Dhru Purohit Show - How To Design Your Morning And Evening Routine For Optimal Brain Health With Dr. Daniel Amen

Episode Date: February 27, 2023

This episode is brought to you by InsideTracker and ButcherBox. Today on The Dhru Purohit Podcast, Dhru sits down with Dr. Daniel Amen to discuss what’s possible when we make our brain health a priority. Dr. Amen shares the insults that harm our brains and how to get started on the path to better brain health. Among other things, they discuss Dr. Amen’s family history with brain health and a few remarkable case studies on the brain healing from trauma. Dr. Daniel Amen is a physician and adult and child psychiatrist on a mission to end mental illness by creating a revolution in brain health. He is the founder of Amen Clinics, as well as the founder of BrainMD, a fast-growing, science-based nutraceutical company, and Amen University, which has trained thousands of medical and mental health professionals on the methods he has developed. In 2020, Dr. Amen launched his digital series, Scan My Brain, on YouTube and Instagram. His highly anticipated new book, Change Your Brain Every Day, will be published on March 21, 2023. In this episode, Dhru and Dr. Amen dive into: -Dr. Amen’s morning routine for brain health (0:58) -What’s possible with optimal brain function (14:24) -How alcohol, marijuana, and psilocybin impact the brain (41:24) -Traumatic brain injuries (56:52) -Understanding your brain type (1:06:21) -How brain health ties into sexual health (1:09:01) -The top beliefs that get in the way of brain health (1:22:40) -How to identify and move past automatic negative thoughts (1:24:56) Also mentioned in this episode: -Change Your Brain Every Day is available for preorder here. -https://www.brainmd.com For more on Dr. Daniel Amen, follow him on Instagram @doc_amen, TikTok @docamen, YouTube @AmenClinic, or through his website, https://www.Amenclinics.com.  InsideTracker provides detailed nutrition and lifestyle guidance based on your individual needs. Right now, they’re offering my podcast community 20% off. Just go to insidetracker.com/DHRU to get your discount and try it out for yourself. ButcherBox has a variety of different boxes, and you can choose your box and frequency. For a limited time, you can sign up today and get two pounds of ground beef free for a whole year PLUS $20 off by going to butcherbox.com/dhru. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Low blood flows the number one brain imaging predictor of Alzheimer's disease. Anything that decreases blood flow decreases brain function. Dr. Daniel Eamon, welcome back to the podcast and thank you for being so generous. We're in your studio in space. It's a beautiful space. It's a pleasure to have you back on. I am just honored that you would want to help me spread the message of brain health. Yeah, I'm all about it. I don't know if you know, but this podcast went originally started was called Broken Brain. It was all about how your brain isn't broken. You were part of a bunch of our dokey series as well, and we're simpatico on that. I've since changed the name, but the

mission is still there, and you are doing that mission better than anybody else. So I want to jump into the new book. Here's a copy of it. Change your brain every day. It's 365 different things that people can do every day over the course of a year to improve their brain health. I want to start off with something that I feel is a topic that my audience really cares a lot about. And that's the idea of how you start your morning sets the tone for the rest of the day. If you were going to bundle a few of the habits or tips inside of here that are broken down by days into a morning routine, what would that look like? Well, the first thing I do, I direct my energy to what I'm excited about.

So I knew this was coming today. and that made me happy. I have a whole bunch of other things today that's going to make me happy. And you can either let your undisciplined mind control you. And for so many people, they wake up and they go to darkness. They go to negativity. They go to what they're worried about. And if you just leave it like that, you suffer.

But if you direct it, you tend to be pretty high. copy, but you need that discipline. So today is going to be a great day. Now, what sets that up is actually the night before. And so I think if you want to have a great day, you have to go to bed, like early. And I say a prayer and then I go, what went well today? So those bookend my day. and I believe by this daily practice, my sleep is better. My dreams are better. And I feel much more in control of my mind. So when you go to bed at night, what went well? And start at the beginning of the day and just go hour by hour. Now, usually at lunch, I'm asleep. But I love the direction that I go.

So a couple of questions on that. So you said, go to bed early. What does that look like? And over the course of your life, being a physician, family man, everything, I'm sure that's changed. I used to love staying up until 1 or 2 o'clock in the morning. And I thought I was special because I could run on four hours of sleep at night. And after the kids go to bed, I'd stay up, I'd write.

this is my 42nd book. So it's my favorite book. My wife says I always say that. But this is my greatest hits in this book. Some most important things I've ever said. But I used to like stay up late. It was quiet. I could get stuff done. And then I started reading the research about how when you sleep, your brain cleans and washes itself. And I realized I wasn't special. Stupid. And so, making it a priority is absolutely critical. So in the last, I don't know, 15 years, it's like, I'm getting eight hours of sleep. In fact, I don't ever take a red eye and I don't take morning flights. Because if you take like a 7 o'clock flight out of LAX, you've got to be up at 4 o'clock. And I'm like, no. And I never sleep well if I have to take an early. Yeah, 2 a.m. you're worried that

you're going to miss your flights. Right. Right. Yeah. So I got, well, so I'll give myself an extra day in a city when I'm traveling rather than try to compress everything. Well, how we ended up with evening is that you were saying your evening routine sets the tone for your morning routine. Anything else in the morning, in addition to you sort of saying what you're grateful for or what you're looking forward to, anything else that's a big part of your personal morning routine? Well, I make my wife, so she's a big part of my morning routine.

So before I get out of bed, I generally find her and connect with her. And then I make the decaf almond milk cappuccino. So I don't know how that happened because it was her recipe, but I make it for us. We sit and chat for a little bit. And then I have huddles with my examines. executive team every morning and I'm always on the bike. So I believe I'm more flexible, I'm happier if I'm getting my heart rate up. So too often people sit during meetings and I find, no, I have to do that with my patients. I'm generally exercising. So I'm in Laguna Beach, walking while I have the

meeting or I'm on Belbow Island walking. I'm somewhere either walking. walking around my stationary bike while I do my huddles in the morning. I love it. So a little bit of movement, gratitude, your love and kind of your relationship, right? Inside of the book, there's also a few references to like simple things that significantly make a difference to people that we forget about. And one thing you didn't mention, but I'm sure you probably do because you wrote about it, is water. Like something as simple as being appropriately hydrated in the morning can have a

substantial impact on your focus for the day. What's your routine or anything with water in the morning? And it may sound basic to you, but I think for a lot of people, they wake up and they immediately go to the caffeinated beverage and they're not necessarily rehydrating their body after, you know, a night's sleep where our body gets super dehydrated. So I always try to drink about half my weight an ounce a day. So I track it during the day. I think hydration is just incredibly important. I love it. You ever add electrolytes or anything to it or you're just drinking plain filtered water? You know, well, part of, I make something called Bright Minds Powder. So part of my morning routine is supplementing my brain. And so in a lot of water, I put it. I put it in a lot of water,

I put a scoop of that, a scoop of something we make called neurogreens, and then smart mushrooms. Because I'm a huge fan of mushrooms, especially lions' main mushroom for the brain. I love it. All right. I want to zoom out. In the start of the book, there is a section that's dedicated to reminding people that their brain is an organ. And why is that such a revolutionary idea for some people? Give us the distinction.

When you don't know that your brain or you don't lean into the idea that your brain is an organ, what ends up happening? Very few people actually care about their brains. I was a double board certified psychiatrist. I'm board certified in general psychiatry and child and adolescent psychiatry. I was the top neuroscience student in medical school. And I didn't care. Like I had all sorts of bad habits that just was very clear I didn't care about my... Can you list off a couple?

Just in context? Well, I wasn't sleeping. Okay, sleep is morning. And I was chronically stressed. I drank a lot of caffeine. And I ate poorly. You know, I mean, like, Jack of the Box was my lunch. And I used to always kid about money.

It's like, no matter what happens today, I can eat at Wendy's tomorrow. And now I'm horrified. Given my education, I should have known better. But I just didn't. I didn't care about my own brain until I saw it. And it was older than I was. It clearly wasn't healthy. And the week before I had scanned my mother's brain and hers was stunningly beautiful, which

reflected her life. And I developed this term called brain envy. Freud was wrong. Penis envy is not the cause of anybody's problem. It's your brain. And I just, and I became so. clear to me. My brain is an organ like my heart is an organ. And if you told me I had heart problems, I'd do everything I could to prevent them. And I fell in love with my brain. And so the reason

most people don't care about their brains is you can't see it. You can see the wrinkles in your skin or the fat around your belly. And you can do something when you're unhappy with it. So we're recording this in Orange County and I often say we have more plastic surgeons here than almost anywhere in the world we care more about our faces our boobs our bellies and our butts than we do our brain and that's insane but I did and I was educated and we just have to change this whole concept of it's not mental ill illness, it's brain health. And I think in broken brain, you guys actually did a really good job of that. Get your brain right and your mind will follow. And if we could just get that message

amplified, get your brain right and your mind will follow. We'll dramatically decrease the incidence of mental health problems. Well, that's like a major part of the opening of the book is setting the tone for that and helping people understand that what you do, to your, what you do to your brain, you also do to your body, right? So give us an idea, because for some people, they're not going to actually know when your brain works right, what's possible for you? Right? Like, as basic as that sounds, like when your brain is working in harmony, when we lean into the fact that our brain is an organ, when we understand that what we do to our brain, we do to our body, and we start taking actions appropriately, you have a bunch of them inside of

here at 365. What is actually possible for us in our lives? Energy, creativity, connection, success, however you define it, comes from the physical functioning of your brain, which, of course, is supported by the physical functioning of your body. And so our first foundational principle is your brain's involved in everything you do, right? How you think, how you feel, how you act, how you get along with other people. The second one, just what you said, is when your brain works right, you work right. And when it doesn't, you don't.

And on the surface, it's just clear, it's simple. Every neuroscientists in the world would agree with that. But it's very disturbing when you understand it, because it directly attacks the idea of free will. And most of us think we have 100% free will. It's just not true. I think most of us have about 80% free will, depending on the health of your brain. But if you had a car accident or you played football in high school or in college and you had a number of concussions, you probably have about 60% free will.

And then if you add a six-pack of micolove or a bottle of red wine, now you have 30% free will. And it really speaks to some huge societal issues about behavior. And very few people connect that. I've had the blessing, suppose you call it a blessing. I've scanned over 100 murderers. I've scanned about 1,000 convicted felons. Their brains are hurt. I mean, not all, but as a group, they have terrible-looking brains,

which is a reflection of their behavior. So one of the first things the scans did for me is it gave me more empathy for people who struggle. You often hear this phrase that, you know, it's so easy to judge somebody, but if you grew up in their life circumstances in the same situation with the same parents in the same neighborhood, you might have a lot of actions that are similar to theirs. And part of that is that if your brain also had the same insults, trauma from parents who might have been dealing with alcohol abuse, you know, negative self-talk patterns that came from how your parents or your coach or your teachers in that community talked to

you, poor food choices that you were surrounded with as a child that led to maybe lack of blood flow as a brain. So it's, I think that empathy, I think the word empathy is so key, but along with it comes with like the law of responsibility, which is that if we were part of the problem, that's exciting because we can be part of the solution as well. Right? Versus if these things are just happening to us, then there's nothing that we can do about it. Well, and just because you have a bad brain doesn't mean if you do something bad, you get to go home. Right.

That there are a lot of people who have a troubled brain that never do anything bad. But it's clearly one of the factors that play into understanding people. And you know, most people who go to marital therapy, no one's ever looking at their brain, which in my mind, that's insane, right? Because you just got married. I've been married to Tanna for the last 15 years. And marriage can be hard with a good brain. If you don't have a good brain, it can be big trouble.

And so when people struggle in their relationship, somebody should be thinking about their brain. when they go to help. But no marital therapist on the planet I know of is like, we're going to look at your brain. In fact, in the book, I talk about the couples from hell study, where I scan 500 couples who failed marital therapy, but still wanted to be together. And 80% of the time, one or both of them had trouble

that could be rehabilitated. Well, you were talking about free will, and you're talking about in this instance, you know, scanning people's brain before, you know, partners come together or when they're going through struggles. There was an interesting story inside of the book where when you originally met your wife, you, I'm paraphrasing here, so you clean it up. You felt that she was on a particular medication that was damaging her brain that actually was having her make decisions that in a healthy brain she wouldn't. Is that accurate? But clean it up for me. Not completely.

So when I met her, I really liked her. Like, she's beautiful. She's smart. So about three weeks later, I'm like, you haven't seen the clinic. Come see the clinic so I could scan her because that's what I do in my family, right? If you date any of my children for more than four months, I'm like, you got to come to the clinic. Because I want to look at your brain. Did she know she was coming in to be scanned or was like, hey, come check out the clinic.

By the way, do you want to get scanned? She's a neurosurgical ICU nurse. So we bonded a bit over the brain. She said that was the best line she ever heard, I want to see your naked brain. There you go. But the story for her is years before she had thyroid cancer. and then got depressed. And the resident at UC Irvine who saw her put her on Prozac.

So never looked at her brain and thought you're depressed, take Prozac. And that's what happens in psychiatry. You come to a psychiatrist, you tell them your symptoms, I'm depressed. He gives you a diagnosis with the same name. Oh, you have depression. Here's an SSRI. I mean, that's standard. It's insane.

but it's standard. Well, on her scan, she has sleepy frontal lobes. Her frontal lobes were not as active. And pro's actually absolutely wrong drug for her because serotonin drugs, serotonin is an inhibitory neurotransmitter. If you have a busy brain, calms it down. If you have a sleepy brain,

it drops it too much and can disinhibit you. And then after she was put on Prozac, she'd find herself making decisions not consistent with her values on Adair ended up in Costa Rica. And she went back to the doctor and she goes, I'm not myself on this. And he doubled her dose, at which point she stopped it. And she writes about it in her book, The Relentless Courage of a Scared Child. It's a great chapter. But just if we just think of the outcome of somebody putting you on the wrong medicine that drops your prefrontal cortex, that executive part of your brain, sort of weakens it or takes it off line.

It can cause people to have affairs. It can cause people to spend money they don't have. It can cause people to say things to their partner that they shouldn't say. all of a sudden it ruins your life and nobody knows it was the doctor's attempt to alleviate suffering that actually created more suffering and so for me it's like well how do I know unless I look become one of the hallmark things I've said over the years it's like why would I ever fly blind yeah it's an important topic and I think that when people hear it, initially there can be this sense of overwhelm, but what you're really talking about

is that when you know what's wrong, you can do something about it. When you know what's wrong, you can do something about it. You can make appropriate changes. And depression is like chest pain. It's a cluster of symptoms that have many different causes. And so you would never think one treatment for chest pain is rational. You have chest pain and you go to the doctor and the doctor says, oh, I'm going to give you nitroglycerin for that. You would go, aren't you going to look at my heart?

Aren't you going to try and, because there's, you know, dozens of reasons for chest pain. Depression's exactly the same thing. But for some reasons, psychiatry in our societies think, oh, take an SSRI and you'll be better. But that's sort of not. I mean, that's what happened when Lincoln was depressed in 1840. It's like, oh, you're depressed from talking to him, looking at him, looking at symptom clusters.

But it doesn't honor the fact maybe at arsenic poisoning or maybe as an infection. And now in the era of COVID, COVID dramatically increases the risk of depression. Another sort of pillar that you set up in the beginning of the book is understanding all the different ways that your brain can say, ouch. You've already mentioned a few of them, like chronic not sleeping, right? You've talked a bunch about head trauma, but there's some more that I have some questions on that. We'll come back to that in a second. But give us some other things that are not typically what people think of as ways that their brain can end up saying, ouch, which could impact its performance. So in the book, I talk about this demonic. I like a lot. I like a lot of,

lot called Bright Minds. And I think one of the innovations we do at A.man clinics besides imaging is we really take a functional medicine approach to psychiatry. And the B in Bright Minds is blood flow. So low blood flow is the number one brain imaging predictor of Alzheimer's disease. Anything that decreases blood flow decreases brain function. And so it's why I'm not a fan of caffeine. or nicotine or marijuana because all of them decrease blood flow. If you have hypertension, you got to get it treated because that decreases blood flow. If you're sedentary, that decreases blood flow. If you're overweight, that decreases blood flow. In fact, of these 11 risk factors, if you're overweight, you have seven of them. And 72% of the population is

overweight and people don't think about that you know is your weight goes up the physical size and function of the brain goes down which is scare the fat off anyone um our is retirement and aging the older you get i'm going to be 69 this year the more serious you have to be and i'm a bit anxious about that i mean i do the right things but i've seen thousands of 60, 70, 80-year-old brains. And it's not good news, right? As your skin sort of falls off your face as you age, that same process happens in the brain.

Eye is inflammation. And, you know, the surprising thing about inflammation, and a lot of people are talking about it. But for my patients, it's like, if you have gum disease, odds are you have brain disease. If you have gum disease, odds are you have heart. heart disease. If you have gum disease, your guts probably not healthy. So I became a flossing fool. And like, I'm at the dentist regularly. I floss every day. I'm serious about the hell of my mouth.

Because if that's not healthy, my brain won't be healthy. And then G is genetics. And I think we don't think about genetics, right? You know, we're like, and what's the genetic tests? And they're not awesome. I've been very disappointed that, you know, your genetic tests will tell us much. But what I am very clear about is you should know your family risks, like mine's heart disease and obesity. And when you know your risk, you should be on a prevention program every day. day of your life. So rather than, oh, I have heart disease because it's in my family,

it's, I don't have heart disease because it's in my family. Or for people who have alcoholism, in their family, they go, oh, well, I drink too much because my dad and grandfather drank too much. I'm like, well, that's insane. If you know it's a risk factor, you should avoid it like the plague. And so I studied children and grandchildren of alcoholics. My first, wife grew up in a very abusive alcoholic home. And so from the time my kids were like 10, I'm like, they're drinking problems in this family. If you don't drink, you won't have a problem. If you drink, you might have a big problem.

So it's really, it's knowing your risk factor and being on a prevention program every single day of your life. I think that's the most rational thing to do. And then head trauma, which we'll talk about single most surprising thing I learned from my database. But the T is so interesting. It's toxins. And we live in a toxic society. And you've heard about this dramatic rise in autism. That's not a genetic thing by itself.

It's a gene environmental interaction. And I think it's a gene toxin interaction. the toxic products we put in our bodies. It's some of the toxic medicines that parents take. It's we just live in this toxic soup that, you know, whether it's the drugs that have now become innocuous in the public mind, it's, I always say the big innovations for 2023 are marijuana, ketamine, and magic mushrooms. These are the big psychiatric innovations. I'd much rather than be lions made mushrooms and a healthy diet and exercise

and avoiding putting toxic products on your body. So, surprise for me, you know the app think dirty? It's a great app. And it allows you to scan your personal products. Is it EWG? Like EWG. Okay, got it. And it'll tell you on a scale of zero to ten how quickly they're killing.

you. So, for example, I shaved for barbersol since I was 14 years old. So for like 50 years, I shaved with barbosol. On a scale of zero to 10, zero is good, 10 is kill you early. It's a nine. And I'm on, oh, no. So now I shave this morning with something called kiss my face, which is a dupe. And it's actually not more expensive because it lasts forever. But imagine all the toxic products parents are putting on their children's bodies. The dermatologist won. They made us afraid of the sun. And so now we have this epidemic of low vitamin D levels, but we also have this epidemic of kids carrying a toxic load in their body. And if your body's toxic, well, it means your brain is toxic too. And like, I'm a psychiatrist. Why do I care about

that because I would look at scans and I'm like, ew, a scan looks like he's a drug addict or an alcoholic. But they're not. It's because of the toxins. Mold is another toxin that's common. General anesthesia, that's a surprise. That was a surprise for me. General anesthesia can be toxic to the brain. People have coronary artery bypass surgery, have a higher incidence of dementia.

So under toxins, there's a whole less from air pollution and water pollution and pesticides on foods that you just look, oh, what to do, what to do. Well, you know, for those that are listening, you know, you just put your hands on your face and you're like, oh, my gosh, right? And I think a lot of people, when they hear about these things, it's like, oh, wow, like, where do I, you know, begin? Obviously here at Eamon clinics and you guys working individually with patients, you're helping people put together a personalized plan, but for the folks that are listening that are out there, when they're listening to these top things that are root cause drivers of brain injury in some form and restriction of blood flow, what have you found to be hierarchical and that would allow people to help

understand where to prioritize if they don't immediately have access to like a functional medicine doctor or your clinics? For example, is, you know, you've, you've, shared on my podcast last time, and inside the book you talk about why you're not a fan of caffeine because of its restriction of blood flow. But you're also a realist, and the recommendation on the caffeine section, which I forgot what day number it is, was like, look, at least try to go for 25% less caffeine or reduce your caffeine intake by 25% less, was that day's sort of recommendation. So is somebody having, how do you balance it out like somebody who's looking at all the different things that they could do in their life? And it's like,

okay, should I get started with reducing caffeine, or should I start with movement and doing a little bit of strength training and walking every week? How do you approach what gets priority in the context of all the things that we can focus on? So in the book, there are dozens of tiny habits. What's the smallest thing you can do today? That will make the biggest difference. And the mother, tiny habit, the most important tiny habit, is when you go through your day, just ask, yourself, is this good for my brain or bad for it? And if you can answer that with information and love, love of yourself, love of your family, love of the reason you're on earth, just start making better decisions. And in the book, I tell about the story about Nancy. So Nancy, who I dearly

love, in fact, I think it was this room I first met her. She's 83. She was from Oxford, England. And Crystal, my niece who used to run this clinic, she said, you have to meet Nancy. She's from Oxford, England. She found your book, change your brain, change your life in a used bookstore at Oxford University for 50 cents. And she transformed her life. And so here, I met her, and she tells me this story.

When I'm 80, I am obese. in chronic pain, depressed, and think my life is over. I find your book. I let it lay around the house for about a year, and then I start reading it. And I was riveted, so that made me happy. And she said, I started writing down all the things to do. And she's like, way too much. So I'm going to do one thing at a time. I started drinking more water. And then she said, it forced me to get off the couch because I had to go pee a lot. She said, but I felt better. And she said, and then I started taking supplements, multiple vitamin, fish oil,

vitamin D because she'd test her level and it was low. And she said, my mood was better. And then I started walking. And then I started playing ping pong. And then I started dancing. And she said, I'm becoming different. And then I changed my food. And I didn't not eat anything I want.

I just ate the good things first. So there was no room for the bad things. So I didn't feel deprived. And then I started learning to play the guitar. And then a language. And I start crying when she's telling me this story because she's the reason why I do what I do. And she said,

now getting my family involved, I lost 14 stones. And I'm like, what's a stone? Because I had no idea what a stone was. She lost 70 pounds. And she said, I had no idea that my life could be this good at 83. And for my 83rd birthday, I gave myself a present of coming to the clinic and getting a scan. And if you looked at typical 80 to 90-year-old brains, as we talked about earlier, they suck. They're just not healthy. And hers was stunning. And she cried when she saw that. And it's the big highlight is you're not stuck with the brain you have. You could make it better and I can prove it. And she cried because she said, I knew last year my brain wouldn't have looked like this. So one thing, and that's why the book is organized the way it is.

It's like a 300-word essay. It'll take you three minutes to read. And one simple thing to do, because brain and mental health, as Nancy found out, their daily practices. But you don't have to start everything at once. Just one simple thing at a time. And the mother of all of the simple things is this good for my brain. or bad for it.

And that's love. Like when I heard so many people go, I can't have this and I can't have that and I can't. And it's like, you're a baby in brain health if you think that way, that that's the wrong way to think about it. When Drew Carey lost a lot of weight, he said eating crappy food isn't a reward.

It's a punishment. And I'm like, oh, he's going to stay healthy because he's got the right mindset. As soon as you go, as soon as your four-year-olds in charge of your life, you know, I want what I want when I wanted. You're never going to get healthy until you go, okay, so what do you really want? And if I asked you, what do you really want when you see the plate of nachos or ice cream float or whatever? What do you want?

I saw, I want that. I was like, come on, what do you really want? For me, I want energy. And I want memory. And I want good decision making. I want creativity. I want longevity. And I love my six children.

I never want to live with them. Love them. Never want to live with them. Right? When they go, bless them. I mean, yes. You're talking about when they leave the house. When, you know, when I'm saying,

70 or when I'm 80 or when I'm 90, I want to have clarity for the rest of my life. I never want to be a burden. But I think people don't focus on what they really want and how their habits serve them or hurt them. Because like alcohol doesn't serve any of these habits that I want, energy, memory, longevity, health, independence, it damages it. And yet, I predict, I know I'm like going on the side street. That's the beauty of podcasts. Alcohol is going to become like smoking.

That, you know, if you look at someone who's smoking, you're like, really? Seriously. It's bad for you. It's bad for me. Alcohol's going to become that. It's not yet. But I think in the next 15 years. And we're up against a big industry, like a trillion-dollar industry.

But it's starting to change. The American Cancer Society came out against any alcohol. Absolutely. Like the American Cancer Society. There is a group in Canada that just, I did a post on it and got over a million views. news, they said they need to put cancer warnings on alcohol labels. When you, you know, earlier you were chatting, just piggybacking off this alcohol thread because we talked about it a little bit last time and you shared some of your thoughts that

are there. And you already see, you know, a lot of people, even in the health space, becoming more comfortable telling their audience, like, look, I just don't have alcohol. Or I've like greatly. and significantly reduced my intake to the place where it's like, okay, great, a friend's wedding or a situation or whatever. But it's like, you know, I don't even call myself a social drinker. So a lot more people have the, are speaking out about that. You were chatting earlier. You put kind of alcohol. We briefly chatted about this, but we didn't go too much deep into it,

marijuana, but you've talked about it in a social lot. And then you've also talked about magic mushrooms, right? Silicine. inside of there. So I want to talk about those things just because you brought them up right now. So marijuana, for those that are not familiar with your content, is the primary place that your biggest concern is around is, again, going back to this restricting of blood flow to the brain. Is that what you're saying when you do these scans? So I published a study on a thousand marijuana users compared to healthy. Every area of their brain is lower in blood flow and activity. Every area.

And then I did a study. I did the world's largest, I think, the world's largest brain imaging study, 62,454 scans on how the brain ages. And it's fascinating. Little kids have very busy, active brains, sort of stabilizes around 25 to about 60, and then it's a slow march lower. And then we looked at, well, what accelerates aging? And we have this massive, database using marijuana, using alcohol, using cigarettes, having diagnoses like depression or ADHD or schizophrenia. Schizophrenia aged the brain the most. But what shocked me is marijuana aged the brain the second most. And I'm like, well, that's not a good thing. And now, alcohol is not good. Nicotine's not good for the brain. But why would I ever do anything that ages my brain. The second thing, and I'm also a child psychiatrist, and I've known for a long time that marijuana and adolescence is bad for the developing brain. It demotivates kids. If I had a 14-year-old who all of a sudden has ADD, but they didn't have ADD when they were 12, I'm like, you need to

pee in the cup. I mean, you needed to do a drug screen, and marijuana was the most common offender. teenagers who smoke, and my big concern, as the perception of the dangerousness of a drug goes down, its use goes up. And now, marijuana is everywhere. You live in L.A. I live in Orange County. They're pot dispensaries. All over the place, it's good medicine.

So teenagers are smoking at rates never seen before. But if you use marijuana as a teenager, you have a 450% increased risk of having a psychotic illness. In your 20s, if you smoke during adolescence, you have a higher incidence of anxiety disorders, depression, and suicide. I'm not okay with this. And what's happening in your brain in your teens and early 20s. You're building the highways. I mean, they're getting myelinated, which means they're getting strengthened. They're going to go faster. And you're throwing poison in there, disrupting that, which may end up be a permanent disruption. So I'm like just not on board with it. And I don't know if you were remember during the presidential debates, during the Democratic presidential

debates. Someone asks, then Vice President Biden, should the federal government legalize marijuana? And he's like, I think more research needs to be done. And Cory Booker shamed him. I was so angry. He's like, man, are you high? Like Cory Booker decided the science has been set and Biden was high. No. It's clearly not settled. And my experience and my research says, I'd avoid it if I could. Yeah, there was a great book that I came across a few years ago. The guy's a little controversial, but his name is Alex Berenson, former New York Times journalist who wrote a book, Parents Tell Your Kids the Truth About Weed.

And he goes in, and his wife was an expert, I believe she's a psychiatrist as well, and she would be an expert witness for these parents who were saying, like my, often a young male, who was smoking a lot of marijuana. And people forget that, you know, besides just the general concern, the THC content has exploded inside. It's like 10 times than when I was a teenager. 10 times more.

I've even heard like 20 times more in some instances and just what that can do to the brain. It's a good book. Again, he's a little controversial figure, but I thought he put a great argument. There's a new term that many of your listeners probably haven't heard yet called scrumeting. So I haven't even heard of that.

I adopted my two nieces. So even at home now, I have a 13-year-old and an 18-year-old. And why did I adopt them? Because their parents couldn't stop using drugs. And it was awful for them. I mean, they were just raised in chronic stress. And the older one, and I tell this story in my book, The End of Mental Illness. I dedicate my book, The End of Mental Illness, to these two children.

And at 11, Al-Azei, the older one, named after cognac. So there's some interesting thing about that. Al-Azay had a damaged brain. It was so clear. You know, whether it's her mother drank when she was pregnant, I don't know. But we spent a lot of time repairing it. And I'm like, you need to avoid drugs, right?

I mean, that's a genetic risk factor. And so I'm always teaching her new words. I'm like, hey, scromitin, look it up. And she goes, it's a combination of screaming and vomiting, which is now common in emergency rooms. Right? If you walk in the emergency room and someone is screaming while they're throwing up, scrommeting, it's from marijuana poisoning. Wow. I've not heard of that.

I've got to look into that. That's crazy. Okay, moving on to the next one, mushrooms. You know, for a long time because mushrooms were on in this. and still are under this federal ban, most of people's experiences would be, you know, taking mushrooms in sort of a party, recreational setting, other things like that. As the federal ban on research came out, you had people like Dr. Roland Griffiths, who's been on this podcast before, talking about some of their work with smoking cessension,

end of life care, other things like that. What are your thoughts? I'm kind of separated a little bit. What are your thoughts about psilocybin in sort of an assistive? or clinical setting that has a specific purpose or an intention behind it, right? So I'm very worried about it. And now, let me be clear, I'm not opposed to marijuana for everything. That end of life, it helps you eat.

Awesome. I actually got it for my father-in-law. For children who have seizure disorders that you can't control on other things. Awesome. But let's not say it's good and teenagers should go out. You're talking about marijuana specifically. Marijuana. But we have seen this show before with psilocybin when Valium and Benzos first came out.

Oh, Mommy's Little Helper, they're innocuous, and they're clearly not innocuous. Benzos hurt a lot of people. Once you start them, you can't stop them. Opiates. And this came out in the 90s that, oh, if you have chronic pain, pain should be the fifth vital sign. And we should do everything we can to decrease people's pain. And then thus, the opiate epidemic is killing a lot of people. Alcohol is a health food.

and like, clearly it's not health food. And I think mushrooms in certain situations can be helpful, but they're also harmful. And nobody's talking about that there are bad trips. There are people that start them and it can trigger an anxiety disorder. And I'm really worried we're going there before we go to, teaching you not to believe every stupid thing you think. Or dealing with trauma with a technique I love called EMDR eye movement desensitization and re-processing.

When I do it with patients, I'm like, now, this is like being on mushrooms without the side effects. It's so powerful. And then I was a huge fan of Will Smith. He did a movie called Concussion. And I was a consultant on the movie. And I loved him and I loved everything. So in his biography, autobiography came out early 2022.

I read it right before the Oscars. And at the end of the book, he talks about going to South America and doing ayahuasca 14 times. And I'm like, well, it didn't fix anything. Because, you know, then, you know, the thing at the Oscars happened at all. Or maybe it did. And he still had some demons that were. were, you know, left that were there.

I don't know. See, for me, it's like, let me look at your brain. Let me balance it in the least toxic, healthiest ways. And then let's see what else we need. But what the mushroom thing is going to do, just like the ketamine thing, just like marijuana, is a quick fix without getting the, baseline strategies of hell in place.

Yeah. I feel like the... And that's my word. Yeah, that's the worry. That's the concern. That's my right. As it becomes more popularized, people look it as like a pill for an ill. Yeah.

I would say that just my own sort of personal viewing of the landscape is that I definitely know that there's bad trips, like the big survey that was done by Dr. Roland Griffith. His estimation was about eight, nine percent of, you know, based on their national survey that they did are actually bad trips. And he's the first person to say and tell people like, bad trips happen, right? Like bad trips are there. When I've seen people who eat healthy, live healthy, do these other things, are not looking at their only component. It does seem to be that these people that are out there, talk about it being one of the mystical experiences that are in their life. Now, I hear what you're saying, which is that, okay, but do we need that? And what are the downstream effects, potential negative effects,

of going through that? And could there be something else that's better like EMDR? And it's in its infancy. So when you get on board too quickly, there are problems with that. Now, I've actually always been a fan of legalizing drugs. Please don't put people in jail for that behavior. It's a complete waste of resource.

Let's learn about it. The imaging work I've done before and after, and my doctors here at Aeman Clinics have done before and after shows it decreases blood flow. That's like on an individual level, no study yet like you did with marijuana, but maybe one day you'll do that? Well, I actually did one of my patients, who I just dearly love. I have his brain in 2010, and it was hurt because of a traumatic brain injury, and he had addiction issues. and then hyperbaric oxygen, which I'm a huge fan of, supplements, five months later, his brain's better. Five years later, it's normal. It's awesome. And then he's like, I'm going to go do a documentary on Ibogaine and take that. Let's do before and after scan. And his before scan was awesome. His after scan was awful. And I begged him, like, please don't do that. Don't ruin the work we've done.

But one question for the folks that were with the that you did the study with marijuana you said a thousand thousand people that were there what was the threshold of people being a part of that study in terms of how much were they smoking? I think there's I don't smoke and I've never really been into marijuana but I think a lot of people who were listening would be curious about that like how frequently were these people smoking or using marijuana? They got a marijuana use disorder. So it was not three times a year. It was something that was impairing their life. Got it. So these are like people who were speaking multiple times, maybe even a day. Okay. Yes. Got it. All right. Okay, moving on from some of those. You know, one principle I think we should talk about. Please. If I'm going to do something that may be bad, can I overcome that by doing all the right things? So, for example, I did the big NFL study. When the NFL was lying, it had a problem. So this was back in 2008, 2008, 2009, 2010. High levels of damage. Like, stop lying about it. Playing football is a brain damaging

sport. But one of my players had an $88 million contract. So he was going to play. And it just reminded me is if you're going to do something that's not necessarily great for your brain, you should be doing everything else right. It's like, why did Tom Brady play at an extraordinary level until he was 45 years old? Well, if you read his book TB12, I know very well. Every other thing he does in his life is right. From going to bed at 9 o'clock to not eating crap, hydration, everything. He did. And so I'm like, if you're going to do something that's not great, make sure everything else you're doing is great. And that helps to soften. Yeah. The blow. So the book has plenty of things in terms of things that you could do to better the brain, right? Soften the blow. We'll get into

those. But one more thing I want to talk about, which I think is still fascinating to this day. I've probably fell in this category, too, on another thing that hurts your brain. you wrote inside the book, we have to ask people 10 times whether or not they had a head injury. You know, you talk about the NFL. Obviously, people understand in that context now, right, regular, traumatic, head injury and the challenges it has. But talk about why you had to ask normal everyday people like me and you, why they had head injury like up to 10 times.

Because they forget. Like big things. they forget. And I had no clue. Like, I mean, I'm an Army-trained psychiatrist. I did my training at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C. And so if you're treating a lot of service people, head injuries are a big deal. And so we're taught, have you ever had a head injury? And then we believe them, yes or no. And then when I started scanning in 1991, you can see brain trauma very clearly on scans. It's generally decreased activity. It might be in the front and the back because of this thing called a contra coup injury. And you would see the evidence on the scan, but they would say no. And the first time this happened, I mean, it was so clear. I'm like, well, are you sure?

So I don't think so. And then I'm thinking, well, what are all the ways? Have you ever fallen out of a tree off a fence, dove into a shallow pool? Have you ever been in a car accident? If you ever had concussions, playing sports? Have you ever run into a play glass window? And he looked at me and he said, oh, my God. When I was seven years old, I fell out of a second story window.

Do you think that counts? I had this one guy. It was my favorite story on this, is he had Tourette's syndrome, which is a tick disorder. and because he had a tick disorder to get scanned, you have to lay perfectly still for about 15 minutes. And he had a tick. That messes up the scan. So I actually took off my wedding ring and my watch, and I got on top of him in the camera, and I held his head for 15 minutes still.

And afterwards, and he was going through drug withdrawal, I'm like, you know, now that we have this close personal relationship, stay and we'll look. He had a very clear head injury to the left front side of his brain. And I'm like, have you ever had a brain injury? And he said no. And he was sort of irritable because he was in withdrawal. And I'm like, are you sure? And now I sort of irritated him. And he's like, F no. But I grew up in the grocery business. swearing never bothered me very much and I'm like ever fall out of a tree F no off a fence F no dive into a shallow pool F no concussion playing sport F no oh my god I lied to you I'm like what he said about five years ago before my addiction

started I was riding my motorcycle around the lake and a baby deer came onto the road, and I didn't want to hit the deer, so I spilled the bike on my left side and broke my left jaw. He said, do you think that counts? F yes, I said, Dale. Undiagnosed brain injuries are a major cause of psychiatric growth. You said number one, right? Would you say that it's a single most important lesson I've learned from 200 and, you know, that sort of thing. Yeah. I mean, there's so many great lessons, but. protect your head. And as much as I loved football, I mean, I played football. Did you think that everything that came out about the NFL and head injuries and the scans and what your work you did

and like the NFL is doing better than ever and I have no judgment on it one way or another, did you think that it was going to have an impact in terms of people, you know, watching the sport, their interest in the sport, just curious? Pop Warner has gone down by about 50 percent Pop Warner? Pop Warner. So, little kiddie football. Okay, got it. And educated parents are not going to let their children play.

Got it. Why would you... So if the brain creates everything, right, it's involved in everything you do. And when it works right, you work right. And it's soft about the consistency of soft butter, tofu, custard somewhere between egg-wide. it's in gel, and it's housed in a really hard skull that has sharp bony ridges. So your brain helps you be successful in life. It's soft and housed in a skull with hard, sharp bony ridges.

Really? You're going to let your children? Because they may be the ones taking care of you. You're really going to let them damage, potentially damage their brain? It's just not wise. and the NFL has done a better job of taking the head out of the game. But, you know, even during the playoffs, we've seen wicked brain injuries. And so, I believe if you're going to do a bad thing for your brain, you should be rehabilitating it all the way along.

And football's not the only brain-damaging profession. Sure. Firefighters. is a brain-damaging profession. Our foundation supports a lot of firefighters because they have head trauma. They have toxic exposure, and they have emotional trauma.

I mean, almost all the firefighters that I know have a level of emotional trauma from what they've seen. I want to pivot to another thing that you're putting the spotlight on. You've done in other books as well, sleep apnea. Talk about why sleep apnea is so much more than what people think of like the classic, older, overweight individual who, you know, very clearly is like snoring loudly at night, right?

Like, that's very clear. But there's a whole other group of sleep apnea that people are totally missing out on. Well, and one of them is children that when I was growing up, it was actually very common to take out your tonsils or adenoids if they were in comparing your airway. It's much less common now, but if your kids snore at night, they have a higher incidence of ADD because their brain's not getting properly oxygenated. So that's what's really important. Your brain is the most oxygen-hungry organ in your body. It's 2% of your body's weight, but uses about 20% of the blood flow and 20% of the oxygen. So whenever you're in an oxygen, Exigen debt stayed, it's harder for you to think. So people have sleep apnea often look like they have ADD, even though they didn't have it as a child. They are more likely to be overweight and have trouble losing that weight, as hard as they try.

And they irritate their partners a lot. A lot of different theories on this, but I don't know if you read James Nestor's book, Breath. I have. I love that book. One of the biggest things that he talks about is that, you know, the narrowing of our jaws that has happened through a combination of industrialized, you know, diets, and that putting a lot of pressure in how we breathe. And a whole generation of kids now that then became adults are, you know, mouth breathers instead

of nasal breeders. I think, didn't we talk about taping your mouth shut at night? Yeah, we're a big fan of it. I, my wife, when we came together, I was telling you, I got married last year. she was a mouth breather at night. And I was like, babe, I know this is going to sound crazy, but I'm going to start taping your mouth at night, and it's because I love you, and it's worked wonders.

She feels so much more focused the next day because it's just forcing her to breathe through her nose. That's so interesting. And if you breathe right at night, you think right the next day because your brain has been properly oxygenated. Yeah. And, you know, who would think about that physical function can impact your mood.

So maybe it's not mental health. Maybe it's brain health. And I love breathing. I have in the book I talk about the 15 second breath and how to almost immediately break a panic attack. Four seconds in, hold it for a second and a half, eight seconds out, hold it for a second and a half. 15 second breath. You do that four times. Your anxiety drops like a rock. I love it. It's a great recommendation. I remember seeing it. One of the things you talk about this book and you've shared in other books is this idea of like understanding your brain type, right? Walk us through that and how did you

come up with what these different brain types are and then what implications do they have in terms of personalizing this approach to ourselves? Well, when I first started scanning people, I was looking for what does depression look like in the brain, or what does ADHD look like in the brain or OCD? And I was sort of looking for the one pattern that would help me make a diagnosis. And early on, I realized none of these have one pattern. They all have multiple types. But people who had healthy brains tend to have healthy lives.

people who had low frontal lobe function tended to be more spontaneous and impulsive. People had high anterior cingulate, so it's deep in the front part of the brain. When that was busy, they tended to be worried, rigid, and flexible. Things don't go their way. They get upset. And I'm like, so I've written whole books on seven types of anxiety and depression, seven types of ADD, six types of addicts, five types of overeaters. And then I went, this really tells us.

what kind of person you're going to be. And so I developed a brain type assessment to help me assess without a scan which of the five primary types you are. So balanced, healthy brain, spontaneous, sleepy frontal lobe, sort of my ADD group. Persistent, high frontal lobes, my OCD-ish group, sensitive. Their limbic brain is active and cautious. They're amygd basil ganglia tend to be cautious. And there's a total of 16 types from six to 16. It's combinations of two, three, four, and five. And it's so helpful just to know, well, I tend to be clashes or I tend to be sensitive or I tend to be spontaneous. And then, well, what are the behavioral strategies and what are the supplement strategies? And is the goal for everybody to move

towards a balanced brain? Are there a natural sort of archetypes in society where people are going to have just, you know, different variations and some people are going to be more creative and spontaneous? Yeah. I think the goal is to be your best self with the healthiest brain. And as you move toward more balance, you tend to be emotionally more balanced. All right. Before we conclude on some mindset-related questions as we wrap up the interview, I want to ask you

about a topic that was in the book, you've written about it before, but it always gets people's attention. How can improving your brain health improve your sex life? Whatever is good for your heart is good for your brain, because your brain gets 20% of the blood flow. And then in 2007, I wrote a book called The Brain in Love. And I'm like, oh, I miss something. Whatever's good for your heart is good for your brain is good for your genitals, because it's about blood flow. And one of the things I've noticed over and over and over and over is if someone goes on a brain health program, their erections get harder. They get better. They get more consistent.

And why is that important? Because your love life is critical to happiness. And 40% of 40-year-olds report having erectile dysfunction. That's horrifying to me. And 70% of 70 worlds have erectile dysfunction, which is why on the news we see all the commercials, or on TV, we see all the commercials for Viagra, Cialis, Libetra. We have a serious erectile dysfunction problem in the United States. And I think it's tied to metabolic syndrome and obesity and diabetes. but when you get your brain right, your love life gets better physically.

But what I often say is you have no forethought. There's no foreplay. That ultimately a healthy brain gives you better decision making, allows you to listen better, gives you better empathy, which means odds are you're more likely to get lucky. A little tangent here, going back to something you said earlier, you said you have a higher risk of heart disease in your family, is that right? And then you looked at your own assessment. Is that what, through genetics, like certain... Now my grandfather died of an art attack.

Okay, got it. And anything that you've seen... My father had a heart arrhythmia. So I clearly have it, so... And... But I don't have heart disease. Yeah, yeah. But it wasn't any genetic sort of, you know, higher risk that came in from the gen X-Side?

No, I'm supposed to die of a blood clot. Okay. This is why I take omega-3 fatty acids every day. Got it. Well, I was going to go into, you know, there's a lot of different people that talk about, you know, what is good for the heart? You know, you're sharing earlier, like, what's good for the heart is good for the brain. You know, some people will say, like, you know, saturated fat, more than 10% of your diet is the devil because they believe in the cholesterol link to you know, arthroscarosis. And there's other people that say, well, we don't have enough data

of that sort of healthy user who's not insulin resistant, who works out, who doesn't smoke and doesn't drink and has vegetables in their diet and whether or not saturated fat is a problem for them. So I was just curious, just because you mentioned it earlier, are there any things that you've done as you are more protective of your heart health and things that you're making decisions on that you decided or not decided. Like, for example, like, do you actively go out of your way to reduce or avoid red meat in your diet, right? Or are you not worried about that? I'm basically looking for what is the Dr. Daniel Aiman approach to all the data that's out there and the different folks that argue one way or another when it comes to heart health?

So I'm a fan of a healthy cholesterol. What a lot of people, so my unique spin on it, is low cholesterol, under 160 is associated with depression, homicide, suicide, and death from all causes. Because cholesterol is the building block of a lot of the hormones that we have. And so this beat the drum, low cholesterol, low cholesterol, low cholesterol, low cholesterol is nuts as far as I'm concerned. Now, you don't want high of the bad cholesterol, but LDH, people think of, or LDL, that's the bad cholesterol? No, no, no. It's critical cholesterol, but there's fractionated parts of it. They're the big fluffy A particles, which are pretty much innocuous, and the little tiny B particles, which are really problematic, because that's what causes Athelis sclerosis.

So the total number is not nearly as important. My cholesterol always tends to run a little high, but my HDL is like 90, which is, you know, what people think of as good cholesterol. I think red meat, it depends. If you are eating grain-fed red meat, that's probably pro-inflammatory and bad for you. If you're eating naturally raised, red meat, Grass-fed red meat, it's probably good for you, unless you're like me and you have high ferretin levels. So ferretin is a measure of iron storage and high ferretin, premature aging.

It's one of the aging risk factors. And so I have to go donate blood, which I was thinking of doing it this weekend, donating blood on a regular basis to keep my ferretin in a healthy range. Now, if you have low ferretin, you're probably having trouble sleeping, and you're probably anxious and you look like you have ADD. So you want to keep it in a healthy range somewhere between like 40 and 70. But there's new work on the ketogenic diet for mental health. Yeah.

Are you talking about Dr. Chris Palmer or? Yeah. We had them on the podcast just recently. Oh, I love Dr. Palmer. Have you guys connected before? I did an Instagram live with you. Oh, that's amazing. Because I've been a fan of the ketogenic diet for a long time.

And I have a granddaughter who turns 12 tomorrow, who's basically been on it since she was nine months, nine months old. Miraculous for her seizure disorder. And I'm like, well, I use anti-convulsants all the time in psychiatry. If you have bipolar disorder, if you have temper problems, if you have mood swings, it tends to level people out. Well, if you can use a natural anti-convulsant diet, ketogenic diet, why not think about that? We eat way too many simple carbs in this country. And when people go on a ketogenic diet, they're not hungry. I mean, it's like one of the huge benefits.

of a ketogenic diet. But it's tricky, right? I mean, you really have to think because people go, oh, I can just eat all the meat I want. It's like, no, ketogenic diet is, and the more liberal ones are called two to one, it's you need twice the amount of fat as you have carbs and protein. That's tricky. And so you end up with a fair amount of saturated fat in that. And, you end up. And, There's studies showing it helps with long COVID. There are studies that show can increase longevity, that burning ketones is more efficient and better for your mitochondria than burning sugar. Yeah.

We didn't talk about sugar, but that's probably another one of those things, high consumption of sugar in our diet, insulin resistance, that has a lot of detrimental impact on the brain. Well, the D in Bright Minds, we haven't talked about it much yet, is diabetes, where you're overweight and have high blood sugar. Either one of them is a risk factor for Alzheimer's disease. But when you put them together, you have seven of the risk factors. If you are overweight or obese, you have low blood flow to your brain. Your brain looks older than you are.

You have inflammation because fat cells produce something called inflammatory cytokines. fat stores toxins. It changes your hormones. Fat on your belly takes healthy testosterone levels and turns it into unhealthy cancer-promoting forms of estrogen. You're also more likely to be anxious and depressed, and then you have diabetes risk. I'm like, well, and I published three studies.

first on my healthy group. So I have a healthy group. It's hard to find healthy people, just saying. Healthy overweight or obese versus healthy, not lower blood flow, especially on the front part of the brain. And then in my NFL group, I'm like overweight or healthy weight, overweight, less blood flow in the front part of their brain. And then last year I published a study on 33,000 scans. There was this linear correlation, healthy, overweight, obese, morbidly obese, lower, lower, lower, lower. No, 72% of Americans are overweight.

And why I was furious with the lockdown, I mean, not to get political. You can get political if you want. Furious at the insane response. to the pandemic, not one thing out of the National Institute of Health. We are sick as a society. We need to work on getting healthy. Instead, they locked us down where people got fatter and more addicted. It was just the wrong strategy. And now they want to give everybody Ozzypick, including kids, especially kids. It's the pharmaceutical industry is running things. And it's like, why would we

do that unless we were just a bit insane? Well, yeah, it seems like we are a little bit insane. No, I'm not in the book. I talk a lot about if I was an evil ruler and I wanted to create

mental illness. I think I have like 20 evil ruler days in the book. What would I do? And I'd have that response to the pandemic. I wouldn't you know, what should they have said to do is if you're overweight, this is a great time to get healthy. If you have low vitamin D, everybody should get their vitamin D level checked. You should have your vitamin D level be midrange

or high normal. People who had healthy vitamin D levels died less from COVID. That's the cheapest intervention. But if you lock everybody inside where they're not getting the sun, you're dropping their vitamin D levels. And low vitamin D also goes with a smaller brain. I read that study. And when I first tested mine, and I live in Southern California where the sun's out a lot, it was terrible. And I'm like, but I'm inside during the day.

I was never really thinking about it. Yeah, super important. I hope that we learn from the response that we had for the future. I feel like as the media shifts and more people are listening to, you know, going to like Instagram, pages like yours, right? We have linked to your social media in the show notes. People can follow you. People are listening to podcasts. And people are getting their news source from different areas.

They're getting a chance to hear the healthy debates. Doesn't mean that we have to all agree. I'm actually okay with polarity. Like I want people to have disagreement about different stuff. Yeah, but they blocked the people who had a different opinion. That's not America. It's like how did they all of a sudden? determined that free speech wasn't part of who we were is a people. It's my speech or no speech.

Yeah, I'm still. For sure. It's good to see that shifting. I think we went one way. We went way too far one way. And so now you have a group of people that are, you know, I know people who have a lot of different opinions about them, but even like Elon Musk taking over Twitter, you know, Apple, Apple was one company that basically said like, because we don't make money on advertising, they didn't say this out loud, and this is the vast majority where people listen to podcasts from in my audience, and then there's Spotify, which also has very strong freedom of speech rules. But Apple was like, we'll let anybody talk about anything. We're like a public utility for our podcast app. Like, we don't even, so people want to listen to whatever they want to listen to? Great. Like,

we're not going to subvert the information unlike, you know, other social media channels that were there. Anyways, I'm kind of getting off a tangent, but I'm hoping that we learn some of the lessons. What a time. What a time. What a time. What do you think are some of the top couple or one or three beliefs that get in the way from people making progress on improving their health and their brain health? It's hard. That's the first one. That's the first one.

It's hard. It's hard. Everything in moderation. It's the gateway thought to hell. It's the gateway thought. thought to cheating. It's expensive, where having an unhealthy brain is way more expensive because your decision making goes down. I think it's hard. And if it just started with, is this good for my brain or bad for it? That's three seconds. So it's easy, and you just

need to gather the information. And, you know, whether it's your podcast, Dr. Hyman's books, my books, so much of the content's free. But it's just, is this good for my brain or bad for it? And quite frankly, most second graders, we get a 90%. Right. Like when my daughter was seven, I went into her second grade class and I wrote 20 things on the board. And I'm like, separate them for me. Good for your brain or bad for it. And I put marijuana and alcohol and playing tackle football and not sleeping, being in a home with chronic stress and multiple vitamin, taking fish oil,

eating your vegetables. They got 95% right. The only thing they missed? Orange juice. They put it in the good category. That's the power of marketing. Yeah. No, my dad was a grower for SunKist.

When he heard me start going after orange juice, he's like, what's the matter with you? Someday the oranges will be yours. And I'm like, love oranges. No, an unwrapping fruit sugar from its fiber source. There's another trap that we get into that you write about in the book. and that's these automatic negative thoughts. What are they? How do we identify them?

And most importantly, how do we move beyond them running our lives? And for a lot of people, they are running their lives. So there's nowhere in school where we teach children not to believe every stupid thing they think. Thoughts come from all sorts of places. They come from our genetic code. that if you have trauma in a past generation, you're more likely to be negative in this generation. They come from the voices of our mother and our father. They come from the voices of our teachers, our coaches, our friends, our thos.

They come from the news we listen to from the music we hear. And they lie a lot. And just because you have a thought has nothing to do with whether or not it's true. And I was 28 years old and had a fair amount of anxiety growing up. I used to bite my fingernails. Which came from where, by the way. I know I'm going on a tangent, but the general sense of anxiety that you had, what do you think was the...

Well, what's two things. My grandfather, when he was 19 years old, his brother was killed in a train accident. And he thought it was his fault. And he was furious at his sister who lent him the car. He held a grudge for decades. So I think some of that. But the other thing is I'm the second son in a Lebanese family.

So which growing up you just sort of feel irrelevant. And I got beaten up a lot by my older brother. And like every video, home videos that my dad took, he's beating me up. And when I'm 50, I went to my dad and I'm like, why didn't you stop him? He's like, somebody had to take the movie, which I just thought was complete crap. And so I think that sort of set it up. But help me with the fight that I've been in for the last 30 years with my colleagues about psychiatry's broken. We need a better way.

Anyways, I'm in my psychiatric residency. I'm 28 years old, and a professor said, you don't have to believe everything you think. And I'm like, holy shit, I've always believed everything I thought. And one day, how the AM thing came about is about 1991. I had a really hard day at work. I saw four suicidal patients, which is a lot. And two couples who hated each other, two teenagers who ran away from home. and I went home and I was I remember feeling tired and I came home to an ant infestation in my house

and I'm like seriously and I was cleaning up the ants I began because when you're a medical student you have to learn 50,000 new words and you're always making up nomenics and acronyms and I'm like automatic negative thoughts my patients are infested and the next day I brought a can of to work. And I put it on my coffee table. I said, I'm going to teach you to kill the ants today. You don't have to believe every stupid thing you think. And then over time, it morphed. I went to Pier 39 in San Francisco and I found an ant puppet and an ant eater puppet. And I would play with that because I'm also a child psychiatrist. And it's one of the most important things I do with people. whenever you feel sad or mad or nervous or out of control, write down what you're thinking.

Because the act of writing helps you get it out of your head. And then I have nine different types of ants. I talk about it in the book, like fortune telling, mind reading, labeling, guilt beating, blaming, guilt beating, blaming, identify what kind of ant it is, and then talk back to it. Now, were you any good at talking back to your mom and dad when you were a teenager? Yeah. I was excellent. Both my parents would tell you, I was excellent.

But nobody ever taught me to talk back to myself. And I've been picked on a lot by the media, which is frustrated and I don't like it. And recently, I got picked on again. And I'm like, I hate this. And so I wrote that down. I hate this. And then there's five questions. Like, is it true?

Yes, I hate this. Is it absolutely true? No, because I keep doing the things that bring negative attention to myself. You know, if you're going to be in a war, you have to be able to have armor. And so I'm like, no, not absolutely. How does it make me feel anxious? How would I feel without it? Normal.

The fifth question. question is the best question. Let's take the original thought. I hate this. Turn it to the opposite. This is like Byron Katie's work type thing? It is. Yeah, okay. But a bit on steroids. Okay. And it's like, I love this. And then focus on, well, which one's really true? And I love being in the fight. Yeah. of changing a medical specialty. I actually had done a lot of work with Byron Kady and have her scan, which wasn't healthy.

But then it was. But she's the most peaceful person. And you find when you don't believe your thoughts, you don't suffer. I'm a big fan of her work. It's beautiful you guys got to work together. Going back to criticism, I think I've seen what you're talking about. Obviously, we're friends, we're colleagues, you know, we're always kind of aware of what's out there in the zeitgeist.

And I feel like, okay, great, you can have thoughts about people's approaches, things like that. But especially when, you know, there's like the clickbait component, there's certain celebrities that when people write about them, that article is just going to be that much more read by people. Right. So people love, and you've worked with a lot of celebrities. over your career. And I felt like the part that felt most disingenuous is that so many times the media wants to criticize celebrities for having unhealthy habits, for, you know, not talking about things that are maybe like positive, whatever it might be. And now here are a group of people that are seeking out genuine help and have publicly talked about how they've gotten better

by following a protocol that you've put together for them and that insight. And now we want to go after people who are genuinely trying to be an example of improving their life to their followers, all day long we want to criticize people for not making a positive statement or not trying to be a good example. That was one of the most disingenuous parts that I felt from them. They go after them. They go after me. It's like this person just said, I changed their life. So now why are you looking for crap on me? And it's irritating. But at the same time, one of my NFL players said they only try to tackle people with the ball. Yeah.

So, yeah, I've been very disappointed in the media because it's no longer about the news. It's about clicks. In fact, in the Washington Post, one of my friends did an internship there. And she said they actually have a board in the newsroom on which stories, online get the most clicks. So it's driven in large part by hatred and fear, because that's what

gets the most clicks. And ultimately, when I'm out in public, people recognize me. And in 30 years, I've only had one person be unhappy with me in public. And everybody else has said, you've changed my son's life. Or thank you for your work. And, Ultimately, I have this great rule in the book I talk about, the 1840-60 rule that says when you're 18, you worry about what everybody's thinking of you. And when you're 40, you don't give a damn what anybody thinks about you. And when you're 60, you realize nobody has been thinking about you at all. And even people who have big followings, most people aren't thinking about us.

They are thinking about themselves. So if something negative comes out, I'm like, not the first time, it's not going to be the last time. And I love what I do. Yeah. You're fighting the good fight. That's why, you know, Warrior seems to be a theme amongst a lot of the stuff that you do and the work and you're giving back. And, you know, you stepped into this position and you're taking the hits, but it's for the larger aspect of the community. and people who are suffering, getting a chance to benefit.

I know I've benefited from your work. A lot of my friends have as well. And I just want to acknowledge you for being in the fight. Thank you. Dr. Amen, this has been great. The book is out there. All the best hits inside of it. Change your brain every day.

Simple daily practices to strengthen your mind, memory, moods, focus, energy habits, and even your relationships. Send you all the good vibes for this book. Anything additional you want to mention about where to send our followers who are right up the alley of everything, brain health? Amenclinics.com to learn about our clinical services, Brain MD, which I'm so proud of, our supplement company that's just grown like crazy to nourish your brain. Amen University for courses. and they can follow me, Doc underscore Eamon on Instagram

and Doc Eamon on TikTok of all places. I love it. Hit the new generation. That's where they're at. They need brain help just as much as anybody else does. Thank you for letting me use your studio and thank you for being part of this interview. Super appreciate you. Thanks, Drew.