The Resilient Mind - Is Your Brain Shrinking? What Modern Life Is Doing to Your Mind - Dr. Daniel Amen

Episode Date: December 19, 2025

Daniel Gregory Amen is an American doctor who practices as a psychiatrist. He is the founder and chief executive officer of the Amen Clinics. He is also the founder of Change Your Brain Foundation, BrainMD, and Amen University. He is a twelve-time New York Times best-selling author as of 2023.Take action and strengthen your mind with The Resilient Mind Journal. Get your free digital copy today: ⁠⁠⁠⁠Download Now⁠⁠This episode is brought to you in partnership with Steven Bartlett for more inspiring videos: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheDiaryOfACEO🌍 The Resilient Mind Podcast is a proud member of 1% for the Planet — building resilient minds and a resilient planet. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to the Resilient Mind podcast. In this episode, you will be listening to is your brain shrinking. What modern life is doing to your mind with Dr. Daniel Amen? Get access to the Resilient Mind Journal by clicking the link in the show notes. Enjoy. 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. 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 panography 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. It'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 caused 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 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, which is sort of why 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 big. 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, 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. 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 U.S. 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,

so I've been a psychiatrist now, 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 Tree. 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 con. 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 if people drink in moderation, are they going to see long-term impacts to their brain? What is there such thing as drinking just a little bit and being fine? Well, 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 tracts. So if you think of gray matter is 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. 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 spec, and spec 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.

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 looked 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. And 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, mood, memory, spatial orientation, spatial processing. So that's the symptoms. You're naming their inadvertently symptoms of someone who is 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. And I worked with my friend B.J. Fogg,

who wrote a wonderful book called Tiny Habits. And 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, and they're 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 the damages stem cell production in your brain? One might argue that it's serving me in the short town. 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. 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. Oh, really? There's one. 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. And... Is it? 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 1,021, 1027 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. 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 improve self-esteem. Why? We teach kids to love and care for their brain. You got your brain scan, 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 love it. And let's love it. And let's love it. learn together how to optimize it. But the big innovation, Stephen, for 2025 in psychiatry, for 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 clonopin and Adam, 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. Silicibin-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. Yeah. And they were training people to do psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy. 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 were, 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, MDMA has, I think, been... Ketamine can do it.

But then ketamine can also be addictive and can be probably. problematic. So I'm like, 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 caused in 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, lead. It's like if you don't look, if you just give everybody you're 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 lock, 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 lomitol, right?

I mean, it's great we have all these treatments, but let's not fly blind when we don't have to. Why does the USA hand out antidepressant pills like their water or something? 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?

And 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 at Aman 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, X, and ambient. 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. Like, 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 have 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. Right? 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 finish college, I finish 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 mold and moderate depression. And a meta-analysis of eight studies fund, no difference between Saffron and SSRIs in reducing depressive symptoms, but in fact, the side effect 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're 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 public. on saffron and brain and mental health. There's actually five studies showing it enhances memory,

that it was as good as Erecept in people, Erecepts of medicine we use in Alzheimer's disease, and it's as good as Erecept. 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. Right. 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. 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 zero to ten.

I'm a one. My wife's an eight. 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 cingulogyrus. 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, they're sort of always looking for bad things to happen. Is there anything someone can do?

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. It's the brain. 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. What supplements? And then multiple

vitamin for basic nutrition, know your vitamin D level and optimize it. And then, you 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 D. vitamin D, omega-3 fatty acid.

I did a study, 50 consecutive patient's stamen clinics who are not taking vitamin D. We measured their omega-3 index. 49 were sub-optimal. 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 benzho. Theonine, aschwaganda, magnesium, gabba, 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 said have a high negativity bias. And so training them to be more positive.

Now, not irrationally positive because you need some anxiety. People have low levels of anxiety die early from a lot. accidents and preventable illnesses. People who have low levels of anxiety. Low levels of anxiety. So 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, no, I wanted 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 live the long. 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 it 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 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 it 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. 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. When, if you're female, when you're in the last week of your cycle, because blood flow to your frontal, Monologue 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're two different people. Sort of like they have multiple personality. Because their brain is just so different. Now, obviously not with all women, but for certain ones, it's a big issue. And if the 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. Frontalob 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 alcohol, but in the context of sleep, 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 there are 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. It's 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 by 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 and 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'll 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 aunt. Right. 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? Right.

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. Because you're more present. Yeah. Yeah. 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 not having the thought? The fifth question is my favor. Just take the thought and turn it to the opposite. And then ask yourself, is that true? So it's going to be good news. Or it's going to be innocuous news.

And then go, yeah, 99 times out of 100, that's true. And then I would, because 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 negative. 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. Oh, yeah. They were distorting things. they were angry, they were making things more negative than they needed to be. We are model, 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. It's 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. But it's not the reality of my life. Thank you for listening. Continue strengthening your mind by subscribing and listening to our other episodes.