DO THIS First Thing In The Morning To COMPLETELY HEAL Your Body & Mind w/Dr. Daniel Amen EP 1243

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Every day you're making your brain a bit better or a bit worse. You're not stuck with the brain you have. You can make it better.

Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, a former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur and each week we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin. Welcome to this special episode and thank you so much for being here today. And if this is your first time listening, I hope today's episode inspires you and helps you on your path to greatness. And I'd love to hear from you and know what your key takeaways are over on social media. Just message me Louishouse over there and if you're a regular listener of the show, then welcome back. I'm so grateful and inspired by your commitment to live greater, love deeper and leave a legacy. Make sure to reference our show notes in the description for today's guest information and any mentioned links. And if you enjoy this show, make sure to tell a friend and leave a review over on Apple Podcast. This really helps the show reach more people and impact more lives as a result. Together. Okay, now it's time to dive dive into today's episode. Are you looking to take control of your health? Well, one way to do that is to check Goodrx and finally stop overpaying for your prescription medications. Prescription prices can vary between pharmacies by as much as $100, meaning you're never sure what you're going to pay. Not only will Goodrx find you discounts, but it'll also let you compare and find the lowest prices at pharmacies near you like cvs, Kroger, Walgreens, Rite Aid, Vons and more. Now you'll always know what you're paying before you to the pharmacy. Even if you have insurance or Medicare. Goodrx often beats your co pay price and I actually have a team member who was prescribed a brand name medication. She had side effects with the generic brand so she was forced to pay.

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What are some of the other techniques or nutritional things that we should be thinking about to optimizing the brain and body beyond ping pong?

Well, the first thing and I did it this morning is you go today's going to be a great day. And that way you get your brain looking for what's right rather than what's wrong. And I get to be with you today and that makes me happy. I end every day and I recommend everybody do this. What went well today? So whenever I put myself to sleep, I say a prayer and then I go, what went well today? And I start at the beginning of the day and I purposefully look for the smallest things that went well that I like that make me happy now along that you'll find the big things. But you know we're both busy and great things happen but you often don't stop and reflect on those great things that happened. And if you make it a habit like the day my dad died, my dad died almost two years ago. And that day when I went to bed, I went, what went well today? The voice, the critic in my head was so upset. It's like you're a bad human being. But it's my habit. And then I thought about all the things that went right that day. And even though I was sad and grieved, I went to sleep because I have my brain trained. We live in a society of undisciplined minds and there's a science to disciplining it. Yeah.

So what would you call that? Is it a. In the beginning of the day and the end of the day, what is that strategy called? Is it just mental focus? Is it gratitude?

People come to my clinic, we often do some neuropsych testing and one of the tests is negativity bias versus positivity bias.

What's the difference between those two?

Well, negativity bias is you're focused on what's wrong. Your brain quickly, almost immediately, goes to what you're afraid of, what's negative, and the news will tell you all sorts of things to be afraid of positivity bias is you go to what's right. And so those two techniques are part of what I talk about in the new book, positivity bias training. How do you train your brain to look for what's right, not for just what's wrong? Now, it's not over the top because I've been thinking about this Bible verse a lot lately. The beginning of wisdom is fear of the Lord. And it used to always sort of bother me. I'm like, why do I have to be afraid? And then I realized people who have low levels of anxiety, direly from accidents or preventable illnesses, they're not worried about anything.

They die earlier is what you're saying.

Right. And often the people that go to jail, they have low levels of anxiety. They actually have slower heart rates, they have lower sweat gland activity. Interesting, right? Like if I think I'm going to go rob a store, I don't because I don't want to be caught. And I don't like institutional food and I don't really look good in an orange jumpsuit. And so I'm always thinking ahead. And one of the lies of happiness, so I open you happier with the lies of happiness, is don't worry, be happy. So Bobby McFerrin's Grammy Award winning song, Don't Worry, Be Happy is a lie because you need some anxiety. So you do the right things and doing the right things consistently help you be happy. Yeah.

So you have a moral code you're doing the right habits for yourself. You're not just like, I'm not going to care. I'm going to drink all day, I'm going to eat whatever I want. Everything's going to be fine. You want to have some? Well, if I do this action, there might be a negative reaction later as well.

Right. 50% of people 85 and older will be diagnosed with dementia. I'm not okay with that. Those are bad odds. Right? Because we're living longer and I don't want a 50% chance of having lost my mind now. But I can't start thinking about that when I'm 83. I need to be thinking about that when I'm 43 or 33. Right. I mean, the earlier you can, the more you can push off those negative effects. So not too much anxiety because the cortisol damages your brain, but enough. It's like a dose response. What's the right dose of anxiety? And as a psychiatrist, I used to think my job was to lower the anxiety in my patients. And that's true for some patients, it's not true for other patients. I need to raise their anxiety.

So what would you say are the three main causes of someone more likely to reach a dementia state over 85 or before than even. What would those things be? The three bad habits or the thing you know, the causes of dementia?

Would you say so increase those chances? In the book I actually talk about our bright minds approach to preventing dementia. So there's 11, but if I had to pick a couple, it would be being overweight. Because if you're overweight or have high blood sugar, there's something I call diabesity. It's a combination. You actually have seven of the 11 risk factors. Because I published three studies, the last one on 33,000 people, that said as your weight goes up, the actual size and function of your brain goes down virtually in a linear pattern.

So does that happen if you're 30 years old and you're younger or is it like only when you.

Happens in children, really? Yeah. So we had two data sets, one in children, one in adults.

Drops the function and the size of.

The brain function trans size because it lowers blood flow to the brain. Obesity lowers blood flow to the brain, it ages the brain, it increases inflammation, fat cells store toxins, it changes your hormones, takes healthy testosterone and turns it into unhealthy, healthy, cancer promoting forms of estrogen. This is not a good thing. And so if I had to go, don't be overweight now, don't be Underweight, Underweight's not good for you, right? Have a reasonable healthy weight. Bmi, be a healthy weight. And you don't want anything to damage your blood vessels because they found neurons, brain cells actually don't age. It's your blood vessels that age. And if your blood vessels aren't feeding your brain cells, they begin to die. And so with all of these risk factors, how do I know if I have it? So spec, this imaging study I do looks at blood flow. If you're drinking caffeine, if you're using nicotine, if you're sedentary, if you have any form of heart disease, if you have high blood pressure, all of those decrease blood flow really to your brain. So you always want to increase blood flow. And I love this part because when I get someone brain healthy, their sex lives get better. Because if you have blood flow problems anywhere, like you have erectile dysfunction, you have brain dysfunction. And if you have brain dysfunction, odds are you also have sex dysfunction because they're connected. It's about blood flow, right? The healthier your blood flow. And so, you know, I see a lot of 50, 60 year old guys and they're worried about their mom had Alzheimer's disease, they don't want to get it, but when they get on the program, their sex lives are better and that makes me so happy for them.

Now, there's something you touched on a little bit ago about the negativity bias and the positivity bias. I like to believe that I think in a positive way. I see the perspective of a situation. I try to look at the good perspective of the situation. I try to appreciate the things that I have as opposed to things that I lack. I try to see, have compassion and empathy for certain situations and say, that's really unfortunate. So I should be extremely grateful for where I'm at in all areas of my life. I try to have that perspective. I feel like it's a positive bias, right? Because it makes me feel better. There's been a lot of talk lately with different researchers and professors talking about the negative effects of, call it toxic positivity or too much positivity, I guess. Is there, you know, a negative, is there really a negative effect to the brain if you're thinking positively all the time? And if so, can you be toxic in the way you think in a positive way?

So I'm actually not a fan of positive thinking. I'm a fan of accurate thinking with a positive bias. Because positive thinking is I can have this third brownie and it won't hurt me. I can drive at 125 miles an hour down the freeway in the rain, and it's not dangerous. I can give my phone number to a woman I met in a bar and not be thinking about the potential downturn sides of that. Especially if I'm married and I want to stay there.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, right.

I have this one friend, he came in and he told me about this woman he'd met at a medical conference, and they were on a plane together, and she'd been to his office, and I looked at him and I'm like, do you like attorneys? And he's like, what do you mean? I said, you're married. You have add you're not going to cover up this affair. Your wife's going to find out, you're going to lose half your net worth, and you're going to be visiting your children on the weekends. And he's like, oh, I hadn't thought about that. Which means his frontal lobes weren't working. Because the front part of your brain not only thinks of the moment, it thinks of all of the moments. Right. If I do this, what happens? And too often, people that have the most sadness, it's because they make bad decisions. And that can be toxic positivity. Like, oh, I'm in the moment where I want people to be in all of the moments, not just now. The future moment. Now and later.

Right.

I want people to feel better quickly. Yes. With things that help them feel good now and tomorrow.

Right. Okay, so I like that. Accurate thinking with a positive bias.

Yeah, accurate thinking.

Okay. Is there such thing as toxic positivity in your life?

Well, it could be. It's like, don't worry, be happy. It's like, no matter what I do today, it's not gonna impact me tomorrow. I can spend. I can max my credit cards. I can flirt with a girl even though I'm in a committed relationship.

I can drink all I want, I can eat all I want.

Yeah. That's toxic positivity. It's like, no, you need to be afraid. Right. I mean, you came to my clinic and we looked at your brain, and it's like, no, I want to love my brain. So if I love my brain, I avoid these things and I do those things, and then you have a better life. Right. The school of greatness starts with a healthy brain.

Yes, absolutely. And so how do we figure out what our brain type is then? There's different brain types. How do we know what ours is?

Most books on happiness. And there have been a Lot of books on happiness is. They go, okay, here are the things that make you happy, from gratitude and purpose and novelty, working out and this and that. And I'm like, well, it depends on what your brain type is. For some people, helicopter skiing makes them happy, or jumping out of an airplane makes them happy. And for other people, that makes them flat out miserable. It's like, no, I'm not gonna do that. I'll be anxious, I'll be afraid. No. And what I learned. So at Amen clinics, I have 10 clinics around the country, we do brain imaging. So if you have anxiety, depression, temper problems, relationship problems, memory problems, head trauma, whatever, we'll talk to you and then we'll scan you. It's been my big love affair in life is looking at people's brains. And early on I realized, because I was looking at, like, what does ADD look like in the brain? Or what does depression look like? Or bipolar disorder or autism. And early on, quickly, I learned they're not one thing, that each of those things have subtypes. And I've written books like Healing add, the seven types of add. And then when I was thinking about happiness, I'm like, it's clearly not one thing. And I've identified five primary types. Brain types, brain types based on imaging. So there's the balance brain type, where, quite frankly, most anything will make you happy. You're focused, you're flexible, you're positive and relaxed. And type two is the spontaneous type. Type one, you have a generally healthy brain. Two, you have sleepy frontal lobes, the front part of your brain, low, lower in activity. And you're very creative.

Often. Often.

A lot of the young superstars I see are the spontaneous type. They need novelty. They love surprises. They hate routine. Yeah, they want their life to be a bit unpredictable. They also like scary movies. They need a dopamine fix. Now, the persistent type, type 3, their frontal lobes actually work a bit harder than everybody else. And they hate surprises and love routine. They're accomplishment oriented. They finish things on time, they show up on time, and unfortunately, they tend to marry. The spontaneous type, or at least those are the people that come to my office, and they come to my office. The fourth type is the sensitive type. And this was the type that was damaged the most in the pandemic because they crave connection, crave relationships. They're deeply empathic. And when their relationships are good, they're really happy. And when they're stressed, they're very unhappy. And then type 5 is the cautious type. These are people that are early to Appointments, they will never jump out of an airplane unless the airplane's on fire. And to make them happy, they need peace, they need relaxation, they need a massage. And so understanding my type and their combinations.

Yeah, you might have two or three.

Or.

Three or four of these things at times. You know, it's like, I like my routine, but I also like to get out once in a while and do something spontaneous, you know.

So there are 16 types. When you look at the combinations and in the book there's a link on how to get your free brain type. It's just so helpful.

What can we do once we know which type we're at? What do we do then with that information?

Well, for the balanced people, just keep it that way. For the spontaneous people, here are some supplements that might help your type. Here's the right diet for your type. Here, the right exercise for your type. So if the spontaneous person, it is critical for them to know their goals in great detail. And they love the exercise. And then every day they ask themselves the question, does it fit? Does my behavior fit? Because the break in their brain is vulnerable, it's a little weak. And so often they'll go off here, they'll go off there. And a lot of CEOs are the spontaneous type, especially entrepreneurs. Not maybe CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, but for their own companies, which can be wildly successful. But they need a persistent person to organize them.

Yes.

Because they're really good at starting businesses, they're not good at growing businesses. So just know, oh, is that me? Then make sure you don't hire someone like you with your type of to grow your business. Because they won't. They'll get you in trouble with the irs.

Exactly. So once we know these. And what's your brain type?

So I'm balanced.

Balanced.

But I have features of cautious and sensitive because I crave relationships. So when Tan and I get along, and thank goodness we get along almost all the time, I'm so happy.

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Along at all and I was miserable for two decades.

Wow.

And I, I guess maybe I have the persistent type too.

You want to try to make it work and try to do everything you.

Can feel guilty when it doesn't.

I know that feeling. What do you say is the biggest lesson you've learned about your own personal life? Of assessing? I think it's 200,000 brain scans now, over 30 years. How long is it, 30 years of work of just assessing the world's brains and these different types. What's the biggest lesson you've learned about yourself in personal life? Relationships, you know, all these things.

So I started imaging in 1991 and I'm 37. I'd been a psychiatrist nearly a decade. I was the top neuroscience student in medical school and I didn't care about my own brain.

So what did that mean? You were eating whatever you were sleeping whenever.

I only slept four hours and I, and I thought I was special because I could do that. Then I realized it wasn't special. You're bragging stupid.

I only need four hours a night of sleep and I can function.

Yeah. I was eating fast food. I was overweight, chronically stressed. And when I, the week before I scanned myself, I scanned my mother and she was 60. And at 60, she had a stunningly beautiful brain. She's 90 now and she still has a stunningly beautiful brain. It's a little irritating. And then the next week I scanned myself and it wasn't good. My brain looked older than her 60 year old brain, but it reflected her life, her brain. She could manage my difficult dad. She has seven children. She now has 54 grandchildren, great grandchildren. She's the most consistently loving person. She knows everybody's birthday. She knows what's going on in everybody's life. She's chronic. She's just always interested. My brain wasn't healthy. I played football in high school. I had meningitis twice when I was a young soldier. And that's a bad thing for your brain. And I didn't care. Right. I never drank or smoked. I just didn't want to do that. I fell in love with my brain. And every day I'm like, is this good for my brain or bad for it? You know, I don't take red eyes because I know that's bad for my brain. I mean, I'd Rather give up a half a day to travel than take a red eye.

Tell me why. Why is that?

You're not going to sleep, right? When you're sleeping, you're changing time zones. And now sometimes if you go to Dubai or something like that, you don't have a choice.

But on a frequent basis, east coast.

To west coast, it's like, no, I have a choice. I'm going to take a 10 o' clock flight and, you know, I'll just get other work done that day. And that way I'm not going to lose a day of sleep because it's. And I look at what I eat, I look at how I think. I mean, everything in my life. Like, if you date my daughter, I'm scanning your brain, right? I mean, it's really at the core, at the center of my life. When I met Tana 16 years ago, liked her a lot. And like, three weeks, please, I hope.

Her brain looks good.

I'm like, you know, she could be the one. And so I said, you haven't seen the clinic? I said, don't you want to come see the clinic? Oh, by the way, could we look at your brain? And she's a neurosurgical ICU nurse, so she loves the brain. And I scanned her and it was good enough.

It could be better now. I'm about to get my girlfriend in there now, too. I'm just like, we just moved in. I'm like, the next, next test is the brain scan to see if you're really healthy.

Well, because ultimately, brain functions are empathy, being able to see things from the other person's point of view.

Yeah.

It's cooperation. That's so true. It's excitement, it's fun, it's listening. It's those things that make a relationship work. Right. Once you get beyond the cocaine phase of a relationship, like when I scan Tana, I was totally in this cocaine phase, the adrenaline phase. I wanted to activate my frontal lobes and go, okay, how's her brain? And one of my kids was dating this very cute girl, and I scanned her and I'm like, please don't marry her. Please don't marry her.

Based on the brain.

Yeah. Because I'm like, she's doing things you don't know that she's doing. Because I can tell if you're a substance abuser now.

You can tell if someone smoking, drinking, marijuana, vaping. You can see this in the brain?

Yeah. I mean, it doesn't label it. This is vaping, but it's like, this is toxic.

There's a toxic thing happening to the brain, Right. And could that be through thoughts alone or is it you can see the difference between a toxic thinking versus toxic substance taking.

It's different.

Is it?

So toxic thinking will often activate your emotional brain, so your limbic brain will be more active. Mold exposure or marijuana or alcohol, your brain starts to shrivel really.

So you can tell. So if say someone is, eats perfectly, has all the right things to eat, they sleep well. Well, they may not be able to do this if they're thinking negatively all the time. But let's just hypothetically say they try to work out consistently, they're healthy weight, they're not taking any harmful substances, but they have extremely low self esteem. They're constantly saying to themselves internally, I'm an idiot, I'm stupid, why did I do that? Doubting themselves, what does that look like to a brain? But they're doing all the other things semi correctly.

Well one we would have to look because I always say, how do you know unless you look? Because they may have been kicked in the head by a horse when they were 10 and it damaged their frontal lobes. And nobody knows about it because they were unconscious and had amnesia for the event. But say they're doing everything physically, right, but mentally their mind is undisciplined and it's negative. They're going to have a relatively healthy brain, but their emotional structures are going to be really busy. And so it's like the chatter in their head, the internal dialogue is just too active.

Yes.

And one of the fun techniques in the book, I love this technique, is give your mind a name and so you can gain psychological distance from it. It's sort of like the man in your head or the woman in your head that's always running a dialogue on you. Name him or her and separate from it. Like when I learned this technique, like what would I name my mind? I named it after my pet raccoon when I was 16. So I literally have pet raccoon. Herme was her name. I thought she was a boy, but she wasn't anyway harming because I loved her. But she was a troublemaker, right? She like tped my mother's bathroom and she went to my dad. My mom went to my dad that night and she said, louie, it's my dad. It's either me or the raccoon. Now my dad loved my mom, but he has the persistent brain type. And if you have the persistent brain type, nobody can tell you what to do as soon as they tell you what to do. You're going to do the opposite. And when I heard him say, don't let the door hit you in the rear, I'm like, this is going to be a bad night for me. And then a couple of days later, Hermey ate all the fish out of my sister's aquarium. It just, like, holds up signs like, you're a fool or you're a failure, you're an idiot, or whatever it is. And on most days, those things aren't true. And if I could watch my thoughts rather than attach. Not the thoughts you have that make you suffer. We all have crazy thoughts. It's the thoughts you attach to that make you suffer.

So it's not having the crazy thoughts is one thing. Attaching, I guess, your identity to the thought or believing. Or believing it's a real thought, will make you suffer.

Right. Like Jerry Seinfeld said, the brain is sneaky organ. We all have weird, crazy, stupid, sexual, violent thoughts that nobody should ever hear. Like, if you see someone with a big load of boxes in his arms, you're like, oh, I should trip him now. You don't. You don't. Because you're a kind, caring person, and you know, that would just cause all sorts of trouble.

Yes.

Right. So just having the thought. And I've had guys, they come into my office and they go, I'm a pedophile. And I'm like, tell me about that.

Wow.

And they're like, well, my teenage daughter brought some friends over and I had sexual thoughts about them. I'm like, did you get their phone number? Did you climb in bed with them? I said, having a thought has nothing to do with whether or not it's true. But when you attach to, I'm a pedophile. Oh, my God. And. And they feel like sometimes they have to share that. I'm like, please don't share that. Share with me. You know, let's work through it. Because if you really are a pedophile, we have to work on that. We have to protect.

Yes.

You and other people, you and the children. We have to protect you. And often I've actually scanned a number of pedophiles.

Really.

They have an impulse of compulsory brain where they can't stop thinking about something and then they can't control it. But just because you have a thought has nothing to do with whether or not it's true.

Right?

Right. I mean, a lot of people have had, you know, I should kill myself, but doesn't mean you're going to. But it's why you shouldn't be drinking. If you have suicidal thoughts, you need to stop drinking because people have suicidal thoughts who drink have a higher risk risk of killing themselves.

So what should we be aware of about thoughts? Are we the creator of thoughts? Do thoughts randomly come to us? Can we shift the thoughts? Should we believe every thought we have or realize, okay, that's just a thought. That doesn't mean it's who I am and it doesn't define me. What's your overall principle around thoughts?

They come from all over the place. They come from your genes. They're actually written in your genetic code. So trauma from a past generation can actually show up in future generations. It's really interesting. Last time I was here, we talked about, your brain is always listening. And I talk about the ancestral drag where the issues you have may not be your issues, they may be from your mom or from your dad. So knowing your family history is really important. Thoughts come from the voices of your mom and dad. I have six siblings, your siblings. Voices come from your friends, from your enemies, from the news, from the music you listen to. And they lie a lot.

Your thoughts lie a lot.

Your thoughts lie a lot. Now, every time you have a thought, your brain releases chemicals. Every time you have a good thought, positive thought, happening thought, hopeful thought, your brain releases chemicals that make you feel good immediately.

Your hands get warmer when you think of positive thought.

When you think of positive thought, your hands get drier, your muscles become more relaxed, your breathing becomes slower and deeper, and your heart rate variability goes up. And it happens immediately. When you have a sad thought, a hopeless thought, a helpless thought, a stressful thought, your body immediately produces chemicals that make your hands colder and wetter, muscles more tense, breathing shallower and more erratic. Heart rate variability goes down. That's a sign of heart health. And it happens immediately.

So how connected are our thoughts to our nervous system and our body?

They're completely connected. Every thought you have impacts every cell in your body, really. And thoughts lie. And it's not the thoughts you have that make you suffer, it's the thoughts you attach to. So whenever you feel sad or mad or nervous or out of control, write down what you're thinking and then just ask yourself if it's true.

What if you think it's true? How do you switch?

So I love Byron, Katie's technique.

She's great.

Talk about it. It'll work. These five questions. And she calls it four questions. And I turn around, I'm like, okay, five questions.

Is it true? Is it really true?

So if we took a thought I don't know if you had a negative thought recently that you want to share.

Negative thought. I've been in a pretty good place, to be honest. I mean, I was just telling you, I'm pretty consistent with my emotional accountability with therapy. I feel like my relationship's in a great place. That's a negative thought. Maybe a negative thought is I've been traveling a lot in the last month, and I haven't been as good with my nutrition, my sleep patterns, and my working out. So it kind of felt like, man, I just feel, like, a little sloppy, a little off. Like, you know, I'm behind, you know, but it's not like a negative.

Let's go with I'm behind. Yeah. Is that true? And remember, we're not interested in positive thinking. We're interested in accurate thinking with us. Positive. Right.

Am I behind? I'm. I'm behind necessarily on, like, my view of what I want to create for myself. So on that viewpoint, I guess I'm a little behind, but it's. I'm not, like, beating myself up. It's more.

Okay, so that's question one. Is it just. Is it true? Question two. Is. Is it absolutely true? A hundred percent certainty you're behind. Right. Is it 100% sure?

It's not 100% true. It's just the story I'm telling myself. Yeah.

Question three, how do you feel when you believe the thought?

I don't feel as good. Yeah. Don't feel as good when I'm ruminating or thinking about that thought, you know, I feel like, you know, frustrated.

Question four is, how would you feel without the thought?

I feel a lot better. Yeah.

Right. And you are not the person. So many people worry. If I didn't feel bad, I wouldn't be motivated. But that's not you.

No. I'm disciplined.

And question five is my favorite of all of them. Let's take the original thought and turn it to the opposite. I'm not behind. And then we ask ourselves, is that true? Do I have any evidence that I'm not behind? So I love that, because if I get a thought, Tana never listens to. To me. I've had that thought. Right. She may be at that time in her cycle, or she may be distracted and she's not listening to me. But if I go, hannah never listens to me.

Is that true? No. No.

Who would I be without the thought? I'd be a good husband. I'd understand. Maybe she's having a harder time, and then the turnaround can Go three ways. It can go to the opposite. Tana does listen to me. Well, I've written and produced 16 national public television shows. She's listened to the script on all of them.

Yes.

So she does listen to me. But you can also take it to, I don't listen to her. I'm like, I'm busy. Or I don't listen to myself. So the turnaround can be opposite self and other, which is a sophisticated concept, but. And when you get it, you don't have to believe your thoughts. They're productions of genetics and environment and chemistry. You then go, does this help me? Does it get me what I want? Is it accurate? And we haven't talked yet about this. I love this idea that happiness is a moral obligation. Because when I grew up in Catholic school, I went to Our lady of Grace Elementary School in Encino and then Crespi High School. The idea that happiness is a moral obligation that was nowhere to be found.

In Catholic school growing up.

Yeah. Or in most religious schools growing up. Or in most families.

Why is that not something that people think about?

And why?

Because they think of it as fluffy. It's like, oh, so you're happy. But when you ask someone who was raised by an unhappy parent or married to an unhappy spouse whether or not happiness is an ethical issue, and I guarantee you the answer will be yes, you're not happy. It's sort of like having bad breath that impacts everybody else. So it's not selfish to seek happiness. Now, in the same breath, I want to say hedonism is the enemy of happiness.

What's hedonism?

Where you just seek pleasure for pleasure's sake.

And so I'm going to have sugar all day. I'm going to have sex all day. I'm going to watch movies all day. I'm going to whatever it is that your pleasure trap is.

Right. Because it wears out your pleasure centers. Before we were on, we started talking about fame and health. Fame can wear out the pleasure centers in your brain. You want to be very careful with the happiness you seek.

What is the fame trap like? How does fame bring happiness or bring sadness to people? Because I feel like a lot of people want money. They want power.

They want.

Fame is what they think they want growing up. But what have you seen from the brains that have a lot of fame, money, power, followers? If they don't have the right habits to help cultivate a healthy brain, what happens?

So there's these two areas in your brain. They're called the nucleus accumbens. And it responds to dopamine. And dopamine is often thought of the molecule of more and pleasure and focus and being high or happy when you hit it hard. So think fame or think cocaine. You feel great, but the more you hit it, you begin to wear it out. And then it takes more and more to feel, to feel anything, anything at all interesting. And then it sets up a cycle of depression. And so, and I just listened to Will Smith's autobiography which I thought was great and he talks about it that, you know, another number one movie release or number one best selling hit.

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As cool as the one before.

It's not enough anymore.

And, and I had, and I experienced this and it was disorienting. My book, Change youe Brain, Change youe Life, spent a year at number two or number three on the New York Times bestseller list, and it was a historic bestseller. But my next book wasn't as good. I mean, I thought it was better, but it didn't sell as much. And so, so how does that. It's disorienting. And then, and then my book after that did great healing add, but then the one after that, not so much. And you just as an author, if you're really successful, you begin to feel off. And then I had to come to grips with it. I've had 12 New York Times bestsellers, but I've written 40 books, so that means a bunch of them worked. And do I write to feed the nucleus accumbens, or is it really a different chemical that I'm after? I'm after serotonin, which is respect, and oxytocin, which is connection. And so it's interesting to think about what you do based on the chemistry of happiness. And so yes, there's dopamine, but unfortunately, dopamine's a trap. It's the molecule of more. I need more sex, more money, more praise, more followers. And I'm not gonna lie, when we went over a million fans on TikTok, that was cool, right? I mean, that was cool, but it's not the point, right? The point is connection, purpose, respect.

Yes. And what happens to the brain, we were talking about this before, of a brain that is in service to something greater than themselves, whether it's locally, whether it's with a friend or family member, they're being in service to someone or they're making it their mission of a cause greater than them or their own accomplishments. What happens to a brain that's on service mentality, more focused towards that versus a brain that's focused on self success, acknowledgement. Can you just compare those?

So part of it depends on your brain type because. And I want people to know, so what makes you uniquely happy? But there's this great study from Baltimore, it's part of the Baltimore Longevity Study, where they did MRI scans on two groups and one group volunteered at least once a week for a year and the other group just did their regular life.

Yeah.

So that was the intervention. Volunteering was the intervention. At the end of the year, they did MRI scans on them again. And the volunteer group had grown their hippocampus. Now, why is that important? The hippocampus, one of my favorite structures in the brain.

Where is that in the brain?

So it's on the inside of your temporal lobe, so behind your eyes.

Back.

Maybe an inch and a half. And the hippocampus is Greek for seahorse because it's shaped like a seahorse. They're about the size of your thumbs, so they're big in your brain and they're very special. Hippocampus is involved in memory, so it gets memory into long term storage. Did you ever see the movie 50 First Dates?

Yes.

With Drew Barrymore and Adam Sandow. It's a great movie. I love that movie. Well, she had damage both of her hippocampi, so she couldn't something happened today, she didn't remember tomorrow. So it's heavily involved in memory, but also in mood and spatial orientation. And it's very special because the hippocampus produces stem cells every day about 700. And when you put the hippo, the baby seahorses, called baby seahorses, in a healing environment, you grow them and they become part of your brain. And volunteering was good for the baby seahorses. And I want to teach people skills, not just give them pills, whether it's antidepressants or anti anxiety medications or marijuana or whatever. It's like. That's not the first thing to go to. The first thing is to learn diaphragmatic breathing. The first thing is to learn not to believe every stupid thing. You think. The first thing is like, let's get your diet right, because that'll fit too. Because 30% of mental health problems you just, you have when you're working with people, you have to find what works for them.

Yes.

Because you know what works for their type and what works for them. You have to find what they love. Because the whole goal is to love your brain because then you love your life.

Here's the thing. Addiction is hard for a lot of people to overcome. It's addiction for a reason. And people stay addicted for a long time because they probably try multiple times on whatever it is, marijuana or cigarettes or alcohol or porn. Or sex, whatever it is people are addicted to or just negative thinking. So how does someone who feels like I've been trapped, I've been addicted for years or a long time on something, how do they really get to the root of healing that addiction or stopping it without taking on a different negative addiction?

In my last book, your Brain is Always Listening, I actually wrote a new 12 step program because the original AA program was written in the 30s. Wow. And I'm like, there's no neuroscience. It's basically a psychological, social, spiritual program. And step number one is know your life is out of control. That's actually step number two. Step number one is, what do you want? What do you want? Your relationship clear on what you want. What do you want? Your work, what do you want? Your money, what do you want? Your physical, emotional, spiritual health. You gotta get really clear, what do you want? And then you ask yourself, is my behavior getting me what I want? And if it's not, that's step two. My life is out of control. It's being controlled by something I don't want. But so often people don't go to step number one, what do you want? And you know, people go, more money. It's like, that's probably not what. What you want, because money doesn't make people happy. I mean, up to about $75,000, right. If you're poor, you're not happy. So there's a baseline of happiness. But above that, there is no connection to money and happiness. And so when you really get to what most people want, and I'm quite shocked by this, I've been a psychiatrist 40 years, and I ask people what they want and they don't know. Or they'll say things like a promotion or a girl or money. But no, no, what do you want? And let's balance it. Because when you're not balanced, I mean, you and I work very hard, but when you're not balanced, you get burned out. Yes. And so what do you want in your relationships? I start there. What do you want for work and money? Because that's important, right? And if you know what you want for your money, you don't spend in a dumb way. What do you want for your physical health? So obesity runs in my family, and I don't want to be obese. So when I think of the brownie or rocky road ice cream or my mother's baklava, I'm like, no, because it doesn't fit. Right? I mean, I care if I don't have tattoos, but if I Had a tattoo. Does it fit? Would be the first tattoo. Maybe over here. Is it true? Is it truly true? Does it fit? And in the new book, there's these seven secrets, like, what's your brain type? And are you doing things that make you happy? Optimize your brain. But with each secret comes a question like, am I doing something that makes me uniquely happy today? And this makes me happy.

Right.

To me, this isn't work. It's fun, connection and education.

So is that one of the things to ask yourself?

What makes me uniquely happy? Based on my brain type every day. And then I want you to look for the micro moments of happiness. What's the smallest thing?

And am I doing those things on a daily basis?

Am I doing those. Those things like hummingbirds. They're my micro moments of happiness. And I have hummingbirds in my yard. So I put plants there that they're going to be interested and it makes them happy. So everybody's winning.

Everyone's happy.

Yeah, everybody's happy.

What's another neuroscience secret?

Optimize the physical function of your brain. So I did a study for this book. We looked at 500 consecutive new patients. Stamen clinic. And I gave them the Oxford happiness questionnaire. So how happy are you on a scale of 1 to 6? We compared the high happiness group with the low happiness group. Low happiness group had lower function in their frontal lobes.

And so how do you increase the function in your frontal lobe?

So hyperbaric, oxygen, certain supplements, not hitting soccer balls with your head. If you're boxing, don't let people hit you in the head. I mean, you protect them. And I have thousands of before and after scans if you do the right thing. So we just. You're on our series. Scan my brain. We just did Troy Gloss. So Troy was the third baseman for the Anaheim Angels. He was the 2002 World Series MVP, hit 320 home runs. He's a very successful baseball player. And. But he was drinking too much and had four concussions when he played. Had no purpose. And he came to see me and his brain looked terrible, especially his frontal lobes. And he was really sad, which meant his family was really sad. People don't get it. It's right. It's not all about you. It's about everybody.

That's why he said moral obligation.

Moral obligation. And I love Troy because he just did. Did what I asked him to do. He stopped drinking.

And there's an athlete mindset. He's like, coach me up. I'll do what he told me to do.

Yeah, yeah, no. That's why I love treating athletes.

So he stopped drinking.

He stopped drinking. He took the supplements I gave him. He ate better. He lost 15 pounds and increased his exercise because a lot of athletes, they got so burned out from working out.

Stop.

They stop. And you can't stop. I mean, you can, can shift, but you can't stop. And two months later, I scanned him again. His brain was so much healthier. Two months and he was happier. Yeah. Now he has appropriate anxiety. He's like, no, I don't want that bad brain. I don't want that bad brain. And I don't want to go back to feeling bad. And so there's enough anxiety. But now he asks himself, at least I hope, does it fit. Does this behavior fit the Goals I have? 3 is supplement your brain. Am I taking my supplements every day? And the supplement for happiness, there's a number of them, but saffron, I'm like a huge fan of saffron. I make something called happy saffron with a saffron extract called afron, zinc and curcumin, because in independent randomized controlled trials, they've been found to boost your mood. In fact, Saffron has 24 randomized controlled trials comparing it to Prozac, Paxil, Lexapro, Zoloft, Wellbutrin, showing it to be equally effective. Really? Most antidepressant essence decrease sexual function where saffron increases sexual function. And I think that's so interesting.

This is a natural supplement.

It's just a natural supplement.

It's not a drug.

Yeah, it's not a drug. And I'm not opposed to medication. It's just never the first thing I think about.

Don't just say my brain's messed up. I have add. Here's a drug.

Right?

You say, here are all these other things you couldn't try to get you a little closer to where you want to be first.

Well, and we want to look at your brain first because how do I know what's going on with your brain? Based on just what you tell me. Right. No other doctor acts like that. 4 Love Food that Loves you back. And when you travel, it's harder. Yeah, but you still have choices. And so we always go, compared to what? Right? So I could have the deep dish pizza or I could find a salad. Right? I mean, it's like, oh, but I love pizza. But it doesn't love you. You're in an abusive relationship with pizza. Because. And I just think both you and I, at least me for sure, have Been in bad relationships in the past. I'm married to my best friend. I'm not doing that anymore. Just not. And so many people come. But I love sugar.

But it makes.

You stupid and it makes you stress. And, oh, but I love cake or cookies or whatever. You know, it's love food that loves you back. You're in a relationship, and your brain.

Is in a relationship with food as well. That's a good one. What's number five?

Master your mind and get psychological distance from the noise in your head. So that's where we put Is it true? And I love just sort of watching my mind because it doesn't torture me anymore. It used to torture me. And I was 28 before I learned I did not have to believe every stupid thing I thought. I was 28 years old. I was a psychiatric writer. And I'm in class. And when the professor said that, I'm like, really? It's a game changer for me just to, like, not believe every thought, but to sort of just watch the storms that come in my head. And when you do what I've done. So I have been a troublemaker in my profession. I have. We've had 10,000. And physicians and mental health professionals refer people to us. I get a lot of love, but I've also gotten a lot of hate. Washington Post did an article on me, and they called me the most popular psychiatrist in America. And to most psychiatrists, that's a really bad thing. But learning how to manage my mind, because sometimes the thought will come up, nobody likes you. And then I'm like 10,000 people for patient statements, sure. So maybe not. But if you don't know how to manage that. And I'm not unique, right? I mean, I have five sisters. I'm used to criticism.

Yeah, sure.

But if you don't know how to manage it, you get resentful, reactive, all of those things.

How do you manage it when you get. Whether it's a media or other. I don't know if there's other scientists or researchers who might be questioning you or your methods. How do you handle that and address it both personally and professionally?

Used to be really hard for me. Used to be really hard. And then I realized none of them will help 1% of the people we've helped at Amen clinics. Yeah, I know. We change lives. I have stories over and over and over. The lever patient that helped me with this, because I lived initially because I was called all sorts of bad names. A charlatan, a snake oil salesman. And I was Just anxious and upset because I became a doctor, in part because I like when people respect me, of course.

And so if you're communicating and now.

I'm being disrespected, and hell is separation from God, or it's separation from your community. And now. And I loved being part of the psychiatric community, won a research award from the American Psychiatric association as distinguished fellow. And now I'm getting all this grief.

And why is this happening?

Well, I know why it's happening. And it's just normal that when you try to change your paradigm, people don't say thank you. Especially for the people that are making money on the current paradigm. They demonize you. There's a great book called the Structure of Scientific Revolution. And initially, somebody sees there's a problem, the powers that be try to fix it. That person comes up with a new paradigm, like what I do. We came up completely new paradigm. You should scan your brain and then you should use skills and natural things, not just pills. So you can see the pharmaceutical industry and the insurance industry are like, oh, no, can't do that. Step four is the rejection. It's the most predictable phase in scientific revolution.

Interesting.

And then. And five, progress in science happens through funerals. The old guard dies, and a new guard comes up that embraces the new paradigm.

But it might take years or decades to embrace the new paradigm. And then that becomes a new norm.

And then that becomes the new norm.

Until that's broken in 50 years or 100 years, or when there's something new.

Or whatever it might be. Well, last year. So one of the exercises and you happier, is write down the 20 happiest moments of your life. Because when you get sad, you can anchor them. Like, I have them anchored in my house, like at my front door. It's anchored in my memory of me holding Tana, taking her across the threshold and almost dropping her, because I almost dropped her when we practiced our dance the night, night before. And it was funny.

It was fun.

Yeah, it was a good memory. And when I go in the kitchen, my grandfather's there at the stove making fudge. Although I'm teaching them how to make a healthy fudge. Right. Well, last May, I got another one of my 20 happiest memories. The Canadian association of Nuclear Medicine, which is a prestigious scientific body that regulates SPECT in Canada, wrote nuclear procedure guidelines as if I wrote them. Wow.

So they used some of your procedures, or they.

They wrote it as if I had written it. And 10 of the authors, five of them were my students, basically saying, you should look. What's the matter with you if you don't look? And it, it's, it's a radical shift in the paradigm.

What specs stand for you?

Single Photon Emission Computed Tomography. This is how you scan the nuclear medicine study that looks at blood flow and activity. But single photon photon's a little piece of light. Let's face it, everyone's juggling long busy days.

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So when I scanned you, we injected the medicine. It goes and locks to your brain and then sends out signals that we could scan. And your image was made up of about 10 million photons or times the pieces of light hit the crystals in the camera. So it's really cool. But if you want to be happy, don't be a pioneer because you're getting criticized, taken down.

Try to be taken down. Told all these nasty things about you.

And I just, I wish I'd known when I started that the sequence to how this is going to go.

Yes, right.

I wasn't excited, I wasn't looking for the hatred.

What was the sequence for you? Was it like, oh, I'm going to try. This paradigm isn't working the way I want it to work. This old paradigm. So let me find something new. This is exciting. I'm seeing some results.

So for me, when 1972, I turned 18 and Vietnam was still going on and I became an infantry medic, where my love of medicine was born. Anyways, about a year into that, I realized I didn't like being shot at. It's not for me. So I got retrained as an X ray technician and developed a passion for imaging. As our professors used to say, how do you know unless you look? So I love taking pictures of people's bodies. I just thought that was so cool. And when I went to medical school, someone I love tried to kill herself and I took her to see a wonderful Psychiatrist. And I fell in love with him because I knew if he helped her, it would help generations of her. So I fell in love with psychiatry, the only medical specialty that never looks at the organ it treats. And because of my imaging background, I knew it was wrong. Interesting. And I knew it would change. I just had no idea I'd be part of it.

Because psychiatry focuses on thoughts and the brain, but it doesn't take an image or scan it necessarily.

Right. So if you went and saw a psychiatrist today, he would make a diagnosis exactly like they did in 1840, based on when Lincoln was depressed.

Based on what you're telling them, by.

What you tell them, how you look, your habits, and they're looking at symptom clusters. Interesting. Oh, you're a bipolar disorder. Oh, you have borderline personality disorder. Oh, you have adhd. And early on, I'm like, that's complete crap. Because how do you know what's going on in their brain? The assumption is, depression's one thing. It's a serotonin deficiency. And. And so everybody should take an ssri, but they work no better than placebo in large groups of patients. I mean, 60 Minutes did a whole study, a whole show on that. Interesting. And then when I started looking, because I like looking, I got so excited. And I'm also a writer and a communicator. Like, I like to write what I'm doing for the general population to benefit from my work, because I feel good when someone else benefits from my work. Right. That gives me serotonin and oxytocin and the chemicals of happiness. We should talk about oxytocin before we finish, for sure. But what I didn't know, because I started looking, and I didn't make this stuff up. I mean, I had a teacher, and other people were doing it at the time because I have a big mouth. I would attract a lot of patients, and that would cause jealousy, and then the haters would come out, and then it didn't fit the current paradigm. Diagnosis based on symptom clusters, no biological data. And then when I did it, the first 10 cases.

When did you first do. How long were you a psychiatrist for? Until you did the first scans?

Nine years.

Nine years. And so you were doing this, and you were trying to diagnose, and I.

Was horrified because, like, they're depressed. Let me give you Prozac, because I was. I just gotten out of my residency when Prozac came on the market. Some people got better, like, dramatically better by giving them the medicine, by giving them Prozac. And some people got worse and wanted to kill people. And I'm like, no, no, no, I'm not okay with that. Or I'm also a child psychiatrist. They had adhd and I'd give them Ritalin. And some kids got dramatically better, like from D's and F's to A's and B's, and so much better. And other kids would become suicidal. And I'm like, no, we're missing something.

Yes.

And then when I started looking, I'm like, okay, what's the one pattern? Like, oh, there's not one pattern. There's like seven or eight different patterns for all these things. So let's stop making diagnoses based on symptom clusters with no biological data. And then the other thing I learned, which is why I do the athlete work I do, is mild traumatic brain injury ruins people's lives. And nobody knows about it.

Wow.

Because they see psychiatrists, psychologists, marriage and family therapists, and nobody's looking at their brain. And so my NFL work, they have four times the level of depression as the general population because of the chronic traumatic brain injuries.

And what's the movie?

Concussion.

Concussion, yeah. That's kind of bringing that more to light.

I was a consultant on concussion and I was actually written into the script. So I know what it's like to be written into a movie.

There you go.

And I know what it's like to be written out of.

To be taken out of it. Yeah. You know, it's interesting that now it's becoming more. And now the NFL is changing the way that the rules of the game where you can't hit head to head. And so I think there's some progress.

Isn't it every bit as exciting?

Yeah.

I mean, the idea that we need the violent hits to feed our animalistic nature. Stop that. I mean, I grew up a Ram fan and the super bowl was fun, but I still saw concussions. And that's still. Yeah, little micro concussions horrified me. Right. I mean, the thousands of sub concussive.

Blows every day in practice. I mean, you play football for how many years? A couple years.

Three.

Three years.

And I loved it.

And you probably hit head to head. This is probably before they had sophisticated helmets.

Oh, we had plastic helmets. Yeah.

And so you probably had.

And we did drills in practice.

That's all you did.

Yeah.

And I'm thinking that's insane.

Yeah.

When you just think the brain is soft, the skull is hard, and the skull has sharp bony ridges. And your brain controls everything you do, how you think, how you feel how you act. Why would you ever let a child do that? I spoke at the Future of Medicine conference, and a friend of mine who's actually a billionaire, stands up and he goes. Because he heard me talk about football. And he goes, but my son really wants to play. And I hired him like a former NFL player coach. I'm like, what if he said, I really want to do cocaine because the level of damage is the same? Would you find him the most talented drug dealer?

Yeah.

Yeah, I hear you.

It's funny, I think about this now. I'm like, one of my buddies who was. I played arena football for a season, and he was the. The MVP of, like, the Arena Championship game. And he goes, there's no way I'd let my son play football. You know, knowing what I know from back then, he's like, just the traumas over and over again. He's like, maybe baseball or some other sport, but basketball, but not in a sport where there's just constant hitting, you know? And I think it's. I ask myself that. My girlfriend's like, would you let your kid do this? I'm like, I don't know.

I don't know.

I mean, it's a lot of.

So when you have LeBron James and Barack Obama saying they wouldn't let their kids play football.

Yeah.

Then I knew LeBron played football so well, then I knew that. It's starting to seep into consciousness because when I started my NFL work, my brother laughed at me. He does that. And he's like, you just want everybody to play ping pong. Table tennis is the world's best, you know, sporting sport.

You know, sport that I've just started playing over. Things keep last Thanksgiving is pickleball. Have you played this?

I have not. People love it.

They love it. And I know why now. It's incredible. It's big table tennis, but little tennis. It's incredible. And you. It's a better workout, but it's just as much, you know, hand eye coordination. So you don't have to be really technically good at swinging a racket. So it's like, anyone can play. It's really fun. We'll have to do it sometime. Yeah, it's a lot of fun.

People who play racket sports live longer than everybody else. Come on. Everybody else study from England. The second was swimmers. The worst were football players, soccer players. But now you're playing pickleball. Exactly.

So for someone like you, who, you know, had a lot of head trauma for three years, essentially, and then, I guess Psychological trauma from the war, you know, for a year or two of just being in that environment. How do you heal your brain?

Or can your brain say, you didn't bring up my five sisters.

Yeah, the emotional trauma and being third.

In a Lebanese family.

Yeah, yeah, the emotional, psychological trauma, all that stuff. You're still able to heal your brain, though, even if you did a lot of these, you know, physical damages to your brain.

Right.

I love that. You can change it. Yeah. Every day.

Right.

I mean, you know, if you go on a bender tonight, your brain is going to be worse tomorrow. But if you sleep well tonight, your brain's gonna be a bit better tomorrow. Every day you're making your brain a bit better or a bit worse. And I have scans like Anthony Davis, the Hall of Fame running back from usc. I love him. He's the reason we did our big NFL study. He came to see me in 2007 and his brain was terrible and he was terrible. Temperamental and memory problems. He just did everything I asked him to do. He's so much better. I have his brain 10 years apart. How cool is that? I just scanned someone recently where I have her brain 24 years apart. How is it she's now 81 and her brain is dramatically better than. Than when she was 50?

Come on.

Oh, no. It's amazing. It's so cool. Makes me so happy for her. But also makes me happy for me. Because this is the idea. You're not stuck with the brain you have. You can make it better, but you gotta have the right mindset. Not of, oh, I can't do this, so I'm deprived. It's, oh, I did the right thing. Good for me. Good job. It's shifting your mindset. Did you ever see City Slickers with Billy Crystal?

I think I did, yeah.

So he's this New York guy going through a midlife crisis and goes to a dude ranch and trying to find his mojo. And he's with an old cowboy, Curly. And Curly goes, you just have to know the one thing. And Curly's played by Jack Palance. Just have to know the one thing. And Mitch, played by Billy Crystal, goes, what's the one thing? And the next scene, Curly dies. So he doesn't know the one thing, but I know the one thing. What is it when you do the right thing? Feel good about yourself.

Okay. So master your mind and also gain psychological distance from it so you're not wrapped up in an all day. What were the next two, then the final two.

So six is notice what you like. About other people more than what you don't.

This is judging people.

You mean giving happiness away? No, it's shaping people. It's. My wife hates when I say this, but I totally believe it. Everybody's out for themselves. It's just the more sophisticated you are, the harder it is to tell. And I do this because I feel good doing this. Yeah, of course. And, you know, altruism is the best medicine for your stress hormones. That when you give and other people benefit, you matter. As opposed to, I need to take advantage of this person. Right. Because that made me feel awful about doing that. But I shape you by what I notice about you. And I clearly do it with my children, and I clearly do it with my wife. My wife has red hair. I can get her to yell at me, or I can notice what I like and make her smile. And is that manipulative?

Sort of.

But it's in a good way, right?

It's better than saying something nasty about.

Them or seeing divorce from them activate your frontal lobes. Does this get me what I want? But notice what you like about other people more than what you don't. So they're really four animals in this book. I collect things. So I guess maybe I'm more of the persistent type than I think. But, like, I collect seahorses because of the hippocampus, and I collect anteater because you have to be able to kill the ants.

Yes.

And I collect penguins. Ever tell you my penguin story?

No.

So I'm a child psychiatrist. I'm in training to be a child psychiatrist, 1986. My son is 7. He's hard for me. He's oppositional. I adopted him when he was two and a half. And it's like, no matter. He's the persistent type. No matter what I say, argue with me. And I'm like. And I didn't feel close to him, and I was feeling bad. And I'm talking to my supervisor, and she's like, you have to spend more time with him. And so I took him to a place I was doing my training in Hawaii and took him to Sea Life park, which is where they have sea animal shows or, like, SeaWorld. And went to the dolphin show, and that was great. And the killer whale show, and that was fun. And the sea lion show, and that was fun. And at the end of the day, grabs my shirt and he goes, I want to see the penguin show. I want to see Fat Freddy. I'm like, who's Fat Freddy? It's penguin. And so at the end of the day Fat Freddy is this chubby but very cute penguin who comes out onto the stage, climbs the ladder to a high dive, goes to the end, bounces, and then jumps in the water.

That's cool.

And then he gets out, he bowls with his nose, he counts with his flipper, he jumps through a hoop of fire. And I'm like, this is so interesting. And then at the end of the show, the trainer asked Freddie to go get something, and Freddie went and got it, and he brought it right back. Then time stood still for me because I asked this kid to get something for me, and he wants to have a discussion.

Yeah.

For like, 20 minutes. And then he doesn't want to do it. And I knew my son was smarter than the penguin, so I go up to the trainer afterwards.

How do you get this penguin to get you what you want?

How did you do all of this with this penguin? And she looked at my son, and then she looked at me, and she said, unlike parents, whenever Freddy does anything like what I want him to do, I notice him. I give him a hug, and I give him a fish. And the light went on in my head that even though my son didn't like raw fish, my daughter actually does. I wasn't paying any attention to him because I'm like my dad. I'm busy, I'm driven, I'm working and blank. So I collect penguins as a way to notice what I like about other people more than what I don't like. And literally, I have thousands of them. I actually wrote a book about this. And you are shaping the people in your environment so you could notice the house isn't clean, or you can notice when the house is clean. And maybe you could be helpful and focus on that. And you can focus. Like, my wife and I, we were Florida, and we were looking for property. And in my head, I'm like, she's gonna make a bonehead decision. And if I would have said that, it would just start her to fight. I'm like, you're one of the smartest people I know with real estate. I said, what do you think? And then she just stopped. Not because I criticized her, because when you criticize someone, you bring them more toward their position. But when you notice what you like and then back up, especially with persistent people, I often call it a little hit and run. It's like, say it kindly, softly, and then don't talk about it. Because if you keep talking about it, you solidify them in their position.

Notice what you like about people. I think that's Something I've tried to live by for a long time. That's a great way to build connection too.

And intimacy is to notice those things, which is happiness. Because relationships, more than almost anything, is happiness.

And what's the seventh?

Live each day based on clearly defined values, purpose and goals.

What happens if we don't have clear values, purpose or goals?

You're thrown around by the news cycle, by the weather, by what other people's values, purpose and goals are.

Yeah. And I'm a big believer that when you have this and you're seeing progress towards these things, it makes you happier as opposed to not seeing progress on anything.

That's what Tony Robbins says, happiness is progress.

Yeah, absolutely. You mentioned one.

So doing this exercise, one page miracle. So important. It's called the one page miracle because on one piece of paper, if you can put down what you want and then just ask yourself every day, am I getting it? You become so much more successful.

It's huge.

And I think it's one of the foundational reasons for my success. Besides building a team, getting people, getting the right people on the bus, this.

Is a very powerful and inspiring book with just so much tools, so many strategies, tools, research images showing before and after and lessons and nutritional facts and studies. All these different things that people can dive into. I want to make sure people get the book powerful, you happier. The 7 Neuroscience Secrets of feeling good, basically based on your brain type. And it's important for us to be aware of what our type is first so we can make actions that will improve that type. Over 200,000 brain scans from people all over the world, 155 countries backing kind of this research and information. So I want people to get a few copies of this, give it to their friends. You give a 30 day game plan on how to improve all these different things and the least you can do is try some of this. And if it doesn't work, then you can try something different. But this is amazing solution to start working towards.

So based on the book I did, 30 Day Happiness Challenge.

Yes.

We actually have it at Amen University. People can sign up for it. People who finished it were 32% happier after 30 days.

That's what I. That's pretty cool.

Their energy was better, their memory was better. You know, with all of my books, I sort of tend to wrap every book I know into, okay, what's this issue? If people pre order the book or order the book in the first week, I'll give them a bottle of Happy Saffron and the 30 Day Happiness Challenge and a workbook and a new cookbook.

Where do they go for that?

Go to youhappier.com and they can get.

All the information there. Okay, cool. Youhappier.com I want to ask you one final question or two about how death and grief affects the brain. You lost your father a year ago, is that right?

Almost two years.

Two years ago. I lost my dad a month ago, just passed away. And I remember the last time you talked about how you miss him every day. You mentioned this last time we spoke. I'm curious about death and grief. How does it affect the brain? Someone that you care about and love deeply when they pass away? And how does the feeling of grief affect the brain? And is it a good thing? Is it a bad thing? Is it, you know, reflecting and processing in a healthy way? Does that heal the brain? Does it affect it in certain ways? I'm just curious. This is something new.

Well, it's a normal thing, right? We all lose people we care about. And I want people to. To do the right things for their brain rather than the wrong things for their brain. So 1 know it. Feel it. The week after my dad died, I mean, every day I was in my office thinking about him. I have voicemails from him, listening to the voicemails, going through pictures. I wrote his eulogy and it was so healing for me. And I was in my office crying. After weeks. I sat.

Yeah.

And it was. I mean, it was 90, but it was a surprise because he had worked so hard in his last five years to be healthy. But it was a combination of COVID and heart stuff. Anyways, feel it. Like, spend time grieving and feeling and make sure you have balanced memories. Like, you know, I had a hard relationship with my dad and don't focus.

On all that stuff.

But I also had a great relationship with him and so keeping it balanced. And I got criticized by some of my nieces and nephews because I didn't talk about him as if he was God or if. Or cbct was perfect. But grieving is being honest and then not letting the ants come in and then doing the brain healthy habits. I have this great story of a woman like you. When I lecture, people come up to me and they say they appreciate your work. Well, for me, people come up and cry. And when she stopped crying, she said, I lost my daughter two years ago to bone cancer. She was 12. Heartbreaking. And I didn't know how bad it would hit me. I went to bed, I drank too much, ate all the wrong foods. She ballooned up to over 200 pounds. And she said on the two year anniversary of her death, I was going to kill myself.

Wow.

And then I saw one of your shows on public television. I decided I'd get your book and if it was a bad book, I'd kill myself twice.

Oh my gosh.

Oh my. No pressure.

Oh man.

She said, but it was so simple. What I try to do in youn happier. This is so simple. See, seven secrets and seven questions you ask yourself every day. She said, I'm down 24 pounds. She said, you gave me my life back. And she said, what I want you to tell people who are grieving is never let grief be your excuse to hurt yourself.

To create bad habits and bad actions to hurt yourself.

Yeah, right. And the people who have prolonged grief often have habits that are not helping them.

Distorted thinking or what do you mean prolonged grief? Like they haven't processed it it in a healthy way.

Right. So I mean sometimes you can grief that goes for years.

Yeah.

And it's because they don't process it. Wow.

So process all the emotions. This is beautiful. Daniel. I appreciate you you Happier the 7 Neuroscience Secrets of feeling good based on your brain type. Make sure you guys get a few copies. You can go to youhappier.com to get all the bonuses as well. I really acknowledge you Daniel for constantly showing up and being of service. It's a beautiful gift from all the years experience, the lessons, the scans, the people you've helped, the case studies. There's just more work to be done. So I acknowledge you for constantly showing up and being of service to so many people. Thanks again for being here and all your help.

Thank you so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and inspired you on your journey towards greatness. Make sure to check out the show notes in the description for a full rundown of today's show with all the important links and also make sure to share this with a friend and subscribe over on Apple Podcasts as well. I really love hearing feedback from you guys. So share a review over on Apple and let me know what part of this episode resonated with you the most. And if no one's told you lately, I want to remind you that you are loved, you are worthy, and you matter. And now it's time to go out there and do something better. Great.

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