DO THIS First Thing In The Morning To BOOST YOUR BRAIN & Increase Lifespan! | Dr. Daniel Amen

I want to start off with uh something that I feel is a topic that my audience really cares a lot about and that's the idea of how you start your morning sets the tone for the rest of the day if you were going to bundle a few of the habits or tips inside of here that are broken down by days into a morning routine what would that look like well the first thing I do I direct my energy to what I'm excited about so I knew this was coming today and that made me happy I have a whole bunch of other things today that's going to make me happy and you can either let your undisciplined mind control you and for so many people they wake up and they go to Darkness they go to negativity they go to what they're worried about and if you just leave it like that you suffer but if you direct it it tend to be pretty happy but you need that discipline so today is going to be a great day now what sets that up is actually the night before and so I think if you want to have a great day you have to go to bed like early and I say a prayer and then I go what went well today so those bookend my day and I believe by this daily practice my sleep is better my dreams are better and I feel much more in control of my mind so when you go to bed at night what went well and start at the beginning of the day and just go hour by hour now usually at lunch I'm asleep but I love the direction that I go so a couple questions on that she said go to bed early what does that look like and over the course of your life being a physician family man everything I'm sure that's changed so I used to love staying up till one or two o'clock in the morning and I I thought I was special because I could run on four hours of sleep at night and after the kids go to bed I'd stay up I'd write this is my 42nd book so it's my favorite book my wife says I always say that but this is my greatest hits in this book it's the most important things I've ever said but I used to like stay up late it was quiet I could get stuff done and then I started reading the research about how when you sleep your brain cleans and washes itself and I realized I wasn't special I was stupid and so making it uh priorities absolutely critical so in the last I don't know 15 years it's like I'm getting eight hours of sleep in fact I don't ever take a red eye and I don't take morning flights because if you take like a seven o'clock flight out of LAX you got to be up at four o'clock and I'm like no and I never sleep well if I have to take an early yeah 2AM you're worried that you're going to miss your flights getting up early yeah so I go well so I'll give myself an extra day in a city when I'm traveling rather than try to compress everything well how we ended up with evening is that you were saying your evening routine sets the tone for your morning routine anything else in the morning in addition to you sort of saying what you're grateful for or what you're looking forward to anything else that's a big part of your personal morning routine well I make my wife so she's a big part of my morning routine so before I get out of bed I generally find her and connect with her and then I make the decaf almond milk cappuccino so I don't know how that happened because it was her recipe but I make it for us we sit and chat for a little bit and then I have huddles with my executive team every morning and I'm always on the bike so I believe I'm more flexible I'm happier if I'm getting my heart rate up so too often people sit during meetings and I find no I have to do that with my patients I'm generally exercising so I'm in Laguna Beach walking uh while I have the meeting or I'm on Balboa Island walking I'm somewhere either walking or on my stationary bike while I do my huddles in the morning I love it so a little bit of movement gratitude you're you know love and kind of your relationship right inside of the book there's also a few references to like simple things that significantly make a difference people that we forget about and one thing you didn't mention but I'm sure you probably do because you wrote about it is water like something as simple as being appropriately hydrated in the morning can have a substantial impact on your focus for the day what's your routine or anything with water in the morning and it may sound basic to you but I think for a lot of people they wake up and they immediately go to the caffeinated beverage and they're not necessarily rehydrating their body after uh you know a night's sleep or our body gets super dehydrated so I always try to drink about half my weight in ounces a day so I track it during the day I think hydration is just incredibly important I love it you ever had electrolytes or anything to it or you're just drinking plain filtered water you know well part of I make something called bright Minds powder so part of my morning routine is supplementing my brain and so in a lot of water I put a scoop of that a scoop of something we make called neuro grains and then smart mushrooms because I'm a huge fan of mushrooms especially lion's mane mushroom for the brain I love it all right I want to zoom out in the start of the book there is a section that's dedicated to reminding people that their brain is an organ um and why is that such a revolutionary idea for some people give us the distinction when you don't know that your brain or you don't lean into the idea that your brain is an organ what ends up happening very few people actually care about their brains I was a double board certified psychiatrist I'm board certified and general Psychiatry and Child and Adolescent Psychiatry I was the top Neuroscience student in medical school and I didn't care like I had all sorts of bad habits that just was very clear I didn't care about a couple just in context well I wasn't sleeping okay sleep man I was chronically stressed I drank a lot of caffeine and I poorly you know I mean like Jack of the box was my lunch and I used to always kid about money uh it's like no matter what happens today I can eat at Wendy's tomorrow and and now I'm horrified given my education I should have known better but I just didn't care about my own brain until I saw it and it was older than I was it clearly wasn't healthy and the week before I had scanned my mother's brain and hers was stunningly beautiful which reflected her life and I developed this term called brain Envy Freud was wrong penis Envy's not the cause of anybody's problem it's your brain and I just and I it became so clear to me my brain is an organ like my heart is an organ and if you told me I had heart problems I'd do everything I could to prevent them and I fell in love with my brain and so the reason most people don't care about their brains is you can't see it you can see the wrinkles in your skin or the fat around your belly and you can do something when you're unhappy with it so we're recording this in Orange County and often say we have more plastic surgeons here than almost anywhere in the world we care more about our faces our boobs our bellies and our butts then we do our brain and that's insane but I did and I was educated and we just have to change this whole concept of it's not mental illness it's brain health and I think in broken brain you guys actually did a really good job of that get your brain right and your mind will follow and if we could just get that message Amplified get your brain right and your mind will follow will dramatically decrease the incidence of mental health problems well that's like a major part of the opening the book is setting the tone for that and now people helping people understand that what you do to your what you do to your brain you also do to your body right so give us an idea because for some people they're not going to actually know when your brain works right what's possible for you right like as basic as that sounds like when your brain is working in Harmony when we lean into the fact that our brain is an organ when we understand that what we do to our brain we do to our body and we start taking actions appropriately you have a bunch of them inside of here 365. what is actually possible for us in our lives energy creativity connection success however you define it comes from the physical functioning of your brain which of course is supported by the physical functioning of your body and so our first foundational principles your brain's involved in everything you do right how you think how you feel how you act how you get along with other people the second one just what you said is when your brain works right you work right and when it doesn't you don't and on the surface it's just clear it's simple every neuroscientist in the world would agree with that but it's very disturbing when you understand it because it directly attacks the idea of Free Will and most of us think we have a hundred percent free will it's just not true I think most of us have about 80 percent free will depending on the health of your brain but if you had a car accident or you played football all in high school and or in college and you had a number of concussions you probably have about 60 percent free will and then if you add a six pack of Michelob or a bottle of red wine now you have 30 percent free will and it really speaks to some huge societal issues uh about behavior and very few people connect that I've had the blessing I suppose you call it a blessing and scanned over a hundred murderers I've scanned about a thousand convicted felons their brains are hurt I mean not all but as a group they have terrible looking brains which is a reflection of their behavior so one of the first things the scans did for me is it gave me more empathy for people who struggle you often hear this phrase that you know it's so easy to judge somebody but if you grew up in their life circumstances in the same situation with the same parents in the same neighborhood you might have a lot of actions that are similar to theirs and part of that is that if your brain also had the same insults Trauma from parents who might have been dealing with alcohol abuse you know negative self-talk patterns that came from how your parents or your coach or teachers in that Community talk to you poor food choices that you were surrounded with as a child that led to maybe lack of blood flow as a brain so it's I think that empathy I think the word empathy is so key but along with it comes with like the law of responsibility which is that if we were part of the problem that's exciting because we can be part of the solution as well right versus because these things are just happening to us and there's nothing that we can we can do about it well and just because you have a bad brain doesn't mean if you do something bad you get to go home right that there are a lot of people who have a troubled brain that never do anything bad and but but it's clearly one of the factors that play into understanding people and you know most people who go to marital therapy no one's ever looking at their brain which in my mind that's insane right because you just got married I've been married to Tana for the last 15 years and marriage can be hard with a good brain if you don't have a good brain it can be big trouble and so when people struggle in their relationships somebody should be thinking about their brain when they go to help but no marital therapist on the planet I know of is like we're going to look at your brain in fact in the book I talk about this Couples from Hell study where I scan 500 couples who failed marital therapy but still wanted to be together and eighty percent of the time one or both of them had trouble that could be rehabilitated well you were talking about free will and you're talking about in this instance you know scanning people's brain before you know Partners come together when they're going through struggles there's an interesting story inside of the book where when you originally met your wife you I'm paraphrasing here so you clean it up you felt that she was on a particular medication that was damaging her brain that actually was having her make decisions that in a healthy brain she wouldn't is that accurate um clean it up not completely so when I met her I really liked her like she's beautiful she's smart um so about three weeks later I'm like you haven't seen the clinic come see the clinic so I could scan her because that's what I do in my family right if you date any of my children for more than four months I'm like you gotta come to the clinic because I want to look at your brain and did she know she was coming in to be scanned or was like hey come check out the clinic she's by the way do you want to get skinned she's a Neurosurgical ICU nurse so the we bonded a bit over the brain um she said that was the best line she ever heard I want to see your naked brain there you go and but the the story for her is years before she had thyroid cancer and then got depressed and the resident at UC Irvine who saw her put her on Prozac so never looked at her brain and thought you were depressed take Prozac and that's what happens in Psychiatry you come to a psychiatrist you tell them your symptoms I'm depressed he gives you a diagnosis with the same name of your you have depression here's an SSRI I mean that's stand it's insane but it's standard well on her scan she has sleepy frontal lobes her frontal lobes were not as active and prozacy absolutely wrong drug for her because serotonin drugs serotonin is an inhibitory neurotransmitter if you have a busy brain calms it down if you have a sleepy brain it drops it too much and can disinhibit you and then after just put on Prozac she'd find herself making decisions not consistent with her values on the Dare ended up in Costa Rica um and she went back to the doctor and she goes I'm not myself on this and he doubled her dose at which point she stopped it and she writes about it in her book The Relentless courage of a scared child it's a great chapter um but just if if we just think of the outcome of somebody putting you on the wrong medicine that drops your pre-fernal cortex that executive part of your brain sort of weakens it or takes it offline it can cause people to have affairs it can cause people to spend money they don't have can cause people to say things to their partner that they shouldn't say and all of a sudden it ruins your life and nobody knows it was the doctor's attempt to alleviate suffering that actually created more suffering and so for me it's like well how do I know unless I walk come one of the Hallmark things I've said over the years it's like why would I ever fly blind yeah it's an important topic and I think that when people hear it initially there can be this sense of overwhelm but what you're really talking about is that when you know what's wrong you can do something about it right when you know what's wrong you can do something about it you can make appropriate changes and depression is like chest pain it's a cluster of symptoms that have many different causes and so you would never think one treatment for chest pain is rational you would never you go you have chest pain and you go to the doctor and the doctor says oh I'm going to give you an nitroglycerin for that you would go aren't you going to look at my heart aren't you going to try it because there's you know dozens of reasons for chest pain depression is exactly the same thing but for some reason psychiatry in our societies thinks oh take an SSRI and you'll be better but that's sort of nuts I mean that's what happened when Lincoln was depressed in 1840 it's like oh you're depressed from talking to him looking at him looking at symptom clusters but it doesn't honor the fact maybe at arsenic poisoning or maybe as an infection and now in the era of covid covet dramatically increases the risk of depression um another sort of pillar that you set up in the beginning of the book is understanding all the different ways that your brain can say ouch you've already mentioned a few of them like chronic not sleeping right um you've talked a bunch about uh head trauma but there's some more that I have some questions on that we'll come back to that in a second but but give us some other things that are not typically what people think of as ways that their brain can end up saying ouch which could impact its performance so in the book I talk about this mnemonic I like a lot called bright minds and I think one of the Innovations we do at Amen Clinics besides Imaging is we really take a functional medicine approach to Psychiatry and the b in bright Minds is blood flow so low blood flows the number one brain Imaging predictor of Alzheimer's disease anything that decreases blood flow decreases brain function and so that's why I'm not a fan of caffeine or nicotine or marijuana because all of decrease blood flow if you have hypertension you got to get it treated because that decreases blood flow you're sedentary that decreases blood flow if you're overweight that decreases blood flow in fact if these 11 risk factors if you're overweight you have seven of them and 72 percent of the population is overweight and people don't think about that you know as your weight goes up the physical size and function of the brain goes down which should scare the fat off anyone um R is retirement and aging the older you get I'm going to be 69 this year the more serious you have to be and I'm a bit anxious about that I mean I do the right things but I've seen thousands of 60 70 80 year old brains and it's not good news right as your skin sort of falls off your face as you age that same process happens in the brain I is inflammation and you know the surprising thing about inflammation and a lot of people are talking about it but for my patients it's like if you have gum disease odds are you have brain disease if you have gum disease odds are you have heart disease if you have gum disease your guts probably not healthy so I became a flossing fool and like I'm at the dentist regularly I floss every day I'm serious about the health of my mouth because if that's not healthy my brain won't be healthy and then G is genetics and I think we don't think about genetics right you know we're like in what's a genetic test s and they're not awesome I've been very disappointed that you know your genetic test will tell us much but what I am very clear about is you should know your family rests like mine's heart disease and obesity and when you know your risk you should be on a prevention program every day of your life so rather than oh I have heart disease because it's in my family it's I don't have heart disease because it's in my family or for people who have alcoholism in their family they go oh well I drink too much because my dad and grandfather drank too much like well that's insane if you know it's a risk factor you should avoid it like the plague and so I studied children and grandchildren of Alcoholics my first wife grew up in a very abusive alcoholic home and so from the time my kids were like 10 I'm like they're drinking problems in this family if you don't drink you won't have a problem if you drink you might have a big problem so it's really it's knowing your risk factor and being on a prevention program every single day of your life I think that's the most rational thing to do and then head trauma which we'll talk about single most surprising thing I learned from my database but the t is so interesting it's toxins and we live in a toxic society and you've heard about this dramatic rise in autism that's not a genetic Thing by itself it's a gene environmental interaction and I think it's a gene toxin interaction it's the toxic products we put in our bodies it's some of the toxic medicines that parents take it's um we just live in this toxic soup that uh you know whether it's the drugs that have now become innocuous in the public mind it's I always say the big Innovations for 2023 or marijuana ketamine and magic mushrooms these are the big psychiatric Innovations I'd much rather them be lion's mane mushrooms and a healthy diet and exercise and avoiding putting toxic products on your body so surprise for me you know the app Think Dirty great app and it allows you to scan your personal products is it ewg it's like ewg and it'll tell you on a scale of zero to ten how quickly they're killing you so for example I say for barbasol since size 14 years old so for like 50 years I shaved with barbasol on a scale of zero to ten zero is good 10 is kill you early it's a nine oh no so now I shave this morning with something called kiss my face which is a do and it's actually not more expensive because it lasts forever um but imagine all the toxic products parents are putting on their children's bodies the dermatologist won they made us afraid of the Sun and so now we have this epidemic of low vitamin D levels but we also have this epidemic of kids carrying a toxic load in their body and if your body's toxic well means your brain is toxic too and like I'm a psychiatrist why do I care about that because I would look at scans and I'm like ew that scan looks like he's a drug addict or an alcoholic and but they're not it's because of the toxins mold is another toxin that's common general anesthesia that's a surprise that was a surprise for me general anesthesia can be toxic to the brain people have coronary artery bypass surgery have a higher incidence of dementia so under toxins there's a whole list from air pollution and water pollution ocean and pesticides on foods that you just let go or what to do what to do well you know that that for those of that are listening you know you just put your hands on your face and you're like oh my gosh right and I think a lot of people when they hear about these things it's like oh wow like where do I you know begin obviously here at Eamon clinics and you guys working individually with patients you're helping people put together a personalized plan but for the folks that are listening that are out there when they're listening to these top things that are root cause drivers of brain injury in some form and restriction of blood flow what have you found to be hierarchical and that would allow people to help understand where to prioritize if they don't immediately have access to like a functional medicine doctor or your clinics for example is uh you know you've shared on my podcast last time and inside the book you talk about why you're not a fan of caffeine because of its restriction of blood flow but you're also a realist and the recommendation on the caffeine section which I forgot what day number it is was like look at least try to go for 25 less caffeine or reduce your caffeine intake by 25 less was that day's sort of recommendation so is somebody having how do you balance it out like somebody who's looking at all the different things that they could do in their life and it's like okay should I get started with reducing caffeine or should I start with movement and doing a little bit of strength training and walking every week how do you approach um what gets priority in the context of all the things that we can focus on so in the book there are dozens of tiny habits what's the smallest thing you can do today that will make the biggest difference and the mother tiny Hobbit the most important tiny habit is when you go through your day just ask yourself is this good for my brain or bad for it and if you can answer that with information and love love of yourself love of your family love of the reason you're on Earth just start making better decisions and in the book I tell about the story about Nancy so Nancy who I dearly love in fact I think it was this room I first met her uh she's 83 she was from Oxford England and Crystal my niece who used to run this Clinic she said you have to meet Nancy she's from Oxford England she found your book change Your Brain Change Your Life in a used bookstore at Oxford University for 50 cents and she transformed her life and so here I met her and she tells me this story when I'm 80 I am obese in chronic pain depressed and think my life is over I find your book I let it lay around the house for about a year and then I start reading it and I was riveted so that made me happy and she said I started writing down all the things to do and she's like way too much so I'm going to do one thing at a time started drinking more water and then she said it forced me to get off the couch because I had to go pee a lot she said but I felt better and she said and then I started taking supplements multiple vitamin fish oil vitamin D because she'd test her love when it was low and she said my mood was better and then I started walking and then I started playing ping pong and then I started dancing and she said I'm becoming different and then I changed my food and I didn't not eat anything I want I just ate the good things first so there was no room for the bad things so I didn't feel deprived and then I started learning to play the guitar and then a language and I started crying when she's telling me this story because she's the reason why do what I do and she said now getting my family involved I lost 14 stones and I'm like what's a stone because I had no idea what a stone one she lost 70 pounds and she said I had no idea that my life could be this good at 83 and for my 83rd birthday I gave myself a present of coming to the clinic and getting a scan and if you looked at typical 80 to 90 year old brains as we talked about earlier they suck they're just not healthy and hers was stunning and she cried when she saw that and it's it's the big highlight is you're not stuck with the brand you have you could make it better and I can prove it and she cried because she said I knew last year my brain wouldn't have looked like this so one thing and that's why the book is organized the way it is it's it's like a 300 word essay it'll take you three minutes to read and one simple thing to do because brain and mental health as Nancy found out their daily practices but you don't have to start everything at once just one simple thing at a time and the mother of all of the simple things is this good for my brain or bad for it that's love like when I heard so many people go I can't have this and I can't have that and I can't and it's like you're a baby in brain health if you think that way that that's the wrong way to think about it when Drew Carey lost a lot of weight he said eating crappy food isn't a reward it's a punishment and I'm like oh he's going to stay healthy because he's got the right mindset as soon as you go as soon as your four-year-old's in charge of your life you know I want what I want when I want it um you're never going to get healthy until you go okay so what do you really want and if I asked you what do you really want when you see the plate of nachos or ice cream float or whatever what do you want I saw I want that it's like come on what do you really want for me I want energy and I want memory and I want good decision making I want creativity I want longevity and I love my six children I never want to live with them love them never want to live with them right when they go bless them I mean yes you're talking about when they leave the house when you know when I'm 70 or what I'm 80 or when I'm 90 I want to have clarity for the rest of my life I never want to be a burden but uh I think people don't focus on what they really want and how their habits serve them or hurt them because like alcohol doesn't serve any of these habits that I want energy memory longevity health Independence it damages it and yet I predict I know I'm like going on a side street that's the beauty of podcasts that alcohols alcohol is going to become like smoking that you know if you look at someone who's smoking you're like really seriously it's bad for you it's bad for me alcohol is going to become that it's not yet but I think in the next 15 years and and we're up against a big industry like a trillion dollar industry um but but starting to change the American Cancer Society came out against any alcohol yeah it's like the American Cancer Society there's a group in Canada that just I did a post on it and got over a million views uh they said they need to put cancer warnings on alcohol labels uh when you you know earlier you were chatting just piggybacking off this alcohol thread because we talked about it a little bit last time and you shared some of your thoughts that are there and you already see you know a lot of people even in the health space becoming more comfortable telling Their audience like look I just don't have alcohol or I've like greatly and significantly reduced my intake to the place where it's like okay great a friend's wedding or a situation or whatever but it's like you know I'm not I don't even call myself a social drinker so a lot more people have the are speaking out um about that um you were chatting earlier you put kind of alcohol we briefly chatted about this we didn't go too much deep into it marijuana but you've talked about it in Social a lot and then you've also talked about magic mushrooms right psilocybin um inside of there so I want to talk about those things just because you brought them up right now so marijuana for those that are not familiar with your content is the primary place that your biggest concern is around is again going back to this restricting of blood flow to the brain is that what you're saying so I published a study on a thousand marijuana users compared to healthy every area of their brain is lower and blood flow and activity every area and then I did a study I did the world's largest I think the world's largest brain Imaging study sixty two thousand four hundred and fifty four scans on how the brain ages and it's fascinating little kids have very busy active brains sort of stabilizes around 25 to about 60 and then it's a slow March lower and then we looked at well what accelerates aging and we have this massive database using marijuana using alcohol using cigarettes having diagnoses like depression or ADHD or schizophrenia schizophrenia age the brain the most but what shocked me is marijuana age the brain the second most and oh lord well that's not a good thing and now alcohol is not good nicotine's not good for the brain but why would I ever do anything that ages my brain the second thing and I'm also a child psychiatrist and I've known for a long time that marijuana and Adolescence is bad for the developing brain it demotivates kids if I had a 14 year old who all of a sudden has ADD but they didn't have ADD when they were 12 I'm like you need to pee in the cup I mean you needed to do a drug screen and marijuana was the most common offender um teenagers who smoke and my big concern as the perception of the dangerousness of a drug goes down its use goes up and now marijuana is everywhere you live in LA I live in Orange County they're pot dispensaries all over the place it's good medicine so teenagers are smoking at rates never seen before but if you use marijuana as a teenager you have a 450 percent increase risk of having a psychotic illness in your 20s if you smoke during adolescence you have a higher incidence of anxiety disorders depression and suicide well I'm not okay with this and what's happening in your brain in your teens and early 20s you're building the highways I mean they're getting myelinated which means they're getting strengthened they're going to go faster and you're throwing poison in there disrupting that which may end up be a permanent disruption so I'm like just not on board with it and I don't know if you remembered her in the presidential debates uh during the Democratic presidential debates someone asked then Vice President Biden should the federal government legalize marijuana and he's like I think more research needs to be done and Cory Booker shamed him I was so angry he's like man are you high like Cory Booker decided the science has been set and Biden was high no it's it's clearly not settled and my experience and my research says I'd avoided if I could yeah there was a great book that I came across a few years ago the guy's a little controversial but his name is Alex Berenson former New York Times journalist who wrote a book parents tell your kids the truth about weed and he goes in and his his wife was a expert uh I believe she's a psychiatrist as well and she would be an expert witness for these parents who were saying like my often a young male who was smoking a lot of marijuana and people forget that you know besides just the general concern the THC content has exploded since 10 times and when I was a teenager 10 times more I've even heard like 20 times more in some instances and just what that can do to the brain it's a it's a good book again he's a little controversial figure but I thought there's a new term that many of your listeners probably haven't heard yet called scrometing so I haven't even heard of that I adopted my two nieces so even at home now I have a 13 year old and an 18 year old and and why did I adopt them because their parents couldn't stop using drugs and um it was awful for them I mean they were just raised in chronic stress and the older one and I tell this story in my book the end of mental illness I dedicate my book the end of mental illness to these two children and um at 11 Alize the older one named after cognac so there's some interesting thing about that Alize uh had a damaged brain was so clear and you know whether it's her mother drank when she was pregnant I don't know but we spent a lot of time repairing it and I'm like you need to avoid drugs right I mean that's a genetic risk factor and so I'm always teaching her new words I'm like hey scrum it and look it up and she goes it's combination of screaming and vomiting which is now common in emergency rooms right if you walk in the emergency room and someone is screaming while they're throwing up scrometing it's from marijuana poisoning wow I've not heard of that I got to look into that that's crazy okay moving on to the next one mushrooms you know for a long time because mushrooms were on this and still are under this Federal ban most of people's experiences would be you know taking mushrooms and sort of uh a party recreational setting other things like that as the federal ban on Research came out you know people like Dr Roland Griffiths who's been on this podcast before talking about some of their work with smoking cessation end of Life Care other things like that what are your thoughts I'm kind of separate a little bit what are your thoughts about psilocybin in sort of an assisted or clinical setting that has a specific purpose or an intention behind it right so I'm very worried about it and now let me be clear I'm not opposed to marijuana for everything that end of life it helps you eat awesome I actually got it for my father-in-law um for children who have seizure disorders that you can't control on other things awesome uh but but let's not say it's good and teenagers should go out and talk about marijuana specifically marijuana but we have seen this show before with psilocybin when Valium and benzos first came out oh Mommy's little helper they're innocuous and they're clearly not innocuous benzos hurt a lot of people once you start them you can't stop them opiates and this came out in the 90s that oh if you have chronic pain pain pain should be the fifth Vital sign and we should do everything we can to decrease people's pain and then thus the opiate epidemic is killing a lot of people um alcohol's health food and like clearly it's not health food and I think mushrooms in certain situations can be helpful but they're also harmful and nobody's talking about that there are bad trips there are people that start them and it can trigger an anxiety disorder and I'm really worried we're going there before we go to teaching you not to believe every stupid thing you think or dealing with trauma with a technique I love called EMDR eye movement desensitization and reprocessing when I do it with patients I'm like now this is like being on mushrooms without the side effects it's so powerful um and then I was a huge fan of Will Smith uh he did a movie called concussion and I was a consultant on the movie and I loved him and I loved everything so in his biography autobiography came out early 2022 I read it right before the Oscars and at the end of the book he talks about going to South America and doing ayahuasca 14 times and I'm like well it didn't fix anything because you know then you know the thing at the Oscars happened at all or maybe it did and he still had some demons that were you know left that were there I don't know see for me it's like let me look at your brain let me balance it in the least toxic healthiest ways and then let's see what else we need but what the mushroom thing is going to do just like the ketamine thing just like marijuana is a quick fix without getting the Baseline strategies of Hell in place yeah I feel like and that's my word yeah that's the worry that's the concern that's that's as it becomes more popularized people look at it as like a pill for nil yeah I would say that just my own sort of personal viewing of the landscape landscape is that I definitely know that there's bad trips like the big survey that was done by Dr Roland Griffiths his estimation was about eight nine percent of you know based on their National survey that they did are actually bad trips and he's the first person to say and tell people like bad trips happen right like bad trips are there when I've seen people who eat healthy live healthy do these other things they're not looking at their only component it does seem to be that these people that are out there talk about it being one of the mystical experiences that are in their life now I hear what you're saying which is that okay but do we need that and what are the down stream effects potential negative effects of going through that and could there be something else that's better like EMDR and it's a it's in its infancy so when you get on board too quickly there are problems with that now I've actually always been a fan of legalizing drugs please don't put people in jail for that behavior it's complete waste of resource um let's learn about it the Imaging work I've done before and after and my doctors here at Amon clinics have done before and after shows it decreases blood flow that's like on an individual level no study yet like you did with marijuana but maybe one day you'll do that well I actually did one of my patients who I just dearly love I have his brain I think 2010 and it was hard because of a traumatic brain injury and he had addiction issues and then hyperbaric oxygen which I'm a huge fan of supplements five months later his brain's better five years later it's normal it's awesome and then he's like I'm gonna go do a documentary on ibogaine and take that let's do a before and after scan and his before scan was awesome his after scan was awful and um because and I like begged him like please don't do that don't ruin the work we've done but one question for the folks that were with the that you did the study with marijuana you said a thousand thousand people that were there what was the threshold of people being a part of that study in terms of how much were they smoking I did I think there's I don't smoke and I've never really been into marijuana but I think a lot of people who are listening would be curious about that like how frequently were these people smoking or using marijuana they got a marijuana use disorder so so it was not three times a year it was something that was impairing their life got it so these are like people who are smoking multiple times maybe even a day okay yes got it all right okay moving on from you know one principle I think we should talk about please if I'm gonna do something that may be bad can I overcome that by doing all the right things so for example I did the big NFL study when the NFL was lying it had a problem so this was back in 2008 2009 2010 um high levels of damage like stop lying about it playing football is a brain damaging sport um but one of my players had an 88 million dollar contract so he was gonna play and it just reminded me as if you're going to do something that's not necessarily great for your brain you should be doing everything else right it's like why did Tom Brady play at an extraordinary level until he was 45 years old well if you read his book tb12 I know very well every other thing he does in his life is right from going to bed at nine o'clock to not eating crap hydration everything he did and so I'm like if you're going to do something that's not great make sure everything else you're doing is great and that helps to soften yeah the blow so the book has plenty of things in terms of things that you could do to better the brain right soften the blow we'll get into those but one more thing I want to talk about which I think is still fascinating to this day I've probably fell in this category too on another thing that hurts your brain you wrote inside the book we have to ask people 10 times whether or not they had a head injury you know you talked about the NFL obviously people understand in that context now right um regular traumatic head injury and the challenges it has but talk about why you had to ask normal everyday people like me and you why they had uh head injury like up to 10 times because they forget like big things they forget and I had no clue like I mean I'm an army trained psychiatrist I did my training at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington DC and so if you're treating a lot of service people head injuries are a big deal um and so we're taught have you ever had a head injury and then we believe them yes or no and then I started scanning in 1991 you can see brain drama very clearly on scans uh it's you know generally decreased activity it might be in the front and the back because of this thing called a contra coup injury and you would see the evidence on the scan but they would say no and the first time this happened I mean it was so clear I'm like well are you sure I said I don't think so and then I'm thinking well what are all the ways have you ever fallen out of a tree off a fence dove into a shallow pool have you ever been in a car accident if you ever had concussions playing sports have you ever run into a play glass window and and he's looked at me and he said oh my god when I was seven years old I fell out of a second story window do you think that counts I had this one guy it was my favorite story on this is he had Tourette's syndrome and which is a tick disorder and because he had a tick disorder to get scanned you have to lay perfectly still for about 15 minutes and he had a tick though that messes up the scan so I actually took off my wedding ring and my watch and I got on top of him in the camera and I held his head for 15 minutes still and afterwards and he was going through drug withdrawal I'm like you know now that we have this close personal relationship stay and we'll look hit a very clear head injury to the left front side of his brain and I'm like Have You Ever Had a Brain Injury and he said no and he was sort of irritable because he was in withdrawal and I'm like are you sure and now I sort of irritated him and he's like f no but I grew up in the grocery business swearing never bothered me very much and um like ever fall out of a tree have no off of fence F no dive into a shallow pool F no concussion playing sport F no oh my God I lied to you I'm like what he said about five years ago before my addiction started I was riding my motorcycle around the lake and a baby deer came onto the road and I didn't want to hit the deer so I spilled the bike on my left side and broke my left jaw he said do you think that counts F yes I said undiagnosed brain injuries are a major cause of something you said number one right would you say that it's the single most important lesson I've learned yeah from separate from 200 yeah and you know that sort of thing but yeah I mean there's so many great lessons but protect your head and as much as I loved football I mean I played football did you think that everything that came out about the NFL and and head injuries and and the scans and what your work you did and like the NFL is doing better than ever and I have no judgment on it one way or another did you think that it was going to have an impact in terms of people you know watching the sport they're interested in the sport just curious um Pop Warner has gone down by about 50 percent Pop Warner Pop Warner so little kitty football okay got it and educated parents are not going to let their children play got it why would you so if the brain creates everything right it's involved in everything you do and when it works right you work right and it's soft about the consistency of soft butter tofu custard somewhere between egg whites and gel and it's housed in really hard skull that has sharp body ridges so your brain helps you be successful in life it's soft and housed in a skull with hard sharp bony ridges really you're gonna let your children because they may be the ones taking care of you you you're really going to let them damage potentially damage their brain it's just not wise and the NFL has done a better job of taking the head out of the game but you know even during the playoffs we've seen Wicked brain injuries and so I believe if you're going to do a bad thing for your brain you should be rehabilitating it all the way along and football's not the only brain damaging profession sure firefighter is it brain damaging profession our foundation supports a lot of firefighters because they have head trauma they have toxic exposure and they have emotional trauma I mean almost all the firefighters that I know have a level of emotional Trauma from what they've seen I want to Pivot to another thing that you're putting the spotlight on you've done in other books as well sleep apnea talk about why sleep apnea as so much more than what people think of like the classic older overweight individual who you know very clearly is like snoring loudly at night right like that's very clear but there's a whole other group of sleep apnea that people are totally missing out on well and one of them is in children that when I was growing up it was actually very common to take out your tonsils or adenoids if they were impairing your Airway it's much less common now but if your kids snore at night they have a higher incidence of ABV because their brain's not getting properly oxygenated so that's what's really important your brain is the most oxygen hungry organ in your body it's two percent of your body's weight but uses about 20 percent of the blood flow and 20 percent of the oxygen so whenever you're in an oxygen debt state harder for you to think so people have sleep apnea are often look like they have ADD even though they didn't have it as a child they are more likely to be overweight and have trouble losing that weight as hard as they try um and they irritate their Partners a lot a lot of different theories on this but I don't know if you read James nestor's book breath I have yeah I love that book one of the biggest things that he talks about is that you know the narrowing of our Jaws that has happened through a combination of industrialized you know diets and that putting a lot of pressure in how we breathe and a whole generation of kids now uh that then became adults are you know mouth breathers instead of nasal breathers uh I think let me talk about taping your mouth yeah we're a big fan of it I my wife when we uh came together I was telling you I got married last year um she was a mouth breather at night and I was like babe I know this is going to sound crazy but I'm gonna start taping your mouth at night and it's because I love you and it's worked wonders she feels so much more focused the next day because it just forcing her to breathe through her nose that's so interesting and if you breathe right at night you think right the next day because your brain has been properly oxygenated yeah and and you know who would think about that physical function can impact your vote so maybe it's not mental health maybe it's brain health um and I love breathing I have in the book I talk about the 15 second breath and how to almost immediately break a panic attack um four seconds in hold it for a second and a half eight seconds out hold it for a second and a half 15 second breath you do that four times your anxiety drops like a rock I love it it's a great recommendation I remember seeing it uh one of the things you talk about this book and you've shared in other books is this idea of like understanding your brain type right walk us through that and how did you come up with what these different brain types are and then what implications do they have in terms of personalizing this approach to ourselves well when I first started scanning people I was looking for what does depression look like in the brain or what is ADHD look like in the brain or OCD and and I was sort of looking for the one pattern that would help me make a diagnosis and early on I realized none of these have one pattern they all have multiple types but people who had healthy brains tend to have healthy lives people who had low frontal lobe function tended to be more spontaneous and impulsive people had high anterior cingulate so it's deep in the front part of the brain when that was busy they tended to be worried rigid and flexible things don't go their way they get upset and I'm like so I've written whole books on seven types of anxiety and depression seven types of add six types of addicts five types of Overeaters and then I went this really tells us what kind of person you're going to be and so I developed a brain type assessment to help me assess without a scan which of the five primary types you are so balanced healthy brain spontaneous sleepy frontal lobe sort of my ADD group persistent High frontal lobes my ocd-ish group uh sensitive their limbic brain is active and cautious there are amygdala basal ganglia tend to be cautious and there's a total of 16 types from 6 to 16 it's combination so two three four and five and it's so helpful just to know what I tend to be cautious or I tend to be sensitive or I tend to be spontaneous and then well what are the behavioral strategies and what are the supplement strategies and it's the goal for everybody to move towards a a balanced brain are there naturally Society where people are going to have just you know different variations and some people are going to be more creative and spontaneous yeah I think the goal is to be your best self with the healthiest brain and as you move toward more balance you tend to be emotionally more balanced all right before we conclude on some mindset related questions as we wrap up the interview I want to ask you about a topic that was in the book you've written about it before but it always gets people's attention how can improving your brain health improve your sex life whatever is good for your heart is good for your brain because your brain gets 20 percent of the blood flow and then in 2007 I wrote a book called The Brain in love and I'm like oh I miss something whatever's good for your heart is good for your brain is good for your genitals because it's about blood flow and one of the things I've noticed over and over and over and over is if someone goes on a brain health program their erections get harder they get better they get more consistent and why is that important because your love life is critical to happiness and 40 of 40 year olds report having erectile dysfunction that's horrifying to me and 70 of 70 year olds have a rectile dysfunction which is why on the news we see all the commercials or on TV we see all the commercials for Viagra Cialis Levitra um we we have a serious erectile dysfunction problem in the United States and I think it's tied to metabolic syndrome and obesity and diabetes but when you get your brain right your love life gets better physically but what I often say is you have no forethought there's no foreplay ultimately a healthy brain gives you better decision making allows you to listen better gives you better empathy um which means odds are you're more likely to get lucky a little tangent here going back to something you said earlier you said you have a higher risk of heart disease in your family is that right and then you looked at your own assessment is that what through genetics like certain um um now my grandfather died of Art Attack okay got it had uh a hard day rhythmia so I clearly have it so and but I don't have heart disease yeah yeah uh but it wasn't any genetic sort of you know higher risk that came in from the Gen X no I'm supposed to die of a blood clot okay which is why I take omega-3 fatty acids every day got it well I was going to go into you know there's a lot of different people that talk about you know what is good for the heart you know you're sharing earlier like what's good for the heart is good for the brain you know some people say like you know saturated fat more than 10 of your diet is the devil because they believe in the cholesterol link to you know atherosclerosis and there's other people that say well we don't have enough data of that sort of healthy user who's not insulin resistant who works out who doesn't smoke and doesn't drink and has vegetables in their diet and whether or not saturated fat is a problem for them so I was just curious just because you mentioned it earlier are there any things that you've done as you are more foreign protective of your heart health and things that you're making decisions on that you decided or not decided like for example like do you actively go out of your way to reduce or avoid red meat in your diet right or are you not worried about that I'm basically looking for what is the Dan Dr Daniel Amen approach to all the data that's out there and the different folks that argue one way or another when it comes to heart health so I'm a fan of a healthy cholesterol what a lot of people so my unique spin on it is low cholesterol under 160 is associated with depression homicide suicide and death from all causes because cholesterol is the building block of a lot of the hormones that we have and so this beat the drum low cholesterol low cholesterol low cholesterols nuts as far as I'm concerned now you don't want high of the bad cholesterol but LDH people think of or LDL that's the bad cholesterol no no no it's critical cholesterol but there's fractionated parts of it they're the big fluffy a particles which are pretty much innocuous and little tiny B particles which are really problematic because that's what causes atherosclerosis so the total number is not nearly as important my cholesterol always tends to run a little high but my HDL is like 90 which is you know what people think of as good cholesterol I think red meat it depends if you are eating grain-fed red meat that's probably pro-inflammatory and bad for you if you're eating naturally raised red meat um grass-fed red meat probably good for you unless you're like me and you have high ferritin levels so ferritin is a measure of iron storage and high ferritin premature aging it's one of the Aging risk factors and so I have to go donate blood which I was thinking of doing it this weekend donating blood on a regular basis to keep my ferritin in a healthy range now if you have low ferritin you're probably having trouble sleeping and you're probably anxious and you look like you have ADD so you want to keep it in a healthy range somewhere between like 40 and 70. um but I there's [Music] um new work on the ketogenic diet for mental health yeah are you talking about Dr Chris Palmer or yeah yeah we had him on the podcast just recently oh I love Dr Palmer have you guys connected before I did an Instagram live with you oh it's amazing because I've been a fan of the ketogenic diet for a long time and I have a granddaughter who turns 12 tomorrow who's basically been on it since she was nine months nine months old miraculous for her seizure disorder and I'm like well I use anti-convulsants all the time in psychiatry if you have bipolar disorder if you have temper problems if you have mood swings it tends to level people out well if you can use a natural um anti-convulsant diet ketogenic diet why not think about that we way too many simple carbs in this country and when people go on a ketogenic diet they're not hungry I mean it's like one of the huge benefits of a ketogenic diet But It's Tricky right I mean you really have to think because people go oh I can just eat all the meat I want it's like no ketogenic diet is and the more liberal ones are called two to one it's you need twice the amount of fat as you have carbs and protein that's tricky and so you end up with a fair amount of saturated fat in that and there's studies showing it helps with long covet there are studies that show can increase longevity that burning ketones is more efficient and better for your mitochondria than burning sugar yeah we didn't talk about sugar but that's probably another one of those things High consumption of sugar in our diet insulin resistance that has a lot of detrimental impact on the brain well the D in bright Minds we haven't talked about it much yet is diabesity where you're overweight and have high blood sugar either one of them is a risk factor for Alzheimer's disease but when you put them together it's you have seven of the risk factors if you are overweight or obese you have low blood flow to your brain your brain looks older than you are you have inflammation because fat cells produce something called inflammatory cytokines you that stores toxins um it changes your hormones uh fat on your belly takes healthy testosterone levels and turns it into unhealthy cancer promoting forms of estrogen you're also more likely to be anxious and depressed and then you have diabetes the diabetes risk I'm like oh and I published three studies first on my healthy group so I have a healthy group it's hard to find healthy people just saying um healthy overweight or obese versus healthy not lower blood flow especially on the front part of the brain and then in my NFL group I'm like overweight or healthy way overweight less blood flow in the front part of their brain and then last year I published a study on 33 000 scans there was this linear correlation healthy overweight obese morbidly obese lower lower lower lower now 72 percent of Americans are overweight and and why I was furious with the lockdown I mean not to get political you can get political if you want furious at the insane response to the pandemic not one thing out of the National Institute of Health we are sick as a society we need to work on getting healthy instead they locked us down where people got fatter and more addicted it was just the wrong stuff they want to give everybody I was epic including kids especially kids it's it's the pharmaceutical Industries running things and it's like why would we why would we do that unless we were just a bit insane well yeah it seems like we are a little bit insane no I'm not in in the book I talk a lot about um if I was an evil ruler and I wanted to create mental illness I think I have like 20 evil ruler days in the book what would I do and I'd have that response to the pandemic I wouldn't you know what should they have said to do is if you're overweight this is a great time to get healthy if you have low vitamin D everybody should get their vitamin D level checked you should have your vitamin D level B mid-range or high normal people had healthy vitamin D levels died less from covid that's the cheapest intervention but if you lock everybody inside where they're not getting the sun you're dropping their vitamin D levels and low vitamin D also goes with a smaller brain a lot I read that study and when I first tested mine and I live in Southern California where the sun's out a lot um it was terrible and I'm like but I'm inside during the day I was never really thinking about it yeah super important I hope that we uh learn from the response that we had for the future I feel like as the media shifts and more people are listening to you know going to like Instagram Pages like yours right we have linked to your social media and the show notes people can follow you people are listening to podcasts and people are getting their news source from different areas they're getting a chance to hear the healthy debates doesn't mean that we have to all agree I'm actually okay with polarity like I want people to have disagreement about that if they blocked the people who had a different opinion that's not America it's like how did they all of a sudden determine that Free Speech wasn't part of who we were is a people it's my speech or no speech yeah I'm still for sure it's good to see that shifting I think we went one way we went way too far one way and so now you have a group of people that are you know I know people will have a lot of different opinions about them but even like Elon Musk taking over Twitter you know apple apple was one company that basically said like because we don't make money on Advertising they didn't say this out loud and this is the vast majority where people listen to podcasts from in my audience and then there's Spotify which also has very strong you know freedom of speech rules but um Apple was like We'll let anybody talk about anything we're like a public utility for our podcast app like we don't even so people want to listen to whatever they want to listen to Great like we're not going to subvert the information unlike you know social other social media channels that were there anyways I'm kind of getting off a tangent but I'm hoping that we learned some of the lessons what a time what a time what a Time what do you think are some of the top couple or one or three beliefs that get in the way from people making progress on improving their health and their brain health it's hard that's the first one that's the first one there's it's hard it's hard um everything in moderation it's the Gateway thought to hell it's a Gateway thought to cheating um it's expensive where having an unhealthy brain is way more expensive because your decision making goes down I think it's hard and if it just started with is this good for my brain or bad for it and that's three seconds so it's easy and you just need to gather the information and you know whether it's your podcasts Dr Hyman's blocks my books so much of the content spree that pretty but it's just is this good for my brain or bad for it and quite frankly most second graders we get a 90 percent right like when my daughter was seven I went into her second grade class and I wrote 20 things on the board and I'm like separate them for me good for your brain or bad for it and I put marijuana and alcohol and plain tackle football and not sleeping uh being in a home with chronic stress and multiple vitamin taking fish oil eating your vegetables they got 95 right the only thing they missed orange juice they put it in the good category That's The Power of marketing yeah no my dad was a grower for Sunkist when he heard me start going after orange juice he's like what's the matter with you someday the oranges will be yours and I'm like love oranges no on unwrapping fruit sugar from its fiber source there's another um trap that we get into that you write about in the book and that's these automatic negative thoughts what are they how do we identify them and most importantly how do we move Beyond them running our lives and I and for a lot of people they they are running their lives so there's nowhere in school where we teach children not to believe every stupid thing they think thoughts come from all sorts of places they come from our genetic code that if you have trauma in a past generation you're more likely to be negative in this generation they come from the voices of our mother and our father they come from the voices of our teachers our coaches our friends our those they come from the news we listen to from the music we hear and they lie a lot and just because you have a thought has nothing to do with whether or not it's true and I was 28 years old and had a fair amount of anxiety growing up um I used to bite my fingernails and um which came from where by the way I know I'm going on a tangent but the general sense of anxiety that you had what do you think was the well what's well two things um my grandfather when he was 19 years old his brother was killed in a train accident and he thought it was his fault and he was furious at his sister who lent him the car and he held a grudge for decades so I think some of that but the other thing is I'm the second son in Lebanese family so which growing up you just sort of feel irrelevant and I got beaten up a lot by my older brother and like every video home videos that my dad took he's beating me up and when I'm 50 I went to my dad and I'm like why didn't you stop him he's like somebody had to take the movie which I just thought was complete crap and so I think that sort of set it up um but help me with the fight that I've been in for the last 30 years with my colleagues about Psychiatry is broken we need a better way anyways I'm in my psychiatric residency I'm 28 years old and a professor said you don't have to believe everything you think and I'm like holy I've always believed everything I thought and one day how the am thing came about is it's about 1991 I had a really hard day at work I saw four suicidal patients which is a lot and two couples who hated each other two teenagers who ran away from home and I went home and I was I remember feeling tired and I came home to an ant infestation in my house and I'm like seriously and I was cleaning up the ants I began because when you're a medical student you have to learn 50 000 new words and you're always making up mnemonics and acronyms and I'm like automatic negative thoughts my patients are invested and the next day I brought a can of raid to work and I put it on my coffee table I said I'm going to teach you kill the ants today you don't have to believe every stupid thing you think and then over time it morphed I went to Pier 39 in San Francisco and I found an ant puppet and an ant eater puppet and I would play with that because I'm also a child psychiatrist and it's one of the most important things I do with people whenever you feel sad or mad or nervous or out of control write down what you're thinking because the act of writing helps you get it out of your head and then I have nine different types of ants I talk about in the book like fortune telling mind reading labeling guilt beating blaming identify what kind of ant it is and then talk back to it now were you any good at talking back to your mom and dad when you were a teenager yeah I was excellent my both my parents would tell you I was excellent but nobody ever taught me to talk back to myself and and I've been picked on a lot by the media which is frustrating I don't like it and recently I got picked on again and I'm like I hate this and so I wrote that down I hate this and then there's five questions like is it true yes I hate this is it absolutely true no because I keep doing the things that bring negative attention to myself you know if you're going to be in a war you have to be able to have armor and so I'm like no not absolutely how does it make me feel anxious how would I feel without it normal the fifth question is the best question let's take the original thought I hate this turn it to the opposite this is like Byron Katie's work type thing it is yeah okay but a little bit on steroids okay and it's like I love this and then focus on well which one's really true and I love being in the fight yeah of changing a medical specialty I actually um have done a lot of work with Byron Katie and have her scan which wasn't healthy but then it was but she's the most peaceful person and you find when you don't believe your thoughts you don't suffer um I'm a big fan of her work it's beautiful you guys got to work together going back to criticism I think I've I've seen what you're talking about obviously we're friends we're colleagues you know we're always kind of aware of what's out there in the zeitgeist and I feel like okay great you can have thoughts about people's approaches things like that but especially when you know there's like the The Click bait component there are certain celebrities that when people write about them that article is just going to be that much more read by people right so people love and you've worked with a lot of celebrities over your career and I felt like the part that felt most disingenuous is that so many times the media wants to criticize celebrities for having unhealthy habits for you know not talking about things that are maybe like positive whatever it might be and now here are a group of people that are seeking out genuine help and have publicly talked about how they've gotten better by following a protocol that you've put together for them and that insight and now we want to go after people who are genuinely trying to be an example of improving their life to their followers when all day long we want to criticize people for for not making a positive statement or not trying to be a good example that was one of the most disingenuous parts that I felt from and they don't go after them they go after me and it's like this person just said I changed their life so now why are you looking for crap on me and it's it's irritating but at the same time one of my NFL players said they only try to tackle people with the ball yeah yeah so um yeah I've been very disappointed and the media because it's no longer about the news it's about clicks in fact in the Washington Post uh one of my friends did an internship there and she said they actually have a board in The Newsroom on which stories online get the most clicks so it's driven in large part by hatred and fear because that's what gets the most clicks and ultimately when I'm out in public people recognize me and in 30 years I've only had one person be unhappy with me in public and everybody else has said you've changed my son's life or thank you for your work and ultimately I have this Great rule in the book I talk about the 1840 60 rule that says when you're 18 you worry about what everybody's thinking of you and when you're 40 you don't give a damn what anybody thinks about you and when you're 60 you realize nobody has been thinking about you at all and even people who have big followings most people aren't thinking about us there thinking about themselves so if something negative comes out I'm like not the first time it's not going to be the last time and I love what I do yeah you're fighting the good fight that's why uh you know Warrior seems to be a theme amongst a lot of the stuff that you do and the work and you're giving back and you know you stepped into this position and uh you're taking the hits but it's for the larger aspect of the community and people who are suffering getting a chance to benefit I know I've benefited from your work a lot of my friends have as well and I just want to acknowledge you for being in the fight thank you Dr Ayman this has been great the book is out there all the best hits inside of it change your brain every day simple daily practices to strengthen your mind memory moods Focus energy habits and even your relationships um send you all the Good Vibes for this book anything additional you want to mention about where to send our followers who are right up the alley of everything brain health amenclinics.com to learn about our Clinical Services brand MD which I'm so proud of are supplement company that's just grown like crazy to nourish your brain amen University for courses and they can follow me uh doc underscore Eamon on Instagram and document on Tick Tock of all places I love it hit the new generation that's where they're at they need brain help just as much as anybody else does thank you for letting me use your studio and thank you for being part of this interview super appreciate you thanks Drew hey YouTube If you enjoyed what you just saw keep watching for more great content on how to improve your brain and your life when you remove these various insults that are actually causing this imbalance no surprise people start to improve and they are now once again able as you said earlier neuroplasticity so this is

Channel: Dhru Purohit

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Id: RPzmVOdX73k

Length: 91min 43sec (5503 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 27 2023