EPISODE #910 Happiness Starts with Your Brain Type | Dr. Daniel Amen

You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey. I promised you that I would tell you why you should listen to a show so you can decide at the beginning. There's tons of podcasts out there. This podcast has to have a high return on investment. You're going to spend an hour with me with my miniature group, the Upgrade Collective, who is secretly feeding me questions during the interview. You can join that as well. And sometimes I get guests on who are really, really transformational, both in the world around us and in my own world. And the reason you want to listen to the show today is to look at hardcore neuroscience based habits, rituals, choices that change your mood so that you can be focused on things that make you upgraded, like values, purpose, and goals. And the promise from this episode is that if you learn from the show and from the book that I'm going to talk about and from the wizard who's our guest today, you can be 30% happier in 30 days. And I think this is real. The reason I think it's real is that Dr. Daniel Amen, who's our guest today, wrote a book many, many years ago called Change youe Brain, Change youe Life. And I read it when I was failing out of Wharton, the Ivy League business school. And that book convinced me that maybe I had a hardware problem instead of a moral failing or maybe just not being as smart as I thought. So over the course of years, I had a chance to get to meet Dr. Amen and get to know him, and we've become friends. And I'll tell you that looking at the brain is a big deal. He's been featured in my books because he's one of those few guys who said, maybe I could measure it. Let's do what works instead of let's doing what we think works and sitting on a couch and talking about cigars and your mother. There's a lot more to it than that. At least I think there is. Dr. Amen, my dear friend, welcome back to the show.

Hi, Dave. Always great to be with you. That makes me happy.

You don't need to write any more books. People think, oh, you're just writing books to make money. And I'll just be blunt. No one writes books to make money. It's very, very low dollars per hour for being an author. It's always a labor of love.

And.

And you had a point in your career. You don't have to write books. Your clinics, you have a lot of them. I've sent family members there multiple times. I've Been a couple times. They're doing fine. Why did you set aside a major chunk of your time to write a book about happiness, which is, by the way, hard to sell as a book? What made you do this?

Now, Americans are the unhappiest they have been since the Great Depression. So when you think of the, the pandemic, the societal unrest, the political divide, I have become horrified to see that depression actually tripled from February of 2020 to August of 2020. Currently, depression in children have doubled. Suicide in teenagers has doubled. And I could write another book about mental illness. Nobody wants that. And I didn't, quite frankly. I've already done that. I wanted to write, I wanted to spend my time and energy and research on happiness because ultimately, and I say this in the introduction of the book, happiness is a moral obligation because of how you impact other people. I guarantee you if you ask anyone who was raised by an unhappy parent or married to an unhappy spouse whether or not happiness is an ethical issue, I just guarantee you they will say yes. And there's been a lot of books on happiness, but as you read them, they miss this big central point. The brain is the organ of happiness. And if your brain is not healthy, you're not likely to be happy. And so I just, I love this book so much because I got to spend just a lot of time, energy with happiness. And actually because, you know, we now have 10 clinics, I'm like, can I find happiness in the brain? And so I gave 500 consecutive patients the Oxford Happiness Questionnaire. And then I looked at their scans and it's really clear if you have real data, if you have low activity in your frontal lobes, you're much more likely to be unhappy. And brain health is central to happiness. So that's why I did it. I mean, I love writing, some people love golf. I just can't be frustrated for five hours when I could perhaps do a chapter.

I hear you loud and clear. And you have a couple hundred thousand brain scans over 20 years. And we say brain scans. It's different than the ones you guys have heard me talk about, brain scans. I work with EEGs largely in my companies because we're doing real time feedback and you do some EEGs, but the scans you're talking about. Tell me about the kind of scan that you do at Amen Clinics. That's the source of data for your happiness book.

So we do a study called Brain SPECT Imaging. And SPECT stands for Single Photon Emission Computed Tomography. It's a nuclear medicine study that looks at Blood flow and activity looks at how your brain works. We also do quantitative EEG, but I like spec because this cool 3D deep image of the brain, and now we have over 200,000 scans. And they taught me so much about brain health, mental health, and why people struggle and why they're successful. And ultimately, it's the brain, it's the organ. I saw Justin Bieber. I'm in his new docu series, Seasons, and I love him. And he came into my office and like a lot of celebrities, sometimes he'd do what I'd say, and sometimes he wouldn't, and. But he came into my office one day and this is when he got it. The light went on and he said, my brain is an organ. Like my heart is an organ. If you told me I had heart problems, I'd do anything you said. He said, now I'm going to do what you say. And then he got radically better. I think he just got nominated for three Grammys. And when I first saw him, you know, his name was synonymous with trouble. And now it's not. And I'm so proud of him. But part of it is because he understands his brain is an organ.

Tell me about marijuana. Cannabis, pot, I, E, THC specifically, and happiness. What do you know?

Well, for some people, it can make them happy in the short run. For most of the people I see, I published a study on a thousand marijuana users. Every area of their brain is lower in activity. For some people who smoke, it makes them anxious. For other people, it makes them paranoid. For teenagers who use, it actually increases their risk of psychosis 450%. And I've always, I want you to do things that help you feel better now and later versus now, but not later.

I've seen some of your posts about lowering blood flow in the brain from cannabis, and I've been meaning to ask you, I've probably asked you in the comment threads, is it the same if you eat it vs smoke it vs vape it vs suppose you could use it topically if you wanted to.

I don't know.

Okay.

Because, you know, when I do the research, typically it's on people. It's on our patients who smoke it or vape it. Vaping has just become this scourge. My daughter went away to college and she said half the kids there are vaping.

They're vaping cannabis, not nicotine or.

It's cannabis or nicotine. And the problem is, is they're wearing out the nucleus accumbens. So if you hit the nucleus accumbens, Too intensely or too often, you begin to wear it out. And the nucleus accumbens, the part of the brain that responds to dopamine, and it sort of makes you pay attention. Like this morning, Tana was getting ready to go for an appointment, and she just looks so beautiful. And just looking at her, I know it was dopamine hitting my nucleus accumbens, and it made me happy.

I think there was testosterone in there. I mean, no. Testosterone receptors had to play a role there. I know you. I know Tana. She's been on the show. Come on.

It's dopamine.

He's blushing.

In that moment, it was dopamine.

All right, I'll go with that.

And. And it's. It's the difference between dripping dopamine or dumping dopamine.

Okay?

And I love that concept because fame dumps dopamine. And if you dump it, if you hit the nucleus accumbens too intensely or too often, it wears it out, which means you require more and more to get that same feeling if you drip it. So that look I had, you know what I felt when I saw Tana, that's dripping it, or if I hold her hand or I saw my grandson over the weekend, it's getting those. I call them the micro moments of happiness. That it just helps keep you level, positive versus jumping out of an airplane. That'll dump dopamine.

So does love release dopamine? I know oxytocin typically is more associated there. So what's the role of dopamine in holding a loved one's hand?

I love to talk about oxytocin because it's all of these chemicals. Oxytocin, serotonin, endorphins. They have their double edge in that if you push on the nucleus accumbens too much with dopamine, you wear it out. Oxytocin happens when you hold someone's hand, when you look in their eyes, but it bonds us to one person, often at the expense of others. And so I often say it's why Red Sox fans hate the Yankees. It's because they're so bonded to the Red Sox, they have to sort of hate everybody else.

So tribalism is driven by oxytocin, not dopamine.

Correct. And respect. Like, I have great respect for you, and I feel honored that you'd have me on the podcast again. That's serotonin. So when we get disrespected at a fight recently with NPR over the issue of cte, Chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or football dementia, my Serotonin went low for a while, and I'm like, no, we have to fight about this. And it's fun. Sort of thinking of the chemicals of happiness. It's not just dopamine. That's a big mistake people make. It's. It's all of them.

Now, serotonin seems to be really bad for you. If it's too high, it's pro inflammatory, all kinds of bad things happen. But if it's too low, you get super depressed. How do you know if you're sitting here listening to the show? Geez, is my oxytocin where it should be? Is my serotonin high enough? Am I dripping dopamine versus dumping dopamine?

What?

Without some really careful measures of what? Salivary something or another, how would anyone ever know what's going on?

So, you know, one of the really unique features of this book is I talk about the seven neuroscience secrets of happiness no one's talking about. And the first one is happiness needs to be geared to your brain type, that everybody's different. You need to know, are you balanced? Which means most anything will make you happy. Are you spontaneous? That's my ADD group. They tend to have low dopamine. Are you persistent, worried, rigid and flexible. Things don't go your way. You get upset. You tend to hold grudges and could be argumentative and oppositional. Your serotonin is probably low. Are you sensitive. You really need other people. Was the pandemic particularly hard on you because of the isolation? So I think of oxytocin and endorphins, or are you cautious, which means your GABA levels may be low. And so knowing your brain type is essential to knowing what makes you happy. Because somebody, for example, the spontaneous person, they need novelty. They love extreme experiences. They love surprises. If you're married, for example, and your wife is persistent and she likes routine, and we can have sex on Tuesday and Sunday morning, and that's. It makes you crazy because it's like, no, no, I don't like routine. I like spontaneity. And so knowing your type and the type of your partner is really important to creating a happy life. And, you know, that's been one of the most fun things I've discovered from the scans. It's like, oh, people are different, you know, And I've written about scans, seven types of ADD and six types of addictions and five types of overeaters. But I realized it's just sort of how we live day to day. If you're a spontaneous CEO because a lot of CEOs have ADD.

If you're a CEO.

A CEO.

Oh, CEO. Sorry, misheard you. Okay. Yeah. Right.

Like you and I are CEOs.

Yeah, we're CEOs.

But if we're spontaneous and we have all these great ideas, we need assistance that are persistent and cautious, that follow through. If you hire a spontaneous assistant, nothing gets done. And the IRS comes and visits you because you didn't file all the right paperwork.

That is exactly the way it works. And you and I both know that because we're successful CEOs. But if you don't have people around you who are the opposite of you. But how does that work in relationships? So, I mean, you mentioned the husband and wife thing, where one is ritual based or time based, the other one is spontaneous based. Are these malleable? Can you change your brain type to more match your partner? Should you?

Well, you should be flexible. You know, around my house, I adopted my two mesas. I don't know if I told you that, but they were growing up in chaos. And I was like, okay, they should come live with us. And I would always walk around the house with my little sayings. And I'd go, who survives a pandemic? And they would respond, people who are flexible. If you're not flexible, this pandemic was really hard for you. Yes. Understanding helps. And sometimes you can change it. When I first started ordering scans, I was seeing this couple. And after about four months of seeing them, I'm like, I am not going to help them. I mean, it was so stressful for me because, like you, I want to make a difference. I like it when my work matters. And at the end of nine months, I'm like, okay, I got to tell them to get divorced because this isn't working. And I just started our imaging work, and so I sent them to be scanned before I told them to get divorced. And she had a persistent brain type. He was spontaneous. And I'm like. And I put him on a little bit of a stimulant for add. I put her on Prozac to boost her serotonin levels. No lie. Next month, they like each other. They're holding hands, they're having sex. And I had taught them lots of good things. They could now use what I taught them. And 32 years later, they're still married. And I just love that, because you just want to balance your type so that. Because, you know, their goal was to be together. I was the fifth marital therapist they saw. So they're persistent. They wanted to be Together, it's just how their brains work always got in the way.

Interesting. You talk in your book about how there's five primary brain types, there's 16 subtypes, and you have quizzes and you have assessments on how to do that. You always have good stuff on your website. And it's part of the book and part of what you've learned in your. In your neuroscience. Can you walk me through the five kinds of brains? I want listeners to understand? What do they generally look like? I think we've talked about two of them, but just walk me through the. The map of those five types.

So the first type is balanced, is they have a very healthy brain and they're focused and flexible and positive and mostly relaxed. Type 2 is the spontaneous type. They have low activity in the front part of their brain, often associated with lower dopamine availability. Type 3 is the persistent type. They have high frontal lobe activity, especially in an area called the anterior cingulate gyrus. And interesting. In my happiness study, they had the people who are unhappy had high anterior cingulate gyrus activity.

That would have been me during my first scan. If I remember right, they were worried.

And, you know, the persistent type, they have trouble letting go of negative thoughts or sometimes even negative behaviors. The fourth type is the sensitive type, who often make great therapists, but they don't like when they have relationship conflict or they feel separated from the group. Often the empaths among us are the sensitive type. And then type 5 is the cautious type. Their basal ganglia and amygdala tend to work too hard. All often they've had childhood trauma and they're looking for what's scary. And they spend a lot of time preparing for problems coming up in the future, which makes them unhappy.

These are preppers.

So these are often preppers. And gaba is often the problem. And so taking gaba or taking ashwagandha or theanine or magnesium can be just so helpful for them. And then the other types. So, for example, type 6 is our spontaneous persistent group. They have features of both and they're often children or grandchildren of alcoholics. I just noticed that there's a particular interest of mine and I noticed, oh, they're generally. If you come up with type 6, I'm asking you about your family history of your addiction.

Now, when I think about these types of brains, you've got a couple hundred thousand data sources. You can look at those, you can identify them. One of the things I've. I've very much liked about the Arc of your work in your very early books, you were mostly a pharmaceutical interventionist. I would say, like very. Going back, you know, 25 plus years, I go, wow, okay, you're saying, here's the tool that I know about the most with my MD to move the neurotransmitter in the right direction. And as you evolved your knowledge, your work, you got more data, you've become more and more nutritional, you have your own line of supplements and things like that that are designed for the brain. And now you're in this nice middle ground where you're totally happy to say, you know what, we tried a natural things with you. You're going to do better with a little dash of insert name of SSRI here. But you don't blanket prescribe them and you're doing different doses. So the fact that you're open to pharma, but that you're doing lifestyle and sleep and intervention things like that, to me, that's a hallmark of being a curious human because it's very easy to get on the pharma train and just stay there and not look at the rest. What got you off the pharma train at the beginning? So you'd be willing to consider supplements and be where you are now, which is, I would say, very curious, but walking in the middle.

So I'm a classically trained psychiatrist. I trained at the Walter Reed Army Medical center in Washington, D.C. and they really trained us to be whole people psychiatrists. Like, I was the primary care doctor for a person's mind, and I would do their therapy once or twice a week, prescribe their medication. I didn't get any lectures on supplements or food in medical school or in my psychiatric training. In the early 90s, when I started to look at the brain, I'm like, oh, some of these medicines are dangerous. Some of these medicines that I was taught to prescribe, like opiates and benzos, they make your brain look worse, not better. And so that was the trigger for me to go look for other options for my patients. Because in medical school, one of the first things they teach you is first do no harm. And I would just be horrified personally if I was hurting anybody. And then something pernicious happened. In the early 90s, managed care took over. And medicine and managed care was never about patients, it was about profit. And they're like, psychiatrists are too expensive. Let psychiatrists do the medication and we'll pay therapists to do the therapy. Because I love, I love doing therapy. I love sending people to therapy. I'm like, oh, no, I'm not okay with this. Because they really pushed us into this current model we have in psychiatry, which I just think is awful. It's the 15 minute med check, and psychiatrists have really become the candyman or pharmaceutical reps. And I think it's just damaged my profession. And at amen clinics, we will have none of that. That's not even an option for us to have 15 minute med checks because I just think it's horrible what's happened to psychiatry. Now as you learn about natural ways to heal the brain and you pay attention as a scientist, it's like there's a whole bunch of studies on omega 3 fatty acids, on B vitamins, on vitamin D, or from a happiness standpoint, my favorite supplement is saffron. There are 24 randomized controlled trials showing it has even equal efficacy to antidepressants for depression. And I'm like, count me in.

I've been wanting to ask you about that. So I formulated the extract of saffron quite a long time ago into one of the supplements I made when I was at Bulletproof. And as far as the manufacturer of the concentrate tells me, we were the first people to hit it out commercially. But when I took it for more than three days, I got weird. Almost like it does have an SSRI like, effect, but I don't know if it was. It was just a very strange mental state. Do people take too much saffron? Are some brains not Saffron compatible?

You know, I wonder what you formulated it with. I make something called Happy saffron. It's got 28 milligrams. No, 30 milligrams of afron. A specific extract.

Yeah, that was the stuff we were using, and it was Zimbrin plus Afron. Zimbrin's a South African bush with similar effects.

Yes. I wonder if it was the zembrin. We formulate it with zinc and curcumin.

And so it's a pretty straightforward formulation that way. Okay, and what was its name again?

Happy Saffron.

Happy Saffron. Okay.

Yeah. And I'm curious about Zembrin. I know a number of other companies produce that, and it has some research. The cool thing about saffron, and this is what made me pay attention, and you'll know it fits me. Not only does it improve your mood, but there's actually been studies with Alzheimer's disease showing it improves your memory. And then there are other studies, and this was the home run for me. Is it improved your sexual function? And Most of the SSRIs decrease your sexual function. I mean, I. When I put someone in ssri, I almost have to apologize. I'm like, you know, it could decrease your libido. It could make it harder for you to have an orgasm. And, you know, for anybody who has premature ejaculation, SSRIs are, like, miraculous because they can help you go forever. And I'm like, you know, if we ever have low census at the clinics, I'm like, oh, we should market premature ejaculation, because they're really good for that. But when I thought of mood, memory, and sex, and then the pandemic started, and I lost my dad and had to close my Manhattan clinic for a couple of weeks, I started taking it. And it's just the one thing I always make sure I take every day.

Wow. I really appreciate that. And I've had hundreds of people tell me that that combination of saffron and Zimbabwin was their favorite thing ever. But for me, I was kind of like, this is very strong, but I think it may have to do with my brain type. And it's okay for people to experiment with supplements to see what works for their brain. And in your new book, you actually talk about types of supplements matched to brain type so that you have a better chance of knowing what's going to work for you.

Right. And we've had about 5 million people take our brain health assessment, and we just have lots of great. You know, it's like, I'm a type 3. One of my favorite stories is one of my friends went to an addiction treatment program. She was going to lose her kids. Her mother came to be with her to help her, but they were fighting like cats and dogs. And Tamara was a two, and her mother was a three and a half. And her mother went on serotonin mood support, which helps boost serotonin saffron 5 HTP. And they just got along so much better because her mother became less rigid. You know, when you walk around with all these rules in your head, it can be really hard on other people, especially if the past is always present. Right. If you're stuck on the past and it goes over and over in your head. So in the book, I talk about these seven secrets. So one is know your brain type. Two is get your brain right. Three is supplement your brain. Because when your brain has the nutrients it needs, you're happier.

I. I've definitely experienced that. And it seems like getting enough energy and enough nutrients to build energy or getting enough ingredients to Build neurotransmitters into the brain to build proper cell membranes and things like that. If the electrical side is working, then you can focus on tuning a little bit. But a lot of us don't make enough power. And if we do make enough power, then we're not allocating it properly. But when you balance all that stuff out, then you can start doing therapy. That works. But if you're trying to do therapy and you have big holes in metabolic function in your brain because you're lacking the core building blocks, it seems like therapy is almost useless if your brain can't do it because the part of your brain you're trying to activate doesn't have what it needs to do it. We should start with the biology of the brain and then move to therapy. Or am I overstating the case? I mean, you are a therapist.

Exactly right. Think of it like hardware and software. I mean, would you ever try to program a computer that wasn't working right? I mean, that would be a waste of energy. And in fact, it demoralizes a lot of people because you go and you go, this is going to help me. And when it doesn't help, you either blame the therapist or you shame yourself.

That's what I was doing.

Is this a hardware problem or a software problem? And often it's both. You know, if you have hardware that is not working right, you end up with psychological problems because you try and it doesn't work. You try and it doesn't work. You try and it doesn't work. And then you say, to hell with it and you stop trying. This concept from Marty Seligman called learned helplessness. And you were working really hard, but when you saw your scan, it's like, okay, this is not a software problem or not just a software problem. And when you got your brain healthy, it was easier.

It was. And by the way, if you're listening to the show brainhealthassessment.com, that's the one. You said 5 million people have taken this. So you want to know your brain type. You do that. Then you read Dr. Ames new book about happiness. And what you find is magically you've just short. You've taken a shortcut to figure out what to do. Even if you never get a. A spec scan at one of his clinics or anything like that. What I want you to do and what I want you to learn from the show is, hey, if I do this, it has a greater likelihood of helping than just doing nothing and just kind of randomly doing something. So the Idea is it'll probably work, but it might not. So if I can reduce the chances of something not working, then I'm going to tell you to go do it. And brain health assessment.com orga.com that's where, that's where you put your thing up.

Yeah.

Brainhealthassessment.com brainhealthassessment.com and it's just worth doing. And then if you're interested in happiness, 30% happier in 30 days. I actually 100% believe that because, well, it's based on real data. It's not based on some belief system about drinking celery juice.

And so we did a 30 day happiness challenge. So after I finished the book, I'm like, okay, does this work? And So I filmed 30 short videos based on the content of the book. And we got 32,000 people to sign up to take the 32. The 30 day happiness challenge. And at the end of 30 days, 32% happier. For the people who finish, their energy was up 30% and their memory was better. And I'm like, I love this. And the stories were phenomenal. That very few people know that happiness is a brain function or that happiness needs to be geared to your type or that supplements like omega 3 fatty acids, vitamin D and saffron matter. And I love secret number four. It's love food that loves you back.

There you go.

And I talk about the relationship people are in with food. You know, I did the Daniel plan with Mark Hyman and Rick Warren, and one of the pastor's wives told me she would rather get Alzheimer's disease than give up sugar. And I'm like, now that is an abusive relationship.

Well, that's because you wouldn't be able to remember that you like sugar. So it would be okay.

Well. Well, it's like you're in love with something that beats you up.

Exactly. It's totally dysfunctional.

Understand that, you know, you want to love food, you want to eat food you love. So both of us, we eat food that's delicious, but it's also nutritious. We love the food we eat and it loves us. To do anything else is not rational. And you have to ask yourself, the United States has 4% of the world's population, but 15% of the world's COVID deaths. Why? It's because we're sick. You know, with 72% of us overweight, 42% of us obese, this is not a good thing. And I wish that the messaging from the government was more about get well Let us help you get well rather than the nonsense that we have gotten.

I wish they would also look at what's most likely to kill you by age group. Because when I look at the 24, you know that whatever the 18 to 24 year olds, it's actually suicide and drug abuse deaths, not any kind of infectious disease or cardiovascular or Alzheimer's. It's that we're making a world that they don't like being in. And that's, that's a pretty scary. And those are deaths.

They don't count. They don't count those.

No, they don't count those. But those, they do count them. They just count them as something else. As long as they can.

Yeah, yeah, no, we can, we can do better. And food is so important. Important. And secret number five. I love this one so much. It's master your mind and gain psychological distance from the noise in your head. And new for this book, the first time I ever wrote about this technique I love called give your mind a name just so you can begin to separate from it. And when I heard this technique for my friend Stephen Hayes, I'm like, what would I name my mind? And I remember I had a raccoon as a pet when I was 16 and she was a troublemaker. And I loved her and she was great fun and just amazing to pick up women. But she used to TP my mother's bathroom. She ate all the fish out of my sister's equipment aquarium. She'd leave raccoon poo around the house. And it's just like my mind, you know, my mind is a troublemaker. It'll like you're a failure or you're not enough or someone else is better. And when I can just shut that down, turn it off, put the raccoon in her cage, I just, it's. Life is so much better if you can separate yourself from the constant chatter in your head.

You talk about using Byron, Katie's questions and she's been on the show and you talk about is it true? And what went well today. Why are those important for happiness?

So I love her and she's great. She has the most elegant form of cognitive therapy I've ever seen. So cognitive therapy, which is basically therapy for your thoughts. So once you get your brain right, you have to program your mind right. Now this is the software part. Whenever you feel sad, mad, nervous or out of control, write down what you're thinking. So I call them ants, automatic negative thoughts, and then question them. And I just, I love her questions so much. I got her permission to use them. And I tell people, if you write down a hundred of your worst thoughts and then just subject them to these questions, is it true? Is it absolutely true? How do I feel when I have this thought? How would I feel without it? And then turn the thought to the opposite. You do that, you're going to begin to discipline your mind. Now, along with that, in the book, I talk about positivity bias training, one of the really great movements in psychology the last 20 years, developed in part by Marty Seligman's group out of the University of Pennsylvania. It's like we need to really think about resilience, not illness or not just illness. And so I have nine positivity bias exercises in the book, and my two favorite ones are the bookends I start every day. It's actually on the top of my to do list. Today is going to be a great day. And when I did it this morning, I knew we were going to talk. And, you know, during a pandemic, we haven't been able to see each other, but we can see each other today. So it sets your brain up to look for what you're looking forward to, what's right. But my favorite exercise is when I go to bed at night, I go, what went well today? And I actually start from early in the morning, and I go through my day looking not for trouble, but looking for what went well. And it's so helpful. I mean, even the night my dad died, I did it because it's just my habit. You wouldn't think somebody would do that. And I just thought about all these really great things that happened that day, including holding his hand before the mortuary took him away. It's a discipline that will help you. In fact, if you just do it for three weeks, you'll notice a significant improvement in your life level of happiness.

It's pretty similar to the. The gratitude practice I do with my kids. You know, tell me three things that went well day three things you're grateful for, and what I found telling someone is useful. But if you write it down, what my brain does is it'll edit out most of the good stuff. You forget it almost instantly. But if you just keep a running total every time something little good happens at the end of the day, you can have this huge list of good things. But if you sit down at the end of the day to think what good things happened, you'll come up with two or three. Why do we literally forget all the cool stuff that happens almost as soon.

As it happens because we're busy. Our brain's always looking for what's next. What do I have to do? Especially you and I, there's an exercise in the book on looking for the micro moments of happiness. And it's like, what's the smallest thing that's happening that I really like that makes me happy? And so for me, it's like I have gardenias outside of my front door. Smelling them when they're in bloom is amazing. Or watching hummingbirds or holding my granddaughter's hand. It's like if you start looking for the little things, you'll drip down dopamine, and that'll help sustain happiness and then you won't have to. Is my book a New York Times bestseller, which is a dump. Dopamine. And, you know, whatever it is, it is, I've learned that by now, whatever it is, it is. And, you know, I wrote a piece during the summer, during the Olympics, on why the Olympics are bad for the brain. Because here are all these Olympians that have to be the best. That's a prescription for unhappiness. Because you have to beat somebody. Where if you have to be your best, that's a prescription for happiness because you have to hang out with people who are better than you. That's the only way to be your best is know what you want and find out who's doing it and befriend them. And so you don't have to beat them. Prescription for unhappiness. You just want to have progress. I think I heard Anthony Robbins say that once, that happiness is progress. And for so many people, that's true. If I'm, like, better than I was, that makes me happy.

It's funny, too, when you look back at the. The founding fathers of the U.S. they didn't talk about creating a perfect union, they talked about creating a more perfect union because you can always be more perfect. And that's a reflection of that. Competing with yourself versus competing with someone else, because you'll never. You'll never achieve perfection, but you can always at least move in that direction. And that's the. The competition thing. I.

Well, and I've seen people who have, you know, more titles, more bestsellers, more gold medals, and it's not a prescription for happiness.

You mentioned the New York Times list. I was doing my evening gratitude a while back, and last book, I just received notice that morning that I'd hit the New York Times list for the second week in a row. And as you know, but listeners probably don't, the more Weeks are on the list. The. The more you can puff up your chest and say what a big author you are, even though if you're on there once you're a New York Times bestselling author, good to go. So I'm sitting there talking with the kids, thinking through the good stuff that happened that day, and I completely forgot that's a relatively large achievement. But I just thought, wow, my ability to forget good stuff is pretty big. And like you said, you're busy and it's all kinds of stuff going on. So I. That's why I do my best to write it down now. And.

Well, on my phone, I actually have a cool events note tab where if I see somebody I really like or look up to, or I get to speak, or if I do something that really is meaningful to me, I write it down. And I actually got the idea from one of the singers I saw who is so focused on, he was 50, something that rolling Stone wrote about him when he was 16. And I'm like, have you ever written down your accomplishments? And he never had. And so I'm like, your homework before you come in to see me in a couple of days is I want you to write down your top 50 accomplishments. And he said he felt so much better by just being able to focus on what was cool rather than on a hurt that, you know, happened 34 years earlier. I mean, isn't that nuts? I mean, you know, whenever you try to do something new, someone is going to hate you. And you have. There's a science to, to deal with the haters.

It's. It's funny. I actually cited you in Game Changers, my book about what do really successful people do in mass to become successful. And I told the story of how many. Just how much crap you took for talking about spec scans early on and how you persevered. And finally, like, I have more data than all of you clowns. Here's how it works. Let's do this. So you've been very much vindicated by sticking to your guns, but you had to take some hits, and I did, too, just for talking about butter and, and coffee and grass fed and all that. And so you do end up developing that skill set, but there are no books about that skill set. So how did you know to develop the skill set to persevere in the face of all the criticism you took early on?

Oh, I was so anxious and so furious for so long. And then I read a book called the Structure of Scientific Revolution, and it helped me so much. And Thomas Kuhn wrote it in 1962, and he said scientific revolution happens in five stages. First, someone notices a problem. I would diagnose you with major depression, like I was taught. I would put you on an ssri, and you want to kill yourself or you want to kill someone else. And I'm like, we have a problem problem. And two is the people in charge, like the American Psychiatric association, make small fixes. Like, there's been six versions of the dsm. They make small fixes, but they're not throwing the whole thing out. Three, someone comes up with a new paradigm. Get your brain right, and your mind will follow. These are brain health issues, not mental health. Stop using the term mental illness. Four, you're rejected the most. He said it's the most reliable of all the stages because. And even Machiavelli said there is nothing more dangerous than coming up with a new paradigm, because the people who are making money from the old paradigm will try to kill you.

That is totally true.

I have been there. And then five is the old group dies, and a new group finds it rational and helpful, and you become the leader of the new group. And last year, we had 10,000 psychiatrists and medical professionals refer patients to Amen clinics. And so whenever I got criticized, I just had a recent 5 fight with NPR. Very unhappy with them, because I've raised over a hundred million dollars for public television stations. And we had a fight over cte. And what I ended up saying to the reporter was, you know, I've changed more people's lives than any of the critics, probably by a thousand fold. And so I don't know what to tell you. If you don't look, you don't know. You should probably stop lying about it.

Wow. And CTE being basically brain damage, from repeated concussions to that.

Yeah. And the fight was, I say that people have had repeated brain damage, that we should image it, and then we should go about healing it. And I published a study. I mean, like, why is this a problem? And they're like, you can't use SPECT scans to diagnose cte. You're absolutely right. It's an autopsy diagnosis. But I can use SPECT scans to say, your brain got hurt. Right. And, you know, I mean, it's a standard indication for spect, and it's like they were purveyors of despair, and they're pushing on me because I'm a purveyor of hope, and it's just irritating. But the coolest thing that happened last year that made me happy was The Canadian association of Nuclear Medicine came out with new procedure guidelines respect as if I wrote them. Of the 10 authors, five of them were my students. So I was really happy about you're making a difference.

And for a lot of people listening now, if you're, if you're younger, like I'm kind of right in the middle from the average human lifespan, I'm only at 28% of my lifespan. But when you look at, you look at this, it takes way longer to create change than you think. It's like when you're 5 years old, anyone's 10 years old is so old they're twice as old as you and all of that. But you realize it really does take about 10 years to see a major swing in terms of the acceptability of grass fed being different than industrial fed. Starting back when my first post about grass fed butter came out in 2010, it took about four years for there to be global shortage of grass fed butter as people started doing this because they felt it working. And now if you go to any whole foods, there's racks of grass fed, all this stuff, right? And it's going to take another 10, maybe even 20 years for there to be availability to meet for supply, to meet the demand that's out there for grass fed meat and everything like that. But this is like a 10, 20, 30 year kind of timeline. And if you're 25 and you're out there starting your career, it feels like it's forever, but it's not. It happens in your lifetime. You just have to keep at it longer than most people would expect. What part of your brain kept you at it? Like what, what do you have in there that made you keep going against all of this?

So growing, growing up, my dad called me a maverick. And I've always sort of pushed against things that didn't make sense to me. But really the, the story that changed everything for me. So I started imaging in 1991. I loved it. I knew it was the future. I wanted to invest in camera companies. I'm like, this is the future. How do I know unless I look? And I had the benefit of also being a writer and I wrote a column in the local newspaper so I had visibility and I started writing about it and I love that. But 1993, the hate just came really strong. You shouldn't do this. This is only for research. You're taking advantage of vulnerable people and I'm just like, 1995 I got a call from my sister in law, Sherry. It was a Tuesday night. She Told me, my nine year old, for no particular reason, I haven't thought about this for a while. And he's my godson, and I'm like, well, that's horrible. What else has gone on? She said, danny, he's different. He's mean, and he doesn't smile anymore. I went into his room today and found two pictures he had drawn. One of them, he was hanging from a tree in a suicide attempt. The other picture, he was shooting other children. So if you think about it, Andrew was Columbine or Parkland, Florida, or Sandy Hook. And 999 child psychiatrists out of a thousand would have put him on medication and in psychotherapy. My first thought is, can you bring him to the clinic tomorrow? I want to scan him. And they lived eight hour. It's for me. And when it came to the clinic, I'm sitting with my godson and I'm like, buddy, what's going on? He said, uncle Danny, I don't know. I'm just mad all the time. Is anybody teasing you? No. Is anybody hurting you? No. Is anybody touching you in places they shouldn't be touching you? No. And so I scanned him. I actually went to the imaging center with him and held his hand while he held his teddy bear. And when the scan came up on the computer monitor, my mentor, so his mother wouldn't hear, wrote down he was missing his left temporal lobe. It was not there and I'd never seen that before. And my mentor wrote down cyst, tumor, stroke. And we got an MRI and found he had a cyst the size of a golf ball occupying the space of his left temporal lobe. And when the neurosurgeon took it out, I got two phone calls, one from his mother, who said the surgery went really well. And when Andrew woke up from surgery, he smiled at her. She said, danny, he's not smiled for a year. And then I got a call from Dr. Lazarev who said, oh, my God, that cyst was so aggressive and it put so much pressure on his brain, actually thin the bone over his left temporal lobe. He said if he would have been hit in the head with the basketball, would have killed him instantly. Either way, he would have been dead in six months. That was the moment the war started for me. It's like I'm in this and I'm always going to be in it. If you don't look, you don't know. Because how many people are there like Andrew that no one's ever looked at their brain and they're shamed, they're labeled as bad. When they're not bad, they're sick. And it's just not conscionable. And I find anybody who does something great, they have passion stories. And I have a lot of those stories. But Andrew is ultimately the reason why I do what I do.

That's the one that kept you going through all the crap, that it's inevitable. Like you said, it's the structure of reality. So for everyone listening, if you feel like you're going through crap and no one understands what you're doing, it's one of two things. You might actually be wrong and batshit crazy. That's why you have good friends and advisors and mentors. Or you might be onto something, in which case you just have to keep doing it. And the more they try to cancel you, the more, I don't know, Joe Rogan yells at you, probably the more good you're doing in the world. And that's okay, right? So you have to look at that as, wow, I'm getting pushback. And if you're doing work with a therapist and all of a sudden you're really angry, you're really pissed off, and you hate your therapist, that's really good work because you've just stirred up something that probably needed a little bit of stirring up. And so the things that you don't like are oftentimes sign of progress. And that can be a motivation for going forward. At least knowing that works for me.

I love that.

Now, you talk about these three regions of the brain that are responsible for happiness in the book. The orbitofrontal cortex, the basal ganglia, and the brainstem. I'm a biohacker, okay? I have lasers, I have pulsed electromagnets. I've had my head locked into a thing with transcranial magnet. Separate stimulation, you can target it. I have TDC after run current over very specific parts of the brain. What can I do to directly stimulate the happiness parts of my brain without opening up my skull and becoming an Elon Musk clone army guy?

So you can use TMS over the left front side of your brain. Not the slow frequencies, but the faster frequencies. As you activate the left frontal lobe tends to treat depression and help your mood. If you're anxious, you can do the slow frequency over your right frontal lobe. That tends to calm anxiety. I think, you know, some of the most important things is you can protect yourself from not damaging your frontal lobes. Like, don't let your children hit soccer balls with their head. Don't allow them to play tackle football and really watch the substances that you use that take your frontal lobes offline so you can be happy for a little bit, which is marijuana and alcohol. Nicotine.

And nicotine. Ooh, we've got to talk about nicotine. I am a massive proponent of low dose 1mg, 2mg, 3mg doses of oral nicotine without smoking as we age to hit the nicotinic acid receptors in the brain and lower risk of Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, Based on the research since about 1986 that shows pharmaceutical nicotine not smoking reverses Alzheimer's because it's a metabolic stimulant that raises PGC1 Alpha. Sorry I went fast, guys, but I know Dr. Amen followed everything I said. So is it true that nicotine, even in low doses, is always bad for these things, or is it possibly good in low doses?

Well, anything that constricts blood flow to the brain prematurely ages it. Now, the nicotine I see are from smokers. They're not people that are using micro doses that potentially may be helpful. And so I think it'd be fascinating to study the same thing with caffeine, because, I mean, I know you make coffee and I've seen caffeine be a vasoconstrictor, and that worries me. And so, because I'm always trying to get better blood flow to the brain, but perhaps in small doses, it activates the brain and doesn't correlate with the vasoconstriction. It.

It's a tough one because, look, you have quantifiable data. People who drink five cups of coffee a day have this going on in their brain. And what I look at, and it's totally okay to blow holes in this. This is just exploration, not a battle of egos and debating and proving who's right or wrong. I think you're one of the masters, and I always listen to what you have to say. I'm looking at brain energetics. So how much electricity can I make in the brain?