The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett - No.1 Brain Doctor: This Parenting Mistake Ruins Your Kids Brains! Alcohol Is Destroying Your Brain! A Stagnant Career Leads To Alzheimers! Dr Daniel Amen

Episode Date: February 10, 2025

Are our brains under attack? Based on a bank of over 200,000 brain scans, Dr Daniel Amen reveals the hidden threats silently destroying our minds and steps to fight back   Dr Daniel Amen is a psychiatrist and brain disorder specialist, and founder and CEO of the Amen Clinics. He is the bestselling author of books such as, ‘Change Your Brain Every Day’ and ‘Raising Mentally Strong Kids’.  In this conversation, Dr Daniel and Steven discuss topics such as, how alcohol shrinks your brain, the link between Alzheimer’s and depression, how heartbreak is equal to heroin withdrawal, and and the impact of social media on the brain.  00:00 Intro 02:25 Why This Conversation Is Important 03:58 How Many Brains Has Daniel Scanned? 04:45 Brain Rot: Why Are People Caring About Their Brains Now? 05:38 Is There a Link Between Porn Consumption and Brain Health? 08:34 Can I Fix My Brain? 09:52 Why Do People Come to See Daniel? 11:10 Alcohol Is Bad for the Brain 15:11 What Does a Brain Look Like After Heavy Drinking? 16:39 Why Does Brain Size Matter? 20:10 Alcohol Is Aging Your Brain 21:36 How Bad Are Drugs for the Brain? 26:38 What's Wrong With Magic Mushrooms? 33:01 Are Antidepressants Being Oversubscribed? Proven Alternatives 39:26 Can You See Trauma on the Brain? 42:59 Things You Can Do at Home to Help Trauma 45:27 The Impact of Negative Thinking on the Brain 46:48 Low Anxiety Will Kill You 48:46 How to Become More Disciplined and Motivated 53:21 How to Calm Your Worries 59:50 Can Extremely Negative People Become Positive? 1:00:29 Ads 1:01:28 Who Is Elizabeth Smart? 1:03:35 Horrific Events Don’t Necessarily Define Who You Are 1:05:23 The Impact of Stress During Pregnancy on Your Child 1:09:03 The Cause of Alzheimer's 1:14:03 The Impact of a Fatty Fish Diet 1:16:12 The Impact of Hope and Grief on the Brain 1:23:55 How Do You Raise the Perfect Brain? 1:30:07 What Are the Non-Obvious Ways to Help Children's Brains? 1:33:57 Ads 1:35:01 Is ADHD Increasing in Our Population? 1:40:32 Daniel Amen’s Daughter 1:43:11 Different Types of ADHD 1:46:12 Can You See Love on the Brain? 1:47:46 What Change Would Daniel Like to See in the World? 1:53:20 Mindfulness and Meditation 1:54:45 Ice Baths 1:55:10 Loving Your Job 1:56:17 Breath work 1:56:56 Social Media and Its Effects on the Brain 1:57:07 Hustle Culture 1:57:42 Microplastics 1:58:06 Noise Pollution 1:59:31 Is AI Going to Be Good or Bad for Our Brains? 2:01:46 Are Brains Getting Bigger or Smaller? 2:03:16 What's the Most Important Thing We Didn't Talk About? 2:05:14 Has Scanning Brains Changed Daniel’s Belief in God? 2:05:32 The Effects of Religion on the Brain 2:09:21 The LA Fires and Their Impact on the Brain 2:13:00 Guest’s Last Question Follow Dr Amen:  Instagram - https://g2ul0.app.link/t3fyeyooNQb  Twitter - https://g2ul0.app.link/UmRfScqoNQb  Podcast - https://g2ul0.app.link/Lfnd1rmoNQb  Amen Clinics - https://g2ul0.app.link/W1oBV9roNQb  BrainMD Supplements - https://g2ul0.app.link/SZLrxBtoNQb  To support Change Your Brain Foundation - https://g2ul0.app.link/Uq3shdvoNQb  You can purchase ‘Raising Mentally Strong Kids: How to Combine the Power of Neuroscience With Love and Logic to Grow Confident, Kind, Responsible, and Resilient Children and Young Adults’, here: https://g2ul0.app.link/lavOHXyoNQb Watch the episodes on Youtube - https://g2ul0.app.link/DOACEpisodes  My new book! 'The 33 Laws Of Business & Life' is out now - https://g2ul0.app.link/DOACBook  You can purchase the The Diary Of A CEO Conversation Cards: Second Edition, here: https://g2ul0.app.link/f31dsUttKKb  Follow me: https://g2ul0.app.link/gnGqL4IsKKb Independent research - danielamen.tiiny.co Sponsors: Linkedin Ads - https://www.linkedin.com/DIARY PerfectTed - https://www.perfectted.com with code DIARY40 for 40% off   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

There are in fact many roads to Alzheimer's disease. And it's things like marijuana, alcohol, and football. And then a study found that people that had a simple carbohydrate-based diet had a 400% increased risk of getting Alzheimer's. But one of the major causes is... Gosh. Dr. Daniel Amon is the renowned psychiatrist and brain health expert who has scanned over 260,000 brains, including Justin Bieber, Miley Cyrus and Kendall Jenner

to determine what we need to do for optimum brain health. In 2024, the word of the year was brain rot. Why? Because people are worried that their habits are shrinking their brain. Like food, gaming, social media, pornography. What about working with assholes? Bad for your brain. And then, is there anything non-obvious

that we do to our children's brains? Yes, and this is so important, because this is one thing a lot of parents do without knowing the consequences for their children. And we'll talk about that. What about the negative thinking? Well, we just published this huge study on this, and the science is really clear.

It decreases activity in your prefrontal cortex, which impacts your motivation, focus, and mood. It is detrimental to your brain. So how can you kill the negative thoughts? Well, there's a whole bunch of things. One is sapon. Head-to-head has been shown to be equally effective. There's anti-depressants.

And then whenever you feel sad or mad or nervous, what I want you to do is it's so simple. I find it incredibly fascinating that when we look at the back end of Spotify and Apple and our audio channels, the majority of people that watch this podcast haven't yet hit the follow button or the subscribe button wherever you're listening to this. I would like to make a deal with you. If you could do me a huge favour and hit that subscribe button, I will work tirelessly from now until forever to make the show better and better and better and better. I can't tell you how much it helps when you hit that subscribe button. The show gets bigger, which means we can expand the production, bring in all

the guests you want to see and continue to doing this thing we love. If you could do me that small favour and hit the follow button, wherever you're listening to this, that would mean the world to me. That is the only favor I will ever ask you. Thank you so much for your time. Back to this episode. Dr. Daniel Amon, if someone's just clicked on this conversation now and they have no idea

who you are, which is highly, highly unlikely, can you tell me why listening to you and this conversation and the work that we're about to go through now is so important for everyone, even those who believe that right now they have no issues? Everybody has a brain that's listening. It controls everything they do, how they think, how they think, how they feel,

how they act, how they get along with other people. And most people know it but don't. Your brain is the organ of intelligence, character, and every decision you make. And when it works right, you work right. And when it doesn't, you have trouble. And most people have no idea that their bad decisions, their sadness, their anxiety, their insomnia, their poor relationship has to do with the physical functioning of their brain. So if they want to be happier,

they need to think about loving and caring for their brain. Optimize your brain, you optimize your mind's ability. You mentioned scanning brains there. Remind me again how many people's brains you've scanned now. So it's now about 260,000. 260,000 people's brains. And you've scanned some famous brains. Yes, actually people from nine months old to 105 105 from 155 countries.

And it's public knowledge. I've been in Justin Bieber's docuseries seasons. I scanned his brain. I've scanned Miley Cyrus's brain. Mel Gibson just went on Joe Rogan and talked about me scanning his brain. Muhammad Ali, Mike Tyson, Jake Paul. You also scanned my brain and you actually taught me a lot from scanning my brain, which I'm...

And did you think about your brain after we talked about it? Of course, I think about it all the time now. It's also interesting that in 2024, the year just gone, the word of the year was the word brain rot. And that's interesting because the subject of the brain, I don't think, has been given the credit and the attention it deserves really until recently and much of your work has played into that. Why do you think, if you had to guess, why do you think Oxford University's word of the year was brain rot. Because people are worried that their habits are shrinking their brain, especially social media and digital addictions. I'm so hoping they'll go to brain health, as be more aspirational.

We've talked about a lot of things on this show. One of the things that really stuck with me is how the content we consume can have a profound impact on our brains. We often think of the chemicals, the drugs, the alcohol and all those things which I want to talk about. But one such piece of content which I don't think we have talked about is the impact of pornography on the brain. Is there a link between brain health and pornography consumption? You know, it's such an important question. And the first thing that comes to my mind is

Exposing developing brains to pornography is so dangerous. And eight, nine, ten-year-old boys are being exposed to the internet where they can see all sorts of pornography when their brains aren't anywhere near the ability to discern what's good, what's not good, what's healthy, what's not healthy. And it's deadening, and I use that word purposefully, the nucleus accumbens, which is the area of your brain that produces, that responds to dopamine. So dopamine, and I know you've done podcasts on dopamine, it's the neurotransmitter that helps us with motivation, which helps us with focus, which helps us with happiness and mood. And when the nucleus accumbens gets hit repeatedly with pornographic images, it's like dopamine, dopamine, dopamine.

It begins to deaden that area. And then you need more and more to begin to feel anything at all. That's why fame is so hard on the brain. But pornography, especially in the young, is incredibly damaging to the brain. So is that applicable to all things that cause like a really sharp burst of dopamine and stimulation? So you said there fame, pornography, I mean, potentially gaming or gambling, those kinds of things.

Alcohol is obviously one of those kinds of things. Alcohol is obviously one of those things as well. Cocaine. Cocaine, especially for a developing brain. Especially for a developing brain. If there's any message, protect your brain until you're 25. And then your brain will protect you. But until then, your prefrontal cortex, that from third of your brain, is not fully developed. It's just sort of like God gave you parents.

It's like, so you supervise. It's like, oh, my teenagers hate it if I supervise them. And yeah, they hate it more if you don't. But what if you get to 25 and you're listening to this now and you go, Jesus, does this mean that I can do nothing about my brain? Of course not. I mean, what I've shown is let's just take the NFL work. Big damage, right?

Let's stop lying about this. Football is a brain damaging sport. And soccer as well is a brain damaging sport. So high levels of damage. 80% of my NFL players got better when we put them on a rehabilitation program. So, if you've been bad to your brain, like nonstop gaming, lots of pornography, terrible food, and all of a sudden you go, oh, I can have a better brain. Your brain can be better in as little as a couple of months where you just feel better, think better, your mood is better. But it has to start with this concept. I think we've talked about brain envy. You have to want to have a better brain.

When people come to you, what is it they're typically motivated by? Like, when they come to you, why do they come to you? Is it because they've heard of your work on the internet and they want to just, they're curious about getting their brain scanned? Or do they usually come with a symptom or some other ailment? Now, usually they come because they're in pain, that they're anxious, they're depressed, their marriage is falling apart, or their wife says, come or I'm going to divorce you. It's not an uncommon thing, or they're struggling in school. They're not living up to their potential in one way or another. Now about 10% of the people come to us go, I'm fine, but I want to see, and I want to

be better, and I don't want Alzheimer's. So a lot of people come because they love a parent or grandparent that has Alzheimer's. They realize there's a genetic component to it and they don't want to have that. But that's really someone who is forward thinking. I think more people come because they're hurting. What evidence have we got that alcohol is bad for the brain and bad for the rest of our body, especially in moderation? Well, the US Surgeon General just came out wanting to put cancer

warning labels on all alcohol. That's sort of big evidence. I mean, three years ago, the American Cancer Society came out against any alcohol because drinking any alcohol increases your risk of seven different cancers. And that's a big deal. And then the evidence I have, and my first clinic was outside of the Napa Valley in Northern California. So alcohol is a big thing. And as I was looking at scans, I'm like, your brain's older than you are, that alcohol is not a health food.

It is detrimental to brain function. And then, of course, you know, I've been a psychiatrist now. I decided to be a psychiatrist 46 years ago. The number one problem I see is someone drinks and they make a bad decision. Someone drinks and they say something to their partner that they just shouldn't have said, or they drink and they go to work, or they drink and they drive, or they drink and it just causes so much trouble. And in 1999, I did a show called The Truth About Drinking.

And we took a young adult who had trouble with alcohol, got him sober, scanned him, and then on national television, we got him drunk, just like he got drunk. And it just crashed his frontal lobes. And you just, it's so clear that alcohol takes the break off your brain. And so people use it to calm the brain down, but there's certain parts of your brain you really don't want to go offline. The part that says, don't say that, don't do that.

Is that just when I've had one drink and then when I sober up, I'm back to normal? Or is this chronic? Well, it depends. One drink will decrease in a mild way your decision making. When it becomes chronic, your life begins to get out of control. Because I'm wondering, you know, if people drink in moderation, are they going to see long-term impacts to their brain? What is their such thing as drinking just a little bit and being fine? I think there's always sort of a dose response. There was a study in Spain that looked at people who had mild, moderate, and severe drinking. And they compared them to people who didn't drink at all.

Even the people who only drank a little had disruptions in the white matter of their brain. Now, most people have heard about gray matter and white matter. Gray matter is nerve cell bodies, white matter is nerve cell tracks. So if you think of gray matter, it's where the computation is happening in the brain and white matter are like the highways. And so even a little bit of alcohol is creating potholes. It's disrupting the highways in the brain.

And if you're drinking a lot, you are prematurely aging your brain. You've scanned a lot of people who are alcoholics. Lots. I mean, I've got some scans here, which I'll put on the screen, but can you explain to me exactly what a brain looks like when the person has been drinking heavily for a long period of time? So, again, we do a study called SPECT, and SPECT looks at blood flow and activity. It looks at how the brain works. And for people who know the mitochondria, those are the little powerhouse energy plants in your cells.

The spec tracer, 49% of it is taken up by the mitochondria in the brain. So we're also looking at energy metabolism. And what we see with alcoholic brains is something we call scalloping, which is this global decrease in activity. So a healthy brain, full, even, symmetrical activity, it sort of look big, fat, and round. With alcohol or other drugs too, you see the brain begin to shrivel and you see it gets this wavy appearance and I'm like the real reason not to drink

is it damages your brain. So if you drink then you have a smaller brain than you would have otherwise? Correct. That's pretty scary. What does it, why does brain size matter? You know when people say it's going to shrink your brain? Why does that matter? So I often say the only organ where size really does matter is your brain because you don't want to lose brain tissue.

There is a part of your brain called the hippocampus which is on the inside of your temporal lobes right here, and it's really important. And it makes new stem cells every day, about 700. And if you're drinking, it's not allowing those new stem cells to take hold, to take root. You want to strengthen them so they will continue to support mood, memory, spatial orientation, spatial processing. So that's the symptoms. You're naming the inadvertently symptoms of someone who has damaged their hippocampus, right?

So poor memory, probably poor spatial awareness, brain fog. And mood. And mood. Issues. And judgment and impulse control. But it impacts the brain globally. So the cerebellum, so they're not going to process as quickly, their decisions are not going to be as good. I worked with my friend, B.J. Fogg, who wrote a wonderful book called Tiny Habits. He's the director of Stanford's persuasive technology lab, which is really on how people

change. And he and I work together because I'm always interested in how I can help my patients better. And I met him at a conference like 18 months after we worked together and he said, I just want to thank you. I'm like, why? He said, I wake up 100% every day. I'm like, why? I stopped drinking. Because people within there around me enough, they either drink more, I suspect, or they stop.

Isn't that what you want? You wake up 100% every day. Why would you ever do anything that damages stem cell production in your brain? One might argue that it's serving me in the short term. Of course, but there are lots of things that are like you see, you know, let's say you're married but you're at a conference and you see this really cute person. And you're like, oh, well, in the short run, that could be awesome.

And in the long run, you lose half your net worth and visit your children on the weekends. It's like, that's not a good thing. And, you know, in the short run, you feel more relaxed, right? With alcohol, you feel more relaxed. And in the long run, it increases your risk of Alzheimer's disease. Oh my, that's not a good trade off. On your blog, you published a study from 2019, sorry, from 2009.

It was a study on monkeys that showed a decline in new brain cell development. And in that study, there was a 58% decline in new brain cells and a 63% reduction in the survival rate of new cells from alcohol use. They had monkeys drinking alcohol? Yes, they had monkeys doing all sorts of things they shouldn't be doing. Which is effectively like premature brain aging. Right. And it's worse if you do it before your brain is finished developing. And so if you think of fraternities and sororities, I'm not a fan of sending children away to college.

And it's because you have all these underdeveloped brains or not fully developed brains, and you put them all together without appropriate adult supervision. And a lot of bad things happen at fraternity parties and sorority parties. They're drinking less though now. No, they're still drinking it. Oh really, those ones, okay. And now they're adding mushroom parties to it. So it's alcohol and psilocybin and marijuana because everybody thinks marijuana is innocuous,

which is a lie. Is it? Marijuana, which is a lie. And... Is it? Not marijuana? It's a lie. Yeah, and I was actually really upset. So President Biden, during the time he was running for president,

so this is 2019, he's on debate stage with a lot of other people, and they ask him if he would federally legalize marijuana. And he said, I don't think the science is decided. And no, I don't think I would. And Cory Booker, the senator from New Jersey, shamed Biden on national television. He said, man, are you high, which is just horrifying. And I'm watching this going.

The science is actually really clear. Marijuana is bad for the brain. I published a study on a thousand marijuana users. Every area of their brain is lower in activity. And just today, a study came out in the Journal of the American Medical Association on a thousand 21, thousand 27 marijuana users, it decreased activity in the hippocampus that affected their memory centers.

If you're a teenager and you use marijuana, in your 20s, you have a higher incidence of anxiety, depression, and suicide. This is not innocuous. And we've been advertised this load of crap, which is, oh, it's just good medicine. And for some people, it is helpful. But let's not say it's innocuous because that's a lie. And we are now, so many states have legalized marijuana for recreational use, including here in California.

And the mental health crisis is not better. If anything, it's dramatically worse. There's two issues here, isn't there? There's the impact cannabis has on the brain, and then there's the whole issue of legalisation. And as you were speaking, I was just looking at some of the research, and it says exactly what you said. It says that there was a study published in JAMA Network which examined over a thousand young adults' brains, and almost 70% of heavy users exhibited reduced brain activity during working memory tasks. The decline was associated with poor performance in retaining and using information. Long-term cannabis use has been linked to smaller hippocampus volume, which again impacts memory and learning. So I mean, the science is clear of what it's doing, but the question

of legalization is a whole other issue. Well, please don't put people who use marijuana in jail. Yeah. Like, that's just a bad use of money. Yeah. That's not smart. But the problem becomes we're not educating kids on the potential damage to brain development, which nobody really argues about.

Nobody's really, nobody reputable I know of is going, yeah, give it to teenagers and let them smoke all they want. No, it's just dumb. So it's a bigger question. And I think the answer, I have a high school course in, it's called Brain Thrive by 25. And we actually studied it in 16 schools.

Decreases drug, alcohol, and tobacco use, decreases depression and improves self-esteem. Why? We teach kids to love and care for their brain. You got your brain scanned, and now you love your brain more. You want it to be better. That's the answer.

It's not scanning everybody. It's educating everybody. Your brain controls everything you do. And when it works right, you work right. And when it doesn't, you don't. So let's love it and let's learn together how to optimize it. But the big innovation, Stephen, for 2025 in psychiatry are marijuana, psilocybin, and ketamine.

The street drugs of the 60s are coming back. And I'm like, I feel like I'm living in this insane world where we're not talking about you should eat better and exercise and learn not to believe every stupid thing you think. And meditation could calm your mind probably more effectively than alcohol or marijuana. It's not hard to learn. What's wrong with psilocybin magic mushrooms? Yeah, everybody's so excited about microdosing and it's a treatment for depression. And I think I've seen this story before.

So in the early 80s, Benzos, you know, like Xanax and Klonopin and Ativan, they were mommy's little helper. And this will really help your anxiety. The problem is they make your brain look older than you are and they're addictive as hell. Then there was alcohol as a health food, marijuana is innocuous, pain is the fifth vital sign, which led to the opiate epidemic. And now we're into mushrooms. Psilocybin-associated psychosis has gone up 300% in the last couple of years. That not for everybody, but for some vulnerable people, and we don't know who they are, it can flip them into a psychotic

episode. I'm like, we need to be careful. We need to be thoughtful. So psilocybin hasn't yet been legalized in the US. In Oregon. Oh, it has been in Oregon. Is it being delivered yet in Oregon? I think just now. Is it? So there was a two-year waiting period and they were training people to do psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy. But there isn't a psilocybin compound that's been approved yet by the FDA. So there's still,

I think it's stage three clinical trials, from what I understand. I was quite involved in that world as an investor once upon a time. So I understand the rigor to get these compounds clinically approved. And you're right. So in the early clinical trials, there's groups of 20 people in some of the early clinical trials. And as they're progressing now, I think getting to stage three, they need to have bigger sample sizes and make sure that these compounds are safe. And from what I've seen, a lot of people are trying to get it approved

in a clinical setting for cases of treatment resistant depression, where you do see, even in the studies that I've read, you see some people have adverse responses. So some people get worse and there's, you know, if you take someone who's treatment resistant, depressed and potentially suicidal and you give them a strong compound like psilocybin, some people can get worse. But for the ones that get better, it's pretty remarkable. It's like I've been, I remember

the first study that I read, I think, coming out of one of the London universities that's really leading on this, maybe Imperial College London or something. And it said something like 30% of people that did one dose of psilocybin went into clinical remission after 12 weeks after one dose. And there's really like nothing else that I can think of that can deliver that kind of response in that period of time. Ketamine. Ketamine, I mean MDMAs I think been... Ketamine can do it but then ketamine can also be addictive and can be problematic.

So I'm like well why wouldn't we scan them first and then try to figure out why you're depressed? Because if you think about it, depression is like chest pain. And nobody gets a diagnosis of chest pain. Why? It doesn't tell you what's causing it, and it doesn't tell you what to do for it. All sorts of things can cause chest pain, right? From a heart attack, a heart arrhythmia, a heart infection, gas, an ulcer, grief. All of those can cause chest pain. Well, there's a whole bunch of things that can cause depression, like loss, negative thinking, low thyroid, having a head injury,

being exposed to mold or mercury, LAD. It's like, if you don't look, if you just give everybody your depressed based on these nine symptoms, and now we go give everybody an SSRI, which is ludicrous, because that's assuming everybody with, it's sort of like giving everybody

with chest pain nitroglycerin, which is stupid, right? You would never give everybody who has chest pain one treatment. You'd go, I have to target the treatment to the cause. But if you never look, you have no idea. So for example, I was on the Kardashians. And so it's public that I saw Kendall and I saw her for post-COVID anxiety. Her brain was on fire from COVID.

And a lot of people don't understand that COVID and other infections can cause inflammation in the brain. Well, that's not a psilocybin thing. That's an anti-inflammatory cocktail to help post-COVID anxiety or post-COVID depression. If you don't look, you don't know, you end up flying blind. And that's what I've been fighting with my colleagues for the last 33 years. It's how do you know unless you look?

And what other medical specialists never look at the organ they treat? So we could talk about, oh, I've seen these amazing results, and I think we should see, well, what's the scan pattern that you're going to respond to psilocybin or Lexapro or ketamine or Lamictal, right? I mean, it's great we have all these treatments, but let's not fly blind when we don't have to. There's this graph I saw the other day circulating around the internet, which I'm going to show

you. I'll put it on the screen for anybody that can't see it. But it shows globally which countries distribute the most antidepressant pills, SSRIs, and the United States leads the way by a long margin. I mean, I think in looking at that graph, it's almost 10 times more antidepressant pills per person are handed out in the United States than otheridepressant pills like their water or something? That's such an interesting graph. Because here in America, we want the fast answer. I don't feel well, fix me. And what doctors have, do you know 85% of psychiatric drugs in America are prescribed

by non-psychiatric physicians in seven-minute office visits that do standard of care 12% of the time? What does that mean? That they do what most doctors would consider good medicine, 12% of the time. So you go to your family doctor, your nurse practitioner, and you go, I'm sad, I'm anxious, I'm not sleeping. You might, and we hear this all the time in Amon clinics, I have 11 clinics around the United States,

we hear it all the time that I went to my doctor and he gave me a prescription for Lexapro, Xanax, and Ambien. And it just blows my mind that they would put you on something that changes your brain to need them in order for you to feel normal. See, people don't understand. And I am not opposed to medication. I use it when I think I need to.

But let's be clear. They do not heal, fix anything. What they do is they suppress symptoms. But then once they've suppressed the symptoms, they've changed your brain. So you need them in order to feel okay. I don't like that. What can I do naturally? Head to head against antidepressants, saffron has been shown to be equally effective,

the spice saffron. Head to head against antidepressants, walking like you're late 45 minutes, four times a week, equally effective. Head to head against antidepressants, taking omega-3 fatty acids, equally effective in a study from Australia. Head to head against antidepressants, learning how to not believe every stupid thing you think has been shown to be equally effective. So why not, if you're depressed and you can't get scanned, start walking. Take omega-3 fatty acids and saffron and learn how to kill the ants.

Ants stands for automatic negative thoughts. The thoughts that come into your mind automatically and ruin your day. And we grow up, I don't know if the same thing is in England, there's no training on how to manage your mind. I was 28 years old in my psychiatric residency when one of my professors said, you have to teach your patients not to believe every stupid thing they think. And I'm 28.

And I'm in my residency, which means I finished college, I finished medical school, and I believe every stupid thing I think, that no one had ever taught me how to manage my own thoughts. I can't believe that thing you just said about saffron. I was reading about it here. It says research indicates that saffron may be as effective as SSRIs in treating mild and moderate depression and a meta-analysis of eight studies found no difference between saffron and SSRIs

in reducing depressive symptoms. But in fact, the side of fact profile is probably better for saffron. So I got interested in saffron about 25 years ago because I saw a study. So there are now 25 randomized controlled trials showing that saffron is as effective as SSRIs and other antidepressants.

But the thing that caught my interest, this may speak more about me, is they didn't decrease sexual function. In fact, they enhanced it. And so I've been a psychiatrist a long time and SSRIs for the right brain, they work, but they make it harder to have an orgasm. They decrease your libido. And I don't like that. I don't want to separate. If you're depressed, you already separated from your partner. If you're depressed and you can't have an orgasm, or you're not interested, that's damaging not only to you, but it damages your partner.

And so when I thought, saffron can enhance sexual function, and I'm like, okay, I'm paying attention. And so I have collected every study ever published on saffron and brain and mental health. There's actually five studies showing it enhances memory, that it was as good as Aricept in people, Aricept's a medicine we use in Alzheimer's disease, and it's as good as Aricept, so it helps memory, it helps mood,

it helps sexual function. I'm like, mood, memory, and sex, I'm going to take it. Mood, memory, and sex. So, yeah, I love saffron. So why wouldn't we start with that and exercise and learn to manage your mind rather than start with Lexapro or even psilocybin or ketamine? One of the things when people are talking about psychedelics that they're trying to treat is trauma, early childhood trauma.

Is that something that you can see if you looked at my brain? Could you see trauma on my brain? Yes. And have you looked at trauma? There's a diamond pattern that I've written about. I published in, actually Discover Magazine in 2016 listed my study. So I published a study on 21,000 people showing we could separate post-traumatic stress disorder from traumatic brain injury with high levels of accuracy.

And then we repeated the study on soldiers and showed the same thing. And this year, I just published the world's largest study on childhood trauma. So do you know the ACE score? Yes, which is a measure of childhood trauma. Child childhood trauma. So do you know the ACE score? Yes, which is a measure of childhood trauma. Childhood trauma, adverse childhood experiences. So it's on a scale of zero to 10. How many bad things happen to you as a child? Physical, emotional, sexual abuse, neglect, being raised with a parent that has a mental illness, that's incarcerated, addiction,

watching your mother be abused. So domestic violence. So 0 to 10. I'm a 1. My wife's an 8. We adopted our two nieces who are both nines. And so I'm very interested in childhood trauma. So a nine is good or bad?

Nine is terrible. Okay, so high the number. So zero means you have none of those. Okay. Eight, you have a lot. And if you have four or more, you have an increased risk of seven of the top 10 leading causes of death. If you have six or more, so my wife's in eight, my nieces are nines, you die 20 years earlier than the general population.

And in our study, what we showed, the more aces you had, the more activation of your limbic structures, especially a very interesting area called the anterior cingulate gyrus. I think of this as the brain's gear shifter. Let you go from thought to thought, move from idea to idea, be flexible, go with the flow. And when this is overactive, people worry.

They hold on to things. It's like the trauma is always in front of them. And I often do timeline. I ask people, do you see your life going from left to right or from front to back? And I see the past behind me. My wife sees the past in front of her. And that's often what you see with trauma. And their brain becomes overactive

in their emotional brain, which makes them at higher risk for pain syndromes, higher risk for anxiety, higher risk for depression, higher risk for insomnia, that they're sort of always looking for bad things to happen. Is there anything someone can do at home? Because, you know, not everybody can afford to go to a therapist, it's hard to get access to these kind of treatments. If I have some kind of trapped trauma or traumatic experience PTSD that I've been through and I don't have any money at all, what would you recommend for me? Well I mean the first thing I

want everyone to do is love their brain, right? The healthier your brain and before we started we talked about this idea it's the brain you bring into trauma that often determines how you deal with it. And to get well, you have to get your brain healthy. So that's the first thing. So that means getting off the alcohol, exercise, eat well. Certain simple supplements. Yes. And then multiple vitamins for basic nutrition, know your vitamin D level and optimize it.

And most people need to supplement vitamin D. And if you have darker skin, you need five times the level of sun as someone from Northern Europe to get a healthy vitamin D level. So you should know your vitamin D level and optimize it. Like I always say, can't change what you don't measure and vitamin D is a very important number to know.

So multiple vitamin, vitamin D, omega-3 fatty acid. I did a study, 50 consecutive patient stamen clinics who are not taking Vitamin D. We measured their Omega-3 index. 49 were suboptimal. And so I think most people would benefit from an Omega-3 fatty acid supplement. And then it sort of depends. If you have issues with your mood, saffron would be great. If you tend to be anxious, don't go for the benzo.

Theanine, ashwagandha, magnesium, GABA, diaphragmatic breathing, hypnosis, so many things to help anxiety before you ever go to something that's addictive that makes your brain look older than you are that increases your risk of dementia. One of the really, really interesting things that you mentioned, which I had never heard of or thought of before, is the impact of negative thinking on your brain? We just published this huge study on negativity bias and it's not good for your frontal lobes

and so I love doing positivity bias training. Like I train all of my patients, start every day. Today is going to be a great day. I mean, somebody asked me today if I believe in manifestation. Sort of. I think you have to tell your brain what you want and then your brain will figure out how to get it. And so if you go, today is going to be a great day, your brain starts looking like, well,

why is today going to be a great day? And when you go to bed at night, what went well today? That's so helpful to just start programming your brain to look for what's right, not just for what's wrong. Virtually every depressed patient, I I said have a high negativity bias. And so training them to be more positive, not irrationally positive, because you need some anxiety. People who have low levels of anxiety die early from accidents and preventable illnesses.

People who have low levels of anxiety. Low levels of anxiety. So I always, I have an older brother who I love. But he's one of the don't worry, be happy people. And I sort of always wanted to be like him because I'm much more serious, much more driven. And I'm like, I wanted I want it to be like him until I read the research. The people who live the longest,

so there's a study from Stanford. They started in 1921, and they looked at 1,548 10-year-old children. And they were looking for what goes with success, health, and longevity. And what they found was shocking. The don't worry, be happy people died the earliest from accidents and preventable illnesses. The people who lived the longest, the one theme was they were conscientious. If they said they were going to show up, and they showed up reliably, consistently, they live longer than everyone else.

And that just shows they had good frontal function. It's like if I say I'm going to do something and I commit to it, I do it, you'll live longer. Could that be also linked to like discipline? Those people are more likely to be disciplined with other areas of the life habits, eating, gym. Yes, which means they had better frontal lobe function. So why would we ever take these guys, frontal lobes, offline? No, love your frontal lobes. This is why, when you have children, don't let them hit soccer balls with their forehead. It's just not a smart thing to do. I think that's probably a big thing people are thinking about this time of the year. So recording now in January 2025, wow. And everybody's thinking about

new year, new me. They're thinking about their new year's resolution, becoming a new person. Habits, motivation, discipline. These are like the trifecta of what I see people talking about the most at this time of year. With everything you understand about the brain, how do I become a more disciplined, motivated person who has better habits. So one, you take care of your brain. And two, you know when relapse happens. Relapse happens when you don't sleep. Okay.

When you've gone too long without eating. When blood sugar levels go low, relapse happens. You start making bad decisions. If you're a female, when you're in the last week of your cycle, because blood flow to your frontal lobe drops for many women, so I have five sisters and five daughters, I completely believe in PMS and I've scanned people best time of their cycle worst time It's like they are two different people sort of like they have multiple personality This work is their brain is just so different now, obviously not with all women, but for certain ones. It's a big

issue and if that ants are taken over, so if the automatic negative thoughts, which also tend to go up if you haven't slept, if you've gone too long without eating, if you're at that time of your cycle or you're under chronic stress or you're drinking or using other drugs. So you might suppress them, but then they come back and they attack you. So then you have to suppress them again and this is how addiction starts. So is it fair to say that if you're trying to change who you are and you're trying to establish a new habit

or crack motivation, then the goal shouldn't be necessarily to get a six pack. It should probably be something further upstream like sleep well or... Better frontal lobes. And so how do I get better frontal lobes? And it's three strategies. Frontal lobe envy, right? Brain envy, got to care about it. Avoid things that hurt damaging my frontal lobes and do things that strengthen my frontal lobes. We talked about two of these points earlier, but we talked about alcohol. But in the context of sleep, I've heard on, I think it was in your podcast, Change Your Brain, after two

drinks your REM sleep drops to roughly an hour. After four drinks, your REM sleep drops to 30 minutes. And after six drinks, your REM sleep drops to 30 minutes and after six drinks, your REM sleep drops to less than two minutes for many people. Obviously, these aren't specific numbers because everybody's brain is different, but it just goes to show, I guess, the relative drop in REM sleep, which is your restorative sleep based on alcohol consumption. And so if I drink, I'm not going to sleep while I'm not going to get restorative sleep. I wake up the next day, I'm going to struggle more with motivation and keeping any habit that I have. And anxiety and then it is going to be more ants. And then you're going to drink more

to shut up the ants. And then when they come back, they come back stronger. And by ants, you mean? The automatic negative thoughts. The chatter that hurts you. And we talked about how to kill them. So whenever you feel sad or mad or nervous or out of control, what I want you to do is just write it down and then ask yourself a series of questions.

And I have this cute diagram of the different types of ants. And I always ask my patients, so which are your ants? Are they like all or nothing ants? Were you thinking words like always, never, everyone, every time. Are they less than ants given to us by social media, where we compare ourselves to others in a negative way?

Guilt-beating ants, mind-reading ants, fortune-telling ants, blame ants. So identify the type. Do you have an example of a bad thought that just sort of runs around your head? Oh, gosh. I think I live in a permanent state of assuming I'm going to get bad news. And it doesn't haunt me. I think I'm generally quite a calm person and quite focused and peaceful in my brain. But I think because I've ran companies for the last 10 years or longer, you're always just about to get bad news.

So I think that can be playing on the radio in the background somewhere. Like I'm going to open an email and it's going to be bad news. There's so many opportunities for bad news in my world. So yeah. Yeah. So I think you write it down. This is going to be bad news. There's so many opportunities for bad news in my world. So yeah. Yeah, so I think you write it down. This is going to be bad. And then my friend Byron Katie has this process that I've refined a bit.

So that's a fortune telling ant. And so this is going to be bad news. Or I always get bad news, fortune telling, and all or nothing. And so the first question is, is it true? No. The second question, is it absolutely true? With 100% certainty, and if one is no,

two is automatically no. The third question is, how does that thought make me feel? On edge. On edge. How does the thought make me act? So the third question has three parts. How does the thought make me feel? Tense on edge. How does it make me act? Removed. What's that word? Is it apathetic? Redicent.

Yeah. Yeah. And the third part of that, what's the outcome of believing it's always going to be bad? News. I mean there's no good outcome, really. Suffering. Yeah. Suffering, yeah. The fourth question is how would you feel if you didn't have that thought? Free.

And how would you act? Happier and more present. And the outcome of not having that thought? Better relationships. Better life. Because you're more present. Yeah. Yeah. Because you're more present. And then the fifth question, so the first one is, is it true?

The second one, is it absolutely true? The third one, how would I, how do I feel, act, and what's the outcome of having this thought? The fourth question is, how would I feel, act, and what's the outcome of not having the thought? The fifth question is, how would I feel, act, and what's the outcome not having the thought? The fifth question's my favorite. Just take the thought and turn it to the opposite, and then ask yourself, is that true?

So, it's gonna be good news. Or it's gonna be be good news or it's going to be innocuous news. And then go, yeah, 99 times out of a hundred. That's true. And then I would, cause I'm also a CEO. I'm like, well, how many of these things can't I handle? Virtually none of them. I can handle all of them, right? So I'll be okay. And then I meditate on the opposite of the thought

that's bothering me. And so I take these thoughts captive. I like that. And people who are depressed are infested with negativity. But you can train that. Your brain is healthy. It's easier to do. You can train that. But you imagine there's no second grade class in the world where teachers teach children not to believe every stupid thing they think. In fact, I was watching one of the confirmation hearings

today and the senators were filled with ants. They were distorting things, they were angry, they were making things more negative than they needed to be. We are modeled bad thinking. And the news does it purposefully because they know if they piss you off, if they scare you, you're going to tune in so they can sell you more copper underwear. So we're in a society that breeds these ant attacks. So you have to be careful. People who watch the news in the morning

are 27% less happy in the afternoon. And so you have to guard what goes in. So every day you're programming happiness or sadness. And I believe Dennis Prager has this great five minute video called Why Be Happy? And I love it so much. I wrote a book called You Happier. And I start with his idea that happiness is a moral obligation. And I'm like, so I grew up not too far from here.

I went to Catholic school. My mom was very serious about being Catholic. And growing up, the idea happiness is a moral obligation was nowhere in my childhood. and I had a good childhood. Why is it a moral obligation? Because of how you impact other people. If you were raised by an unhappy parent, or married to an unhappy spouse,

or raised in an unhappy child, and you ask those people, is happiness an ethical issue? They would all say yes. So is it wrong to program your mind to look for what's right? It's hard for some people. It's just a pattern, right? It's like getting biceps are hard.

But it's not, right? It's just repeatedly doing the same thing that gives you the desire you want. Have you seen someone shift from being a stereotypically negative person, down and out, negative, depressed, to the opposite. Yes. Truly the opposite. A lot. But you got to do the process.

You got to do the work. When you love yourself, you do the work. Like I come from a family of fat people, but I'm not. Why? Because I know it's a risk for me. And so every day of my life, I'm on an obesity prevention plan. And I wish I didn't have to be, right? I wish I could just eat anything I want and it would be okay.

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That's linkedin.com slash diary. And of course course terms and conditions apply and only available on LinkedIn ads. Now for people that don't know who Elizabeth Smart is, who is she and what did you learn from scanning her brain? So Elizabeth is someone who made really international news. Many years ago, she was kidnapped when she was a teenager and virtually raped every day for nine months. And then she was found that she was actually very smart and she manipulated her kidnappers to bring her back to Utah,

Salt Lake City, where they kidnapped her from, and she was found by the police. And one would think she would have severe, lasting post-traumatic stress disorder. And I was very interested to scan her and be helpful to her. She in fact did not have post-traumatic stress disorder. She had post-traumatic growth. She took her trauma and made something special out of it,

where she actually runs an organization for women who have been abused. And I just remember sitting there, and her brain was actually quite healthy. I think she helped me more than I helped her. Just so fascinated by how she could take something that's truly horrifying and come out of it and be quite okay. And she's how old now?

She's in her thirties. And she's in a relationship, married? She's married. She has children. She's run old now? She's in her thirties. And she's in a relationship, married? She's married, she has children, she's run in an organization, she speaks around the country. I mean, when people hear that, they might begin to question how they think about trauma, because we think of trauma as a very deterministic thing.

I, if that happens to you, I can predict that you're gonna be X,'re going to be, you know, maybe depressed, you're not going to be socially functioning, you're probably not going to have functional good relationships. That's the kind of thing we think when we hear about such a horrific event, we kind of see it as deterministic of who you then become, but she's proving that that's not the case. Now, in fact, of people who go through something really terrible, about 10% of people will develop PTSD, and about 10% of people will develop post-traumatic growth. And most people sort of land in the middle. I wrote an article in 1982 when I was a resident at Walter Reed called post-Vietnam stress disorder, a metaphor for current and past life events. And it was when

I was a resident I got the idea it's the brain you bring into Vietnam that often determines the brain that comes out of Vietnam. That if you grew up in an alcoholic home, or you grew up with a lot of stress, you are much more likely to become a heroin addict and much more likely to come home and struggle. Obviously not always. But there's a concept since I started imaging that I just dearly love so much called brain

reserve. So brain reserve is the extra tissue you have to deal with whatever stress comes your way. Brain reserve actually starts before you were conceived. So you get your brain wrapped around that a little bit, this idea of epigenetics, that if your parents grew up in trauma and abuse, it changed their genes to make you more vulnerable. And if, so your genetic history matters, the health of your mom while she's carrying you, your brain starts to develop three weeks after she gets pregnant. Three weeks, like about day 21. So her stress level, her infectious disease level burden,

her nutrition, her sleep, all of these things matter. One of my patients' wife is pregnant. I'm like, you need to be nice to her. You need to like lower her stress because your child, that this has generational consequences. And then when you're born, how did the birth go? And then as a child, what was your nutrition like? What were your stress levels?

Like, did you play football? Did you fall off the swing? All of those things are either building your brain reserve or stealing your brain reserve. So when you get kidnapped or let's just take two soldiers They're in the same tank. They go over an IED. So the tank is blown up. One walks away unharmed. The other one's permanently disabled. Why?

It's their brain reserve. The brain they brought into the explosion often determines how they are. So I argue we should always be building reserve. And I turned 70 this year, and I know 50 of people, 85 and older, have Alzheimer's disease. One in two. Horrifying statistics. And so I know that. So between now and 15 years from now, what are the things I can do to build my reserve so the gravity of age has less impact on me. Because your brain is going to shrink with aging regardless of any... It's going to show. Although I have a whole group of super brains, people that are 80, 90, 105, like stunningly beautiful brains.

But they're people that had stunningly beautiful brain reserve habits. That they didn't smoke, they weren't drinkers, they ate well, they were not overweight. So on the subject of Alzheimer's, it's increasing globally. I was reading something I think from the Alzheimer's Association that said they're predicting by 2050 that there's going to be 150 or 160 million people globally that have Alzheimer's disease. There's still a lot of question marks around what causes it, what increases its probability, etc. But what do you think the cause of Alzheimer's is? I think there are many causes of it.

And the going wisdom until recently was excessive beta amyloid plaque formation caused Alzheimer's. And there's a lot of questions around that theory. I think I have a mnemonic I like called bright minds. You want to keep your brain healthy or rescue it. You have to prevent or treat the 11 major risk factors. So I think there are in fact many roads to Alzheimer's disease. And people go, what's the difference between Alzheimer's and dementia? Dementia is the umbrella category. You start

losing your faculties. Alzheimer's is one of the types. But the more you get into it, you realize it's a pretty mixed bag. And so bright minds, blood flow, retirement and aging, inflammation, genetics, head trauma, toxins, mental health. If a woman is depressed, it doubles her risk of Alzheimer's disease. If a man is depressed, it quadruples his risk of Alzheimer's. And then the sleeper in all of these is infections, immunity and infections. Many of us think it's a major, one of the major causes of Alzheimer's disease.

In fact, there's a new study out on COVID, people who had COVID had a significantly increased risk of getting Alzheimer's disease. people who had COVID had a significantly increased risk of getting Alzheimer's disease. And then neurohormones, and we have this epidemic of low testosterone in young males now, diabetes and sleep. Diabeticities, you either have high blood sugar

and or you're overweight and that one risk factor, if you have that one risk factor, now all of a sudden you have 10 of the 11 risk factors. If you have diabetes. If you're overweight or you have high blood sugar. It lowers blood flow to your brain. It prematurely ages your brain. It increases inflammation. Fat cells produce something called adipokines, which is inflammatory molecules. It changes your genetics, fat stores toxins.

You're more likely to be depressed. It damages your immunity, takes healthy testosterone, turns it into unhealthy cancer promoting forms of estrogen and impairs your sleep. Unomgously. And then people go, oh, but you're fat-ching. And it's like, no, I published a study on 33,000 people as your weight goes up, the size and function of the brain goes down.

Somebody's got to like say the truth. The truth is being in an unhealthy weight is unhealthy for your brain and body. I was reading some studies earlier on when I spoke to an insulin resistance expert. One of the things he said to me was that they now almost describe Alzheimer's as type 3 diabetes. That's a phrase that's often used. And when they look at brains that are insulin resistant, the person between 40 or 80% of the time, depending on which studies you look at, has insulin resistance, i.e. they've had elevated blood sugar levels which have caused an insulin resistance or something else that could be stress that causes insulin resistance

or many other things. But it's interesting to think of, as you said, that that one thing, which is the high blood sugar levels, insulin resistance can have such a profound impact on the brain. And if I've ever heard a case for being a bit more careful about sugar and other things that will spike my blood sugar levels chronically, I think that's probably it. Because your brain, as you said at the start of this conversation, drives everything in your life. And to think that sugar and over consumption of sugar, shall I say, has such a profound impact on the brain is, is pause for me because I don't like sugar

that much. You don't like it as much as you like your brain. Yeah. And my life. So there's a study from the Mayo Clinic where they looked at people who had primarily a fat-based diet. So fish, healthy oils, avocados, nuts and seeds, they had 42% less risk of getting Alzheimer's disease. And then they looked at people who had primarily a protein-based diet.

So think of a caveman diet, 21% less risk of getting Alzheimer's disease. And then they looked at people that had a standard American diet, simple carbohydrate-based diet, bread, pasta, potatoes, rice, fruit juice, sugar, a 400% increased risk of getting Alzheimer's disease. It's the sugar and the foods that quickly turn to sugar, which goes with the insulin diabetes type 3 hypothesis, you have to manage it. And the reason this is so important to me is having high blood sugar makes your blood brittle and more likely to break, which means it takes longer for things to heal and you're

more likely to have a stroke. And having a stroke increases your risk of Alzheimer's tenfold. So you're a fan of the keto diet. For some people. I find that it doesn't have enough plants in it, which means it's probably not gonna be awesome for your microbiome. So I'm more a fan of a paleo diet that has healthy fat, healthy protein, and lots of plants.

Mm-hmm. We've covered so much. There's, uh, the one thing we talked, we started talking about briefly, I think before we started recording, was the subject of hope and grief. I've never heard someone talk about the impact that grief has on the brain when we lose someone, when we're going through prolonged pain because of a loss. Oh, I know more about this than I want. It activates the limbic or emotional circuits in the brain. And so when you lose someone important to you, or even a pet. Like I had, maybe a white shepherd,

and so beautiful and so sweet, and he's got cancer. And when he died, he still lives in my head. And I lost someone important to me about 20 years ago. And for like a year, I was just not okay. And so I scanned myself and my emotional brain was so busy. And it's like when you have someone, they actually become ingrained in every fun place in your brain.

So they get stored in multiple places in your brain. And when they're not there anymore, your brain still looks for them. And figuring out ways to sort of calm down your emotional brain can be so helpful. What part of the brain is that? Is that the amygdala? No. It's more the insular cortex and the thalamus.

And that's what we found with depression. I published a study with scientists from USC and Los Angeles Children's Hospital on depression. And what we found, those were the structures that were dramatically overactive compared to people who were not depressed. So in grief, the prefrontal cortex, assuming because that's the more rational part of the brain, that's probably gonna be quieter. Right.

And so it's the prefrontal cortex you bring in to the loss that often determines how you deal with it. Okay. And so your emotional brain fires up if you're drinking and taking the prefrontal cortex offline, it can't manage it. So one thing people don't understand is the fibers from the prefrontal cortex

to the rest of the brain are inhibitory, which means they calm things down. So if this isn't working right, the emotional part can sort of override it, and it becomes problematic. And so protecting this is so important to managing so much of your life. I mean, it's really the human, most human thoughtful part of us. And what we found within hope was that insular cortex was low. It's really interesting to us. And hope is tomorrow can be better

and I have a part in it. When you're hopeless, you don't believe you have agency to make tomorrow better. agency to make tomorrow better. And so often there are hope training courses that can be good and I with all of my patients I do this exercise called the one-page miracle I referred to earlier. It's like write down what do you want? Relationships, work, money, physical, emotional, spiritual health, all these things, write it down. And so we talked earlier about

we're recording this in January. I have all my patients do it when I first see them. And then every January for sure. And then you just ask yourself, does my behavior get me what I want? Just ask yourself, does my behavior get me what I want? But it starts with, what do you want? You have to write it down. Like with my wife, I'm very clear.

I want a kind, caring, loving, supportive, passionate relationship. Always want that. Don't always feel like that. I had these rude thoughts that show up or conflicting ideas that'll just show up in my head. And I'm like, oh no, don't say that. No, don't do that, because it doesn't fit.

And it's been the best relationship of my life because both of us have the same goals and we're pretty good at matching our behavior to the goal. And as a CEO, right, what do you do with companies? You have a business plan. And then you have regular meetings and key performance indicators to like go, how are we doing? And if we're not doing great, we change. But it always starts with plan.

And most individuals never have a plan. So they're kind of just being dragged around by whatever. And now in social media, it's very dangerous because you might want what the Kardashians have. And it's like, wait a minute, relationships, work, money, physical, emotional, spiritual health. And then if I had tattoos, I don't yet. My wife got one and freaked me out. It's my daughter's birthday.

But the tattoo would be, does it fit? Know what you want and then ask yourself every day, my behavior, get me what I want. And some people go, well, isn't that selfish? It's like, absolutely not. Cause if I'm good, I'm good for everyone around me. Your goal could be to be a great father. It absolutely should be a great father.

It's to be a loving husband, kind, caring, loving, supportive, passionate. It's, oh, by the way, when people do our program, their erections are better, just saying. Because blood flow is better when brain health is better. Because your brain uses 20% of the blood flow in your body. And so if you're working to have a healthy brain, everything works better. Jesse. Why did that come to mind when I asked about your goals? Well, because I went passionate and I'm like, okay, you have to be clear.

Or even think about work. You know, what's the goal with work? It's to do meaningful work. It's to make a difference. You're a father. I'm not a father yet, but I hope to be. I've got three little nieces. My brother's had three, two little nieces and one nephew. My brother's a year older than me and he's had three kids already so I've got some catching up to do. But as I'm progressing towards this season of life, one of the things I think about having met you is how to raise healthy brains. Like what parenting style is going to make sure that my kids have very healthy brains? There's so much conversation about parenting styles. Some people say just let them do whatever they want to do. Some people say be an authoritarian and put rules in place. I'm wondering from the perspective of someone who scanned 260,000 brains,

how do you raise a perfect brain? Well, one, you get rid of the idea that you're going to raise a perfect brain because there's a little OCD in there. There's a little OCD in there. The first thing you do is you have goals for yourself. What kind of parent do you want to be? And what kind of child do you want to raise? And for me, I want to be present, kind, and effective. And for my kids, I want them to be mentally strong and resilient.

And I want them to feel good about themselves. And then you bond with them. You wanna be a good dad? Bonding requires two things. Time, actual, physical time, and listening. So time, I have an exercise I love so much called special time. 20 minutes a day, do something with your child that your child wants to do, and during that time, no commands, no questions, no directions, just time to bond.

The most important thing to children is time with their parents. And people are busy. It doesn't have to be a lot. But if you do that 20 minutes a day, it's money in the relational bank. So my first literary agent, I think he was 42 when he had his first child. And he's like, my daughter, she's two. Laura never wants to be with me. I come home, she completely ignores me.

She just wants her mother. She wants nothing to do with me. That's because she's a girl, right? I'm like, absolutely not. Carl, you're ignoring her. What do you mean I'm ignoring her? I said, you're ignoring her. Do this. And I told him about special time.

And he's like, that won't work. I'm like, negativity bias. I'm like, oh great. You represent an idiot. You represent me and you're telling me it won't work. I said, do this, it works. And I'm gonna call you in three weeks. So I wrote him in my appointment book,

we had appointment books then. And three weeks later I called him. Carl, it's Daniel. Daniel, she won't leave me alone. All she wants to do is be with me. As soon as I get home, she grabs my leg and wants her time. I'm like, I told you, it works. It works.

Time, actual physical time, and then shut up. Listen. This is so important. Parents are awful at listening. You've heard of active listening? Yeah. So active listening, it's like so simple. Child says something.

Before you give your two cents, just repeat it back and sort of listen to the feelings behind the words. I wanna have blue hair. I know what my dad would have said. I said, I want to have blue hair. No way in hell, as long as you live in my house, you can have blue hair. But what does that do? It just shuts down the conversation or starts a fight.

Like, oh, you want to have blue hair. And then just be quiet. And then the child might say, everyone's doing that. My dad would say, I don't care what anyone else is doing. As long as you live in this house, you're not going to have blue hair. If they're going to jump off a cliff, are you going to go with them? Not helpful. Sounds like you want to be like the other kids.

And then he might say, sometimes I feel like I don't fit in, which is really the conversation you want to have. And my mother would have said, of course you fit in. You're a good boy. You're a good looking boy. And that's not helpful either. It's just helpful to listen. If you have time and you have listening, you bond, and then the kids tend to pick your

values because they're bonded. And then when they make a mistake, don't rescue them. Today, parents do way too much for their children, And they steal their self-esteem. I often say, if you do too much for your kids, you build your self-esteem by stealing theirs. And you're gonna be tempted because you're gonna have such love for them, you don't want them to hurt. And that's a mistake.

Because character is built through struggle. Character and self-esteem are built by feeling competent. You can solve problems. So when a child says, I'm bored, rather than, well, we could do this, or we could do that, or we could do this, go, I wonder what you're gonna do about it. In terms of their diet and lifestyle, am I right in thinking it's pretty obvious here?

Sugar, chemicals, toxins, these kinds of things are really, really bad for the child's brain. Is there anything non-obvious that we do to our children's brains? Well, I think the most important thing is you model the message. And there's a reason that all of the sugar poisoned cereals are on the bottom two aisles or the bottom two rows because that's where children can see them. And they're like, mommy, I want this. And I always want you to remember this rule. And I want you to consider sharing it with your children.

If you have a tantrum to get your way, the answer's no. It's always gonna be no. Go for it. I'm dead serious. The answer is no. It's always gonna be no. Go for it. I'm dead serious. We teach people how to treat us by what we tolerate. We train children to be bad by what we pay attention to. So I think that's always been a very effective rule for me. If you have a fit, the answer is no.

It's always going to be no and I'm not going to be fazed if you do. But what if they do it in a store? It's like you want long-term pain or short-term pain. Short-term pain is not given into the tantrum and there probably be a consequence when you come home for acting like that. So are you saying to ignore the tantrum? It's like I'm not giving in, like have fun with it. I am not giving in. We're at a friend's house and you have a fit? Well, one, there's going to be a consequence

when you come home. I don't know what it is, but I'm gonna think about it. It's such a great line. That in my book, Raising Mentally Strong Kids, we have lots of great lines for parents. And it's, I don't know what the consequence is, but I'm gonna think about it, just to increase their anxiety about it.

Because we want them thinking about their behavior and like in life, their consequences to bad behavior. We want them to think about what that might be. Might that stray into neglect when they express their emotions though? For example, if my kid isn't in a supermarket and screaming and crying, my daddy, give me this,

and I just always ignore them, are they gonna be raised to be like neglected children or something? Well, if you do it in the context of special time, an act of listening, and I think rules are important, like tell the truth, put away things that you take out. We treat each other with respect. Do what I asked the first time.

It's one of my favorite rules. It prevents the kids from going on and on about being oppositional. There's no way they're gonna feel like you're not listening and you're ignoring them. But if they're acting inappropriately, you want to not give into it and to have a significant conversation and consequence for it. I've invested more than a million pounds into this company, Perfect Ted, and they're

also a sponsor of this podcast. I switched over to using Matcha as my dominant energy source, and that's where Perfect Ted comes in. They have the Matcha powders, they have the Matcha drinks, they have the pods, and all of this keeps me focused throughout a very, very long recording day, no matter what's going on. And their team is obsessed with quality, which is why they source their ceremonial grade Matcha from Japan. So when people say to me that they don't like the taste of Matcha, I'm guessing that they haven't tried Perfect Ted. Unlike low quality matcha that has a bitter grassy taste, Perfect Ted is smooth and naturally sweet. And without knowing it you're probably a Perfect Ted customer already if you're getting your matcha at places like Blank Street or Joe in the Juice.

But now you can make it yourself at home. So give it a try and we'll see if you still don't like matcha. So here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to give you 40% off our matcha if you try it today. Head to perfected.com and use code DIARY40 at checkout. Or if you're in a supermarket, you can get it at Tesco's or Holland & Barrett or in the Netherlands at Albert Heijn. And those of you in the US, you can get it on Amazon. One of the big themes that I wanted to ask you about, it's the last thing I really wanted to focus on today, is there's been such a huge rise in the conversation

around neurodivergence, which we talked about in part last time. You looked at my brain, you looked at my brain and we did some tests and such, and you spoke to some of my colleagues and people that know me. I think they did some surveys about me as well. And you concluded that I had ADHD.

So many people are being diagnosed with ADHD it seems. When we look at some of the numbers around the increase in diagnosis, it's quite alarming. And I wonder why that is. Are people being born with more ADHD or is it an increase in the diagnosis? Is there a pop culture element to it where it's become quite popular to say that you have ADHD if you forget your keys or something? What is it in your view? So ADHD is real There's a significant genetic component to it, but we're also living in a society that promotes its expression

so the more sugary cereals with red dye number 40 increases hyperactivity. The more gadgets you give them so they can't pay attention, the less they're outside in the sun, the more they're playing video games, all of those things increase the expression of ADHD. Again, something I know more about than I want to, I have a book called Healing ADD and I write about my own personal experience being married to someone who has ADHD and having several of my kids who have it. That it's real and left untreated.

There are all sorts of consequences. So people always ask you, if you think of medicine like Ritalin or Adderall, people go, what are the side effects? And it has side effects. Sometimes it can increase ticks. Sometimes it'll cause sleep problems. Sometimes you'll lose some weight or decrease your appetite. But they don't ask me the other question, and I always want to make sure they do is what are the side effects of not treating ADHD.

And there are things like school failure, incarceration, bankruptcy, divorce. It's serious. For someone like you, who's really driven and very bright, for you the consequences — and this is going to sound crazy — but than if you had it treated. But I have this, an example of a 14 year old who was literally failing in school and conflict driven with everyone around him. So people didn't really want to be near him. And I diagnosed him.

I started with natural things and they helped, but not enough, put him on Concerta, a form of methylphenidate, or Ritalin. And he went from failing to all A's and B's and he got into the high school he wanted to get into which was very competitive. And he's easy to be around. That's a win because it's going to change the trajectory of his life. And I like that. I remember you talking last time about your daughter. We have the clip, don't we, of Dr. Armand talking about his daughter. We can just insert it here. I have a daughter. And the truth is, and this is going to sound awful, I never thought she was very smart. And I'm ashamed of myself for thinking that and

She's staying up every night till one or two o'clock in the morning to get her homework done and one night she came just crying to me and she said dad I Don't think I can ever be as smart as my friends. And it just broke my heart. And I scanned her the next day. And I'd actually scanned her originally, but I had no experience in scans. This was like 1991. I'm like a child psychiatrist and an expert in ADD, and I didn't see it in my own child and

the next day I put her on a tiny dose of Ritalin and scanned her again and her brain normalized. A week later I had dinner with her and'm like, do you notice any difference? And she said, oh my god. She said, a class seemed like it always took eight hours to just do that one class. And I was always lost. And I'm very religious. I was praying to God that the teacher wouldn't call on me

because I was lost. She said, now that same class goes by in about 20 minutes. And my hand's up because I track what's going on. And that child who had always gotten B's and C's, but with great effort, her first report card was straight A's. The next 10 years, straight A's. The next 10 years straight A's. She actually got into the University of Edinburgh's veterinarian school, one of the best vet schools in the world where they cloned Dolly the sheep. And if I wouldn't have figured that out, she would have been condemned to a lifetime of mediocrity,

hating herself, working so hard to get a mediocre result, optimizing your brain. And medicine is never the first thing I think about, but it's one of the things I think about. Because I just want to use all the tools of my toolbox to optimize your brain, because if I optimize your brain, I optimize your life. It was really powerful and something that I then spoke to lots of my friends about and such. One of the things I've always struggled with ADHD in terms of my understanding is some people that I know that have ADHD, they're so remarkably different to me. And they're so remarkably different from each other. So if I think about one of my friends that has it, very, very different in terms of productivity, symptomology versus someone like me who, for example, in my case,

I'm very focused, I think. I can be very focused, not always. But when I'm into something, I can focus on it for a long period of time. In fact, people don't know this, but it's worth me saying. My last book, I went to Bali for, I think it was either 11 or 14 days, and I came out of the jungle with the book. So I went into the jungle with basically 33 sentences, individual sentences, I knew what the chapter titles were. They came out of the jungle and handed my publisher Penguin the manuscript after that period in the jungle, which basically meant that for those 11 or 14 days, I can't remember the exact number, I sat there for about 10 hours a day

and did, I was obviously getting distracted once in a while, but I wrote the whole book in about 14 days. Decent book. I'm so jealous. But for me, it's an example of that. When I think of ADHD, I think of like attention deficit. And again, I don't know much about ADHD, so I'm very naive. I represent most of the population probably in that regard.

But I don't think I have an attention deficit necessarily. Well, for things that are new, novel, highly interesting, stimulating or frightening. People with ADD can pay attention just fine. That's why a lot of people who have it go, I don't have it. Like if I love my history teacher, I'm like focused. But then when I go to geometry, I can't do it at all. Yeah. That's the story of me in school. It should be, it's like love is a drug. If you love something, well you can do it. But the problem is, most of life you don't love.

And so you end up with this really sort of erratic attention disorder. And they tend to gravitate toward things, you know, attention disorder. And they tend to gravitate toward things. You know, I see here the story a lot, unfortunately, is they experiment in college and they take a little bit of methamphetamine and it helps them and they're more focused. but then they don't know how to manage it and they end up taking more and more and they end up getting addicted and it steals their soul. Love. Can you see love on the brain?

Helen Fisher, who's a neuroscientist in New Jersey, has actually studied love. And new love shows up as increased activity in the dopamine centers of the brain. And it makes you just a bit obsessive. I think of new love as dopamine, but lasting love more like opiates. So new love when you break up is sort of like getting off cocaine. Hard, but not that bad.

sort of like getting off cocaine. Hard, but not that bad. Lasting love, if it goes away, and we talked about grief earlier, it's like it's ripping your skin off. It's really hard, sort of like getting off of heroin. Do people come to you that are heartbroken? A lot. What do they say? I can't stop. I think that their brain gets into anxiety, sadness, and that person just lives in every fun place in their brain and they can't get over it. And it can be quite messy for them.

What is the change that you would like to see in the world? Well, I'm actually working on it. I want everybody to just ask this one question. to just ask this one question. And we mentioned my work with BJ Fogg on how people change. And he talks about tiny habits. What's the smallest thing I can do that will make the biggest difference?

that will make the biggest difference. And if I could impact the world, it would be through one question. Whatever I'm doing right now, is it good for my brain or bad for it? I want to teach people to love their brains and to just make better decisions for the health of their brain. Because then everything follows that. Is it good for my brain or bad for it? I'm 15. I have a developing brain. My brain is myelinating itself, which means it's wrapping all my nerves, all my brain

cells with a white fatty substance called myelin. And my frontal lobes are not done until I'm 25. Oh, I'm going to love my brain. So I'm not pouring crap in my body with what I eat or what I drink because it's bad for my brain. When I'm 60 and I'm stressed because my football team's not winning, I'm not going for an extra beer because I love my brain. And I'm gonna get to a healthy weight

because I love my brain. That's the change. That's why I think God put me on the earth. I wanted to do something. I was just thinking about it as you were speaking then about the one simple thing that I can do to help my brain and to love my brain. When you think about behaviors and habits that are popular and trendy at the moment, are there any that stand out to you as being particularly good for the brain or particularly bad for the brain? Because I had a couple come to mind that I wanted to throw at you.

I mean, one of them that's exploding in the UK at the moment is paddle, which is kind of, I think you call it pickleball here. Good for my brain, bad for my brain. Good for your brain. Really good. Do you know what? When you scanned my brain, you told me that. You said, for the next six months, Steve, I need you to take some Omega 3, do this,

do this, do this, and I'd like you to play more racket sports. I built a paddle court in my garden. So I have a paddle court in my garden. So I have a paddle court in my garden in Cape Town and I love playing it now. And when I play it all the time, I said, Dr. Amon said it's good for my brain, but it's exploding. It's exploding across Europe really, but really across much of the world now. And here in the US too. Oh really? And it's so good for your brain because it's working your cerebellum and I told you that because yours was sleepy and as you activate this and you do that with coordination exercises,

it then activates your frontal lobes. Does that mean that people that are uncoordinated have a cerebellum issue? Yes. Oh, really? And the more you do it, the better coordination you develop. And that's why coordination exercises for kids, so we talked about kids, is you want to do that with them early. Play sports, but not sports where they're going to get a head injury, right? I mean, we have to be smarter than we are. But when I was young, my mother,

who's now 93, was the ping pong champion in the neighborhood. And she was really good. And she never let us beat her until we could. But she was always encouraging. I've got, I was looking then as you're speaking about different trends at the moment that are either good or bad for the brain. And one big trend at the moment is neuroplasticity training. Lots of people are doing games and using other things to, like there's apps you can get that are neuroplasticity training apps. Does any of that stuff work?

Some of it. Some of it works. And if you're, so for example, if you're doing memorization games, do them while you're on the bike. Now, not in the street, but if you're on the bike. Now, not in the street, but if you're on a stationary bike and you're doing those games, it's been found that exercise increases blood flow

to the hippocampus, meaning you're more likely to remember it and you're strengthening your brain in the process. So exercise with new learning. Stunnel. So if I want to learn something, I should do it while walking or moving in motion. Right. So if you're listening to a language app, for example, do it while you're walking. Mindfulness and meditation, good or bad for the brain. Great. I published three studies on a Kundalini yoga form of meditation called Kirtan Kriya.

It's a 12-minute meditation. I always say it's the perfect ADD meditation because it's only 12 minutes. And for 12 minutes, you do this. Sa, ta, na, ma. Sa, ta, na, sa ta na ma, sa ta na ma. It's two minutes out loud, two minutes whispering, four minutes silently to yourself, two minutes whispering, two minutes out loud, you're done. Sa ta na ma, birth, life, death, reborn, birth, life, death, reborn. But the one we studied is satana ma.

And so if they look it up, kirtan kriya activates your cerebellum, activates your frontal lobes, calms down your emotional brain. People who did that for 12 minutes for eight weeks, their resting frontal lobe function was stronger. So simple. What the hell is going on there? I think it's the focused attention plus you're doing a coordination meditation. Sa, ta, na, pa, sa. Cold therapy, cold exposure therapy, ice bath,

those kinds of things, good or bad for the brain. I think you have to be careful with it because it can trigger atrial fibrillation. I think taking a cold shower is probably good for your brain because it's going to short-term increase dopamine and sort of give you a jolt. Loving your job. Absolutely great for your brain. If you're learning new things, people who are in a job that does not require new learning have a higher incidence of Alzheimer's disease.

So if you're stagnant in your work, you have a higher risk of Alzheimer's. And like, if I just read brain scans all day, well, I know how am writing about something I don't know about. Or I'm learning something new. What if you're working with assholes? I'm sorry? I love the job, but I'm working with assholes. Bad for your brain. Chronic stress increases cortisol.

And I think everybody should sort of know their baseline cortisol level. And cortisol shrinks the hippocampus and puts fat on your belly. So that's two very bad things for your brain. Breath work, that's a big trend. Excellent. Excellent. You want to break a panic attack? The 15 second breath, four seconds in,

hold it for a second and a half, eight seconds out, hold it for a second and a half. You just do that four or five times, your whole nervous system will calm down. And the research shows take twice as long to breathe out as you breathe in. That's why four seconds in, eight seconds out. It shifts your nervous system, doesn't it? Yes, it increases something called vagal tone. Okay, some bad things then. Social media usage, chronic social media usage,

good for the brain, bad for the brain. Because you're constantly comparing yourself to people who aren't real. What about workaholism and hustle culture? So, I love my work. Am I addicted to it? I don't know, but I love it. When they say people are workaholics and it's bad for the brain,

it's they're working with assholes or doing something they don't like, or doing it for the money but without other purpose. Microplastics, that's a big trick. Awful for the brain. One of the major causes of hormone disruption and cancer. And other environmental... Thank you for not giving me a plastic water bottle. Yeah, it's okay.

Imagine if we did that when we spent a lot of time these days talking about the microplastics and other environmental toxins that I think people are becoming more aware of now which is good. Noise pollution. Bad for the brain. And if it hurts your hearing, hearing loss is actually one of the risk factors for Alzheimer's. Why is that? I didn't hear you.

Because you're not getting input. And if you're not getting appropriate input, your brain starts to atrophy. And if you don't hear what other people are saying, and you have a lot of ants, you have a high negativity bias, is you can actually begin to get a bit paranoid and fill in the empty spaces with negativity. I just bought some new Apple AirPods

and when I connected them to my phone, it said, do you wanna do a hearing test? So I did the hearing test and then I asked my girlfriend, I said, you should do this hearing test as well because I needed something to compare it to. And I was a little bit shocked. It said I hadn't lost any hearing yet, but my hearing was significantly not as good as hers. And I remember thinking, gosh, you know, this is, but I didn't have any idea that it was

linked to Alzheimer's at all. So now I've turned down the volume for the first time in my life because I think your hearing declines regardless really of what you do with age anyway. But as you said earlier, like starting from a better baseline when you're talking about the brain reserves is really the game, I think, with ageing. My last point is a... my last question is a bit of a... seems to be uncorrelated, but the world is heading towards a world that's driven by artificial intelligence. It's like all the rage at the moment if you log on the internet. People talking about they're going to lose their jobs, all of these new tools that allow

us to optimize our lives in a variety of different ways. When you think about the world of AI that we're heading into, there's so many ways that I imagine it's going to make your job easier as someone who's doing scans of brains and so on. But do you think artificial intelligence is going to be good or bad for our brains? I think in the short run it's going to be bad because your brain is going to do less and that's bad for the brain. I think it's fascinating to watch what's gonna happen and

ultimately in the words of my friend Byron Katie, argue with reality welcome to hell. We need to figure out how to use it to enhance our lives rather than to steal brain development. And so much of technology, we haven't talked about this, has stolen brain development. When video games came into my house, was actually 1987, I remember, my son was 11, he was a straight A student, and then he wasn't. And then we started fighting about, it's like, you can play for half an hour.

And then, like, I took it out of the house because I saw it as an agent of thrilling his brain to death, deadening the dopamine structures. And then I've watched this whole group of kids grow up with very cool video games that are I think damaging their brain. So unleash technology without any neuroscience study on the impact of brain development. It's a bad idea. Are brains getting bigger or smaller? Does anybody know? I don't know. Interesting question. We could ask the chat GPT. Oh gosh, yeah. It's not funny. Well, it's things for you. This is the thing.

Although, one caution with chat GPT, it sucks if you ask it for medical advice. It often will make mistakes. And so there are other sites I like better that I trust more. Social connections, obviously, another point on that, because there's now, I saw articles where men are getting into relationships with an AI character of a woman they like and you know social connection is so good for the brain so I wonder if artificial social connection

is going to... It's probably not great for the brain because your brain doesn't have to work as hard with an artificial, especially when you create it. Your brain is, when you're with like another real person, your brain has to do a lot more calculations to make that work than with someone you can just trash it. Well, you'd program it for dopamine, wouldn't you? If you're making a friend or partner yourself. What's the most important thing we haven't talked about

that we should have talked about, Doctor? I think purpose and... Why does purpose matter? Connection to a higher power. Well, I always think when I assess patients of them in four big circles, it's like, so what's the biology? We talked a lot about the brain. What's the psychology?

We talked about development a little bit and trauma and ants. What's the social circle? Like, what's going on in your life now and who you're connected with? And we talked about love. But we didn't really talk about this spiritual circle, which is, so what's the point? Why am I here? Am I here because of random chance,

because of an explosion that happened billions of years ago? Or do I believe in creative design where I'm really created for a purpose that is to make the world a better place? And I find people who live without purpose have a higher incidence of depression, have a higher incidence of loneliness, have a higher incidence of dementia. And so I encourage all of my patients to seek and live with purpose. It's one of the reasons the One page miracle is so important to me. What do I want?

Relationships, work, money, physical, emotional, spiritual health, which is really the why question. And a lot of my colleagues go, well how can you believe in God if you're a scientist? And I'm like, do you know anything about physics, that the second law of physics is entropy? Things go from order to disorder. I'm like, I think there's an order to this,

and that I'm here talking to you and there's a purpose behind it that's greater than me. Studies suggest that religious belief can be associated with differences in brain structure and function. While there is no single religious brain, certain patterns have been observed in neuroscience research. The prefrontal cortex involved in decision making, mortality and self-regulation tends to be more active in religious individuals. And their right temporal lobe tends to be bigger. There's another communicate with God. There's gotta be a neuroscience mechanism for that. And Michael Persinger is a researcher

out of the University of Laurentian University in Canada. He would put helmets on people and give them low volt electrical activity. And whenever he would stimulate the right temporal lobe, people would get a sensed presence. They would actually feel the presence of God in the room. I just think that's so interesting. And does that mean that the brain makes up God

or that the brain has pathways to experience God? I think it's an interesting question. I actually did a study on prayer. We have a foundation called the Change Your Brain Foundation and we raise money for research, education, service. And I did a prayer study of conversational prayer, I pray for you, and speaking in tongues, which is channeling the Holy Spirit in Christian tradition.

And it was so interesting. And there's actually been other studies, Andrew Newberg, who studied channelers in Brazil. They would channel the dead. And the idea is if you're going to channel an outside spirit, you have to turn down the noise in your brain so that you can sort of hear the other frequencies. And that was our hypothesis. And 60% of our subjects dropped their brain activity when they were speaking in tongues, which sounds so interesting. One, completely activated the dopamine centers.

And so I'm looking at them like, I bet you do this a lot. Prayer. Prayer can change the brain. I mean, we talked about meditation changing the brain and Dr. Newberg again studied Tibetan monks while they meditated and Franciscan nuns while they prayed and they found very similar changes. Strengthens the prefrontal cortex, reduces stress and anxiety, increases dopamine, changes

brain connectivity, thickens the cortex, promotes neuroplasticity if you pray. Now what if you're not religious? Because I don't think I believe in any particular God, but I would like some of these benefits. So I guess I could achieve them by meditation and those kinds of things. I can still pray. I've got no issue with praying. I don't know what I would be praying to. And you could be curious.

Yeah. I've got no issue with praying. I just don't know what I'd be praying to. I'm praying to the universe, I guess. Spirituality is another big trend. I wonder if that's good for the brain. I think it depends on is it a healthy tradition or is it an unhealthy tradition? And I've seen both. I've seen some religions being very rigid and shaming. I've seen others, you know, be more open and seeking.

You've scanned 260,000 brains roughly. How has that, if at all, changed your belief in a God? that if it all changed your belief in a God? You know, I believed in God since I was, since I can remember. And there's not been one thing in my life that's caused me to not believe. So I always thought, going back to the second law of physics, that if it's random chance, it just doesn't make sense that randomly we would get a brain cell that has DNA and a mitochondria. It's like it's it's statistically impossible. And I'm just like, we are so beautifully made. I just don't get the whole thing. So one thing

we haven't talked about is the LA fires and the impact of disaster on the brain. And I grew up in Los Angeles and I'm just horrified by what happened. And we talked that my foundation is actually going to give away a hundred evaluations for firefighters. And I almost feel bad. I did the big NFL study and it was really cool and it was a lot of fun for me. But NFL players aren't heroes. They're entertainers. Firefighters are heroes.

First responders are heroes. And what I've seen with firefighters, this makes me so sad because they have damaged brains, often because of the toxins that they're exposed to, the emotional trauma that goes with that job, and the head trauma that also goes with this, with things falling on them. And they have a higher suicide rate than the general population, significantly higher. I think it's like 25% higher. And shouldn't we be teaching them about brain health and go, hey, look, this is a brain

damaging job, but we need you to do it. So all the way along, let's see and repair your brain. Let's make sure your reserve is something special rather than we had a really bad day at work. Let's go get drunk together. Let's elevate brain health to the people who saved us. Why is that emotion so raw for you? Well, just thinking of what happened, one of my close friends lost his home. And then he went to work and did a consult for me.

I'm just blown away by him. But you know, we're so close to the sadness of what happened. And I have a clinic that we had to evacuate, and I have doctors that they had to evacuate. The group trauma is so high, and yet the people who care for us, we're not doing a good job of caring for them. And I think I have parted the answer. And I just wish I could do more. Incredibly kind of you to offer to scan a hundred firefighters brains.

Yeah, and hopefully as our foundation, you know, can raise money, we can do thousands of them. How does one go about supporting your foundation? Where do we go to support it? So changeyourbrain.org. Changeyourbrain.org. Yeah. We have a closing tradition, as you know,

where the last guest leaves a question for the next. And the question left for you is what advice would you give a couple who want to start a family? I love that question so much. If you want to start a family, you have to get your bodies ready. So she was born with all the eggs she'll ever have. And you want to give them time, like a year or more, of good nutrition. And the child? No, no, the mom. Okay, so my partner, I'm someone that wants to start a family. So you want to go, what I'm eating, what I'm thinking, the stress I'm under is going to

impact the next generation? What are the right brain and body habits that we both can do to get our bodies in the best shape? Is this good for my brain and body, or is it bad for it? And really focus on good. You know, a lot of people who are drinking, they actually stop drinking when they find out they're pregnant. Remember, the brain develops at day 21.

You may not even know you're pregnant at day 21. Just let that roll around your head a little bit. So I love this question, is, oh, I can start to get my brain and my ovaries and my sperm ready to connect, to be healthy. So I think that's the advice I would give them. Dr. Daniel Eamon, thank you so much once again for your time and thank you for the wisdom and value you've given to my audience over the years.

Like as I was saying before we started filming, I get stopped all the time everywhere I go. People telling me about you, I told you I was stopped yesterday while I was having a spa treatment. I would say what it is because people roast me. But I was having a first of its kind for me spa treatment and the lady turned to me 20 minutes in and was like, by the way, thank you so much for having Dr. Danny Lehmann on because he helped me understand my ADHD, et cetera, et cetera. So, and I see that absolute love and admiration for you in the comments section every time where people recount stories from decades ago where their kid came to see you

and how you've transformed their life. I actually think the top comment on our last episode was someone who I think they came to see 15 years ago, and they said that you changed their son's life. And that was just over and over and over and over again in the comments. So the life you've lived is such an important one, and it's added so much value and hope,

and it's turned on the lights for so many people in so many ways. So on behalf of all those people, and on behalf of the tens of millions of people who've tuned into our conversations, thank you so much. I really appreciate it. Well, Stephen, thank you. The last time I was on, we got calls from all over the world.

I mean, obviously you're doing amazing, purposeful work. Thank you. Isn't this cool? Every single conversation I have here on the Diary of a CEO, at the very end of it, you'll know. cool. Every single conversation I have here on the diary of a CEO, at the very end of it you'll know, I asked the guest to leave a question in the diary of a CEO and what we've done is we've turned every single question written in the diary of a CEO into these conversation cards that you can play at home. So you've got every guest we've ever had, their question and on the back of it if you scan that QR code You get to watch the person who answered that question. We're finally revealing all of the questions and

The people that answered the question the brand new version 2 Updated conversation cards are out right now at the conversation cards dot com. They've sold out twice instantaneously So if you are interested in getting hold of some limited edition conversation cards, I really really recommend acting quickly This has always blown my mind a little bit 53% of you that listen to the show regularly haven't yet subscribed to the show So could I ask you for a favor before we start if you like the show and you like what we do here and you Want to support us the free simple way that you can do just that is by hitting the subscribe button.

And my commitment to you is if you do that, then I'll do everything in my power, me and my team, to make sure that this show is better for you every single week. We'll listen to your feedback, we'll find the guests that you want me to speak to, and we'll continue to do what we do. Thank you so much.