Change Your Brain Every Day - The Prefrontal Cortex: How to Reduce Your Impulsive Urges

Episode Date: October 25, 2018

The prefrontal cortex is a part of your brain that plays a major role in how you make decisions in your life. In this episode of The Brain Warrior’s Way Podcast, Dr. Daniel Amen and Tana Amen touch on some of the material from Dr. Amen’s new book, Feel Better Fast and Make It Last, that relates to the prefrontal cortex, and how you can take care of it to improve your decision-making process.

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 Warrior's Way podcast. Welcome back to Feel Better Fast and Make It Last, our series on my brand new book, which people can pre-order at feelbetterfast.com. We've been talking about our brain Excel formula, and we have a couple more things to do on the brain, including what we're going to talk about in this podcast, control yourself. We're going to talk about how important it is to take care

of your prefrontal cortex. And then in the next one, we're going to talk about change and how people can change their behavior. But the most human thoughtful part of you is your prefrontal cortex. I know we've talked about it before, but let's talk about it in more detail. We finished the last podcast by saying, if there's no forethought, there is no foreplay. And yes, many guys can just turn on, but that's not true for many women. Yeah. Is that you need to be romanced.

Well, for women, that can start with, you know, helping her do the dishes and just, you know, being nice to her, giving her a hug. And you know what I mean? Like just being kind and thoughtful throughout the day. You don't get to just show up. So it doesn't work like that. So if you want to feel better fast physically, you have to use the front third of your brain.

You need to be thinking about it when you wake up in the morning. Yeah. So the front third of your brain is called the prefrontal cortex. Right. Largest in humans than any other animal by far. It's 30% of the human brain, 11% of the chimpanzee's brain, 7% of Aslan's brain or your dog's brain, 3% of Miso's brain or your cat's brain, 1% of the mouse's brain. This is why you should never let a child hit a soccer ball with their forehead because it can damage

their prefrontal cortex. It's why you don't let kids play tackle football because it can damage their brain. So what does the prefrontal cortex do? It's called the executive part of the brain because it's like the boss at work. It's called the executive part of the brain because it's like the boss at work. It's involved with executive functions like focus and forethought, judgment, impulse control, organization, planning, empathy, learning from the mistakes you make. And when the prefrontal cortex is low in activity as in ADD, or you've had too much to drink,

or you're smoking pot, or it's hurt, all of those things tend to go out the window. And you don't feel better fast. You have trouble focusing. You're more impulsive. You're easily distracted. You're disorganizedized you tend to procrastinate and the decisions you make are not that great and i know we've all had days like this so yesterday i described it because i two days in a row i got less than seven hours of sleep and we were rushing

like on the go you were on the dr phil show like we were just so many things we had to rush to an event and get there and do you remember last night i'm like, I feel like I've been hungover and my entire day has been out of sync, left my phone somewhere. Like, and I'm not used to that. Usually I'm pretty buttoned up and I'm like, I like everything's out of sync. That's what that's like. That's that exact, that's exactly what it's what it's like when your frontal lobes aren't working right. And it's very important. They're the last part of the brain to develop. And what that means, they're the last part of the brain that becomes myelinated. So myelin is a white fatty substance that wraps your neurons and it makes them more efficient. When you're like two, three months old,

your occipital lobes myelinate. That's why when you look at a baby, the baby looks back and smiles at you because she's taking you in. And myelination happens from the back of the brain and it actually doesn't finish to the front part of your brain. So it goes back to front until you're about 25 or 27.

And yet we send kids off to live on their own at 18. Which I'm just not a fan of because we see the incidence of depression and suicide, the first psychotic breaks when kids go off to college. And so what disrupts myelinization? Smoking, drinking, drug use, depression toxins so all the bright minds risk factors that we talked about so i think we should be protecting children um until they're a little bit older yeah so when problems in the prefrontal cortex um erratic decision making They tend to be late. Their judgment, empathy, things are off. So if you want to have a healthy brain and you want to make good decisions, you have to protect

your prefrontal cortex. And you do that by sleeping seven hours at least, which is why for my travel schedule, because I travel a lot, I don't let them schedule six o'clock flights for me because I know that whole day may be in jeopardy because I might not be able to get seven hours of sleep. Yeah. And if you're a morning person like me, I can leave really early so that I can get to bed early. So just that you have to know your circadian rhythm, right? So that you can plan for that. So sleep is essential. Eating. They've actually found relapse for addicts happens when their blood sugar goes low. So avoid the sugar.

And so eating three, four, five times if you need to, to avoid the low blood flow states, which go with more anxiety and bad decision making. And avoiding foods that keep triggering the addiction center. So the process is- You need to learn to say no to yourself. It's like a muscle. Practice saying no to others. Too often, especially people with low frontal lobe, somebody asks them to do something, they'll just say yes. And I have my patients

practice, I have to think about that. I like that. You taught me that. So I have to think, if you can't just say no, then just say, I have to think about it. And the other one is, no, thank you. So because people have a hard time, it's like, oh, no, thank you. Just, you know, I have to think about it. Just don't automatically say yes so people ask me all the time to do things and I just can't or I wouldn't be able to sleep um be very clear about your goals we talk about the one page miracle a lot here on one piece of paper write down what you want and then ask yourself does this what someone's asking me to do, fit the goals I have for my life? And it doesn't fit.

You have to say no. In addiction circles, to help your judgment, they have a mnemonic called HALT. Don't get too hungry. Low blood sugar. Angry. Negative thinking drops brain function. Lonely or tired. So don't get too hungry, angry, lonely, or tired because those are the things that increase relapse. And then cut out

sugar and foods that turn to sugar. It's just so important. So supplements can help boost the prefrontal cortex. We make Focus and Energy specifically to do that. Brand new study out of Holland, Omega-3 fatty acids actually increased executive function. And isn't theanine good too? Theanine can be very helpful. Ask yourself, does my behavior get me what I want? Does it fit the goals I have for my life? Tiny habits to help you with making good decisions when I'm tempted by something that's bad for my brain, I'll hum to myself just for a few minutes

until the temptation goes away. So new study on the game, computer game, Tetris, that people who have cravings, if they just play Tetris for like 10 minutes, their cravings will go away. But isn't it weird how it like – okay, so that's a really weird thing. So sometimes when I'm having trouble sleeping, I will play the word games or Tetris and it like zones my brain out. I know some people say it keeps them awake. Not me.

It like puts me almost in like a hypnotic trance. It's the weirdest thing. And another little tiny habit, when I feel out of sorts, I'll just take 10 deep diaphragmatic breaths and in that way, get good oxygen to my brain, recenter myself. There are so many things.

Okay, wait, I just have to, I have to plug this, which is funny because I always tease you about it. So your soundtrack for bright minds and for feel better fast that you came up with like okay it's a joke in our family because the guy who wears black jeans and black t-shirts got written up in style magazine as the fat okay new york magazine new york times style icon okay Fashion icon. And then his...

He doesn't play a musical instrument or anything, but his two soundtracks have been on billboards, like list, like top whatever list forever. Forever! It's crazy. It's like so annoying. So Barry Goldstein and I have created... We're now going to launch our third album.

Barry creates all the music. I just help him with the direction of it. Right. So, Music for Bright Minds. How does this happen? 35 weeks on Billboard's New Age chart. Makes my daughter. Top 10. It debuted at number two. And then

coming soon in November, we have Feel Better Fast and Make It Last. It's beautiful music for focus, relaxation, creativity, sleep. Right. Boost your mood. Because as we talked about, music can do that. And we hope it does really well.

But we're not creating it for that. We're creating it for you to feel better fast. But anyways, this makes my daughter roll her eyes, right? He just shows up and stuff happens like this. It's just crazy. But I do want to plug it because when I can't sleep at night, when I'm having trouble, I'm feeling stressed. Like I have to admit, I hated even admitting it to you because it's just so ridiculous that like you get all this stuff like that. It's amazing. It actually is really helpful. It helps me. There's, there's. There's tracks on there that help with meditation for increasing energy,

but there are ones on there that help you just like totally relax and just like zone out. So it actually is a really good track. Feel Better Fast and Make It Last. When we come back, we're going to talk about change. You can preorder the book now at feelbetterfast.com. And when you do, you can download the introduction the book now at feelbetterfast.com. And when you do, you can download the introduction and chapter one for the book, starter guide,

sort of the cliff notes for Feel Better Fast. So helpful. In addition, audios to Feel Better Fast, hypnosis tracks I do for you, and Tana's new cookbook, The 10-Day Brain Boost. 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 away every month.