Change Your Brain Every Day - What Long-Term Stress Does to Your Brain

Episode Date: October 12, 2020

Depression in the United States has now tripled due to the impact of the coronavirus. The social isolation, chronic negative news, and worries over job losses and finances have brought long-term stress to millions of people. In this episode of The Brain Warrior’s Way Podcast, Dr. Daniel Amen and Tana Amen discuss how long-term stress affects both the brain and the body, highlighting the importance of focusing on your health.

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 everyone. Today, we're going to talk about strategies to deal with long-term stress. And boy, have we had long-term stress this year. I've heard so many people saying, you know, 2020, let's just cancel it. This year's just-

I got one this morning, hashtag 2020. I'm over it. I'm over it. Exactly. So many people feel that way. And even people who have generally pretty, don't, don't have reason to have as much stress as some people we know. They're just getting really, really down. They're feeling very cornered. They're feeling very hopeless. And so didn't you say you read the depression? Last time we talked about this, it had doubled. And now it is tripled. That fast it's gone up.

So before we get to the content, hopefully you'll learn something amazing this week. And we want you to write it down, take a picture of it, post it on any of your social media sites, and then go to Brain Warriors Way podcast, leave us a comment, question, or review. And if we read it, which we're going to do this week for winners, you know, when we have

guests, we often don't announce winners. We have four winners this week. We'll send you a copy of the cookbook or my new book, The End of Mental Illness. And I have our first winner, which is Carrie0178 from the United States titled, Love Your Work. Thank you. I love your podcast and all the information you and the guest speakers bring to us. I am learning so much. I am 60 and have been feeling brain fog for a few years. So I am changing up my diet and supplement to continue to be the healthiest I can be for the rest of my

life. I can't thank you enough. So Carrie, you are one of our winners. Thank you so much. So the incidence of depression in the general population, and it's actually remained fairly constant since 1980, when I decided to be a psychiatrist, it was about 6%. So about 6% or 20 million Americans at any point in time will experience significant depressive episodes. But it started to creep up. And before the pandemic, it was actually at 8%. Well, now in a brand new study just out this week, it's at 25.7%. That's insane. It's gone up that fast from 8% to 25.7%.

It is tripled in six months. Wow. And I'm not okay with it. think of social isolation, chronic negative news, the worry about getting sick, loved ones getting sick, losing your business, losing your job, being at home. Thankfully, I'm at home with somebody I like a whole bunch. And so I sort of like being at home. But if you're at home, in fact, I was having a conversation yesterday where this person had grown up in an alcoholic home and had been abused. The incidence of child abuse reported is dramatically less. But the reason it's dramatically less is children aren't around mandated reporters. So teachers are not seeing the bruises on the back of their legs or janitors, coaches, nurses, because I mean, be honest, who really wants to go to the emergency room now? Because

you're worried about COVID-19. And so people are not getting the help they need. You know, I feel like we throw the word depression and even anxiety around so much that we start to desensitize to what it really means. And so I think it's really important that we tap into what people are really feeling. I know when I actually had depression to a point, I wanted to die. Um, depression can go anywhere from like, I just feel black. Like I don't want to go out and do anything. Like I just don't want to get out of bed or I just don't, I just have no energy all the way to you want to rip your freaking skin off. And that's how I was. Um, like you just can't get away from the overwhelming sense of hopelessness

and sadness. And, um, to the point that you can't really see a reason to live. Um, in my case, thank God I wouldn't consider doing that, but I did used to hope that something would happen. So I think it's really important to really not just mention depression, because we keep saying it. Well, it's sort of like, well, how do you know if you're depressed? I mean, everybody during this pandemic has had down days. But it's when the down days stay, when it's gone on for two weeks or more. And you start to feel hopeless, you feel sad, blue, hopeless,

helpless, worthless, where you're not sleeping well, where your appetite either goes away and you lose weight or you become ravenous and you gain a bunch of weight. So sleep, appetite, concentration often goes down and people go, my goodness, I have ADD. Now ADD is something you have over a long period of time. But when you're exposed to chronic stress, so even if you're in a business that's doing well, given the isolation, the masks, the working from home, the inability to go to a movie, the chronic stress really begins to wear out your immune system. And we've got teenagers at home and I think that population is really struggling. Very vulnerable. So we had two of them get really depressed. The teenagers got depressed. The youngest one actually likes being home. So that was weird. We didn't expect that. She doesn't want to go back to school, but even there, there's a problem because now a lot

of kids are really anxious and like winding themselves up about having to go back out into society. So either way you look at it, it's a problem. And so- And also the incidence of social anxiety has gone way up. The incidence of agoraphobia, where you're not leaving your house is gone way up. The incidence of OCD. I saw someone at the clinic and she's like, I've been vindicated. Yeah. Yeah.

And even I've had those moments and that's not like us. We're usually so busy. I've had those moments of like, I don't really want to go out. Like you just start to, you know, and I, but I catch myself and I'm like, okay, I want to be careful, but I don't want to get into this mindset of, I can't do something. Well, we have a new clinic in Texas that is coming in Dallas, uh, you know, probably in January. And so we went to Texas for a week. So I have to tell you after six months of being in the house and feeling like life is never going to be normal again, we just have a new normal. I that was just going to Texas and driving. Like, we didn't like go, you know, to the Bahamas, or we just like we're working mostly, but it was I felt so refreshed. So we And we were super careful, but so refreshed.

So just like there was hope again, that things were going to sort of like be normal again. Yeah, but there were stressful times, like just getting on a plane with COVID-19. I mean, we wiped everything down. We wore masks. We like, we're super careful. But it was weird.

And then, you know, I'm like Googling. I like pretty places. It's like, what's the prettiest city in Texas. And, you know, Fredericksburg just came up over and over again. And it was a Sunday. Um, no, it wasn't a Saturday. And, um, when we got out and started walking around Fredericksburg, well, apparently thousands of other people had that same. It looked like going to Disneyland. They Googled the same thing. And I felt like I was at the Staples Center with 18,000 people. Yeah, it was crazy.

And after about five minutes, I'm like, no, we're leaving. The second we got over to where they were. Because I'm like, no. People were shoulder to shoulder. And the minute we got over there, you were like, I'm done. I'm leaving. And she was hungry. Yeah, I'm not nice when I'm hungry.

And we couldn't find anything for two hours. So I got punished for two hours, which is not good. All right. So in this podcast, we talked about the effects of chronic stress. In the next podcast coming up, we're going to give you some strategies on how do you manage this? How do brain warriors manage chronic stress? And so just know everybody's been exposed to it. Whether your life is going great or terrible, this has been a very stressful year, which can affect your mood, your level of anxiety, your focus, your immune system. And we're going to talk about how to manage long-term stress.

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