BRAIN HEALTH EXPERT: Change Your Brain, Change Your Life | Dr. Daniel Amen X Rich Roll Podcast

the message in our society is wrong, you are not stuck with the

brain

you have, you can improve it and I can prove it. Meet Dr. Daniel, a celebrity psychiatrist,

brain

health

expert

, and 12x New York Times bestselling author, so yes I'm right and I'm right, you need brains. Envy, you need to love

your

brain. The mission is to end mental illness by creating a solution for brain

health

. Today we discuss all things brain health, dementia, Alzheimer's, and ADHD, and debunk some MTH along the way. Come on, we have to enter the 21st century. Psychiatrists are the only doctors who practically never look at the organ they treat.

Think about it, if you want to keep

your

brain healthy or rescue it, you have to prevent or treat the top 11 risk factors. that steal your mind Today's episode is brought to you by the incredible organizations that make this show possible. Well, Dr. Aon, it's a pleasure to meet you, thank you for coming on a very rainy day here in Los Angeles to spend time with me. I am eager to discuss everything related to brain health, optimizing brain health, targeting memory, cognition, preventing things like cognitive decline, dementia, Alzheimer's, I am interested in brain mutability and brain health. brain, and we're going to talk about her new book and, of course, parenting, too. mentally strong children I am a father of four children, this is very interesting to me, but I think the two main motivations that made me most excited about sitting with you today were the first, a little over a year ago, when I was diagnosed with 88 HD, which which was a big surprise.

Lots of questions for you about this, it wasn't something I thought would be something I would be associated with. The second is that my mother is currently in dementia, obviously, a pretty devastating situation, as you know. everything is very good and that is why I want to learn everything I can about how to help her, how to help my dad, as you can also imagine, she is in a very difficult situation and, of course, do everything she can to avoid a similar danger . for me and as much as it seems like I'm trying to make this about me, I'm actually maybe a little off on the ADHD part, but when you consider the statistics about dementia and Alzheimer's, it really is about all of us.

It is not like this? I looked up some statistics about an hour ago and it's pretty devastating to what extent these dementia diseases are taking over and growing at alarming rates in 2023. 6.7 million Americans over the age of 65 have Alzheimer's, which is like one in N 55 million worldwide 2 a third of these people are women, which is fascinating and on the rise. I saw some statistics like by 2060 the CDC predicts a sevenfold increase and globally from 55 million to 139 million by 2050, so this is a problem that will leave very few people untouched, without a doubt, I mean, if you have the lucky to live to be 85, you have a one in two chance of being diagnosed with dementia, one in two, one in two, which means it's either you or your partner. and that's horrible, but what most people don't know is that you can have an impact on that and since 2005 I wrote a book with my friend Rod Shankle called Alzheimer's Prevention and I updated it in 2017 with Memory Rescue and the Big Idea It is if you want to keep your brain healthy or rescue it you have to prevent or treat the 11 main risk factors that steal your mind and you talked about your mother having it, the pneumonia that we will talk about is called brilliant minds and the g in brilliant The mind It's genetics, but we don't think about it properly.

Well, I'm overweight because my family is overweight or I have hypertension because it runs in my family or I have diabetes because it runs in my family or I have Alzheimer's disease or I'm vulnerable to it and there's nothing I can do about it and that's a lie, genes increase your vulnerability and teach you what you should do, for example, I have six children, three of them are adopted, we adopted two of my nieces because their parents couldn't give up drugs and alcohol and it was a disaster for these children and I tell my nieces that if you never drink or do drugs you will never have a problem, but if you do, it could be serious, you should be in an alcohol and drug prevention program every day mm of your

life

I have obesity and heart disease in my family I'm turning 70 this year I'm not overweight and I don't have heart disease because I'm on an obesity heart disease prevention program every day of my

life

so if you have it in your family so As soon as you know, you should get serious about preventing these top 11 risk factors.

I want to address all of those strategies, um, but let's talk a little bit about what's driving it. This is what is causing this. I imagine that part of the increase we are seeing in this increase in incidents is related to the fact that people are living longer and baby boomers are getting older, but I also suspect that lifestyle habits are contributing to this as well. It is due to the increase in type 2 diabetes, obesity, hypertension and the like. So what is causing cognitive decline is a seriously unhealthy and undisciplined lifestyle. Minds, did you know that depression doubles the risk of Alzheimer's in women and quadruples it in men?

What is the relationship between depression and dementia, many people think that if you are an older person and you become depressed, it is actually a precursor to dementia, they are both brain diseases or brain problems, if you will, and it is critical and that is in Bright Mind mental health, so I am. I'm very excited about this because what I realized I started looking at the brain in 1991 and we've looked at over 250,000 scans, but from the beginning I realized that you're not stuck with the brain that you have, that you can improve it and I can try it, so if I look at your brain and then you get in a car accident, your brain is going to get worse if I look at your brain and then you get drugged.

Bender, your brain is going to get worse if I watch. your brain and then all of a sudden you stop sleeping or you get divorced, your brain is likely to

change

in a negative way, but I also did the big NFL study when the NFL was kind of the line that they had a problem with trauma. brain injury in soccer 80% of my players improved. I could see the damage, but when they followed a mental health program, 80% of their brains looked better 2-6 months later, that's exciting. I was a consultant on the movie concussion and I was a little bummed because the movie is a little depressing, um, you know, it's Will Smith, the Smith, yeah, I remember that and it's like where's the hope and the message about football ?

Dementia or CTE, chronic trauma and selling the message to Phil's apathy. in our society it's wrong, it's like, oh you have this, it's chronic, it's progressive, it's untreatable, so players don't come for help because they feel desperate, it's like they don't get help early, probably while you're still playing, so you can begin to reverse the damage is the big exciting lesson of the last 30 years in neuroscience neuroplasticity you are not stuck with the brain you have you can improve it there is an area of ​​the brain called the hippocampus why collecting seahorses is seahorse in Greek It's shaped like a seahorse every day you're producing 700 new stem cells in the hippocampus or I think of them as baby seahorses, your behavior will make them grow or shrink them, so if you're vulnerable to dementia that's the area who is affected early by dementia and you want to love those seahorses, feed them, feed them, teach them instead of getting them drunk, drugged or withered.

Your main protocol for testing people's brains is this imaging technology called spec right, so can you describe what it is? Can I tell you? priest story just to put it in context so when I was Vietnam was still going on and the government had a draft and I became an infantry medic where my love for medicine was born but about a year later I didn't like that They will shoot me. It's just not for me, it's for some people, it's not for me, so I retrained as an X-ray technician and developed a passion for medical imaging, as our teachers used to say, how do you know unless you look ? and then in 1979, I'm a second year medical student, I just got married and two months later my wife tried to commit suicide in horror and I took her to see a wonderful psychiatrist and I realized that if he helps her, he won't just help her. , but it will also help her.

For me, he will help our children, our grandchildren, since they would be raised by someone happier and more stable. 45 years ago I fell in love with psychiatry and I have loved it every day since, but I fell in love with the only medical specialty that never looks at the organ it treats and I knew it was wrong and I knew it would

change

. I just had no idea I would be a part of it. 1991 I have now been a psychiatrist for about a decade and attended a conference at my local hospital. about brain specifications Single photon emission computed tomography imaging is a nuclear medicine study that looks at blood flow and activity, looks at how the brain works and basically shows us three things: Healthy AC AC, too little or too much activity, does how are you doing it?

What is the process by which that is revealed? Again it is a nuclear medicine study. What we do is take a radiopharmaceutical. So you take a radioisotope. We take one that we use. His name is Technum and Technum has self-esteem problems. I don't like being who it is and it changes shape and when it changes shape it produces a photon or a small packet of light that we can measure, so we combine technici with hmpao, a drug that is easily absorbed by brain cells, we combine them, we inject them . in your arm and it's called a first pass extraction, so 70% is absorbed into your brain in that first pass, in about 2 minutes and then it's the hardest part of the procedure, a tiny little needle and a vein in your arm. inject the drug, light up your brain and then we can measure it, you lie on the table in a chamber, it's not claustrophobic, it's not like an MRI, uh, people lie on the camera, the camera heads rotate around your head in about 15 minutes and we're moving. 10 million beads or 10 million times that little piece of light hits the lenses of the camera and then we reconstruct it and it looks like a brain and then we can see in your brain which areas are most active, which areas are healthy, which areas are sleepy. .

Compare it to our huge database and my 8 year old grandson can look at a scan and be healthy or not and it's very useful to look at and off camera we talk about controversy so I started looking at the brain. I'm like a little kid very excited and we never make a diagnosis from a scan so that's really important, we make a diagnosis like all doctors with all the information, we take a detailed history, if you came to see us you would miss approx. an hour of spoken paperwork. our historian for a couple of hours, I mean, we really get to know you and then we would test your brain, we would do a computerized neurological evaluation and we would scan your brain and when you put that puzzle together, it's so powerful that he's the first patient I've ever met.

I scanned, so I skipped the lecture on brain speech. Images given by the director of the hospital where she worked, to Sy's room and I didn't meet her. I just met her. She attempted suicide the night before and while I was talking to her. I'm thinking she has adult ADD. She attempted impulsive suicide after a fight with her husband that caused her to have an IQ of 144 but she never finished college. When I go, tell me how you studied. She said, "Well, I never really did unless it was the night before the exam." I put on a cup of coffee, stayed up all night, and tested an eight-year-old that I had added, so in my mind I feel pretty confident about this, but when I talk to her about it, she says, oh Adults.

I can't have ADD and I'm thinking I'm the doctor. She resisted. I said, well, why don't we look at your brain? She had been doing a study called EEG quantification up to that point, so she knew she needed to do it. Do it twice once, rest once while she did a concentration task and then after getting the results a couple days later I'm in her hospital room. She has a table. I put the scanners on the table. She had a healthy brain at rest. and when he tried to concentrate his frontal loes and his cerebellum, which we will talk about, he fell, it was so clear what that tells you, the more he tries, the worse it gets, it is a classic, it is what he was predicting, I would see why that is what I saw a quantitative EEG and when I showed her the scans and explained them to her, she started crying and said "You mean this isn't my fault" and I told her that "you know people have ADD, it's like people "They will need glasses." We are not stupid, crazy or stupid.

You know, people wear glasses. I wear glasses to drive. We are not stupid, crazy or stupid. Our eyeballs have aPeople, this is California, every athlete I know is going to tell you that having the right equipment is key to performance. If what you are wearing is not well put together, it will only put distance between you and the goals you have set for yourself. You owe it to yourself to invest in the best, and the best is there. I'm obsessed with the cloud. It's great on the trails and I just got the new NextGen Cloud Stratus 3 for the trail.

I love them, but I also have this incredible line of lightweight performance clothing that goes beyond anything I've ever owned. I woke up earlier, it's like this unbeatable second skin. I love wearing the sweat-wicking Ultra shorts and the ultra shorts that have this pocket right at the base of the spine that holds your phone perfectly without shaking. I am very proud to partner with them. and I love their vision of the future where their gear is designed for circularity, so check out their amazing line of super comfortable, stylish, and durable pieces at on.com in case someone who suffered from a CTE, some type of brain injury o In the case of someone like Justin Bieber who is being diagnosed with bipolar disorder, not in vain, for example, how about the fact that he is so young, so famous, and so

rich

?

How can you not have some kind of dysfunction being so young with a young Brain trying to navigate that kind of world, but I guess so, they almost killed that kid. He was pretty out of control for a while and seems to be doing great now, that's all I know. I don't know him personally and if you read his Mom's Book, I mean public knowledge, he grew up with a lot of uncertainty, trauma and anxiety, her parents didn't want her to have Justin and she ended up going to the Salvation Army home in their married mothers.

Oh wow, there's a lot, so there's some childhood. traumatic things, childhood trauma and then you think about early fame, which is one of the worst things for the brain because you wear out your pleasure centers in the brain, all that excitement and then unlimited money with very few people. Supervision in a brain that It doesn't finish developing until you're 25. I mean, just look, yeah, it's a recipe for some kind of dysfunction and you know, one of my other patients, who I love very much, Miley Cyrus, got the Grammy this year for the song of the year I'm excited because the song is really about love and loving yourself, but it was a show for a long time, she's been on a journey, she's been on a journey, I'm so proud of her because she's in charge of your life instead of fame is in charge or drugs are in charge or other people are in charge.

I mean, you know I work very hard with my patients to become good CEOs of their lives, but you have to take care of the Executive Center in your life, which is your The prefrontal cortex is the largest in humans and anyone else. animal, by far, if you damage it with head trauma, drugs, alcohol, bad food, not sleeping, social media, it's not a good recipe, what are some of the most important Topline lifestyle protocols or interventions that you recommend When do your patients come? through and you see something that lights up or doesn't light up in these scans and you realize that there is work that can be done to course correct, so it's up to your brain.

I mean, you know there are things everyone should do, like love your brain, and I was horrified. I don't know, I guess it was about 10 years ago, when I went. Brain health is three things. Brain. Envy has to worry about that. Nobody cares about your brain. Why, because you can't see it, you can't see it, you can see the wrinkles. on your skin or in the fat around your abdomen and it can do something when you're not happy with it. I also think we're just not taught how to take care of it, it's not something we think about, we know we should eat better and all that. and we know we can learn things with our brains, but there isn't a broad sense that we can improve the health of our brains through certain lifestyle choices we're making right away.

Your brain gets worse if you drink alcohol or smoke. pot immediately your brain gets worse if you don't prioritize sleep if you eat bad food you know go back to these top 11 risk factors but it's three things brain Envy so when I started in 1991 I scanned everyone I knew I'm very excited and I scanned my mom she was 60 years old she had a beautiful brain that really reflected her life she has seven children 54 grandchildren great grandchildren she knows everyone still 92 she knows everyone's name she knows what is going on in their lives and she is just someone who brings people to her I got scanned a week later and it wasn't as good as my 60 year old mother's and that just irritated me, but I played football in high school.

I had menitis twice when I was a young soldier, it's bad for the brain and I had bad habits, you know, I never drank, I never smoked, but I didn't sleep. I thought I was special because I could get by on four hours of sleep. I'm not especial. I'm stupid because sleep is essential. I was overweight I didn't care I'm a double-certified psychiatrist, an excellent neuroscience student in medical school, and I don't care about my own brain. I saw it and I cared. I'm envious. I want my mom's brain and that's why I always. You say Freud was wrong.

Penis envy is not the cause of anyone's problem. You need brains. Envy, you need to love your brain and that's where brain healing begins. It's like, oh, I have this organ that creates me. Let me love him and then avoid the things that hurt him. I knew the list and I did things that helped it and again, you just have to know the list and if we do the Brilliant Minds, it says what to avoid and what to do. MH, yeah, those 11 types of right principles that are built into that. acronym yes and they are everywhere in my head, as examples of blood flow, low blood flow is the number one predictor of brain imaging of Alzheimer's disease, so if you have it in your family and it scans you, let's look , I mean.

Spa is a study that analyzes blood flow and mitochondrial activity. 49% of the tracer is absorbed into the mitochondria, so we'll look at blood flow and energy, and if it's low, we'll ask why you know head trauma. drugs alcohol caffeine nicotine not sleeping having high blood pressure being overweight and we are going to focus on the reasons why it is low and then we are going to exercise increases blood flow I love exercise Ginko is one of my favorite supplements because the best brands Any time I've seen that I've taken genko, oregano, cayenne pepper, beets, they increase blood flow so know your risk factor and then know what to do and the trick with exercise is coordination exercises.

People who play Rocket Sports live longer than everyone else. This is a replicated study on 990,000 people. people because what coordination does is activate the cerebellum, the little brain, 10% of the volume of the brain in the back, they are half of the neurons in the brain and if you activate that it turns on the rest of your brain, so I'm a big fan of table tennis and pickle ball and tennis is bad news for me. I'm very athletic, but when it comes to anything that involves hand coordination, I'm terrible at it and that's why I've avoided it my whole life, but it's good news for you if you can get it. about yourself, there is more to gain, right, yes, get a very good pingpong coach and don't judge yourself, just go and learn to be good and don't have to beat people, if you spend half an hour twice a week, that will help you.

It has a big impact on your ability to think because you have to make your eyes, hands, and feet work together while you think about the spin. I consider it aerobic chess. I have this thing that I think might be pretty common, which is this idea that maybe I'm past the point of no return, so let me explain. I was a competitive swimmer growing up, so from ages 14 to 21 I trained, you know, four to five hours a day, waking up at 4:30. in the morning and walked around overtrained like a zombie, so I didn't sleep well. I never felt rested.

I always felt fatigued during that period of time. Alcohol became common around age 18 and from 18 to 31, a progression towards alcoholism and during that time period, you know, maybe I slept well one night while the rest of the nights were blackouts. or recovering from blackouts. I stayed sober at 31, but from 31 to 40 I transferred a lot of that addictive energy into my lifestyle choices, so I was basically sedentary and subsisted on hot dogs fries Pizza McDonald's Jack in the Box while not exercising around 40. I have reached the time to come to Jesus. I changed my lifestyle habits and many things about my life and now I am a much healthier person.

I follow a plant-based diet. I am very fit and active. I'm mentally involved in the process of making this

podcast

and other things I do. And my life is good, but I can't get rid of this feeling I have. I have done so much damage in my life that no matter how many good things I do now that at some point I am not going to be able to overcome that damage, it will catch up with me and then what is the point of doubling it? I get depressed and really invested in all the things you're saying and I think on some level that might be common, people are thinking right.

I have treated myself terribly. I think that song has been sung, so you know that mutability is your thing. Like we can't, but is there a period where I mean I would suspect it's harder than others, but what would you say to someone like me or someone who has a similar mindset or a similar type of past history? Well we should look well how do you know unless you look and so many people say oh no I don't want to know yeah I'm afraid I'm a little I'm a little afraid if you knew a train was going to crash would you do it ?

Don't you at least try to get out of the way while there is a chance to get out of the way? Of course, if I can't get out of the way, just let him hit me and I won't notice. In fact, I make a show, I want you to be on it, it scans my brain on YouTube and Instagram and one of my favorite guys tests the shine. 2002 World Series MVP he played third base for the Angels. I love him so much drinking too much for concussions, depressed, suicidal I mean. he was in a dark place, I didn't think there was any hope and I got him to do my show.

I don't know how that happened. His brain was horrible, but he did what I asked him to do and his wife, uh an. who I love very much she was a good companion he stopped drinking he ate better he exercised he took the supplements he lost 15 pounds in two months and I think, let's look again because I realized that he was better spraying significantly better in a period of two months months and then I scanned him 16 months later, how old is he now? 47 and you know there were ups and downs just when you're an alcoholic, you just don't stop.

I mean, some people do it, but you know there were some obstacles. for us, but you know that we are together in the fight and 16 months later his brain is so good and I know that in five years if he continues and has a brain. Envy your brain will become incredibly normal you have a choice but if you don't know if you don't look you don't know and why would you ever be in that position I want to know and that's why you know every two years I'll get a scan of everything the body because if there are problems coming I want to get it early I don't want to wait until late a lot of the lifestyle diseases we're seeing now are due to chronic inflammation so what are some of the things we can do to improve that that have implications in terms of brain health, so at Bright Minds the first eye is inflammation and some surprising things is that 98% of us have low levels of omega-3 fatty acids if you're not taking an omega-3 supplement. or if you don't focus on eating low levels of mercury. -3 fish, that's a problem because low levels of omega-3 increase inflammation if you're not a little obsessed with your gums and your teeth, if you have gum disease, you're more likely to have brain and heart disease and, Like me, I actually didn't.

Dig a little deeper into that, I'm always surprised that that doesn't have enough bandwidth in terms of our overall health because I know I've had peronal disease and gum problems my whole life and I was educated early on the implications of not treating as well because that tends to lead to arteriosclerotic problems and brain health, obviously, it's a circulatory situation that has to have implications in terms of brain health, absolutely because your brain represents 2% of your body weight but uses 20% of the Blood flow. your body, 20% of your body's oxygen goes to your brain and if you have gum disease, gum infections, periodontal problems, abscesses and the like, how does that translate into circulatory problems, such as, do you have a increased risk of Alzheimer's disease? it increases inflammation, which you know, a lot of people think is the mother of all diseases.

I don't know, but I don't want to have inflammation and for a long time I didn't worry about my own gums until study after study about gums. heart diseasethumb disease brain disease like you don't have to take care of it so become a flossing fool in terms of blood tests, what should people pay attention to? I mean, you mentioned omega-3s, but if someone was doing a blood test and they got the results, what are some things that would jump out at them? So if we look at some of the important numbers for brilliant minds, like blood pressure, it would be for blood flow, retirement and aging, you don't want high levels of iron, iron, iron accelerates aging, you don't No.

I want low iron because that will make you sleep deprived and anxious and I tend to hoard iron so I donate blood twice a year and that seems to help other people. Good for me for inflammation. You want to know your C.-reactive protein for genetics, you should probably know your gene type APO E4 I'm a 2 three is the gene that's connected to the Earth situation where it duplicates or whatever, yeah, yeah, yeah , it's an e44, which means it's ten times the risk, but ten times the risk. The risk means about 25%, so it simply means being serious and exercising.

The type of exercise you are doing decreases the risk. If you have one or two E4 genes for head trauma. The number of head injuries you have. You have toxins. How does your liver work? liver function tests mental health is your Ace score adverse childhood experiences from 0 to 10 how many do you have? My wife wrote a book called The Relentless Courage of a Frightened Child. She's an eight out of 10. My nieces that I adopted are both nines, I mean, yeah. if you have four or more you increase your risk of seven of the 10 leading causes of death if you have six or more you die 20 years earlier now my nieces and my wife are not going to die 20 years earlier because there are things you can do to extract past trauma , which is very important, the second eye is immunity and infection, so know your vitamin D level and get it above 40.

People over 40 have half the risk of cancer as those under 20 and when I tried mine for the first time. When I realized this 20 years ago, I was 17. I wonder: how am I 17? Because I exercise, but I exercise at night because I work during the day and I realize that I need more sun and I need to supplement myself. have a healthy level, not too much, but a healthy level and then they are neurohormones, test them every year. We live in a society where low testosterone levels are rife in young men and I have never seen anything like it.

What is contributing to that head trauma and toxins is that there are more young men suffering from head trauma than ever before. Well with soccer and skateboarding, maybe the other thing is the toxins in their bodies, the products that you put in their body, so I have all my patients. Download the app, think dirty and scan all your personal products to see what it's like, it's similar, so for example I used to shave with barbasol for 50 years and on a scale of zero is live long, 10 is kill yourself early, it's a nine and now I shave with something called besamecara, which is a two, it's crazy, the extent to which there are so many chemicals in our daily products that we don't know about and the lack of regulation in this regard.

I have had many guests in the past to talk about Ken. Cook from ewg, my friend Darren Oen, wrote a book called Fatal Conveniences and you read it, it's very solution-oriented, but it's a huge eye-opener to realize the disturbing amount of toxicity in our personal care products and things that we give for granted and I guess they're safe and what happened during covid is all of a sudden these toxic hand sanitizers that have parabens and fragrances that are just bad for people are lathering their kids in this stuff so that's why I'm a fan of Earth-friendly products. because they make these cleaning products that I don't care about except I love them, you have to be careful, you know what you clean your clothes with, what deodorant you use, what sunscreen you use, you read the label and you're like, oh well, I can't understand.

So you need to understand it, understand it or think dirty and just scan it and it will tell you if it's good or bad for your brain and your body and people say oh, but that's very expensive. I think that not being sick is expensive. This is just about love why would you put something in your body or your child's body that is poisonous? Get your hormones checked and then your hemoglobin A1c obviously and your BMI are very important numbers to know. 72% of Americans are overweight. 42%. Obesity is the largest brain drain in the history of the world.

I published three studies that say that as weight increases, brain size and function decrease and I learned that connection. 2009 Cyrus Rajie from the University of Pittsburgh published an MRI study that if you are overweight you have 4% less volume in your brain and your brain looks eight years older than that of healthy people if you are obese you have 8% less volume. volume in your brain and your brain looks 16 years older and I have a normal database of scans, but we never, I mean, we ask them about weight, but we never use it as an exclusion criterion. Healthy weight versus overweight or obesity.

Significantly less blood flow than I did in an NFL stadium. Healthy weight. NFL players versus overweight players. NFL players love the front L feature and I'm like, oh no, can you talk about it without anyone getting mad at you? I've had a lot of people mad at me, but it's just science. I'm just making the connection if you are overweight with these 11 risk factors. you have seven of them wow because it decreases blood flow promotes aging increases inflammation changes healthy testosterone into unhealthy cancer promotes forms of estrogen and you have to get serious now being underweight is bad for your brain being overweight is bad for your brain you mentioned the importance of loving your brain and I imagine showing your patient these images, these scans helps create that connection because you see what's really happening and maybe that opens the door to loving your brain a little more.

I think a lot about what the difference is between people who are able to absorb information and then make a change in their life versus people who absorb the same information and choose not to or have a hard time making that change or struggle to make that change last or fade. hold because if they have low self-esteem If you are someone who has a negative disposition or simply views the world through the lens of lack rather than opportunity, I suspect those people are tougher cases in terms of trying to get them excited about the possibility if you don't love For yourself, it is quite difficult to invest in getting that person to invest in healthier lifestyle habits.

It's absolutely a matter of mental health as much as logical and rational information, no doubt, and there are many people who had early childhood trauma. for example, who developed real anger because of what happened but then feels guilty out of anger because I still have to be with these people, they still shelter me and feed me so I go unconscious, they start attacking themselves and I'm mean , it's hard for me yes I believe deep down that I'm bad at doing the right things out of love because you don't love yourself MH and that's a brain problem because trauma gets stuck in your brain, but it's also a psychological problem .

I think of all my patients. in four big circles is what is the biology, what is the health of the brain, why do we have to look at your brain and those important numbers that we talk about, how is your psychological health, what is your mind, what is the quality of your thoughts, the level of trauma you have. What's the chatter in your head? There is also a Social Circle. What is happening in your life now with your children, with your jets, with work and there is a spiritual Circle. So why do you care? You know what your deepest sense of meaning and purpose is, etc. in my mind when I evaluate my patients the four circles all the time I want to have an exercise called a one page miracle I want you to know what you want relationships work money physical emotional spiritual what you want let's define it so you can look If you do it regularly, you notice what You like the other people in your life more than you don't, and every time you feel sad, nervous, or out of control, write down what you're thinking and I've got this. big process of thinking honestly and accurately, so I'm not a big fan of positive thinking.

I'm a fan of precise thinking with a positive spin that would be worth talking about and then I will make your brain healthy so if I give you these strategies and you don't do them I want to bond with you so that you come back and trust me and then I want work on what you know, maybe past trauma. I love a therapy called MDR, trauma-specific psychological treatment. for eye movement desensitization and reprocessing and I love another one called intensive short-term dynamic therapy istdp and the basis of that therapy is that people who really struggle and like it don't do the things that they could do to be healthy, they are attachment problems that lead to anger. and then the guilt because of the anger and the self-attack is like they are living that I did something wrong even though everyone has done things wrong and you know most people forgive themselves, they are living with this self-attack and that sometimes it requires intense therapy, but it doesn't It doesn't have to be long, that's why they call it short-term intensive dynamic psychotherapy and you've had success with that great success, yeah, yeah, it's very interesting, I mean, because you can't show scan that person as many times as you want, but until you untie that knot and get to the root of what's driving that disposition that's preventing them from making changes, it's not going to matter.

I've never seen anything as powerful as showing someone your addicted brain when I started decluttering. scans I was the director of the dual diagnosis unit, so a psychiatric hospital unit that takes care of substance addicts, their brains were so bad and I was like, here's a healthy brain, here's your brain, Your brain controls everything you do, what brain do you want, I mean me. I think anyone with an addiction should get a brain scan and it occurred to me, I wrote a book with David Smith called Unchain Your Brain, Break the Addictions That Steal Your Life and I like to give everyone proacs and say right there, lots of different ways to get depressed, give them to everyone. a 12 step program a little crazy because they are impulsive addicts they are compulsive addicts they are impulsive compulsive addicts they are sad addicts or head trauma addicts it's like it's not the type you had and if someone diagnosed you with ADD, which we'll talk about that, well that's our group of impulsive addicts, it's like you want to do the right things but you just don't have enough rest to stop and that could be due to low frontal lobe activity or compulsive addicts, they just think the same thing.

They go over their heads over and over again, and sometimes clinically it's hard to tell the difference because they say, "I'm impulsive," but what they really mean is that they're compulsive. They have a thought. The impulsive person has a thought and does it without thinking. The compulsive person. you think over and over again and you have to do it, so one is a dopamine intervention, the other is a serotonin intervention and how would you know unless you actually seemed interesting? Hello everyone, today's episode is brought to you by Seed Intestinal Health. I talk about that. All the time on the

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2 do it a little over a year ago. I did a week long intensive therapeutic process that was meant to be geared towards childhood trauma and it was amazing and over the course of that. This week I spent time with a wide variety of psychiatrists and at the end of that week there was a consensus among all of these psychiatrists that I had ADHD, as I said at the beginning, that was news to me, because I had always thought of this as an associated condition with hyperactivity.

He was not a hyperactive child. I didn't feel like I had any of the symptoms that at least in my mind were associated withthat condition, but through the process of being diagnosed and working on it. I have developed a completely new perspective on this and realized the extent to which I developed coping strategies to deal with this that allowed me to overcome that predisposition that I would never have known about. I just didn't think I was you. I know that person who swam and treated Al, yeah, that's how I did it. I would just exhaust myself with exercise and then I could calm down and sit down so I didn't have that experience of not being able to focus because exercise gave me a different baseline so Can I talk about the five symptoms of ADD on homework and you Tell me which ones do you have?

I mean, there's more. The diagnostic criteria include 18, but I think of one. It's a short attention span, but not for everything. It is a short attention span for the daily routine. things homework assignments paperwork assignments that are highly stimulating or scary new novels people with ADD can pay attention very well because they have their own intrinsic dopamine love is a drug, especially new love is a dopamine drug, so if you love your teacher, let's go I want to please them and that's why you do well in that class, but your attention span is erratic and that's what fools people because they say no.

I'm interested. I heard President George W. Bush say this and he said no. I did well in class. classes that I was interested in and I'm not another President added, right, we just came out of Bill Clinton, who clearly had impulse control issues, does that resonate with you? Sure the things I'm interested in I can be completely obsessed with The things I'm not interested in are more challenging, but for me that's not for everyone and I think in reflecting on that, I've made some pretty big life decisions about my career. in the past, when I was choosing a career path. that that really wasn't what I should have been doing and I have an enormous capacity for perseverance and determination and I could force myself to do work that I wasn't interested in um but it gets very exhausting and I was a lawyer for a long time and I have a lot of memories of being at the law firm and trying to force myself to write these briefs and motions and do Discovery and all the things you do as a litigator and look around and realize that my colleagues seem like they were much more interested in this than I was and I thought that everyone was suffering from this the same way I was, instead of the truth, which was that I was this round Peg trying to fit myself into a square hole.

Yeah, you didn't love it. And if you add one of the things I tell all my ADD patients is to find something that you like and that you can make money with. I mean, very often people find things you like and then you depend on other people, that's a recipe for misery. the second symptom is distraction you see too much you feel too much you feel too much it's like the world is coming at you quickly and then you want to sit down and read a book but then you get distracted by email or your phone or because you're hungry or something, but It's not like everyone doesn't either, my best friend in medical school had added and I loved him very much, he graduated first in our class, I was second, he was first, but he was my partner so I was proud of him . and I just distracted Ed and it was fun to watch.

I don't feel like a distracted person, but I do feel like I need to do one thing at a time and as long as I only have this one thing. What I'm doing is like it's okay. I can concentrate. I can even when I don't feel like doing it. I can get over that. Cancel it and do it. When I get in trouble is when I wake up and now. my life is very full, a lot of things happen and I start thinking about all the things I have to do and it becomes very overwhelming very quickly and I get stressed and anxious and that just translates into being an irritated person and you know it's unpleasant to be close, but I leave it to my own devices, if I can, I like to do everything I can to make a thing disappear. fill it out and then I'm open to the next thing, the third is organization, it's difficult for people who have ADD Organization in time and space now I think there are seven different types of ADD, let's say What is the difference between ADD ADHD, what are we about talking? well I think there are seven types, that's what I learned from Iman, but add attention deficit disorder was a name given to this thing, before the American Psychiatric Association with dsm3 used to call it minimal brain dysfunction.

Diagnostic and Statistical Manual from 1980, that's what I trained. in 1987, god knows what reason they changed the name to ADHD, so it used to be add with hyperactivity or add without hyperactivity and they changed the name to ADHD to group everyone together, the problem is that half of the people who have this disorder They never are. hyperactive, so it was very confusing and then in 1994 they changed the name again to ad/hd highlighting that half of the people who have this are never hyperactive, so you know, the names are not scientific, let's be very clear about that, there is no biology in this group.

Many psychiatrists get together and vote based on what they think is the best evidence and it's often a bit silly like this time we'll lose Asperger's Syndrome. Now everyone, whether you're Elon Musk or a high-functioning autistic person, receives the same diagnosis as someone who is in a developmental stage. Center that can never live independently. I mean, it's just weird when I started with images. I thought, oh, it's not something based on images and if we look at your brain, I'll be able to tell you that type one is classic ADHD. attention span distraction disorganized in time and space we don't talk about it much but your room your desk your backpack problems with organization and you might I'm not that guy anyway I'm OCD so you might be the three us type I'll get to people with ADD they tend to be late or just on time because they don't really start getting ready to go until, oh my god, I'm late, that's not me either, okay, I'm usually on time, that's why it's like I want to go and get a brain , I'm not convinced I have one or two, not so much, uhhuh, not being able to multitask is a very masculine brain thing, as opposed to additional disorganization because it's procrastination, you put things together. procrastinate, procrastinate, I do it until you're mad or someone else is mad at you and then five is impulse control, you say things you probably shouldn't say or do things you probably shouldn't do and it's like rest. in your brain it is vulnerable and I think those are the five things and if you have three out of five you probably have them and you think that someone should take a good look at your brain and what you would see would be the interruption in the conference you attended or in the treatment the one you attended where all the psychiatrist says you added interruption, what do you mean if you interrupted people in conversations or not?

I don't believe it, why did they say it wasn't like that? If I interrupt you now, that's why you say I get accused of that on the podcast of interrupting people too much. If I was interrupting, they didn't tell me I was doing it and if I was doing it, I probably wasn't aware of it. doing it so why do they want to drug you? What did they see? Do you have ADHD? It's probably related to addiction issues, maybe I don't know, or the coping mechanisms I've developed to focus or the way I can use them. excessive exercise to calm me down I'm not sure, well we'll see MH and it's like how do we know unless we look good?

It's like one of the things you'd see on a brain scan of an ADHD brain versus a healthy brain—often healthy at rest, and it decreases with concentration, especially in the prefrontal cortex, the front third of your brain, an area called the brain ganglia. basil where dopamine and cerebellum works, so healthy at rest falls when you focus, we need to fix ourselves and it can be fixed with exercise, it can be fixed with certain stimulant supplements and sometimes medications can be incredibly helpful, but the problem is what I saw because I am a child psychiatrist and an adult psychiatrist, part of half of the patients we have at the Aman clinics have ADD in one form or another and what I found is the classic short attention span, distraction, hyperactivity, impulse control, there is lack of attention, he is never really hyperactive or terribly impulsive, but he has problems functioning, problems with concentration.

I have a son with both types, type three is too focused, adds the The problem is not that you can't pay attention, it's that you can't divert your attention, you end up stuck in things and, because you are organized, that tends to be the The only exception is type three, but these people also tend to be argumentative. Oppositionalists, if things don't go their way, they get angry and may hold grudges, and their addiction of choice tends to be things that calm their brain, whether it's alcohol or marijuana. MH type four is limbic and his emotional brain also works. difficult and tend to see the world through dark glasses, they have additional distinctive features plus a kind of mild depression, type five is low temporal, often due to a head injury, one or both of their temporal loes hurt, so mood instability, irritability, temporary things six.

I'm famous for being in movies, it's called The Ring of Fire, where the brain is not underactive, it's overactive, it works too often due to inflammation and the type seven is anxious and it's their anxiety level that increases. . in some places on time, but they have to work much harder than their colleagues and this is all rooted in genetics, some are RO in trauma, but adding it is very genetic, right? It's so genetic that if I see a child with ADHD and I don't look at all on their mother's side or their father's side. I'm looking at the boy to see if he looks like his parents.

I mean, it's literally that genetic, yeah, interesting, yeah. I don't know if I could identify it in my Family Tree. I mean, I'm not qualified to do that, but it can also be caused by a concussion, so you know, if you come see me, one of the things we'll ask you five or six. , seven, 10 times, have you ever had? a brain injury, have you ever fallen from a tree, from a fence, dove into a shallow pool, have you ever had a concussion, playing sports, a car accident, I hope to have my brain scanned, will it be super interesting, will you understand me correctly? we can do this I'm so excited yeah okay let's talk about raising mentally strong kids.

Yo AP Oliz, you just gave me this book. I haven't read it yet, so maybe you can give us the thesis, like why you wrote this. book and what are you trying to say here that children are at the worst time in history in terms of mental health problems anxiety levels depression ADHD self-destructive behaviors are out of control new study 54% of teenage girls report being persistently sad 32% have thought about suicide 24% have planned suicide and 133% have attempted suicide schools are overwhelmed by the incidence of children taking medication and children suffering panic attacks and other mental health problems is horrible What is happening and what I learned very early in my career is that the most effective intervention for raising mentally healthy children is parenting strategies and the first one, obviously, if you want to have mentally healthy children, you have to be mentally strong.

I talk about how important that is and then there's this system that I stick to that I think is very effective and I wrote the book with my friend Dr. Charles Fay, who is the president of the Institute of Love and Logic and that program. It's really very important to me personally because when we brought it our home became a lot happier and that's why in the book we mixed neuroscience and the program that I've been using for years with love and logic, so we combined these two programs to really make what we think are the latest innovations in parenting all parents want mentally strong children we want our children to be confident, kind and responsible all these things and obviously children participate in it, how you behave, that's much more important than what comes out of your mouth, if your behavior does not match. you know what you're saying, they're paying attention to behavior much more than words, um, but you know where even the best intentions are failing.

I mean, the statistics you cited are devastating, there are many things that contribute to that of course but where is where we think we are doing the right thing and maybe we are wrong we are rescuing too many children we are solving their problems because of our low self-esteem and OB guilty of this I think about the first three and I love all my children and if you don't feel very good about yourself you gain self-esteem by doing for your children when they could do it for themselves and then what you do is create incompetent people, so When a child comes to you and says: I'm bored Too often, parents rush to get him the latest video game or take him somewhere instead of just returning theproblem.

MH oh, I wonder what you're going to do about it. and then be loving enough to not set it up so that my wife and Chloe or the 20-year-old, when she was six and seven, would have these monstrous battles with homework and I'm a child psychiatrist and I look at Tana and say: finished second grade, get out of this fight, she listens to me, but three of her friends recommended parenting with love and logic and that is the fund

amen

tal principle: letting children solve their own problems. I mean, be a good coach, be a resource, don't solve it and Then when Tana really got it, she announced to Chloe, honey, I'm done with second grade.

I will never ask you to do your homework again, it's up to you and if you don't do it, you just have to accept. the aftermath and Khloe had a fit and said, "I never said I was going to do my homework, I'm just not going to do it." She now she stormed off, she came back 20 minutes later, now she's a junior, a Chapman, no one has asked her to do it. homework again and she got a 4.2 in high school she is responsible, competent and can solve her own problems we were wrong when we robbed them of their self-esteem by solving their problems so for example Chloe knew if she forgot her homework no one would give it to her she will bring, if she forgot her sweater on a cold day, no one will bring it to her. um, if she forgot her lunch, it takes 24 hours to starve, no one will bring it to her and she only forgot those things like twice and now she doesn't forget anything. the lesson, yes, you become self-directed, you develop that self-efficacy which will be useful to you later in life, self-esteem comes from performing estimable acts on your behalf and if you are always rushing to solve the problem or rescue yourself, you are depriving your child of the opportunity to learn those things properly is a short-term gain, a long-term pain, and I think a lot of times time-poor parents say, "Okay, let me solve the problem because you know I have other things to do." do and I can figure this out instead of letting the kid wallow and make mistakes and figure it out on his own because sometimes that's not convenient and it's also not aimed at gold, so principle number one is know what you want, What kind of father do you want? you want to be and what kind of child you want to raise ask yourself that question ask the other parent that question what parents do we want to be and what kind of child do we want to raise because then your behavior comes out of whatever mission statement you create and then the second thing is attachment, the bond and that requires two things: time, real physical time and listening, parents talk too much and we have all this great knowledge and all these great experiences that we just want to pour into their little heads and they disconnect us if you listen actively with them they will be very close to you but if you tell them how to think and you interrupt them it's very bad for the relationship because of the attachment and then I have an exercise in the book that is just gold, I mean, it works, it works every time.

I think the parents who really do it the way I ask them to do is 20 minutes a day with the child, they do something with them that they want to do and during that time there are no commands, no questions, no instructions, and when. I first discovered it and then I saw that it worked and it worked and it worked my literary agent uh at that time Carl called me and told me that I'm having problems with my 2 year old son, so he had a son. Later in life and Lara was too and she says she never wants anything to do with me and I think you're ignoring her.

What do you mean? I told him to do this and told him it was a special time, 20 minutes a day. something with her she turned 18. She told me that if I voted for McGovern the country would go to hell and since we had no relationship I voted for McGovern and the country would go to hell but it had nothing to do with McGovern it was for Nixon and Watergate and me We like to have influence with my children, but there is no influence without connection, there are different types of attachment. I also think that that is very wise and it is also very simple and feasible, like investing your time in your children, being interested in what they are interested in. in uh when they tell you something don't lecture them or tell them why they're wrong just tell me tell me more and stay at their level so they don't feel judged or like you're going to basically explain something to them.

You're right, I think that's great advice on the opposite end. On the spectrum of someone like your father is the very immersed father who has a different type of attachment to order where he cares too much about the well-being of his child and the child. It becomes a vehicle for their own self-esteem, so they are projecting all this emotional baggage onto their child and the child takes on this responsibility to make their parents feel good and whether that projection is ambition or their own insecurities or their own dreams that were never realized, the child at a barely conscious level.

This is subsuming all of that and that becomes problematic, I certainly like to think that good parents make good coaches and I have been lucky enough to work with some amazing coaches and the good coaches notice what they do well and teach the bad coaches. . what you're doing wrong and focus on it and in the book there's a whole section on why I collect penguins, so I have like 2000 penguins, it's a little strange, they're not real penguins, there are no penguins, pens, CBS dolls, ties, I have a penguin, the weather, it rains, a penguin. empty it's strange but my oldest son Anton who I adopted was difficult for me he was argumentative oppositional thinking go his way he got angry and I talked to my supervisor and she told me you need more time alone with him and I took him to a place called Sea Life Park, which is in Hawaii, it's in aahu, kind of like SeaWorld, they had marine animal shows and we had a great day, whale show, sea lion show, dolphin show and at the end of the day I took him to the Fat Freddy show.

He was a humiliated chubby penguin but it's incredible he climbed like a 20 foot diving board he went to the end he bounced and jumped in the water thrown with his nose counted with his flippers he jumped through a fire and at the end of the show the trainer asked him to go to get something, he went and got it and brought it back and time stopped for me because in my head I was like damn, I asked my son to get something and he wants to have an argument for like 20 minutes and then He doesn't want to do it and I knew that my son was smarter than the Penguin and I realized that I was the problem, so later I went to the coach and asked him: how did you get Freddy to do all this? cool things and she said unlike parents, every time Freddy does something like what I want him to do, I notice it, I give him a hug and I give him a fish and the light went on in my head that when my son liked things I liked them a lot.

I didn't pay attention to him, but when he didn't, I paid a lot of attention to him because I didn't want to raise bad children and I collect penguins, it's a way to remind myself every day that I am molding the people around me. what I pay attention to is interesting, yeah, so it's like that, this totem to bring you back to that place that's cool, you mentioned the danger that so many teenage girls are currently experiencing, when a young person reaches a certain age, it's natural for They differentiate themselves and, sometimes, if it is not common for communication with the parents to be affected because the child is no longer interested in going out with the parents because they have their own things, they want to close the door to their room and do their own thing and not be disturbed.

Well, with this increase in mental health issues that young people are experiencing, what's the advice for parents who find themselves in the middle of that situation where it's harder to connect and communicate with their young teen because that person you you know isn't it? in the same place as when the child was a teenager, but also knowing that there are all these threats and you know that the risks are much greater in terms of the mental health conditions that we are seeing now, which is why we talk about so many things. In the book, the attachment protects and you need to supervise your children until their brain develops.

I mean, you really need to understand the normal development of your prefrontal cortex, so the front third of your brain, the largest in humans and any other animal, is not fully melinated until you are about 25 years old and so We think of 18 year olds as adults, it's ridiculous from a neuroscience standpoint and the insurance industry actually knew this before neuroscientists knew it. When do your insurance rates change? When you're 25 they go down significantly because you make better decisions because you have more melinated front handles and myelination is really important so when you're born not much happens in your brain, about 2 months the back of your brain melinates and you see better , that's why when you smile at a newborn, he doesn't smile back, but when he's about 8 weeks old, you smile at him and he starts to totally connect with you.

So, he thinks of a copper wire or a neuron. A brain cell is enveloped. with a white fatty substance like insulation on a copper wire and that neuron works 10 to 100 times faster, so your prefrontal cortex, the most human thinking part of you, is not fully melinized until you are about 25 years old , so it is undergoing wild development. 14 to 25 years old, however, that's when many parents abdicate their role and like to send their kids away even though they're not really mature enough to hang out with a bunch of other single brains who join sororities. and fraternities and all kinds of bad things happen.

For children, then I think we need to have supervision in a way that is not intrusive, but it's like he's watching. I want to know where you are. I want to know when you will come home. The kids hate it, but you know what they hate. You're more concerned if you don't because that means you don't care what the advice is for the parent who is struggling to close that communication gap with the teen who says, leave me alone, I don't want to talk to you or how it was. Your day is fine, you know, the kind of naval look you know happens around that age.

Yeah, I think try to be in their space as much as you can and be a good listener. There are always two default words: firm and kind. If you really understand the research we talked about about raising mentally strong children, parents who are firm and loving do much better than parents who are loving and permissive, so permissiveness raises less healthy children, because whether you are affectionate and permissive or hostile and permissive. permissiveness is not good it is good to have limits and rules and children should have housework and the problem is and I would love for people to write this statement.

I only do good things for people who treat me with respect and very often children will be very disrespectful and then parents will go out of their way to give them things because of their own fault. I do nice things for people who treat me with respect and I'm always pushing to have that time and even if they reject you I just keep coming back but don't bend over and do all these nice things for people who are rude to you that's not nice which is your advice on devices clearly a part probably a large part of the depression suicidal ideation Etc. that is on the rise particularly with teenage girls is a result of, on some level, social media, the comparison that takes place, 247 um access to what your peer group is doing at all times, the bullying and criticism that happens there, I think parents are often confused about how you handle that like selfish absorption, I mean, what They drive social media is at a toxic level, it's all about me and my advice is delayed as long as you can.

I mean, I would hold out for as long as you can and then I would supervise it, and if you're paying for it, it's like you know you can have this, make sure there are safety features for the parents because having 8 year olds exposed to porn is something very bad for the developing brain, talk about wear and tear on your pleasure centers. Um, so you need the parent devices to delay it and then if they have it, it's like you can only keep it if I have access to it, so I think it's very important to have supervision, you have to be their front loes until it's develop because there are dangerous things.

On the web you get it as long as it's not a problem like those kids who play video games who have a fit when you tell them to stop, the video game has to go away, I mean it has to go away because you. You are the father, that is your role. I've sent too many kids to video game addiction programs. I don't like that and they're like, oh, but their friends are doing it, oh, it's like you can do it as long as it's not. creating a problem and I think you should limit it because vices, social networks and video games that release dopamine, were intentionally created to make you addicted, they use the same principles that Las Vegas uses to make money in gambling, which is a intermittent reinforcement.

We're not going to reinforce you all the time, we will do it every once in a while and it releases dopamine, so what does that mean? You have two pleasure centersin your brain they are called the nucleus, succumbing part of the basil ganglia, and when you get excited about something that produces a little doping, it pushes the pleasure center, but the more you push it, the harder you push it, think about these violent video games , very soon the accumulated core becomes numb and you need more and more to get the same effect, so you had an addiction, right?, you struggled with an addiction towards the end of the addiction, you were not getting the OFA that you got at the beginning, because your pleasure centers had worn out, they were wearing them down sooner than ever. before and I think that is one of the main reasons for the increasing incidents of depression, well social media sites are designed in a similar way, they are scientifically designed to be addicted in the same way that a slot machine or a video game is designed and mentally. sharing, that's what gets complicated when you're 16 or 18 and part of being a member of their cohort or tribe is being familiar with these platforms and communicating on these devices, so it's not as easy as saying "I" .

I'm taking your phone away because that's the same as saying you're being kicked out of your community, yes, but you have to be careful, I mean, you have to be willing to do it to show love, which is super Vision if a parent is to see your child sink into a depressive state what advice would you give him, the first thing is not to prescribe an antidepressant eh, that's not the first thing you should do now, it may be the seventh or eighth thing you should do, but the first thing is to evaluate your lifestyle, too often children take their devices to bed and don't sleep, so I think it's a very good family habit for everyone, including parents, to put away their devices or for you to take the yours. kids, I recently had a patient who got a new phone, he had an iPad and he was up until 2:00 3:00 4:00 and he wasn't doing well in school, it's like, sleep deprived people don't care.

He is doing well in school, so supervising the technology I think is essential. I teach a high school course called Brand Thrive by 25. We've done it for 15 years. It's been like this in seven different countries in all 50 states. We teach children to love and care for their brains and what I found. The current idea about teenagers is that parents have lost influence and their friends are more important and don't listen. It's wrong if you are linked to them, they listen, you have to explain it to them and give them the reasons why these companies use neuroscientists.

To addict your brain and steal your mind, these vape companies are making money off your early death, so you have to educate them and piss them off with what I call the evil ruler, right? If I were an evil ruler and I wanted to create mentally. illness, what would I do? I would create vaping devices and say this is a healthy way to smoke or I would make them think that marijuana is harmless, which it clearly isn't, or I would give them a device that is clearly addictive and has all kinds of effects. side effects and well have fun with this and other people your age are doing it so it's probably okay when you educate them like my 20 year old daughter she knows the time of day she's on her social media sites and limits it. and now she's doing this: how much sleep can I get? and she discovers that I do better with n and a half hours than with eight hours.

I thought, well, how clever is that, that she's tracking him correctly, so she uses devices and I'm trying to track him and it's because she understands it, so instead of doing this, don't do that, that's not helpful, it's a relationship and then this is your brain, how can you take care of your brain? And that's what we do with the brain before we're 25. It's very clever to create this narrative where there's some sort of evil Overlord who connects emotionally with healthy habits because you know young people and I would put myself in this category when I was young, I mean, there's a sense of invincibility like I can do whatever I want and you can get away with anything when you're young, so it's harder to make those calculations, especially when the brain isn't as developed as I want to eat what I want to eat and wanna. "I like, you know, satisfying my impulses when they arise and it doesn't matter if my parents tell me otherwise, I'm still going to do it and there's a process of learning for themselves, over time, that's how it is." It doesn't work anymore, sometimes that takes longer than you imagine for certain habits than others, um, but I think that idea of ​​connecting with them on a story level is like, oh, I understand that we're in a competition and there's a battle.

Against them. these people who want to keep me down is a really interesting and cool way, in fact Florida used that strategy, they spent hundreds of millions of dollars on campaigns to help kids quit smoking and nothing worked until they used that strategy, let me tell you as. the tobacco company is making money by making you sick and getting them angry so I turned on anger which I thought was brilliant and when I wrote my book The End of Mental Illness I'm like here 62 Evil Ruler Strategies and you can see like Girl Scouts selling Girl Scout cookies, I mean the big evil ruler. strategy there was a girl in San Diego who set up outside a marijuana dispensary and sold like 300 cases in 3 hours, more people had him as a marketing genius, but you know, giving them these very unhealthy sugar-laden things that increase the risk of diabetes, right?, but selling them.

For people who are high and feel like eating too, it's not a bad idea. From the business perspective we need to get this over with, but maybe you can leave us with a few more thoughts on not only the importance of taking care of our brains, but also. A few more practices to think about that we could incorporate into our lives, so I worked with BJ Fog to create small habits for him and I to work together and these are some small habits for brain health to start each day today. a great day pushes your brain to look for what's right instead of what's wrong as you go through the day this is our little great mom habit, see this is good or bad for your brain so i used to do that with Chloe, uh, we played. a game we call the Khloe game I'm like blueberries, good or bad for your brain two thumbs up avocados two thumbs up god butter hitting a soccer ball with your head oh no THS down your brain is soft your skull It's a hard game to play with them, whatever they're going to do good or bad to your brain, I mean, ask yourself if this is good for my brain or bad for you, you just have to know the science, my little one. favorite habit, it's actually not that small, but it's so good when you go to bed at night I say a prayer and then I'm gone well today it turned out well and it's not like writing down just three things you're grateful for I go hour by hour looking for what What I liked about the day What made me happy was even the smallest things, like we had this Health Challenge at home with my mother-in-law, it's public knowledge and, as I was walking up the stairs, I held my wife's hand and that made it happen. most notable was real because it was that cute. moment in a difficult time, if you do that, research shows that your level of happiness will increase in just 3 weeks and when you go to choose something to eat or drink, ask yourself if I love him and if he loves me too.

In a relationship with food and with the things you consume, it's like oh, but I love wine, but does it love you? Uh, we didn't talk about alcohol, but he doesn't love you, right? It damages the microbiome in your mouth. and in your gut it is something bad, beautiful. I love that practice. It's similar to a gratitude practice, but pay attention to the little things that happen every day and those little things become the big things that drive happiness. I did it that night. My dad died 3 and 2 years ago, one of the worst days of my life and I think we're really going to do this tonight, but this is a very important point.

Your brain is lazy. What you do. What you teach him to do. it's what it's going to do automatically, so like I've done for a decade, even on a horrible day I found these three moments that were so tender and beautiful that they put me to sleep and that didn't mean I didn't. I'm not grieving, I still do, but it means I'm managing my mind instead of letting it manage itself. Do you think that a fund

amen

tally negative or pessimistic person can transform into an optimist? I don't know if he's an optimist, but he can certainly transform. they are more realistic and that is why I love Byron Katie's work.

I don't know if you ever had her, but I'm familiar with her work. It's amazing and it's about what's true and a lot of people have the negative side. of what is true and completely ignore the positive side of what is true as if my wife never listens to me. I've had that thought, write it down and then wow, it's true, it's absolutely true, how does that thought make me feel bad? How would it be? without the thought it would be fine so take the original thought and turn it into the opposite she does listen to me and in fact she doesn't do it all the time but if I focus on what is wrong I am going to feel bad if I am focused on what is right I'm GNA I'll be much happier this thing had like 12 million views on Instagram I have the R for 12 which is if I'm going to do something important film a public television special write a book go on a trip it happens that things are going to go wrong, just face it, i don't get angry until day 13. the thing went wrong because a mentally strong person can roll with things, not roll over, but can roll with whatever comes their way, not roll away. because I don't want people to take advantage of you, but learning that mental flexibility and that comes with practice, part of it is not identifying with your thoughts and understanding that just because you're thinking about something doesn't mean it happened. be an integral part of your identity or that you need to act accordingly.

One of the strategies that I love is to give your mind a name. I named my pet raccoon in my mind when I was 16 years old. I literally had a pet raccoon. I loved her. She loved. me, but she was a troublemaker, she would like to eat all the fish in my sister's aquarium, clean my mom's bathroom, leave raccoon poop on my shoes, raccoon in the house, claws and all, rage and all that kind of things. She loved her, but she was. a troublemaker, that's my mind, but that's what raccoons are, that's what they do, they have 200 different sounds, I mean, it's like my mind and now when my mind bothers me, I think I should put you on the spot. cage or what I do. now because initially I would like to metaphorically put my mind in the cage and ignore it and now what I do is I turn it around because I used to do that and tickle it and raccoons have 200 different sounds and I say oh I bet I can make you purr just to being able to separate myself from my mind and be in control.

It is not the thoughts you have that make you suffer, it is the thoughts that you attribute to what is right, it is attachment and attachment to expectations and results, but yes you can. uncoupling which allows more room to respond rather than react and be in a more neutral state of mind about whatever is happening and I have to treat myself how I would like other people to treat me many of my patients when I first see them, yes They would treat their friends like they treated themselves, they would have no friends, they are so bad, but like a good coach, am I noticing what is right and am I learning?

I bring to public knowledge Alicia Newman, whom I love very much. uh the Canadian pole Walter, she's going to be in her second Olympics last year, she was world indoor champion and she's very hard on herself when we first met and we've come to win or learn, win or learn and that's What I want all my patients to have a good day, you win, if not, we learn. I think it's a good place to land the plane today. Thank you for coming and sharing with me today. I appreciate it and I hope to visit your clinic and have my brain looked at and we'll see, yes, advertisement or not, who knows, who knows what it is, I'm a little scared, although no, don't be afraid, so many people go, oh, I'm scared and I'm like anything we see.

It's good news because you have what you have and if it's incredible because you've done so many incredible things, we celebrate it and if it's not, we rehabilitate ourselves and now is the time. How old are you? 57 yes. Now it's time to start the party. not when you're 77 and you're saying names and forgetting appointments and people are trying to take your keys, the most loving thing you can do for your kids is work on having a healthy brain, cheers for that, thank you. Welcome peace, that's all for today, thanks for listening. I really hope you enjoyed the conversation to learn more about today's guest, including links and resources related to everything discussed today.

Visit the episode page on Rich roll.com, where you can find the full podcast archive. as well as podcast products, my books Finding Ultra voicing change and the plant power way, as well as the plant energy in meals meal planner. ral.com, if you want to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is subscribe to the show in theApple podcasts on Spotify and YouTube and leave a review or comment supporting the sponsors who support the show. It is also important and appreciated and sharing the show or your favorite episode with friends or on social media is of course amazing and very useful and finally to get podcast updates, special offers on books, the meal planner and other topics, subscribe to our newsletter you can find. footer of any page on Rich roll.com Today's show was produced and engineered by Jason Cameo with additional audio engineering by Kale Curtis the video edit of the podcast was created by Blake Curtis with help from our creative director Dan Drake portraits by Davey Greenberg graphic and social media resources courtesy of Daniel CIS thank you Georgia W for writing and managing the website and of course our theme song was created by Tyler Patt Trapper Patt and Harry matthys appreciate the love love the support, see you soon here peace plance namaste