April 9, 2025 • 64 mins
Is your brain trying to tell you something—and are you ignoring the signs?
In this urgent and eye-opening episode of Arroyo Grande, Dr. Daniel Amen—renowned psychiatrist, neuroscientist, and founder of Amen Clinics—reveals the silent killers affecting your brain every day. From marijuana use and stress to poor sleep, trauma, and toxic food choices, Dr. Amen breaks down what’s really behind the rise in depression, dementia, and Alzheimer’s—and what you can do to prevent them.
📍 We cover:
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The real impact of marijuana on brain blood flow
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How childhood trauma rewires your brain (and how to heal)
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Surprising early signs of Alzheimer’s
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The connection between obesity and memory loss
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Daily habits that boost brain health and reverse damage
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Why mental health meds could accelerate dementia in some people
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And Dr. Amen’s “One Page Miracle” that changes lives
⚠️ This episode could save your life—or someone you love.
Subscribe now and hit the bell so you never miss a breakthrough:
👉 https://www.youtube.com/@ArroyoGrandeShow
📘 Learn more: Dr. Amen's latest book Change Your Brain Every Day is available now.
#BrainHealth #DanielAmen #MentalWellness #ArroyoGrande #DementiaPrevention #Neuroscience #TraumaHealing #Podcast
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Are you using marijuana, are you depressed, have you suffered
some sort of trauma? All of that impact your brain
in incredible ways and not happy ones. Doctor Daniel aman Or,
a nown brain specialist, will tell you not only how
those things affect your brain, but how you can restore it.
This is an Arroyo Grande that could literally save your life.
(00:22):
Come on in, I'm Raymond Arroyo. Welcome to Arroyo Grande.
I don't want to waste any time, because this is
really an urgent and important episode. If you're suffering from
(00:44):
brain fog, or you can't recall things that once came easily,
if Alzheimer's runs in your family, or if you're using marijuana,
you have to listen to this show. Doctor Daniel Amond,
a neuroscientist and psychiatrist, has spent his life teaching people
how to heal their brains and lives. Everything you're going
(01:06):
to hear today is actionable. By the way, go subscribe
to the Arroyo Grande Show right now on YouTube wherever
you get your podcasts. Turn the notifications on. I don't
want you to miss an episode and be sure you
like this one, and you will. We are joined now
by doctor Daniel Aman, brain specialist, New York Times bestselling
author and founder of the Aiman Clinics. Doctor, thank you
(01:28):
so much for being with us. You know I've always
been and long fascinated by your work. The center of
it seems to my eye at least the taking of
these three despect images of the brain. How did you
come upon spect imaging? Why do you use that in
your practice?
Speaker 2 (01:47):
Well, you know, a psychiatrists are the only medical doctors
who virtually never look at the organ they treat. And
when I became a psychiatrist decided to be a psychiatrist
in nineteen seventy nine, I knew that was wrong and
I knew it would change. I just had no idea
i'd be part of it. Nineteen ninety one, I went
(02:07):
to a lecture on brain spect imaging. It's a nuclear
medicine study that looks at blood flow and activity. It
looks at how your brain works, and it basically shows
you three things good activity, too little, or too much.
And you've heard it. Set of pictures worth a thousand words,
(02:30):
but a map is worth a thousand pictures. A map
tells you where you are and then gives you direction
on how to get to where you want to go.
And that's exactly what I saw with spec you would
come in. I published a brand new paper out yesterday
in Jammas Psychiatry, so one of the best journals in
(02:52):
the world on depression, and what we showed is when
you lump fifteen thousand people with depression, you see overall
pretty severe low activity in the brain. But having treated
depressed people for over thirty years, it's like they're not
(03:15):
all the same. Some have low activity, some have high activity.
Some look like they have toxic exposure from drugs, alcohol,
or mold. Some look like they have infection, some look
like they have head trauma. And if you don't look
at the individual person in front of you, you actually
(03:38):
have no idea what's going on in their brain. And
throw trying this medicine, that medicine. This treatment is like
growing darts in the dark. And I just became a
heck of a lot more effective when I would look.
And then the other big benefit is people fill in
(03:59):
life love with their brains and they started treating them better.
So they're smoking less pot, they're drinking less alcohol, they're
eating less bad food because they get engaged in wanting
a better brain.
Speaker 1 (04:17):
Doctor Rayman, how does dementia present, for instance, when you
look at these scans and how early can you see it?
Speaker 2 (04:25):
So Alzheimer's disease actually starts in the brain decades before
you have any symptoms. But Alzheimer's is only one of
ten different dementia categories, and Speck actually helps to distinguish
between is it frontal temporal lobe dementia, the kind of
(04:49):
dementia Bruce Willis has, is Alzheimer's disease? Is it vascular dementia?
Is it alcoholic Dementia's Louis body dementia? What Robin Williams had?
And I wrote a book in two thousand and five
called Preventing Alzheimer's and got no end of grief for
(05:10):
writing it. It's like, no, you can't do that. Don't
give people false hope. And last year in the Lancet
there was an article that said fifty percent of Alzheimer's
disease is preventable, and I think everybody should be scanned
at fifty but if you have it in your family,
(05:32):
you probably should be scanned when you're forty.
Speaker 1 (05:36):
But doctor, I want to just stop you one second.
Why not use a pet scan? Or an MRI, which
I'm told is more advanced and gives you clearer imaging.
Speaker 2 (05:46):
Well, that's not true. And MRI is a structural study,
and the problem is functional study. Functional problems always start
before you see structural problems. And SPECT and PAT are
(06:07):
cousins to each other. PAT does have a little bit
better resolution, but no one in the world has the
experience we have at Aiman Clinics, where we've done over
two hundred and sixty thousand scans on people from one
hundred and fifty five countries. So and we actually are
(06:27):
able to use AI now to read the scans as
if they were my eyes, and we're very excited about it.
And I believe that we can prevent much of dementia
if and here's the plan. You want to keep your
(06:50):
brain healthy or rescue it, you have to prevent or
treat the eleven major risk factors that steal your mind.
And we know what they are. That for example, if
you're overweight, that increases your risk, If you abuse drugs,
that increases your risk. If you're depressed, that increases your risk.
(07:15):
But a brand new study out I'm actually going to
post on it tomorrow that people on SSRIs like proza
zolof lexapro selexa. If you have dementia and you're on
one of those medications, it accelerates memory loss. Really, those
medications are inhibitory. They increase serotonin. Serotonin calms things down
(07:42):
in the brain. So if you have a busy brain,
they're the right thing for you. But dementia generally is
a sleepy brain, and they actually can make things worse.
But again, how would you know if you didn't? Yeah,
I often feel like Galileo, who was imprisoned at the
(08:05):
end of his life. What did Galileo do? He developed
a high powered telescope, looked at the stars and said,
the Earth is not the center of the universe.
Speaker 1 (08:15):
Yeah, you got it all wrong. And of course, look,
but he was eventually proven and even the Church caught
up and forgave Galileo and themselves I think in the mix.
But look, doctor and Alzheimer's, and this is something that
affects millions of us, millions of families. The effects of
this disease currently hit seven million people, and it's expected
(08:39):
to triple in the coming decades. Tell me what is
fueling it? What is fueling the explosion in Alzheimer's that
we're seeing, and I imagine the isolation of this pandemic
will only exacerbate things in the years to come.
Speaker 2 (08:54):
The pandemic did so many bad things for our society
as a whole. COVID all by itself causes inflammation in
the brain and increases the risk of anxiety, depression, and dementia.
And then if you add well, they locked us at home,
(09:18):
so the isolation. They left the liquor stores open, so
the isolation more alcohol. They left us at home, so
they ate bad food. So obesity continued to climb. And
of the eleven major risk factors, if you're overweight, you
automatically have ten of them. We have to be serious
(09:43):
with seventy five percent of the population overweight, forty three
percent obese. There's nothing about this that's okay when it
comes to brain health.
Speaker 1 (09:57):
Well, doctor Renett, what are the primary early indicators you
see of dementia? What are the things when people walk
in the door you see these things that some probably
take for granted, you know their minor things. What should
we be on the lookout for.
Speaker 2 (10:15):
If your memory is worse than it was ten years ago,
you should be a concern because there's an eighty percent chance,
So continue to get worse if you're starting to make
poor decisions, if you say things that hurt others people's feelings,
and that's not been sort of the story of your life.
(10:35):
So you look at memory, decision making, socialization. Some people
who start losing their memories start to isolate themselves because
they're like, I just don't remember people's names anymore, and
I'll be embarrassed. So that is something they start having
(10:56):
more accidents because if you put your thumbs in your
ears and your hands on your head, that's the pattern
for Alzheimer's disease. So it's by lap parietal lobe decreased activity.
That's why people get lost, and it's why people get
into more accidents because this is direction sense and depth perception,
(11:22):
and then your temporal lobes that's memory and also recall
of things like names and places and Raymond, we're diagnosing
this later than ever before because of smartphones, because before
someone who'd lived in a city for thirty years, they
(11:44):
wouldn't they'd forget how to go home. They would family
from a phone both and go on loss and they'd
be freaked out and their family would bring them in
to see me. But you know, now since two thousand
and seven, you can go, hey, see take me home.
And so we're actually and people don't want to see
(12:06):
it in their family, and so they often denied, deny
until there's overwhelming evidence. And I'm like, I think we
should be screening everybody. And another reason we're seeing it
more is because of the obesity epidemic.
Speaker 1 (12:26):
I was just going to ask you that how does
obesity affect the brain? What is the tangible impact of obesity?
And you said it seventy five percent of the population
is obese. Doctor, what impact does that have when you
look at these brains?
Speaker 2 (12:40):
So I published three studies on thirty three thousand people
showing azure weight goes up, the size and function of
the brain goes down, and that should scare the fat
off anyone. And so if you look at the eleven
major risk factors, being overweight decreases blood flow, It prematurely
(13:03):
ages your brain. Fat cells store produce something called inflammatory cytokines,
so you have more inflammation in your body. It changes
genetic expression, fat stores toxins, your more risk for mental
health stuff like depression. It changes your immune system. One
(13:27):
of the worst things it does is it takes healthy
testosterone and turns it into unhealthy, cancer promoting forms of estrogen. Yeah,
it's it's very disruptive and I never mean to fat
shame anyone, but it's like, if you can't tell the
(13:49):
truth in our society, this is not good for the
health of your brain or body. And you know we've
suericized everything and when you go to a restaurant they
give you these crazy meals. We need to be way
more thoughtful of what we put in our bodies, which
(14:13):
why I'm a huge fan of you know, RFK Junior.
And it's like, well, let's at least talk about getting help.
Speaker 1 (14:20):
Well. I like in one of your books you say,
when you go to dinner, go to dinner with a
very fit person because that will inevitably restrain what you order,
because you know you don't want to be embarrassed in
somebody who's in great shape. Give me a sense of
you mentioned there a moment ago reduced blood flow. I
was stunned when I read in one of your books,
and we read about this across the culture. You see
(14:43):
these ads every time you turn around, erectile dysfunction, this
and erectile dysfunction that that is actually a marker that
you cite as an early indicator of dementia.
Speaker 2 (14:55):
Well, you have blood flow problems anywhere EveryWare and one
of the biggest benefits, like I shouldn't say it that way,
one of the benefits of getting on one of our
brain health programs is your sex life gets better. You
know with blood flow. What are you doing that decreases
(15:16):
blood flow? Caffeine, nicotine, being sedentary, alcohol, marijuana, And what
are you doing to increase blood flow, which is exercise, beats, oregano, cayenne, pepper, ginko,
one of my favorite supplements.
Speaker 1 (15:37):
Tell me about the effect of trauma. Doctor this. You know,
we often hear about you know, depression and you know
obesity and the physical body affecting the brain. But in
your books you talk about the effect of trauma, not
necessarily physical trauma, but emotional trauma on the brain.
Speaker 2 (16:00):
So we published a huge new study this year on
seventy five hundred people looking at adverse childhood experiences. So
there's an ACE questionnaire on a scale of zero to ten,
how many bad things happened to you growing up, from physical,
emotional sexual abuse to neglect to being raised by a
(16:24):
parent with mental illness, addiction, going to prison. If you
have four more that you have an increased risk of
seven of the top ten leading causes of death. If
you have six or more, you die twenty years earlier.
And so we studied them and what we found is
(16:46):
childhood trauma activated the limbic or emotional circuits in the brain,
making you at greater risk for anxiety, depression, worry, and obsessiveness.
And the exciting news is if you see it, well,
(17:07):
then you can calm it down. But if you never look,
you don't know. He's the brain working too hard or
not hard enough.
Speaker 1 (17:14):
You write about people who obsess over perceived wrongs. I
read this in one of your books recently. It's like
they're recycling and they're revisiting all those wounds of the past.
They keep them very much alive. How do you get
past that. You're a psychiatrist, what would you advise people?
Speaker 2 (17:32):
Well, I teach my patients to kill the ants, the
automatic negative thoughts that steal their happiness. I never want
people drinking away their pain or medicating their pain. I
want them to go into it and actually so write
it down. Whenever you have a thought, your brain releases chemicals.
(17:54):
Whenever you have a happy thought, a hopeful thought, your
brain release is completely different set of chemicals that make
you feel good. But when you have a grudge thought,
an angry thought, a hopeless, helpless thought, your brain releases
chemicals that increase your limbic brain but also increase cortisol
(18:17):
and make you more likely to be sick. So one
of the things to do, here's the exercise. Whenever you
feel sad, mad, nervous, or out of control, write down
what you're thinking, and then ask yourself is it true?
Is it absolutely true? How do I feel when I
have this thought? How would I feel if I didn't
(18:39):
have the thought? And then what I really love is
take the original thought my wife never listens to me,
turn it to the opposite my wife listens to me,
and then meditate on that. And what you find is
you stop letting your undisciplined mind torture you, and you
(19:03):
think in a more realistic, rational, hopeful way. And it's
our I'd love the idea of give your mind a name,
and that way you can gain some distance from it.
In my mind, after my pet raccoon when I was
sixteen and I loved her, but she was a troublemaker,
(19:26):
all sorts of trouble, which is just my mind and
like stirs up stuff that doesn't help me. And I'm
not a fan of accurate thinking of positive thinking. I'm
a fan of accurate thinking with a positive spin. Because
we have a new study coming out on negativity bias
and that's very bad for yourself.
Speaker 1 (19:46):
Yeah, well that's what I was going to say. In
all of your books, you write about the stories we
tell ourselves about ourselves, about our relationships. That does have
a supreme and major influence on your health, your mind,
and your brain's well being, which is something you just
don't think about.
Speaker 2 (20:06):
Well, there's nowhere in school. Think about this with me, Raymond.
There's nowhere in school where we teach children how to
manage their minds. Isn't that crazy? Like I was twenty
eight years old in my psychiatric residency at the Walter
Reed Army Medical Center, and one of our professors said,
(20:27):
you have to teach your patients not to believe every
stupid thing they think. And I'm like, but I believe
every stupid thing I think, and it caused me no
end of grief. And now when I have a thought.
I realize, Oh, it's just a thought that I don't
have to attach to it. I can question it, and
(20:51):
I can go, well, does this thought serve me? Is
this thought helpful for me? Well? This thought help me
have a better relationship with my wife, do better job
with my patience. And if it doesn't serve me, I'm like,
I don't need you. It's not the thing you have
that make you suffer, it's the thought you attached to.
(21:12):
Seinfeld One said, the brain is a sneaky organ. We
all have weird, crazy, stupid, sexual, violent thoughts that nobody
should ever hear. And you know people where they have
no filter, like whatever they think gets out of their mouth.
And that's usually because their frontal lobes are sleepy. They
(21:35):
don't break in their brain. Because when people come to
me and they go, you know, I'm brutally honest, my
first thought is that's usually not helpful.
Speaker 1 (21:45):
Uh huh. Well, you mentioned Walter Read where you did
your residency, and I want to get to that in
the moment. Because I'm reading all your books. I thought,
I'll bet that Walter Read experience was pretty foundational for you.
But I want to get to that moment The most
important thing I need to tackle now. How can you
protect yourself doctor from Alzheimer's, especially if it runs in
(22:08):
your family. What are the practical things people can do
right now?
Speaker 2 (22:13):
Well, so if we go through the eleven major risk factors,
I'll just give you one simple thing for each of them.
So the acronym is Bright Minds and the B is
for blood flow. Low blood flows the number one brain
imaging predictor of Alzheimer's disease. Walk like you're late, forty
five minutes, four or five times a week. You should
(22:36):
do that if you haven't. In your family, are's retirement
and aging. New learning every day ten minutes. Learn something new,
something that you don't know how to do, that you're
not good at. Push your brain to learn. The eye
is inflammation. There's so many things you could do there.
Floss your teeth, take really great care of your gums,
(23:01):
and take fish oil BEGA three fatty acid because it's
anti inflammatory. The g is genetics, and we don't think
about genes right, So you may have an APPOEF gene
one or two of them that increases your risk. I
think all of us should know. But genes aren't a
death sentence. What they are is a wake up call.
(23:24):
If I had it in my family, I'm going to
be on an Alzheimer's prevention program my whole life. H's
head trauma a major cause of dementia that very few
people know about. If you've had head injuries, concussions, car accidents,
(23:45):
got your bell, run plane sports. I'm a huge fan
of hyperbaric oxygen. I mean, but what, Raymond, we got
to look. If you don't look, you don't know. T
is toxins. Stop thinking of alcohol is a health food.
The American Cancer Society for Goodness Sakes came out three
(24:06):
years ago and said it increases the risk of seven
different types of cancer. Alcohol is pro dementia and pro depression.
Speaker 1 (24:18):
Any kind of alcohol, any kind of alcohol, wine, everything.
Speaker 2 (24:22):
Everything, it's and they're empty calories. So and they cause
you to say things you shouldn't say.
Speaker 1 (24:32):
Well, wine is good for you because of the blood flow. Oh,
the Italians do it, The French drink it. Look how
healthy they are. You don't agree with that, lone.
Speaker 2 (24:40):
It's a lie. We've been sold a bill of goods.
Even this year, the Surgeon General came out and said
you shouldn't drink because of its association with cancer. M
is mental health. So learn to not believe every stupid
thing you say because depression. If you're a girl, a
(25:05):
female and you have depression, it doubles your risk of
Alzheimer's disease. If you are a male, it quadruples your risk.
Speaker 1 (25:14):
And as song is that.
Speaker 2 (25:18):
And it could be because what we saw in the
study we just published this week the low activity in
the brain. But it also with depression comes memory problems,
comes isolation. And one of the types of dementia that
we see on spect is called pseudo dementia, where it's
really severe depression that masquerades as dementia. Very interesting. The
(25:46):
second eye is immunity and infections. Know your vitamin D
level and get it high. I never wanted to be
in the bottom of my class. I always wanted the
top of What is not a normal level, What is
an optimal level? N is ner hormones. You just have
(26:08):
your hormones tested every year. I'm like three patients today
with low testosterone and all the products we put on
our body, they're hormone disruptors and decrease your testosterone levels.
And D is diabesity. Know how many calories have a sense.
I eat this many calories a day, I'm more likely
(26:30):
to gain weight less. It's not just calories, right, it's
the quality of your calories. But calories count to and
then go to bed half an hour early because sleep
is absolutely essential. So those are the bright minds and
just some high level things. People could read My book
(26:50):
Change your Brain every Day, you know, of all my books,
I think that's the one to read because it's three
hundred and sixty six short essays on the most important
things I've ever said.
Speaker 1 (27:02):
And very practical. You can do them every day, and
you encourage people to read them day by day because
I've read them. How do you start your day? Doctor?
What's your routine? Do you what do you eat when
you begin the day, and do you have coffee?
Speaker 2 (27:17):
So I start every day with today is going to
be a great day. I push my mind to look
for what I'm excited about. I end every day with
what went well today. And it's actually a pretty detailed practice.
I say a prayer and then I go hour by
hour looking for what I loved about the day until
(27:40):
I'm asleep. I start with a decaf cappuccino that I
make for my wife and I with unsweetened almond milk
and a little bit of Stevia put in creating and
something we make called smart mushrooms. So it's just delicious.
(28:02):
Brand new study out on creatine. Not only does it
give you bigger muscles, it also helps to treat depression
and help mine be sharper. Five grams of creatine. Very
excited about that. And then usually for me, I have
a couple of eggs, and then later on I'll make
a shake for myself with a healthy protein powder and
(28:29):
nutrients in it and half a couple of blueberries. I'll
generally have a salad in the middle of the day,
and almost always in the morning, I go on a
long walk with our two dogs and my wife and
we sort of start the day connecting with exercise, and
(28:52):
then I look for what I love about the day,
to sort of the micro miracles. What are the littlest
things that I can find that make me happy and
like a butterfly or a hummingbird, or that first taste
of brain healthy hot chocolate. I make at night virtually
every night because my wife looks at me and goes
(29:15):
and this is like, do you love me? Will you
make me brain, healthy, hot chocolate.
Speaker 1 (29:21):
Okay, Now I want to go back to the beginning.
You did your psychiatric training at Walter Reed, which you mentioned.
What did that place and that particular cohort of clients
teach you that you've carried with you into this part
of your life and work.
Speaker 2 (29:37):
So I was out of high school, I went into
the Army because Vietnam was going on, and I became
an infantry medic where my love of medicine was born.
So after I finished got out of the army then
and finished college and medical school, I went back in
as an Army captain and serve the military and their
(30:03):
dependence and just loved it because it was familiar to me.
I felt at home at Walter Reed. We saw all
the really unusual things in psychiatry that you typically don't
see in sort of a day to day outpatient clinic.
It was fun and fascinating and yeah, I learned so
(30:27):
much and loved my experience there. And then I'm also
a child psychiatrist. I did that in Triple Or Army
Medical Center in Hawaii. Completely loved Honolulu and my experience there.
But where I grew the most is a little place
in the middle of the Mojave Desert called Fort Irwin,
(30:49):
where I was the only psychiatrist for ten thousand people,
and I just loved it so much. And I brought
brain imaging technology two because I'm the boss, and so
I just had to get my boss to approve it.
Where we started doing neuro feedback, where we could put
(31:09):
electrodes on your scalp, start measuring brain activity, and then
based on what we saw, teach you to change it.
And that's where I got the idea, change your brain,
change your life. And that has really been foundational for
the rest of my career. So when I went to
(31:31):
the lecture in nineteen ninety one on brain spect imaging,
I'd already been thinking about it. I'd already primed. It's like,
if you don't look, you don't know, but you can
take bad brains and make them better. You can take
good brains and make them great.
Speaker 1 (31:46):
Incredible. And the diversity of people I imagine that you
meet in the military, especially people coming back from from
war or hostile situations, I'm sure that's a very specialized
type of medicine as opposed to the generic folks that
walk through the door today.
Speaker 2 (32:06):
I don't know you know, at Aiman clinics, we've seen
a lot who have failed on average six medicines three
point three providers, and we've seen a whole bunch a
very interesting things. And we have a nonprofit foundation, Change
Your Brain Foundation of actually doing a special project now
(32:28):
for firefighters. Because I did the big NFL study when
the NFL was sort of lying it had a problem
with traumatic brain injury in football. It's like, stop lying
about it bad for the brain. But eighty percent of
our players got better. But when I realized afterwards, as
(32:48):
much as I love our football players, they're not heroes,
They're entertainers. Firefighters are heroes. And what we saw recently
with the devastation in California in Los Angeles, our foundation
raising money specifically for firefighters to scan them treat them
(33:12):
so that they did You know, firefighters have a forty
percent increased risk of suicide.
Speaker 1 (33:21):
I did not know that about why.
Speaker 2 (33:23):
Why is that because of the toxic exposure the trauma.
I talk about emotional trauma. Every day. They spend time
with people on the worst day of their lives, and
so you end up being re traumatized over and over again,
(33:46):
and often because of the machismo. It's like, oh, there's
nothing the matter with me. I don't need help. They
end up medicating the trauma with alcohol.
Speaker 1 (33:57):
You know, you mentioned in passing I don't want to
let this go before I move on, you said eighty
percent of the NFL players you worked with who had
experienced head trauma that they improved. How did you What
did you give them to do? Was it medication? Was
it practice?
Speaker 2 (34:13):
Now? As actually a multiple vitamin, high dose B vitamins,
because there are a number of studies that say B six,
B twelve and fol aid in these particular dosages decrease
the conversion of mild cognitive impairment to Alzheimer's disease, and
it grew their hippocampus, major memory structure of the random
(34:37):
like okay, multiple vitamin with those doses of bees, high
dose of omega three, fatty acids and nutrients found to
increase blood flow and activity like genko. So we put
them on this supplement protocol that and then told them
(34:58):
to stop doing things that hurt their alcohol, marijuana and
so on. That was it. Eighty percent of will work
better now?
Speaker 1 (35:06):
Incredible.
Speaker 2 (35:06):
Also added later hyperbaric oxygen, which we found helpful and
if they were depressed, we would add either supplements like
saffron or medication if needed. But eighty percent was just
on the nutrient program and a little bit of brain
(35:30):
health education.
Speaker 1 (35:32):
Incredible. Tell me about marijuana use. We talked about this
in passing, but you see all of these states legalizing this.
So many young people, so many young men use it
just the way you would smoke a cigar or have
a drink. In fact, it's a daily in fact, multiple
practice a day. And I'm often told, you know, by
(35:53):
people who use it regularly. Look, it just mellows me out.
It has no long term effect. You studied this, what
did you find and how does it affect the brain?
Speaker 2 (36:02):
So I studied it. I mean I've been studying it
for thirty four years now with image and their brains
look older than they are. It's not good for the brain.
And then I published a study on a thousand marijuana users.
Every area of their brain is lower in blood flow
(36:23):
and activity. And then just a couple of weeks ago
in Jamma's psychiatry, there's an article not from my group,
from a completely separate group on a thousand marijuana users.
The learning and memory centers of their brain significantly lower
in activity. And it's common knowledge among psychiatrists, and studies
(36:49):
show that teenagers who use, and teenagers in massive numbers
now think it's harmless.
Speaker 1 (36:56):
Yeah do doing.
Speaker 2 (36:57):
It with their parents. I mean, this is the insanity
that's happening in our society. And teenagers who use in
their twenties increase anxiety, depression, suicide, and psychosis. This is
not okay. Now, I'm not a fan. If you're smoking
(37:19):
pot for them to arrest you and send you to jail,
I don't think that's a good use of our resources.
But we need and President Trump talked about this when
he was at the Department of Justice. It's we need
a serious brain health education, a drug prevention education program.
(37:43):
And I don't know if you know, but after I
listened to him all about how much does Anheuser Busch
spend a year in marketing? Because the President said he
raised like fifty million dollars for this campaign. V Heyser
Busch spends six point eight bill billion dollars a year
on sales and marketing. I'm like, we spend what almost
(38:08):
a trillion dollars on our defense budget. You're much more
likely to die from depression, suicide, obesity, dementia than you
are from a nuclear warhead. And shouldn't we be serious
about having prevention, a Department of Defense for brain health
(38:33):
and my big goal, maybe you can help me with it.
I would create a brain health revolution, and I think
this administration is the only one that can do it.
Speaker 1 (38:42):
Does marijuana use? Does it make you more susceptible to Alzheimer's?
Imagine it does because you're constricting blood flow.
Speaker 2 (38:50):
Yes, because it is not It does not give you
a healthy brain over time. That this study is because
it's only been legal for a very short time. There
are no great long term studies. But if I wanted
to prevent Alzheimer's and I had it in my family,
(39:11):
I absolutely wouldn't use it.
Speaker 1 (39:14):
Doctor. I find, particularly when you talk to young people today,
they are wanderers, people who are just they're just wandering,
waiting for the next experience, waiting for something to happen.
You developed something that has intrigued me for a long time.
It's called the one page miracle. Tell people what that
is and the power it has.
Speaker 2 (39:36):
I love this exercise so much. It's actually the first
thing I do with all of my patients on one
piece of paper, write down what you want relationships, work, money, physical, emotional,
spiritual health, What do you want? And then you ask yourself,
(40:00):
is my behavior getting me what I want? In one
of my books, I rewrote the twelve Step Program, you
know that was actually written eighty five years ago to
help people with alcoholism and addiction. And you know, step
one in the twelve Step program is my life is
out of control. And I'm like, no, that's not step one,
(40:21):
that's step two. Step one is, well, what the heck
do you want? What kind of relationship do you want
to have? What do you want to do at work?
What do you want with your money, What do you
want with your physical, emotional, spiritual health? Because then step
two becomes really easy. Is my behavior getting me what
I want? Or has in fact my life been hijacked
(40:43):
by a substance or a practice?
Speaker 1 (40:47):
And what does it tell us? That exercise about the
power of what we tell ourselves? My finckory, we were
repeating our own heads.
Speaker 2 (40:56):
Well, it's intention. You have to tell your brain. Your
brain is the most complicated, beautiful, elegant organ in the universe,
but like any computer, you have to tell it what
to do. And if you tell it, oh, I want
(41:18):
a kind, caring, loving, supportive relationship with my wife, Well,
then when you get that thought, that's rude. You just
don't say it because it doesn't help you get what
you want. I don't have any tattoos, and I actually
don't recommend them because there's new research coming out on
(41:39):
lymphomas and tattoos. But if I had, it would be
does it fit? Does my behavior today fit the goals
I have for my life? But you have to know
what you want. And Raymond, I find so many people,
(41:59):
like ninety five percent of my patients when I do
this exercise with them, they hadn't really thought about it.
They spent more time thinking about their vacation than what
they really want in their lives.
Speaker 1 (42:15):
No, no, we plan, we plan our meals, and we
plan our vacations more than we plan our lives. And
sometimes you got to invert that in one of your books, doctor,
and I'm you know, I'm a perpetual hummer. I'm humming
all day long. When you know, when I walk out
the door in the morning, I'm humming or singing something.
You talk about the power of toning or humming. Share
(42:38):
that with people. That was kind of fascinating to me
how it can change your spirits and really rejuvenate you
in some ways.
Speaker 2 (42:44):
Well in a number of really important ways. It actually
increases your breath and increases your lung capacity by doing
that on a regular basis. Also, the two are activating
your cerebellum and your temporal lobe. So the cerebellum is
(43:07):
the Rodney Dangerfield part of the brain. Now I hate
a lot of young people have no idea who Rodney
Dangerfield is, which just ages me. But he is a
very famous comedian, hilarious, I get no respect. So the
cerebellum is ten percent of the brain's volume, but fifty
percent of the brain's neurons, and it is like the
(43:31):
master controller in your brain, and humming activates it, which
just will then turn on the rest of your brain.
And during the pandemic, we released a supplement I love
called Happy Saffron, and my assistant took it and the
(43:54):
next day she's humming at work. We're working from my house,
and I'm like, why are you humming? And she said,
I don't know, I'm just happy.
Speaker 1 (44:04):
You see, it's a symptom. It's a good thing. Well,
music is you know, it's the it's the it makes
the soul buoyant, and I guess the mind as well.
You wrote a book recently called Raising Mentally Strong Kids,
and it seems to me the major key here is
building of those relationships, bonding with that child. What is
(44:26):
the thing that parents often miss doctor? What do they
miss out on? I get? I know one of the
big ones is just authority, making themselves the authority there,
but doing it with love.
Speaker 2 (44:40):
It's the relationship that too often devices are getting in
the middle of relationships, and parents aren't spending the time
and they're not listening, and because of that, they often
feel guilty. So they overdo and they solve their children's problems.
(45:03):
And when you do that, you are building your self
esteem by stealing theirs, because self esteem actually comes from
feeling and acting in competent ways. I can deal with
this with this challenge. So when your child comes to
(45:25):
you and says I'm bored, rather than go well, you
could do this, or we could do that, or have
you thought about this, go oh, you're born. It's just
active listening, repeat back what you're hearing and then let
(45:46):
them fill it figure it out. Then go well, I
wonder what you're going to do about it, and you know,
and if you've been solving all of their problems up
till now, they might have a meltdown. It's like I
don't know, I don't know, and it's like you figure
it out.
Speaker 1 (46:03):
Yeah, let them figure it out. I guess we're afraid, though,
of giving kids too much responsibility. And I see a
lot of parents they never want to let their kids fail.
And I guess the flip side is the drill sergeant parent.
You know you're not good at anything, you'll never amount
to anything. What's the balance there?
Speaker 2 (46:22):
Furmin kind? Whenever you don't know what to do, go
to those two words. The best parents are firm when
they say something, they mean at and they expect it
to be complied with. But they're kind. I always say,
think of the best coach you ever had. The best
(46:43):
coaches notice what you do right, and they teach you
so you can be better. The worst coaches, the worst
parents notice what you do wrong and they never let
you forget it. And so bonding requires time, actual physical time.
(47:04):
There's an exercise in the book I Love. It's called
special time. Twenty minutes a day, do something with your child,
your child wants to do, and during that time, no commands,
no questions, no directions, It's just time to be together.
If you're like, my child will never talk to me,
it's probably because you're not spending enough time with them
and you're not listening and then active listening. Stop talking
(47:29):
over them, stop trying to cram you know, the thirty
or forty to fifty years of experience you have in
their heads, they're going to pick up just by living
with you. What you think and what you know. Your
job is to help them learn how to think, and
(47:49):
you do that through listening, asking thoughtful questions, and not
giving them the answer.
Speaker 1 (47:58):
Doctor, add and ADHD is exploding in kids. Do you
believe in the medical approach of medication giving them medicines
to cope or is there another approach? Is there another
way that perhaps we're missing here.
Speaker 2 (48:13):
So Ever, since I've been a psychiatrist, every year they
say ADDS exploding, and so it's been exploding for a
long time. In fact, it is increasing in the population
in part because kids aren't exercising. Kids aren't out in
the sunlight as much as they were before. Their devices
(48:38):
are draining, they're dopamine availability, and we're feeding them bad food.
So if you take all of those things, yeah I can't.
It's just a play for one of my grandkids. And
the number of overweight kids, it's shocking. If you're overweight,
(49:01):
you're not getting the exercise, You're getting a lot of
bad food that is going to cause your brain to
be more sluggish. Now, so first thing I do brain
healthy habits, exercise, and I like to put people on
an elimination diet for a month. Let's just get rid
(49:22):
of gluten, dairy corns, artificial dyes and sweeteners. Two studies
published in the Lancet kids who went on eighty d
kids who went on an elimination diet seventy two percent
lost their add And so let's start there. But yeah,
(49:43):
it doesn't work. Omega three fatty acids can help zinc magnesium.
So then we'll go to a supplement regimen. And then
if it doesn't work, I'm going to go to medicine.
Why because add is real and when left untreated, right
if it's not because of devices or a low quality diet,
(50:06):
left untreated kids don't finish high school. Thirty three percent
of untreated ADDY kids don't finish high school for incidence
of drug abuse, divorce, incarceration, and the medicine can change
their lives. And I write about it in my books
that several of my kids have add and the medicine
(50:29):
took them from being mediocre to straight A students. And
I just it's never about medicine or not, It's about
what's best for your brain.
Speaker 1 (50:43):
Yeah. Somewhere in one of the books, or maybe a
mutual friend told me that you have collected, doctor Amon,
hundreds of penguins. Why do you collect penguins? They're in
your office, They're everywhere.
Speaker 2 (51:00):
It's a little bit of an obsession. When my oldest
who I adopted, was seven, he was really hard for me,
and I was talking to my supervisor. So I'm in
Hawaii at the time, talking to my child psychiatry supervisor,
and she said, oh, you should probably spend more alone
(51:21):
time with him, which was sort of the last thing
I wanted to do because he was argumentative and oppositional.
And I took him to a place called Sea Life Park,
which is in Hawaii and it's like Marine World or SeaWorld,
and we went to the Killer Whale show and that
was great and the dolphin show, which was fun, and
(51:42):
the Sea Lion show, which was hysterical, And at the
end of the day grabs my shirt and he goes,
I want to see Fat Freddy, and I'm like, who's
Fat Freddy? He said the penguin, Dad, don't you know anything,
which is sort of our relationship. And we went to
that is the last show of the day in this
(52:03):
beautiful stadium on Oahu, and this little fat Humboldt penguin
comes on the stage, climb the ladder to a high dive,
goes to the end of the board, balances on it,
and then jumps in the water and I'm like, holy smokes.
(52:23):
And then he gets out of the water bowls with
his nose, counts with this flipper, jumps through hoop a
fire and I'm like blown away with this little bird.
And then at the end of the show, the trainer
asked Freddy to go get something, and Freddy went and
got it and he brought it right back, and in
my mind, like time stood still. I'm like, damn, I
(52:49):
asked this kid to get something for me and he
wants to have a discussion for like twenty minutes, and
I knew my son was smarter than the pain. And
so I went up to the trainer afterwards, because you know,
I'm a child psychiatry trainee, I don't know anything. I'm like,
how'd you get the penguin to do all these really
(53:09):
cool things? And she looked at my son, and then
she looked at me and said, unlike parents, whenever Freddy
does anything like what I want him to do, I
notice him. I give him a hug, and I give
him a fish. And the light went on in my
head that even though my son didn't like raw fish,
(53:33):
that whenever he did what I wanted him to do,
I wasn't paying any attention to him because I was
like my dad. I was too busy, and I realized
I was teaching him to be bad as a way
to get my attention. So I collect penguins to remind
me to notice what I like about other people way
(53:56):
more than what I don't like, because ultimately, every day
you are shaping the people in your life by what
you notice.
Speaker 1 (54:07):
That is fascinating, such that may be the most brilliant
and smart, insightful practical thing for me that I think
I've gotten out of today's conversation. Your constant refrain, doctor,
is we are not stuck with the brain we have.
We can do something practically to improve it, to reverse
(54:29):
the damage. What advice would you give people? What are
a few practical things they can do?
Speaker 2 (54:35):
Every day? You are making your brain better or you're
making your brain worse by what you do with it.
And if you want a better memory tomorrow, go to
better half an hour early tonight. When you ego to
eat something, ask yourself, do I love this? And does
(54:58):
it love me back? Because you're in a relationship. I
don't know if you've ever been in a bad relationship,
but I have and I'm not doing it anymore. I
married my best friend and no, and I'm for certain
not doing it with food or that.
Speaker 1 (55:18):
Well, doctor, I live in New Orleans. Everything I love
is probably not good for me. So I just stay
away from the restaurants. It's the only way I can survive.
Because everything you want that big sloppy pole boy, you
want that extra gumbo, but it will kill you. You're
just to.
Speaker 2 (55:33):
Stop like wanting that woman. You know that is just
going to break your heart. No, you want to look
at it and go, oh that's so nice, But I'm
not consuming that because ultimately, I'm going to die. And
you know, you got to ask yourself what do you
really want? And I know what I want. I want energy,
(55:58):
I want memory, I want clarity, I want focus, I
want passion. I want to fulfill the mission I'm on
earth to do. That's what i want. In the moment.
You know, I might want that brownie with you know,
vanilla ice cream and chocolates.
Speaker 1 (56:17):
So I'm tempting me, but.
Speaker 2 (56:19):
Really what I want, right, that's the urge of the moment.
But if you are giving into the urges of the moment,
you're not going to live as long.
Speaker 1 (56:30):
Yeah, two quick famous diagnoses. If you will, I'm going
to tempt you now a little bit. First, I've been
watching the president for many years, covering him, and you know,
I've been near him enough to see how he operates. Now,
he violates some of the very things that you advocate.
I mean, he's drinking diet coke, he doesn't eat particularly well.
(56:54):
He only sleeps three hours a night, he told me
this two weeks ago. But he is very engaged. He's
got a break next schedule. Give me a sense of
the habits his brain habits, and how are they affecting
his brain, do you think so.
Speaker 2 (57:10):
I don't think they're good for him, But yet I
want his brain so badly as anyone who was literally
one of the most famous people in the world and
beloved to then run for president, to be hated, to
be lied about, maligned, impeached, indicted, almost assassinated, and yet
(57:40):
to show up every day consistently working hard for us.
I mean, that's a brain. I'm so interested. And because
you're right, he doesn't sleep. It's bad for your brain.
He eats lousy, although I hear with RFK on board
(58:02):
he's trying to do better, which.
Speaker 1 (58:04):
Is great McDonald's.
Speaker 2 (58:06):
But you know, one of the things I think that
helps him so much is when he was a kid,
he went to Norman Vincent Peel's church, and Norman Vincent
Peel preached a long time, and he showed up a
lot to that church about how you think and our
(58:29):
resilience and positive thinking was there at a formative age
for him, and he's just the most resilient person that.
Speaker 1 (58:46):
I'm amazed at his memory. Though, Doctor, you would think
somebody who's eating that way, drinking diet coke, for God's sake,
that they would have no recall This man can recall
things from five months ago down to the life detail.
He sees hundreds of people a day, and that it
blew my mind. I mean, this was just very recently
(59:08):
and he recalled not only where we were, but what
was said and his reaction to it. That's pretty astounding
for a seventy eight year old.
Speaker 2 (59:18):
It's incredible, and he's a very unique person for sure.
Speaker 1 (59:24):
Let's talk about Pope Francis for a minute. He's eighty
eight years old. He just battled double pneumonia and he's
on oxygen on and off. Now. He's mostly confined to
a wheelchair. He's been in that wheelchair for a number
of years now. Doctor largely isolated to his apartment for
at least two months after five weeks of hospitalization. What
(59:44):
do you see in that brain habit and what effect
do you think it had on his brain and his
having well?
Speaker 2 (59:52):
I think it's clearly the stress the pneumonia, which then
goes with lower oxygen levels is clear bad for his brain.
That by itself will age his brain. And I don't know.
I mean, we had the last pope retire before, right,
I Mean it's like they almost should have term limits
(01:00:17):
because you know, they're running a massive organization for God,
and one would think you'd want them at their peak.
So and when he started, he was an amazing pope.
But now, I mean, it's hard to function when your
health is not good. And you know, thankfully he came
(01:00:41):
out of what a lot of people thought he wouldn't.
Speaker 1 (01:00:44):
Yeah, no, he survived. But the question is, you know,
how how does he how does he continue governing now
and running what is the last monarchy on the planet,
supreme monarchy. Anyway, doctor, I want to move on to
something that that I've been meaning to ask you. What
is the thing you're encountering most in your practice now
(01:01:04):
that you didn't see, say, five years ago.
Speaker 2 (01:01:08):
Well, long COVID for sure. Well we see with COVID
and some with the vaccine is it activates the limbic
system in the brain and over time, so initially we
see what looks like an inflammatory bomb go off in
the brain and then over time it'll actually decrease blood
(01:01:33):
flow and activity. Oh my god, airing COVID is very important.
Speaker 1 (01:01:41):
Wow. Who would have thought that a vaccine could have
that kind of impact on your brain, not only in
the moment, but long term. So you're still seeing effects
of this.
Speaker 2 (01:01:50):
Yes, it's amazing.
Speaker 1 (01:01:53):
Doctor. What's the final word? What would you advise people?
Given the stressors that we invite into our own lives
with these devices, constant the world coming in on you
because of media, what would be your final word to
them to keep not only your brain healthy, but your
soul healthy. Well.
Speaker 2 (01:02:15):
I love the idea that you're not stuck with the
brain you have. You can make it better. I can
prove it. And it starts my caring about your brain.
You know, very few people actually care about it. In
nineteen ninety one, when I started imaging, I didn't care
about my own brain. And I'm a double board certified
(01:02:37):
psychiatrist and was the top neuroscience student in medical school.
But when I saw it and it wasn't as healthy
as it could have been, I'm like, oh no, we
have to make this better. Because your brain is involved
in everything you do, how you think, how you feel,
how you act it and get along with other people.
So it starts with caring. And then every day you
(01:02:58):
just ask yourself, is good for my brain or bad
for it? And if you can answer that with information
and love of love of yourself, love of your mission,
love of the reason God puts you on earth. You
just start treating it better and then you reap the
benefits of that.
Speaker 1 (01:03:18):
Well, doctor Amen, I'm so thankful for the way you've
refocused us on not only our brain health. It's really
about our lives and living a full life with purpose,
with clarity, and to be as vibrant as you can
in it at every stage. I thank you for that
and hope to see you in person soon, doctor Daniel Amen.
(01:03:38):
And the aim and clinics you've got how many now
twelve twelve clinics.
Speaker 2 (01:03:43):
Have eleven clinics from New York to Seattle, Los Angeles, Dallas, Atlanta, Florida. Wow.
Speaker 1 (01:03:52):
I don't know how you do it all, but you
do it, and you do it in good spirits and
so well. Thank you, doctor Daniel Aman. We'll check in
with you in the days ahead.
Speaker 2 (01:04:00):
Thanks Raymond, thank you.
Speaker 1 (01:04:02):
Okay, here's the hole. You have the power to protect
your brain and renew it. You heard what doctor Amon said, Diet, exercise,
your mental state, the story you tell yourself. All of
that can renew your mind and perhaps your world. Our
special thanks to doctor Amen, and I hope you'll come
back soon. To Royo Grande. Why live a dry, narrow,
(01:04:25):
constricted life when if you fill it with good things
that can flow into a broad, thriving Arroyo Grande. I'm
Raymond Arroyo. Make sure you subscribe like this episode, Thank
you for diving in, and we'll see you next time.
Arroyo Grande has produced in partnership with iHeart Podcasts and
Divine Providence Studios, and is available on YouTube, the iHeartRadio app,
(01:04:48):
or wherever you get your podcasts,
Are you using marijuana, are you depressed, have you suffered
some sort of trauma? All of that impact your brain
in incredible ways and not happy ones. Doctor Daniel aman Or,
a nown brain specialist, will tell you not only how
those things affect your brain, but how you can restore it.
This is an Arroyo Grande that could literally save your life.
(00:22):
Come on in, I'm Raymond Arroyo. Welcome to Arroyo Grande.
I don't want to waste any time, because this is
really an urgent and important episode. If you're suffering from
(00:44):
brain fog, or you can't recall things that once came easily,
if Alzheimer's runs in your family, or if you're using marijuana,
you have to listen to this show. Doctor Daniel Amond,
a neuroscientist and psychiatrist, has spent his life teaching people
how to heal their brains and lives. Everything you're going
(01:06):
to hear today is actionable. By the way, go subscribe
to the Arroyo Grande Show right now on YouTube wherever
you get your podcasts. Turn the notifications on. I don't
want you to miss an episode and be sure you
like this one, and you will. We are joined now
by doctor Daniel Aman, brain specialist, New York Times bestselling
author and founder of the Aiman Clinics. Doctor, thank you
(01:28):
so much for being with us. You know I've always
been and long fascinated by your work. The center of
it seems to my eye at least the taking of
these three despect images of the brain. How did you
come upon spect imaging? Why do you use that in
your practice?
Speaker 2 (01:47):
Well, you know, a psychiatrists are the only medical doctors
who virtually never look at the organ they treat. And
when I became a psychiatrist decided to be a psychiatrist
in nineteen seventy nine, I knew that was wrong and
I knew it would change. I just had no idea
i'd be part of it. Nineteen ninety one, I went
(02:07):
to a lecture on brain spect imaging. It's a nuclear
medicine study that looks at blood flow and activity. It
looks at how your brain works, and it basically shows
you three things good activity, too little, or too much.
And you've heard it. Set of pictures worth a thousand words,
(02:30):
but a map is worth a thousand pictures. A map
tells you where you are and then gives you direction
on how to get to where you want to go.
And that's exactly what I saw with spec you would
come in. I published a brand new paper out yesterday
in Jammas Psychiatry, so one of the best journals in
(02:52):
the world on depression, and what we showed is when
you lump fifteen thousand people with depression, you see overall
pretty severe low activity in the brain. But having treated
depressed people for over thirty years, it's like they're not
(03:15):
all the same. Some have low activity, some have high activity.
Some look like they have toxic exposure from drugs, alcohol,
or mold. Some look like they have infection, some look
like they have head trauma. And if you don't look
at the individual person in front of you, you actually
(03:38):
have no idea what's going on in their brain. And
throw trying this medicine, that medicine. This treatment is like
growing darts in the dark. And I just became a
heck of a lot more effective when I would look.
And then the other big benefit is people fill in
(03:59):
life love with their brains and they started treating them better.
So they're smoking less pot, they're drinking less alcohol, they're
eating less bad food because they get engaged in wanting
a better brain.
Speaker 1 (04:17):
Doctor Rayman, how does dementia present, for instance, when you
look at these scans and how early can you see it?
Speaker 2 (04:25):
So Alzheimer's disease actually starts in the brain decades before
you have any symptoms. But Alzheimer's is only one of
ten different dementia categories, and Speck actually helps to distinguish
between is it frontal temporal lobe dementia, the kind of
(04:49):
dementia Bruce Willis has, is Alzheimer's disease? Is it vascular dementia?
Is it alcoholic Dementia's Louis body dementia? What Robin Williams had?
And I wrote a book in two thousand and five
called Preventing Alzheimer's and got no end of grief for
(05:10):
writing it. It's like, no, you can't do that. Don't
give people false hope. And last year in the Lancet
there was an article that said fifty percent of Alzheimer's
disease is preventable, and I think everybody should be scanned
at fifty but if you have it in your family,
(05:32):
you probably should be scanned when you're forty.
Speaker 1 (05:36):
But doctor, I want to just stop you one second.
Why not use a pet scan? Or an MRI, which
I'm told is more advanced and gives you clearer imaging.
Speaker 2 (05:46):
Well, that's not true. And MRI is a structural study,
and the problem is functional study. Functional problems always start
before you see structural problems. And SPECT and PAT are
(06:07):
cousins to each other. PAT does have a little bit
better resolution, but no one in the world has the
experience we have at Aiman Clinics, where we've done over
two hundred and sixty thousand scans on people from one
hundred and fifty five countries. So and we actually are
(06:27):
able to use AI now to read the scans as
if they were my eyes, and we're very excited about it.
And I believe that we can prevent much of dementia
if and here's the plan. You want to keep your
(06:50):
brain healthy or rescue it, you have to prevent or
treat the eleven major risk factors that steal your mind.
And we know what they are. That for example, if
you're overweight, that increases your risk, If you abuse drugs,
that increases your risk. If you're depressed, that increases your risk.
(07:15):
But a brand new study out I'm actually going to
post on it tomorrow that people on SSRIs like proza
zolof lexapro selexa. If you have dementia and you're on
one of those medications, it accelerates memory loss. Really, those
medications are inhibitory. They increase serotonin. Serotonin calms things down
(07:42):
in the brain. So if you have a busy brain,
they're the right thing for you. But dementia generally is
a sleepy brain, and they actually can make things worse.
But again, how would you know if you didn't? Yeah,
I often feel like Galileo, who was imprisoned at the
(08:05):
end of his life. What did Galileo do? He developed
a high powered telescope, looked at the stars and said,
the Earth is not the center of the universe.
Speaker 1 (08:15):
Yeah, you got it all wrong. And of course, look,
but he was eventually proven and even the Church caught
up and forgave Galileo and themselves I think in the mix.
But look, doctor and Alzheimer's, and this is something that
affects millions of us, millions of families. The effects of
this disease currently hit seven million people, and it's expected
(08:39):
to triple in the coming decades. Tell me what is
fueling it? What is fueling the explosion in Alzheimer's that
we're seeing, and I imagine the isolation of this pandemic
will only exacerbate things in the years to come.
Speaker 2 (08:54):
The pandemic did so many bad things for our society
as a whole. COVID all by itself causes inflammation in
the brain and increases the risk of anxiety, depression, and dementia.
And then if you add well, they locked us at home,
(09:18):
so the isolation. They left the liquor stores open, so
the isolation more alcohol. They left us at home, so
they ate bad food. So obesity continued to climb. And
of the eleven major risk factors, if you're overweight, you
automatically have ten of them. We have to be serious
(09:43):
with seventy five percent of the population overweight, forty three
percent obese. There's nothing about this that's okay when it
comes to brain health.
Speaker 1 (09:57):
Well, doctor Renett, what are the primary early indicators you
see of dementia? What are the things when people walk
in the door you see these things that some probably
take for granted, you know their minor things. What should
we be on the lookout for.
Speaker 2 (10:15):
If your memory is worse than it was ten years ago,
you should be a concern because there's an eighty percent chance,
So continue to get worse if you're starting to make
poor decisions, if you say things that hurt others people's feelings,
and that's not been sort of the story of your life.
(10:35):
So you look at memory, decision making, socialization. Some people
who start losing their memories start to isolate themselves because
they're like, I just don't remember people's names anymore, and
I'll be embarrassed. So that is something they start having
(10:56):
more accidents because if you put your thumbs in your
ears and your hands on your head, that's the pattern
for Alzheimer's disease. So it's by lap parietal lobe decreased activity.
That's why people get lost, and it's why people get
into more accidents because this is direction sense and depth perception,
(11:22):
and then your temporal lobes that's memory and also recall
of things like names and places and Raymond, we're diagnosing
this later than ever before because of smartphones, because before
someone who'd lived in a city for thirty years, they
(11:44):
wouldn't they'd forget how to go home. They would family
from a phone both and go on loss and they'd
be freaked out and their family would bring them in
to see me. But you know, now since two thousand
and seven, you can go, hey, see take me home.
And so we're actually and people don't want to see
(12:06):
it in their family, and so they often denied, deny
until there's overwhelming evidence. And I'm like, I think we
should be screening everybody. And another reason we're seeing it
more is because of the obesity epidemic.
Speaker 1 (12:26):
I was just going to ask you that how does
obesity affect the brain? What is the tangible impact of obesity?
And you said it seventy five percent of the population
is obese. Doctor, what impact does that have when you
look at these brains?
Speaker 2 (12:40):
So I published three studies on thirty three thousand people
showing azure weight goes up, the size and function of
the brain goes down, and that should scare the fat
off anyone. And so if you look at the eleven
major risk factors, being overweight decreases blood flow, It prematurely
(13:03):
ages your brain. Fat cells store produce something called inflammatory cytokines,
so you have more inflammation in your body. It changes
genetic expression, fat stores toxins, your more risk for mental
health stuff like depression. It changes your immune system. One
(13:27):
of the worst things it does is it takes healthy
testosterone and turns it into unhealthy, cancer promoting forms of estrogen. Yeah,
it's it's very disruptive and I never mean to fat
shame anyone, but it's like, if you can't tell the
(13:49):
truth in our society, this is not good for the
health of your brain or body. And you know we've
suericized everything and when you go to a restaurant they
give you these crazy meals. We need to be way
more thoughtful of what we put in our bodies, which
(14:13):
why I'm a huge fan of you know, RFK Junior.
And it's like, well, let's at least talk about getting help.
Speaker 1 (14:20):
Well. I like in one of your books you say,
when you go to dinner, go to dinner with a
very fit person because that will inevitably restrain what you order,
because you know you don't want to be embarrassed in
somebody who's in great shape. Give me a sense of
you mentioned there a moment ago reduced blood flow. I
was stunned when I read in one of your books,
and we read about this across the culture. You see
(14:43):
these ads every time you turn around, erectile dysfunction, this
and erectile dysfunction that that is actually a marker that
you cite as an early indicator of dementia.
Speaker 2 (14:55):
Well, you have blood flow problems anywhere EveryWare and one
of the biggest benefits, like I shouldn't say it that way,
one of the benefits of getting on one of our
brain health programs is your sex life gets better. You
know with blood flow. What are you doing that decreases
(15:16):
blood flow? Caffeine, nicotine, being sedentary, alcohol, marijuana, And what
are you doing to increase blood flow, which is exercise, beats, oregano, cayenne, pepper, ginko,
one of my favorite supplements.
Speaker 1 (15:37):
Tell me about the effect of trauma. Doctor this. You know,
we often hear about you know, depression and you know
obesity and the physical body affecting the brain. But in
your books you talk about the effect of trauma, not
necessarily physical trauma, but emotional trauma on the brain.
Speaker 2 (16:00):
So we published a huge new study this year on
seventy five hundred people looking at adverse childhood experiences. So
there's an ACE questionnaire on a scale of zero to ten,
how many bad things happened to you growing up, from physical,
emotional sexual abuse to neglect to being raised by a
(16:24):
parent with mental illness, addiction, going to prison. If you
have four more that you have an increased risk of
seven of the top ten leading causes of death. If
you have six or more, you die twenty years earlier.
And so we studied them and what we found is
(16:46):
childhood trauma activated the limbic or emotional circuits in the brain,
making you at greater risk for anxiety, depression, worry, and obsessiveness.
And the exciting news is if you see it, well,
(17:07):
then you can calm it down. But if you never look,
you don't know. He's the brain working too hard or
not hard enough.
Speaker 1 (17:14):
You write about people who obsess over perceived wrongs. I
read this in one of your books recently. It's like
they're recycling and they're revisiting all those wounds of the past.
They keep them very much alive. How do you get
past that. You're a psychiatrist, what would you advise people?
Speaker 2 (17:32):
Well, I teach my patients to kill the ants, the
automatic negative thoughts that steal their happiness. I never want
people drinking away their pain or medicating their pain. I
want them to go into it and actually so write
it down. Whenever you have a thought, your brain releases chemicals.
(17:54):
Whenever you have a happy thought, a hopeful thought, your
brain release is completely different set of chemicals that make
you feel good. But when you have a grudge thought,
an angry thought, a hopeless, helpless thought, your brain releases
chemicals that increase your limbic brain but also increase cortisol
(18:17):
and make you more likely to be sick. So one
of the things to do, here's the exercise. Whenever you
feel sad, mad, nervous, or out of control, write down
what you're thinking, and then ask yourself is it true?
Is it absolutely true? How do I feel when I
have this thought? How would I feel if I didn't
(18:39):
have the thought? And then what I really love is
take the original thought my wife never listens to me,
turn it to the opposite my wife listens to me,
and then meditate on that. And what you find is
you stop letting your undisciplined mind torture you, and you
(19:03):
think in a more realistic, rational, hopeful way. And it's
our I'd love the idea of give your mind a name,
and that way you can gain some distance from it.
In my mind, after my pet raccoon when I was
sixteen and I loved her, but she was a troublemaker,
(19:26):
all sorts of trouble, which is just my mind and
like stirs up stuff that doesn't help me. And I'm
not a fan of accurate thinking of positive thinking. I'm
a fan of accurate thinking with a positive spin. Because
we have a new study coming out on negativity bias
and that's very bad for yourself.
Speaker 1 (19:46):
Yeah, well that's what I was going to say. In
all of your books, you write about the stories we
tell ourselves about ourselves, about our relationships. That does have
a supreme and major influence on your health, your mind,
and your brain's well being, which is something you just
don't think about.
Speaker 2 (20:06):
Well, there's nowhere in school. Think about this with me, Raymond.
There's nowhere in school where we teach children how to
manage their minds. Isn't that crazy? Like I was twenty
eight years old in my psychiatric residency at the Walter
Reed Army Medical Center, and one of our professors said,
(20:27):
you have to teach your patients not to believe every
stupid thing they think. And I'm like, but I believe
every stupid thing I think, and it caused me no
end of grief. And now when I have a thought.
I realize, Oh, it's just a thought that I don't
have to attach to it. I can question it, and
(20:51):
I can go, well, does this thought serve me? Is
this thought helpful for me? Well? This thought help me
have a better relationship with my wife, do better job
with my patience. And if it doesn't serve me, I'm like,
I don't need you. It's not the thing you have
that make you suffer, it's the thought you attached to.
(21:12):
Seinfeld One said, the brain is a sneaky organ. We
all have weird, crazy, stupid, sexual, violent thoughts that nobody
should ever hear. And you know people where they have
no filter, like whatever they think gets out of their mouth.
And that's usually because their frontal lobes are sleepy. They
(21:35):
don't break in their brain. Because when people come to
me and they go, you know, I'm brutally honest, my
first thought is that's usually not helpful.
Speaker 1 (21:45):
Uh huh. Well, you mentioned Walter Read where you did
your residency, and I want to get to that in
the moment. Because I'm reading all your books. I thought,
I'll bet that Walter Read experience was pretty foundational for you.
But I want to get to that moment The most
important thing I need to tackle now. How can you
protect yourself doctor from Alzheimer's, especially if it runs in
(22:08):
your family. What are the practical things people can do
right now?
Speaker 2 (22:13):
Well, so if we go through the eleven major risk factors,
I'll just give you one simple thing for each of them.
So the acronym is Bright Minds and the B is
for blood flow. Low blood flows the number one brain
imaging predictor of Alzheimer's disease. Walk like you're late, forty
five minutes, four or five times a week. You should
(22:36):
do that if you haven't. In your family, are's retirement
and aging. New learning every day ten minutes. Learn something new,
something that you don't know how to do, that you're
not good at. Push your brain to learn. The eye
is inflammation. There's so many things you could do there.
Floss your teeth, take really great care of your gums,
(23:01):
and take fish oil BEGA three fatty acid because it's
anti inflammatory. The g is genetics, and we don't think
about genes right, So you may have an APPOEF gene
one or two of them that increases your risk. I
think all of us should know. But genes aren't a
death sentence. What they are is a wake up call.
(23:24):
If I had it in my family, I'm going to
be on an Alzheimer's prevention program my whole life. H's
head trauma a major cause of dementia that very few
people know about. If you've had head injuries, concussions, car accidents,
(23:45):
got your bell, run plane sports. I'm a huge fan
of hyperbaric oxygen. I mean, but what, Raymond, we got
to look. If you don't look, you don't know. T
is toxins. Stop thinking of alcohol is a health food.
The American Cancer Society for Goodness Sakes came out three
(24:06):
years ago and said it increases the risk of seven
different types of cancer. Alcohol is pro dementia and pro depression.
Speaker 1 (24:18):
Any kind of alcohol, any kind of alcohol, wine, everything.
Speaker 2 (24:22):
Everything, it's and they're empty calories. So and they cause
you to say things you shouldn't say.
Speaker 1 (24:32):
Well, wine is good for you because of the blood flow. Oh,
the Italians do it, The French drink it. Look how
healthy they are. You don't agree with that, lone.
Speaker 2 (24:40):
It's a lie. We've been sold a bill of goods.
Even this year, the Surgeon General came out and said
you shouldn't drink because of its association with cancer. M
is mental health. So learn to not believe every stupid
thing you say because depression. If you're a girl, a
(25:05):
female and you have depression, it doubles your risk of
Alzheimer's disease. If you are a male, it quadruples your risk.
Speaker 1 (25:14):
And as song is that.
Speaker 2 (25:18):
And it could be because what we saw in the
study we just published this week the low activity in
the brain. But it also with depression comes memory problems,
comes isolation. And one of the types of dementia that
we see on spect is called pseudo dementia, where it's
really severe depression that masquerades as dementia. Very interesting. The
(25:46):
second eye is immunity and infections. Know your vitamin D
level and get it high. I never wanted to be
in the bottom of my class. I always wanted the
top of What is not a normal level, What is
an optimal level? N is ner hormones. You just have
(26:08):
your hormones tested every year. I'm like three patients today
with low testosterone and all the products we put on
our body, they're hormone disruptors and decrease your testosterone levels.
And D is diabesity. Know how many calories have a sense.
I eat this many calories a day, I'm more likely
(26:30):
to gain weight less. It's not just calories, right, it's
the quality of your calories. But calories count to and
then go to bed half an hour early because sleep
is absolutely essential. So those are the bright minds and
just some high level things. People could read My book
(26:50):
Change your Brain every Day, you know, of all my books,
I think that's the one to read because it's three
hundred and sixty six short essays on the most important
things I've ever said.
Speaker 1 (27:02):
And very practical. You can do them every day, and
you encourage people to read them day by day because
I've read them. How do you start your day? Doctor?
What's your routine? Do you what do you eat when
you begin the day, and do you have coffee?
Speaker 2 (27:17):
So I start every day with today is going to
be a great day. I push my mind to look
for what I'm excited about. I end every day with
what went well today. And it's actually a pretty detailed practice.
I say a prayer and then I go hour by
hour looking for what I loved about the day until
(27:40):
I'm asleep. I start with a decaf cappuccino that I
make for my wife and I with unsweetened almond milk
and a little bit of Stevia put in creating and
something we make called smart mushrooms. So it's just delicious.
(28:02):
Brand new study out on creatine. Not only does it
give you bigger muscles, it also helps to treat depression
and help mine be sharper. Five grams of creatine. Very
excited about that. And then usually for me, I have
a couple of eggs, and then later on I'll make
a shake for myself with a healthy protein powder and
(28:29):
nutrients in it and half a couple of blueberries. I'll
generally have a salad in the middle of the day,
and almost always in the morning, I go on a
long walk with our two dogs and my wife and
we sort of start the day connecting with exercise, and
(28:52):
then I look for what I love about the day,
to sort of the micro miracles. What are the littlest
things that I can find that make me happy and
like a butterfly or a hummingbird, or that first taste
of brain healthy hot chocolate. I make at night virtually
every night because my wife looks at me and goes
(29:15):
and this is like, do you love me? Will you
make me brain, healthy, hot chocolate.
Speaker 1 (29:21):
Okay, Now I want to go back to the beginning.
You did your psychiatric training at Walter Reed, which you mentioned.
What did that place and that particular cohort of clients
teach you that you've carried with you into this part
of your life and work.
Speaker 2 (29:37):
So I was out of high school, I went into
the Army because Vietnam was going on, and I became
an infantry medic where my love of medicine was born.
So after I finished got out of the army then
and finished college and medical school, I went back in
as an Army captain and serve the military and their
(30:03):
dependence and just loved it because it was familiar to me.
I felt at home at Walter Reed. We saw all
the really unusual things in psychiatry that you typically don't
see in sort of a day to day outpatient clinic.
It was fun and fascinating and yeah, I learned so
(30:27):
much and loved my experience there. And then I'm also
a child psychiatrist. I did that in Triple Or Army
Medical Center in Hawaii. Completely loved Honolulu and my experience there.
But where I grew the most is a little place
in the middle of the Mojave Desert called Fort Irwin,
(30:49):
where I was the only psychiatrist for ten thousand people,
and I just loved it so much. And I brought
brain imaging technology two because I'm the boss, and so
I just had to get my boss to approve it.
Where we started doing neuro feedback, where we could put
(31:09):
electrodes on your scalp, start measuring brain activity, and then
based on what we saw, teach you to change it.
And that's where I got the idea, change your brain,
change your life. And that has really been foundational for
the rest of my career. So when I went to
(31:31):
the lecture in nineteen ninety one on brain spect imaging,
I'd already been thinking about it. I'd already primed. It's like,
if you don't look, you don't know, but you can
take bad brains and make them better. You can take
good brains and make them great.
Speaker 1 (31:46):
Incredible. And the diversity of people I imagine that you
meet in the military, especially people coming back from from
war or hostile situations, I'm sure that's a very specialized
type of medicine as opposed to the generic folks that
walk through the door today.
Speaker 2 (32:06):
I don't know you know, at Aiman clinics, we've seen
a lot who have failed on average six medicines three
point three providers, and we've seen a whole bunch a
very interesting things. And we have a nonprofit foundation, Change
Your Brain Foundation of actually doing a special project now
(32:28):
for firefighters. Because I did the big NFL study when
the NFL was sort of lying it had a problem
with traumatic brain injury in football. It's like, stop lying
about it bad for the brain. But eighty percent of
our players got better. But when I realized afterwards, as
(32:48):
much as I love our football players, they're not heroes,
They're entertainers. Firefighters are heroes. And what we saw recently
with the devastation in California in Los Angeles, our foundation
raising money specifically for firefighters to scan them treat them
(33:12):
so that they did You know, firefighters have a forty
percent increased risk of suicide.
Speaker 1 (33:21):
I did not know that about why.
Speaker 2 (33:23):
Why is that because of the toxic exposure the trauma.
I talk about emotional trauma. Every day. They spend time
with people on the worst day of their lives, and
so you end up being re traumatized over and over again,
(33:46):
and often because of the machismo. It's like, oh, there's
nothing the matter with me. I don't need help. They
end up medicating the trauma with alcohol.
Speaker 1 (33:57):
You know, you mentioned in passing I don't want to
let this go before I move on, you said eighty
percent of the NFL players you worked with who had
experienced head trauma that they improved. How did you What
did you give them to do? Was it medication? Was
it practice?
Speaker 2 (34:13):
Now? As actually a multiple vitamin, high dose B vitamins,
because there are a number of studies that say B six,
B twelve and fol aid in these particular dosages decrease
the conversion of mild cognitive impairment to Alzheimer's disease, and
it grew their hippocampus, major memory structure of the random
(34:37):
like okay, multiple vitamin with those doses of bees, high
dose of omega three, fatty acids and nutrients found to
increase blood flow and activity like genko. So we put
them on this supplement protocol that and then told them
(34:58):
to stop doing things that hurt their alcohol, marijuana and
so on. That was it. Eighty percent of will work
better now?
Speaker 1 (35:06):
Incredible.
Speaker 2 (35:06):
Also added later hyperbaric oxygen, which we found helpful and
if they were depressed, we would add either supplements like
saffron or medication if needed. But eighty percent was just
on the nutrient program and a little bit of brain
(35:30):
health education.
Speaker 1 (35:32):
Incredible. Tell me about marijuana use. We talked about this
in passing, but you see all of these states legalizing this.
So many young people, so many young men use it
just the way you would smoke a cigar or have
a drink. In fact, it's a daily in fact, multiple
practice a day. And I'm often told, you know, by
(35:53):
people who use it regularly. Look, it just mellows me out.
It has no long term effect. You studied this, what
did you find and how does it affect the brain?
Speaker 2 (36:02):
So I studied it. I mean I've been studying it
for thirty four years now with image and their brains
look older than they are. It's not good for the brain.
And then I published a study on a thousand marijuana users.
Every area of their brain is lower in blood flow
(36:23):
and activity. And then just a couple of weeks ago
in Jamma's psychiatry, there's an article not from my group,
from a completely separate group on a thousand marijuana users.
The learning and memory centers of their brain significantly lower
in activity. And it's common knowledge among psychiatrists, and studies
(36:49):
show that teenagers who use, and teenagers in massive numbers
now think it's harmless.
Speaker 1 (36:56):
Yeah do doing.
Speaker 2 (36:57):
It with their parents. I mean, this is the insanity
that's happening in our society. And teenagers who use in
their twenties increase anxiety, depression, suicide, and psychosis. This is
not okay. Now, I'm not a fan. If you're smoking
(37:19):
pot for them to arrest you and send you to jail,
I don't think that's a good use of our resources.
But we need and President Trump talked about this when
he was at the Department of Justice. It's we need
a serious brain health education, a drug prevention education program.
(37:43):
And I don't know if you know, but after I
listened to him all about how much does Anheuser Busch
spend a year in marketing? Because the President said he
raised like fifty million dollars for this campaign. V Heyser
Busch spends six point eight bill billion dollars a year
on sales and marketing. I'm like, we spend what almost
(38:08):
a trillion dollars on our defense budget. You're much more
likely to die from depression, suicide, obesity, dementia than you
are from a nuclear warhead. And shouldn't we be serious
about having prevention, a Department of Defense for brain health
(38:33):
and my big goal, maybe you can help me with it.
I would create a brain health revolution, and I think
this administration is the only one that can do it.
Speaker 1 (38:42):
Does marijuana use? Does it make you more susceptible to Alzheimer's?
Imagine it does because you're constricting blood flow.
Speaker 2 (38:50):
Yes, because it is not It does not give you
a healthy brain over time. That this study is because
it's only been legal for a very short time. There
are no great long term studies. But if I wanted
to prevent Alzheimer's and I had it in my family,
(39:11):
I absolutely wouldn't use it.
Speaker 1 (39:14):
Doctor. I find, particularly when you talk to young people today,
they are wanderers, people who are just they're just wandering,
waiting for the next experience, waiting for something to happen.
You developed something that has intrigued me for a long time.
It's called the one page miracle. Tell people what that
is and the power it has.
Speaker 2 (39:36):
I love this exercise so much. It's actually the first
thing I do with all of my patients on one
piece of paper, write down what you want relationships, work, money, physical, emotional,
spiritual health, What do you want? And then you ask yourself,
(40:00):
is my behavior getting me what I want? In one
of my books, I rewrote the twelve Step Program, you
know that was actually written eighty five years ago to
help people with alcoholism and addiction. And you know, step
one in the twelve Step program is my life is
out of control. And I'm like, no, that's not step one,
(40:21):
that's step two. Step one is, well, what the heck
do you want? What kind of relationship do you want
to have? What do you want to do at work?
What do you want with your money, What do you
want with your physical, emotional, spiritual health? Because then step
two becomes really easy. Is my behavior getting me what
I want? Or has in fact my life been hijacked
(40:43):
by a substance or a practice?
Speaker 1 (40:47):
And what does it tell us? That exercise about the
power of what we tell ourselves? My finckory, we were
repeating our own heads.
Speaker 2 (40:56):
Well, it's intention. You have to tell your brain. Your
brain is the most complicated, beautiful, elegant organ in the universe,
but like any computer, you have to tell it what
to do. And if you tell it, oh, I want
(41:18):
a kind, caring, loving, supportive relationship with my wife, Well,
then when you get that thought, that's rude. You just
don't say it because it doesn't help you get what
you want. I don't have any tattoos, and I actually
don't recommend them because there's new research coming out on
(41:39):
lymphomas and tattoos. But if I had, it would be
does it fit? Does my behavior today fit the goals
I have for my life? But you have to know
what you want. And Raymond, I find so many people,
(41:59):
like ninety five percent of my patients when I do
this exercise with them, they hadn't really thought about it.
They spent more time thinking about their vacation than what
they really want in their lives.
Speaker 1 (42:15):
No, no, we plan, we plan our meals, and we
plan our vacations more than we plan our lives. And
sometimes you got to invert that in one of your books, doctor,
and I'm you know, I'm a perpetual hummer. I'm humming
all day long. When you know, when I walk out
the door in the morning, I'm humming or singing something.
You talk about the power of toning or humming. Share
(42:38):
that with people. That was kind of fascinating to me
how it can change your spirits and really rejuvenate you
in some ways.
Speaker 2 (42:44):
Well in a number of really important ways. It actually
increases your breath and increases your lung capacity by doing
that on a regular basis. Also, the two are activating
your cerebellum and your temporal lobe. So the cerebellum is
(43:07):
the Rodney Dangerfield part of the brain. Now I hate
a lot of young people have no idea who Rodney
Dangerfield is, which just ages me. But he is a
very famous comedian, hilarious, I get no respect. So the
cerebellum is ten percent of the brain's volume, but fifty
percent of the brain's neurons, and it is like the
(43:31):
master controller in your brain, and humming activates it, which
just will then turn on the rest of your brain.
And during the pandemic, we released a supplement I love
called Happy Saffron, and my assistant took it and the
(43:54):
next day she's humming at work. We're working from my house,
and I'm like, why are you humming? And she said,
I don't know, I'm just happy.
Speaker 1 (44:04):
You see, it's a symptom. It's a good thing. Well,
music is you know, it's the it's the it makes
the soul buoyant, and I guess the mind as well.
You wrote a book recently called Raising Mentally Strong Kids,
and it seems to me the major key here is
building of those relationships, bonding with that child. What is
(44:26):
the thing that parents often miss doctor? What do they
miss out on? I get? I know one of the
big ones is just authority, making themselves the authority there,
but doing it with love.
Speaker 2 (44:40):
It's the relationship that too often devices are getting in
the middle of relationships, and parents aren't spending the time
and they're not listening, and because of that, they often
feel guilty. So they overdo and they solve their children's problems.
(45:03):
And when you do that, you are building your self
esteem by stealing theirs, because self esteem actually comes from
feeling and acting in competent ways. I can deal with
this with this challenge. So when your child comes to
(45:25):
you and says I'm bored, rather than go well, you
could do this, or we could do that, or have
you thought about this, go oh, you're born. It's just
active listening, repeat back what you're hearing and then let
(45:46):
them fill it figure it out. Then go well, I
wonder what you're going to do about it, and you know,
and if you've been solving all of their problems up
till now, they might have a meltdown. It's like I
don't know, I don't know, and it's like you figure
it out.
Speaker 1 (46:03):
Yeah, let them figure it out. I guess we're afraid, though,
of giving kids too much responsibility. And I see a
lot of parents they never want to let their kids fail.
And I guess the flip side is the drill sergeant parent.
You know you're not good at anything, you'll never amount
to anything. What's the balance there?
Speaker 2 (46:22):
Furmin kind? Whenever you don't know what to do, go
to those two words. The best parents are firm when
they say something, they mean at and they expect it
to be complied with. But they're kind. I always say,
think of the best coach you ever had. The best
(46:43):
coaches notice what you do right, and they teach you
so you can be better. The worst coaches, the worst
parents notice what you do wrong and they never let
you forget it. And so bonding requires time, actual physical time.
(47:04):
There's an exercise in the book I Love. It's called
special time. Twenty minutes a day, do something with your child,
your child wants to do, and during that time, no commands,
no questions, no directions, It's just time to be together.
If you're like, my child will never talk to me,
it's probably because you're not spending enough time with them
and you're not listening and then active listening. Stop talking
(47:29):
over them, stop trying to cram you know, the thirty
or forty to fifty years of experience you have in
their heads, they're going to pick up just by living
with you. What you think and what you know. Your
job is to help them learn how to think, and
(47:49):
you do that through listening, asking thoughtful questions, and not
giving them the answer.
Speaker 1 (47:58):
Doctor, add and ADHD is exploding in kids. Do you
believe in the medical approach of medication giving them medicines
to cope or is there another approach? Is there another
way that perhaps we're missing here.
Speaker 2 (48:13):
So Ever, since I've been a psychiatrist, every year they
say ADDS exploding, and so it's been exploding for a
long time. In fact, it is increasing in the population
in part because kids aren't exercising. Kids aren't out in
the sunlight as much as they were before. Their devices
(48:38):
are draining, they're dopamine availability, and we're feeding them bad food.
So if you take all of those things, yeah I can't.
It's just a play for one of my grandkids. And
the number of overweight kids, it's shocking. If you're overweight,
(49:01):
you're not getting the exercise, You're getting a lot of
bad food that is going to cause your brain to
be more sluggish. Now, so first thing I do brain
healthy habits, exercise, and I like to put people on
an elimination diet for a month. Let's just get rid
(49:22):
of gluten, dairy corns, artificial dyes and sweeteners. Two studies
published in the Lancet kids who went on eighty d
kids who went on an elimination diet seventy two percent
lost their add And so let's start there. But yeah,
(49:43):
it doesn't work. Omega three fatty acids can help zinc magnesium.
So then we'll go to a supplement regimen. And then
if it doesn't work, I'm going to go to medicine.
Why because add is real and when left untreated, right
if it's not because of devices or a low quality diet,
(50:06):
left untreated kids don't finish high school. Thirty three percent
of untreated ADDY kids don't finish high school for incidence
of drug abuse, divorce, incarceration, and the medicine can change
their lives. And I write about it in my books
that several of my kids have add and the medicine
(50:29):
took them from being mediocre to straight A students. And
I just it's never about medicine or not, It's about
what's best for your brain.
Speaker 1 (50:43):
Yeah. Somewhere in one of the books, or maybe a
mutual friend told me that you have collected, doctor Amon,
hundreds of penguins. Why do you collect penguins? They're in
your office, They're everywhere.
Speaker 2 (51:00):
It's a little bit of an obsession. When my oldest
who I adopted, was seven, he was really hard for me,
and I was talking to my supervisor. So I'm in
Hawaii at the time, talking to my child psychiatry supervisor,
and she said, oh, you should probably spend more alone
(51:21):
time with him, which was sort of the last thing
I wanted to do because he was argumentative and oppositional.
And I took him to a place called Sea Life Park,
which is in Hawaii and it's like Marine World or SeaWorld,
and we went to the Killer Whale show and that
was great and the dolphin show, which was fun, and
(51:42):
the Sea Lion show, which was hysterical, And at the
end of the day grabs my shirt and he goes,
I want to see Fat Freddy, and I'm like, who's
Fat Freddy? He said the penguin, Dad, don't you know anything,
which is sort of our relationship. And we went to
that is the last show of the day in this
(52:03):
beautiful stadium on Oahu, and this little fat Humboldt penguin
comes on the stage, climb the ladder to a high dive,
goes to the end of the board, balances on it,
and then jumps in the water and I'm like, holy smokes.
(52:23):
And then he gets out of the water bowls with
his nose, counts with this flipper, jumps through hoop a
fire and I'm like blown away with this little bird.
And then at the end of the show, the trainer
asked Freddy to go get something, and Freddy went and
got it and he brought it right back, and in
my mind, like time stood still. I'm like, damn, I
(52:49):
asked this kid to get something for me and he
wants to have a discussion for like twenty minutes, and
I knew my son was smarter than the pain. And
so I went up to the trainer afterwards, because you know,
I'm a child psychiatry trainee, I don't know anything. I'm like,
how'd you get the penguin to do all these really
(53:09):
cool things? And she looked at my son, and then
she looked at me and said, unlike parents, whenever Freddy
does anything like what I want him to do, I
notice him. I give him a hug, and I give
him a fish. And the light went on in my
head that even though my son didn't like raw fish,
(53:33):
that whenever he did what I wanted him to do,
I wasn't paying any attention to him because I was
like my dad. I was too busy, and I realized
I was teaching him to be bad as a way
to get my attention. So I collect penguins to remind
me to notice what I like about other people way
(53:56):
more than what I don't like, because ultimately, every day
you are shaping the people in your life by what
you notice.
Speaker 1 (54:07):
That is fascinating, such that may be the most brilliant
and smart, insightful practical thing for me that I think
I've gotten out of today's conversation. Your constant refrain, doctor,
is we are not stuck with the brain we have.
We can do something practically to improve it, to reverse
(54:29):
the damage. What advice would you give people? What are
a few practical things they can do?
Speaker 2 (54:35):
Every day? You are making your brain better or you're
making your brain worse by what you do with it.
And if you want a better memory tomorrow, go to
better half an hour early tonight. When you ego to
eat something, ask yourself, do I love this? And does
(54:58):
it love me back? Because you're in a relationship. I
don't know if you've ever been in a bad relationship,
but I have and I'm not doing it anymore. I
married my best friend and no, and I'm for certain
not doing it with food or that.
Speaker 1 (55:18):
Well, doctor, I live in New Orleans. Everything I love
is probably not good for me. So I just stay
away from the restaurants. It's the only way I can survive.
Because everything you want that big sloppy pole boy, you
want that extra gumbo, but it will kill you. You're
just to.
Speaker 2 (55:33):
Stop like wanting that woman. You know that is just
going to break your heart. No, you want to look
at it and go, oh that's so nice, But I'm
not consuming that because ultimately, I'm going to die. And
you know, you got to ask yourself what do you
really want? And I know what I want. I want energy,
(55:58):
I want memory, I want clarity, I want focus, I
want passion. I want to fulfill the mission I'm on
earth to do. That's what i want. In the moment.
You know, I might want that brownie with you know,
vanilla ice cream and chocolates.
Speaker 1 (56:17):
So I'm tempting me, but.
Speaker 2 (56:19):
Really what I want, right, that's the urge of the moment.
But if you are giving into the urges of the moment,
you're not going to live as long.
Speaker 1 (56:30):
Yeah, two quick famous diagnoses. If you will, I'm going
to tempt you now a little bit. First, I've been
watching the president for many years, covering him, and you know,
I've been near him enough to see how he operates. Now,
he violates some of the very things that you advocate.
I mean, he's drinking diet coke, he doesn't eat particularly well.
(56:54):
He only sleeps three hours a night, he told me
this two weeks ago. But he is very engaged. He's
got a break next schedule. Give me a sense of
the habits his brain habits, and how are they affecting
his brain, do you think so.
Speaker 2 (57:10):
I don't think they're good for him, But yet I
want his brain so badly as anyone who was literally
one of the most famous people in the world and
beloved to then run for president, to be hated, to
be lied about, maligned, impeached, indicted, almost assassinated, and yet
(57:40):
to show up every day consistently working hard for us.
I mean, that's a brain. I'm so interested. And because
you're right, he doesn't sleep. It's bad for your brain.
He eats lousy, although I hear with RFK on board
(58:02):
he's trying to do better, which.
Speaker 1 (58:04):
Is great McDonald's.
Speaker 2 (58:06):
But you know, one of the things I think that
helps him so much is when he was a kid,
he went to Norman Vincent Peel's church, and Norman Vincent
Peel preached a long time, and he showed up a
lot to that church about how you think and our
(58:29):
resilience and positive thinking was there at a formative age
for him, and he's just the most resilient person that.
Speaker 1 (58:46):
I'm amazed at his memory. Though, Doctor, you would think
somebody who's eating that way, drinking diet coke, for God's sake,
that they would have no recall This man can recall
things from five months ago down to the life detail.
He sees hundreds of people a day, and that it
blew my mind. I mean, this was just very recently
(59:08):
and he recalled not only where we were, but what
was said and his reaction to it. That's pretty astounding
for a seventy eight year old.
Speaker 2 (59:18):
It's incredible, and he's a very unique person for sure.
Speaker 1 (59:24):
Let's talk about Pope Francis for a minute. He's eighty
eight years old. He just battled double pneumonia and he's
on oxygen on and off. Now. He's mostly confined to
a wheelchair. He's been in that wheelchair for a number
of years now. Doctor largely isolated to his apartment for
at least two months after five weeks of hospitalization. What
(59:44):
do you see in that brain habit and what effect
do you think it had on his brain and his
having well?
Speaker 2 (59:52):
I think it's clearly the stress the pneumonia, which then
goes with lower oxygen levels is clear bad for his brain.
That by itself will age his brain. And I don't know.
I mean, we had the last pope retire before, right,
I Mean it's like they almost should have term limits
(01:00:17):
because you know, they're running a massive organization for God,
and one would think you'd want them at their peak.
So and when he started, he was an amazing pope.
But now, I mean, it's hard to function when your
health is not good. And you know, thankfully he came
(01:00:41):
out of what a lot of people thought he wouldn't.
Speaker 1 (01:00:44):
Yeah, no, he survived. But the question is, you know,
how how does he how does he continue governing now
and running what is the last monarchy on the planet,
supreme monarchy. Anyway, doctor, I want to move on to
something that that I've been meaning to ask you. What
is the thing you're encountering most in your practice now
(01:01:04):
that you didn't see, say, five years ago.
Speaker 2 (01:01:08):
Well, long COVID for sure. Well we see with COVID
and some with the vaccine is it activates the limbic
system in the brain and over time, so initially we
see what looks like an inflammatory bomb go off in
the brain and then over time it'll actually decrease blood
(01:01:33):
flow and activity. Oh my god, airing COVID is very important.
Speaker 1 (01:01:41):
Wow. Who would have thought that a vaccine could have
that kind of impact on your brain, not only in
the moment, but long term. So you're still seeing effects
of this.
Speaker 2 (01:01:50):
Yes, it's amazing.
Speaker 1 (01:01:53):
Doctor. What's the final word? What would you advise people?
Given the stressors that we invite into our own lives
with these devices, constant the world coming in on you
because of media, what would be your final word to
them to keep not only your brain healthy, but your
soul healthy. Well.
Speaker 2 (01:02:15):
I love the idea that you're not stuck with the
brain you have. You can make it better. I can
prove it. And it starts my caring about your brain.
You know, very few people actually care about it. In
nineteen ninety one, when I started imaging, I didn't care
about my own brain. And I'm a double board certified
(01:02:37):
psychiatrist and was the top neuroscience student in medical school.
But when I saw it and it wasn't as healthy
as it could have been, I'm like, oh no, we
have to make this better. Because your brain is involved
in everything you do, how you think, how you feel,
how you act it and get along with other people.
So it starts with caring. And then every day you
(01:02:58):
just ask yourself, is good for my brain or bad
for it? And if you can answer that with information
and love of love of yourself, love of your mission,
love of the reason God puts you on earth. You
just start treating it better and then you reap the
benefits of that.
Speaker 1 (01:03:18):
Well, doctor Amen, I'm so thankful for the way you've
refocused us on not only our brain health. It's really
about our lives and living a full life with purpose,
with clarity, and to be as vibrant as you can
in it at every stage. I thank you for that
and hope to see you in person soon, doctor Daniel Amen.
(01:03:38):
And the aim and clinics you've got how many now
twelve twelve clinics.
Speaker 2 (01:03:43):
Have eleven clinics from New York to Seattle, Los Angeles, Dallas, Atlanta, Florida. Wow.
Speaker 1 (01:03:52):
I don't know how you do it all, but you
do it, and you do it in good spirits and
so well. Thank you, doctor Daniel Aman. We'll check in
with you in the days ahead.
Speaker 2 (01:04:00):
Thanks Raymond, thank you.
Speaker 1 (01:04:02):
Okay, here's the hole. You have the power to protect
your brain and renew it. You heard what doctor Amon said, Diet, exercise,
your mental state, the story you tell yourself. All of
that can renew your mind and perhaps your world. Our
special thanks to doctor Amen, and I hope you'll come
back soon. To Royo Grande. Why live a dry, narrow,
(01:04:25):
constricted life when if you fill it with good things
that can flow into a broad, thriving Arroyo Grande. I'm
Raymond Arroyo. Make sure you subscribe like this episode, Thank
you for diving in, and we'll see you next time.
Arroyo Grande has produced in partnership with iHeart Podcasts and
Divine Providence Studios, and is available on YouTube, the iHeartRadio app,
(01:04:48):
or wherever you get your podcasts,
Host
Raymond Arroyo
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