Former Football Player Lewis Howes "I Felt Like I Was Dumb My Whole Life"

[Music] so [Music] thanks for having me again appreciate it you have a great brand okay and you scored really well on a lot of the testing cool um but you played football right for a long time and you were taught to lead with your head right in the front and you're over and over big and you're strong right and that's bad right right my hope is you're gonna fall in love with your brain i'm excited so i read your history and i looked at your scans and i've looked at your testing and i have a pretty good idea why you're here but i want to hear from you your goals what do you want uh i think peace of mind peace of mind clarity uh and to have awareness about what's actually happening in my mind and my brain and see if there's things i can do to improve or things i can do to continue to stay on the track of it's in a good place and just more clarity awareness and a game plan moving forward of how to maintain a healthy brain for the rest of my life great so obviously many many strengths successful athlete entrepreneur teacher author podcaster influencer right so let's just start with that whatever state your brain is in it's really helped you right get to where you are [Music] you're the youngest of four you grew up in a small town in ohio um you were sexually molested by the brother of a babysitter starting at age five yeah only one time only one time um older brother went to jail yeah and you went to jail a lot to visit almost every weekend for how long of four and a half years what was it like i think it was really stressful the first six months to a year because it was a very traumatic event for the whole family i mean my parents were under a lot of stress and that kind of trickled down to my other siblings it was just like i think my brother had a lot of shame and guilt for being in prison and it just affected all of us so i remember it was also i didn't really i wasn't able to hang out with kids during that time because being in a small town everyone knew about this so the parents on the neighborhood that i lived on wouldn't let their kids hang out with me because you know maybe i'm bad or maybe i'll do something to mess up their kids or whatever because my brother so that was challenging but after a while you got i got used to going to the the prison you know it's a process you go through security it takes like an hour to get in they check everything so you go through all these metal detectors pat downs everything just to go into kind of the visitor area but then when i was in there i realized like there's a lot of good men in there that just made bad decisions make bad mistakes and i was becoming friends with other inmates and learning their stories and just as curious you know eight-year-old nine-year-old ten-year-old i would just walk around and just ask questions realize they weren't that bad of humans they just made some bad mistakes so it became a normal you know after a while i love that it's easy to call people bad it's easy it's harder to go why exactly and who among us has not made mistakes that we wouldn't do again absolutely right yeah [Music] yeah i wonder how that fits into the school of greatness that experience uh it gave me a perspective of the life that most eight-year-olds don't have i think right being and i don't know if many people have ever been to a prison in general to visit let alone go and spend time with inmates for multiple hours for multiple years weekly so learning about the traumas of what happens in a prison when you're there hearing the stories from my brother every week about what was happening really scared me really made me one of the reasons why i never drank never smoked never did drugs still a day never been drunk in my life it's like i just don't want to be in there i was like no matter what i just want to make sure if i make mistakes i want to be sober making mistakes so i have 100 responsibility for my actions and i just don't want to lead myself down that path and so it uh it scared me in a sense because i was just like this is not a way to live so like the old documentary scared straight right yeah yeah but that's a sign of intelligent life like i'm one of the few people i know i don't drink i never did drugs i always thought it was dumb i'm like why do you want to be out of control and they scared me right and some anxiety is good right people with low levels of anxiety are more likely to go to jail really because they don't see the future with fear and it's why i don't drive down the freeway at 125 miles an hour in the rain right because i see this bad thing could happen now obviously if anxiety's too much that's a bad thing right [Music] you had dyslexia yeah i think this was probably one of the biggest challenges for me and probably still something that i'll reference but i'm in a very peaceful place with it it's like i accept it you know i'll read something and i'll have to reread it over and over or if i'm typing something and misspelling constantly i think everyone posted when i did our interview i wrote brain as brian like just i still spell things backwards a little different and so i struggled in school i had a tutor throughout all through school i was in kind of the special needs classes on the side during recess and after school just to kind of stay with my classmates in the same grade because they wanted to hold me back a few times and when i went to eighth grade they tested me at a second grade reading level so i was just kind of always behind and i was fortunate enough i had some good teachers that just like had compassion and just struggled confidence wise in school with thinking that i was enough thinking that i was worthy smart intelligent um you know and i felt like i was dumb pretty much my whole life so i had to i had to really learn how to overcome that insecurity in my 20s because i never feel like i was smart enough so when i was launching my business i was like man i really need to learn how to learn because i didn't learn how to learn in school so that's when i really didn't learn to love learning because it was always stressful it was always exactly stressful i was always in the bottom of my class so it's like what's the point of trying no matter how hard i studied i was still getting c's d's in the bottom of my class you've done a lot of work on yourself and i'm grateful for that many different therapies therapeutic experiences of the last eight years for sure workshops group kind of therapy experiences i've been working with a therapist over the last five months intensely pretty much weekly uh some five hour sessions because i felt for most of my childhood i didn't have peace i didn't feel inner peace you didn't no and so i was always struggling in school there's family chaos never felt peace after i started that kind of therapeutic experience that i did eight years ago and talked about sexual trauma for the first time in 25 years since it happened it was like wow i never felt that type of peace from that release now there's many other things that i still have yet to work on and was working on over the last eight years but that one was a big one for me that allowed me to have a sense of peace and never helped him the image is on the right blue is average activity red and white are the most active parts of the brain and they should be here front in the cerebellum the front area or no it's in the back here yeah so this is the back of the brain got it so the back bottom part got it it should be active should be because it's got half the brain's neurons it's like really important it's like the cpu or the central processing unit in the brain and then when i look at your brain [Music] it's a little bumpy and since you don't drink and don't smoke because that'll make it bumpier i think it's a repetitive trauma interesting you have and your temporal lobes which are here they're hurt and it makes total sense it's almost all of my football players all of them now the question and i'll show you a program i have can i make it better because that's what i like cerebellums okay this is your worry center it's the brain's gear shifter it's got a long term it's called the anterior just means toward the front cingulate gyrus and sometimes i'll give somebody a little bit of serotonin we make something called happy saffron raise the syrup naturally calm it down deep in your temple low there's an active area so if you hadn't gotten control of your temper i'd like oh i want to calm that down all right this are your right-handed or left-right-handed right-hand this can go with dark thoughts and for like no reason how to boil sure and part of your emotional brightness is your thalamus it's working really hard um and in the first scan i took of you everything was low in activity and this was really high and i'm like do i trust that which is why i scanned you again and i i think that was artificially too high okay and did you go to a breakup recently yeah a month ago yeah so it's been a journey the last month yeah and so i'm like i think something's going on yeah it's been for him yeah and um so i want to calm that down that's working too hard and so that's why balance is important yeah and so i want you to continue to do coordination exercises and you beat me in that basketball games yes i need to do them too but we want to calm this down and improve this okay so [Music] wow if we put your brain in a healing environment totally can get better right i mean i wouldn't recommend more football no love your brain well now we have a baseline and let's plan like four months from now do it again and see if we're making the progress we hope i mean yeah appreciate it thank you you're welcome very helpful very informative exciting to see [Music] you

Channel: AmenClinics

Views: 29,387

Keywords: lewis howes, scan my brain, dr amen, dr daniel amen, school of greatness, brain spect scan, brain scan, tbi, head trauma, concussions in brain, concussions brain scan, football concussion, concussion brain, head trauma concussions, Brain Health, ADHD, Anxiety, Depression, Dementia, Alzheimers, Nutrition, Daniel Amen, Amen Clinics, Psychiatrist, ADD, Mental Health, Brain SPECT scan, Brain Scan, Psychiatry, Integrative Health, Wholistic Health, Memory

Id: BGpOKOnYXW8

Length: 13min 7sec (787 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 08 2021