Change Your Brain Every Day - What Are The 5 Brain Types Associated with Addiction?

Episode Date: November 16, 2017

When we talk about treating addiction, too often we think in terms of a “one size fits all” approach, but there are different types of brain function associated with addiction. Sometimes what works best for some may actually be quite detrimental towards others. In this episode, Dr. Daniel Amen and Tana Amen reveal the five different brain types associated with addiction and give treatment methods for each type.

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 Warriors Way podcast. Welcome back. We're talking about addiction rescue, and we have to talk about what I think is one of the big innovations that we've made at Amen Clinics is we have seen that all addicts are not the same. No. That there are some that are impulsive, some that are compulsive, some that are impulsive and compulsive, some that are sad, some that are anxious, and some that have head trauma.

In fact, that's actually really common. If you're going to understand addictions, it's critical to understand the brain. So I have to say, because we talked in our last episode about how personal this is to me, and we've got several people in my family who have suffered with addiction. It just seems to be an issue and something that if you are the person in your family who's not the addict, um, it's really easy to get angry. It's really easy to be frustrated, to not understand, to be judgmental, guilty as charged. Um, it's very easy to not just go, why can't they just do it right?

Why can't they just figure this out? But what's fascinating to me is that after understanding this work better, I mean, I'm a kind of a hard charging ICU nurse. And it's like, just freaking do what you need to do. Like, what the hell is the matter with you? I'm sorry. I'm just being honest, right? That's been my way of handling things in the past.

And because of that, I just built walls. If you couldn't do it right, then you were weak and you need to stay away. Um, so, you know, I mean, obviously how's that working out for you? That didn't work out too well. Um, so, um, understanding our work a little better, um, and you bringing all these people back into my life, um, I had a chance to actually see their brains and what, what I found odd, here's what's odd the three three of the people I know in my family who had addiction which all would seem to be the same we're all extremely different right one had ADD from hell right that's my uncle who was the past heroin addict ADD from hell. One was like OCD brain on fire. And one was like head injury PTSD.

Like weird. Like none of them were the same. Right. And because most addicts never get their brains scanned and treatment targeted to their brain, the whole field is without a map. And so it then becomes chaotic. Right. So each one of those people had a different treatment plan.

Right. And so by the imaging work that we do here at Amen Clinics, almost immediately, you know, we learned, one, substances are toxic to brain function. If you love your brain, you avoid them like the plague. And we have a high school course that decreases drug, alcohol, and tobacco use, decreases depression, and improves self-esteem because we teach kids to love their brain. But if you've gone overboard and you end up with an addiction, it's just not the same. So the same plan will never work for everyone. And what we discovered is some people have low frontal lobe function. And the front part of your brain does what? Is out to lunch.

It's on vacation. The boss is out to lunch, right. The boss is away. So the mice will play. And so if you have low prefrontal cortex function, you often get a diagnosis of ADD. Short attention span, distractibility, restlessness, impulse control, poor planning. So that didn't surprise me. What surprised me was when that wasn't the case,

and it was actually over-focused, and you're like, well, then you shouldn't have trouble making decisions. Let's do this one first. Let's stay with me. I'm getting a little excited. It's a little intense for me. We're going to go through all six in the next 15 minutes. Because what a lot of people don't know is that untreated ADD, and girls or guys, 52% of them will have trouble with substances. Right.

Isn't that horrible? I mean, it's just awful. Yeah, I don't think that's surprising to me at all. And because the prefrontal cortex, focus, forethought, judgment, impulse, control, organization, planning, empathy, learning from the mistakes you make. And it could come from ADD because you have ADD people in your family like you do, or it could come from a traumatic brain injury that damaged the front part of your brain. And so the treatment is often you have to treat the ADD or they'll never get their addiction under control. But just as you said, not everybody is like that. And what we also discovered was some people had frontal lobes that work too hard.

So think about this with me. You're in a Ferrari or a Mercedes or a Porsche. And you're at the top of a Colorado mountain. And the car, which is awesome, has lousy brakes. Well, you actually don't make it to the bottom because you're dead. You go off a cliff. Right, you go off a cliff. And when you have low frontal lobes, it's like the brakes in your head are not effective. And so you say things that hurt other people's feelings. You do things that your decision-making is consistently poor because your frontal lobes are low in activity. But what if your frontal lobes are high in activity? What if the brakes are always on, right? You can't get anywhere. you can't get anywhere you can't get anywhere you

never get down the mountain no because it's like stop stop stop i've seen this so i try to coach this person in my family and she's spins and spins and no matter what i say she'll say she'll say i have this problem and i'll say okay so we'll work through it together and we're on this really good path and then all of a sudden brakes breaks her on and she switches gears. And she's like, but that's not the problem. And then she goes on to a new problem. I'm like, what is that? It's like she's got Teflon on.

And I'm like, we can never get anywhere. Well, and Teflon's a great example because, you know, we're not a fan of cooking with Teflon. It's so irritating. But it's like nothing sticks. But it's exhausting. No matter what you say, it bounces off. Do you know how exhausting that is? I've been a psychiatrist 35 years.

Okay, but when it's your family and I'm not getting paid for it, it's exhausting. And you're getting called all night long. Getting paid helps. I know. It's just exhausting dealing with people like that because they constantly have problems. So that's the over-focused type. Worried, rigid, inflexible. Things don't go their way.

They get upset. And they constantly have a problem. They tend to be argumentative and oppositional. No matter what it is you say, they argue with you and it's exhausting. Exhausting. And then, so type one, impulsive addicts, low frontal lobes, we need to stimulate them. So we'll do it with stimulating supplements like Focus and Energy, the one we create that has ginseng and rhodiola, ashwagandha uh or stimulants like ritalin or adderall and it's a miracle if you don't treat their add their addiction will never get better right i mean it's really fascinating

but the one who has high frontal lobe activity they usually have low levels of serotonin and if you stimulate them, you make them crazy. So if they end up addicted to cocaine... And that happened to this person. Someone put her on something stimulating. Yeah, which I totally can understand. Because she acts like she has ADD, but her brain was not

ADD. Not good. She acts like it, but her brain wasn't consistent and therefore she didn't have a positive response. It was bad. Made her want to kill herself. Too hard. like it, but her brain wasn't consistent and therefore she didn't have a positive response. It was bad. But if her brain works too hard, we have to calm it down. And we use that with serotonin intervention. So sometimes the medications that increase serotonin, I'm actually a fan of the nutritional supplements like saffron and 5-HTP and L-tryptophan can be really helpful. The diet, because we said we'd talk a little bit about diet,

for the impulsive addict is the Atkins diet. It's a high-protein, low-carbohydrate diet, paleo diet. You put the compulsive addict on that diet, they become mean, and they become very unhappy on that diet. So diet matters to the type. And then there's type three, which I discovered in the children and grandchildren that I see because, as I said, my first wife grew up in an alcoholic home, so I have grandchildren of alcoholics as children of mine. And I learned that they have a combination of type 1 and type 2, so type 3 is impulsive, compulsive addicts. So they have features of ADD, features of OCD, and you have to balance their brain. And we do it by raising both dopamine and serotonin.

And then we discovered that there's sad addicts. What they really are, they're using their addiction to treat an underlying depression. And what we've actually seen, for example, social rejection. When you feel rejected by your friends, by your classmates, by your peers, it actually activates the physical pain centers in your brain. And that hurts, right? I mean, physically, it hurts. And so if they use heroin or they... I've actually heard that, so the person I'm thinking of has... She's not only sad, but she's got some PTSD and head injury.

This is the other one, not the same one I was just talking about, another person. And she has physical pain a lot. So when she's going through this depression and the cycle of addiction, she's physically in pain. And she's very, very tired. Well, and isn't that interesting that some of our antidepressants help pain, right? Cymbalta, amitriptyline, and SAMe, the supplement SAMe actually helps pain. And then there are the anxious addicts. They feel nervous, tense, and when they're in social situations, they clam up. And they find, like the co-author of my book, our book, Unchain Your Brain, Breaking the Addictions That Steal Your Life, David Smith, he's the founder of the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic. He said the first time he had alcohol, it loosened him up and he was social. And he said, I think I felt like other people normally feel. And he could be the life of the party where without that, he was terribly anxious and shy

and nervous. So sometimes people use substances to treat underlying brain problems. And I always say, you know, let me do your medicine. I'm better at it than you are, right? And then the last type of addict is head injury. We call them temporal lobe addicts. They have had a head injury of one form or another that damaged their frontal lobes and their temporal lobes so mood instability irritability learning memory temper problems so know your type but there are combinations of these yes you can have all of them um Know your type or combination of types and then put the brain in a healing environment,

which is just so important. So, and I think in the next one, we're going to talk specifically about food and supplements, what to avoid and what to do, right? Because this is a really big, yeah, no, I've had a couple of therapists ask me about this. You have red hair. Yeah, and a couple therapists asked me about this. You have red hair and I'm afraid. No, you're not, unfortunately. Unfortunately, I cannot make you afraid. Stay with us. We'll be back.

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