Change Your Brain Every Day - Why Don’t Psychiatrists Look at the Organ They Treat? – Pt. 4 with Chase Mattioli

Episode Date: October 4, 2018

In the fourth and final episode of a series with former NASCAR driver Chase Mattioli, Dr. Daniel Amen and Chase discuss some of the more common mental health issues people face, probable causes, how they can be misdiagnosed, and what can be done to help.

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. I'm here with Chase Mattioli. We're talking about it's insane not to look at your brain. And when you do, at least for me, everything in my life changed. And you can say the same thing when you look at your brain. Everything has changed and you've fallen in love with your brain. And I'm so happy.

Let me read one more review. Taisha Ann, thank you so much for creating this podcast. My 16-year-old suffers from ADHD and sleep disorders. I look forward to bringing him to you for a scan to see how we can help him be the best person he can be. I want to do all that we can to heal his brain. And as you can tell, it's not just you have six out of these nine criteria. You get the diagnosis of ADHD, depression, bipolar disorder. Here, take this medication. Go see somebody and talk about your problems.

And then you're done. And I'm thinking about a new book called Get Off the Psychiatrist's Couch. Because it's really about how do you take this really whole person approach to getting truly well that lasts? And that's what I want for you. How can we help you have the best brain possible for the rest of your life? Because if you think about the low activity in your brain, and how old were you when you got scammed? I was 26. 26. And so at 26, very few 26-year-olds are thinking about what's life like when I'm 60 or when I'm 80, right?

Because your brain's just finished developing. So you're really not thinking long-term. Now that I'm 64, I'm really thinking about the rest of my life. And I think about my children's lives for the rest of their life. And how you prevent Alzheimer's disease or how you prevent early cognitive impairment, which you clearly were going toward, is you got to work on having a healthy brain your whole life. So by doing what you're doing now, your 30s will be better. Your 40s will be better. Your 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s will be better. And being forward thinking does not mean you won't be able to have any fun now. But I guess that'd be an interesting question. Now that you're really conscious about your brain and your lifestyle, are you having more fun or less fun?

I'm having more fun. I'd say different fun. You know, you mentioned at 26, not people are thinking about getting brain healthy and all that other stuff. For me, the impetus was I wasn't healthy at all. But at 26, I think a lot of people, especially anybody like me that came through school, it's like, how do I get that next job? How do I become better at work? What's holding me back? So that was really cool too. It's one of the things that was holding me back was I was getting angry at everybody I was talking to. It wasn't helping me get any promotions if you're getting grumpy.

And I could be the smartest person in the room, but if I told everybody they were stupid first, it wasn't really going to help me get my point across. Yes, that's true. Yeah. Right? It's hard to manage people if you're mad. Exactly. So for me, it was almost like a career-building thing as well because it helped me kind of put my life back on track. Also, my grandmother has dementia, so I think about that all the time.

Hers was really bad. She can't remember me when I walk in the room and things along those – That's so sad. It's hard, but it was great for me to identify that, like, all right, this is something that's probably going to happen to me if it happened to her. And if that happens, I should be conscious of it and doing what I can to prevent it. So that was kind of the impetus to doing it. Am I having fun now?

I'm having different fun. So before I'd go out to concerts or I'd go out to a bar and party or, like, go to a happy hour with friends. I was in the entertainment and racing industry. So we'd go, we'd race, and then we'd go crush beer and and like, you know, get drunk. That's really what you do for fun. If not, you're going to some bad restaurant, eating a bunch of bad food, you know? Um, so yeah, I was doing pretty much everything you shouldn't do. Um, then I decided I wanted to get healthy and the hardest part, like, you know, I think anybody that gets sober, um, it's like telling your friends you're not drinking anymore. And it's almost going beyond that and say, I'm not drinking, I'm not eating this bad

food and I'm not going to that place with these people anymore. They're like, well, what's wrong? Are you okay? Are you dying? Like, no, this is just who I am now and what I want to do. So once you figure out who those friends are that accept those like positions, um, they got a lot more fun. So I do a lot of intramural sports now.

Um, I do a lot of biking, like we mentioned earlier. So a couple of my coworkers here, now. I do a lot of biking, like we mentioned earlier. So a couple of my coworkers here, we go cycling on the weekends together, do cooking with a lot of my friends now. So I'm very conscious about what I'm eating. So we trade like recipes or we'll do potlucks, things along that nature. What else am I doing for fun? Coaching.

That's kind of random and we haven't gotten there. So once I got through getting healthier, I was like, the next best thing to getting your own health is sharing with other people, right? So that was after your advisement and actually Terry's as well, that I went to Emory University and got a coaching certificate so that I can work with other people who are having similar issues as me. So that's actually, it sounds messed up, I guess, what I do for fun, but I work with other people. Helping other people? I mean, it's the biggest joy I have when someone tells me that they're better, right? I mean, that's its own hit of cocaine, emotional cocaine, and it doesn't wear off,

and it doesn't have side effects. And one of the things I learned when we did the Daniel Plan, the big project at Saddleback Church to get the world healthy through churches, is if I want to stay healthy, I have to learn it like you've learned it. And then I have to give it away because it's in the act of giving that you receive because what you're really doing is you're creating your own support group yeah making it more likely you will stay on the program forever oh yeah right so by giving it away and then hanging out with people who get it right brain warriors they don't do well if they don't have a community of warriors who do the same thing, who you can learn from and so on. Now, I promised people we would actually talk about what's the difference between bipolar disorder and depression. And I think way too many people are diagnosed with bipolar disorder. That if they hurt their temporal lobes and they have mood instability,

irritability, temper problems, and they hurt their frontal lobes from accidents or concussions, just like you had, and they have impulse control issues, they get diagnosed with bipolar disorder. They get put on lithium or lamectal or dupacode or Depakote or Trilopetal or whatever. Bipolar disorder is real. And left untreated, it devastates people's lives. But these are people who literally go between two poles. So they have normal times when they're just fine. And then they'll have discrete episodes where they're down, they're sad, they're blue, they feel hopeless, helpless, worthless, guilty, suicidal.

And they'll cycle out of that. And they'll either then cycle back down or they'll go up. And when they go up, their thoughts go fast. They don't need to sleep. They're terribly impulsive, hypersexual, hyper religious bipolar disorder, they go, I don't have that. I don't have those discrete episodes. It's like, I'm sort of always irritable. I'm sort of always impulsive. I'm sort of always this way. And for those people who have bipolar disorder, omega-3 fatty acids, really helpful. Mood stabilizers like Lamictal, really helpful, or lithium. I mean, they save people's lives.

But if you don't have that, the potential side effects from medicine can ruin your life. Now, depression, and it's more commonly diagnosed in women, but a lot of men have it because they don't say I'm sad they say I'm mad and it's the irritability the negativity that just becomes pervasive often often happens after I had trauma anxiety often happens after I had trauma but the difference is people who are depressed go down and then back to normal or they just stay down people have bipolar disorder go between those poles but people have the chronic effects of traumatic brain injury, they just sort of bounce around all the time. And the brain injury, when you get stressed, moves, job changes, ending of relationships, parents die, that stress will bring out whatever vulnerability that you might have. Mm-hmm. Yeah, definitely. I thought, as I said, bipolar. That's what they thought immediately.

And going back to it, probably with the intermittent explosive disorder, they saw me get angry and it was out of character and they know that I'm normally kind of a happy person. So a lot of people around me are like, oh, that's got to be bipolar, right? Because he's happy sometimes and really mad the other times. But I really wasn't. I mean, I guess it was easy. Have you ever had what we think of as a manic episode that lasted weeks long, didn't need to sleep, racing thoughts, really bad decisions? I mean, I've had some women come in here and they put their family in $200,000 of debt and they have no idea how they're going to tell their husband. Well, never that bad. Obviously, I've made a lot of poor decisions health-wise as far as jumping off a ski jump and things along that nature, but never like,

I'm going to sell the house this week or do something like that. Never once. It was more just when I would have an emotional reaction that didn't seem to fit with the proper emotional reaction was. And that was more my issue, which is more of a depression issue and less of a bipolar. More a temporal issue. Yeah. There's a researcher, he's now at the University of Tennessee. When I learned about him, he was at Emory, Dietrich Blumer. And he actually talks about temporal lobe syndromes, that there's a whole sort of cluster of symptoms for people who've heard their temporal lobes, or they have temporal lobe seizures. And I see so many people here at Amen Clinics, mood instability, irritability, temper problems,

sometimes weird experiences. They may hear things that aren't there, but it's not like typical psychotic voices. You're bad, do this awful thing. It's more like they hear illusions, like the sound of bees buzzing. Or they think their name's being called when nobody's there. Or they get the smell.

Happens to me all the time. Burning rubber. And there's no burning rubber. Well, I have that one different reason so um but that could be temporal lobe instability and another um potential treatment is this thing we do called nerve feedback so we can actually see what's going on in your temporal lobe on the spec scan or on a quantitative eeg. And then once we see it, we can then retrain your brain to function in a healthier way and dramatically can change people's lives. Definitely.

In a good way. All right. Well, it's insane not to look at your brain. But once you do, everything in your life changes. You fall in love with your brain, and then you become a brain warrior. 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.

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