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

the message in our society is wrong you're not stuck with the brain you have you can make it better and I can prove it meet Dr Daniel aan a celebrity psychiatrist a brain health expert and a 12-time New York Times bestselling author so if I'm right and I am you need brain Envy you need to love your brain the mission is to end mental illness by creating a solution in brain health today we discuss all things brain health dementia Alzheimer's and ADHD and debunk a few MTH along the way come on we need to get

into the 21st century psychiatrists are the only medical doctors who virtually never look at the organ they treat think about that if you want to keep your brain healthy or rescue it you have to prevent or treat the 11 major risk factors that steal your [Music] mind today's episode is brought to you by the awesome organizations that make this show [Music] possible well Dr Aon it's a pleasure to meet you thank you for making your way on a very rainy day here in Los Angeles to spend time with me I'm looking forward to discussing all

things brain health optimizing brain health Focus memory cognition preventing things like cognitive decline dementia Alzheimer's I'm interested in the mutability of the brain and brain health and we're going to talk about your new book also of course raising mentally strong kids I'm a parent of four kids this is very interesting to me um but I think the two primary motivating things that that made me most excited about sitting down with you today is first a little over a year ago I was diagnosed with 88 HD which came as quite a surprise many questions for you

about this it was not something that I thought would be something I would be associated with the second is that my mother is currently in the throws of dementia obviously a quite devastating situation as you know all too well and so I want to learn as much as I can uh about how to help her how to help my dad as you also might imagine uh is in a very challenging situation and of course to do everything I can to avoid a similar Peril for myself and as much as that might sound like I'm trying

to make this about me I'm actually not maybe a little bit with the ADHD part but when you consider the statistics on dementia and Alzheimer's it really is about all of us isn't it I kind of looked up some statistics about an hour ago and it's quite devastating the extent to which these diseases of dementia are are kind of taking over and grow growing at alarming rates in 2023 6.7 million Americans over 65 have Alzheimer's which is like one in N 55 million around the globe 2third of these people are women which is fascinating and

it's very much 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 is going to leave very few people untouched no question I mean if you're blessed to live to 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 horrifying but what most people don't know is you can have an impact on that and since 2005

I wrote a book with my friend Rod Shankle called preventing Alzheimer's and I updated it in 2017 with memory rescue and the big idea is if you want to keep your brain healthy or rescue it you have to prevent or treat the 11 major risk factors that steal your mind and you talked about your mom having it the pneumonic that we'll talk about is called called bright minds and the g in bright Minds is genetics but we don't think about it properly oh well I'm overweight because my family's overweight or I have hypertension because it

runs in my family or I have diabetes because it runs in my family or 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 they teach you what you should be doing doing so for example I have six children three of them are adopted two of my nieces we adopted because their parents couldn't stop with drugs and alcohol and it was a disaster for these kids and I tell my nieces if you never drink or do drugs you're never going to

have a problem but if you do it could be serious you need to be on an alcohol drug prevention program every day mm of your life I have obesity and heart disease in my family I'm going to be 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 as soon as you know you should be serious about preventing these 11 major risk factors I want to get into all those strategies uh but

let's talk a little bit about what's driving this what is causing this I mean I would imagine a portion of the spike that we're seeing this increase in incidents is related to the fact that people are living long and baby boomers are aging up but also I suspect that lifestyle habits are contributing to this as well with the increase in type 2 diabetes obesity hypertension and the like so what's causing cognitive decline are seriously unhealthy lifestyle and undisciplined Minds did you know depression doubles the risk of Alzheimer's in women and quadruples it in men what

is the relationship between depression and dementia so many people think if you're an older person and you get depressed it's actually a precursor to dementia they're both brain diseases or brain problems if if you will and it's critical and the m in bright mind's mental health stuff so I get so excited about this because what I came to realize I started looking at the brain in 1991 and we've looked at over 250,000 scans but early on I came to realize you're not stuck with the brain you have you can make it better and I can

prove it and so if I look at your brain and then you have a car accident your brain's going to be worse if I look at your brain and then you go on a drug Bender your brain is going to be worse if I look at your brain and then you all of a sudden you stop sleeping or you go through a divorce odds are your brain's going to change in a negative way but I also did the big NFL study when the NFL was sort of line they had a problem with traumatic brain injury

in football 80% of my players got better I could see the damage but when they go on a brainhealthy program 80% their brains looked better anywhere from 2 to 6 months later that's exciting I was a consultant on the movie concussion and and I was sort of bummed because the movie is's sort of a downer um you know is is that the Will Smith one the Smith yeah I remember that and it's like where's the hope and the message on football Dementia or CTE chronic traumatic and sell Phil apathy the message in our society is

wrong it's like oh you have this it's chronic progressive untreatable and so players don't come and get help because they feel hopeless it's like no get help early probably while you're still playing so that you can begin to reverse the damage it's the big exciting lesson over the last 30 years in Neuroscience neuroplasticity you're not stuck with the brain you have you can make it better there's an area of the brain called the hippocampus why I collect seahorses it's Greek for seahorse it's shaped like a seahorse every day you are making 700 new stem cells

in the hippocampus or I think of them as baby seahorses your behavior is going to grow them or it's going to shrink them and so if you're vulnerable to dementia that's the area that gets hit early in dementia and you want to love those seahorses nourish them feed them teach them rather than get them drunk or stoned or shrivel them your main protocol in evaluating people's brains is this imaging technology called spec right so can you describe what that is so can I tell the priest story just to put it in context so when I

was a Vietnam was still going on and the government had a draft and I became an infantry medic where my love of medicine was born but about a year into it I didn't like being shot at it just not for me it's for some people it's not for me so I got retrained as an x-ray technician and developed a passion for medical imaging as our professors used to say how do you know unless you look and then 1979 I'm a secondy year medical student I just get married and and 2 months later my wife tried

to kill herself horrified and I take her to see a wonderful psychiatrist and I come to realize if he helps her it won't just help her it'll help me it'll help our children our grandchildren as they would be shaped by someone who's happier and more stable so 45 years ago I fell in love with Psychiatry and I've loved it everyday 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 itd

be part of it 1991 I'm now a psychiatrist for about a decade and I went to a lecture at my local hospital on brain spec Imaging single Photon emission computed tomography it's a nuclear medicine study that looks at blood flow and activity it looks at how your brain works and it basically shows us three things healthy AC AC ity too little activity or too much how is it doing that what is the process by which that's revealing itself so again it's a nuclear medicine study so what we do is we take a radio pharmaceutical so

you take a radio isotope we take one we use is called technum and technum has self-esteem problems it doesn't like being who it is and it changes shape and when it changes shape it produces a photon or a little packet of light that we can measure so we combine technici with hmpao a medicine that's easily taken up by cells in the brain combine them inject them into your arm and it's called a first pass extraction so 70% of it is taken up in your brain in that first pass so within about 2 minutes and then

so it's the hardest part of the procedure little tiny needle and to a vein in your arm inject the medicine it lights up your brain and then we can measure it have you lay on a camera table it's not claustrophobic it's not like an MRI uh people lay on the camera the camera heads come around your head in about 15 minutes and we get about 10 million counts or 10 million times that little piece of light hits the crystals in the camera and then we re constructed and it looks like a brain and we then

can see in your brain which areas are most active which areas are healthy which areas are sleepy compare it to our massive database and my 8-year-old grandson can look at a scan and go healthy or not and it's so helpful to look and off camera we talked about controversy so I started looking at the brain I'm like a little kid so excited and we never make a diagnosis from a scan so that's really important we make a diagnosis like all doctors with all of the information take detailed history if you came to see us you'd

fill out about an hour's worth of paperwork talked to our historian for a couple of hours I mean we really get to know you and then we would test your brain we do a computerized neuros pych assessment and we would scan your brain and when you put that puzzle together it's so powerful the first patient I ever scanned so I went from the lecture on brains speec Imaging given by the head of the hospital where I worked into sy's room and I didn't met her I just met her she tried to kill herself the night

before and as I was talking to her I'm thinking she has adult ADD impulsive suicide attempt after a fight with her husband that she caused I Q of 144 but never finished College when I go tell me how you studied she said well I really never did unless it was the night before the test I put on a pot of coffee stay up all night and do the test she an eight-year-old son that had add so in my mind I'm feeling pretty confident about this but when I broach the subject with her she's like oh

adults can't have ADD and I'm thinking I'm the doctor she was resistant I said well why don't we look at your brain and I had been doing a study called quantitating EEG up to that point so I knew I needed to do it twice once it rested once while she did a concentration task and then after I got the results a couple of days later I'm in her hospital room she has a table I put the scans on the table she had a healthy brain at rest and when she tried to concentrate her frontal loes

and her cerebellum which we'll talk about dropped it was so clear what does that tell you the harder she tries the worse it gets it's a classic is what I was predicting I would see cuz that's what I saw in quantitative EEG and when I showed her the scans and explained them to her she starts to cry and she said you mean this is not my fault and I'm like you know people have ADD it's sort of like people who need glasses they're not dumb crazy or stupid you know people wear glasses I wear glasses

to drive we're not dumb crazy or stupid our eyeballs are shaped funny and we wear glasses so we can focus people have ADD aren't dumb crazy or stupid their frontal loes and cerebellum often turn off when they should turn on so medicine or supplements or other strategies we talk about so you can focus I could see with the image that her shame melted away and her compliance went up and she took the medicine her relationships were better she ended up she was underemployed as many add people are finished College got a better job and uh

was in touch with her for about 10 years so this was sort of an inciting incident that allowed you to see the benefits of using this as a diagnostic tool this imaging technology yes yeah I like it when my patients get better so I went into psychiatry and it was totally personal for me and I loved it but I was already getting criticism from it it's like oh we don't do this it's not standard it's not what we do but 1992 all day seminar at the American Psychiatric association brand spect Imaging and child psychiatry because

I'm also a child psychiatrist I'm so excited because I'm meeting colleagues who do it and in 199 93 I teach with that group so I'm like all in on the technology but it was 1993 lots of push back from the American Psychiatric association because it doesn't fit the current diagnostic Paradigm MH it's like stop giving people the diagnosis of depression depression is a symptom cluster it shouldn't be a diagnosis sort of like chest pain is a symptom it's not a diagnosis right if you have chest pain it doesn't tell you what's causing it and it

doesn't tell you what to do for it right right it's just IND disa to look deeper and use other diagnostic tools to confirm right you know what's happening but that was 20 years ago is there a sense that the medical establishment has changed its tune because if you look at your Wikipedia page it's like a it's like a diet tribe on you know the lack of some scientific efficacy with respect to this Imaging techn I don't know what to do about Wikipedia um 2016 January I've published 80 studies people go he's never published his work

it's like dude do you read discovered magazine listed our research as one of the top 100 stories in science for 2015 I was pretty excited about that 2021 the Canadian Association of nuclear medicine wrote procedure guidelines on spe basically as if I wrote them and five of the 10 authors had been my students at some point had 10,000 medical and mental health professionals referred to our 11 clinics and 250,000 scans that You' reviewed so that's people from 155 it's a massive data set what are some of the general trends that you see like what can

you extract from that giant data set that speaks to bra brain health the mutability of brain health and the types of conditions that you see most consistently in the patients that end up in your clinics well can I can I stay with the controversy just a little bit longer because it really irritates me the people criticize me say oh he's only do it for money oh you can't see these things in the scans even though they're not experts but what's the alternative I mean i' said it earlier psychiatrists are the only medical doctors who virtually

never look at the organ they treat think about that and obviously if you have a brain dysfunction that's going to dictate a you know mental health outcome well if we agree that your brain controls everything you do right how you think how you feel how you act how you get along with other people and when it works right you tend to work right and when it's troubled you're more likely to have trouble in your life if your brain the moment by moment function of your brain creates your mind then why wouldn't you assess the organ

that you're you're working on and so just a little more history 1993 I start to get anxious because I have two big flaws I've worked on them a lot but I like people to like me and you can't change a medical specialty if you're anxious about what people think of you and I hate conflict I'm a middle child you and I both I hate conflict and I like people to like me and all that changed in 1995 so I spent from 1993 to 1995 just anxious because I knew I had to do this right there's

not a choice once you look you can't UNL and 1995 I get a call late one night from my sister-in-law Sherry who told me my nine-year-old nephew Andrew had attacked a little girl on the baseball field for no particular reason and I'm like what and she said Danny he's different he's mean he doesn't smile anymore I went into his room today and found two pictures he had drawn one of them he was hanging from a tree the other picture he was was shooting other children so if you think about it he's Coline or Sandy Hook

or Parkland Florida waiting to happen and I'm like I want to see him tomorrow and they lived eight hours from me so they brought him to me I'm like buddy what's going on and he's like Uncle Danny I'm just mad all the time like is anybody hurting you no is anybody teasing you no is anybody touching you in places that shouldn't be touching you no and 9 99 child psychiatrists out of a thousand would put him on medicine and therapy and because of my experience I already scanned a thousand people at that point I'm like

he's got a left temporal Lo problem and so I'm like I held his hand while he held his teddy bear and got scanned and he was missing the function of his left temporal Lo I'd never seen it I've seen it aund times since then turned out he had a cyst the size of a golf ball occupied the space of his left temporal lobe and I told his pediatrician I said you find somebody to take it out cuz he wasn't in my neighborhood and he talked to three neurologists all of them said they wouldn't touch the

cyst until he had real symptoms at which point I lost my mind and I start screaming at the pediatrician of a homicidal suicidal child who attacks people for no reason what do you mean real symptoms and he got anxious and he said I think they mean like seizures or he loses Consciousness I'm like ser ious and in my head I'm like neurologist neurologist neurosurgeons neurosurgeons will do stuff so I called UCLA talked to the head of the Pediatric nurse surgery Department J loera and he said Dr Ammon when these cysts are symptomatic we drain them

he's obviously symptomatic and after the surgery I got two calls one from my sister-in-law who said the surgery went really well and when Andrew woke up he smiled at her she said Danny he's not smiled for a year and then I got a call from Dr Lazer who said oh my God Dr Ammon that cyst was so aggressive that put so much pressure on Andrew's brain that thin the bone over his left temporal LOE so his skull had been thinned he said if he would have been hit in the head with the basketball would have

killed him instantly either way would have been dead in six months that's an amazing story what's so interesting is the idea that our personalities are not static that something a Miss with the brain could completely change a person's outlook on life how they show up in the world the thoughts that they're entertaining and with in the case of that example like a simple proced not a simple procedure but a a procedure could completely change that good or bad right it can go way but after Andrew and you know it's now 30 years later 29 years

later Andrew's married has two children has his own business I mean he's normal and it was that moment I lost my anxiety and my need for you to like me that's When The War Began to try to change Psychiatry to become let's like come on we need to get into the 21st century and 1979 when I told my dad I wanted to be a psychiatrist he asked me why I didn't want to be a real doctor yeah he wasn't happy about it why I wanted to be a nut doctor and hang out with nuts all

day long but that he just was just reflecting what society believes that you're weak if you have a mental health problems you're bad if you have uh behavioral problem and the images clearly taught me free will is not zero or 100 that Free Will is gray and I ended up testifying in some death penalty cases and um so if I'm right and I am that means 40,000 psychiatrists and hundreds of thousands family practice doctors OBGYN internist that they're practicing witchcraft by making diagnosis based on symptom clusters with no biological data last year 3 37 million

prescriptions for anti-depressants that's insane what's happening in our society is just tragic and we need a different way and the mission I have in my life is crazy but the mission is to end mental illness by creating a revolution in brain health which is why I'm so excited about Bring It's a bold statement it's a great Mission I love it um I think ancar what you just shared is there's a lot of misnomers when it comes to mental health like language is important and the words that we associate with some of the things that that

people experience are perhaps not in the best interest of healing and and Welfare can you talk a little bit about that like the idea of just talking about disease in general with respect to mental health so of the 337 million prescriptions written for anti-depressants virtually no one was talked to about their diet about their sleep habits about if they turn on the news first thing in the morning I love the idea of getting my patients excited about making their brains better rather than you have borderline personality disorder and you're probably not going to get better

but here are the things to do or you're by poar you're going to need to take this medication for the rest of your life um in Justin Bieber's docu series seasons and he came to me diagnosed with bipolar disorder on lithium I scanned him that's not what he had but can you imagine being 23 and people saying you have a mental illness you're always going to have this mental illness you need to be on this medicine for the rest of your life that's insane with no biological data or one of my favorite stories is Adriana

who I just dearly L normal 16-year-old beautiful goes to euse they think it's a magic moment when they're surrounded by six deer 10 days later she becomes aggressive she starts to hallucinate she's paranoid she's hospitalized given a diagnosis of schizophrenia and after three hospitalizations multiple medications the family spent $100,000 Adrian is a she comes to our Clinic she's one of our doctors her brain's on fire why is her brain on fire U you know we see inflammation turned out she had Lyme disease on an antibiotic within a year she's normal she graduated from Pepperdine she's

got a master's degree from the University of London she's normal I think infectious disease and talk about covid because it's part of it is a major C of psychiatric problems and nobody knows about it because people aren't looking at the brain and so you ask me you know what sort of the big lessons I've learned mild traumatic brain injuries a major cause of psychiatric illness and nobody knows it because they don't walk one of my friends was mountain biking and had an accident he fell broke his helmet didn't lose Consciousness never had an anxiety disorder

panic attack depression never in his whole life he's in his 50s all of a sudden he's having panic attacks doctor put him on Prozac and Xanax very common combination and for the wrong brain it's big trouble he's he became suicidal he saw me on TV and I came to see him had a dent in the left front side of his brain his left frontal lobe his left temporal lobe I'm like do I have a brain injury no are you sure what I found is you got to ask people multiple times do you ever have a

brain when I see it on the scan I'll generally find it ever fall out of a tree off a fence dive into a shallow pool car accident con cussion plane Sports he's like oh my God two weeks before I had my first panic attack I had a mountain biking accident and I broke the helmet I didn't think anything of it because I didn't lose Consciousness Consciousness is a brain stem phenomenon so you can really do damage to your brain and not lose Consciousness because you don't damage your brain St yeah yeah Phineas Gage the famous

case in Neurosurgical history was a railroad construction worker in 1848 and his job was in explosions he'd explode out the rock so they could lay the railroad tracks and one day there was an accident that happened his 3ot tamping iron he was tamping down the fuse and sand and gunpowder and he dropped the rod caused a spark then an explosion it went through a missile underneath his left cheekbone took out the left front side of his brain landed 30 yards away and he looked to his friend and said did you see that and then he

looked to another friend did you see that he didn't lose Consciousness but obviously it damaged his brain changed his personality was conscientious and a man of good character before that and then he got fired cuz he couldn't stop swearing and he didn't show up and he had these crazy ideas and was a stage coach driver and then moved to where all these people move which is California every athlete I know is going to tell you that having the right gear is key to Performance if what you're wearing is poorly crafted it's just going to put

distance between you and those goals you've set you owe it to yourself to invest in the best and the best is on I'm obsessed with the cloud Ultra great on the trails and I just got the new NextGen Cloud Stratus 3 for the road I'm loving those but an also has this incredible line of lightweight high performance apparel that it's just beyond anything I've previously dawned it's like this second to none Second Skin I love to rock the sweat wicking Ultra te and the ultra shorts which have this pocket right at the base of the

spine that perfectly anchors your phone no jiggle I'm just so proud to partner with an and I love their vision for the future where their gear is engineered for circularity so check out their amazing lineup of super comfortable sleek and durable pieces for yourself at on.com in the case of somebody who suffered a a CTE some kind of brain injury or in the case of someone like Justin Bieber who's being diagnosed with bipolar disorder I mean not for nothing like how about just the fact that he's so young and so famous and so wealthy like

how do you not have some kind of dysfunction being so young with a young brain trying to navigate that type of world but I guess yeah they almost killed that boy he was pretty out of control for a while and he seems to be 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 and Trauma and anxiety her parents didn't want her to have Justin and she ended up going in the Salvation Army home from wedm

mothers oh wow there's a lot so there's some childhood trauma stuff there childhood trauma and then you think early Fame which is one of the worst things for brain because you wear wear out your pleasure centers in the brain all of that excitement and then unlimited money with very poor Supervision in a brain that doesn't finish developing until 25 I mean just see sort of yeah it's a recipe for kind of dysfunction and you know one of my other sort of patients I dearly love Miley Cyrus got the Grammy this year for song of the

year makes me emotional because the song's really about love and loving yourself but it was a show for a long time she's been on a journey she she's been on a journey I'm just so proud of her because she's in charge of her life rather than fame's in charge or drugs are in charge or other people are in charge I mean you know I work really hard with my patients for them to become good CEOs of their life but you have to take care of the Executive Center in your life which is your prefrontal cortex

largest in humans and any other animal by far if you damage it with head trauma drugs alcohol bad food not sleeping social media it's not a good prescription what are some of the Topline most important lifestyle protocols or interventions that you recommend when your patients come through and you see something lighting up or not lighting up in these scans and and realize that there's work that can be done to course correct so it depends on your brain I mean you know there are things everybody should do like love your brain and I horrified myself I

don't know I guess about 10 years ago when I went brain health is three things brain Envy got to care about it nobody cares about their brain why because you can't see it don't see it you can see the wrinkles in your skin or the fat around your belly and can do something when you're unhappy with it I also think we're just not taught to care for it it's not something that we think about we know we should eat better and all the like and we know we can learn things with our brain but there

isn't a broad sense that we can improve our brain health through certain lifestyle choices that we're making immediately your brain's worse if you're drinking alcohol or if you're smoking pot immediately your brain's worse it if you don't prioritize sleep if you eat crappy food you know going back to these 11 major risk factors but it's three things brain Envy so when I started 1991 I scanned everybody I knew I'm like so excited and I scanned my mom she was 60 she had a beautiful brain which really reflected her life she has seven children 54 grandchildren

great grandchildren she knows everybody still 92 she knows everybody's name she knows what's going on in their lives and she's just someone that she brings people to her I scanned myself a week later and it wasn't nearly as good as my 60-year-old mother and that just irritated me but I played football in high school I had menitis twice as a young Soldier bad for the brain and I had bad habits you know I've never drank I never smoked but I wasn't sleeping I thought I was special like I could get by on four hours of

sleep and I'm not special I'm stupid because sleep is critical I was overweight I was I didn't care I'm a double board certified psychiatrist top Neuroscience student in medical school and I don't care about my own brain I saw it and I cared I have Envy I want my mom's brain and so I always say Freud was wrong penis envy is not the cause anybody's problem you need brain Envy you need to love your brain and that's where brain heal starts it's like oh I have this organ that creates me let me love it and

then avoid things that hurt it just got to know the list and do things that help it and again you just have to know the list and if we do the bright Minds it says what to avoid and what to do MH yeah those 11 sort of principles right that are buil built into that acronym yeah and they're everywhere in my head like be for examples for blood flow low blood flow is the number one brain Imaging predictor of Alzheimer's disease so if you have it in your family and I scan you we're going to

look I mean Spa is a study that looks at blood flow and mitochondrial activity 49% of the Tracer is taken up in the mitochondria so we're going to look at blood flow and energy and if it's low we're going to go why you know head traumas drugs alcohol caffeine nicotine not sleeping having high blood pressure being overweight and we're going to Target the reasons why it's low and then we're going to do exercise increases blood flow I love exercise Ginko is one of my favorite supplements because the Best Brands I ever see have taken genko

oregano cayenne pepper beets 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 everybody else this is a replicated study on like 990,000 people because what coordination does is it activates your cerebellum little brain 10% of the brain's volume in the back it's half the brain's neurons and if you activate that it turns on the rest of your brain so I'm a huge fan of table tennis and pickle ball and Tennis it's bad news for me

I'm very athletic but when it comes to anything involving I hand coordination I'm terrible at it and so I've avoided it my whole life but that's good news for you if you can get over yourself there's more more to be gained right yeah get a really 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 a half an hour twice a week it'll have a major impact on your ability to think because you got to get your eyes hands and feet all working

together while you think about the spin on the I think of it as aerobic chess I have this thing which I think might be fairly common which is this idea that perhaps I'm past the point of no return so let me explain I was a competitive swimmer growing up so between the ages of like 14 and 21 I was training you know four to five hours a day waking up at 4:30 in the morning and walking around overtrained like a zombie so I wasn't getting good sleep I never felt rested I always felt fatigued during

that period of time alcohol became quite the thing around age 18 and from 18 to 31 a progression into alcoholism and during that period of time you know maybe getting one good night of sleep while the rest of the nights were blackouts or recovering from blackouts I get sober at 31 but from 31 to 40 I transfer a lot of that addictive energy into my lifestyle choices so I was basically sedentary and subsisting on hot dogs french fries Pizza McDonald's Jack in the Box while not exercising at around 40 I have a come to Jesus

moment I Chang My Lifestyle habits and and many things about my life and I'm a much healthier person now I'm eat a plant-based diet I'm very fit and active I'm engaged mentally through the process of doing this podcast and other things that I do uh and my life is good but I can't shake this sense that I have done so much damage over the course of my lifetime that no matter how many good things I do now that at some point I'm not going to be able to overcome that damage it's going to catch up

to me and so what's the point in doubling down and really investing in in all of the things that you're saying and I I I think on some level that might be common people are thinking well I've treated myself terribly I think that song has been sung so you know mutability is your whole thing like we can't but is there a period at which I mean I would suspect it's more difficult than it is for others but what would you tell someone like myself or someone who's of a similar mindset or a similar type past

history well one we should look right how do you know unless you look and so many people go oh no I don't want to know yeah I'm scared I'm a little I'm a little scared if you knew a train was going to hit you wouldn't you at least try to get out of the way as long as there was a possibility to get out of the way of course if I couldn't get out of the way just let it hit me and I'm none the wiser so I do a show actually I want you to

be on it scan my brain on YouTube and Instagram and one of my favorite guys try gloss 2002 World Series MVP played third base for the Angels love him dearly drinking way too much for concussions depressed suicidal I mean he was in a dark place 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 awful like awful but he did what I asked him to do and his wife uh an who I dearly love she was a good partner he stopped drinking he

ate better exercised took the supplements lost 15 lbs in two months and I'm like let's look again cuz I could just tell he was better spray significantly better in a two month period two months and then I scanned him 16 months later how old is he 47 now and you know there were ups and downs right when you're an alcoholic it does you just don't stop I mean some people do but you know there was some bumps for us but you know we're in the fight together and 16 months later his brain is so good

and I know five years from now if he continues on and he has brain Envy his brain's going to be freaking 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 which is why you know every couple years I'll get a whole body scan because if trouble's coming I want to get it early I don't want to wait until late so many of the lifestyle illnesses that we're seeing now are tracked to chronic inflammation so what

are some of the things that we can do to ameliorate that that have implications in terms of brain health so in bright Minds the first eye is inflammation and some surprising things it's like 98% of us have low levels of omega-3 fatty acids if you're not taking an omega-3 supplement or focused on eating low mercury High omega-3 fish that's a problem because low omega-3 increases inflammation if you're not bit obsessed with your gums and your teeth if you have gum disease you more likely to have brain disease and heart disease and like I didn't really

just to drill down on that a little bit it's always amazing to me that that doesn't get 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 about the implications of not treating that well because that tends to lead to artherosclerotic issues and brain health obviously it's a circulatory situation it has to have implications in terms of brain health absolutely because your brain is 2% of your body's weight but uses 20% of the blood flow in your body 20% of

the oxygen in your body goes to your brain and if you have gum disease infections in your gums perodontal issues abscess and the like how does that translate into circulatory issues like what is you have a higher risk of Alzheimer's disease so it increases inflammation which you know many people think is the mother of all illness I don't know about that but I don't want to have inflammation and for a long time I didn't really care about my own gums until study after study gum disease heart disease thumb disease brain disease like no got to

take care of like so become a flossing fool in terms of blood work what should people be paying attention to I mean you mentioned Omega-3s but if someone's doing a blood panel and they get the results what are some things that would jump out to you so if we look at some of the important numbers for bright Minds like blood pressure would be for blood flow retirement and aging you don't want high iron levels iron iron accelerates aging you you don't want low iron because that'll make you not sleep and be anxious and I tend

to accumulate iron so I go donate blood twice a year and that seems to help good for other people good for me for inflammation you want to know your C-reactive protein for genetics you probably should know your apoe4 Gene type I'm a 2 three is that the gene that's connected Tois Earth situation where he double or whatever yeah yeah yeah he's a e44 which means he has a tenfold risk but a tenfold risk means about 25% and so it just means be serious and exercise the kind of exercise you're doing decreases the risk if you

have one or two E4 genes for head traumas is the number of head traumas you have toxins how's your liver function so liver function tests mental health it's your Ace score adverse childhood experiences 0 to 10 how many do you have my wife wrote a book called The Relentless courage of a scared child she's an eight out of 10 my nieces who I adopted are both nines I mean if you have four or more it increases your risk of seven of the top 10 leading causes of death if you have six or more you die

20 years early now my nieces and my wife aren't dying 20 years early because there are things you can do to extract the past trauma which is super important the second eye is immunity and infection so know your vitamin D level and get it above 40 people who are above 40 have half the risk of cancer of those who are under 20 and when I first tested mine when I sort of figured this out 20 years ago I was 17 I'm like how am I 17 cuz I exercise but I exercise at night because I'm

working during the day and I realize I need more sun and I need to supplement to have a healthy level not too much but a healthy level and then n is neuro hormones get them tested every year we're living in a society where low testosterone levels are r rampant in young males and I've just never seen anything quite like it what is contributing to that head trauma and toxins are more young males having head trauma than they used to be well with football and soccer and skateboarding maybe the other thing is toxins on their body

the products you put on their body so I have all my patients download the app think dirty and scan all of your personal products to see ewg thing like it it's it's similar to it so for example I used to shave with barbasol 50 years and on a scale of zero is live long 10 is kill you early it's a nine and now I shave with something called kiss my face which is a two it's insane the extent to which uh there are so many chemicals in our everyday products that we're unaware of and the

lack of regulation on this I've had plenty of guests in the past come on 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 quite an eyeopener to realize so disturbing the amount of uh toxicity in our personal care products and things that we sort of take for granted and assume are safe and what happened during covid it's all of a sudden these toxic hand sanitizers that have parabens and and fragrance that are just bad for you people are

lathering themselves their children with this stuff which is why I'm a fan of Earth friendly products because they make these cleaning products that I have no interest in them except I love them you need to be thoughtful you know what you clean your clothes with what deodorant you use what sunscreen you use read the label and like oh well I can't understand it then you need to like understand or get ewg or think dirty and just scan it and it'll tell you good for your brain and body or bad for it and people go oh

but that's so expensive I'm like no being sick is expensive this is just about love why would you put something on your body or your child's body that is poison get your hormon checked and then your hemoglobin A1c obviously and your BMI they're very important numbers to know 72% of Americans are overweight 42% are obese it's the biggest brain drain in the history of the world I published three studies that say as your weight goes up the size and function of your brain goes down and I learned that connection 2009 Cyrus rajie from the University

of Pittsburgh published MRI study that if you're overweight you have 4% less volume in your brain and your brain looks eight years older than healthy people if you're obese you have 8% less 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 that as an exclusion criteria healthy weight versus overweight or obese significantly less blood flow then I did an NFL stady healthy weight NFL players versus overweight NFL players love frontal L function

and I'm like oh no and can you talk about it without somebody being mad at you so I've had lots of people mad at me but it's just science right I'm just making the connection if you are overweight of 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 promoting forms of estrogen and you got 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 would imagine showing your patient these images these scans helps to create that connection because you see what's actually happening and perhaps that opens the door to loving your brain a little bit 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 either choose not to or struggle to make that change or struggle to make that change last or sustain because if you have low self-esteem if you are somebody who is of

a negative disposition or just see the world through the lens of lack as opposed to opportunity those people I would suspect are more difficult cases in terms of trying to get them excited about the possibility if you don't love yourself it's pretty hard to in invest in get that person to invest in healthier lifestyle habits it's absolutely so there is a it's a mental health thing as much as it is a rational logical information thing no question and there are many people who had Early Childhood trauma for example who developed real rage about what happened

but then guilt about the rage because I still have to be with these people they still house me and feed me and so it goes unconscious they start attacking themselves and I'm bad it's hard for me if I believe at my core I'm bad to do the right things out of love cuz you don't love yourself MH and that is 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 it's what's the biology which is brain health why we got

to look at your brain and those important numbers we talked about how's your psychological Health right it's it's your mind what's the quality of your thoughts the level of the trauma you have uh what's the chatter in your head there's also a Social Circle what's going on in your life now with your kids with your spouts with work and there's a spiritual Circle so why that do you care you know what is your deepest sense of meaning and purpose and so in my mind when I evaluate my patients all four circles all the time I

want to have an exercise called the onepage miracle I want you to know what do you want relationships work money physical emotional spiritual what do you want let's define it so you can look at it on a regular basis are you're noticing what you like about the other people in your life more than what you don't and whenever you feel sad mad nervous or out of control write down what you're thinking and I have this great process thinking in honest accurate ways so I'm not a huge fan of positive thinking I'm a fan of accurate

thinking with a positive spin that'd be worth chatting about and then I'm going get your brain healthy so if I give you these strategies and you don't do it I want to bond with you so you come back and trust me and then I want to work on you know perhaps the past trauma I love a therapy called the MDR specific psychological treatment for trauma stands for eye movement desensitization and reprocessing and I love another one called istdp intensive short-term dynamic therapy and the foundation of that therapy is people really struggling they like won't do

the things they could do to be healthy it's attachment problems that led to rage and then guilt about the rage and self attack it's like they're living that I did something wrong even though everybody's done things wrong and you know most people forgive themselves they're living with this self attack and that takes sometimes intense therapy but doesn't have to be long that's why they call it intensive short-term Dynamic Psychotherapy and you've had success with that great success with that yes yeah it's so interesting I mean because you can show that person as not as many

scans as you want but until you untie that knot and get to the root of what's driving that you know disposition that's preventing them from making changes it it's not going to matter I've never seen anything as powerful as showing somebody their brain like with addiction when I first started ordering scans I was the director of dual diagnosis unit so a psychiatric hospital unit that takes care of substance abusers their brains were so bad and I was like here's a healthy brain here's your brain your brain controls everything you do which brain do you want

I mean I think anybody with an addiction should get their brain scanned and I came up with I wrote a book with David Smith called unchain your brain breaking the addictions that steal your life and like giving everybody proacs and say right there many different ways to get depressed give everybody a 12-step programs a bit insane because they're impulsive addicts they're compulsive addicts they're impulsive compulsive addicts they're sad addicts or head trauma addicts it's like no the type you had and if somebody diagnosed you with ADD which we will talk about well that's our impulsive

addicts group it's like you want to do the right things but you just don't have enough of a break to stop and that could go with low frontal lobe activity or compulsive addicts they just get the same thought in their head over and over again and sometimes clinically it's hard to tell the difference because they go I'm impulsive but what they really mean is they're compulsive they get a thought the impulsive person gets a thought and does it without thinking the compulsive person gets thought over and over again and has to do it and so

one is a dopamine intervention the other is a serotonin intervention and how would you know unless you really looked interesting hey everybody today's episode is brought to you by seed gut health I talk about it all the time on the podcast you know it's important if you've even listened to a few of my podcasts I think I've maybe devoted I don't know a dozen two dozen episodes to the microbiome you got to take care of your gut health if you want to have Optimal Health how do you do that well you're nutrition your lifestyle habits

sleep all of these things play into that but it's also important to find a really good Prebiotic and probiotic how do you do that well there's a lot of nonsense out there so you got to follow the science and the best evidence-based product that I found out there is seeds ds01 daily symbiotic I've been taking it for I don't know over 3 years at this point every single day there's just a tremendous amount of science behind this product I urge you to check it out and right now it's a great time to do that because

you can get 25% off your first month of seeds ds01 daily symbiotic hit the link in the description below to visit seed.com roll and use code Rich roll2 get on [Music] it a little over a year ago I did a week-long intensive therapeutic process that was intended to be trauma oriented childhood trauma oriented and it was was it was incredible and over the course of that 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 uh because I had always thought of this as a condition associated with hyperactivity I was not a hyperactive kid I didn't feel like I had any of the symptomology that at least at least in my mind was associated with that condition but through the process of of being diagnosed and and kind of working through it I've developed a whole new perspective on this and I realized the extent to which I developed coping strategies to deal with this that allowed me to kind of overcome that predisposition

I would have never known I just didn't think that I was you know that person swimming Al treated yeah that's how I did it I would just exhaust myself through exercise and then I could calm down and sit so I didn't have that experience of not being able to focus because the exercise gave me a different Baseline so can I talk about the five homework symptoms of ADD and you tell me which ones you have I mean there more the diagnostic criteria includes 18 but I think of one it's short attention span but not for

everything it's short attention span for regular routine everyday things schoolwork homework paperwork chores for things that are new novel highly stimulating or frightening people with ADD can pay attention just fine because they have their own intrinsic dopamine love is a drug especially new love is a dopamine drug so if you love your teacher we going to want to please them and so you do fine in that class but your atten span is erratic and that's what fools people because they're like no I'm interest I heard President George W bush say this and he said no

I did well in the classes I was interested in and I'm like not another add President right we just came off of Bill Clinton who clearly had impulse control issues so does that resonate with you sure the things that I'm interested in I can be completely obsessed by the things I'm not interested in uh are more challenging but to me that just isn't that everybody and I think in reflecting on that like I've made some pretty big life decisions about career in the past where I was choosing a career path that that really wasn't what

I should have been doing and I have a huge capacity for persevering and determination and I could force myself to you know do the work that I wasn't interested in um but it becomes very exhausting and I I was a lawyer for a long time and I have many memories of being in the law firm and trying to force myself to write these briefs and motions and do Discovery and all the stuff that you do as a litigator and looking around and and realizing that my colleagues seem much more interested in this than me and

I just thought everybody was suffering through this in the same way that I was rather than the truth which was I was this round Peg trying to Jam myself into a square hole Yeah that you didn't love it and if you have add one of the things I tell all my ADD patients is find something you love that you can make money at right I mean too often people oh find things you love that you're then dependent on other people that's prescription for misery the second symptom is distractability you see too much you feel too

much you sense too much it's like the world comes at you quickly and so you want to sit down and read a book but then you get distracted by the email or by your phone or because you're hungry or something but also isn't that everybody no my best friend in medical school had add and I loved him dearly he graduated top of our class I was second he was first but he was my partner so I was proud of him and just so distru Ed and it was funny to sort of watch it I don't

feel like I'm a distracted person but I do feel like I need to be doing one thing at a time and as long as I just have this one thing that I'm doing like I'm okay I can focus I can even when I don't feel like like doing it I can kind of overcome that override it and do it where I get into trouble is when I wake up and now my life is very full there's lots of things happening and I start to think about all the things that I have to do and it

becomes very overwhelming very quickly and I get stressed and anxious and that gets translated into just being an aggravated person and you know being unpleasant to be around but it left to my own devices if I can just I like to go all in on one thing disappear complete it and then I'm open for the next thing the third one is organization it's hard for people who have ADD Organization for time and space now I think there's seven different types of ADD say What's the difference between ADD ADHD what are we talking about well I

think there's seven types that's what I learned from Iman but add attention deficit disorder was a name given to this thing it used to be called minimal brain dysfunction before then by the American Psychiatric association with dsm3 Diagnostic and statistical manual 1980 that's what I trained on 1987 for God knows what reason they changed the name to ADHD so it used to be add with hyperactivity or add without hyperactivity and they Chang the name to ADHD to sort of lump everybody together the problem is half the people who have this disorder are never hyperactive and

so it was very confusing and then 1994 they changed the name again to ad/hd highlighting half the people have this are never hyperactive so you know the names are not scientific let's just be super clear about this there's no biology to this a group of psychiatrists get together and they vote based on what they think the best evidence is and often it's sort of silly like we lost Aspergers this time everybody now whether you're Elon Musk and high functioning autistic gets the same diagnosis as someone who's in a Developmental Center that can never live independently

I mean it's just bizarre when I first started Imaging I'm like oh it's not one thing based on Imaging and if we look at your brain I'll be able to tell you so type one is classic ADHD short attention span distractability disorganized for time and space we didn't talk much about that one but your room your desk your book bag trouble with organization and you might I'm not that guy if anything I'm OCD so you might be type three we'll get to that people with ADD tend to be late or just right on time because

they actually don't start getting ready to go until oh my God I'm late that's not me either okay I'm generally timely this is why like I want to go and get a brain brain I'm not convinced that I have so one sort of two not that much uhhuh the not being able to multitask is very male brain thing as opposed to an add thing disorganization for is procrastination you put things off put things off put things off I do that until you're mad or somebody else is mad at you and then five is impulse control

you say things you probably shouldn't say or do things probably shouldn't do and it's like the break in your brain is vulnerable and I think those are the five things and if you have three out of five you probably do have it and it sounds like for you somebody should look at your brain right and what would you see was it the interrupting at the conference you went to or at the treatment you went to where all the psychiatrist says you have add the interrupting what do you mean like were you interrupting people in conversations

or no I don't think so why were they say it wasn't that am I interrupting you now is that why you're saying that I get accused of that on the podcast interrupting people too much if I was interrupting they didn't tell me that I was and if I was doing it I was probably not consciously aware of doing it so why do they want to drug you what did they see that they went you have ADHD probably related to to addiction issues perhaps I don't know or coping mechanisms that I've developed to focus or the

way in which I can use excessive exercise to calm myself down I'm not sure well we'll look at it MH and it's like how do we know unless we look right it's like right one of the things I what would you see in a brain scan of a brain with ADHD versus a healthy brain so often healthy at rest and drops with concentration especially in your prefrontal cortex front third of your brain an area called the basil ganglia where dopamine works and your cerebellum so healthy at rest drops when you concentrate we need to fix

up and you can fix it with exercise you can fix it with certain stimulating supplements and sometimes medication can be incredibly helpful but the problem is what I saw because I'm a child psychiatrist and an adult psychiatrist part of half the patients we have at Aman clinics have ADD of one form or another and what I found there's classic short attention span distractability hyperactivity impulse control issues there's inattentive add never really hyperactive or terribly impulsive but trouble performing trouble with Focus I have a child with both of those types type three is overfocused add the

problem is not that you can't pay attention it's you can't shift your attention you end up to get stuck on things and because you're organized that tends to be the one exception is type three but these people also tend to be argumentative oppositional if things don't go their way they get upset and uh they can hold on to grudges and their addiction of choice tends to be things that calm their brain down whether it's alcohol or marijuana MH type four is limbic add their emotional brain works too hard and they tend to see the world

through dark glasses they have the a Hallmark add traits plus sort of mild depression type five is temporal low add often from a head injury one or both of their temporal loes hurt so mood instability irritability temp stuff six I'm famous for it's made it to movies it's called The Ring of Fire where the brain is not low in activity it's high in activity it's working way too hard often due to inflammation and type seven is anxious add and it's their level of anxiety that gets some places on time but they have to work so

much harder than their colleagues and all of these are rooted in genetics some is RO in trauma but add is very genetic right it's so genetic that if I see an ADHD child and I don't see it at all in their mom side or their dad's side I'm looking at the kid to see if he looks like their parents I mean it's literally that really genetic yeah interesting yeah I don't know if I could identify it in my in my family tree I mean I'm not qualified to but it can also be caused by a

concussion and so you know if you come to see me one of the things we're going to ask you five or six seven 10 times have you ever had a brain injury have you ever fallen out of a tree off a fence dove into a shallow pool have you ever had a concussion playing sports a car accident I look forward to getting my brain scanned it'll be super interesting you'll have me right we can do this I'm so excited yeah good let's talk about raising mentally strong kids I AP oliz you just handed me this

book I haven't read it yet so perhaps you can kind of give us the thesis like why did you write this book and what is it that you're trying to say here so children are at the worst in recorded history as far as mental health problems the levels of anxiety depression ADHD self-harming behaviors is out of control brand new study 54 % of teenage girls report being persistently sad 32% have thought of killing themselves 24% have planned to kill themselves and 133% have tried to kill themselves schools are overwhelmed by the incidence of kids on

medication and the kids suffering with panic attacks and other mental health problems it's awful what's happening and what I learned really early in my career is the most effective intervention to raise mentally healthy kids is parenting strategies and the first one obviously if you want mentally healthy children you have to be mentally strong yourself I talk about how important that is and then there's this system that I become attached to that I just think is so effective and I wrote the book with my friend Dr Charles Fay who's the president of the love and logic

Institute and that program is actually very important to me personally because when we brought that into our home it just became so much happier and so in the book we mixed neuroscience and the program I've been using for years with love and logic so we combine these two programs to really do what we think of is the latest Innovations in parenting every parent wants mentally strong kids we want our kids to be confident kind responsible all of these things and obviously kids in it how you're behaving that's much more important than what's coming out of

your mouth if your if your behavior doesn't match you know what you're saying they're paying attention to the behavior much more than the words um but where you know where are even the best intentions going wrong I mean the statistics that you you quoted are devastating there's a lot of things contributing to that of course but where is it where we think we're doing the right thing and perhaps we're misguided we're rescuing children way too much we're solving their problems because of our low self-esteem and OB guilty of this I think for the first three

and and I love all my children and if you don't feel really great about yourself you get self-esteem by doing for your children when they could do for themselves and then what you do is you create incompetent people so when a child comes to you and says I'm bored too often parents then scramble to get them the latest video game or take take them someplace rather than just give them the problem back MH oh I wonder what you're going to do about that and then be loving enough to not fix it so my wife and

Chloe or 20-year-old when she was six seven they'd have these monster homework battles and I'm a child psychiatrist and I look at tana and go you've done second grade get out of this fight she listen to me so but three of her friends recommended parenting with love and logic and that's the foundational principle let kids solve their own problems I mean be a good coach be a resource don't solve it and so when Tana really understood it she announced to Chloe sweetheart I've done second grade I'm never ever again going to ask you to do

your homework it's on you and if if you don't do it you just have to be okay with the consequences 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 now stormed off came back 20 minutes later she's now a junior a Chapman no one's ever asked her to do her homework again and she had a 4.2 out of high school she's responsible she competent and can solve her own problems we go wrong when we steal their self-esteem by solving their problems

so for example Chloe knew it if she forgot her homework nobody's bringing it to her if she forgot her sweater in a cold day nobody's bringing it to her um if she forgot her lunch it takes 24 hours to starve nobody's bringing it to her and she only forgot those things like twice and now she doesn't forget anything you learn the lesson yeah you become self-directed you develop that self-efficacy that will serve you later in life self-esteem comes from performing esteemable acts on behalf of yourself and if you're always rushing in to solve the problem

or rescue you're depriving your child of the opportunity to learn those things right it's a short-term gain long-term pain situation and I think a lot of time crunched parents are like okay let me just solve the problem because I just you know I have other things to do and I can fix this rather than allow the child to scramble and mess up and figure it out on their own because sometimes that's not convenient right and it's also not gold directed so principle number one is know what you want what kind of parent do you want

to be and what kind of child do you want to raise ask yourself that question ask the other parent that question kind of parents do we want to be and what kind of child do we want to raise because then your behavior stems from whatever mission statement you create and then the second thing is attachment it's bonding and that requires two things time actual physical time and listening parents talk way too much and we have all this great knowledge and all these great experiences we just want to pour it into their little heads and they

tune us out if you do active listening with them they'll be so close to you but if you tell them how to think and you interrupt them it's very bad for the relationship for the attachment and then I have an exercise in the book that's just gold I mean it works it's worked every time I think parents who actually do it the way I ask is 20 minutes a day with the kid do something with them they want to do and during that time no commands no questions no direction and and when I first figured

it out and then I just saw it work and it worked and it worked my literary agent uh at the time Carl he called me up and he said I'm having trouble with my 2-year-old so he had a child later in life and Lara was too and she's like she never wants anything to do with me and I'm like you're ignoring her like what do you mean I'm like do this and I told him special time 20 minutes a day do something with her that she wants to do which means basically sit on the floor

and play with her blocks and no questions no commands no directions and he's like that won't work uh he tended to be oppositional and I'm like oh great you represent an idiot I said you need to do this I'm going to call you in three weeks get the party started and three weeks later I called him up and I'm like hey Carl it's Daniel Daniel she won't leave me alone all she wants to do is be with me i s I walk in the door she grabs my leg she wants her time right because isn't

that what we all wanted I mean unless our parent was awful we all wanted their attention and you know I'm one of seven so you know my mother had to be judicious about how she did but because my dad was never home we didn't have a relationship and 1972 turned 18 He told me if I voted for movern the country would go to hell and because we didn't have a relationship I voted for McGovern and the country went to hell but it had nothing to do with McGovern it was because of Nixon and Watergate and

I like having influence with my kids but there's no influence without connection there's different kinds of attachment also I think that's very wise and it's also very straightforward and doable like invest your time in your children be interested in what they're interested in uh when they tell you something Don't lecture them or tell them why they're wrong just say tell me more and be on their level where they don't feel judged or like you're going to you know basically explain something to them right I think that's great advice on the opposite end of the spectrum

from someone like your father is the very in mesed parent that's a different kind of attachment disorder where they're overly invested in in their child's well-being and the child becomes a vehicle for their own self-esteem right so they're projecting all of this emotional baggage on their child and the child then is shouldering this responsibility to make their parent feel okay and whether that projection is ambition or their own insecurities or their own dreams that were never realized the child on an conscious level is is subsuming all of that and that you know becomes problematic no

question I like to think of good parents like good coaches and I've been blessed to work with some amazing coaches and good coaches notice what you do right and they teach bad coaches notice what you do wrong and focus on on it and in the book there's a whole section on why I collect Penguins so I have like 2,000 Penguins it's a little weird not real live Penguins no penguin pens cups dolls tie I have a penguin Weather Vein a penguin vacuum it's bizarre but my oldest child Anton who I adopted he was hard for

me was argumentative oppositional things go his way got upset and I talked to my supervisor and she said you need more one-on-one time with him and I took him to a place called Sea Life Park which is in Hawaii it's on aahu it's sort of like SeaWorld they had sea 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 humbled penguin chubby but he's a amazing he climbed like a 20 foot diving board

went to the end would bounce and jump in the water bowled with his nose counted with his flippers jumped through a fire and at the end of the show the trainer asked him to go get something he went and got it and he brought it right back and time Stood Still for me because in my head I'm like damn I asked my kid to get something and he wants to have a discussion for like 20 minutes and then he doesn't want to do it and I knew knew my son was smarter than the Penguin and

I realized I was the problem and so I went up to the trainer afterwards and I'm like how'd you get Freddy to do all these really cool things and she said unlike parents whenever Freddy does anything like what I want him to do I notice him I give him a hug and I give him a fish and the light went on in my head that when my son did like things I really liked I wasn't paying attention but when he didn't I gave him a lot of attention cuz I didn't want to raise bad kids

and I collect Penguins as a way to remind myself every day I'm shaping the people around me by what I pay attention that's interesting yeah so it's like this this totem to bring you back to that place that's cool you mentioned the Peril that so many teenage girls are experiencing currently when a young person reaches a certain c age it's natural for them to differentiate and sometimes if not often the communication suffers with the parent as a result because the kid is no longer interested in hanging out with the parent as much they got their

own thing they want to shut the door to their bedroom and do their thing and and and not be bothered um so with this rise in mental health issues that young people are experiencing what is the counsel to the parent parent who is in the middle of that situation where it's more challenging to connect and communicate with their young teen because that person you know they're not in the same place as when the kid was an adolescent but also knowing there are all these threats out there and you know the risks are much higher in

terms of the mental health conditions that we're seeing now so there's so many things we talk about in the book attachment protects and you need to supervise your kids until their brain develops I mean you really need to understand normal development your prefrontal cortex so the front third of your brain largest in humans and any other animal by far is not fully melinated until you're about 25 and so we think of 18-year-olds as adults it's ridiculous from a neuroscience standpoint and the insurance industry actually knew this way 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 frontal loes and uh myelinization is really important so when you're born there's not much of it going on in your brain about 2 months the back of your brain brain becomes melinated and you see better which is why when you smile at a newborn they don't smile back but when they're about 8 weeks old you smile at them they totally begin to connect with you so mization think of a copper wire or a neuron a brain cell

mization is it gets wrapped with a white fatty substance sort of like insulation on a copper wire and that neuron Works 10 to 100 times faster and so your prefrontal cortex the most human thoughtful part of you is not fully melinated till you're about 25 and so it's undergoing wild development from 14 to 25 yet that's when many parents abdicate their role and they like send kids off even though they're really not mature enough to go hang out with a bunch of other unmated br that join sororities and fraternities and all sorts of bad things

happen to kids then I think we need to have Supervision in a way not that's intrusive but it's like I'm watching I want to know where you are I want to know when you're coming home and kids hate it but you know what they hate it more if you don't do it because that means you don't care what's the counsel for the parent who's struggling to bridge that communication gap with the teenager who's like leave me alone I don't want to talk to you or how was your day fine you know the the sort of

Naval gazing you know that kind of occurs around that age yeah I think just try to be in their space as much as you can and be a good listener there's always two words to default to firm and kind if you really understand the resarch we talk about this in raising mentally strong kids it's parents who are firm and loving do way better than parents who are loving and permissive so permissiveness raises the most unhealthy children whether you're loving and permissive or hostile and permissive permissiveness is not good it's good to have boundaries and rules

and kids should have chores and the problem is and I would love for people to write down statement I only do nice things for people who treat me with respect and too often children will be very disrespectful and then the parents will go out of their way to give them things because of their own guilt I do nice things for people who treat me with respect and I'm always nudging 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 good what is your counsel around devices clearly some portion probably a large portion of the depression the suicidal ideation Etc that's on the rise particularly with teenage girls is a result of on some level social media the comparison that takes place the 247 um access to what your peer group is doing at all times the bullying and criticism that occurs there parents I think are often confounded and confused about how to kind of manage that like the selfish absorption I mean what social media leads to is a toxic

level of its about me and my council is delayed as long as you can I mean like I would hold out as long as you could and then supervise it and if you're paying for it it like you know you can have this make sure there are parental um security things on it because having eight-year-old boys exposed to pornography is a very bad thing for the developing brain talk about wearing out your pleasure centers um so you need parental devices delay it and then if they have it it's like you only can keep this if

I have access to it so I think it's really important to have supervision you have to be their frontal loes until theirs develop because there's dangerous things out on the web you get it as long as it's not a problem like those kids who play video games that'll have a fit when you tell them to stop the video game needs to go away I mean it like needs to go away because you're the parent that's your role I I've sent way too many children to video game addiction programs I don't like that and they're like

oh but his 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 the vices and social media and video games they dump dopamine they were purposefully created to addict you they use the same principles that Las Vegas uses to win money in gambling which is intermittent reinforcement we're not going to reinforce you all the time we're going to do it every so often and it dumps dopamine so what is that mean so you have two pleasure centers in your

brain they're called the nucleus succumbent part of the basil ganglia and when you get excited about something it produces a little bit of dop and and pushes on the pleasure Center but the more you push on it the harder you push on it think about these violent video games pretty soon the uh nucleus accumbent becomes numb and you need more and more to get the same effect so you had an addiction right you struggled with an addiction toward the end of the addiction you were not getting the out OFA that you did in the beginning

right because your pleasure centers had been worn out were wearing them out earlier than ever before and I think that's one of the big reasons for the escalating incidents of depression well the social media sites are similarly designed similarly designed they're scientifically devised to addict in the same way that a slot machine or or a video game is designed and mind share that's what they want that becomes tricky when you have a 16y old or an 18y old and part of being a member of their cohort or their tribe is being conversent on these platforms

and being in communication on these devices so it's not as easy as saying I'm taking your phone away because that's the same as saying you're being kicked out of your community yeah but you have to be careful I mean you have to be willing to do that in order to show love which is super Vision if a parent is seeing their child sink into a depressive state what is the advice that you would give well the first thing is do not put them on an anti-depressant uh that's not the first thing to do now it

may be the seventh or eighth thing to do but the first thing is to sort of evaluate their lifestyle too often children are taking their devices to bed and they're not sleeping and so I think it's a really good family habit for everybody including the parents to put their devices away or for you to take your kids I had one patient recently that got a new phone had an iPad and was up till 2:00 3:00 4:00 and he wasn't doing well in school it's like yeah sleep propri people don't do well in school so supervising

technology I think is is critical I teach a high school course called brand Thrive by 25 we've done it for 15 years it's been like on seven different countries all 50 states we teach kids to love and care for their brains and what I found is the going idea about teenagers is parents have lost influence and their friends are more important and they won't listen is wrong if you are bonded to them they listen you have to explain it to them and give them reasons why why these companies use neuroscientists to addict your brains and

steal your mind these vaping companies they are making money off of your early death so you have to educate them and get them angry at what I call the evil ruler right if I was an evil ruler and I wanted to create mental illness what would I do I'd create vaping devices and go this is a healthy form of smoking or I'd make them think marijuana's innocuous clearly it isn't or I'd give them a device that's clearly addictive and has all sorts of side effects and go well have fun with this and other people of

your age are doing it so it's probably okay when you educate them like my 20-year-old she knows the time day that she's on her social media sites and she limits it and now she's doing this thing is how much sleep can I get right and she finds I do better with n and a half hours than I do with eight hours I was like well how smart is that that she's tracking it right so she uses devices oring to track it and it's because she understands it so rather than do this don't do that that's

not helpful it's relation ship and then this is your brain how can you take care of your brain and that's what we do with brain thve by 25 it's very clever creating this narrative where there's sort of an evil Overlord you know kind of connect emotionally you know with healthy habits because you know young people and I would put myself in this category when I was young I mean there is a sense of invincibility like I can just do whatever I want and you can you can get away with things when you're young so it's

harder to do that math especially when the brain isn't as developed like I want to eat what I want to eat and I want to like you know satisfy my urges when they crop up and doesn't matter if my parents tell me otherwise like I'm still going to do it and there's a process of like learning for themselves like well over time it's like well this isn't working anymore sometimes that takes longer than you know for certain habits than other habits um but I think that idea of like connecting with them on a story level

where it's like oh I understand like it's we're in a competition and there's a battle against these people that want to keep me down is a really interesting cool way actually Florida used that strategy they'd spent hundreds of millions of dollars on campaigns to help kids stop smoking and none of it worked until they used that strategy let me tell you how the tobacco company's making money off of making you sick and getting them angry so activating the Rage 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 just see like Girl Scouts selling Girl Scout cookies I mean the the big evil ruler strategy there was one girl in San Diego who set up outside a pot dispensary and sold like 300 box in 3 hours more people had like a marketing genius but you know giving these very unhealthy sugar Laden things that increases the risk of diabetes right but selling it to people who are high and have the munchies too is like not a not a bad idea entrepreneurship perspective we got to kind of

wind this down but maybe you can leave us with a few more thoughts on not just the importance of caring for our brains but a few more practices to think about out that we could incorporate into our lives so I worked with BJ fog fors tiny habits so he and I work together and here are some of the tiny habits for brain health start every day with today is going to be a great day push your brain to look for what's right rather than what's wrong as you go through the day this is our big

mother tiny habit go is this good for for your brain or bad for it so I used to do that with Chloe uh we played a game we called it Khloe's game I'm like blueberries good for your brain or bad for it two thumbs up avocados two thumbs up God's butter hitting a soccer ball with your head oh no th thumbs down your brain is soft your skull is hard play the game with them whatever they're going to do good for your brain or bad for it I mean ask yourself is this good for my

brain or bad for you just have to know the science my favorite tiny habit it's actually not so tiny but it's so good when you go to bed at night um I say prayer and then I go well went well today and it's not like just writing down three things you're grateful for I go hour by hour looking for what I liked about the day what made me happy even the tiniest things like we have this Health Challenge or home with my mother-in-law it's public knowledge and just walking up the stairs I grabb my wife's

hand and that made the highlight real because it was just this really tender moment in a hard time um if you do that the research shows your level of happiness will increase in just 3 weeks and when you go to pick something to eat or to drink ask yourself do I love it and does it love love me back you're in a relationship with food and with the things you consume do I it's like oh but I love wine but does it love you back uh we didn't talk about alcohol but it doesn't love you

back right it damages the microbiome in your mouth and in your gut it' be a bad thing beautiful I love that practice it's similar to a gratitude practice but the paying attention to the little things that happen every day and those little things then becoming the big things that drive happiness I did that the night my dad died three and a half years ago one of the worst days of my life and I'm like really we're going to do this tonight but this is a very important Point your brain is lazy what you do what

you teach it to do is what it's just going to do automatically so because I've done that for a decade even on an awful day day I found these three moments that were just so tender and beautiful that put me to sleep and it didn't mean I didn't grieve I still do but it means I'm managing my mind rather than letting it manage itself do you think that a fundamentally negative or pessimistic person can transform themselves into an an optimist I don't know about an optimist but they certainly can transform themselves to to be more

of a realist which is why I love Byron Katie's work I don't know if you ever had her on she's aw I but I'm familiar with her work she's awesome and it's about what's true and too many people have the negative side of what's true and completely ignore the positive side of what's true like my wife never listens to me I've had that thought write it down and then go is that true is it absolutely true how does that thought make me feel awful how would I be without the thought I'd be just fine then

take the original thought and turn it to the opposite she does listen to me and in fact she does not all the time but if I'm focused on what's wrong I'm going to feel wrong if I'm focused on what's right I'm going to be so much happier this thing got like 12 million views on Instagram I have the rule of 12 which is if I'm going to do something important film a public television special write a book go on a trip happens stuff is going to go wrong just own it I don't get mad till

the 13th thing has gone wrong cuz a mentally strong person can roll with things not roll over but they can roll with whatever comes your way not roll over because I don't want people taking advant advantage of you but learning that mental flexibility and that comes with practice part of it is not self-identifying with your thoughts and understanding that just because you're thinking something doesn't mean it has to be part and parcel of your identity nor that you need to act on it one of the strategies I love is give your mind a name I

named my mind after my pet raccoon when I was 16 I literally had a pet raccoon loved her she loved me but she was a troublemaker she'd like ate all the fish out of my sister's aquarium tpd my mom's bathroom leave raccoon poo in my shoes raccoon in the house Claws and all and rabies and all that kind of stuff I loved her but she was a troublemaker that's my mind but that's that's what raccoons are that's what they do they have 200 different sounds I mean it's just like my mind and now when my

mind is bothering me I'm like I should put you in the cage or what I do now because initially I would like just metaphorically put my mind in the cage and ignore her and now what I do is I flip her me over because I used to do that and tickle her and raccoons they have 200 different sounds and I'm like oh I bet I can get you to purr just so I can separate from my mind and be in control it's not the thought you you have that make you suffer it's the thoughts you

attach to right it's the attachment and the attachment to expectations and outcomes but if you can uncouple that it allows more space to respond rather than to react and to be in a more neutral frame of mind about whatever is happening and I have to treat me like I would want other people to treat me so many of my patients when I first see them if they treated their friends the way they treated themselves they would have no friends they're so mean but sort of like a good coach am I noticing what's right and am

I learning I treat public knowledge Alicia Newman who I dearly love she's uh Canadian pole Walter she's going to be in her second Olympics last year she was the world indoor champion and she's so hard on herself when we first met and we've come to we win or we learn we win or we learn and that's what I want all my patients to do they have a good day you win if not we learn I think that's a good place to land the plane for today thank you for coming and sharing with me today I

appreciate it and I look forward to visiting your clinic and having my brain looked at and we'll see yeah add or not who knows who knows what it is I am a little scared though no don't be scared so so many people go oh I'm scared and I'm like whatever we see is good news because you have what you have and if it's awesome because you've done so many awesome things we celebrate and if it's not we rehabilitate and now is the time how old are you 57 yeah Now's the Time to get the party

started it's not when you're 77 and you're dropping names and forgetting appointments and people are trying to take your keys from you the most loving thing you can do for your children is to work on having a healthy brain cheers to that thank you you're welcome [Music] peace that's it for today thank you for listening I truly 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 at Rich roll.com where you can find the entire podcast archive as well as podcast merch

my books Finding Ultra voicing change in the plant power way as well as the plant power meal planner at meals. roll.com if you'd like to support the podcast the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple podcast on Spotify and on YouTube and leave a review and or comment supporting the sponsors who support the show is also important and appreciated and sharing the show or your favorite episode with friends or on social media is of course awesome and very helpful and finally for podcast updates special offers on

books the meal planner and other subjects please subscribe to our newsletter which you can find on the footer of any page at Rich roll.com Today's show was produced and engineered by Jason Cameo with additional audio engineering by Kale Curtis the video edition of the podcast was created by Blake Curtis with assistance by our creative director Dan Drake portraits by Davy Greenberg graphic and social media assets courtesy of Daniel CIS thank you Georgia Wy for copywriting and website management and of course our theme music was created by Tyler Patt Traer Patt and Harry matis appreciate the

love love the support see you back here soon peace plance namaste [Music] [Applause] [Music]