Brain Health & Mental Resilience Secrets (Science-Backed) w/ Dr. Daniel Amen

I have a real friend here today and somebody that I admire tremendously he's helped me he's scanned my brain I think he's the foremost expert on brain health on the planet we're living in a toxic Society if you take the toxic food the toxic products the toxic social media that creates this high level of self-absorption and self-absorbed people are never happy does your mind tend to go to what's wrong or does it go to what's right and if your mind goes to what's wrong you're much more likely to be anxious to be depressed to have an addiction thoughts are creations of your mind and they come from all sorts of places sometimes they're not yours sometimes they actually come from your mom or dad or from your grandparents because we know trauma gets transmitted epigenetically so it actually comes through our genes so voices come from our parents from our siblings from our friends our foes from the music we listen to the news we watch and they lie thoughts lie just because you have a thought has nothing to do with whether or not it's true whether or not it's helpful and you can learn to direct them or you can become a victim people don't think about genetics right but you have the genetic vulnerability I adopted my two nieces both parents were alcoholics and drug addicts and I'm like if you never drink you're never going to have a problem you need to be on an addiction prevention program every day of your life and and I'm like dead serious with them and they're doing awesome that's [Music] awesome so hey guys are you frustrated with where you're at right now maybe stunted in your progress well if you are I want to recommend a place for you to go called growth day growth.com sled it is the number one personal development app on the planet it's got all kinds of high performance techniques in there courses accountability journaling live speeches from some of the top influencers in the world including me it's an overall environment to change your life growth day.com sled all right welcome back to the show everybody I have a a real friend here today and somebody that I admire tremendously he's helped me he scanned my brain as a matter of fact and I have referred friends to him who were in need of his work because I believe in him interestingly I've also referred a few young people to him over the years that were the children of people that I loved that needed help and I'm really grateful that he's written a book that he has coming out right now called raising mentally strong kids because of all the people that I've referred to him over the years I felt the best about the children that he was able to help and catch whatever was going on there a little bit earlier and turn it around he's only done about 160,000 brain scans from people from over 121 countries so I think he's just about ready to be qualified to talk about this topic today I think he's the foremost expert on brain health on the planet he's a great friend of mine I love him very much he's a strong man of Faith as well Dr Daniel aan welcome back to the show brother thank you so much for helping me spread this message about brain health and mental strength kids are in trouble more than ever before it's horrifying there's a new study the CDC put out that 54% of teenage girls report being persistently sad that 32% have thought of killing themselves 24% have planned to kill themselves just think of that a quarter of teenage girls and 133% have tried these are statistics unlike anything in recorded history why well it's an interesting question but we're living in a toxic Society so if you take the toxic food we feed them the toxic products that go on their bodies the toxic social media that creates this high level of self-absorption and self-absorbed people are never happy people and then the toxic news which really drives them to negative thinking patterns because you and I both knows the news is no longer the news the news like the crisis News Network because if they scare you you'll pay attention and so you buy more copper underwear but the negativity and I actually been studying negativity bias so does your mind tend to go to what's wrong or does it go to what's right and if your mind goes to what's wrong you're much more likely to be anxious to be depressed to have an addiction and so I train kids to have a positivity bias and to take care of their brains in the book you reference the fact that they need to be working on their brains and their minds tell me did I misunderstand that or is there a difference between those two things well your brain the physical functioning of your brain Moment by moment creates your mind and like all the parenting books on the bookshelf nobody's talking about brain health but it's the health of your brain that then creates your mind so if you think of it like hardware and software you have to get the hardware right first okay and then you have to program it properly like in the book we talk about brain health and brain reserve and uh how to have a healthy brain but once you you have a healthy brain well how do you have a healthy mind and we talk about killing the ants the automatic negative thoughts that steal people's happiness I was 28 years old in my psychiatric residency before I learned I didn't have to believe every stupid thing I thought the brain is a sneaky organ right we all have weird crazy stupid sexual violent thoughts that nobody should ever hear but there's nothing in school I'm friends with Paul Simon love Paul Simon especially his song Krome which starts off with when I think back on all the crap I learned in high school it's a wonder I can think at all and if you think schools really have not been redesigned in 120 years um we need to redesign them to create healthy people well I was 48 years old before I learned about the ants which was from you and I remember leaving you that day and saying to my son who was the first person I saw I go hey Max I just had a revelation he goes what's that dad I said I don't have to believe everything I think and one of the thing I have a tendency to do I want to know if this affects children because really this book and today's conversation will be about mental health in general but more specifically how it applies to our children I do something when I have a negative thought Dr Ammon where I do what I call it like thought stacking so I get a negative thought I don't do this with my positive ones I do with my negative ones where I repeat it over and over and over and then I stack it if this happens then that happens this and I create this entire almost narrative in my mind of what I deter I I coin thought stacking is that a common thing in people just like me or is that something that happens in children as well where maybe they're being bullied at school they have a thought I don't want to go and then they repeat it and repeat it and it gets bigger and bigger and bigger and now you believe the bigger lie it's even worse than the original lie you were telling yourself thought stack the ants the automatic negative thoughts they link they stack they link and then they attack you and it's it's not hard to kill the ANS but it needs to become a practice and I have my patients especially the ones that are anxious depressed or obsessed write down aund of their worst thoughts and then take them through a process to get rid of them and it doesn't work after you do it the first second third or fourth time but after you do it the 20th or 30th time pretty soon your brain is making new connections to attack and eliminate the ants and in the book I talk about nine different types of ants so let's go through three or four of them if you don't mind we want them to get the book but let's give them fortune telling what's that what's I know what it is but you tell that where you're predicting things are going to turn out badly even though you don't have evidence for it um there's mind reading where you believe you know what another person is thinking even though um they haven't told you that and I have 25 years of education and I can't tell what anybody else is thinking the negative you know a negative look from someone else may mean nothing more than they're constipated you don't know right it's like clarify it um blame is the worst ant it's a big red ant because when you blame someone else for the problems in your life you become a victim and you become powerless so I wrote my first book many moons ago was called the sabotage Factor all the ways we mess ourselves up from getting what we want and the number one Hallmark of self-defeating behavior is blaming other people for how your life is turning out um there's guilt beating ants and one of the worst ones that's happening we're in a political year is labeling whenever you label yourself or someone else with a negative term you're liberal you're conservative um you're jerk he's an idiot um you lump them with all the Liberals conservatives jerks idiots that you've ever known and you can't deal with them anymore because you're not dealing with them you're dealing with a group of them so here's the exercise whenever you're sad mad nervous or out of control write down what you're thinking and then identify what kind of ant it is and then we take them through this process that actually um borrowed from my friend Byron Katie is like Tana never listens to me so that's an all or nothing thought whenever you think in words like always never everyone every time it's usually wrong so T my wife never listens to me I've had that thought and so you write it down and then you go is that true and if you're really irritated you go yeah right and then you go is it absolutely true with 100% certainty I've written and produced 18 national public television specials about the brain she has listened to all of the scripts so it's like no that's actually not true the third question is how does that thought make you feel sad how does a thought make you act mad what's the outcome of the thought separation so the fourth question is how would I feel if I didn't have the thought happy wow how would I act connected what's the outcome we have a better relation relationship and my favorite question of all of them is five take the original thought T never listens to me and flip it to the opposite TNA does listen to me now don't go to the narcissistic opposite which is she always listens to me because that's not true either and go t does listen to me and then I'm completely not bugged by my thought and you have to understand thoughts are creations of your mind and they come from all sorts of places sometimes they're not yours sometimes they actually come from your mom or dad or from your grandparents because we know trauma for example gets transmitted epigenetically so it actually comes through our genes and so if my grandfather because he had a big trauma when he was 19 years old wow wow that can actually imp impact my dad's genes and then impact me so this whole thing of epigenetics is so interesting so thoughts can come from a different generation they come from the voices obviously of my mom you know I'll give you something to cry about uh or my dad uh who told me what did he say I told him when I wanted to be a psychiatrist why don't you want to be a real doctor why do you want to be a nut doctor and hang out with nuts all day long so voices come from our our parents from our siblings from our friends our foes from the music we listen to the news we watch and they lie I mean that's the one thing I didn't know till I was 28 thoughts lie just because you have a thought has nothing to do with whether or not it's true whether or not it's helpful and you can learn to direct them or you can become a victim of them and one great strategy I talk about in the book is give your mind a name is it's based on this concept of gaining psychological distance from the nonsense in your head so I named my mind after my pet raccoon when I was 16 I grew up in the San frero Valley I had a pet raccoon I loved her but she was a troublemaker would leave raccoon poo in my shoes ate all the fish out of my sister's aquarium and that's my mind my mind will just like stir up trouble and I'll see you know everything's gone away and I die this horrible death and you know my mind used to do the same thing you're talking about it would stack and Link and then attack me like if I almost got into an accident I wouldn't go oh thank God I'm fine I would see the accident play out I'd then see the car burst into flames I'd then see the ambulance driver probably had add and got lost to the accident and that I would be in the hospital and I'd be burned over 80% of my body and the nurse was kn C just I was thinking two things one the separation from the thought these exercises are separating you that word that you Ed and when you get distance or above your thought you can begin to see sort of the Folly of them and the Ridiculousness of them as you were describing it also I'm processing because this is something that I really work on myself you and I have talked about this and the techniques that you just went through and more of them that are in the book um the lack of them that pattern that we get is like you truly become a prisoner of your thoughts and the techniques on the way out creates the what I was thinking when you're saying it is freedom there's should be some Freedom if you could actually flip that that strategy that you talked about you go from being a prisoner of your thoughts to freedom I just talked about this in the last interview is and there's this great quote that I mess up all the time from Gandhi that says I will not allow you to trample through my mind with your dirty feet and in my own life a lot of time I'm the guy walking and trampling through my mind with my dirty feet and I don't have to believe everything I think so hey guys as you know I've partnered up with my good friend Brennan brard who's created the greatest personal development system that has ever been designed called growth day if you go to growth day.com sled you can get all the information but it's that time of year where everybody's trying to form new habits they've got new resolutions and goals and you need an environment and you need some coaches and you need to be able to do it super inexpensively and that's where growth day.com Ed comes in there's everything from journaling to accountability programs live messages every Monday for myself and other influencers There's an opportunity for you to to get courses that would cost thousands of dollars completely for free it's incredible go to growth day.com Ed and check it out if we were to look at the scans of an unhealthy brain of one of these children or one of ourselves what would we see number one would we see this evidence if we looked at a scan and two the traditional world's prescription for that is literally a prescription most of the time which is some sort of medication and so I want your thoughts on that what would we see if we looked at the scan of someone who's healthy versus unhealthy in these situations and how do you feel about prescribing prescription medication to children for the most part as a general answer for these ailments or problems they think they have oh two huge questions uh I did a study with Noel Nelson uh who wrote a book called The Power of appreciation and we scanned her when she was appreciating her life and then um and her brain was really healthy and I'm like we need to scan you when you're hating your life and she goes I don't want to do that that'll make me unhappy I'm like come on you have to suffer for science science and so I remember it like it was yesterday uh right before I scanned her uh she her dog was sick and so her thoughts linked uh my dog is sick uh I have to stay home I'm going to lose my job I won't have money to take care of the dog the dog will die and I'll be sad and I'll end up homeless in Malibu I mean like within five minutes that was the trail um and then I injected the medicine that we do the scans with and the spec scans we do are so cool because we're getting that moment in time of of that couple of minutes but that couple of minutes seems to be your brain over time and healthy when she thought what she appreciated about her life and when she thought what she hated about her life or her fear her frontal loes dropped so the frontal loes is the break in your brain her left temporal love dropped which is often a source of really dark thoughts like suicidal thoughts and her sarb Bellum drops cerebellum's the back bottom part of the brain that's involved in physical coordination but it's also involved in thought coordination so she's not coordinated she's irritated and she has less control and when I saw that I'm like oh this is negativity is the pattern that creates athletic slumps because if you think you're going to strike out you're a little less coordinated and you're more likely to strike out isn't that interesting I think I'm going to miss the free throw and I'm more likely to miss the free throw and so negativity is bad for the brain and I'm doing this study now on negativity bias and it's just associated with every bad thing now medication that's a huge topic and it's not the first thing I think about I own a supplement company so if you're depressed I want you to be on a good multiple vitamin I want you to take omega-3 fatty acids and I want you to take saffron because there are now 25 randomized controlled trials showing it's equally effective to anti-depressants but rather than knock off your libido it enhances it and it enhances your memory so the science of saffron very exciting now if nothing is working generally with kids I don't give them anti-depressants because they have blackbox warnings and can increase the risk of suicidal Behavior now if I'm really stumped I might um the issue with ADD is different though and I know everybody thinks all the kids are overmedicated and they are but there are a lot of kids that aren't medicated that should be because having untreated add right whenever the doctor says oh I think maybe we should treat him for add you want to go I want to know the side effects and the Gan can lose their appetite can develop ticks can have problems sleeping I mean it has side effects but you have to ask the other question What are the side effects of having untreated add which are things like School failure friend failure incarceration bankruptcy divorce it's it's a lot identity and confidence starts to stack the wrong way if you're not if you really have ADD and you're not diagnosed by the age of nine your self-esteem generally is problematic because you try and it doesn't work you try and it doesn't work and you know my first thought is not medicine have natural solutions like decrease their time on gadgets get them to exercise more Sunshine simple supplements like multiple vitamins fish oil um riola is one of my favorite supplements to help with focus and decrease stress but if those things don't work I'd think about it stimulant okay you would you said is it saffron is that what how you said it saffron spelled house so everybody so s a FF r o n so the spice it's the world's most expensive spice but if you just look at the science it's stunning okay that's crazy and when I when I learned about saffron was 25 years ago I'm reading the studies and they're prosexual and that's the thing that got me because all the ssris I've prescribed yep people don't want to have sex or it takes longer to have an orgasm now somebody has premature ejaculation that can be really helpful for them it like one of those little tricks with Prozac I'm like you'll last longer sometimes you'll last forever wear your partner out very bad uh um but I I saw it was prosexual and I'm like pay attention and then so there's five studies showing sexual enhancement for females and males uh but 25 studies on moood interesting so small thing and uh well not small one things you emphasized with me was caffeine and I'm just curious if you still feel strongly about that because I'm thinking about kids in general and I'm thinking of all these energy drinks everybody drinks coffee at about age three it seems like nowadays right and and I remember in my case you were saying Hey listen this may seem insignificant and small and yeah have omega-3s but also like your caffeine intake is making an impact on your brain health and I just want if people have children right now that are pumping them full of caffeine and soft drinks and all these other things there's got to be an impact on brain health for them as well and why would you do that it's clearly a drug and it's just a bad idea caffeine and the reason you know I pick on lots of things I pick on alcohol I pick on marijuana uh but I pick on caffeine because it constricts blood flow to the brain and what we've learned is neurons brain cells don't age it's blood vessels that age and so what you want I often talk about brain Envy you know you want to want to have a better brain Freud was wrong penis envy is not the thing uh you want to have blood flow Envy because you want to keep their blood flow your blood flow right because to be mentally have mentally strong kids you have to model that right so it always starts with the parents being mentally strong um but you want to lose the caffeine and sugar right I mean energy drinks are just a disaster I have one sitting right over there that's probably why I'm doing such a bad job in the interview no they're not good for you because I mean one the sugar is pro-inflammatory brand new study out today on inflammation damaging the dopamine circuit in the front part of your brain so kill the sugar and whenever it comes to food you just want to ask yourself this question do I love it and does it love me back gotta uh and so with kids when my daughter was two we played this game called Khloe's game is this good for my brain or bad for it and so I'd go avocados and she'd go two thumbs up R's butter if I said blueberry she'd put her her little hands on her hips and go are they organic because nonorganic blueberries hold more pesticides than almost any fruit she I'm like no of course they're organic she go oh God's candy oh God's candy I love that hitting a soccer ball with your head oh very stupid brain is soft skull is hard skull has sharp bony ridges right and I playing these games I talk about this in the book playing these games with kids just to get them to love and think about and care about their brain and a lot of parents especially parents and teenagers go I just don't have any influence it's because you don't have a good bond with them and in the book I I talk a lot about attachment or Dr Fay and I talk a lot about attachment because my dad and I weren't not bonded um we didn't really like each other and when I was 18 another political year was 1972 my dad told me if I voted for Senator McGovern the country would go to hell I voted for McGovern because I did not was not bonded to my dad and the country went to hell but it had nothing to do with McGovern right it was all Richard Nixon and Watergate and all that craziness if you want influence you have to be attached and for the kids that are attached to their parents they tend to pick their values and what does bonding require time actual physical time without your phone and listening and there's one exercise in here that's so good it's gold give us give us one it's called special time 20 minutes a day with your kids doing something they want to do and during that time no commands no questions no directions it's just to be in their space and I don't know if when you were a kid that would have been special to you for me I'm one of seven that was so much I mean not so much for my dad CU he was harsh but with my mom I just craved so did I in fact it's so special and profound I can think of the only two or three of those moments I had with my dad and I can picture them right now right when you said it I flashed I know literally at a park playing catcher with my dad he was the catcher I was I was just literally I was it was like one of these very rare you imagine that I'm 53 years old this month and then those moments are so special I can recall the only two or three of them that I remember as a child they're that big of a deal I want you to say more about that okay that's so important well I I'm so you know so here I sit here and I can picture really only two or three of them in my life now by the way even when I picture them too my whole internal State I can feel changing when I say it there's another part of me that's sad that my recollection is only two or three of these moments and the reason I think I recall them which I want to ask you about that in a minute is because they were so unique and stood out emotionally for me that they they they are they appear to be um more from a neurological standpoint connected to me and my brain than other experiences of my life because my emotions were so high during those moments and that's how memory is formed it's anchored with emotion so the higher that is true then Dr am so the higher the emotional state during a moment the more likely the memory is anchored to us yes good or bad and so you know if it's really bad when I was six I my mom said I told a lie I don't remember it but I do remember her starting to cry and say I never thought I would have a son who's going to hell wow I'm like I think that imprinted that you're bad it's at some level and overall my mom was great and overall my dad was but you know they may mistakes right and so being forgiving is important but when you're not bonded it can create all sorts of unconscious Mischief in your brain so for example Our Big Goal as babies and small children is to be attached because they feed us right they protect us they house us it's it's life saving and when the B Bond becomes broken we develop this internal rage but then because we need them we feel guilt about the rage and we suppress it but then we start attacking ourselves because we feel we feel guilt like we actually did something awful right the brain can often not distinguish an action from a thought and we live with this sort of chronic sense of being bad um and it comes out in physical symptoms like back pain or neck pain or your guts not right and often healing people you have to get in touch with the broken attachment and the rage but more importantly the guilt about the rage so you answered one of my next questions which is that do thoughts have physical manifestations in our bodies and clearly you're saying they do so well if I hooked your body up and when I was a young psychiatrist I was a biof feedback therapist so I would hook up your hand temperature how much your hand sweat your muscle tension breathing rate heart rate variability and then I would ask you questions I just say father and if your dad was like mine which was um an ambivalent stressful concept for me now we fixed it when he was 85 thank God but um immediately if you would have said father my hands would get colder they would start to sweat my muscles would get tense my breathing would become faster and more shallow and my heart rate variability would go down and it happens immediately so whenever you have a negative thought it impacts your physiology virtually every cell in your body responds to that whenever you have a positive thought a hopeful thought a happy thought and for the most part with my mom not that but for the most part my hands would get warmer they'd get dryer my muscles would be more relaxed I know you can't answer this definitively but I'm curious about it hey guys I want to talk to you about Shopify look you know when I started the show the furthest thing from my mind was doing online business and now I can't imagine my life without it so I 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shopify.com myet all lowercase go to shopify.com milet now to grow your business no matter what stage you're in shopify.com myet so I've never asked anybody this and I'm not putting you on the spot here but I want to take that to a level maybe even beyond what we just talked about in our bodies we all have some genetic predispositions could be to a particular cancer could be to heart disease could be to alzheimer's etc etc whatever it might be is a hard one when my dad got sick you ever just have an overwhelming sense of something you know in your life you just sense something and in my dad's case my dad was my favorite human being he got sober he was not my favorite human being when he was a drinker once he got sober my favorite human my best friend in the world but my dad was a worrier he inherited worrying thoughts from his father and from his father's father what you said earlier is so profound that even from a neurological standpoint I mean genetically we inheriting some of this trauma that's fascinating to me but my father lived with his father who was a warrior a good man but a warrior and I live with my father and I became one and I just had this sense my dad got cancer with what I still think is Young which is in his late 60s and I have believed this is just as a Layman I have not a scientific bone in my body that perhaps the way that my dad lived with just chronic worry and concern may have flipped that Gene on prematurely in his body and I know that sounds like kind of an a reach of shorts do you believe psychon neuroimmunology which is your brain and the mind it creates uh can either e increase cortisol in your body's stress hormone or decrease it and if you're putting yourself with your undisciplined mind the worry habit that was also modeled for him and modeled for you um you're more likely to have an immunological disorder like an autoimmune disorder or cancer um in my work I talk about it in the book if you want to keep your brain healthy or rescue it you have to prevent or treat the 11 major risk factors that steal your mind and and we talk about them and the pneumonic is bright minds I think in our last podcast we went through some of it well the G is for genetics but people don't think about genetics right I'm like I'm overweight because my family's overweight I'm like no you're overweight because you're eating too much uh but you have the genetic vulnerability like that's one of my vulnerabilities I family members that are morbidly obese but I'm not why because every day of my life I know the risk factor and I'm on an obesity prevention program I also have heart disease in my family but I don't have heart disease because I'm on a heart disease prevention program every day of my life so if you know your vulnerabilities I adopted my two nieces because um they had massive trauma and both parents were alcoholics and drug addicts and I'm like if you never drink you're never going to have a problem and you need to be on an addiction prevention program every day of your life and and I'm like dead serious with them um and they're doing awesome that's awesome speaking of kids in the book one of my concerns that I see is by the way I sound like an old man get off my lawn when I say this but what I worry about for the generation that I watch now is a resiliency deficiency because this last generation overall was everybody got a trophy everybody won everybody's okay I don't think they've experienced it a lot of helicopter parents have come in and fixed things at school and I don't feel like there's a resiliency that maybe has come with previous generations I certainly don't mean that critically because there's an innovation in this generation that's never existed before there's a kindness there's a wanting to give there's a social Consciousness that's even more elevated in some ways than ever um and so there's incredible things about this generation of young people right now did I sandwich that well I think I did um and I mean those things having said that what I see is resiliency the first sign of defeat they give in a little bit more than I would like to see or criticism affects them in a way that is even more there's not a lot of thick skin so to speak and in the book you talk about strategies from a neuroscience standpoint about building resiliency in your children and some techniques and habits I have to think any parent listening to this or any human listening to this would love more strategies for resiliency so throw throw something at us on that well one of the huge mistakes I made early on and I think it was because my self-esteem wasn't good is I got self-esteem by fixing my kids' problems and looking back on a huge mistake and if a child comes to you and says on board way too many parents Scurry around trying to fix that for them please don't do that hand it back to them it's like oh you're bored I wonder what you're going to do about that and if if they put it on you you have taught them that you will solve their problems wow and when Khloe I pick on Khloe a lot when she was seven she was a Helen we all used to say she's going to be the leader of a gang or the leader of the Free World and her mother used to sit with her for hours trying to you know nudge her to get her homework done and I'm a child psychiatrist I'm like stop that you did second grade but she wasn't listening to me and three of her friends recommended this program called parent ING with love and logic by uh Jim Fay it's spectacular in fact I co-wrote this book with Charles Fay his son who's the president of the love and logic Institute and after Tana really got this parenting in a way that allows children to make mistakes and pay the consequences for their mistakes when they're young to build resilience everything in the house changed every everything she announced to Chloe one night um sweetheart I'm never going to ask you to do your homework again I've done second grade and if you don't do it it's on you teacher might be mad at you you might not get to go out with recess and if you really don't do it you'll make new friends when you repeat second grade and Chloe like had a fit that doesn't make any sense stormed off 20 minutes later came back no one's ever asked her to do her homework she's going to graduate from Chapman University she's responsible and oh by the way and some people are going to think this is Harsh and I think it's incredibly loving if she forgot her sweater at home nobody brought it to her at school she was cold if she didn't bring her lunch nobody brought it to her at school she was hungry but she only forgot it once if she didn't bring her homework to school even if she did it with a group of other kids nobody brought it to school cuz we were teaching her you're responsible for your life now of course we're always protecting her one of my kids would run in the street I still have BTSD from her ADHD but you protect her but then there are consequences um and never hit a child I mean seriously that is just not helpful but consequences are important uh you know whether it's time out or you drain my energy so you get more chores and oh by the way all children should have chores that you don't pay for it's this is your part of this family and you're important to make the family work there's a big study from Harvard looking at 454 inner city Boston school kids they followed for 70 years what goes with health success and Longevity and the only thing that went was self-esteem whether or not you worked as a child and it can be a paper route it could be chores for me I went to my dad's grocery store I had the guy who's the current host for that at Harvard on we talked about it and it you you you literally our vibrational frequency together is so good because it leads to my next question so hey guys if you're like me I am always on a lookout to try to eliminate these cold and flu symptoms I got to tell you literally right now as I'm recording this the last three or four days I was struggling I've had a cough I've been congested I tried an IV I went and did a bunch of vitamin C I've tried about everything under the sun none of it has been working bam someone sends me armra colostrum and it has changed everything here's the kicker in clinical trials Bine colostrum was found to be at least three times more effective than the flu vaccine at preventing the flu so here's our special offer we worked out a special offer from my audience receive 15% off your first order go to Tri ara.com myet that's TR AR rm.com myet or enter mlet to get 15% off your first order that's Tri ara.com TR r y ma.com myet these statements and products have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration these products are not intended to diagnose treat cure or prevent any disease or condition these statements and information are not a substitute for or alternative to seeking care from your healthc care providers there's a Nuance with kids or or friends or ourselves of what you just suggested which is they forget their lunch they don't eat right there's consequences I'm not going to tell you to do your homework when I was a kid I had a a friend whose father I loved he was very kind to me when my dad was drinking I would go to their house and um this friend of mine uh I think it's long enough that I could say this this friend of mine was smarter than me he was a little bit better athlete than me um better looking kid than me but I remember my dad would drink and do different things the one thing he never did that I can remember anyway was verbally beat me so you talk about never hitting a kid for some reason this dad who was a good man he must have learned it from his own dad when his kid would drop a pass you idiot right the f is wrong with you um he would say something and he would shame him in front of me and I remember it now that I'm 53 I've remembered it all my life remember he's such a good why does he talk to him like that and then life's happened with both of us and I no assessment of whether he's a happy or sad person I'm not around him but he didn't go out into the world and become what I know he was capable of becoming from an achievement standpoint living on his own even and I think he's struggled through his life I've watched the evidence of this and I attribute that to the verbal hitting of the child when we were growing up and I'm wondering because there's a balance isn't there there's a Nuance see all the parents that are helicopter parents you've given them you know let them forget their lunch but then there's a parents who are the tough parents and I think sometimes then they take permission for what we just said and they take it a step further where there's the verbal hitting of the child that happens behind closed doors and I I have to believe that that is one of the things that impacted this man's life so deeply was the way his father spoke to him so negatively about himself cuz all I ever wanted was my dad's affection and that could be the birth of his own ants his automatic negative thoughts I think of good parents like good coaches they notice what you do right and they teach you when you can do better they teach you yeah I got to do uh some work with the Miami Heat last year and Eric spoler is just such an amazing human being and he's really positive but he's also firm and the research is very clear so there's four different types of parents we talk about in the book there along two dimensions are you firm or permissive or um versus being loving versus being hostile so that gives you hostile permissive hostile firm loving permissive loving and firm and so most people go loving and firm are the best parents by far like not even close and um hostile and permissive the worst parents but then people go between loving and permissive or hostile and permissive which kids are the worst it's loving and permissive interesting like w you don't want to be permissive where kids have no supervision so firm and kind if you just remember those two words from this book firm and kind whenever I come to make a decision with a child like they didn't come home on time okay I need to be firm but I need to do it in a kind way like you know you're probably not going out for three weeks and I love you and I'll look forward to spending more more time with you if you want right right what about physical activity as it affects brain health uh this is a gamer phone Etc so combination question physical activity and I I I've asked you two two-parters today I just think they're somewhat connected and is there an age you think some child should not be on social media as long as possible if you had kids again right now would your 10-year-old be on social or no no no no not no because why um apple and Facebook and Tik talk they work with neuroscientists to keep you there longer their goal is mind share and that's not okay because they're stealing uh the minds of this generation I mean on average people are spending three and a half four hours on social media just imagine what you could do at that time so put screens off as long as humanly you can and get them to exercise but it's coordination exercises remember we talked about the sarabellum yes it's tennis and table tennis and pickle ball rocketball those are really great for brain development because the cerebellum I'm getting old and people don't remember Rodney Dangerfield I sure so respect horrifying for me I get no respect Sarah BMS this Rodney Dangerfield part of the brain 10% of the brain's volume but has half of the brain's neurons and when you do coordination exercises you're developing that very important part of your brain and uh yeah I'm not a fan of hitting soccer balls with your head you said that multiple times yeah or letting kids play Taco football I did the big NFL study when the NFL was sort of lying they had a problem with traumatic brain injury in football and now everybody knows it's true why would you put a developing brain in a position to have damage think think about that your brain and most people don't know this but your brain is not finished developing until you're 25 so there's this process called myelinization so your neurons your brain cells get wrapped with a white fatty substance called myin sort of like insulation on a copper wire and once they're myelinated they work 10 to 100 times faster so this is where maturity happens mization well it starts in the back when you're two months old right babies can see and when you smile at them they smile back your prefrontal cortex largest in humans and the other animal by far Focus forethought judgment impulse control organization planning empathy learning from the mistakes you make it's not finished developing till you're 25 which is why I'm not a fan of sending kids away to college and have them join sororities and fraternities with other underdeveloped Brains it's just a prescription for a lot of trauma and bad things to happen I got my haircut this morning and uh it's a young lady that cuts my hair and uh she's always asking me for advice you know on life and I said well I said you know you'll see these videos on social media often when you ask somebody towards the end of their life they'll say what are your regrets and it's not typically I wish I'd have worked more it's typically I wish I'd have been more present with my family I wish I'd have traveled more I wish I had more memories and I told her and I wish I'd have taken more risks and pursued my dreams I wish I wouldn't have played it so safe in my life and it made an impact on her and I watched her kind of drift into her thoughts and she says you know Ed I think my generation at the end of their life when we get there they're going to say their biggest regret is they wish they spent less time on their phones they wish they spent less time on social media that they wasted their lives away in these digital devices and they weren't present in the real world and I told her I said I think you're 100% right she goes I know 30 years from now will'll be watching my generation say this so your point is so incredibly profound all right this is as usual my conversations with you I want to go 11 hours with you we've already filled up most of our time here today but I want to ask you this lastly um if someone's listening to this today they have a child or themselves they just have a sense that this person is in some sort of a spiral or a funk or a just they're not joyous and happy and productive what did I not ask you about today that I should have that would be be a technique or a strategy that's in the book by the way it's raising mentally strong kids I got to tell everyone this when I read the book it is about children but to be candid with all of you it's kind of you're your own kid and it's almost a way to raise a mentally strong you as well even if you don't have children but what is something you'd say to someone like they're just not themselves right now what is something they could be doing thinking a technique or a strategy right now for them well I would go back to bonding in special time I would make sure the first thing and yes you can take him to see a mental health provider um and that can be helpful can be hurtful that's not the right person sure right lot of that but but I think Step One is know what you want as a parent what kind of dad do I want to be what kind of mom do I want to be what kind of child do I want to raise because you know as entrepreneur everything really starts with what do I want what's the goal of my business what's the mission statement right parents hardly ever do that gosh that's true what what do I want and then what's going on with the bond between me and the child am I spending time and am I talking less and listening more and then because then you'll have be privy to their internal life and you'll be able to assess oh I need to get him help or I just need more time with them time is so healing and then there's this great story in the book about why I collect penguins and what do it tell us the story um so I just actually talked to my son uh when he I adopted him and he was hard for me argumentative oppositional he was hard and I'm in my child psychiatry training program 40 years ago and I'm telling my supervisor that I'm having trouble um and she goes you need to spend more time with him I'm like but I'm mad at him right and she said and gave me some strategies and that weekend I was doing my child's CH training program in Hawaii and there's a place in Hawaii called Sea Life Park on aahu so I took him to see Life Park and just he and I and we saw the killer whale show and that was great then we saw the Dolphin Show and that was fun and the sea lion show which was hysterical but at the end of the day he grabs my shirt and he said I want to see fat Freddy I'm like who's fat Freddy he's like the penguin show Dad don't you know anything right that's the quality of our religion and so we go into the stadium and this little fat humbl penguin walks onto the stage climbs a high diving board goes to the end bounces and then jumps in the water and I have my arm around my son and I'm like this is so cool and then Freddy bowled with his nose he counted with his flipper he jumped through a hoop of fire and I'm blown away until the trainer asked Freddy to go get something and Freddy went and got it and he brought it right back and time Stood Still for me then because I'm like damn I asked this kid to get something for me and he wants to have a discussion and then he doesn't want to do it I knew it was my fault I mean it just crystallized if she could get this bird to do all these really cool things I'm doing something wrong and I went up to the trainer afterwards and I said that was really amazing how did you get Freddy to do all these really cool things and she looked at and my son and then she looked at me and she said unlike parents whenever Freddy does anything like what I want him to do I notice him i' give him a hug and I'd give him a fish and the light went on in my head that even though my son didn't like raw fish that whenever he did what he I wanted him to do I didn't pay any attention to him because I was like my dad but when he didn't do what I wanted him to do I gave him a t ton of attention because I didn't want to raise bad kids so I was inadvertently noticing the wrong things so I collect Penguins as a way to remind myself notice what you like about the people in your life because every day you are shaping them uh to be positive or negative and it's helped me so much in my life I wish everybody can see your face right now yeah got me too I love you brother I love you back thank you for having me that's such a great story that's such a great story and it still impacts you that deeply now um You got me right there you got me that's why I love this man so much you guys um man I'm thinking do I do that I hope I pay attention to the good things I hope I give attention to the good things what a lesson for a marriage what a lesson for friends what a lesson for being a parent a boss supervisor ourselves ourselves I so often well One More Story I'm it's public knowledge I um Alicia Newman is my patient Alicia is an Olympic Athlete she has the Canadian record for pole vating she was the indoor World indoor pole vating Champion uh last year and when I first saw her she was so hard on herself she had a concussion which is why she on me um and she's she's just amazing now and we know every tournament or practice she wins or she learns so it's not about losing anymore it's about we win or we learn and that's beautiful I'm so proud of her and then there one more it's also public Miley Cyrus has been my patient and I love her so much but her song flowers which is about self love one song of the year she just got two Grammys for it and that's the whole message right it's not permissiveness that's the right thing it's being firm with yourself and kind at the same time yeah yeah that's 100% it being firm with your self and kind at the same time I'm proud of you I knew this would be good today I don't think I knew it would be this good though and I love you and I I love your work you guys this book is Raising mentally strong kids you should get it whether you have a kid or not because there's a kid inside of you that needs to be mentally stronger and be more resilient and heal themselves as well as usual by the way I'm getting all of these supplements that are in the book as well I'm on a lot of them already from you but I'm going to get the rest of them thank you for today thank you so much love you brother all right everyone hope you enjoyed Today's show clearly this is one I don't need to ask you to share share it with anybody that this applies to which is probably everyone that you know okay God bless you max out your [Music] life

Channel: Ed Mylett

Views: 202,694

Keywords: ed mylett, mylett, the ed mylett show, maxout, maxout with ed mylett, podcast, show

Id: oKmecQNxPQM

Length: 60min 28sec (3628 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 09 2024