The No.1 Brain Doctor: This Parenting Mistake Ruins Your Kids Brain & Alcohol Will Ruin Yours!

there are in fact many roads to Alzheimer's disease and it's things like marijuana alcohol and football and then a study found that people had had a simple carbohydrate based diet had a 400% increased risk of getting Alzheimer's but one of the major classes is gosh Dr Daniel aan is the renowned psychiatrist and brain health expert who has scanned over 260,000 brains including Justin Bieber Miley Cyrus and Kendall Jenner to determine what we need to do for Optimum brain health in 2024 the word of the year was brain rot why because people are worried that their

habits are shrinking their brain like food gaming social media pornography what about working with bad for your brain and then is there anything nonobvious that we do to our children's brains yes and this is so important because this is one thing a lot of parents do without knowing the consequences for their children and we'll talk about that what about negative thinking well we just this huge study on this and the science is really clear it decreases activity in your preal cortex which impacts your motivation focus and mood it is detrimental to your brain so how

can you kill the negative thoughts well there's a whole bunch of things when is sap on head-to-head has been shown to be equally effective as anti-depressants and then whenever you feel sad or mad or nervous what I want you to do is it's so simple I have been forced into a bet with my team we're about to hit 10 million subscribers on YouTube which is our biggest Milestone ever thanks to all of you and we want to have a massive party for the people that have worked on this show for years behind the scenes so

they said to me Steve for every new subscriber we get in the next 30 days can $1 be given to our celebration fund for the entire team and I've agreed to the bet so if you want to say thank you to the team behind the scenes at D of a CE all you've got to do is hit the subscribe button so actually this is the first time I'm going to tell you not to subscribe because it might end up costing me an [Applause] [Music] awful Dr Daniel aan if someone's just clicked on this conversation now

and they have no idea who you are which is highly highly unlikely can you tell me why listening to you and this conversation and the work that we're about to go through now is so important for everyone even those who believe that right now they have no issues everybody has a brain that's listening it controls everything they do how they think how they feel how they act how they get along with other people and most people know it but don't your brain is the organ of intelligence character and every decision you make and when it

works right you work right and when it doesn't you have trouble and most people have no idea that their bad decisions their sadness their anxiety their insomnia their poor relationship have has to do with the physical functioning of their brain so if they want to be happier they need to think about loving and caring for their brain optimize your brain you optimize your mind's ability you mentioned scanning brains there remind me again how many people's brains youve scanned now so it's now about 260,000 260,000 people's brains and you've scanned some famous brains yes actually people

from nine months old to 105 from 155 countries and it's public knowledge I've been in Justin Bieber's docu series seasons I scanned his brain I've scanned Miley Cyrus's brain um Mel Gibson just went on Joe Rogan and talked about me scanning his brain um Muhammad Ali Mike Tyson Jake Paul you also scanned my brain and you actually taught me a lot from scanning my brain which I'm did you think about your brain after we talked about of course I think about it all the time now it's also interesting that in 2024 the year just gone

the word of the year was the word brain rot and that's interesting because the subject of the brain I don't think has been given the credit and the attention it deserves really until recently and much of your work has played into that why do you think if you had to guess why do you think Oxford University's word of the year was brainroot because people are worried that their habits are shrinking their brain especially social media and digital addictions I'm so hoping they'll go to brain health as be more aspirational we've talked about a lot of

things on this show um one of the things that really stuck with me is how the content we consume can have a profound impact on our brains we often think of the chemicals the the drugs the alcohol and all those things which I want to talk about but one such piece of content which I don't think we have talked about is the impact of pornography on the brain is there a link between brain health and pornography consumption you know it's such an important question and the first thing that comes to my mind is exposing developing

brains to pornography is so dangerous and8 nine 10 yearold boys are being exposed to the internet where they can see all sorts of pornography when their brains aren't anywhere near the ability to discern what's good what's not good what's healthy what's not healthy and it's deadening and I use that word purposefully the nucleus accumbens which is the area of your brain that produces that responds to dopamine so dopamine and I know you've done podcasts on dopamine it's the neurotransmitter that helps us with motivation which helps us with Focus which helps us with happiness and mood

and when the nucle succumbent gets hit repeatedly with pornographic images it's like dopamine dopamine dopamine it begins to deaden that area and then you need more and more to begin to feel anything at all it's why Fame is so hard on the brain but pornography especially in the young is incredibly damaging to the brain so is that applicable to all things that cause like a really sharp burst of dopamine and stimulation so you said there Fame ponography I mean potentially gaming or gambling those kinds of things um alcohol is obviously one of those things as

well cocaine cocaine especially for a developing brain especially for a developing brain if there's any message protect your brain until you're 25 and then your brain will protect you but until then your prefrontal cortex at from third of your brain is not fully developed which is sort of why God gave you parents it's like so supervise it's like oh my teenagers hate it if I supervise them and yeah they hate it more if you don't um but what if you get to 25 and you're listening to this now and you go Jesus I does this

mean that I can do nothing about my brain of course not I mean what I've shown is let's just take the NFL work H big damage right let's stop lying about this football is a brain damaging Sport and soccer as well is a brain damaging sport so high levels of damage 80% of my NFL players got better when we put them on a rehabilitation program so if you've been bad to your brain like non-stop gaming lots of pornography terrible food and all of a sudden you go oh I can have a better brain your brain

can be better in as little as a couple of months where you just feel better think better your mood is better but it has to start with this concept I think we've talked about brain Envy it's you have to want to have a better brain when when people come to you what is it they're typically motivated by like in ter when they come to you why do they come to you is it because they've heard of your work on the internet and they they want to just they're curious about getting their brain scanned or is

do they usually come with a symptom or some other ailment no usually they come because they're in pain that they're anxious they're depressed they're um marriage is falling apart or um their wife says come or I'm going to divorce you it's not an uncommon thing or they're struggling in school they're not living up to their potential in one way or another now about 10% of the people come to us go I'm fine but I want to see and I want to be better and I don't want Alzheimer's so a lot of people come because they

love a parent or grandparent that has Alzheimer they realize there's a genetic component to it and they don't want to have that but that's really someone who is Forward Thinking I think more people come because they're hurting what evidence have we got that alcohol is bad for the brain and bad for the rest of our body especially in moderation well the S US Surgeon General just came out wanting to put cancer warning labels on all alcohol um that's sort of big evidence I mean three years ago the American Cancer Society came out against any alcohol

because drinking any alcohol increases your risk of seven different cancers and that's a big deal and then the evidence I have and my first Clinic was outside of the Napa Valley in Northern California so alcohol is a big thing and as I was looking at scans I'm like your brain's older than you are that alcohol is not a health food it is detrimental to brain function and then of course you know so I've been a psychiatrist now I decided to be a psychiatrist 46 years ago the number one problem I see is someone drinks and

they make a bad decision someone drinks and they say something to their partner that they just shouldn't have said or they drink and they go to work or they drink and they drive or they drink and it just causes so much trouble and in 1999 I did a show uh called the truth about drinking and we took a young adult um who had trouble with alcohol got him sober scanned him and then on National Television we got him drunk just like he got drunk and it just crashed his frontal loes and you just it's so

clear that alcohol takes the break off your brain and so people use it to calm the brain down but there's certain parts of your brain you really don't want to go offline the part that says don't say that don't do that is that just when when I've had one drink and then when I say BR up I'm back to normal or is this chronic well it depends one drink will decrease um in a mild way your decision making when it becomes chronic your life begins to get out of control because I'm wondering you know if

if people drink in moderation are they going to see long-term impacts to their brain what is there such thing as um drinking just a little bit and being fine well you I think there's always sort of a dose response there was a study in Spain that looked at people who had mild moderate and severe drinking and they compared them to people who didn't drink at all even the people who only drank a little had disruptions in the white matter of their brain now most people have heard about gray matter and white matter gray matter is

nerve cell bodies white matter is nerve cell tracks so if you think of gray matter is where the computation uh is happening in the brain and white matter are like the highways and so even a little bit of alcohol is creating potholes it's disrupting the highways in the brain and if if you're drinking a lot you are prematurely aging your brain you've scammed a lot of people who are alcoholics Lots I mean I've got some scans here and which I'll put on the screen but can you explain to me exactly what a brain looks like

when the person has been drinking heavily for a long period of time so again we do a study called Spa in Spec looks at blood flow and activity it looks at how the brain works and for people who know the mitochondria those are the little Powerhouse energy plants in your cells the spect Tracer 49% of it is taken up by the mitochondria in the brain so we're also looking at energy metabolism and what we see with alcoholic brains is something we call scallopine which is This Global decrease in Act activ it so a healthy brain

full even symmetrical activity it sort of look big fat and round with alcohol or other drugs too you see the brain begin to shrivel and you see it gets this wavy appearance and I'm like the real reason not to drink is it damages your brain so if you drink then you have a smaller brain than you would have otherwise correct that's pretty scary what does it why does brain size matter you know when people say it's going to shrink your brain why does that matter so I often say the only organ where size really does

matter is your brain um because you don't want to lose brain tissue right there is a part of your brain called the Hipp canvas which is on the inside of your temporal loes right here and it's really important and um it makes new stem cells every day about 700 and if you're drinking it's not allowing those new stem cells to take hold to take root you want to strengthen them so they will continue to support mood memory um spatial orientation spatial processing so that's the symptoms you you're naming there inadvertently symptoms of someone who has

damaged their hippocampus right so poor memory probably poor spatial awareness brain fog and moood and me issues and judgment and impulse control um but it it impacts the brain globally so the cerebellum so they're not going to process as quickly their decisions are not going to be as good and um I worked with my friend BJ fog who wrote a wonderful book called tiny habits and he's the um director of Stanford's persuasive technology lab which is really on how people people change and he and I work together cuz I'm always interested in how I can

help my patients better um and I met him at a conference like 18 months after we worked together and he said I just want to thank you I'm like why he said I wake up 100% every day I'm like why I stopped drinking because people with and they're around me enough they either drink more I suspect or they stop and isn't that what you want you wake up 100% every day why would you ever do anything that damages stem cell production in your brain one might argue that it's serving me in the short term of

course but there are lots of things that like you see you know let's say you're married but but you're at a conference and you see this really cute person and you're like oh well in the short run that could be awesome and in the long run you lose half your net worth and visit your children on the weekends it's like that's not a good thing and you know in the short run you feel more relaxed right with alcohol you feel more relaxed and in the long run it increases your risk of Al Al's disease I'm

like that's not a good tradeoff on your blog you published a study from 2019 sorry from 2009 it was a study on monkeys that showed a decline in new brain cell development and in that study there was a 58% decline in new brain cells and a 63% reduction in the survival rate of new cells from alcohol use they had monkeys drinking alcohol yes they have monkeys doing all sorts of things they shouldn't be doing which is effectively like pre ual brain aging right and it's worse if you do it before your brain is finished developing

and so if you think of fraternities yeah and surori like I'm not a fan of sending children away to college and um is because you have all these underdeveloped brains or not fully developed brains and you put them all together without appropriate adult supervision and a lot of bad things happen at fraternity parties and sorority parties they're drinking less though now no they're still drinking it oh really there's one second and now they're adding mushroom parties to it so it's alcohol and psilocybin and marijuana because everybody thinks marijuana is innocuous which is a lie and

uh is it m marijuana it's a lie yeah and I was actually really upset um so President Biden during the time he was running for president so this is 2019 he's on debate stage with a lot of other people and they asked him if he would federally uh legalize marijuana and he Saidi don't think the science is decided and no I don't think I would and Cory Booker the senator from New Jersey shamed Biden on National Television he said man are you high which is just horrifying and I'm watching this going the science is actually

really clear marijuana is bad for the brain I published a study on a thousand marijuana users every area of their brain is lower in activity and just today a study came out in the Journal of the American Medical Association on a, 21,27 marijuana users um it decreased activity in the hippocampus that affected their memory centers if you're a teenager and you use marijuana in your 20s you have a higher incidence of anxiety depression and suicide this is not innocuous and we've been advertised this load of crap which is oh it's just good medicine and for

some people it is helpful but let's not say say it's innocuous because that's a lie and we are now so many states have legalized marijuana for recreational use including here in California and the Mental Health crisis is not better if anything it's dramatically worse there's two issues here isn't there there's the impact cannabis has on the brain and then there's the whole issue of legalization and I was re as you was speaking I was was just looking at some of the research and it it says exactly what you said it says that there was a

study published in Jama Network which examined over a thousand young adults brains and almost 70% of heavy users exhibited reduced brain activity during working memory tasks the decline was associated with poor poor performance in retaining and using information long-term cannabis use has been linked to smaller hippocampus volume which again impacts memory and learning so I mean the science is clear that of what it's doing but the the question of legalization is a whole another issue well please don't put people who use marijuana in jail yeah like that's just a bad use of money yeah that

that's not smart but the the problem becomes we're not educating kids on the potential damage to brain development which nobody really argues about nobody's really nobody reputable I know of is going yeah give it to teenagers and let them smoke all they want no it's just dumb so I it's a bigger question and I think the answer I have a high school course in um it's called brain Thrive by 25 and we actually studied it in 16 schools decreases drug alcohol and tobacco use decreases depression and improves self-esteem why we teach kids to love and

care for their brain you got your brain scan and now you love love your brain more you you want it to be better that's the answer it's not scanning everybody it's educating everybody your brain controls everything you do and when it works right you work right and when it doesn't you don't so let's love it and let's learn together how to optimize it but the big innovation Stephen for 2025 in psychiatry marijuana psilocybin and ketamine the street drugs of the 60s are coming back and I'm like I feel like I'm living in this insane world

where we're not talking about you should eat better and exercise and learn not to believe every stupid thing you think and meditation could calm your mind probably more effectively than alcohol or marijuana it's not hard to learn what's wrong with cocy in magic mushrooms yeah everybody's so excited about micro doing and it's a treatment for depression and I think I've seen this story before so in the early 80s benzos you know like Xanax and clopen and Adavan they were Mommy's Little Helper and this will really help your anxiety the problem is they make your brain

look older than you are and they're addictive as hell then there was alcohol is a health food marijuana is innocuous pain is the fifth Vital sign which led to the opiate epidemic and now we're into mushrooms psilocybin Associated psychosis has gone up 300% in the last couple of years that not for everybody but for some vulnerable people and we don't know who they are it can flip them into a psychotic episode I'm like we need to be careful we need to be thoughtful so psilocybin hasn't yet been legalized in the US in Oregon oh it

has been in Oregon um is it being delivered yet in Oregon in a theraputic just now is it so it there was a 2-year waiting period yeah and they were training uh people to do psilocybin assisted psychotherapy but there isn't a psilocybin compound that's been approved yet by the FDA so there's still I think it's stage three clinical trials from what I understand I was quite involved in that world as an investor once upon a time so I understand the like rigor to get these compounds clinically approved and you're right so in the early like

clinical trials there's I mean groups of like 20 people in some of the early clinical trials and as they're progressing now I I think getting to stage three they need to have bigger sample sizes and make sure that these compounds are safe and from what I've seen a lot of people are trying to get it approved in a clinical setting for CA cases of treatment resistant depression where you do see even in those the studies that I've read you see some people have adverse responses so some people get worse and there's you know if you

take a someone who's treatment resistant depressed and potentially suicidal and you give them a a a strong compound like of sideon some people can get worse but for the ones that get better it's pretty remarkable it's like I've been I remember the first study that I read I think coming out of the L uh one of the London universities that's really leading on this maybe Imperial College London or something and it said something like 30% of people that did one dose of celoc cybin were went into clinical remission after 12 weeks after one dose and

there's really like nothing else that I can think of that can deliver that kind of response in that period of time K ketamine ketamine I mean MDMA has I think been ketamine can do it but then ketamine can also be addictive and can be problematic so I'm like well why wouldn't we scan them first and then try to figure out why you're depressed CU if you think about it depression is like chest pain and nobody gets a diagnosis of chest pain why it doesn't tell you what's causing it and it doesn't tell you what to

do for it all sorts of things can cause chest pain right from a heart attack a heart arhythmia a heart infection gas an ulcer grief all of those can cause chest pain well there's a whole bunch of things that can cause depression like loss negative thinking low thyroid having a head injury um being exposed to mold or Mercury blad it's like if you don't look if you just give everybody you're depressed based on these nine symptoms and now we go give everybody an SSRI which is ludicrous because that's assuming everybody with it's sort of like

giving everybody with chest pain nitroglycerin which is stupid right you would never give everybody who has chest pain one treatment you'd go I have to Target the treatment to the cause but if you never look you have no idea so for example I was on the Kardashians and so it's public that um I saw Kendall and I saw her for postco anxiety her brain was on fire from covid and a lot of people don't understand that covid and other infections can cause inflammation in the brain well that's not a psilocybon thing that's an anti-inflammatory cocktail

to help postco anxiety or postco depression if you don't look you don't know you end up Flying Blind and that's what I'm in fighting with my colleagues for the last 33 years it's how do you know unless you look and what other Medical Specialists never look at the organ they so we could talk about oh I've seen these amazing results and I think we should see well what's this scan pattern that you're going to respond to psilocybin or Lexapro or ketamine or lctl right I mean it's great we have all these treatments but let's not

fly [Music] blind when we don't have to there's this graph I saw the other day circulating around the internet which I'm going to show you and I'll put it on the screen for anybody that can't see it but it shows globally which countries distribute the most anti-depressant pills ssris and the United States leads the way by a long margin I mean I think in in looking at that graph it's almost 10 times more anti-depressant pills per person are handed out in the United States than other parts of the world and I wondered why why does

the USA hand out anti-depressant pills like like their water or something it's such an interesting graph um because here in America we want the fast answer I don't feel well fix me and what doctors have do you know 85% of psychiatric drugs in America are prescribed by non- psychiatric physicians in 7-minute office visits that do standard of care 12% of the time what does that mean and that they do what most doctors would consider good medicine 12% of the time so you go to your family doctor or your nurse practitioner and you go I'm sad

I'm anxious I'm not sleeping you might and we hear this all the time at clinics I have 11 clinics around the United States we hear it all the time that I went to my doctor and he gave me a prescription for Lexapro Xanax and ambian and it just blows my mind that they would put you on something that changes your brain to need them in order for you to feel normal see people don't understand and I am not opposed to medication I use it when I think I need to but let's be clear they do

not heal fix anything what they do is they suppress symptoms but then once they've suppressed the symptoms they've changed your brain so you need them in order to feel okay I don't like that like what can I do naturally head-to-head against anti-depressants saffron has been shown to be equally effective the spice saffron head-to-head against anti-depressants walking like you're late 45 minutes four times a week equally effective head-to-head against anti-depressants taking omega-3 fatty acids equally effective in a study from Australia head-to-head against anti-depressants learning how to not believe believe every stupid thing you think has been

shown to be equally effective so why not if you're depressed and you can't get scanned start walking take omega-3 fatty acids and saffron and learn how to kill the ants ants stands for automatic negative thoughts the thoughts that come into your mind automatically and ruin your day and we grow up I don't know if the same thing is in England there's no training on how to manage your mind right I was 28 years old in my psychiatric residency when one of my professors said you have to teach your patients not to believe every stupid thing

they think and I'm 28 and I'm in my residency which means I finished College I finished medical school and I believe every stupid thing I think that no one had ever taught me how to manage my own thoughts I can't believe that thing you just said about saffron I was reading about it here it says Research indicates that saffron may be as effective as ssris in treating mild and moderate depression and a metaanalysis of eight studies found no difference between saffron and ssris in reducing depressive symptoms but in fact the side of effect profile is

probably better for saffron well so I got interested in Saffron about 25 years ago because I saw a study so there are now 25 randomized controlled trials showing that saffron is as effective as ssris and other anti-depressants but the thing that caught my interest this may speak more about me is they didn't decrease sexual function in fact they enhanced it and so I've been a psychiatrist a long time and ssris for the right brain they work but they make it harder to have an orgasm they decrease your libido and I don't like that I don't

want to separate if you're depressed you're already separated from your partner yeah if you're depressed and you can't have an orgasm or you're not interested that's damaging not only to you but it damages your partner and so and I thought saffron can enhance sexual function and I'm like okay I'm paying attention and so I have collected every study ever published on saffron and brain and mental health there's actually five studies showing en hance's memory that it was as good as AOSP in people AOSP a medicine we use in Alzheimer's disease and it's as good as

AOSP so it helps memory it helps mood it helps sexual function I'm like mood memory and sex I'm going to take it mood memory and sex so yeah i' love saffron so why wouldn't we start with that and exercise and learn to manage your mind rather than start with Lexapro or even soloc cybin or ketamine one of the things when people are talking about psychedelics that they're trying to treat is trauma right Early Childhood trauma um is that something that you can see if you looked at my brain could you see trauma on my brain

yes and have you looked a diamond pattern that I've written about I published in actually discover magazine in 2016 listed my study so I published a study on 21,000 people showing we could separate post-traumatic stress disorder from traumatic brain injury with high levels of accuracy and then we repeated this study on soldiers and showed the same thing and this year I just published the world's largest study on childhood trauma so do you know the a score yes which is a measure of childhood trauma childhood trauma adverse childhood experiences so it's on a scale of 0

to 10 how many bad things happen to you as a child physical emotional sexual abuse neglect um being being raised with parent that has a mental illness that's incarcerated addiction watching um your mother be abused so domestic violence so 0 to 10 I'm a one my wife's an eight we adopted our two nieces who are both nines and so I'm very interested in childhood trauma so so a nine is good or bad nine is terrible okay so higher the number so zero is means you have none of those okay a you have a lot and

we if you have four or more you have an increased risk of seven of the top 10 leading causes of death if you have six or more so my wife's in eight my nieces are nines you die 20 years earlier than the general population and in our study what we showed the more Aces you had the more activation of your limbic structures especially a very interesting area called the anterior singular gyus I think of this as the brain's gear shifter lets you go from thought to thought move from idea to idea be flexible go with

the flow and when this is overactive people worry they hold on to things it's like the trauma is always in front of them and I often do timeline I ask people do you see your life um going from left to right or from front to back and I see the past behind me my wife sees the past in front of her and that's often what you see with trauma and their brain becomes overactive in their emotional brain which makes them at higher risk for pain syndromes um higher risk for anxiety higher risk for depression higher

risk for insomnia that they're sort of always looking for bad things to happen is there anything someone can do at home because you know not everybody can afford to go to a therapist it's hard to get access to these kind of treatments if if I have some kind of Trapped trauma or traumatic experienc PTSD that I've been through and I don't have any money at all it what would you recommend for me well I mean the first thing I want everyone to do is love their brain right the healthier your brain and before we we

started we talked about this idea it's the brain you bring in into trauma that often determines how you deal with it and to get well you have to get your brain healthy so that's the first thing so that means getting off the alcohol exercise eat well certain simple supplements yes what supplements and then um multiple vitamin for basic nutrition know your vitamin D level and optimize it and most people need to supplement vitamin D and if you have darker skin you need five times the level of Sun as someone from northern Europe to get a

healthy vitamin D level so you should know your vitamin D level and optimize it like I always say can't change what you don't measure and vitamin D is a very important number to know so multiple vitamin vitamin D omega-3 fatty acid I did a study 50 consecutive patient Stam in clinics who are not taking vitamin D we measured their omega-3 index 49 were suboptimal and so I think most people would benefit from an omega-3 fatty acid supplement and then it's sort of depends if you have issues with your mood saffron would be great if you

tend to be anxious don't go for the benzo um theanine ashwagandha magnesium Gaba diaphragmatic breathing hypnosis so many things to help anxiety before you ever go to something that's addictive that makes your brain look older than you are that increases your risk of dementia one of the really really interesting things that you mentioned which I had never heard of or thought thought of before is the impact of negative thinking on your brain we just published this huge study on negativity bias and it's not good for your frontal loes and so I love doing positivity biased

training like I train all of my patients start every day today is going to be a great day I mean somebody asked me today if I believe in manifestation um part of I think you have to tell your brain what you want and then your brain will figure out how to get it and so if you go today is going to be a great day your brain starts looking like why is today going to be a great day and when you go to bed at night what went well today that's so helpful to just start

programming your brain to look for what's right not just for what's wrong virtually every depressed patient I said have a high negativity bias and so training them to be more positive now not irrationally positive because you need some anxiety people have low levels of anxiety die early from accidents and preventable illnesses people who have low levels of anxiety low levels of anxiety so I always I have an older brother who I love um but he's one of the don't worry be happy people and I sort of always wanted to be like him because I'm much

more serious much more driven and I'm like no I wanted to be like him until I read the research the people who live the longest so there's a study from Stanford they started in 1921 and they looked at 1548 10-year-old children and they were looking for what goes with success Health and Longevity and what they found was shocking the don't worry be happy people died the earliest from accidents and preventable illnesses the people who live the longest the one theme was they were conscientious if they said they were going to show up and they showed

up reliably consistently they live longer than everyone else and I just shows they had good frontal function it's like if I say I'm going to do something and I commit to it I do it you live longer could that be also linked to like discipline those people are more likely to be disciplined with other areas of their life habits eating gym yes which means they had better frontal lob function so why would we ever take these guys fernal loes offline no love your fernal loses this is why when you have children don't let them hit

soccer balls with their forehead it's just not a smart thing to do I think that's probably a big thing people are thinking about this time of the year so we're recording now in January 2025 wow um and everybody's thinking about new year new me they're thinking about their New Year's resolution becoming a new person habits motivation discipline these are like the trifactor of what I I see people talking about the most at this time of year when you with everything you understand about the brain how do I become a more disciplined motivated person who has

better habits so one you take care of your brain and two you know when relapse happens relapse happens when you don't sleep okay when you've gone too long without eating when blood sugar levels go low relapse happens you start making bad decisions when if you're a female when you're in the last week of your cycle because blood flow to your frontal lobe drops for many women so I have five sisters and five daughters I completely believe in PMs and I've scanned people best time of their cycle worst time it's like they're two different people sort

of like they have multiple personality disorder because their brain is just so different now obviously not with all women but for certain ones it's a big issue and if the ants are taken over so if the automatic negative thoughts which also tend to go up if you haven't slept if you've gone too long without eating if you're at that time of your cycle or you're under chronic stress or you're drinking or using other drugs so you might suppress them but then they come back and they attack you so then you have to suppress them again

and this is how addiction starts so is it fair to say that if you're trying to change who you are and you're trying to establish a new habit or crack motivation then the goal shouldn't be necessarily to get a six-pack it should probably be something further Upstream like sleep well or better frontales and so how do I get better frontales and it's three strategies frontal lobe Envy right brain Envy got to care about it avoid things that hurt damaging my frontal loes and do things that strengthen my frontal loes we talked about two of these

points earlier but you we talked about alcohol but in the context of sleep I've heard on you I think it was in your podcast change your brain after two drinks your REM sleep drops to roughly an hour after four drinks your REM sleep drops to 30 minutes and after six drinks your REM sleep drops to less than 2 minutes for many people um obviously these aren't specific numbers because everybody's brain is different but it just goes to show I guess the relative drop in REM sleep which is your restorative sleep based on alcohol consumption and

so if I drink I'm not going to sleep while I'm not going to get restorative sleep I wake up the next day I'm going to struggle more with motivation and keeping any habit that I have ending anxiety and then you're going to be more ants and then you're going to drink more to shut up the ants and then when they come back they come back stronger and by ants you mean the automatic negative thoughts okay the chatter that hurts you and we talked about how to kill them so whenever you feel sad or mad or

nervous or out of control what I want you to do is just write it down and then ask yourself a series of questions um and I have I have this cute diagram of the different types of ants and I always ask my patients so which which are your ants are they like All or Nothing ants were you thinking words like always never everyone every time are they less than ants given to us by social media uh where we compare ourselves others in a negative way guilt beating ants mind reading ants fortune telling ants blame ants

um so identify the type do you have a example of a bad thought that just sort of runs around your head oh gosh um I think I live in a permanent state of assuming I'm going to get bad bad news and it doesn't haunt me I think I'm generally quite calm person and quite focused and peaceful in my brain but I think because I've ran companies for the last 10 years or longer you're always just about to get bad news so I think that can be that can be playing on the radio in the background

somewhere like I'm GNA open an email and it's going to be bad news there's so many opportunities for bad news in my world so yeah yeah so I think you write it down this is going to be bad and then my friend Byron Katie has has this process that I've refined a bit so that's a fortune telling amp right and so this is going to be bad news or I always get bad news fortune telling and all or nothing and so the first question is is it true right the second question is it absolutely true

with 100% certainty and if one is no two is automatically no the third question question is how does that thought Make Me Feel on edge on edge how does the thought make me act so the third question has three parts how does the thought make me feel tense on edge how does it make me act uh removed uh what's that word is it apathetic reticent yeah yeah and the third part of that what's the outcome of believing it's always is going to be bad news I mean there's no good outcome really suffering yeah suffering yeah

the fourth question is how would you feel if you didn't have that thought free and how would you act uh happier and uh more present and the outcome of not having that thought better relationships because you're more present yeah yeah and then the fifth question so the first one is is it true the second one is it absolutely true the third one how would I how do I feel act and what's the outcome of having this thought the fourth question is how would I feel act and what's the outcome of not having the thought the

fifth question is my favorite just take the thought and turn it to the opposite and then ask yourself is that true so it's going to be good news or it's going to be innocuous news and then go yeah 99 times out of 100 that's true and then I would because I'm also a CEO I'm like well how many of these things can't I handle virtually none of them I can handle all of them right so I'll be okay and then I meditate on the opposite of the thought that's bothering me and so I take these

thoughts captive I like that and people who are depressed are infested with negativity but you can train that your brain is healthy it's easier to do you can train that but you imagine there's no second grade class in the world where teachers teach children not to believe every stupid thing they think in fact I was watching one of the confirmation hearings today and the senators were filled with ants oh yeah they were distorted things they were angry they were making things more negative than they needed to be we are model bad thinking and the News

does it purposefully because they know if they piss you off if they scare you you're going to tune in so they can sell you more copper underwear so we're in a society that breeds these ant attacks so you have to be careful people who watch the news in the morning are 27% less happy in the afternoon and so you have to guard what goes in so every day your programming happiness or sadness and I believe Dennis Prager has this great five minute video called why be happy and I love it so much I wrote a

book called you happier and I start with his idea that happiness is a moral obligation and I'm like so I grew up not too far from here I went to Catholic School my mom was very serious about being Catholic and growing up the idea happiness is a moral obligation was nowhere in my childhood and I had a good childhood why is it a moral obligation because of how you impact other people if you were raised by an unhappy parent or married to an unhappy spouse or raising an unhappy child and you ask those people is

happiness an ethical issue they would all say yes so is it wrong to program your mind to look for what's right it's hard for some people it's just a pattern right it's like getting biceps are hard but it's it's not right it's just repeatedly doing the same thing that gives you the desire you want have you seen someone shift from being a stereotypically negative person down and out negative depressed to the opposite yes truly the opposite a lot but you got to do the process it's you you got to do the work when you love

yourself you do the work like I come from a family of fat people but I'm not why because I know it's a risk for me and so every day of my life I'm on an obesity prevention plan and wish I didn't have to be right I wish I could just eat anything I want and it would be okay but it's not the reality of my life do you own a business or do you work in marketing if that's you listen up for a valuable opportunity from our show sponsor LinkedIn I'm an invested in about 40

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and start targeting the right crowd through Linkedin now and because you're part of my community LinkedIn is offering you a $100 credit for your next campaign head to linkedin.com diary to claim yours now that's linkedin.com diary and of course terms and conditions apply and only available on LinkedIn ads now for people that don't know who Elizabeth Smart is who is she and what did you learn from scanning her brain so Elizabeth is someone who made really international news many years ago she was kidnapped when she was a teenager and virtually raped every day for nine

months and then she was found um that she was actually very smart and she manipulated her kidnappers to bring her back to Utah Salt Lake city where the kidnapped her from and she was found by the police and one would think she would have severe lasting post-traumatic stress disorder and I was very interested to scan her and be helpful to her she in fact did not have post-traumatic stress disorder she had post-traumatic growth she took her trauma and made something special out of it where she actually runs an organization for women who have been abused

um and I just remember sitting there and her brain was actually quite healthy I think she helped me more than I helped her just so fascinated by how she could take something that's truly horrifying and come out of it and be quite okay and she's how old now she's in she's in her in 30s and she's in a relationship married she's married she has children she's running an organization she speaks around the country I mean when people hear that they might begin to question how they think about trauma because we think of trauma as a

very deterministic thing I if that happens to you I can predict that you're going to be X you're going to be you know maybe depressed you're not going to be social functioning you're probably not going to have functional good relationships that's the kind of thing we think when we hear about such a horrific event we kind of see it as deterministic of who you then become but she's proving that that that's not the case now in fact of people who go through something really terrible about 10% of people will develop PTSD and about 10% of

people will develop post-traumatic growth and most people sort of land in the middle I wrote an article 1982 when I was a resident at Walter Reed um called post Vietnam stress disorder a metaphor for current and past life events and it was when I was resident I got the idea it's the brain you bring into Vietnam that often determines the brain that comes out of Vietnam that if you grew up in an alcoholic home or you grew up with a lot of stress you are much more likely to become a heroin addict and much more

likely to come home and struggle um obviously not always but we should there's a concept since I started Imaging that I just dearly love so much called brain Reserve so brain Reserve is the extra tissue you have to deal with whatever stress comes your way and brain Reserve actually starts before you were conceived so you get your brain wrapped around that a little bit it's the idea of epigenetics that if your parents grew up in trauma and abuse it changed their genes to make you more [Music] vulnerable and if so your genetic history matters the

health of your mom while she's carrying you your brain starts to develop three weeks after she gets pregnant three weeks like about day 21 and so her stress level her infectious disease level burden her nutrition her sleep all of these things matter one of my patients wife is pregnant I'm like you need to be nice to her you need to like lower her stress because you a child that this has generational consequences and then when you're born how did the birth go and then as a child what was your nutrition link what were your stress

levels like did you play football did you fall off the swing all of those things are either building your brain Reserve or stealing your brain Reserve so when you get kidnapped or let's just take two soldiers and War they're in the same tank they go over an IED so they're both the tank is blown up one walks away unharmed the other one's permanently disabled why it's their brain reserve the brain they brought into the explosion often determines how they are so I argue we should always be building reserve and I turned 70 this year and

I know 50% of people 85 and older have Alzheimer's disease one and two horrifying statistics and so I know that so between now and 15 years from now what are the things I can do to build my Reserve so the gravity of age has less impact on me because your brain is going to shrink with aging regardless of any it it's going to show although I have a whole group of super brains people that are 80 90 1005 like stunningly beautiful brains but they're people that had stunningly beautiful brain Reserve habits okay that they didn't

smoke they weren't drinkers they ate well they were not overweight so on this subject of Alzheimer's it's increasing globally the I reading something I think from like the Alzheimer's Association that said they're predicting by 2050 that there's going to be 150 or 160 million people globally that have Alzheimer's disease there's still a lot of question marks around what causes it what increases its probability Etc but what do you think the cause of Outsiders is I think there are many causes of it and the going wisdom until recently was excessive beta ameloid pla formation caused Alzheimer's

and there's a lot of questions around that theory I think uh I have a pneumonic I like called bright Minds you want to keep your brain healthy or rescue it you have to prevent or treat the 11 major risk factors so I think there are in fact many roads to Alzheimer's disease and people go what the difference between Alzheimer's and Dementia dementia is the umbrella category you start losing your faculties Alzheimer's is one of the types but the more you get into it you realize it's a pretty mixed bag and so um bright Minds blood

flow retirement and aging inflammation genetics head trauma toxins mental health you know if a woman is depressed it doubles her risk of Alzheimer's disease if a man is depressed it quadruples his risk of Alzheimer's and then the sleeper in all of these is infections immunity and infections many of of us think it's a major one of the major causes of Alzheimer's disease in fact there's a new study out on covid people who had covid had an significantly increased risk of getting Alzheimer's disease and then neuro hormones and we have this epidemic of low testosterone in

young males now um diabesity and sleep diabet is you either have high blood sugar and or you're overweight and that one risk factor if you have that one risk factor now all of a sudden you have 10 of the 11 risk factors because if you have one if you have diabetes if you're overweight or you have high blood sugar it lowers blood flow to your brain it prematurely ages your brain it increases is inflammation fat cells produce something called adapin which is inflammatory molecules it changes your genetics fat stores toxins you're more likely to be

depressed you're it damages your immunity um takes healthy testosterone turns it into unhealthy cancer promoting forms of estrogen and impairs your sleep om justly and then people go oh but you're fat shaming and it's like no I published a study on 33,000 people as your weight goes up the size and function of the brain goes down somebody's got to like say the truth the truth is being at an unhealthy weight is unhealthy for your brain and body I was reading a some studies earlier on when I spoke to a insulin resistance expert one of the

things said to me was that they now almost describe Alzheimer's as type 3 diabetes that's a phrase that's often used and when they look at brains that are insulin resistant the person between 40 or 80% of the time depending on which studies you look at has insulin resistance I.E they've had elevated blood sugar levels which have caused an insulin resistance or something else it could be stress that causes insulin resistance or many other things but it's interesting to think of to think of as you said that that one one thing which is the high blood

sugar levels insulin resistance can have such a profound impact on the brain and if I've ever heard a case for being a bit more careful about sugar and other things that will Spike my blood sugar levels and chronically I think that's probably it you know because your brain as you said at the start of this conversation drives everything in your life and to think that Sugar an overc consumption of sugar should I say has such a profound impact on the brain is is pause for me because I don't like sugar that much um you don't

like it as much as you like your brain yeah and my life so there's a study from the Mayo Clinic where they looked at people who had primarily a fat-based diet so fish healthy oils avocados nuts and seeds they had 42% less risk of getting Alzheimer's disease and then they looked at people who had primarily a protein based diet so think of a caveman diet 21% less risk of getting Alzheimer's disease and then they looked at people that had a standard American diet simple carbohydrate based diet bread pasta potatoes rice fruit juice sugar a 4

100% increased risk of getting Alzheimer's disease it's the sugar and the foods that quickly turn to sugar which goes with the insulin Diabetes Type 3 hypothesis you have to manage it and the reason this is so important to me is having high blood sugar makes your blood vessel brittle and more likely to break which means it takes longer for things to heal and you're more likely to have a stroke and having a stroke increases your risk of Alzheimer's tfold so you a fan of the keto diet I sound like for some people I I I

find that it doesn't have enough plants m in it which means it's probably not going to be awesome for your microbiome so I'm more a fan of a paleo diet that has healthy fat healthy protein and lots of plants MH we've covered so much there's uh the one thing we talk we started talking about briefly I think before we started recording was the subject of Hope and grief I've never heard someone talk about the impact that grief has on the brain brain when we lose someone when we're going through prolonged pain because of a loss

oh I know more about this than I want it activates the limic or emotional circuits in the brain and so when you lose someone important to you or even a pet like I hadry a white shepher and so beautiful and so sweet and he got cancer and when he died he still lives in my head and I lost someone important to me about 20 years ago and for like a year I was just not okay and so I scanned myself and my emotional brain was so busy and it's like when you have someone they actually

become ingrained in every fun place in your brain so they get stored in multiple places in your brain and when they're not there anymore your brain still looks for them and figuring out ways to sort of calm down your emotional brain can be so help so helpful what part of the brain is that is that the amydala no it's more the insular cortex and the thalamus and that's what we found with depression I published a study with Scientists from USC and Los Angeles Children's Hospital on depression and what we found those were the structures that

were dramatically overactive compared to people who were not depressed so in grief the prefrontal cortex assuming because that's the more rational part of the brain that's probably going to be quieter right what do I and so it's the pre fernal cortex you bring in to the loss that often determines how you deal with it okay and so your emotional brain fires up if you're drinking and taking the prefrontal cortex offline it can't manage it so one thing people don't understand is the fibers from the preal cortex to the rest of the brain are inhibitory which

means they calm things down so if this isn't working right the emotional part can sort of override it and it becomes problematic IC um and so protecting this is so important to managing so much of your life I mean it's really the human most human thoughtful part of us and what we found within Hope was the insular cortex was low it's really interesting to us and hope is tomorrow can be better and I have a part in it when you're hopeless you don't believe you have agency to make tomorrow better and so often there are

hope training courses that can be good and I with all of my patients I do this exercise called the onepage miracle I referred to earlier it's like write down what do you want relationships work money physical emotional spiritual health all these things write it down and so talked earlier about we're recording this in January I have all my patients do it when I first see them and then every January for sure and then you just ask yourself does my behavior get me what I want but but it starts with or what do you want you

have to write it down like with my wife I'm very clear I want a kind caring loving supportive passionate relationship always want that don't always feel like that got these rude thoughts that show up or conflicting ideas that'll just show up in my head and I'm like oh no don't say that no don't do that because it doesn't fit and it's been the best relationship of my life because both of us have the same goals and we're pretty good at matching our Behavior to the goal and as a CEO right what do you do with

companies you have a business plan and then you have regular meetings and key perform indicators to like go how are we doing and if we're not doing great we change but it always starts with plan and most individuals never have a plan so they're kind of just being dragged around by whatever I mean and now in social media it's very dangerous because you might want what the Kardashians have and it's like wait a minute relationships work money physical emotional spiritual health and then if I had tattoos I don't yet my wife got one that freaked

me out it's my daughter's birthday but the tattoo would be does it fit know what you want and then ask yourself every day my behavior get me what I want and some people go well isn't that selfish it's like absolutely not cuz if I'm good I'm good for everyone around me your goal could be to be a great father it absolutely should be a great father it's to be a loving husband kind caring loving supported passionate it's oh by the way when people do our program their erections are better just saying because blood flow is

better when brain health is better CU your brain uses 20% of the blood flow in your body and so if you're working to have a healthy brain everything works better J say why did that come to mind when I asked about your goals well because I went passionate and I'm like okay you have to be clear um and or even think about work you know what's the goal with work it's to do meaningful work it's to to make a difference I am you're a father I'm not a father yet but I hope to be um

I've got three little nieces my brothers had three three two little nieces and one nephew my brother's a year older than me and he's had three kids already so I've got some catching up to do but as I'm progressing towards this season of life one of the things I think about having met you is how to raise healthy brains like what parenting style is going to make sure that my kids have very healthy brains there's so much conversation about parenting stuff um some people say just let them do whatever they want to do some people

say be an authoritarian and put rules in place I'm wondering from the perspective of someone who scanned 260,000 brains how do you raise a perfect brain well one you get rid of the idea that you're going to raise a perfect brain okay because there's a little OCD in there um the first thing you do is you have goals for yourself what kind of parent do you want to be and what kind of child do you want to raise and for me I want to be present kind and effective and for my kids I want them

to be mentally strong and resilient and I want them to feel good about themselves and then you bond with them you want to be a good dad bonding requires two things time actual physical time and listening so time have an exercise I love so much called special time 20 minutes a day do something with your child that your child wants to do and during that time no commands no questions no directions just time to bond the most important thing to Children is time with their parents and people are busy doesn't have to be a lot

but if you do that 20 minutes a day it's money in the relational bank so my first literary agent I think he was 42 when he had his first child and he's like my daughter she's to Laura never wants to be with me I come home she completely ignores me she just wants her mother she wants nothing to do with me that's because she's a girl right like absolutely not Carl you're ignoring her what do you mean I'm ignoring her I said you're ignoring her do this and I told him about special time and he's

like that won't work I'm like negativity bias I'm like oh great you represent an idiot you represent me and you're telling me it won't work I said do this it works and I'm going to call you in three weeks so I wrote them in my appointment book we had appointment books then and three weeks later I called him Carl it's Daniel Daniel she won't leave me alone all she wants to do is be with me as soon as I get home she grabs my leg and wants her time I'm like I told you it works

it works time actual physical time and then shut up listen this is so important parents are awful at listening you've heard of active listening yeah so active listen it's like so simple child says something before you give your two cents just repeat it back and sort of listen to the feelings behind the words I want to have blue hair I know what my dad would have said want I have blue hair no way in hell as long as you live in my house you can have a blue hair but what does that do it just

shuts down the conversation or starts a fight like oh you want to have blue hair and then just be quiet and then the child might say everyone's doing that my dad would say I don't care what anyone else is doing as long as you live in this house you're not going to have blue hair if they're going to jump off a cliff or you're going to go with them not helpful sounds like you want to be like the other kids and then he might say sometimes I feel like I don't fit in which is really

the conversation you want to have and my mother would have said of course you fit in you're a good boy you're a good-look boy said and that's not helpful either it's just helpful to listen if you have time and you have listening you Bond and then the kids tell to pick your values because they're bonded and then when they make a mistake don't rescue them today parents do way too much for their children and they steal their self-esteem I often say if you do too much for your kids you build your self-esteem by stealing theirs

and you're going to be tempted because you're going to have such love for them you don't want them to hurt and that's a mistake because character is built through struggle character and self-esteem are built by feeling competent you can solve problems so when a child says um bored rather than well we could do this or we could do that or we could do this go I wonder what you're going to do about in terms of their diet and lifestyle am I right in thinking it's it's pretty obvious here sugar chemicals toxins these kinds of things

are really really bad for the child's bre is there anything non-obvious that we do to our children's brains well I think the most important thing is you model OKAY the message so what you do and there's a reason that all of the sugar poison cereals are on the bottom two aisles or the bottom two rows on because that's where children can see them and they're like Mommy I want this and I always want you to remember this Rule and I want you to consider sharing it with your children if you have a tantrum to get

your way the answer is no it's always going to be no go for it I'm dead serious we teach people how to treat us by what we tolerate we train children to be bad by what we pay attention to so I think that's always been a very effective rule for me if you have a fit the answer is no it's always going to be no and I'm not going to be phased if you do but what if they do it in a store it's like you want long-term pain or short-term pain short-term pain is not

given into the Tantrum and there' probably be a consequence when you come home for acting like that um so are you saying to ignore the tension it's like I'm not giving in like have fun with it I am not giving in we're at a friend's house and you have a fit well one there's going to be a consequence uh when you come home I don't know what it is but I'm going to think about it it's such a great line that in my book raising mentally strong kids kids we we have lots of great lines

for parents and it's I don't know what the consequence is but I'm going to think about it just to increase their anxiety about it uh because we want them thinking about their behavior and like in life their consequences to bad behavior we want them to think about what that might be might that stray into neglect when they get they express their emotions though for example if my kid is in a supermarket and screaming and crying Daddy give me this and I just always ignore them are they going to be raised to be like neglected children

or something well if you do it in the context of special time an active listening and I think rules are important um like tell the truth put away things that you take out we treat each other with respect um do what I ask the first time it's one of my favorite rules um it prevents the kids from like going on and on about being oppositional um there's no way they're going to feel like you're not listening and you're ignoring them but if they're acting inappropriately you you want one not give into it and to have

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try it today head to perfect ted.com and use code steven4 or if you're in a supermarket you can get it at tesos or Holland and Barrett or in the Netherlands at Albert Hein and those of you in the US you can get it on Amazon one of the big themes that I wanted to ask you about it's the last thing I really wanted to to focus on today is there's been such a huge rise in the conversation around neurod Divergence which we talked about in part last time you looked at my brain you looked at

my brain and we did some tests and such and you spoke to some of my colleagues and people that know me I think they did some surveys about me as well and you concluded that I had ADHD so many people are being diagnosed with with ADHD it seems when we look at some of the numbers around the increase in diagnosis it's quite it's quite alarming and I wonder why that is are people being born with more ADHD or is it an increase in the diagnosis um is there a pop culture element to it where it's

become quite popular to say that you have ADHD if you like forget your keys or something what is it in your view so ADHD is real there's a significant genetic component to it but we're also living in a society that promotes its expression so the more sugary cereals with red dye number 40 increases hyperactivity the more gadgets you give them so they can't pay attention um the less they're outside in the sun the more they're playing video games all of those things increase the expression of ADHD um again something I know more about than I

want to um I I have a book called healing add and I write about my own personal experience being married to someone who has ADHD and having several of my kids who have it um that it's real and left untreated they're all sorts of consequences so people always ask if you think of medicine like Rin or adderal people go what are the side effects and it has side effects sometimes it can increase tick sometimes it'll cause sleep problems sometimes you'll lose some weight or decrease your appetite um but they don't ask me the other question

and I always want to make sure they do is what are the side effects of not treating ADHD and they are things like School failure incarceration bankruptcy divorce it's serious now for someone like you who's really driven and very bright for you the consequences and this is going to sound crazy but it's under achievement or it takes more for you to be at your best than if you had it treated but I have this an example of a 14-year-old who was literally failing in school and conflict driven with everyone around him so people didn't really

want to be near him and I diagnosed him started with natural things and they help but not enough put him on conserta a form of methylphenidate or Rin and he went from failing to all A's and B's and he got into the high school he wanted to get into which was very competitive and he's easy to be around that's a win because it's going to change the trajectory of his life and I like that I remember you talking last time about your daughter we have the clip don't we of Dr talking about his daughter we

can just insert it here I have a daughter and the truth is and this is going to sound awful I never thought she was very smart and and I'm ashamed of myself for thinking that and um she's staying up every night till 1 or 2 o'clock in the morning to get her homework done and one night she came just crying to me and she said dad I don't think I can ever be as smart as my friends and it just broke my heart and I scanned her the next day and I'd actually scanned her originally

but I had no experience in scans this was like 1991 I'm like child psychiatrist and an expert in add and I didn't see it in my own child and the next day I put her on Tiny dose of Ridin scanned her again and her brain normalized normalized a week later I had dinner with her and I'm like do you notice any difference and she said oh my God she said a class seemed like it always took eight hours to just do that one class and I was always lost and I'm very religious I was praying

to God that the teacher wouldn't call on me because I was lost she said now that same class goes by in about 20 minutes and my hands up because I track what's going on and that child who had always gotten B's and C's but with great effort her first report card was straight A's the next 10 years straight A she actually got into the University of Ed University of edinburgh's veterinarian school one of the best vet schools in the world where they clone Dolly the sheep and if I wouldn't have figured that out she would

have been condemned to a lifetime of mediocrity hating herself working so hard to get a mediocre result optimizing your brain and medicine's never the first thing I think about but it's one of the things I think about because I just want to use all the tools of my tool tool box to optimize your brain because if I optimize your brain I optimize your life it was really powerful and something that I then spoke to lots of my friends about and such um one of the things I've always struggled with with ADHD in terms of my

understanding is some people that I know H that have ADHD they just they're so remarkably different to me and they're so remarkably different from each other so I think about one of my friends that has it very very different in terms of productivity symptomology versus someone like me who for example in my case I'm very focused I think I can be very focused not always but when I'm into something I can I can focus on it for a long period of time in fact people don't know this but it's worth me saying um my last

book I went to Barley for I think it was either 11 or 14 days and I came out of the Jungle with the book so I went into the jungle with um basically 33 sentences individual sentences I knew what the chapter titles were they came out of the Jungle and handed my publisher penguin the manuscript after that that period in The Jungle which basically meant that for those 11 or 14 days I can't remember the exact number I sat there for about 10 hours a day and did I was obviously getting distracted once in a

while but I I wrote the whole book in uh about 14 about 14 days decent book I'm so jealous um but I but for me it's an example of the you when I think of ADHD I think of like attention deficit and again I don't know much about ADHD so I'm very naive I represent most of the population probably in that regard but I don't think I have an attention deficit necessarily well for things that are new novel highly interesting stimulating or frightening yeah people with ADD can pay attention just fine that's why a lot

of people who have it though I don't have it like if I love my history teacher I'm like focused but then when I go to Geometry I can't do it at all yeah that's the story of me in school it's it should be it's like love is a drug if you love something well you can do it but the problem is most of life you don't love and so you end up with this really sort of AR IC attention disorder um and they tend to gravitate toward things you know I I see hear this story

a lot unfortunately is they they experiment in college and they take a little bit of methamphetamine and it helps them and they're more focused and but then they don't know how to manage it and they end up taking more and more and they end up getting addicted and it steals their soul love can you see love on the brain Helen fiser who's a neuroscientist in New Jersey has actually studied love and new love shows up is increased activity in the dopamine centers of the brain and it makes you just a bit obsessive I think of

new love as dopamine but lasting love more like opiates so new love when you break up is sort of like getting off cocaine hard but not that bad lasting love if it goes away and we talked about grief earlier it's like it's ripping your skin off it's really hard sort of like getting off of heroin do people come to you that are heartbroken a lot what do they say I can't stop think that their brain gets into um anxiety sadness and that that person just lives in every fun place in their brain and they can't

get over it and it can be quite messy for them what is the change that you would like to see in the world well I'm actually working on it um I want everybody to just ask this one question and we mentioned my work with BJ fog on how people change and he um talks about tiny habits what's the smallest thing I can do that will make the biggest difference and if I could impact the world it would be through one question whatever I'm doing right now is it good for my brain or bad for it

I want to teach people to love their brains and to just make better decisions for the health of their brain because then everything follows that so good for my brain or bad for it I'm 15 I have a developing brain my brain is milting itself which means it's wrapping all my nerves all my brain cells with a white fatty substance called myin and my frontal Oaks are not done until I'm 25 oh I'm going to love my brain so I'm not pouring crap in my body with what I eat or what I drink because it's

bad for my brain when I'm 60 and I'm stressed because my football team's not winning I'm not going for Extra beer because I'd love my brain and I'm going to get to a healthy weight because I love my brain that's the change that's why I think God put me on the earth I wanted to do something um was just thinking about it as you were speaking then about the one simple thing that I can do to help my brain and to love my brain when you think about behaviors and habits that are popular and trendy

at the moment are there any that stand out to you as being particularly good for the brain or particularly bad for the brain CU I had a couple come to mind that I wanted to throw at you I mean one of them that's exploding in the UK at the moment is paddle which is kind of I think you call it pickle ball here good for my brain bad for my brain good for your brain really good do you know what brain you when you scanned my brain you told me that you said for the next

six months Steve I need you to take some Omega-3 do this do this do this and I'd like you to play more racket Sports I built a paddle Court in my garden so I have a paddle Court in my garden um in Cape Town and I love playing it now and when I play it all the time I said Dr aan said it's good for my brain um but it's exploding it's exploding across Europe really but really across much of the world now p and here in the US too oh really and it's so good

for your brain because it's working your sh Bellum and I told you that because yours was sleepy and is you activate this and you do that with coordination exercises it then activates your frontal upes does that mean that people that are uncoordinated have a cerebellum issue yes oh really okay and the more you do it the better coordination you develop and that's why coordination exercises for kids so we talked about kids is is you want to do that with them early play sports but not Sports where they're going to get a head injury right I

mean we have to be smarter than we are um but when I was young my mother who's now 93 was the pingpong champion in the neighborhood and she was really good and she never let us beat her until we could and but she was always encouraging I've got um I was looking then as you were speaking about different trends at the moment that are either good or bad for the brain and one big Trend at the moment is neuroplasticity training lots of people are doing games and using other things to like there's apps you can

get that are neuroplasticity training apps does any of that stuff work some of it some of it works and if you're so for example if you're doing memorization games do them while you're on the bike now not in the street but if you're on a stationary bike and you're doing those games it's been found that exercise increases blood flow to the hippocampus meaning you're more likely to remember it and you're strengthening your brain in the process so exercise with new learning stunning so if I want to learn something I should do it while walking or

moving in motion right so if you're listening to a language app for example do it while you're walking mindfulness and meditation good or bad for the brain great I published three studies on a calini yoga form of meditation called Kon Crea it's a 12 minute meditation I always say it's the perfect add meditation because it's only 12 minutes and for 12 minutes you do this sa it's two minutes out loud two minutes Whispering four minutes silently to yourself two minutes Whispering two minutes out loud you're done sat ma birth Life Death reborn birth Life Death

reborn but the one we studied is sat ta na ma and so if they look it up kytin Crea um activates your cerebellum activates your frontal loes calms down your emotional brain people who did that for 12 minutes for eight weeks their resting frontal lobe function was Stronger so simple what the hell is going on there I think it's the focused attention plus you're doing a coordination meditation cold therapy cold exposure therapy ice bath those kinds of things good or bad for the brain um I think you have to be careful with it because it

can trigger atrial fibrillation um I think taking a cold shower is probably good for your brain because it's going to shortterm increase dopamine and sort of give you a jolt loving your job absolutely great for your brain if you're learning new things people who are in a job that does not require new learning have a higher incidence of Alzheimer's disease so if you're stagnant in your work you have a higher risk of alheim and like if I just read brain scans all day well I know how to do it I'm not learning anything new so

I do that but I also am writing about something I don't know about um or I'm learning something new what if you're working with I'm sorry I love the job but I'm working with bad for your brain chronic stress increases cortisol and I think everybody should sort of know their Baseline cortisol level and cortisol shrinks the hippocampus and puts fat on your belly so that's two very bad things for your brain breath work that's a big Trend excellent excellent you want to break a panic attack the 15 second breath 4 seconds in hold it for

a second and a half 8 seconds out hold it for a second and a half you just do that four or five times your whole nervous system will calm down and the research shows take twice as long to breathe out as you breathe in that's why 4 seconds in 8 seconds out yeah shift your nervous system doesn't it yes it increases something called vagal tone okay some bad things then social media usage chronic social media usage good for the brain bad for the brain because you're constantly comparing yourself to people who aren't real what about

workaholism and hustle culture so I love my work am I addicted to it I don't know but I love it when they say people are Workaholics and it's bad for the brain it's their working with or doing something they don't want like or doing it for the money but without other purpose microplastics that's a big Tri awful for the brain one of the major causes of hormone disruption and cancer and other environment thank you for not giving me a plastic water bottle yeah it's okay imagine if imagine if we did that when we spend long

a lot of time these days talking about the microplastics and other environmental toxins that I think people are becoming more aware of now which is good noise pollution bad for the brain and if if it hurts your hearing hearing loss is actually one of the risk factors for Alzheimer's why is that I did I did a hear because you're not getting input right and if you're not getting appropriate input your brain starts to atropy and if you don't hear what other people are saying and you have a lot of ants you have a high negativity

bias is you can actually begin to get a bit paranoid and fill in the empty spaces with negativity I just bought some new Apple airpods and when I connected them to my phone it said you want to do a hearing test so I did the hearing test and then I asked my girlfriend I said you should do this hearing test as well because I needed something to compare it to and I was a little bit shocked um it said I hadn't lost any hearing yet but my hearing was significantly not as good as hers and

I remember thinking gosh you know this is but I didn't have any idea that it was linked to Alzheimers at all so now I've turned down the volume for the first time in my life because I think your hearing declines regardless really of what you do with age anyway um but as you said earlier like starting from a better Baseline when you're talking about the brain reserves is really the game I think with aging my last point is a my last question is a bit of a seems to be uncorrelated but the world is heading

towards a world that's driven by artificial intelligence it's like all the all the rage at the moment if you log on the internet people talking about they're going to lose their jobs all of these new tools that allow us to optimize our lives in a variety of different ways when you think about the world of AI that we're heading into there's so many ways that I imagine it's going to make your job easier as someone who's doing scans of brains and so on but do you think artificial intelligence is going to be good or bad

for our brain I think in the short run it's going to be bad because your brain is going to do less and that's bad for the brain I I think it's fascinating to watch what's going to happen and ultimately in the words of my friend Byron Katie argue with reality welcome to hell we need to figure out how to use said to enhance Our Lives rather than to steal brain development and so much of Technology you haven't talked about this has stolen brain development um when video games came into my house was actually 1987 I

remember my son was 11 he was a straight A student and then he wasn't and then we started fighting about it's like you can play for a half an hour and then like I took it out of the house because I saw it as an agent of thrilling his brain to death deadening the dopamine structures um and then I've watched this whole group of kids grow up with very cool video games that are I think damaging their brain so unleash technology without any Neuroscience study on the impact of brain development it's a bad idea our

brains getting bigger or smaller do does anybody know I don't know wondering if tech interesting question yeah because if ask GPT oh gosh yeah is it funny well it's it's things for you this is the thing although one caution with chat GPT it sucks if you ask it for medical advice it often will make mistakes and so there are other sites I like better that I trust more social connections obviously another point on that because there's now saw articles where men are getting into relationships with an AI character of a woman they like and you

know social connection is so good for the brain so I wonder if artificial social connection is going to is probably not great for for the brain because your brain doesn't have to work as hard with an artificial especially one you created yeah right your brain is when when you're with like another real person your brain has to do a lot more calculations to make that work than with someone you can just trash anymore well you'd program it for dopamine wouldn't you if you're making a friend or partner yourself what's the most important thing we haven't

talked about that we should have talked about Dr I think purpose and um what is purpose matter connection to a higher power well I always think when I assess patients of them in four big circles it's like what's the biology we talked a lot about the brain what's the psychology so we talked about development a little bit and Trauma and ants what's the Social Circle like what's going on in your life now and who you're connected with and we talked about love but we didn't really talk about the spiritual Circle which is so what's the

point why am I here am I here because of random chance because of an explosion that happened billions of years ago or do I believe in Creative Design where I'm really created for a purpose that is to make the world a better place and I find people who live without purpose have a higher incidence of depression have a higher incidence of loneliness have a higher incidence of dementia and so I encourage all of my P patience to seek and live with purpose it's one of the reasons the onepage miracle is so important to me what

do I want relationships work money physical emotional spiritual health which is really the why question and a lot of my colleagues go well how can you believe in God if you're a scientist and I'm like do you know anything about physics that the second law of physics is entropy things go from order to disorder I'm like I think there's an order to this and that I'm here talking to you and there's a purpose behind it that's greater than me studies suggest that religious belief can be associated with differences in brain structure and function while there

is no single religious brain certain patterns have been observed in Neuroscience research the prefrontal cortex involved in decision- making mortality and self-regulation tends to be more active in religious individuals and their right temporal lobe tends to be bigger there's another study with that and if if there is a God and we communicate with God there's got to be a neurosci mechanism for that and Michael perser is's a researcher out of the University of Laurentian University in Canada he would put helmets on people and give them low volt electrical activity and whenever he would stimulate the

right temporal loow people would get a sensed presence they would actually feel the presence of God in the room I just think that's so interesting and does that mean that the brain makes up God or that the brain has Pathways to experience God has you I think it's an interesting question I actually did a study on prayer uh we have a foundation called the change your brain foundation and we rais money for research Education Service and um I did a prayer study of conversational prayer I pray for you and speaking in tongues which is channeling

the holy spirit in Christian tradition and it was so interesting and there's actually been other studies uh Andrew Newberg uh who studied channelers in Brazil they would channel the dead and the idea is if you're going to channel an outside Spirit you have to turn down the noise in your brain so that you can sort of fear the other frequencies and that was our hypothesis and 60% of our subjects dropped their brain activity when they were speaking in tongues which sounds so interesting one completely activated the dopamine centers so I'm looking at him like I

bet you do this L prayer prayer can change the brain I mean we talked about meditation changing the brain and Dr Newberg again studied Tibetan Monks while they meditated and Franciscan nuns while they prayed and they found very similar changes strengthens the prefrontal cortex reduces Stress and Anxiety increases dopamine changes brain connectivity thickens the cortex promotes neuroplasticity if you pray now what if you're not religious cuz I I don't think I believe in any particular God but I would like some of these benefits so I guess I could achieve them by meditation and those kinds

of things I could still pray I've got no issue with praying I don't know what would be praying and you could be curious yeah I've got no issue with praying I just don't know what i' be praying to praying to the universe I guess spirituality is another big Trend I wonder if that's good for the brain if any I guess depends yeah on is it a healthy tradition or is it an unhealthy tradition and I've I've seen both I've seen some religions uh being very rigid and shaming and I've seen others you know be more

open and seeking you've scanned 260 thousand brains roughly how has that if at all changed your belief in a god um you know I believed in God since I was since I can remember and there's not been one thing in my life that's caused me to not believe so I I always thought going back to the second law physics that if it's random chance it just doesn't make sense that randomly we would get a brain cell that has DNA and a mitochondria it's like it's it's statistically impossible and I'm just like we are so beautifully

made I just don't get the whole thing so one thing we haven't talked about is the LA fires and the impact of disaster on the brain and I grew up in Los Angeles and I'm just horrified by what happened um and we talked that my Foundation is actually going to give away a hundred evaluations for firefighters and I almost feel bad I I did the big NFL study and it was really cool and it was a lot of fun for me but NFL players aren't Heroes they're entertainers firefighters are heroes First Responders are heroes and

what I've seen with firefighters this makes me so sad because they have damaged brains often because of the toxins that they're exposed to the emotional trauma that goes with that job and the head trauma that also goes with this with things falling on them and they have a higher suicide rate than the general population significantly higher I think it's like 25% higher and shouldn't we be teaching them about brain health and go hey look this is a brain damaging job but we need you to do it so all the way along let's see and repair

your brain let's make sure your reserve is something special rather than we had a really bad day at work let's go get drunk together let's Elevate brain health to the people who say us why is that emotion so raw for you but just thinking of what happened one of my close friends lost his hope and then he went to work and did a consult for me I'm just blown away by him but you know we're so close to the sadness of what happened and I have a clinic that we had to evacuate and I have

doctors that they had to evacuate the group trauma is so high and yet the people who care for us were not doing a good job of caring for them and I think I have parted the answer and and I just wish I could do more incredibly kind of you to offer to scan 105 fighter brains yeah and hopefully as our foundation you know can raise money we can do thousands of them how does one go about supporting your foundation where where do we go to support it so changey your brain. org changey yourb brain. org

yeah we have a closing tradition as you know where the last guest leaves a question for the next and the question left for you is what advice would you give a couple who want to start a family I love that question so much uh is if you want to start a family you have to get your bodies ready so she was born with all the eggs she'll ever have and you want to give them time like a year or more of good nutrition and the child no no the mom okay so my so my partner

I'm someone that wants to start a family so you want to go what I'm eating what I'm thinking the stress I'm under is going to impact the Next Generation what are the right brain and body habits that we both can do to get our bodies in the best shape is this good for my brain and body or is it bad for it and really focus on good you know a lot of people who are drinking they actually stop drinking when they find out they're pregnant remember the brain develops a day 21 you may not even

know you're pregnant at day 21 just let that roll around your head a little bit so I love this question is oh I can start to get my brain and my ovaries and my sperm ready to connect to be healthy so I think that's the advice I would give them Dr Daniel lman thank you so much once again for your time and thank you for the wisdom and value you've given to my audience over the years like as I was saying before we started filming I get stopped all the time everywhere I go people telling

me about you I told you I stopped yesterday well I was having a spa treatment I won't say what it is cuz people will roast me but I was having a first first first of of its kind for me Spar treatment and the lady turned to me 20 minutes in and was like by the way thank you so much for having Dan Dr Daniel Aon on because he helped me understand my ADHD etc etc so and I see that absolute love and admiration for you in the comment section every time where people recount stories from

decades ago where their kid came to see you and how you've transformed their life I actually think the top comment on our last episode was someone who I think they they came to see you 15 years ago and they said that you changed their son's life and that is just over and over and over and over again in the comments so the life you've lived is such an important one and it's added so much value and um hope and so many it's turned on the lights for so many people in so many ways so on

behalf of all those people and behalf of the tens of millions of people who've tuned into our conversations thank you so much I really appreciate it well Stephen thank you the last time I was on we got calls from all over the world I mean obviously you're doing amazing purposeful work thank you isn't this cool every single conversation I have here on the Dio at the very end of it you'll know I asked the guest to leave a question in the Diary of a CEO and what we've done is we've turned every single question written

in the Diary of a CEO into these conversation cards that you can play at home so you've got every guest we've ever had their question and on the back of it if you scan that QR code you get to watch the person who answered that question we're finally revealing all of the questions and the people that answered the question the brand new version two updated conversation cards are out right now at the conversation cards.com they' sold out twice instantaneously so if you are interested in getting hold of some limited edition conversation cards I really really

recommend acting quickly this has always blown my mind a little bit 53% of you that listen to the show regularly haven't yet subscribed to the show so could I ask you for a favor before we start if you like the show and you like what we do here and you want to support us the free simple way that you can do just that is by hitting the Subscribe button and my commitment to you is if you do that then I'll do everything in my power me and my team to make sure that this show is

better for you every single week we'll listen to your feedback we'll find the guests that you want me to speak to and we'll continue to do what we do thank you so much [Music] a [Music]