Healthy Brains, Healthy Bedrooms with Dr. Daniel Amen

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We don't think about genetics properly. I think genes load the gun. It's your behavior that pulls the trigger. It's what happens to you that pulls the trigger. And so yes, we want to know your genetic vulnerabilities, but we also want to put your body in a healing environment. So for example, I have a genetic risk for heart disease. I don't because I don't give in to the behaviors making it likely to be so have a genetic vulnerability for obesity. I'm one of seven children and a couple of my siblings are obese. And I'm not. Why? Because I don't give in to the behavior. I know it's a risk. And so if I gain a few pounds, I literally start counting my calories and I'm like, no, I'm not going to be fat. I'm just not. Because as your weight goes up, the size of your brain goes down. So know your risk and then get serious.

Thanks for listening to Sex with Emily. I'm Dr. Emily and on today's show I'm joined by best selling Author and physician Dr. Daniel Amen to talk about why mental health needs to be rebranded as brain health and how that change can alter how we see relationships. Topics include why looking more closely at the brain can severely help people get a better understanding into their own psyche and actually give you tools to heal how trauma work like EMDR therapy can reprogram our brains to release or cope with said trauma and exercise in killing your ants or automatic negative thoughts and ways our neuro hormones have a direct impact on our libidos and how we act in relationships. All this and more. Thanks for listening.

Look into his eyes. They're the eyes of a man obsessed by sex. Eyes that mock our sacred institutions. Bedroom eyes, they call them. In a bygone day. Hey, Emily, you got a boyfriend? Because my man E here, he just got his heart broken. He thinks you're kind of cute.

A girl's gotta have her standards. Oh my.

The women know about shrinkage. Isn't it common knowledge?

What do you mean? Like laundry? It shrinks. Can we not talk about sex so much?

Are you kidding me?

Oh, my God, I feel so good.

Being bad feels pretty good. But you know, Emily's not the kind of girl you just play with.

You're listening to Sex with Emily. We're talking about sex, relationships and everything in between. For more information, check out sex with emily.com. you're going to love our site. Lots of great, amazing blog posts on there to help you have the sex you want, you crave, you deserve. And sex family across the board on all social media. Intentions for this. Okay, guys, join me in setting an intention for the show. Why are you listening to it? What do you want to get out of it? I find that it really helps to set an intention. Saying something like, well, I'm fascinated. What we could learn from the brain or I don't think I've been given the right information about mental health. I want to know. My intention is to take a deep, deep dive into the world of mental health and the brain and see why changing the ideas and the ways we deal with our brain and health could make a huge impact on the world. All right, guys, enjoy the show. I'm so thrilled to welcome my guest today. Dr. Amen is one of America's leading psychiatrist and brain health experts. And you called one of the most popular psychiatrists in America by the Washington Post. You've written over more than 40 books, 10 bestsellers in the New York Times, and this new book coming out on March 3, the end of Mental Illness, How Neuroscience is Transforming Psychiatry and helping prevent or reverse Mood and anxiety disorders, ADHD, addictions, PTSD, psychosis, personality disorders, and more. So basically, Dr. Amen is a leading expert on brains and we need a lot more information on this as a whole. So this is going to be an information packed Interview. If you've got a brain, which you do, he can tell you what's right, what's wrong, and maybe save you from a misdiagnosis. There's a lot to discuss here. Thank you for being here today.

I'm so honored. Thank you for having me.

I'm so honored. I have been following your work for so long that I was thrilled to be able to sit down with you. So I've always been fascinated with psychiatry, psychology. I went to undergrad, I studied psychology. But I first went to see a therapist when I was like 10 because my parents got divorced. And then I had some trauma growing up. My dad died when I was 19. He had a heart attack when he was 49. And when I first came across your clinics in the, in the late 90s, I was like, what is wrong with my brain? Like, I feel like. And I kept saying this, like, why can't I focus? I know that I'm smart. My mom used to say, like, well, there's all these exams. You test high. And I'm like, but I can't remember things or focus. And in reading your book, basically the statement that you make is reframing mental health as brain health. Like, you just start the book saying that and my mind is blown. And then you go into all the brain scans, and I'm thinking, no one ever scanned my brain. How did you. And I don't never hear anyone saying they're getting brain scans. Let's go to the distinction. Mental health, brain health, whatever you want to go. We're going to be talking.

So I'm a classically trained psychiatrist. I'm also a child psychiatrist, and it's the only medical specialty that virtually never looks at the organ it treats. And that's wrong. So when I was young, when I was 18, the government still had a draft because Vietnam was going on. And I became an infantry medic, where my love of medicine was born. But about a year into it, I realized I didn't really like being shot at. It's just, you know, some people like that.

It's not, it's not your jam.

And so I got retrained as an X ray technician. And that's where I developed a passion for medical imaging is our professors used to say, how do you know unless you look? And then in 1979, I'm a second year medical student and someone I loved tried to kill herself. And I took her to see a wonderful psychiatrist. And I came to realize if he helped her, which he did, it wouldn't just help her it would ultimately help her children and her grandchildren. So I fell in love with psychiatry because I realized it has the potential to change generations of people. And I've loved it every single day for the last 40 years.

Amazing.

But I fell in love with the only medical specialty that never looks at the organ and treats. And I knew it was wrong. And so when I was a psychiatric resident, I start needling and pushing my professors. It's like, why aren't we looking? And they go, well, it's not part of our training, it's not part of our tradition. And a long time ago, neurology and psychiatry, they used to be the same. And they got divorced. And it was a bad divorce because neurologists got the brain and psychiatrists got the mind. And what I've come to realize is psychiatric disorders are brain disorders. And they're not mental illnesses. They're brain health issues that steal your mind. And this one idea changes everything. Get your brain right and your mind will follow. So when you're really struggling, nobody's looking. They're coming up with all sorts of theories. She doesn't care. It's her dad's death.

You're leaving. Lazy.

You're lazy. Let me tell you a story. When I first started scanning people, I scanned everybody I knew.

Come over for dinner. You're like, hey, can you.

Including my kids. But at the time, in 1991, I only had the eyes of someone who'd seen very few scans. My daughter Brianne. Beautiful, actually. She looks like you. Sweet.

And this is going to sound terrible, but I never thought she was very smart. And I. It hurts me to say that, but I had to teach her the times tables, like over and over and over. In fifth grade, she still didn't know them. And so I took her to psychologist. And who said, you know, she's not very smart, basically. She didn't say that. But I read the testing and she said she'll be okay because she works so hard.

And here I am, I'm a child psychiatrist. But in 10th grade she fell apart. She's staying up every night till one or two o' clock in the morning, getting her homework done. And one day she comes to me and she's crying. They're studying genetics. She says, I just don't get it. I can never be as smart as my friends. And it broke my heart. And so the next day I scanned her again, now with the eyes of someone who'd seen thousands of scans. And she had a really sleepy br. Really low activity in the front Part of her brain and in her temporal lobes. I'm like, oh, my God, how'd you miss that? Your own child has ADD and.

On a little bit of a stimulant. The next day, it normalized her brain. Now, this is a child who worked so hard.

And really had never gotten great grades. But the next grading period, straight A's.

Wow.

Straight ace for the next 10 years. And she actually got into the University of Edinburgh's veterinarian school. It's one of the best veterinarian schools in the world. And if I wouldn't have looked, I could have come up with all sorts of explanations on why she struggled. But if you don't look, you don't know. And wholesale around the world. I mean, you try and kill yourself today in LA or Hong Kong or Beijing or London, and. And no one will ever look at your brain. And that's insane.

It is insane. So I. And are people still resistant to your work and saying, like, I. Or other people now, psychiatrists saying, you know what? I want to start scanning brains. Or. It's just not. They're like, we don't have brain. You come into my office and we talk. I don't have access to that. Is that. Is that why there's a resistance? Because this makes so much sense? I'm like, I want to come in and get scanned tomorrow. You know, I.

Well, there's been a lot of controversy over my work, although we've had about 10,000 medical and mental health professionals refer to us. So the idea that everybody thinks I'm crazy is probably not correct. But if I'm right, and I believe I am, then 40,000 psychiatrists are wrong. And so people don't go, oh, you're right, I'm wrong. Easily. It actually changes the paradigm. And the paradigm's broken. Our outcomes in psychiatry are no better than they were in the 1950s. There are more people. Despite all the new medications, there are more people on disability for mental health reasons than ever before in human history. It's four times the number of people who are on disability in the 1980s. We're not making progress. Since 1999, cancer's declined 27%, but suicide went up 33%. Why? We're working on the wrong paradigm. It's not mental illness, it's brain illness. Get your brain right and your mind will follow.

This is just. So how do you know that if you have a. Okay, let's say we can't get a brain scan tomorrow, which I'm going to want. We're Going to talk about after. How do you get. But how do you know then? Because you do have the five brain types. Then you break it down into subtypes. But how do you know if you have a healthy brain or not? Or should we just all assume your brain's good? It could be better.

Now let's not all assume our brain's good. Okay. If you go, hey, Daniel. Single most important thing you've learned from 160,000 scans. Smile. Traumatic brain injury ruins people's lives. And nobody knows about it because they don't look. Brand new study out on the homeless. 50% of homeless people had a significant brain injury before they were homeless. On average, there are 3 million new traumatic brain injuries every year in the United States. And most people live. So think about that over the last 40 years. That means there's more than 100 million people who've had the effects of traumatic brain injury. Increases your risk of suicide, depression, adhd, addiction. Nobody's looking. So nobody knows that. This epidemic is part of the mental health challenge in this country. And in the book, actually a big part of the book. So how do you know if you have a problem?

Right.

If you want to keep your brain healthy or rescue it if it's headed to the dark place, you have to prevent or treat the 11 major risk factors that steal your mind. And we know what they are. There's a mnemonic called Bright Mind. Let's talk about that is for blood flow. But I was actually just doing research on 20,000 patients and all I did was look at their BMI, their weight, their body mass index and brain function. And it was just really clear as your weight went up, the actual physical size and function of your brain went down. Which should scare the fat off anyone.

Exactly.

Think about that. With 72% of us overweight, 40% of us obese, it's the biggest brain drain in the history of the United States. In fact, now it's a national security crisis because 72% of people try to sign up for the military are rejected. Why? Because they're not healthy. And so with obesity at epidemic levels, with diabesity now at epidemic levels, diabesity.

Like diabetic and obesity?

Yes, and some diet. 60 million people have sleep related problems. It's. No one's thinking, right, this is not a Prozac or Ritalin deficiency. This is a brain health disaster.

It's. It's a disaster. I mean, my mind is just exploding or my brain. Which one's exploding? My. I'm thinking like my mind Is because. Okay, so there's a lot here because you talked about the traumatic brain. Just the woman actually has a head injury, and it could be, like, a mild concussion. Like me, who I'm trying to remember. Like, did I ever fall and hurt myself? Other people might have just something that happened when they were 5 or 10. But what about other kinds of trauma? Because that was the other thing. I kind of. I was excited you were here when I'm telling you my all my stories about my dad. I also had some, like, physical abuse with, like, a stepdad. There was a lot of things going on in my life, and I realized lately. I've been in EMDR therapy the last 14 years, 14 months. I'm sort of obsessed with therapy. I've tried a little bit of everything. And what I found was in this trauma work that, first of all, so many of us have trauma. And it's like, you know, they say, do you know about emdr?

I published a study on it.

Okay.

I'm like, a huge fan.

Okay, yes, huge fan. It's been life changing, actually. And so that's part of it is that kind of trauma as well. And to me, that has felt like a lot of progress. But I also know I've got the other stuff that I deal with, too. So what about other kinds of trauma? If you've had even, like, a sexual trauma or abuse? I know you talked a lot about.

Traumas stuck in your brain. So I published a study on 21,000 people showing I could separate emotional trauma. So if I scanned you, your limbic brain, your emotional brain would be working too hard. So trauma can get stuck in the brain. And that's what EMDR does, is it helps to calm those emotional areas down. And I showed I could separate emotional trauma from physical trauma, traumatic brain injury, with high levels of accuracy. And then I did a study on police officers. We're actually working on a program with the Newport Beach Police Department, where over six months, I've been creating a brain healthy police department. You want your first responders to have brains that work right, because they're in chronically stressful situations.

And so I did a study on police officers who couldn't go back to work because they were involved in shootings, and the shootings traumatized them. And after an average of eight sessions, all of them went back to work, and it helped to balance their brain. We did before and after scan with.

The EMDR or with the emdr. Okay. So I have the EMDR that I've been doing, and I do feel Like, I'm able to feel. Feel more that I'm connecting my brain, my thoughts. Like, I feel like I had a lot of disassociation. I was sort of shut down. But this book, what you talk about in all of your work, the End of Mental Illness, which I think is like, a must read if I think we all can learn something from this. But where would you suggest that you start? Because I believe that this is all helping. But then I'm like, oh, but I've never had my brain scanned, and maybe I am doing some stuff that isn't that healthy. And you talk about toxic environment. So I'm like, do we need to get it checked? And this is an old building we work in.

Talk about where to start.

Thank you.

Think of it as hardware and software.

Okay?

You would never try to do software programming on a computer that had hardware problems.

Right?

That's just stupid. But we. People go for therapy over and over and over again, and they're not working on getting their brain healthy. So the first thing is, let's get your brain healthy. Because then when you go to therapy, you'll remember what you talked about. You'll be able to put into place the insights that you get from therapy. Plus, when I do therapy with people, I really want to give you skills, not just let you talk about whatever you want to talk about. I want to teach you how to kill the ants. The automatic negative thoughts.

We use those all the time here.

Kill your happiness. But that's a software program. The first thing I want to do is get your brain right. How do you do that? It's three simple things. The first thing is brain envy. Freud was wrong. Penis envy is not the cause of anybody's problem. I have not seen it once in the 40 years I've been a psychiatrist. Except once I was on Broadway and it was the intermission of a play. And the women's restroom had a line, like around the. The building. And there was nobody in the boys restaurant line. And I'm like, penis envy. That's it.

I have you, right? That's my eye.

But I've never seen it. That's not the cause of people's problems. It's. They don't. We don't care about our brains.

We don't get it right because we.

Can'T see them right. You can see the wrinkles in your skin or the fat around your belly. You can do something when you're unhappy with it. And so when I looked at my brain in 1991, it wasn't healthy because I played football and I wasn't sleeping and I had meningitis when I was a young soldier. And so I developed brain envy. I wanted a better brain because ultimately it's the three pounds of fat between your ears that creates happiness, that creates wealth, that creates health. Because your brain is involved in absolutely every decision you make. And so when your brain works right, you work right. So the first thing is care and then avoid anything that hurts it. Know the list. We'll talk about bright minds. And then the third thing is do things that help it. Again, know the list. And I work with BJ Fogg, who is a professor at Stanford. He has a book called Tiny Habits. And I worked with him for six months on creating brain healthy, tiny habits. And here's the number one thing you should do that will cause really a domino effect of brain health. Before you go to do anything or eat anything, or drink anything, or even say anything, ask yourself, is this good for my brain or bad for it? And if you can answer that question with information and love, love for yourself, love for your spouse, love for your children, love for, for your mission on the earth. If you can answer it with information and love, you'll start doing the right things.

Well, let's you have those little what I liked in the book, you have the little icons, little tiny habits, which are talking about bright minds and like the brain love stories, which I love because I feel like if you even just are like going through this, it's really great tips.

So bright minds B is for blood flow. Low blood flow is the number one brain imaging predictor of Alzheimer's disease. And so you can see it on a scan. But what if you can't get a scan? If you're not exercising, you have low blood flow to your brain. If you have hypertension, 60% of Americans are either hypertensive or pre hypertensive. You should be measuring your blood pressure at least four times a year. Blood pressure goes up, blood flow to the brain goes down. If you have any form of heart disease, if you have erectile dysfunction, I mean, you know, sex with Emily, we.

Should absolutely talk about erectile dysfunctional. No, it's true.

40%. Think about this. 40% of 40 year old men, according to a study from Harvard, have erectile dysfunction. What does that mean? It means 40% of 40 year old men have brain dysfunction. Because if you have blood flow problems anywhere, it likely means they are everywhere. And 70% of 70 year old men have erectile dysfunction. And 70% of 70 year Old Men have Brain dysfunction. And so one of the big benefits of the end of mental illness in my program, your sex life is going to be better because it's about blood flow. And you know, I often say no forethought equals no foreplay. Right? Because you won't make good decisions and she'll remember everything bad thing you said just because of the difference between male and female brains. And so how do you get your blood flow right? Exercise, walk like you're late, 45 minutes, four or five times a week, and lift weights twice a week. It amazing how it'll increase blood flow. There's certain foods that increase blood flow, like beets, oregano, thyme, cayenne pepper. This isn't hard. And certain supplements, especially ginkgo. I love ginkgo because I've seen it increases blood flow. So that's just one of the risk factors. So know if you have it and then go after it. The R is retirement and aging. When you stop learning, your brain starts dying. And so we all should be on a learning journey because it just keeps your brain healthy. You have these two structures in your brain called the hippocampus, which is Greek for seahorse. So you have these two seahorse shaped structures in your brain. And most people don't know, but they're very special. They're involved in memory and mood. And every day they produce new cells. Every day, your hippocampus produces 700 thereabouts new baby seahorses. And your habits are either growing the seahorses so they become part of you, or they're murdering the seahorses, so they're gone. So if you're smoking pot, if you're drinking alcohol, if you're not exercising, if you have a digital addiction, murdering the seahorses and shrinking your brain.

Okay, so I want to go back to the penis here at the erection, because, you know, hey, sex with Emily is that. So I had a urologist on my show last night, and he was saying that the penis, that if you are not having blood flow, you're having erection problems, that it probably has to do with your heart.

He's right.

But now I'm feeling like the brain is trumping, like, I almost. Because this is why my. I'm turned on my head here. That so really? Then we should just start there. Like, is it kind of like you going to your heart? I mean, no one's going to agree with. Right? Because I feel like I should go get checked by my cardiologist. I mean, everyone should. But are we saying now, though, that this is it that easy to get a scan, to get checked? Are we wasting our time with all these other things? Like are you saying that that's where we need to start?

Well, remember, blood flow's one of the 11 risk factors. And like we're never going to find the one pill for Alzheimer's disease because there are many roads to the problem. So you have to know of these 11 risk factors, well, which ones do I have? But you're absolutely right. The guest you had on. Whatever's good for your heart is good for your brain. So your brain is only 2% of your body's weight. It's about 3 pounds. But it uses 20 to 30% of the calories you consume and 20% of the blood flow and the oxygen you breathe. So if your heart's not right, your brain's not right. And I learned this when I was in medical school. The year I graduated from medical school, my grandfather died. And I loved him. He was just an awesome human being. I'm named after him. He's my best friend. When I was growing up, he was a candy maker. That was his profession. So my earliest memories are standing at the stove making fudge and pralines with him. But the sugar was terrible for him and it killed him too early. But he, after he had his first heart attack, he got very depressed. And there's this connection between heart disease and mental health issues. Because of blood flow and inflammation, which is the eye in bright minds, the first eye. As inflammation goes up, people have more problems with depression and, and dementia. So you have to be on an anti inflammatory program which is basically you got to get your food right, you got to get your gut healthy. Take omega 3 fatty acids, a supplement I like called curcumin and get inflammation under control. You're happier. Well, that's not hard.

How do you get it? But how do you know if you're having that?

So there's a couple of tests. There's a blood test called C reactive protein. If it's high, you have inflammation in your body. Your omega 3 fatty acid level, I mean it's like one drop of blood and we eat too many omega 6s which are pro inflammatory and not enough omega 3s. Think salmon. And as omega 3s go down, there's fascinating study from Australia. They looked at two outer islands. One had fast food restaurants, the other didn't. The island with the fast food restaurants, low levels of omega 3 fatty acids. Five times the level of depression in the population.

It's the food, it's Food, Right?

It is the food. And so. And. And I went.

There's. Yeah, I mean, there's so many. It's like, we gotta change our food. We gotta check our blood flow. We gotta check our brains and. But I want to ask you a question, though. You talk about all the different region of the brains and what they control, but what about sex drive, desire, arousal?

How about your limbic brain?

Right?

But you want to have a balance between your limbic brain and your prefrontal cortex. So the front third of your brain, largest in humans than any other animal by far. And it's involved with focus and forethought, judgment, impulse control, organization, planning, empathy, learning from the mistakes you make. And so your limbic brain will give you desire. Your frontal lobes will actually help you direct it in a healthy way or an unhealthy way. So I've actually scanned hundreds of sex addicts, and we did a study and found 70% of them had low function in their prefrontal cortex. So it's like, think of it as the elephant in the rider. It's, you know, your libido is like the elephant, but if it doesn't have a rider, it can cause a stampede and destroy your life.

Does it change? Are we born this way? Like, is it. The kind of thing is. It's everything, right?

Well, the G is genetic. And genetics.

We don't think about genetics properly. I think genes load the gun. It's your behavior that pulls the trigger. It's what happens to you that pulls the trigger. And so, yes, we want to know your genetic vulnerabilities, but we also want to put your body in a healing environment. So, for example, I have a genetic risk for heart disease. Disease, I don't. Because I don't give in to the behaviors making it likely to be so. I also have a genetic vulnerability for obesity. I'm one of seven children, and a couple of my siblings are obese. And I'm not. Why? Because I don't give in to the behavior. I know it's a risk. And so if I gain a few pounds, I literally start counting my calories, right? And I'm like, no, I'm not going to be fat. I'm just not. Because as your weight goes up, the size of your brain goes down. So know your risk and then get serious.

We're going to take a quick break, and we come back more with Dr. Daniel Amen.

I have a new show coming out on public television at the end of February, and Lisa Gibbons is one of my friends and One of my patients and she lets me talk about it. Her mom and her grandmother died with Alzheimer's disease and she used to have a show on television. I was on it like 20 times and I'm like, I start talking to her, I'm like, come on, you need to come and get scanned. Because with that genetic history, we need to know if you're vulnerable. And when she was 50, she went through a divorce and she got sad and she says, okay, I'm coming. And her brain looked terrible. I mean, her brain was headed to the dark place. But she's super smart and she just did everything I asked her to do. And 10 years later, I just scanned her again last year. Her brain's fuller, fatter, healthier. You are not stuck with the brain you have. You can make it better by doing these bright mind strategies.

What about the we you talk about the end to the, the neuro hormones. Those are the hormones that affect the brain. Because I also feel like hormones. I remember saying to psychologists once, like, what? Tell me about hormones. Like, what do you know about like, you know, I was asking him something about like perimenopause and hormone. He's like, we just, he used to Stanford trained. He's like, we just don't know much. This is like five years ago. We don't know enough.

Well, he may not know enough. The research is huge. Yeah, there's so much and if your testosterone level is low, if you're a guy or a girl, that it's associated with memory problems, low libido, depression and low motivation. Now if it's too high, your libido is gonna get out of control and your empathy goes down. So I mean, that's a prescription for getting depression, divorce, losing half of your net worth, and visiting your children on the weekends. It's like, no, that's not a good idea. So it's about balance. And I think of all the chemistry I talk about in the book, not about what's normal, but about what's optimal. So you want to have optimal hormone levels. There's a brand new study out just this week on thyroid that if your thyroid levels are low, you have low blood flow to your brain. If your thyroid levels are high, the anxiety centers in your brain go bonkers and you can't sleep and you can't stop thinking about negative thoughts. So balancing your hormones is a critical piece to solving mental health issues at.

Any age though, right? Because I feel like people don't often look at them soon enough. Like they're not looking at them in their 20s or 30s, they're not looking until they feel like there's a problem with their sex drive. For example, like men like the bioidentical hormones. Right.

What most women don't know is that progesterone. Progesterone is sort of like your brain's natural anti anxiety medicine. And it goes low 10 years before women go into menopause. So what does that mean? So say you're 38 or you're 39 or 42 and all of a sudden you can't sleep and you're anxious and you go to the doctor who put you on Xanax and. Or you decide to treat yourself with two glasses of wine every night, have to have my wine, and all of a sudden you're hooked on pills or alcohol when a little bit of progesterone could have been super helpful for you. And yes, people go, oh, well, it's normal when you're 60 not to have, you know, strong hormone levels, but it's also normal to feel like crap. And so.

I'm never interested in normal. I'm always interested in my best. What do I need to be my best? And I need my hormones to be right.

So do you recommend that then that people get their hormones checked every year? Any age? Every year?

Yeah. I mean, not for eight year olds.

But the health insurance doesn't even like, it's, it's extra. I feel like it's. So if they don't make.

Well, your doctor often won't do it because he won't know what to do for this is what I'm saying. Oh, you don't need that. And it's like, please don't be my mother or please don't be my father. You want to be my partner in health and if you're not going to be my partner, I fire you. And I think doctors should get fired a lot.

I do too.

MD stands for minor deity. I'm like, not okay with this. It's, they need to be your partner. We're doing a six week brain health challenge. And one.

Oh, I saw that. You guys can check that out.

One of the things on it is get your important numbers checked right. Peter Drucker, the famous business consultant, said, you can't change what you don't measure. And if you don't measure your important numbers, how do you know if you're inflamed? How do you know if your iron's too high, which is a problem, or too low, which is a problem.

So how do you recommend the Best way to get hormones because there's like the urine test and the, then there's the blood work and people, some people spit, like use saliva. What do you think?

I think it depends. But for us blood work really works well and that's a really standard, great place to start. Now if you've been under chronic stress, say you've raised an autistic child, or you've been in a chronically conflicted marriage, or you're a firefighter, I think doing a four point cortisol where you chew on these cotton balls. So we can see your level of cortisol is really important because sometimes people end up with this thing we call adrenal fatigue where the stress in their life that just have worn out their ability to manage what's going on on. So hormones are really.

But this is what I'm saying. So we fear doctors like, you know, no, I won't do it. We just go to another doctor, we sleep.

Yeah, you have to find a healthcare provider that works with you. So stop thinking about them as your mother, your father.

That's how I, I used to be like, oh well that's a doctor. Like they, they know.

Right? But most of them, you know, I mean most psychiatrists, for example, you come in and you have five of these eight symptoms for depression. You're going on a serotonin drug and there's so many other things to do and people don't know. And I'm not opposed to psychiatric medicine. I've already told you, I put my daughter on a stimulant I'm opposed to. That's the first and only thing you do. And in the end of mental illness, there's a whole chapter on mind medicine versus nutraceuticals. And I go, so if you have anxiety disorder, what are the 10 things I'm going to do for you before I put you on medicine? Or if you have a depression, what are the 10 things I'm going to do before I put you on medicine? And so many patients that come to the Amen clinics, we have eight clinics around the country. So many of our patients go, I want to take medicine. What else can I do? Now if I do the other things and they don't work, like I hope I'm totally going to give you medicine. It's just not the first thing I.

Think, but usually it is like most, so many people are on, what is it? How many, what is it? 3 out of 5 women I think are on antidepressants. What percentage is it right now?

20.3Percent of women.

Between the ages of 20 and 60 are taking antidepressant medication. That's a scandal.

It is because you go in like when I. Okay, so my experience was when I went in and I was having. Really. Because I want to talk about the birth control pill as well, because I feel like there's been so much more. I always felt that that was wrong. And now there's all this research out that shows that it really does wreak havoc on your system. Starting it and stopping it. And all the things that we did, they were just like, take a pill. I don't know if this might. My problems were. It was. Could have been the pill or could have just been what I was going through. But I was like 27 and I went to my gynecologist and I said, my periods are so bad that the week before I was like, I am, you know, I am so sad. I'm depressed. I feel like I ruined my entire life for a week. I can't leave the house. And then the day I get my period, I'm fine, I go back. And then. But. But I've already just. So I spent, you know, a quarter of my life in the state. What can I do? And she was like, take. I think it was, it was probably Prozac or something. It was Prozac, I believe, at the time. And I was like, okay. And I remember feeling this, like I. I couldn't believe that I had gotten my. The next month I got my period, I felt great and I was running again and doing all these things, things. But then I had the sexual side effects. Couldn't, wasn't interested, you know, all the other things that happened. But I feel like for many other people right now, probably listening to this too, they got pulled up, put on a medication, maybe either gynecologist once, maybe they went to see a therapist once, and then they're just still on it. Because if you stay on it long enough, then it does change your brain, right? And you can't go, you can't go.

Off and going off of it. I mean, you could read the horror stories of trying to stop antidepressants, including the brain zaps that the brain zaps. And nobody says that. Saffron. So the spice saffron has 20 studies comparing it to other antidepressants like Prozac, Zoloft, Imipramine, Effexor, and shows it to be equally effective without the sexual side effects. In fact, it's pro sexual and there's even a study showing it Helps your memory. And it helps with saffron.

Just saffron.

The spice Saffron, the world's most expensive spice. But there are a number of supplements. We make a supplement called Serotonin Mood support, which we use to support your mood, that has five htp, which is the amino acid building block for serotonin and saffron. And people love that. Yeah, because. And it doesn't decrease your ability to have an orgasm or it doesn't decrease your sex drive. That's why I have problems with the SSRIs, because I don't like that. If you are not interested in your husband, that can begin to cause problems in your marriage, which is going to accelerate your depression.

Right. Because then if you get on a medication because you're so depressed, you don't want, you don't want to have sex, you don't want to do anything, but then you go on the medication, you feel better in every other area, but then you don't want to have sex. So it's really, it really messes with you. But I feel like all the things you say, like when people should take these certain protocols before they go on a medication, like do the ten things you tell them to do. Do you find that in many cases, what percentage of the cases that work for people that they're like, oh, I don't need the medication now for them.

At least half. At least half.

And then. And also it's because it's probably a lot to do because you have to be regular, you have to be consistent and you have to, to do it every day.

If they don't work and they take medicine, they feel like they've done everything they should do.

Right.

Like for example, if you're depressed. Head to head against antidepressants. Fish oil has been found to be equally effective. Head to head against antidepressants. Exercise, walking like you're late, 45 minutes, four times a week. Equally effective at 12 weeks. Better than antidepressants at 10 months. Head to head learning how not to believe every stupid thing you think. Equally effective. So why not before you go on an antidepressant, you take a really good dose of fish oil, you start walking fast, and then you learn how to kill the ants. The automatic negative thoughts. One of the tiny habits. Whenever you feel sad, mad, nervous or out of control, write down what you're thinking and then just ask yourself if it's true. If you absolutely know that's true.

Yeah, I love that you. Because the ants is something that I, I think that Is so brilliant. And I never hear about how you came up with that about. We do. Is it here sometimes. Because I've always had that. And sometimes when I'm going through something, which I actually am. I have been. Now this week, I'm just like, it's so negative. My friends who've known me forever, like, okay, Emily, the negative thoughts. And it's like, I don't. I know. Like, you have the one thought and then they all start running. And how do you. How do you stop them? I mean, I've been meditating for 20.

Years, so you want to. You want to get louder and tell me the negative thought.

Oh, my God. Just in the last minute or like in the last few days?

Well, they. They stack. Once you have a negative thought, they link to other negative thoughts, and then they stack and then they attack you, and so you break the link. So the first thing is you write out, so what's the negative thought?

Okay. Yeah. I mean, the negative thought was. I mean, just. No, I just.

Well, okay. In this moment, I was like, there's so much I want to talk to you about, and I hope. Is this a negative. I hope that this is coming across like I have. I feel sort of scattered in this interview because I'm like, I so badly want this to go well. And I'm like, I hope that I'm able to meet you here and do a good job for your book. And I. I've had so much going on this life this week, and it's just been a lot. So I'm like, oh, I hope this is okay. That's a negative thought. I'm not doing well. I'm not.

I'm not doing well.

I didn't do well enough to prepare. I. My brain is scrambled.

So let's just say with that. So those of you listening, write down the thoughts that are bothering you. So not doing well. Five simple questions.

Okay.

Is it true?

I don't know. You tell me. Is it true? Okay, we're going. We're doing well.

Okay. So if you go, I don't know. That's.

I don't know.

The second question. Is it absolutely true with a hundred percent certainty? This is going terribly.

No, because I feel that a lot. And then people love the shows, so. No.

Third question. How do you feel when you believe the thought? It's not going well.

Horrible.

What else?

I feel.

Sad. I feel. It makes me angry. It makes me feel mad at myself. Really. Just a lot of.

Yeah. Along with less than not confident, all the things. So it's a thought that's not necessarily true, that is making you feel like dirt.

Right?

Fourth question.

Okay.

How would you feel if you didn't have the thought? If you couldn't have the thought?

I would feel like. I feel when I'm good, like in flow, confident, grateful.

Helpful, useful. I would feel like so much more like my listeners. Everyone's getting stuff out of this and, you know, I'd feel.

So let's. Let's. My favorite part and part of this is a process I learned from my friend Byron, Katie, is take the original thought, I'm scattered, and this is not going well, and turn it around to the exact opposite of the thought, which is this is going well. Give me an example where that's true.

This is going well.

Right now. I think we're having a really good conversation. I think it already is. I already feel better. I just wanted to be really honest when you asked me. So an example is. You mean in this moment that I feel like we're really. I feel very present and connected right now with you.

If you don't question the thoughts that go through your head, you believe them as if, even though they're lies, you believe them as if they're true. And then you act out of the belief, which can just devastate people's lives. So one example I'll give. You know, I've had the thought, my wife never listens to me. And so if I believe that, how does that make me feel? Sad and I feel lonely. And I give myself permission to be sort of an ass to her. But. But is it true? Absolutely not. There's all sorts of times she's listened to me. I've written 14 public television specials. She's listened to every script probably four or five times. But. But you see, it's that lie that I tell myself that if I don't question it, I act out of the belief, which then I could actually make it possible because if I'm negative to her, she's not gonna listen to me. You don't have to believe every stupid thought you have.

Right.

And I learning how to take and.

Catching them, too, in the moment is so important.

Important. And so when I get thoughts, because I've been attacked a lot by my colleagues, and it just doesn't bother me anymore because I know it's, oh, I was devastated for the first three, four years because what's the definition of hell? Many theologians think that hell is being disconnected from God or disconnected from your group. And we're wired for connection as human Beings. And when you get disconnected from your group, I mean, it's an evolutionary threat. And I was shunned. But I had all these stories of transformation from my patients. And the moment for me, I think anyone who does something really important, they have a passion moment. And the passion moment for me is in 1995, my nephew Andrew attacked a little girl on the baseball field for no reason, out of the blue. And his mother called me up crying. And she told me about it. And I'm like, what's going on with Ann? What else? And she said, danny, he's different. He's mean. He doesn't smile anymore. I went into his room today and found two pictures he had drawn. One of them, he was hanging from a tree in a suicide. The other one, he was shooting other children. And I was just horrified. But by the time in 1995, had already scanned over a thousand myelin people. And I thought he had a problem in his left temporal lobe underneath your temples and behind your eyes. And when I scanned him the next day, he was missing his left temporal lobe. He actually had a cyst the size of a golf ball occupying that part of his brain. And when they took the cyst out, his behavior went back to normal. And it was at that moment I didn't care if you liked me anymore.

Oh, exactly.

Because if you don't look, you don't know. Stop lying. Behavior is more complicated than most people think. And you know, he was Columbine or.

I was gonna say this is like.

This waiting to happen.

Exactly.

And it's easy to call those kids bad. It's harder to ask why. And so I didn't care anymore because of. I had the passion story that has supported me, Andrew and thousands of other people that have supported me through the separation from my colleagues. And the end of mental illness is really a putting the stake in the ground and go, these aren't mental, they're brain. And if you don't see it like that, you will hurt people. Because, you know, if the stigma associated with mental health issues, it's. It's psychiatrists fault. It is because we don't act like real doctors. In 1979, when I told my dad I wanted to be a psychiatrist, he asked me why I didn't want to be a real doctor, why I wanted to be a nut doctor and hang out with nuts all day long. And you know, my dad never got father of the year award, but 40 years later, I sort of get where he's coming from.

Isn't that interesting?

Don't Know, Huh.

And so, so I believe that this, I mean, to me, and I know you've been talking about this for, for many years, but with this book, because there is so much, there is so much talk now about mental illness, but we're not really, I've saying it's mental illness now. So at least you know, there's like celebrities and there's, I mean, you had something here from like, I think it was like Selena Gomez talking about how, you know, we don't look at it. So I think people are getting it now. But, but you're also saying, but it's not just mental, it's brain. So you're kind of saying like, great, we're looking at it. That's good that we shouldn't criticize people, we shouldn't shame them. It's like if people always say, well, if you have diabetes, you would take something. If. Why, if you have mental illness, you should, you shouldn't be ashamed.

But the new movements knock over going far enough because it's going to get people on more psychiatric drugs without ever looking. So when Sandy Hook happened in Connecticut, President Obama came out and said, we need more money for mental health. And I just shook my head because you're going to get more money to do the same thing we've always done. And the Sandy Hook killer, Adam Lanza, had seen psychiatrists, had taken medication. Virtually all the school shooters.

Wow.

Had seen psychiatrists and taken medication. The Columbine killers, the Parkland, Florida killer, the Springfield, Oregon killer. And no, we need to break the paradigm and think of these as brain health issues. What if they had Lyme disease? What if they had mold toxicity? What if they had lead poisoning? The scans have taught me there's so many different things. So we just talked about a couple of the risk factors. The T is for toxins. And, you know, I've scanned hundreds of firefighters. They'll have toxic brains because of breathing the toxins. Even when they take their masks off, the poisons are still coming up from the burning furniture, the emotional trauma.

What are some of the other toxins that are in our environment that we don't really realize?

Well, the new darling is marijuana. And I published a study on a thousand marijuana smokers. Virtually every area of their brain is lower in blood flow. And we're going around thinking this is just innocuous when it is not innocuous. I don't know if you saw the presidential debate, but.

Joe Biden said, you know, I'm just not sure if I think it should be legalized. Everywhere. And Cory Booker said, are you high? I mean, he literally made fun of him because he wanted to take a thoughtful position. And the imaging work I do, it's clearly toxic for the brain, but there are other things, like painters.

What about marijuana? In smaller doses, like if it help. If you're not doing it all the time. But, you know, because it could help with relaxation more than taking a Adavad or a anxiety, you know.

Well, we don't know that.

We don't.

I published another study on 62,000 scans.

Got less interesting. Now, if I listen to everything in here, I mean, I don't do, I don't drink. I, you know, I sometimes have smoke or not even smoke, like eat or. You know what I'm saying? It does help with.

And I would go, well, one, we should look at your brain for sure and see is it toxic for you? It doesn't seem to be toxic for everybody. But then we should go, what are other things we could do? Hypnosis, biofeedback, meditation, certain kinds of music, body work.

I love. I have this one exercise where we stimulate all things, five of your senses at once with relaxation. And so you get the right smells, like lavender, you get the right playlist, you look at images of nature, you get a massage, you eat certain foods, all of these things that can stimulate all five of your senses. Whenever you rely on a plant or a medicine, it decreases your effectiveness.

No, I, I get that. I get that it's problematic. I'm just saying, in general, we just talk about how, you know, with. Instead of taking a pill. But I get, I also know how much it damages the brain. So I understand that. Especially at a young age. I mean, I never.

Especially for a drug.

That's the thing. Yeah. And I never did anything growing up or Even in my 20s, it was like I was just so driven with. I was working all the time and very anxious. But, and I do understand also, I used to say, well, I'm not going to take anything or do anything. And I would try to do all the supplements and all the things. And it's just, there's a lot to do.

So we should look.

We're going to look.

Yeah, you should look. It's like, well, how do we do it? No.

Unless we look.

We don't know. Everyone has to look. And any doctor. Well, okay, so if you go to your regular doctor, your MD and they, you know, look at your brain, can everyone read it in the same way that you do?

Well, no, because we have more experience than anyone in the world.

And there are different ways to look at the brain. So we do a study called SPECT. We also do one called Quantitative EEG. And a lot of doctors do QEEGs, and they're helpful. I like to have both. And, you know, no medical specialty ever relies on one. Right. If you have chest pain, they'll look at your heart in five different ways. And the brain is a whole bunch more complicated than your heart. And so I think looking at it in different ways is helpful for people. So if you came to our Orange county clinic, we could look at the electrical activity in your brain, and then we could do a SPECT scan that looks at blood flow.

That's amazing.

And then what you do is you fall in love with it, and then you do the right things to treat it. But it starts with love. And then, yeah, you could measure it that way. Your history is not your destiny.

I love that.

In fact, I dedicate this book to my two nieces, Amelie and Alize, because they're loaded for mental illness. They're genes. They have a family history of schizophrenia, multiple suicides, depression, bipolar disorder, criminal behavior, addictions. But genes only load the gun. It's your behavior and what happens to us that pulls the trigger. And unfortunately for them, they were raised in chaos with parents who struggled with domestic violence, depression, addiction. And they moved a lot. And four years ago, they were taken by child protective services in. Into foster care, where yet more traumas occurred. And at the time, my wife was estranged from her half sister, so we didn't have any idea what was going on. And it was the worst week of my marriage because I'm a child psychiatrist. We need to take these kids in. And she's like, I came from crazy. I don't want crazy in my house. I've been working really hard to keep crazy people away from me, and. But I can't stand it. Even though I hadn't met the children.

Right.

But of course. And we agreed to wrap services around their mother. And on Mother's Day 2017, she got the kids back and the end of mental illness. The whole point of the book is how do I prevent it in them and in their children and grandchildren?

Oh, that's amazing. I mean, it seems like, God, you've helped so many people over these years. I mean, I think your work is. Is tremendous. And I really think this book could be the end of mental illness as we know it. So congratulations on this. And I want to ask you one more question about. You talked about the brain, love stories, like, because we didn't. We didn't get into sec. But this is fascinating to me. If their significant others are facing something and they're having some mental issues, things are going on. How do we support each other in this?

So the reason Brain Love Stories is I've written a lot about testimonials in other books because I love stories.

I love the stories.

But. But. But I wanted to sort of write the origin of how they came to see us. And so the Brain Love Stories is. Well, it's these five people we helped that got this person to the clinic. And one of my favorite ones starts chapter one. It's Jared.

Out of control since he was little. Hyperactive, restless, impulsive. School problems, friend problems, violence at home. Well, his mother was a friend of my wife's when they were in their 20s together. And so it was that relationship that caused her to raise. Reach out to my wife and said, jarrett's in trouble. And when I scanned Jared, he was diagnosed with add, failed five stimulant medications. So somebody had a learning problem, but it was Jarrett's doctor. If you fail three of them, nobody should ever put you on them again. And on supplements, calmed down. His brain got better in school. He's been on the honor roll now, literally for 10 straight years, and he wants to be a firefighter. And I asked him recently why, he said, on someone's worst day, I want to make it better. So we literally changed the trajectory of his life. And then in chapter one, I go through, well, how would they have treated Jared throughout the ages? So 6,000 years ago, they may have drilled a hole in his skull to let the evil spirits out. In the time of Hippocrates, they'd have changed his diet, got him to accept exercise, put him in a job he loved. So I like that. Yeah, but then they would have bled him to get rid of the excessive fluids. I don't like that. Freud would have put him on the couch and talked about his relationship with his mother. You know, why? He's always blamed for everything.

If it's not one thing, it's your mother.

And no, it wouldn't have worked. They'd have given him ECT or prefrontal lobotomy, and all of it's.

You started with the brain. Yeah. So you started with the brain. His brain. That's amazing. Thank you for being here, Doctor. Amen. This is. This is such a joy. Thank you. I feel like this is going to be super helpful. Your book comes out on March 3rd. They can take your. Your on YouTube. I saw that you had your.

So we have a six week challenge.

And we're giving away all sorts of prizes because the whole point of the. The end of mental illness, the end of mental illness begins with a revolution in brain health. And so if you're going to create a revolution, you have to have Brain warriors. And you've been on our Brain Warriors Way podcast. But what we're trying to do, when we have 20,000 people have signed up, which is really exciting, amazing. So six weeks, we give you something to do every day to get your brain right.

Okay. We're gonna have links to that in the show notes as well. And I do think this is starting a revolution because I, well, I'm gonna be telling everyone about it and I think it is, is really going to change people's lives. I mean, if you think about everything we've touched, people's sex life, you know, it could be the danger we see in schools with the shooters, with people's, you know, relationships is everywhere. It just makes sense that all the talking and all the therapy could just have to be with, you know, starting with some, some brain health and go from there. So thank you, thank you, thank you to my amazing team. Ken, Kristen, Elisa, Brian, our interns, producer Jamie and Michael. Was it good for you? Email me feedbacksexwithemily.com.

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