see and how you feel and how you think? And one of the big lessons,

I'd be interested in your take on this. One of the big lessons I've learned, and I didn't know it, and I'm an army trained psychiatrist, which means we thought about head trauma. Right. Because there was a lot of it in Vietnam. And 40% of the patients who come to Amen clinics for mental health reasons

had had a significant brain injury in their past 40% and that mild traumatic brain injury is a major cause of psychiatric problems so just like with your mom right that that injury can set off a cascade of negative effects. It doesn't just affect her, but it also affects her husband. It affects her babies. It affects the psychology of her babies, which then impact how they parent. And you can see how that board breaking and those 50 stitches and the shaking of her brain. It's not just about her. No. It's about generations of her. Exactly.

And don't you have the same experience? And healing. You talked about the, like, before we got on here, you talked about the healing that occurs in different families, and that's just amazing. That's what we love to see is the healing. Oh, yeah. The generational healing. Yeah healing yeah no there's uh children and grandchildren great-grandchildren are experiencing a grandmother that's fully present and they don't see her as an angry

person or anything like that i mean it's beautiful there's no pins and needles. When that happens, do you notice with some of your patients that when the patient starts to heal, they suddenly feel sad and guilty? Oh, yeah. They have a lot to deal with from all the years. They do. And that's a psychotherapy issue. Right. But now they're able to do it. Right.

Is so important. Yeah. Is so important. Yeah, no, because there's a, you're right on the money. There's like this grief reaction. That happened. Because it all clicks. Oh, my. What have I done? And what have I missed out on? And so on.

That happened with my sister. There was suddenly a lot of sadness. Exactly. And that's important to talk through. It is. And so we are not opposed to psychotherapy. We love psychotherapy. We think psychotherapy is so important.

But you want to do it with hardware that works. You want to do it with a brain that works correctly. It's just so powerful. One more story before we have to stop. Is there one on the top of your head? Yeah, one that kind of illustrates everything we talked about. You know, a pastor in his family referred their son-in-law to me, a veteran from Afghanistan, and was disabled 100%

because the Humvee ahead of him, they're all friends, got hit with an IED and he watched the vehicle explode and everybody burned to death. And then his huge firefight where he did manage to save the lives of three or four people in his group. But the PTSD, and he'd been through extensive treatment at the VA, and the family had paid for a lot of treatment out of their pocket. And then they called me because he was getting worse

and becoming suicidal himself. So I called my friends because they didn't have the money for this. And they donated the money to get him a scan. And he lives on the East Coast. So I came in on a Friday morning, got the scan, got read. I mean, they sent me the pictures because by the end of the day, they were back in my office. And so I have this two, three hour block to go over the scan and decide on what to do now. And he'd already in his history been reactive to just about every medication. You could just

tell it was mood stabilizers or anti-anxiety antidepressants they he overreacted to everything and so i used uh suggested they use a combination of neural link and gaba calming support three to four times a day because when i was looking at a scan i could see if we could just lower that basal ganglia a little bit then maybe he wouldn't hyper-focus, you know, turn those thoughts over and over. And his wife is an RN, and she's sitting right there in a session, and I take him through, and take the supplement right then and there, and then took him to a thought field therapy exercise, and he had, you rate these things on a scale of zero to 10, a 10 being horrible, zero being neutral and just thinking about the picture you know of that he rated you know five thousand i mean it's

just that bad and so i took him through the sequence of tapping and choosing like acupressure points pain came out the fear came out but with that anxiety center just a little bit lower, he could, that front part of the brain could click in and he could actually process it and talk about it. And so we spent a couple hours going through that. And then I taught the wife, I said, because they were headed up to the mountains, somebody was loaning him a house. It was just God's timing because it's going to be quiet and things like this. We were headed up to the mountains. Somebody was loaning him a house. It was just God's timing because it was going to be quiet and things like this. And I taught her how to do this thought field therapy because if this happened,

it wouldn't be unusual for more to come back to do that up at the house in the mountains. And I got the loveliest voicemail the next day where they called to let me know that he got up there and oh yeah it was also restless sleep restless sleep the supplement that that was produced here was excellent so i had him take that at night too and he slept all the way through the night, didn't wake up one time. It was the first time since he'd been back from the Middle East that he'd been able to sleep. And so we had everything kind of collided together. We got to look at the brain. We were able to do something to help the brain to calm down so it could process this horrible trauma he'd been through.

And then he was able to actually go to bed and sleep all night through. A year later, I get an email from him, and then he'd gone back to college because he was close to finishing college, but he had to drop out because of all the trauma, and graduated with his bachelor's degree and now was going to be working as an elementary school teacher. And this guy is going to be one of those men that's going to be that father figure to so many kids and is going to be healing because he's such a gentle spirit,

and he's still taking the supplements to this day. So healing is possible it kind of reminds me of the story of denny so one of the one of the people i rescued was like i adopted was a veteran foundation paid for the foundation paid for right he um same thing his his vehicle um hit an i hit an iud in afghanistan and he um watched his three friends die in front of him and he was hurt really badly. And he, over the next few months, went through that sort of rabbit hole to hell that they go through when they get back and woke up one day with a gun in his mouth.

And it's just terrible. But now he's so much better. He's learned so many skills. He's been able to learn those skills because his brain's better. And he has full custody of his daughter. And he's just doing amazing. He's married. That's exciting. Oh. He's married. That's exciting.

Oh, it's incredible. Well, we have to thank you so much for being on the podcast with us. You are one of our favorite brain warriors. Dr. Earl Hensland, drearlhensland.com, his book, one of his books, Brain on Joy. What did you learn today? Post that. You know, the thing I learned is the brain and mine are totally connected and they can be better, but you have to work in concert. So post what you learned on any of your social media channels and hashtag Brain Warriors Way. Also go to brainwarriorswaypodcast.com or Apple Podcasts,

leave a review, and we will enter you into a drawing for Tana's cookbook, The Brain Warriors Way. Also leave questions and we'll answer them on weeks that we don't have a guest. I hope you've enjoyed Dr. Hensland as much as we've loved him over the years. Excited to have you back next week. 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 BrainMD,

you can use the code podcast10 to get a 10% discount on a full evaluation at amenclinics.com or a 10% discount on all supplements at brainmdhealth.com. For more information, give us a call at 855-978-1363.