Change Your Brain Every Day - Why Aren’t You Drinking? – Part 2 of an Interview with Andy Ramage

Episode Date: June 22, 2017

In this episode of The Brain Warrior’s Way Podcast, Dr. Daniel Amen and Tana Amen continue their discussion with ‘One Year No Beer’ founder Andy Ramage. Andy discusses the effects of alcohol, particularly as they relate to such subjects as hangovers, sports injuries, anxiety, weight loss, and motivation.

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 to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. We are here with Andy Ramage. We're having a great discussion on one year, no beer. And, you know, here at Amen Clinics, we have looked at people's brains for the last 26 years. We have scanned nearly 130,000 brains

on people from 111 countries. And one of the first things I learned from looking at all these brain scans is that alcohol is not a health food. What I saw is over time, it significantly decreases blood flow to the brain. So you're not as happy. You're not as sharp. You're not as sharp. You're not optimized. And I went through this whole period in American culture where people would drink two glasses

of red wine a day and they go, it's a health food. And I'm like, that's just the big lie. And you came to a similar conclusion, not based on imaging, but based on scanning your body. And so let's talk about the benefits to you when you stopped drinking alcohol and then went on a campaign,

on a challenge really, to not drink for a year. Yeah, they were huge, really, and not from the obvious negation of those hangover feelings. It really started, I think, with, well, let's start mentally. I would suffer with anxiety the day after, which lots of people do, the beer fear, as it were. I'd wake up that following morning just not right quite anxious and almost I feel very lucky that I've never suffered with depression but the one time that I could

describe something that was like a depression was after a very big drinking session if that was like a Saturday evening type of that flowed into a late Sunday morning of that flipping almost into a hole and having to climb my way out only to then completely undo that bash myself over the head and knock myself to the bottom of the hole on Wednesday again by going out on a long lunch and an evening out so instantly and I feel very fortunate that disappeared and it's never come back since because that clearly was 100 down to the way i felt mentally after a big night out or drinking too much alcohol so that was a huge win right there for me a huge win out of the track um and then followed by that that flowed into my physical health because um as we discussed in

the first episode what happened was suddenly I was able to train a lot and harder because I wasn't calling off sick I wasn't suddenly going out on a Wednesday or Thursday on a big lunch or a big dinner and then so hung over on a Friday morning that I didn't have the energy to train or the motivation to train so suddenly I got this big streak of training hard mentally Mentally, I felt so much better, so much more motivated, more productive. And that then combined, I completely addressed my diet. And this is, again, it sounds extreme, but I was the stereotypical meat-eating, beer-drinking city broker. And then I looked at my diet and said, actually, I'm eating these big steaks.

They're not really, I could actually feel what they were doing to me because I couldn't blame it on a hangover or tiredness. And then I refined my diet. I became a vegetarian. I'm pretty much vegan today. So all these combinations of things had a huge effect on me. I mentioned previously I lost a lot of weight, 42 pounds in weight. My body fat went from 35% down to 10%.

I was back in the real shape at 40 years old or late 30s that I was when I was playing football professionally in my 20s. That was huge for me. That's amazing. Well, and there's a wild card in here that's really important to understand. People who play professional soccer often have suffered concussions. And the scans I've done,

so here at Amen Clinics, we did the world's largest study on active and retired NFL players. And the level of damage was just awful. Okay, that's not a big surprise now. Culturally, it's accepted. But soccer is not that much different. No, in fact, without saying names, we're seeing a famous soccer player this week.

And it's not uncommon for that to happen because of the headbutts and whatever you call it, headers, whatever you call them, with the ball. And so your brain was likely more vulnerable because of the repetitive trauma. And to heal it, that's the exciting. So the headline from our study is those brains can often be healed if you put them in a healing environment. And having four, five, six, eight beers a week is not a healing environment, as you could just tell from how you felt. Yeah, and it's a fantastic point. And I've actually looked at a lot of that type of research on the American footballers and concussions. Because in football, as you almost rightly said they're called headers that was perfectly in the end we had the ball all the time so although these are not you know knockout blows

we use our head as part of you know the game and the position that i've played in i used it a lot and and i think it's probably not really been revealed or uncovered the damage that that could potentially be doing. And then, as you pointed out, if you're putting that in the wrong environment, which is three or four, five, six beers every day, you know, the mental effect that that has, the cumulative effect that has over time,

I think is very damaging. And actually, it's very interesting. There's a really famous cricketer, there's another strange game that we play over here, but it's called cricket, a guy called Freddy Flintoff. It was really world-renowned as this stereotypical,

larger-than-life, beer-drinking cricket player, massive sportsman. And ironically, he did a study, he was involved in a study on other players that suffered mental health issues. And whilst he was involved in this study, he realized his own symptoms were starting to appear because he was drinking too much. And actually now he's a complete teetotal as well. He doesn't drink at all. And he's a

fantastic advert for what we do. That's awesome. So, I mean, I want to talk about some of the practical things because people are hearing this and they're saying, gosh, it sounds amazing. Not going to work for me because they've got this list of reasons in their head you're an nlp guy right i do nlp i love it and so you've got this list of reasons that you have of reasons you can't do something or you can so one of the things we hear a lot that we know of um especially for one thing for women is anxiety so So you've got hormonal anxiety, you've got social anxiety. That's one of the things. Or as you talked about social lubricant, people are introverts. They want it because it helps them relax so that they can talk to people.

There's a whole host of reasons that people drink besides just being alcoholics. In fact, that's probably not the number one reason. So help us out. And the other question I have for you is, how long was it before you started noticing a pretty radical shift in feeling better? Yeah, to answer the last question first, it was probably within that first month, really, two to three weeks when actually my eyes felt bright again and the energy started to return and just to dig a bit deeper on that one particular question i think it's really interesting because most people start drinking and i certainly did in their teens and they never

really stop you know so they never really get a break for long enough to actually realize what life was like before they felt a bit tired and a bit lethargic and they just accept those things as just a natural part maybe of growing old when actually it's it's very very often the alcohol that's having these cumulative negative effects so that's why our challenge is so important i think to give people that look of wow this is 30 days without alcohol i feel marvelous this is what i've been missing out on um and then to go back to answer those first questions, the challenge initially is all part of the habit love to do it, but I've got the wedding, but I've got the holiday. There's always that excuse. And actually what we've found that some of the most powerful moments are when you go to the wedding or the friend's birthday and you don't drink and you actually prove to yourself that actually you can still go and be social and have a great time and skip those debilitating effects or those hangovers.

And that's really, really powerful. And we see that all the time. People that don't, they can do it. They do the wedding. Like my biggest fear was how was I going to dance sober at weddings? How are you going to dance sober at weddings? That's hilarious. Yeah, you know, and it's silly and it's laughable,

but that's exactly what we're talking about. It puts people off trying these new things because they're scared by it. So, again, the challenge process, we try and get people to do the shorter challenge, which is just 28 days. Can you do it? Can you do it in one month? See, I love that challenge part. I just think that is so brilliant.

It's got an end, so it's not daunting. It's not overwhelming. Can you come and do it and prove to yourself? And it's all about mindset, really. And we see this all the time. If you have a mindset, you're giving something up, you're missing out, or you have a mindset, I'm going to get all these amazing advantages. I'm going to feel great.

My skin's going to look great. I'm going to be healthier. As soon as you can help people make that mindset shift, everything changes. We love that. So what did your wife say about all this? Well, yeah, I mean, she's a good Irish lady. In fact, the story is true. I fell in love with her because she drank pints of beer,

which is the big, big glasses of beer. So she could keep up, right? Yeah. But in Ireland, it's culturally slightly different to here, but they drink the big, big pints that essentially men would normally drink. And I couldn't believe it when I first saw this pretty lady with this huge glass of beer, effectively. That's hilarious.

No, she's been amazingly supportive. And, you know, anything that's good for me is good for her. And that's another key part of this. know i'm not running around we're not pointing fingers or telling anyone off it's very much a case of leading by example yeah and i know that my example is having a positive influence on people she still drinks but a way way less than than she did before for example so no she totally gets it, totally supports me. And I can still just about dance at weddings. So she's happy enough.

That's so funny. So let's talk about the practical aspect. So someone wants to stop doing this, but they've got this list of reasons in their head. And some of those reasons are real. They're anxious. They're shy. They're uncomfortable in social situations.

Whatever those reasons are, what are some practical things they can do? I'd love to hear from both of you, medical and social, what you guys think that people can do. Yeah, if I kick it off, a lot of what we do is, again, it's that practical social side of things. For example, a lot of people's fear is telling people that they want to start this challenge that they're scared because again if you walk into a room of let's take my city example

and you tell people you want to stop drinking it's the only drug in the world that people turn around and they break you for it you know they tell you off for wanting to take a break from alcohol because they don't want to lose their drinking buddy. So our tips are very practical. For example, take out the ringleader. There's always that one person, that one friend, that if you can get them on side, it's going to make your life a whole lot easier because if they support you on this challenge,

then you just watch the rest follow. Again, that's just a very quick practical, practical tip. That's excellent. Yeah, so it's finding the lever person in your social circle. Right. And my experience is tell them what you're doing, tell them why you're doing it, and then get a stiff backbone. So what can they do for the anxiety aspect for that?

Well, there's so many other things to do. So as a psychiatrist, I love teaching people to meditate. I love using hypnosis, self-hypnosis. I like certain supplements. We make something called serotonin mood support for people who are worried and they can't let go of negative thoughts or bad thoughts. It's got saffron, the world's most expensive spice, but it's been shown to really help with depression and anxiety. Also 5-HTP, which is the amino acid building block for serotonin. We also make something called GABA calming support that raises GABA. And what GABA does is sort of what alcohol does without the hangover.

GABA raises a neurotransmitter called GABA that calms down the over firing we see in the brain that often goes with anxiety. But no one's going to get addicted to the GABA. It's not going to cause social problems for them. So one practical tip I have for people when I'm coaching them, sometimes people, it's a social thing where they just want something to hold and to sip because they just don't know what to do. So we'll have them get sparkling water and add some lemon or lime or whatever, or fresh berries, make it pretty, and put a few drops of stevia in it. That's just a practical solution. So you have something to hold while you're in that environment.

That's not full of sugar. Another, there's a new study on the game Tetris. So it's an app. You can download it to your phone. It's free. Most of us have played Tetris at some point in our life. You play for 20 minutes a day, decreases cravings for alcohol. I mean, well, how simple is that? Just play Tetris on your phone. There's also an interesting supplement I like a lot called N-etylcysteine which is a super antioxidant that actually has been shown to decrease the cravings for

alcohol marijuana and cocaine and It's something we actually put in a number of our products Especially craving control just as a way to get your chemistry better balanced so so what else do you have to add to that Andy yeah and all those points have made a fantastic we're big believers in mindfulness that's a big part of what we do again a bit we try and do all these things without putting labels on them to sort of scare people off especially lots of people that come to one you know beer may have never really heard of mindfulness before or meditation.

So we try and ease them very much into this just by becoming more aware of their habits, becoming more aware of what they're actually doing and actually introducing mindfulness without labels, which I think helps. And also, if you get really practical, as you said, for example, if someone's socially anxious, give them all those tips and tricks yours was a great tip there actually to to maybe use even non-alcoholic lookalikes that's what we do lots of so the low alcohol or non-alcohol beers for example are fantastic ways to ease your ease your way into a social setting you still feel part of the group which is very important and lots of people leave you alone once you've got something that looks

like alcohol you don't get the constant barrage of questions leave you alone once you've got something that looks like alcohol. You don't get the constant barrage of questions, why you're not drinking, why you're not drinking. That's another really important tip, I think, and also to always know what you're going to drink and have a backup plan because what catches a lot of people out, they go into that bar setting,

and this is my experience on numerous occasions, and this is where we can look at the sort of social and psychological conditioning that surrounds us for years. If you're programming yourself for 20 years to drink alcohol, you walk into a bar and you smell the crisps and you feel the ambience. And the bar person says, what do you want? I can't tell you how many times I had a spark of water in mind. I'd get to the bar and I'd order a pint of lager. It's like a habit.

It just happens so many times. It's those triggers. It's a habit. So when we come back, we are going to talk about habit change. Okay, good. And what Andy has learned in One Year No Beer and helping thousands of people change, habits are actually, they become burned into your brain. And so you actually end up saying yes before your frontal lobes say

no. And so when we come back with Andy Ramage, One Year No Beer, you can actually go to oneyearnobeer.com and learn more about Andy's journey and how he's been helping people around the world. Stay with us. Thank you for listening to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. We have a special gift for you. It's an opportunity to win an evaluation at the Amen Clinics. All you have to do is subscribe to this podcast, leave a review, and rate us on iTunes. To learn more about Amen Clinics and the work we do,

go to amenclinics.com. You can also learn about our nutraceutical products at brainmdhealth.com. Thanks for listening.