11 Risk Factors That Destroy Your Brain | Dr. Daniel Amen on Health Theory

thanks for tuning in to this episode sponsored by our friends at butcher box we've got an awesome offer for you guys in the description below so be sure to check that out in today's episode of hell theory with dr. Daniel Amon we discuss why football is worse for your brain than cocaine how to interrupt negative thinking patterns why low fat diets may cause depression and what you can do to improve your brain function right now everybody welcome to health theory today's guest is dr. Daniel Amen a double board certified psychiatrist who also happens to be a 10 time New York Times bestselling author he is arguably the world's foremost expert in brain scanning and he is responsible for scanning roughly 100,000 brains in his career Discover Magazine named his breakthrough brain imaging work as one of the top 20 stories in science in 2015 and the Washington Post called him the most popular psychiatrist in America now having said all of that knowing what you know about the brain how do we take a good brain and make it great well I love that idea it's really three simple things and the first thing is you have to care about it when I first scan myself in 1991 it wasn't good and just the week before it's gone my 60 year old mother and she had a gorgeous brain and so I created brain Envy I wanted her brain so here I am I'm a double board certified psychiatrist so for people who don't know what that means so I'm a general skytruss and I've especially in kids of a child nonetheless in psychiatrists I'm a physician I'm highly educated and I don't care at all about my own brain right I love watching football on Sunday and when I saw my brain I'm like ouch this can be better and so how do you make it better well the second thing is you avoid anything that hurts it and I have a demonic we can talk about called bright minds it's if you want to keep your brain healthy you have to prevent or Treat the 11 major risk factors that's steal your mind yeah so brain Envy got care avoid things that hurt it do things that help it and so what what have we learned that exercise boosts blood flow to the brain not believing every stupid thing you think calms the anxiety centers in the brain things like omega-3 fatty acids get your gut right because your gut makes most of the neurotransmitters in your body well the little tiny habit for brain health is before you go to make any decision you ask yourself is this good for my brain or bad for it and if you love yourself because it's never about as soon as you think you should do something you won't do it just because we're all four years old in our head and rebellious it's you answer the question in a positive way because you love yourself because you love yourself your wife your life your mission that's why you do the right thing because too often people go oh I can't have this and I can't have that and as soon as you get into that deprivation mind said it's not going to work it's really interesting to me how often the answer that you push people towards whatever their struggle is is something that I'll call soft love comes up a lot attachment not being lonely like things that you would expect a psychiatrist to give you a pill for you've traditionally shied away from that obviously speak it can be very profound but that you're leading people to do may be easier or more basic things first what are some of the like just dead simple easy things that people should be thinking about with protecting the brain so if they want to answer you know I want to do something that's good for my brain but they don't know what that is like well that's over things so I went to my daughter's second grade class and I put 20 things on the board and I went 20 things that are good for your brain just just 20 things 10 of them were good ten of them were bad and I'm go separate them for me they got them all right except one thing marijuana orange juice really okay they put it in the good category when in fact it's got way too much and whenever you unwrap sugar from its fiber source it turns toxic in your body and so so is this good for my brain or bad for it or is it good for my child's brain or bad for it and they come to you and they want to play football where does that fall it falls in the bad category brain is soft about the consistency of soft butter your skull is really hard and has sharp bony ridges no don't let them do that and I had one billionaire he goes but my son really wants to do it and I've hired this you know NFL coach and I'm like oh well if he told you he really wanted to do cocaine would you go get him a dealer because it's the same frickin thing right because I have scanned you know we have a hundred and fifty thousand scans on people from 120 countries and contact sports damage the brain about the same as cocaine whoa I knew it was bad i knows that bad so and we talked before we started about I tend to get myself in trouble and about ten years ago we started the world's first and largest study on football players on professional football players and the level of damage is sad but eighty percent of them get better when we put them on a rehabilitation program so even if you've been bad to your brain you can make it better and I can prove it I've spoken to my audience about it before but the thing that led me to you was massive anxiety that seemed to be getting worse by the day and one of the things that helped me was crushing the ant's the automatic negative thoughts and that becoming a pattern interrupt and stopping that walk people through some of the things that aren't necessarily because we'll get into diet but that aren't diet related that are really just the way that they allow themselves to think whether it's the brain getting stuck and looping around repetitive negative things whether it's negative thoughts that they never interrupt like what are those things that really cause people problems that they may not even be aware of we have a brain health assessment online people go to brain health assessment dot-com and ago which of the sixteen brain types do you have so I'm gonna take just to step back and I'll answer that question whenever I see someone so if you came to see me I'm always thinking about the four circles of your life so I'm thinking about your biology so with anxiety my first thought is areas in your emotional brain just are working too hard and so it's driving that anxiety so what's the biology what's the psychology which is how do you think and the environment that you grew up in what's the social circle because if you're around a lot of irritated angry negative people you're more likely to be anxious and what's the spiritual circle why do you care why you're on the planet what's your deepest sense of meaning and purpose so I'm always thinking biopsychosocial spiritual and that way I end up helping whole people not just oh you're anxious to examine because that's the quick answer that if you go to Kaiser for example and I just hired a doctor from Kaiser and he saw 25 patients a day so the 25 patient a day answer is xanax is let me give you a benzo and the problem with it is once you start it it's insidious it changes your brain to need it in order to feel normal and some like so else can we quell your anxiety so there's some simple supplements like gaba or one of my favorites magnesium that can be really helpful but the psychological one there was one day I was at work and I saw for suicidal patients and that's hard for me and then I saw two couples who hated each other and two teenagers who ran away from home and so at the end of the day I was worn out and I came home to an ant infestation in my house and I'm cleaning up thousands of ants and I'm like uh and then it just hit me and automatic negative thoughts my patients aren't vested and the next day I went to work with a can of ant spray and I put it on my coffee table and I'm like we need to help you get rid of these things that are investing your mind and they liked that it was just something they could grab one too so here's the exercise whenever you feel sad or mad or nervous or out of control so I want you to write down what you're thinking and ask yourself if it's true and I have a process I don't know if you know we could do it together pick a thought any thought you want to share and I'll teach you how to put a stake in it this is never gonna work okay so here are the five questions is it true it certainly could be true yeah it is it true I can't say definitively I don't know sure but yeah cuz I am NOT a fan of positive thinking I am NOT interesting positive thinking kills way too many people I'm a fan of activity think it was too many people do you mean so they did a study at Stanford 19:21 on fifteen hundred and forty eight ten year old children and they followed them for 90 years looking at what goes with success health and longevity and it wasn't the don't worry kids it wasn't the happy kids factor don't worry be happy kids died the earliest from accidents and preventable illnesses the kids who lived the longest were the conscientious kids the kids who said they're going to show up at a certain time and they show up on time the kids who got their homework done the kids who were responsible who actually had a bit of anxiety because anxiety prevents you from driving at 125 miles an hour down the freeway in the rain right you need some anxiety obviously too much it makes people suffer so this isn't going to work out is it true I don't know the second question is can you absolutely know with a hundred percent certainty it's not going to work out no don't third question how do you feel when you believe the thought it's not going to work out bad anxious do you feel uncomfortable impending doom this sense that you know it's overwhelming you don't want to look at it you want to turn away you want to go do things that are fun that are just easy immediate gratification eating a marshmallow immediately that it's sort of all at a limbic level it's just emotion and then how do you treat other people when you believe the thought if I were to give in to it you're gonna be grumpy or grouchy or shorter with people or just sullen and quiet yeah so is it true I don't know can I absolutely know that it's true no how do I feel when I believe the thought anxious workers I mean it's fuel wine the thing that makes you naturally upset fourth question is who would you be or how would you feel if you didn't have the thought if you couldn't have the thought hmm certainly better for sure and I'm gonna nomina start pushing you because one I want this to be useful in my own life and then two I want people listening for it to really be useful I find that there is a certain point where the anxiety kicks over into it feeling purely biological and what I mean by that is I can't differentiate between being cold and being anxious they're the same physical sensations so I'm like am I just cold or is this an exacerbation of the anxiety and so one of the quotes that has just seemed so true to me in my life and this isn't how they meant it but this is you'll understand in a second why it's always running so true the only thing to fear is fear itself so the only thing that I have to fear when it comes to public speaking is anxiety it's like if I didn't have to worry about the anxiety I'm not worried about the performance or the outcome I've done it so many times and so before I go on stage I have to meditate to calm everything down to slow my breathing to get the blood back into the right areas so in that situation there's not negative thoughts that are driving you right so in the beginning I had to learn to stop that loop from even starting by killing that initial thought which is why that was so powerful for me so killing the answers but it's a biological treatment too because when you believe these negative thoughts it changes your physiology immediately so how would you feel if you didn't have the thought better you son so the fifth question is my favorite question it's you take the original thought this will not work out and you flip it to the opposite to the exact opposite not the narcissistic opposite which is I will be the best ever so the opposite of it this will work out you have any evidence that that's true if you're thinking about you know whatever the situation and you won't work out historical performance sure just like once in your life or more than once depending on what we're talking about now it could be years of successes something right somebody on my board just this morning I'm dumb and then when we switched it to I'm not dumb she had like fifty reasons why is it wasn't dumb right but if you don't challenge your thoughts if you don't question your thoughts you believe them a hundred percent and then you act out of the belief so learning how to clean that up is really important but sometimes they're remnants of anxiety that are not driven by the negative thoughts and their diaphragmatic breathing is so important so if I was you well and I used to be you because before I'd speak I'd be very nervous and I was on the speech team in college but I couldn't hold paper in my hand because it would check it was like really irritating and so I became masterful at diaphragmatic breathing and it's super simple I put people in my office on the floor put a book on their belly and I teach them when you breathe in make the book go up when you breathe out make it go down the trick is big breath take twice as long to blow it out so it's like three or four seconds in hold it just for a second and then about eight seconds and that triggers a parasympathetic response so you know the difference between the fight-or-flight response you have a sympathetic response we're really anxious our hands get cold so that's the cold connection they start to sweat our muscles get tense our breathing becomes shallow and fast which is inefficient for the brain and you just you want to run away or you want to hit something you want to trigger the opposite it's called a parasympathetic response and that breathing pattern will do it also holding something warm will do it as well and first for some people they just put their hands under warm water and if you could get in a sauna that's great or getting a hot tub you can't do that before you speak but so what is like if somebody comes to you I know you're gonna say that you scan their brain like it's a bit tough for everybody watching at home but what are like the the basic protocols for some of the most typical things that you see is it are you starting with diet are you starting with exercise like how do you get people to take the sort of edge off whatever they might be experiencing well I'm usually working always in those four circles so yes I'll scan them because if I don't look I don't know but not everybody can do it so and change your brain change your life I think that's my book you read there one of questionnaires that go oh well you're more likely to have olymic issue here or basal ganglion anxiety issue with these symptoms or prefrontal cortex issue which is so common for us and then I'll go oh well if this is likely the issue these are the supplements I would think about and I tend to start with supplements I mean unless you're schizophrenic or you're a brittle bipolar person I generally start with supplements first and so at home people couldn't go to brain health assessment calm find out which of the 16 types they have and then we'll work on the biology along with biology yes you should exercise of course you should yeah and there are certain kinds of exercise especially coordination exercises so rocket sports by far my favorite very few head injuries but they work your cerebellum and the cerebellum I think of it as the Rodney Dangerfield part of the brain it gets no respect even though it's 10% of the brain's volume but has 50% of the brains and neurons can you imagine something that has half the brains neurons actually gets very little coverage in the scientific media and so what is this cerebellum doing is it to do with coordination and well that's what they used to think yeah coordination movement but now we know 80% of it is dedicated to cognition and emotion and cognition in what way just like general processing processing speed you want to talk about something near and dear to my heart I would love to be able to process raw data faster that's how I think of it I'm assuming then that's cerebellum cerebral so I start playing table tennis that's step one what else what am i sup lamenting what other activities am i doing so a racquet sport if your wife likes ballroom dancing become good at it because it's a coordination exercise and then you want to stimulate it and there's certain supplements that I actually like like Thea name because it helps you feel relaxed but it really also helps you focus and this is over-the-counter mmm-hmm rhodiola ashwagandha ginseng we actually make something we like called focus and energy and we find it stimulates your frontal lobes and your cerebellum at the same time and then stop hurting it alcohol is directly toxic to the cerebellum I mean it's why they make you try to walk a straight line and you can because your cerebellum is not working it's being poisoned so I hardly ever drink what are some other things that people do on a day-to-day basis that could be totally just horrific for that so if you're playing football or your kids playing football what they're doing is they're banging their frontal lobes and there's actually this really cool term I like it's called crossed cerebellar diocese's it's like what is that but you hurt your left frontal lobe it actually turns off your right cerebellum and if you hurt your right frontal lobe it turns off the left cerebellum and if you're heading foot soccer balls you're turning off both sides of your cerebellum so we just have to do so much better protecting the brain talk to me about diets impact on that what are some main sort of ballpark things you should be pulling out you know it's not hard and again if I put this these things on the board people would get it sugar is pro-inflammatory it increases erratic brain cell firing and it's addictive so if you can get rid of a really limit sugar that's really helpful for people the more colorful clean fruits and vegetables the better the one misnomer people often have is oh I should go on a low-fat diet the problem with that is 60% of the solid weight of your brain is fat and low-fat diets can actually trigger depression and so I like healthy fat fish although clean fish and so swordfish is out and never would have that it's just loaded with mercury and I'm a huge fan of salmon wild salmon avocados they're like God's butter right it's just a great brain food for you you have to be calorie smart because 70 percent of us are overweight 40 percent of us are obese I published two studies that show as your weight goes up the physical size and function of your brain goes down should scare the fat off anyone when I read that I ended up losing 30 pounds you know I'd like tried for 30 years and I just never really had the motivation until I went I am NOT going to have a smaller brain I'm not going to do that so clean protein healthy fat actually at every meal because it helps stabilize your blood sugar one of the biggest things that will steal your mind is have a high fasting blood sugar level it's actually been shown to be associated with brain atrophy and it makes your blood vessels brittle and more likely to break so there's a term I like I didn't coin it but I like it called diabesity it's a combination of being overweight with high blood sugar it's a disaster for brain function and this is why people get addicted its carbohydrates simple carbohydrate so if you ingest cupcake your pancreas sees all the sugar and it sends out an insulin burst well that insulin burst drives tryptophan the amino acid precursor to serotonin into your brain so when you eat bread or pasta or potatoes your brain likes it because it feels happier it feels more relaxed now the problem is it kills you early and so you have to sort of take us but you know the other thing that drives tryptophan into the brain is exercise and so and many of my athletes they exercise intensely so they don't get depressed and when they get hurt they get depressed because they can't get their antidepressant thanks and so they'll go to sugar and then that'll make them feel terrible about themselves and so know what's good for tryptophan to get him into your Brennan know what's so before we started rolling you said something so fascinating and you said if I were basically an evil genius and I wanted to just absolutely destroy people's health I would create what kind of lifestyle so let's just take this mnemonic I've created on how to keep your brain healthy it's called bright minds and so if I was at the evil ruler the bee and bright man stands for blood flow is I would give all children social media and video games and encourage them to play as much as they could because that would drop blood flow to their brain brand-new study the more screentime smaller the brain a little horrifying well one they're not going outside they're not getting exercise they're not getting the Sun we have a massive deficiency of vitamin D in this country and exercise increases something called BDNF or brain derived neurotrophic factor it helps your brain grow so we're losing Miracle Grow retirement and aging is the are and bright minds if I was an evil ruler I would let everybody retire at 55 and not have to and then I'd put them in front of the TV there and make them angry you know whatever political fight is going on the eye is inflammation which comes basically from low omega-3 fatty acid levels processed foods gut problems and so I'd like comb nobody gets fish in my kingdom and we don't have fresh food we basically have fast food restaurants the G is genetics and I don't know what you have in your family and mine I have heart disease and obesity obesity in a big way in my family yeah but as you we can see jeans are not a death sentence they should be a wake-up call to do the right things to decrease your genetic vulnerability so if I was the evil ruler I would go you have obesity in your family I do a public campaign so it's in your family why worry about it live it up you're gonna die early enjoy the path as opposed to what I think is actually more rational is you have this vulnerability you need to be really serious about your health H is head trauma I'd encourage all kids to hit soccer balls with their head to play tackle football to ride horses and people go well why are you down on horses it's like well what killed Superman what's a horse I can't tell you the number of patients I see who had serious addictions because they had fallen off of a horse and had no frontal lobe function the tea is toxins so if I was the evil ruler I would get rid of all of the environmental protections so that we are filled with air pollution water pollution and I would never I would tell the manufacturers they don't have to put the ingredients on the labels not only for food but also for personal products and one of the things things like parabens and Val aids or hormone disruptors and aluminum and we're putting them on our body whatever goes in your body goes on your body goes in your body becomes your body I'd think of alcohol as a health food we've certainly had that crazy I would legalize not only legalize marijuana but it's like let's not say it's good for us because all of my published research says it's bad that now does that mean if someone's dying of cancer and it'll help their pain and help the nausea and help them eat god bless them right I mean so let's be rational about I just saw someone had been smoking pot for 50 years and his brain was remarkably older than he was the M is mental health and if I was the evil ruler I'd create CNN and Fox News and that it did ruins people's health because they always lead with negative they increase anger and frustration and polarization the more you're exposed with the anger you got and the more it separates you from other people the eye is immunity and infections I would belittle people who are testing patients for Lyme disease my great stories are patients who have Lyme one girl she's 16 she became psychotic after a visit to Yosemite and she went had three psychiatric hospitalizations none of the medications work she became a shell of herself she came to our clinic and I'm like so what happened at you 70 and her mother said we were surrounded by six deer and we thought it was a magical moment she got bit by a deer tech that caused Lyme that then cost her lose her mind and on an antibiotic she got her mind back the anistar hormone deficiencies and so letting kids hit things with their head actually drops their hormone levels and so I test for that diabesity I'd create the American food system Isis has nothing on our food industry the real and I'm not kidding when I say it the weapons of mass destruction are highly processed pesticide sprayed high glycemic low fiber food like substances stored in plastic containers they're ruining our health if I'm right you know and I'm not the only one who's published this there's been I think 20 other scientists your weight goes up the size of your brain goes down it's like oh my god if 70% of us are overweight it's the biggest brain drain in the history of the United States in fact it's a national security crisis because they're not letting as many not as many people are eligible to sign up for military service because we just have an unhealthy population and if I was a naval rule or I would create screens that have blue lights because they disrupt sleep because the s in bright - is sleep so there's so many things happening I'm just it gives me pause about the society we're raising our babies and grandbabies in is gonna say a lot of what you're describing sounds like what we're encountering every day so if that's the way to really mess people up then what is the lifestyle that is gonna help us supercharge so you talked about sleep where where should we be at how much sleep are we talking about this time of day matter or like and not just sleep what is the idealized lifestyle so if we just go back through those bright minds risk factors so with blood flow it's exercise simple supplements like ginkgo and vinpocetine boost blood flow to the brain simple foods like beets or cayenne pepper rosemary so they're dietary things you can do there are lifestyle things exercises well you said that I thought was really interesting is what happens in the heart happens to the brain happens to the genitals and what's the statin the number of 40 and 50 and six year olds that have erectile dysfunction it since forty percent of forty world seventy percent of seven year olds and if you have blood flow problems anywhere it likely means they're everywhere and it's one of them I don't want to say big benefits that's bad but it's one of the benefits of the program almost everybody's sex life gets better which I'm like a huge fan of but this is you know for years my antidepressants not mine but you know like Prozac and Zoloft and lexapro they decrease sexual function which that makes me sad right it makes it harder for women to have an orgasm or harder for men to perform right and I'm like well let me give you something that'll enhance your performance because your mood will be better and I'm always thinking what I do for you how is that going to affect your partner right because I never think of myself as your psychiatrist I always think of myself as your family's psychiatrist because I see little kids and hold people on everybody in between so exercise though for retirement and aging I want you working in a job that you're passionate about that you're purposeful with and if you're not and some people just aren't it's well what are you doing for new learning everyday what do you do for new learning everyday it's all around the brain or do you have stuff outside of them now in fact it shouldn't be like I know how to read brain scans just reading more scans doesn't really help my brains pattern recognition so I play the piano which I really like simply piano is my app for playing the piano which is good which is good for my cerebellum mm-hmm and then I have a table tennis coach and there's a table tennis coach I do sorry you played at the national level didn't you I did but you want to get better and the only way you get better as pay play people better than you and so so I do that the AI is take fish oil and a probiotic because we talked about keto so I being inflammation so keto is the only thing in my life that had a drug like effect when I tried it I had suffered from inflammation for like 15 years I was icing my wrist every night because they just hurt and just to keep them in check but I wasn't doing any fat in my diet I basically lived in a state of rabbit starvation for two or three years and then for the potential anti-cancer properties I'd been hearing about ketogenic thanks to Peter T and Dom D'Agostino and I thought I'm gonna give this a shot I went hardcore four to one so for every combined gram of protein and carbohydrate I was eating four grams of fat it was miserable I hated it the most but my wrists felt amazing that was really transformative for me what what are your thoughts on Kia well I'm a fan of it for neurodegenerative disease and for seizures in fact I have a grandmother who has a wicked seizure disorder and on a ketogenic diet she lost her seizures it's actually one of my passion stories because when I suggested it she's five months old she's having 160 seizures a day and on the diet she lost her seizures but the reason I'm not a fan in general is there's not enough colorful plants and plants have message so for your pain it may have been dairy or it may have been gluten or it may have been corn or it may have been soy those things that tend to go away on a ketogenic diet it could have been one of those things as well that was driving the inflammation because a lot of people would argue that meat can drive inflammation as well and the first thing I do with almost all of my patients that aren't getting better as I put them on an elimination diet and I have to tell you the nutritionists in my clinics they have more success stories than the skytruss no one story at a guy that was severely depressed at ECT you've been hospital electric shock therapy she had been hospitalized multiple time you suicidal he said to me he said you're my last hope I get that a lot that's a little bit stressful for me and I'm like nothing's worked I want you to try an elimination diet he's like do I have to like really yes you have to and so what does that mean no gluten no dairy kill the sugar no corn no soy no artificial dyes or preservatives he's like that's my whole diet but I'll do it three weeks later is dramatically better off but then I said so let's see what it is so we added back gluten mmm nothing happened we added back dairy nothing happened we added back corn he said within 20 minutes he had a vision of a gun in his mouth I'm like we have to break up with corn his depression has not come back well that's crazy that isn't that crazy yeah and I mean I should be used to that at this point like the number of people that have that kind of reaction to a specific type of food and how variable it is meaning maybe corn for me is fine but for him is absolutely catastrophic and how much variability do you see how do you because an elimination I can be very confusing for people how do you walk do you have to think of it really simply it's these are foods I get to choose and these are the foods I should lose and you just have to know the list like where do you start is there a Ground Zero like is it chicken breast and broccoli like what is your start well it's easy for me the first rule is it has to be delicious and nutritious so I am fortunate that I'm married to a nurse who not only is beautiful but she's really smart and one of her best gifts is taking really healthy food and making it taste awesome so there is no suffering so you have to get that in their head and we're all creatures of routine I mean I'm so accretor of routine so that means I really don't have to find 20 foods I love that love me back and I don't know in your relationship if you've ever been in love that was bad for you if you've ever had a bad relationship but I have and I'm not doing it again and I'm damn sure not doing it with food so because I have control over that do I love this and does it love me back I'm not gonna be in love with something that hurts me I did the Daniel plan Pastor Rick Warren called me up and said I'm fat my church is fat will you help me we created a program for them Mark Hyman and I did and thousands of churches around the world had done it it's awesome but one of the pastors wives came into my office and she said I told my husband last night after you gave a lecture that I'd rather get Alzheimer's disease then give up sugar I'm like did you date the bad boys in high school because that's a bad relationship Wow and later we found out she has a family history of Alzheimer's and she's given up sugar by the insanity around food this is crazy do that that like actually makes me emotional that's crazy it's crazy but so many they're attached to you know at the holidays this is how my mother loved me so if I give this up it's like giving up my mother and you really have to understand the attachments to the different foods they have but then get them attached to new foods by showing them it could be both delicious and nutritious I was watching I was listening to a podcast that you did with somebody and they were asking you like final questions and they said what do you wish better out or something like that and you said the one thing I wish I could do was get more people to change I thought God I so get that like I'm I totally agree with you but I imagine a meaning that you tell people hey this is what you need to do like even your own father for years like wouldn't listen and then obviously he finally has this breakthrough moment but what have you learned in all of that to get to the point where you have maybe a better success rate than somebody else even though still far too many people would rather get Alzheimer's and can actually say it out loud which is just beyond crazy to me but where have you had successes with that what are some takeaways that people watching this can try to implement because I I know it is true if even if it's only me there are people watching this that either they need to change or maybe more importantly someone they love needs to change and they just don't know how to help them well if you were gonna help someone else in my dad's stories a great story you have to live the message if you don't live the message you suck as a messenger and too many physicians don't live the message of health and the so therefore they're not good at changing behavior in their patients and so the end of just one medicine after the other which i think is bad medicine so the first thing is you have to live it and then you have to find smart ways to get them interested so I start an exercise with all of my patients called the one page mirror so on one piece of paper I want you to write out what you want what do you want in your relationships in your work in your money in your physical emotional and spiritual health what do you want write it down and then I want you to ask yourself does your behavior get you what you want because I realize nobody does it because they should do it but they're more likely to do it if it fits if it's their goal so I want to live a long time because I love my mission I love my wife I love my kids I love my grandkids you have to understand so why do you want to be healthy so that really becomes primary so you live it you get them into what their motivation is and then you make it as simple as possible is this good for my brain or bad for start every day with today is going to be a great day because then your unconscious mind will find why it's going to be a great day or end every day with what went well today just to begin to direct your mind so I find I have to make it really simple and I have this huge benefit I have pictures you know 30 percent of the brain is dedicated to vision and so I can show you here's a healthy scan here's your scan I'm sort of hoping you'll get some anxiety over it right ramp up your anxiety so you do better that's what I've seen I had this one guy from the valley came to see me and he was really his wife was concerned he's really depressed and his brain looked like he had Alzheimer's disease and I'm like how much do you drink and he's like I'm never drunk I'm like that's not the question how much do drink and he was like having three scotches a day oh and he was overweight and I added up the calories that he was drinking a year at three scotches a day it was 30 pounds of fat he was putting on his body just from those calories and but when he saw his scan he got appropriately anxious stop drinking started with bright minds habits and completely transformed his life in six months that that is really pretty extraordinary one thing again you keep throwing out these little nuggets that I find so interesting is starting the day putting your feet on the ground and saying this is gonna be a great day like these the the I call them soft things but they're so powerful one thing you talked about that I absolutely love is I forget the exact phrase you use but basically to bathe in happiness to just drink that in one why is it important and then to how do we actually do that well in my new book feel better fast and make it last which I'm really excited about is there's an exercise and feel that are fast it's about flooding all five of your senses at once with happiness I mean that's why you have senses it brings the world in why not bring it in and a happy way rather than in a terrifying way so they're visual things like images in nature although on my phone it's like here my favorites and I can just go to it and it makes me happy because it triggers happy memories for me listening to sounds of nature like the rain or the ocean or certain music like for me it's good vibrations from the Beach Boys what are the sense what are the touches what are the taste the smells that can trigger happiness so vanilla of all things honeysuckle jasmine have been found in scientific studies to trigger happiness it's really interesting and if I remember right there's something about smell it's the one sense that doesn't go through like a relay station in the brain it's like processed directly goes right to your limbic brain hmm and so smells will trigger either intense happiness or sadness really interesting all right so before I ask my last question tell these guys where they can find you online and then I have a modified question for you ayman clinics calm is a great place we also have brainmd health for our supplements to take the brain health assessment brain health assessment comm and they can find feel better fast Amazon or Barnes and Noble wherever books are sold nice alright my last question normally I ask people just what the one thing they can do that will have the biggest impact on their health but for you I want the one thing in each of the four areas I thought that was so interesting that you think when you're treating a patient of those four areas that really make up the whole human so in each of those four quadrants what's the one change that they can make that would have the biggest impact on them so under biology it's this tiny habit three seconds is this good for my brain or bad for it you just you need to know the list but if you love yourself you're gonna do the right thing under the psychological circle is it true you should just carry those three words around everywhere you go because the thoughts that just pop into your head my wife doesn't listen to me the traffic today is going to be terrible you know it's like is that true in this social circle what have I done today to enhance my relationships and I know because relationships are the one thing that can make you immediately feel better or homicidal and so how can you enhance your relationships and spiritually what am i doing today that's purposeful because purposeful people live longer they're happier they actually have less risk of dementia amazing awesome and you'll thank you so much for joining me that was really awesome guys this is somebody who has had a massive impact on me one of the earliest books that I ever read about the brain was making a good brain grate and realizing that we are not stuck with the brain that we have that we can make change and if you guys know me you hear so much of my rhetoric about change from those books and that was what really began to show me that there were concrete steps that I can take to improve things I love his mnemonic devices I think that they will be very effective for you one that we touched on but didn't go letter my letter is brain Excel that's when you're gonna want to look up you can find that on his website it's absolutely extraordinary in terms of improving your ability to basically perform at a high level so going out figuring out what the things are that are working against you and then breaking down brain Excel which is feeling better and making it stay that way so getting into his world finding those things applying them in your life fixing your lifestyle so that it matches something that is good for your brain I think it's fascinating that he said that you can give it to little kids and they can sort it out in terms of what's good for your brain and what's not and yet as adults we're hearing crazy-ass phrases like I would rather get Alzheimer's than give up sugar and so really coming to terms with what you want to achieve and then the steps you have to take to get there and I don't think anybody does that as well as he does so as you dive into the world that will be your reward you'll be able to optimize your brain in a pretty profound way so check him out he certainly changed my life alright if you haven't already be sure to subscribe and until next time my friends be legendary take care thank you sir phenomenal hey everyone I hope you loved that episode now I want to take a quick second to share about our awesome friends at butcher box butcher box delivers 100% grass-fed and grass-finished beef free-range organic chicken and heritage breed pork straight to your door every month when it comes to cooking it is really hard to find high-quality meat that you can actually trust and with what lisa has gone through I've realized just how important it is that the food you eat is raised and sourced properly and that's why Lisa and I are so passionate about butcher box every box comes with at least nine to eleven pounds of meat and that's enough for 24 individual size meals and the ship for free nationwide except for Alaska and Hawaii sorry guys we have an awesome offer for you right now to give butcher box a try get $20 off your order by 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Channel: Tom Bilyeu

Views: 387,566

Rating: 4.8714828 out of 5

Keywords: Tom Bilyeu, Impact Theory, ImpactTheory, TomBilyeu, Inside Quest, InsideQuest, Tom Bilyou, Theory Impact, motivation, inspiration, talk show, interview, motivational speech, daniel amen, dr daniel amen, psychiatrist, brain health, 11 risk factors that destroy your brain, feel better fast and make it last, brain, negative thoughts, brain type, health theory, health, health show, don't believe your brain

Id: AUBe5vkPPlY

Length: 50min 30sec (3030 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 10 2019