The Endless Benefits of Getting an Early Brain Scans Feat. Dr. Daniel Amen

I am so excited to be here because what I get to do is talk about my obsession, which has been the brain. But I want to start with this slide.

I saw this recently.

If you knew a train was going to hit you, would you get out of the way? So that's going to become very important. It's 1991. I'm a psychiatrist, been a psychiatrist for about 10 years. And I order my first brain spec study. Spect looks at blood flow and activity. It looks at how your brain works. It's different than a CAT scan or an mri. Those are anatomy studies. So we're looking at function. So I'm the director of a dual diagnosis unit, a psychiatric hospital unit that takes care of drug addicts. So this is a healthy brain. This is an addicted brain. And right away, you realize why you shouldn't do drugs. It's because they damage your brain. I got so excited about this, this technology that I scanned everybody I knew, including myself. And when I scanned myself, this is my first scan. I was horrified. I'm like, why is it so bumpy? A healthy brain is fat and beautiful and smooth and even. And I was horrified because I don't drink. I've never used drugs. But I had meningitis when I was in the army when I was 18. And I had a lot of bad brain habits. And what I'm excited about, what our work is all about. Twenty years later, my brain is younger, and it doesn't usually work that way. You literally can change your brain, and when you do, you change your life. Imaging changed everything for my children because, in fact, if you dated one of my daughters for more than four months, you had to come to the clinic and get a scan. It's actually meet the parents. But worse, imaging changed my love life. After being in a long marriage that I wasn't very happy with, I was determined the next woman I would give my heart to, I would first see her brain. And so I got very attached to Tana. And two weeks later, she's in the clinic, she's getting scanned. Her brain is beautiful. Now she gets to stay. Imaging literally changed absolutely everything I do with my own patients. So the current psychiatric model is you tell the doctor your symptoms, he gives you a diagnosis that actually is just a regurgitation of your symptoms. And then he gives you a medicine to attack the symptoms. So if you're depressed, you get a depression diagnosis, and you get an antidepressant. If you're anxious, you'll get an anxiety disorder diagnosis and medicine for that. My favorite to explain this is if you explode intermittently, if you have temper problems, they'll actually give you a diagnosis called Intermittent Explosive disorder. So think about that ied and then they don't know what to do. And did you know, outcomes in psychiatry happen to be no better than they were in the 1950s? So it's psychiatry's dirty little secret. So when I started looking at people's brains, I'm like, oh, my goodness. Scans taught me that depression wasn't one thing. In fact, it's a symptom, that there were many different causes. In fact, giving someone the diagnosis of depression was exactly like giving them the diagnosis of chest pain. And doctors don't give people the diagnosis of chest pain because it doesn't tell you what causes it or what to do for it. And so I've written a number of books. One, my latest one, Healing add, where I talk about seven different types of add. Don't put everybody on a stimulant, because you can make some people much better and a whole bunch of other people dramatically worse. Imaging helped me see the underlying biology behind the symptoms. So was your brain overactive? Was it underactive? Was it toxic, either from substance abuse or alcoholism or an environmental toxin like mold? Or did you have a traumatic brain injury? Traumatic brain injuries are one of the major causes of psychiatric illness. But of course, nobody knows that because nobody's looking at the brains of their patients on a regular basis. Imaging. And this was the beautiful part, this is the heart part of imaging. It decreased stigma. I loved that because people saw their problems as medical and not moral. It decreased shame, decreased guilt. And the other part I truly loved is the families then got on board because it increased forgiveness and compassion. We have nothing else in psychiatry that's that powerful or that immediate. Imaging actually completely changes the discussion around mental health. Nobody wants to see a psychiatrist. I mean, how weird is that? I decided I want to be a psychiatrist, and now nobody wants to talk to me. You're not going to shrink me. No one wants to be labeled as abnormal or defective, but all of us want better brains. So what if mental health was really all about brain health? Imaging changed everything about my health. Oh, my goodness. There are 200 studies now that say as your weight goes up, the actual physical size and function of your brain goes down.

Oh, my God.

That should scare the fat off anyone. This is the biggest brain drain in the history of the United States. Two thirds of us are overweight. Can you imagine the neurons and the IQ points we're losing? In fact, a couple of years ago, I coined this term called the dinosaur syndrome. Big body, little tiny brain, you're going to become extinct. Now I know that's rude, but it's true. And when I read the first study, I lost 30 pounds because I don't want to be a dinosaur. Imaging can change the Alzheimer's epidemic. Did you know Alzheimer's disease is expected to triple in the next 25 years? There's no cure for it on the horizon. If you're fortunate enough to live until you're 85, you have a 50% risk of being diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. And the little scary nugget we've learned in the last 10 years, Alzheimer's disease starts in your brain 30 to 50 years before you have any, any symptoms. So if you knew a train was going to hit you, would you get out of the way? This 59 year old woman was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. It's a scan on the right, you can see the whole back half of her brain is deteriorating. Likely she had brain changes in her 20s. I think all of us should be scanned by 50 because treatment works when early or late?

Early.

And how would you ever know if you were vulnerable unless you looked? Imaging changed everything for the NFL. And my problem with the NFL is if you don't admit you have a problem, you can't do anything to solve it. And imaging really broke the NFL's denial. We did the first and largest study on active and retired NFL players and it just changed everything. So our first study on 100 players, the Blue equals damage across their whole brain. And you know, I think most 9 year olds would figure out it's a brain damaging sport. That's not hard. What was really exciting about our work with the NFL was we showed that 80% of our players could rehabilitate their brains on a smart program. Now how exciting is that? You're not stuck with the brain you have, you can make it better. Now I hate this graph because I just turned 60 a couple of weeks ago. But it's really clear based on a study we did with 8,000 people, your brain gets less and less active as you age. So sort of like as your skin falls off your face as you age, the same process is happening in the brain, but it doesn't have to. That's really the exciting. So a typical 82 year old scan on the left, my friend, Doris Rapskan on the right. Fat, full, beautiful for 82. You know, if something happens to Tana, I'm asking her out. So the most Exciting thing I'm going to tell you is you can literally change your brain and change your life. But how would you know unless you looked? So my favorite story to illustrate this is my oldest daughter, Brianne. Always easy, always sweet. But the sad truth is I never thought she was very smart. Had to get her tutors, had to work hard, had her tested, and in 10th grade, she fell apart. She got depressed. She came to me one night in tears and she said, dad, I just don't think I can be as smart as my friends. And it broke my heart. Next day, scanned her at the clinic and I'm like, oh, my God. I cried when I saw this because what it indicates she had really low energy blood flow in her brain. I knew how to fix it. I mean, that's really what made me so sad, because I had been fixing people's brains for years. The next day, on just a little tiny bit of targeted medication for her, was much better. Three months later. This is a girl who never got one A in her life. The next three months later, straight A's. The next ten years, straight as. So the ultimate question is, which brain do you want? Which brain do you have of these? And how would you ever know unless you look? I am so grateful to be here because, of course, you know, brains run the world. They run the stock market, the local market, huge corporations, mom and pop shops down the street. Brains run governments, although. Not that well. Schools. Sexual art program in the Fraser Academy in Vancouver. We teach thousands of kids every year to care about their brains. Churches. We have a brain health program in churches around the world. Families. It's my family and you. Yet most people rarely think about their brains, which is a huge mistake, because success in anything you do always starts with a healthy brain. After looking at NOW's 115,000 scans and some of the most interesting people in the world, including Joe, it is very clear to me that when your brain works right, you work right. And when your brain is troubled for whatever reason, a head injury, an infection, mold exposure, you're going to have trouble in your life. With a healthy brain, people are happier, physically healthier because they make better decisions, wealthier because they make better decisions. And they're more successful in everything they do. When your brain is not healthy, people are sadder, sicker, poorer, less successful. So your competitive advantage or your disadvantage is the actual physical functioning of your brain. But let's be clear, you're in a war for the health of your brain. Everywhere you go, someone is trying to shove bad food down your Throat that will kill you early. The real weapons of mass destruction.

Or.

Processed pesticide sprayed highly glycemic, low fiber food like substances. The clown and the king have killed more people than ISIS has ever dreamed. And these food companies use neuroscientists. They use trick to hook your pleasure centers because you know this woman would never look this way if she ate that. Tech companies create addictive gadgets that hook our attention and distract us from our loved ones. New study from Microsoft. The attention span in humans is now 8 seconds. A goldfish is 9. This is evolution going the wrong way. Study from the Harvard Business Review said that only 10% of us are high in both focus and energy, the two things that drive success. 90% of people are without one or the other. Which is why in your bag I put our focus and energy supplement. This is the one I hate now that I'm 61 because it's very clear to me after doing a study with 8,000 people, your brain gets less and less active as you age. Typical 55 year old brain with lots of wrinkles. Worse at 82. But here's a friend of mine who actually lives In Phoenix at 82, she has a stunningly beautiful brain. Brain aging is much more about your habits than your age. So here's the program. This is the $250,000 idea. And for you in this room, it's way more than that. If you pay attention to me, it's, you're not stuck with the brain you have. You can make it better. I can prove it.

Hey, I hope you're enjoying this video. And I want to let you know that I have a new book that's come out and if you'd like to get it absolutely free, there's a link below in the description. Or you can wait till the end of this video or you can Simply go to joe'sfreebook.com and you can get a copy there.

Here's the plan we use at Amen Clinics. First you gotta look at your brain. So baseline brain health assessments. We do a study called SPECT that looks at blood flow and activity. Here's a healthy scan. Compared to someone with accelerated aging, someone who has Alzheimer's disease, which we can tell decades before you have any symptoms, someone with a brain injury, someone whose brain's working too hard, such as people who have obsessive compulsive disorder and people who have underactive brains. This one drank way too much. I think of imaging like a map. You know, a picture's worth a thousand words, but a Map is worth a thousand pictures. A map tells you where you are and gives you direction on how to get to where you want to go. Without a map, you don't know how to. And you're lost. And it can cost you your life. The second thing we do is we don't want you to have normal anything normal is sick. 51% of the US population at some point in their life will have a mental illness. And if you're fortunate enough to live until you're 85, 50% of you will be diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. That's normal. And I don't want any part of it. And Genius Network people don't either. So I want to know your important numbers. And you got a copy of my new book, Change youe Brain, Change youe Life. This program is in there, in chapter 19, in detail. The third part is your brain. You know, people go, oh, take my supplement, because it'll give you a great brain. And it has one thing in it, and that just doesn't work.

Why?

Because the brain does not get sick in one way. It gets sick in many different ways. And that's exactly how. How we get it better. So we take a multiple mechanism approach from omega 3 fatty acids for inflammation, ginkgo for blood flow and so on. And the last thing, and I'm really proud of this, in 2005, I wrote a book and I got all sorts of grief for it. It was called Preventing Alzheimer's. You can't do that. But since then, there have been programs at UCLA and Johns Hopkins called Preventing Alzheimer's. I love that. Here's the short course. You want to prevent Alzheimer's disease in yourself or your family, you have to prevent or treat all of the risk factors that are associated with it. And if you go after obesity, diabetes, heart disease, hormone levels that are not optimized, and all the rest of these, this is how you prevent it. So let me show you how this works. Joe's one of my favorite people. I love Joe having a problem. I called Joe. Having a great day. I'll call Joe. And Joe called me. He's like, my brain's not right. And this was about five years ago and he got hurt. He had a head injury. Most people don't know that head injuries are major cause of addictions and psychiatric problems. And nobody knows because psychiatrists are the only medical specialists that never look at the organ they treat. How crazy is that? He came, his brain was troubled and he just. What I love about Joe is he just did everything I Said, imagine if you just did everything he said, where your business would be. And in seven months, his brain is better. Five years later, it's freaking normal. It's healthier than his age. Some of you who've come to my clinic, I'll tell you, your brain looks older than you are, and his looks younger than he is. I love that for him. We also did the world's largest study on active and retired NFL players at a time when the NFL was lying that they had a problem. And we demonstrated high levels of damage in 96% of the players that we study. It's horrible. And, oh, by the way, if you played football at any level, 80% of you have brain damage. But my job, my love, is never to tell you you have a bad brain. I'm like the eternal optimist. Well, can we make bad brains better? And in fact, on this program, 80% of our NFL players showed improvement in memory, attention, mood and sleep. You are not stuck with the brain you have. You can make it better. Here's one of our players, Freddie Dreyer, who said, I replaced a part of my mind that had been lost. My energy and focus are much better. Duvall Love played 20 years. He's an offensive guard. His brain just looked awful. Year later, it's much better. Oh, by the way, lost 110 pounds. I was pretty excited for him. Now he has a master's degree. He thinks he's really smart. It's really awesome. And so, November 3rd, Change youe Brain, Change youe Life, which is in 26 countries. And I'm so proud of this book, but it's old. And so I had to revise it and I expanded it and I put all of my best work into this book. So I'm very excited. I called Joe up. I said, joe, how do we get this to the world? He said, well, I have a forum, the Genius Crowdsource Blueprint. And I. I'm a good student. I just. I do what he tells me to do. So we have a name. I changed my brain and changed my life to win the prize, Best Video or Essay on how you used my work to help your brain and your life. Our goal is a thousand stories, a million more books sold, and the prize is we will pay for you to come to Southern California, get a full evaluation that we pay for. I'll actually do it because I don't do many of them anymore. And we'll give you a year's worth of supplements. And the deadline is February 14th, because that's love. My brain day. And the first day we got 60 entries, so we now have about two. It's been out for like four days. So one of them, Steve, writes my rental car confirmation number. And I'm thinking, why do I want to know this? The reason I know is that I'm supernaturally able to remember things that I would never have been able to. And they don't go away. My productivity and creativity is off the charts. I'm able to connect with my wife in ways I've never experienced. And the sexual intimacy is another area of peak performance. I love that. But my favorite one so far is Cheryl. My brain was broken because of your work. I went from being homeless and hopeless without the custody of my three children to being an RN on a busy surgical trauma unit in a stable relationship. But most importantly, I'm able to be a good mother to my children. You are not stuck with the brain you have. You can make it better. I can prove it.

What I want to do is share with you just eight tips, maybe principles if you will just really remind you of what you're doing when you do it well. So I want just everyone just, just quick acronym. Just be faster. All right, so be faster. And these will be the. Just the really quick. How Many is that?

8.

Eight quick tips and then we'll do our sit down. So the B to learn. How many of you came here today like to upgrade your mind. How many of you came here today like to have a better memory? How many of you forgot why you came here today? Have you ever done that? Walk into a room of your own home and just forgot why you're there? Feel absent minded? Senior moments come a little bit early. So the B here stands for believe. If you believe, you can believe you can. Either way. What? You're right. Who said that? Henry Ford said that. You know, I believe all behavior is belief driven. You know, you could learn a technique for how to remember names and maybe we could talk about that in the conversation today. But if you believe, people come to me all the time. They're like today, just right before you started. Jim, I'm just getting too old. You know, I'm not smart enough. I have a horrible memory. And I always say stop. If you fight for your limitations, you get to keep them, right? Your brain is this incredible supercomputer and your self talk is the program it will run. So if you tell yourself I'm not good at remembering names, you are not likely to remember the name and the next person you meet because you program your supercomputer not to. Does that make sense? Right. And again, you know this. And so this is just a reinforcement. Let me show you what a belief is. Real quick. Stand up and just make some distance between the person next to you. So if you went like this, you could kind of not touch anybody. Some of you done this exercise before. Shake out your body. All right, Notice where your feet are and keep them stationary. I want you to just point forward with your right hand. Your other right hand, sir. All right, right hand. And what I want you to do, without moving your feet, turn to your right, clockwise as far as you go. And notice the exact point you're pointing at. Okay, Come back center. Put your arms by your side. Empty your hands not in your pocket. And take a deep breath. Exhale and just breathe normally. Breathe normally. And if you're comfortable, close your eyes. It'll help you to focus. And I want you, I'm going to take you through a quick 30 second visualization exercise in your mind's eye. I want you to imagine with your arms by your side. See and feel yourself pointing forward again. But this time, imagine you're going twice as far as you did the first time. See and feel. Imagine you're going further. If you can't imagine it, imagine you can imagine it. And then with your eyes closed, see and feel yourself going three times around like you're Gumby. You're getting a great stretch. This is a pleasurable thing. You're made out of rubber. See and feel yourself going three times around. What does that feel like? And then one more time with a smile on your face, thinking, what does this have to do with reading faster? See and feel yourself going four times around. 1, 2, 3, 4. All right, open your eyes. Watch this. Open your eyes. Point forward with your right hand. Turn to your right as far as you can. Now go. All right, Clap. If you went further a second time. Have a seat. Have a seat. Now raise your hand just so we see this. How many people went further a second time? Raise your hand. My question, my quick question for you is, were you physically capable of turning that far the first time? Yes or no? Yeah. Nobody took a yoga class and my eyes were closed. Right, but you're physically capable. Where is the limitation? If we're talking about becoming limitless, where was the limitation if there was one in your mind? And some people say, I didn't have a belief on how far I could turn, but how many ideas of certainty do we have in our mind? Right? And so we're going to talk a Little bit about mindset and growth. Mindset be able to change limiting beliefs. And I know there are people in this room that are experts at this. But we start with the belief, right? Your mind is always eavesdropping on your self talk. The E very quickly is exercise. Exercise and execute. There is a lie. I talk about seven lies to learning and limitless. And a lie for me is a limited stands for everything's an acronym for me. It's a limited idea. Entertained. It's not true that you're too old. It's not true that you're not smart enough. It's not true you have a horrible memory. One of the lies I talk about is that knowledge is when we hear a lot, knowledge is what is power and is that true knowledge alone. So it has the potential to be power. It becomes power when we what? When we apply it, when we implement it, when we execute, when we exercise. Right. So the bad news, it takes effort to learn how to remember names. But the truth is the good news, it doesn't take as much as you think. But you have to take knowledge, turn into power. I ask myself three questions to do this throughout the weekend. I would be thinking about this. How can I use this? I'm obsessed with this question. I must ask this question 100 times a day. How can I use this? Second question, why must I use this? Because a lot of information stays in your head. But if you're not acting with your hands, you have to check in with the second H, which is your heart. Right? The purpose. Because reasons reap results. If you can't come up with a reason to remember someone's name, you're not going to remember that person's name. Right? And so it goes from your head to your heart to your hands and ask yourself, why? So how can I use this? Why must I use this? Third question, when will I use this? I think one of the most powerful productivity performance tools we have is in our phones, right? Our calendars. But a lot of times we'll schedule investor meetings, doctor appointments, PTA meetings, but not our own execution. I think for every hour you spend learning something, you're on clubhouse, you're living. You have to spend an equal hour implementing. Is that fair? All right, the F. And we'll go through these fast Forget. As Joe mentioned, there's a lot of power in unlearning things and a lot of us get stuck. Right. It's the curse of expertise. They call it the curse of expertise is somebody who's become an expert. They become more Closed minded because they feel like they know all of this, right? And your mind is like a parachute. It only works when it's what, when it's open. And so I would temporarily forget what you know about a subject so you can learn something new so you could be able to adapt so you're not tied to the old ways. A lot of people, you hear this all the time, right? It's in our industry also as well where people say they have 30 years of experience, you know, in direct response. But sometimes when you go discover they have one year experience that they, they've repeated that many times also, right? And so first learn something new. Forget about what you know because the half life information gets shorter and shorter and shorter, right? And so have that open mind. The other thing I would say, forget. Forget about distractions. And that's easy to say, but you know, how many of you multitask a lot, right? And you've seen the research saying, suggesting that most people can't multitask. Do two cognitive activities at once. The task switching, which wastes a lot of time, could take 5, 10 minutes to regain your focus on an activity. So when you're here, be here, it could also make more errors when we're trying to multitask. And the third thing, it uses up a lot of energy. Anyone suffer from like brain fog or mental fatigue? Going, switching, there's a cost energetically you use more brain glucose from going task to task and your context switching, right? So you're lighting a certain pattern of your nervous system's lit up and then you're going from this lighting and then coming back, right? So stick on that. And then, so forget about what you know, forget about multitasking and not. So forget the A really quick. The A stands for active. I always think that learning, like life, is not a spectator sport, right? The old 20th century model for education was sit there, be quiet, be lectured to. And the human brain does not learn through consumption as well as it does through creation. Future belongs to the creators, right? And that's what's truly limitless. There's no limit to your creativity or imagination or ability to solve problems. But it requires us to be active in our learning. So how can you be more active in your learning? This is very meta right now. How could you be more active in your learning? You could ask questions, you could be taking notes, right? And we did an episode on different ways you could take notes also as well. In our podcast, the S stands for state. I want to remind you the next few days that all Learning is state dependent. And I'm defining state functionally as a snapshot of your mood, of the mood of your mind and your body. How do you feel? Because the key to a long term memory is information by itself. Do this information, say this information, put your hands out. Information combined with emotions become long term memories. And you know this. How many of you have a song that you could listen to and it could just take you back to when you were a teenager. How many of you, it's a food or a fragrance, could take you back to when you were a child. The challenge is how do we up the emotion? Because that part of your middle brain, when you're talking about emotion and your amygdala also, it's connected to your hippocampus, right? Your memory. So when you could tie emotions, the state you learn something in is a state that you're going to be able to encode it. So your memory has three parts. You encode information, you store it and then you retrieve it. Right? But if you can encode it with emotions. Because we are not logical, people don't buy logically, they buy what. Yeah, emotionally. And they justify logically. Because we're not logical, we are biological. You think about dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, endorphins, and so control your state. Like right now, who controls how you feel? You do, right? Like sit the way you'd be sitting if you're really interested in what I was saying and really paying attention. Sit the way you'd be sitting right now. Why do you even have to move? But you know that your physiology is going to affect your psychology, right? Okay, so that's your state and you control that. And then finally the last few letters, T stands for teach. Your intention matters. If you want to learn the information better over the next two and a half days at a meta level, I'd be thinking, how do I teach this to somebody else? How do I teach this to my team? If I had to give a TEDX talk or a 10 minute talk on Monday to my team, you know, how would I go about learning this? They call it the explanation effect. The explanation effect. If you have to explain it to somebody else, you're gonna learn it better, right? You're gonna focus better, you're gonna ask questions, you're gonna integrate it and then finally the E and the R. The E, I'm gonna just, I'm gonna call it entry. And entry is really just to enter it into your schedule like we talked about. Because I feel like if you don't put it into your schedule. It doesn't get done. Same as with your workouts, your ice baths, your meditation. You know the day could escape you and then you don't get to it, you're floating. And so make sure you enter it. You get your studies. And finally the R. This is the retrieval, all right? This is retrieval review. I'll put two things, the way to learn anything faster. Remember I said learning is not a spectator sport. You don't consume information. You actually, you don't push information inside the human brain. You learn it better by pulling it out. So review is spaced repetition, right? Interval training. When you separate, you take data and you study it and you review it over a period of time spaced like an hour later, a day later, a week later, then you consolidate short to long term memory. So it's wonderful to take lots of notes. How many of you gone to an event, you take lots of notes and, and then you never review those notes again, Right? So you could enter, going back to the E, your review. The other great way besides the review for R is retrieval, active retrieval. And this is a technique where you are quizzing yourself. It's shown in studies to be so much more powerful than reading something twice. You could read something and then quiz yourself. It takes a lot less time than reading something twice because usually when you're reading something twice, you're not really learning it. More people are recognizing it. And there's a difference because that doesn't mean it's here you're recognizing. I've seen this before. But until you quiz yourself, after you take notes, you go through it and then you test yourself, then you're going to get a lot more out of it.

So what are you currently working on? And how would someone define integrative medicine? Because when you hear that, it's like, what does that actually mean?

Well, I think that this is a new system which I think is clearly the way of the future, that places great emphasis on the human organism's potential for healing. So that I think most people have very little confidence in their body's ability to heal. So that's the first thing, strong emphasis on healing. It also looks at patients as more than physical bodies. It's whole person medicine that looks at the mental, emotional aspects, spiritual aspects of being. It places great emphasis on lifestyle. So when you sit with an integrated physician, they will ask you about diet, sleep, what you do for fun, all that stuff. Then we make use of all available therapies, wherever they come from, as long as they're not going to hurt people and show reasonable evidence of efficacy. And we don't reject conventional medicine and we don't accept alternative treatment uncritically. I am absolutely certain this is the way of the future because the great promise of integrative medicine is that it can lower health care costs by bringing in treatments that are not dependent on expensive technology, including pharmaceuticals. And as well as through its attention to lifestyle, really practice real prevention. And I'm also confident that one day we'll be able to drop the word integration. It'll just be good medicine.

Good medicine. You know, okay, let's kind of talk just that term, good medicine. So there's a lot of doctors medical, and there's a lot of, you know, there's functional medicine doctors, there's all kinds of different doctors. And there are, I think, like in any industry, there's some amazing ones and there's ones that just aren't. A lot of it is just a pill for an ill. You know, it's either medicine or it's some sort of supplement. And to what degree do. Because we live in a culture where they want a magic pill. Right. And a lot of people are trained that way. And you see so much advertising that way. And of course, your emphasis on food, and I believe food is medicine. So how do you think about supplementation and exercise and eating as it all works together?

I mean, what are your thoughts on supplement?

Well, you know, I think the big components of healthy lifestyle, certainly diet. And there's a lot of information that we have about what is a good diet. I see an awful lot of people today who follow extreme eating patterns that I think are unwise in the long term. I think physical activity is critical to good health. I think it's also important to change the nature of physical activity as you age. In my 20s, I ran and then I got signals from my knees that they didn't like that anymore. And I changed to cycling, and I did that for a long time. Now I'm a swimmer and that's my main activity. I also have two big dogs that walk me every day. But I love swimming. But I think it's important to be physically active. I think that managing stress is key. And there's lots of ways of doing. You can't live without stress, but you can practice methods that neutralize its harmful effects on your mind, in body. My favorite are simple breathing techniques because they're so time and cost efficient.

So you're a swimmer. One thing I. And you mentioned as you got, you used to run in the Beginning I have to bring this up and I didn't have it as a question, but what I found when we were talking, when we went out to lunch in Tucson, is that you were a fan of Dr. John Sarno's work when it comes to physical pain. And I'm a huge believer. I think the vast majority of, of the way that pain is treated and diagnosed is wrong. And I lived in chronic pain for most of my adult life. Which the way Sarno would describe what he called tms. In the beginning he called it tension myositis syndrome. Then it became tension myonuro, then the mind body syndrome. And you're an expert in this area. And he said that the pain is caused by oxygen deprivation and brought on by repressed emotions, predominantly anger. And, and so Steve Ozanich, who wrote recent books on it, he sent you some of his books. Could you explain that from your standpoint about how much the mind and emotional states affect the physical body?

Well, to me this is one of the great limitations of conventional medicine is that it is totally stuck in the biomedical model which sees only that which is physical as being real. And in that model, if you observe a change in a physical system, the cause has to be physical. The idea of non physical causation of physical events is not allowed. And for that reason, all of the whole realm of mind body medicine is viewed with great suspicion by conventional science and medicine and that enormously limits their ability to manage these conditions. With back pain particularly, one of the most striking facts about it is that you can see, you can look at X rays and scans of people that look so horrible you can't imagine that they are not crippled by pain and they have no symptoms whatever. On the other hand, you can look at scans and X rays of people that look completely normal and the people are disabled by pain. So there's a very low correlation between physical findings and subjective experience. And that's one of the things that Sarna is based on. So this is a major component of integrated medicine. I call it whole person medicine, where you don't exclude the mind. That's like it's key. Let me tell you one story. A couple weeks ago I was in Japan and I spent time in Okinawa, which is one of my favorite places. When I was doing research for my book Healthy Aging, I made a number of trips there because Okinawa has had the highest concentration of centenarians in the world. And it's very interesting to look at their. What is it about that it's awful hard to tease all those things apart It's a tropical Pacific paradise with clean air and water. The Okinawan diet is one of the most interesting diets I've ever seen and enormous. Very different from mainland Japanese diet, but incredible variety of sea and land vegetables, unusual foods. Okinawans get great physical activity all the time. Not by going to gyms and using exercise machines. They're quite hauling in fishnets and carrying water and chopping wood and hoeing in the garden and stuff like that. But I think especially there is an enormous influence of the way that aging is thought of in that culture. The old people in Okinawa are honored. They're living treasures. They're made part of all community activities. One story I collected there, which I think is very telling, is that a common culture of sibling fighting in traditional Okinawan society is over who is going to get to take care of the aging parents. Very different from here. Anyway, I was in. There's a village in Okinawa called Ogimi, which is celebrated as the Longevity Village. I had been there a number of times, but I went back this time and they paraded out a number of their old centenarians, which they do. And all of them were asked what was the secret of their longevity. And one of the things that they all said was eat everything. Interesting. However, in the past couple of years, Okinawan longevity has plummeted, and now Hong Kong has surpassed them, which is hard for me to believe. And the fall in Okinawan longevity is entirely attributed to McDonald's. That there has been a sudden appearance of American fast food, and people go for it. So when these people say eat everything, I don't think they meant mc. I think it was their traditional diet. But how dramatic to see this change in such a short time.

No doubt.

Wow, that's fascinating.

One woman who was 102, I think another secret that she had, which I've started to practice, she says, you want to move your fingers all the time. And she was always doing things like this. She said, it's very good for the brain.

Well, you know, even ping pong.

How have you been able to get to people to bees more consistent with their workouts.

And some of these things, as far.

As like stopping drinking pot, one, for.

The most part, it's probably like an.

Emotional thing for them that's stopping them.

From working out or emotional thing, a trigger that gets them to drink that.

Pot, I don't give much credence to that, because if people don't control their food intake, then it's easier for them to make bad choices. So the emotional part somewhat, but I think a lot of it is solvable by managing your brain nutrition to a T. Right. For example, a lot of ADD is malnutrition. So you fix the kid's diet that suddenly you can concentrate as are.

Is addiction.

Yeah, yeah. And addictions and so on. So I think that if you. There's a lot of papers that have been published mainly out of Toronto and Boston, where they look at a composition of the breakfast and how it impacts cognition, but also food choices throughout the whole day. So it does really set you up as far as discipline. If you have a proper breakfast, I think that, you know, one of the best ways to solve America's health issues would be to have a federal breakfast program. And then you don't have to feed your kids at home. You bring them in half an hour earlier and they have the right nutrition. So if I was emperor of all galaxies, I would standardize the breakfast because that would be a way to fight things like obesity. And, you know, kids don't pay attention in class. And any. Ask any school teacher. You can tell if kids eat breakfast and a proper breakfast by the attention. Spanish in class, okay. Because it sets you up for the whole day.

Yeah. Awesome.

And we'll go to. We'll go to Paris.

I want to clarify, you know, the point on the post workout shake. A lot of people say, you know, you have a shake with grape juice.

In it, and it causes you to.

Get insulin, which builds muscle.

I don't understand that. You're not a proponent to that. I'm a proponent of it. If you deserve it, write this down. You need to deserve your carbohydrates. Okay? So if you're not lean, like, tell men, if you don't have penis skin on your arms, you're too fat. Okay? So you pinch. It has to be really lean. If it's not, fuck. Stay away from carbohydrates. They're not your friend. Right. But I think that's really good to be vulgar because it raises dopamine levels and people actually pay attention. Right. But the thing is that I'm for spiking some post workout if you deserve it. Okay? So you have to be sub 10% body fat for a male and sub 16 for a female.

All right, so if you could say it real loud, Ed, too.

Sure. I wonder if Charles, if you talk about the difference, especially on a guy's hormones, with respect to doing isolated workouts versus compound workouts, you know, full body movements versus isolation, is there a difference?

Yes. If you look at the research, the larger the muscle mass you recruit, the more hormones, I mean beneficial hormones you produce. So if all your exercise are single joint, you're not going to be able to muscle mass, you're not going to lose a lot of fat. So if you center your first 70% of your workout around big compound exercise, you're on the right way. I have a friend who's set 76 world records in parlathing. He says work on a Christmas tree, not the ornaments. That's Ed Cohn. So I think it's really important that you. It's what I call most bang for your buck exercises. So squats, deadlifts, chin ups, bench presses. I really like a lot of dumbbell work because it keeps you balanced. And I really like fat handled type of dumbbells. Joe has done a video on that. Yeah.

Watson's Gym in the uk.

Yeah.

Make the best dumbbells in the world for sure. Designed by Charles.

Yes. So, you know, nothing beats the basics. And the thing is that basics are hard work and people like to avoid hard work. Right. I mean, they do tricep kickbacks and they don't forget to purge the lips. Okay, that's not going to do much for you. Right. But if you vomit a lung because you did a set of 20 in a squat, you're going to make progress. Right.

It's real great advice.

Just. Yeah. The goal of workout is that your spleen should come out through the left eye. If it has to come out through not the right eye, but the left eye, then the workout was hard enough.

So we'll take two more. So summer and then Dan and then we're done.

What are your thoughts on intermittent fasting?

Thoughts on intermittent fasting for people watching.

Okay. If you look at the research, you'll find that intermittent fasting is beneficial in the very obese. Research on intermittent fasting is looking at the world through a straw. Okay. They don't look at other things, but in the labs where they look at things like cognition, they found and muscle performance, they found that intermittent fasting was harmful. So I think that you should take care of your brain. Right. So I'm not big on intermittent fasting. There's different conditions. It depends how you do it. There's a lot of. But one thing they found in women is that it does really mess up the endocrine system. And one of the things I find when people do intermittent fasting, they become food obsessed. It's like another 52 minutes, another 48. Right. And then they compensate by drinking more coffee. So I think that because I'm a big believer in a breakfast, I'm not so keen on intermittent fasting. Some people are very. But I think a lot of it with intermittent fasting, if it works for you or not, is actually genetics. Some people, for example, if I did intermittent fasting, I would be for the first time in my life on CNN because I've killed 76 persons in a parking lot on my way to work. Because I get extremely irritable if I don't manage my protein intake in the morning. Some people don't have an appetite at all. So I'm not 100% against intermittent fasting. It's conditional. But I'm not a big fan of it either.

Okay, Dan, you brought up breakfast being the most important, I guess, meal of the day.

I have 11 and nine year old. They're important to me. And also for me. I'm curious, what are the foods that.

You recommend at breakfast that the best that we could look at either for.

Ourselves or our kids? I think what you have to look at is a very high quality protein. Now, I prefer to eat only wild meat, so I live in Colorado so I can get elk or yakur baisan.

Awesome gerbil.

That's if you live in Kentucky. But the quality of the protein is very important. And then I would like to have a type of nut. The reason why I like to have different types of nuts for breakfast is that they provide choline, which is a precursor to the neurotransmitter acetylcholine. So it helps you with paying attention and brain speed, which is important in our lives. And then if you can afford it, berries is a good source of carbohydrate. A very simple rule is the thinner the skin is of the fruit naturally, the more phytonutrients it has because, for example, a raspberry doesn't want to be sunburned. So how do you protect yourself from the sun, which is an oxidant? You make antioxidants. So if you look at, for example, grapes, the grapes that have the highest amount of phytonutrients are the ones harvested in hills, like in Sardinia and in Spain, as compared to, let's say, German wines, which are in valleys and they don't have that angle of the sun. So berries are a very good choice. And any thin peel fruit is good. Do you advocate green shakes? Green shakes are very good. One of the problems though in the industry is a lot of them are loaded with heavy metals. So there's some companies that are good and some might as well drink a liquefied bumper. Okay. So the quality of the product really matters if you make it yourself.

Like spinach.

Okay.

That's even better if you make your own green drinks. But I thought you were asking about powdered greens. Powdered greens. There's a lot of countries out there, but usually if you can buy them to a regular store, you're drinking a green liquefied bumper because it's full of heavy metals.

What about juicing versus like blending like greens in smoothies?

The problem with juicing is that you cut away the fiber and the fiber is very important to stabilize your blood sugar. So I prefer to use a powdered green versus a juicing. Okay.

Anything that I should have asked you that I did, not that you would like to say.

Well, I'll take an extra question on that. I don't know. I mean, there's so many things we could talk about.

Is this the most important book you've ever read? The pre release, of course, of Joe's marketing book.

But your check didn't clear my bank account until it does. No, but this is a very good book. I've actually read it. Or that. One of the first advanced copies. And we do marketing every day anyway. Right. So it is a valuable tool.

Yeah, I just needed to fit that in. Just for no other reason than it's. You're right here. And my self esteem requires constant edification. Okay. So where do people find more information about you?

On my website, which is strengthsensei.com so strength and S E N S e I. Yep.

Strengthsensei.com and what I'm going to do in the future because of what we're doing with Artists for addicts and the platform with addiction. Charles can speak to a variety of different subjects on health and exercise and fitness and supplementation. But he also knows a ton about the brain and about human behavior. And so I want to do a whole episode with you in the future when we launch the platform to help people with addictions. About. Because like for instance, the supplements. If someone has an alcohol problem and they want their body to kind of reject alcohol, what is it?

The best two are the combination of two amino acids, which is thyrosine and DL phyllonalanine. And if you take three grams of each on an empty stomach in the morning, people will find that they don't find alcohol tasty anymore, so they naturally take it out of their regimen. You will find that pretty much anything that has to do with the brain is fixable with a Certain combination of the omega 3s and certain amino acids. Because with fish oil, if the fish is big and comes from a warm water, it tends to contain more EPA. And of the omega 3s, EPA down regulates inflammation. So if you have arthritis, high blood pressure and so on, you want to use a fish oil with a lot of epa. But if you have attention deficit disorder or bipolar disorder, there's at least 16 brain disorders that we know are manageable with the right type of fish oil. But that fish oil has to have a high DHA content. And where do you get a high DHA content in the fish oil? They tend to be small fish in very cold water like sardines and herrings and so on. But when you go to the store, if you go see your doctor or your nutritionist, you could look at a ratio between EPA and DHA and that will decide actually which tissues are affected with it. If you don't have anything particular with your health, I would say every time you go through a bottle of fish oil, pick another brand with a different ratio and that will lower the odds that you have any sort of disorder. One thing you should know about omega 3s is that there's not a single disease known to man, and I've known this since 1994 that is not helped by Omega 3s. So if you don't believe me, you could go to PubMed, which is the biggest library of scientific papers, and put in any weird disease, you know, put omega 3 as the second keyword and you will find at least one study, if not minimum 14, that show that that fish oil is beneficial for any ailment known to man. Is there any way to know if fish oil is good? I've heard that a lot of the.

Fish oil you buy in stores is.

Rancid and you should just never eat it.

It's actually worse than not eating it.

I used to do it until I heard that. And you know, you hear so much bullshit advice. You know, worst advice is, you know.

Bad advice is the worst thing you can take.

So how do you know whether fish oil is good or bad? The best way to find out is if available through a health practitioner only. So basically it means that you can't buy on the Internet. The only company there's an exception to the rule and I don't get paid by this company. It's called Nordic Naturals. They have very high quality. They really standardize the way they make fish oil. In Canada the rules are very different. So in Canada you can actually buy a store bought and probably the best company to buy is called ATP Labs, but they make a fish oil that already has carnitine in it. It's called Omega Carn, and I think that's the best product for your brain. One thing we know from research is that any brain disorder is actually an electrical problem in your brain. And research backs up. The combination of Carnitines and Omega 3s is probably the best healing agent for any brain disorder for ranging from dyspraxia to dyslexia. And you're saying 6 grams per day, that would be a minimum. I mean, it depends on your percentage of body fat. Right. So at higher body fat, I've used as much as 45 grams. But that means your body fat is 45%. As you get leaner, you will use less and less fish oil. Okay, so it's relative. If you got 10%, do 10. Yeah. Typically when you start off, but you could be at 10%. You've been on fish oil for six months. If I measure your fatty acids and your blood may be down to 3 grams. But usually one of the guys I was recommending 30 or 45 grams for at least two decades. And then I remember Mark Houston is probably one of the best vascular health specialists in the world. Said, man, that's three to eight times more what the literature recommends. But the problem literature never tried high dosages. And one of the best compliments I ever had is that in 2008, there was a KN study that showed that in the average person, 60 grams of fish oil was the best dose. Okay, so he sent me an email that says, in the bottle of the day, huh? No, but if you use liquid, it's not so bad. But the thing, the interesting point that Mark put in his email was clinicians always ahead of the research. But when we were cavemen or cave women, we consumed 3 to 400 grams of omega 3s a week. But where did it come from? Came from animal brains. Because if you're in South Africa, in the middle of the savannah, you're not going to have access to a lot of fish. So what would happen is that the caveman would wait for the lion, lions would eat the entrails of the antelope and leave the rest alone. So what the caveman would do is he would split the skull of the antelope and eat the brain. And 60% of the brain is actually omega 3s, and 80% of that is DHA. So that's why what you find in research is that where humans, early humans consumed the most Omega 3s, the faster their brains developed. There's a strong correlation between omega 3 content in a native diet and IQs. For example, the bow and arrow concept was developed where there was more better developed brains.

Okay, it is wonderful to be here at Genius Network and see all of your shining faces. So everyone in the room here is an optimizer. So let's take a moment and imagine your perfect way of being in the world. Maybe for you, your perfect way of being is calm and in control. You're planning, you're organizing, you're in control of your day in your mind. Or maybe your perfect way of being is compassionate. You're caring, you're empathetic, you're listening. When you have a conversation with somebody, you want them to feel like the only person in the room. Or maybe your perfect way of being is maximally productive. You are laser focused on what needs to get done. You do what's important and you do it in less time every day. So all these ways of being are amazing, but we're not all these ways every day. What if there was a technique that, that could help you get there each and every day? And there is. It's called meditation. So most people think that meditation is just kind of letting your mind go blank. It's not. Meditation is a practice or a training that leads to healthy and positive mind states. Sounds pretty good, right? Practice that leads to a healthy mind. There are lots of different forms of meditation. The most basic one is a focused attention on the breath. In focused attention on the breath, you focus your attention on your breath, your mind wanders, which all our minds do. You notice it and you bring it back to your breath. So you focus on your breath, your mind wanders again, you notice it wanders, and you return it to a neutral object. This very simple, simple thing has profound impact. So the first thing you notice when you start to do this exercise is, is that you can take your mind off of your thoughts, which are often negative, repetitive, and stressful, and put them on a neutral object. This is huge. You can actually have control over your mind. Most people just sort of feel like every day your mind has stuff going through it and it's kind of thinking you. But with meditation, you learn that you can have control over the contents of your mind. You can get off the thought train. And once that happens, something really amazing happens. If you recognize that you have control over your mind and the contents of it, you can also make decisions about what's in it. And you don't need to be defined by it you realize that you are not your thoughts. And so all those stories that you may have about yourself and what you're capable of and what your limitations are on the world around you, those can go out the window. You can make the choice about what's inside your head. And then you realize the same thing can happen with your emotions. If you feel an emotion, it would in the past trigger an uncomfortable thought, which triggers more uncomfortable feelings. With a meditation practice, you realize that you can get off the emotional roller coaster, that rather than having a feeling and having it rule you, you can simply experience it as a sensation, let it rise and let it fall, and not give it the attention to control your life. So as an example, you are an employee and maybe you just made a big mistake at work. Your boss starts walking up to you and you feel your heart rate starting to raise and your breath is getting kind of shallow and you don't realize it. And you're realizing you have all sorts of sensations of fear and shame and guilt. And this really sucks, these feelings. And so maybe you'll just blame your colleagues so you don't have to feel this stuff. Well, if you have a longer term meditation practice, you can begin to start to work with those feelings and as they start to rise, not be ruled by them, not be triggered by them, and then make a more appropriate choice in that scenario. Another place where meditation has fantastic impact is in your productivity. So you may not realize it, but every time your mind wanders off task, you're actually microprocrastinating. Each and every one of those little mind wanders is actually something that's sucking up time from your precious day. So one of the things that I noticed when I started meditation practice is I got incredibly efficient early on. I had a long format essay to do and I was the boss of a company. We sat in an open office. Everything was distracting me because everybody's problem was my problem too. So I was writing this long format essay, which normally took me a few hours, and everything was distracting me. But once I started a meditation practice, those long format essays just became really efficient because each of those distractions I could say, nope, don't care. Back to the task at hand. You're a distraction. Don't care about you. Back to the task at hand. And I finished one of those things in 45 minutes. So all of these great benefits that we've discussed, improved productivity, better emotional responsiveness, they actually have corollary changes in your brain. Meditation makes real change in your brain. So let's dive into our brains to find out how. So let's start at the top. One of the first ways that meditation can change your brain is it affects your prefrontal cortex. Fantastic news. We have this area at the front of your head called your prefrontal cortex. It's your attentional control center. It helps us plan, it helps us process and organize. It's amazing. Bad news, as you age, your prefrontal cortex thins. Good news. If you are able to maintain a long term meditation practice, you may maintain the thickness of your prefrontal cortex as you age. In one study, a 50 year old long term meditator had the prefrontal cortex thickness of a 23 year old. Meditation can also help you down regulate your amygdala. So if you remember in that example with the employee when his physiology was flying all over the place, well, that was his amygdala in hyperdrive. Meditation helps you actually calm and down regulate your amygdala so you can calm and manage your body's emotional responses. Meditation also can increase the volume of your hippocampus. The side of your brain right there, right in the middle, your hippocampus is the area responsible for learning and memory. And who couldn't use more learning and memory in their life? Meditation also impacts your temporal parietal junction. Why does that matter? Well, your TPJ is an area responsible for compassion, empathy and perspective taking. And a meditation practice actually impacts that area of your brain. Meditation can also, and this is the coolest one to me, eight weeks of meditation can increase the density of your gray matter. Why is that meaningful? Well, Einstein had more gray matter than the average individual. Just saying. So if all of these things are so amazing, why don't more people meditate? We saw that only a portion of you do it. And the ones that do them, fantastic. But the ones that don't, why not? Or why do you start meditating and then you stop? Well, it turns out that meditation is actually hard to do. There's no one sitting inside the black box of your mind to tell you what you should be doing in there or to guide you and coach you. And we wanted to change that. So we set about a few years ago to create a tool called Muse that would actually give you real time feedback on your mind during meditation so you could know what was going on in there when you were focused and when your mind was wandering. As you heard, it's been used over millions of sessions, Hundreds of companies and institutions. And then we stood back and we said, we want to really ramp this up, we want to build something new. And today, for the very first time on stage, I'm going to present to you. Muse 2. It's a beautiful, slim little device, slips on just like a pair of glasses. It has sensors that track your mind and your body during meditation to give you real time feedback to start, deepen and enhance your practice. So those of you who know Muse one will know that Muse one had EEG sensors to track your brain during meditation. Muse two add sensors that track your body, your breathing and your heart to give you real time feedback on your brain and body to guide you into a deeper practice. So Muse's body sensors track your body's movements to guide you into stillness and to help you find a pain free posture for meditating. For a lot of people, this is the first place to start. Muse2's breath sensing technology tracks each and every one of your breaths and guides you in breathing exercises to calm yourself or to energize yourself. Within this very same device, there's also a heart sensor that tracks the beating of your heart and gives you real time feedback on it. It's a beautiful experience. It's not simply a number on your wrist, you actually hear the sound of your heart translated every beat into the beat of a drum so that you can tap into your heart's rhythm and learn what helps you calm it. Our classic brain feedback still in this device, actually lets you know what your brain is doing during meditation, gives you real time feedback so you hear when your mind is wandering and when you're focused. The metaphor we use is your mind is like the weather. So when you're thinking distracted, you hear it as stormy and it guides your brain into calm. So not only is there real time feedback that actually guides you into an ability to harness and hone and calm your brain and your body, but there's also data. All this rich, beautiful data that's actually showing you what your brain and body is doing so that you can understand it, track it, and improve it. It's like having a little coach right inside this device. So meditation is amazing, but you need to actually build a daily practice. So we have a motivational architecture in there that helps you build a practice and even lets you schedule your meditations, because meditation really is amazing. It's one of the best things you can do in your life, but so few people actually do it. And in order to get this benefit, you need to actually do it each and every single day. It's like going to the gym. You go to the gym for your body. You go to the gym for your mind. And when I asked Joe why does he meditate every day, what are the benefits that he experiences? He said that meditation helps me respond versus react. So you owe it to your mind and your body to teach it how to shift its responses so that you can live more productively, more compassionately, more happily, and so that you can make the choice of how you want to show up in the world every day.

Okay. I hope you found that video awesome and useful. So if you want to get a free copy of my book, I want you to click here. And if you want to watch some more videos that will be useful and awesome, click here. Go ahead.

You're over here. Do it now.

Come on.

Thank you. Watch them.