Shownotes:
We Zoom in Dr. Daniel Amen for this thought-provoking episode. Dr. Amen takes us on a journey through his groundbreaking approach to mental health. Discover how his unique focus on brain health is challenging and transforming traditional psychiatry. From personal stories that sparked his passion to innovative techniques reshaping mental wellness, this episode is a must-listen for anyone curious about the powerful link between our brain's health and our overall well-being. Tune in for an episode that promises to change the way you think about mental health.
About Our Guest:
Dr. Daniel Amen’s mission is end mental illness by creating a revolution in brain health. He is dedicated to providing the education, products, and services to accomplish this goal. Dr. Amen is a physician, adult and child psychiatrist, and founder of Amen Clinics with 11 locations across the U.S. Amen Clinics has the world’s largest database of brain scans for psychiatry totaling more than 225,000 SPECT scans on patients from 155 countries. He is the founder of BrainMD, a fast growing, science-based nutraceutical company, and Amen University, which has trained thousands of medical and mental health professionals on the methods he has developed.
Dr. Amen is one of the most visible and influential experts on brain health and mental health with millions of followers on social media. In 2020 Dr. Amen launched his digital series Scan My Brain featuring high-profile actors, musical artists, athletes, entrepreneurs, and influencers that airs on YouTube and Instagram. Over 90 episodes have aired, turning it into viral social media content with collectively millions of views. He has also produced 17 national public television shows about the brain and his online videos on brain and mental health have been viewed over 300 million times. Dr. Amen is a 12-time New York Times bestselling author, including Change Your Brain, Change Your Life, The End of Mental Illness, Healing ADD, and many more. His highly anticipated new book is Change Your Brain Every Day: Simple Daily Practices to Strengthen Your Mind, Memory, Moods, Focus, Energy, Habits, and Relationships was released March 23rd, 2023.
Thrive Global Article:
A Brain Health Revolution: Dr. Daniel Amen's Mission to End Mental Illness
Connect with and learn from Dr. Amen:
Websites – DanielAmenMD.com & AmenClinics.com
Instagram – @doc_amen
TikTok – @docamen
X/Twitter – @DocAmen
LinkedIn – @DrDanielAmen
Facebook – @DrDanielAmen
YouTube – AmenClinics
About Lainie:
Lainie Rowell is a bestselling author, award-winning educator, and TEDx speaker. She is dedicated to human flourishing, focusing on community building, social-emotional learning, and honoring what makes each of us unique and dynamic through learner-driven design. She earned her degree in psychology and went on to earn both a post-graduate credential and a master's degree in education. An international keynote speaker, Lainie has presented in 41 states as well as in dozens of countries across 4 continents. As a consultant, Lainie’s client list ranges from Fortune 100 companies like Apple and Google to school districts and independent schools. Learn more at linktr.ee/lainierowell.
Website - LainieRowell.com
Twitter - @LainieRowell
Instagram - @LainieRowell
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Transcript:
Lainie Rowell: [00:00:00] Hello friends. Welcome to the pod. In this episode, we're incredibly fortunate to have Dr. Daniel Amen joining us. Thanks to the gracious connection made by Dr. Christine Olmstead.
Dr. Amen is on a bold mission to eradicate mental illness through a revolution in brain health.
He's a physician, adult, and child psychiatrist, and Amen Clinics has the world's largest database of brain scans for psychiatry. Totally more than 225,000 SPECT scans on patients from 155 countries. Get ready for an eyeopening chat about brain health, innovation in psychiatry, and Dr. Amen's extraordinary impact on mental wellness. Let's dive in.
Thank you for being here, Dr. Amen. I really appreciate your time.
Dr. Daniel Amen: You're welcome.
Lainie Rowell: I did get the honor of seeing you speak a while back and I just love the way that you really cut to the importance of brain health in a way that I had never heard anyone explain before. So what do you want to tell us about brain health and psychiatry?
Dr. Daniel Amen: I'll give you a little background and why I'm horrified with what's going on in society, and then perhaps a new direction. So, I'm one of seven children, and growing up I was irrelevant. Which is funny, you know, I'm a middle child, and my dad called me a maverick, and to him that was a very bad thing, But that becomes very important later in my life.
1972, I turn 18, the government still has a draft. And I become 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 wasn't my thing. Some people like it. It was irritating. And so I got myself retrained as an x ray technician and developed a passion for medical imaging.
And our professors used to say, how do you know unless you look and that becomes one of the major themes of my life. And then in 1979, I'm a second year medical student, and someone I love tries to kill herself, and I'm horrified, and I take her to the chief of the Department of Psychiatry at Oral Roberts University, where I was going to medical school, and his name was Stan Wallace, And I came to realize if Dr. Wallace helped her, it wouldn't just help her, that ultimately it would help me as someone who loved her. It would help her children, would help her grandchildren, as they would be shaped by someone who is happier and more stable. And I fell in love with psychiatry, which is now 44 years ago, and I've loved it every day since.
It was the perfect fit for me. But I fell in love with the only medical specialty that never looks at the organ it treats. Think about that. If you have chest pain, cardiologist is going to look at your heart. If you have back pain, the orthopedic doctor is going to look at your spine. If you have belly pain, they're going to look at it in so many different ways.
But if you try to kill yourself or you try to kill someone else, or you're wracked with an anxiety or an addiction that won't stop. No one is going to look at the organ that creates behavior. And in 1979, I knew that was wrong and I knew it would change. I just had no idea I'd be part of the process. And in 1991, I went to a lecture on brain SPECT imaging.
So now I've been a psychiatrist for almost a decade. And I, I just know something's wrong, making diagnoses based on symptom clusters with no biological data, and then trying to drug people's brains into submission. And it's just not me. And I'm like, we should look. And in 1991, I went to a lecture on brain SPECT imaging.
SPECT stands for Single Photon Emission Computed Tomography. It's a nuclear medicine study that looks at blood flow and activity. It looks at how your brain works. And no lie, it changed everything about my whole life. When I started looking at the brain, I realized your brain's an organ just like your heart is an organ, and you have to take care of it if you want a better mind, if you want happiness, if you want peace, if you want passion, purpose, and connection.
And it completely upended my training and I'm like, Oh no, I have to be a brain health doctor, not a psychiatrist. And, you know, 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.
So, it's very clear I have daddy issues and love my dad, who I lost three years ago who is my best friend in the last five years of his life, but he reflected society's view of psychiatrists, that it's not really science. And the truth is, it's not really science because they never look at the organ they treat.
And so, everything in my life changed. If you dated my daughter for more than four months, I'm scanning your brain. When I got divorced in 2000 and I told myself, If I ever got married again, the first naked part of her I wanted to see was her brain. And the way out of this mess, and, you know, I call it a shitshow last year there were 337 million prescriptions for antidepressants, with nobody looking at any of their brains.
27%, this is a horrifying statistic, 27 percent of all doctor visits, someone's being prescribed a benzodiazepine. Not just psychiatric visits. OB GYN, internal medicine, family practice, it's insanity is what's happening. We are trying to drug America into happiness and it's not working. We are the unhappiest we've been since the Great Depression.
And the way out is not through Johnson Johnson or Pfizer or Eli Lilly. The way out is through brain health. And I wrote a book, I've written a bunch, but one of my favorite books is called The End of Mental Illness, and in it, I talk about, we need to change the paradigm, away from diagnosing people with mental illnesses, nobody wants that
and move it toward brain health. And so based on what is now almost a quarter of a million SPECTs scans I've done over the last 32 years, most psychiatric problems are not mental health issues. They're brain health issues. Get your brain healthy and your mind will follow. So, if you follow my thinking, what's happening in psychiatry is just dumb.
Make diagnoses based on symptom clusters with no biological data and then try to drug the brain into submission. If I'm right, and I am I'm certain of it. If I get your brain healthy, which means you have to eat right, and you need to exercise, and you probably, 72 percent of Americans need to lose some weight and make sleep a priority, and turn off the news, and stop scrolling and probably some nutrients, like omega 3 fatty acids, vitamin D, B vitamins, and so on.
Completely changes the paradigm away from what isn't working. The outcomes in psychiatry are no better than they were in 1954, the year I was born to brain health and our outcomes, I have 11 clinics around the country, our outcomes are better than anyone who publishes their outcomes.
Lainie Rowell: I want to touch on, I heard you say the generational ripple effects.
Right? It's that we need to get our brain healthy, not only for us, but for all of those around us. And that also, when you're talking about these ways that we can get our brain healthy, that's also where I'm hearing the generational connection, because that's how we're teaching our children to take care of themselves.
Is that fair to say?
Dr. Daniel Amen: Every day, you are modeling health. Or you're modeling illness with your behavior. And, you know, by what you feed your family, by what you order when you're out at a restaurant, by how you think, by the amount of love, or lack thereof, for your brain. And every day, , your habits are turning on or off health promoting genes in your body that impact you, but also generations of you.
So, when a little girl is born, she's born with all of the eggs in her ovaries she will ever have. And her habits throughout her life turn on or off certain genes that make illness more or less likely in her, but also in her babies and grandbabies. So, it's just not about us. It's about generations of us, and in the United States, you know, as opposed to Japan Asian cultures are about we, and American culture is about me, and there's something inherently flawed with when it's about me, and not generations of me, we're just more likely to be sick.
And, you know, if you just think of COVID, which I have all sorts of opinions about the United States has 4 percent of the world's population and 16 percent of the world's COVID deaths. And I think it's sort of that. Me First Mindset.
Lainie Rowell: I want to go into the taking care of it a little bit more because, to me, you reminding us that your brain is an organ, like the heart, and we know that we can heal the heart by having better lifestyle choices, and we can also heal the brain by having better lifestyle choices. In fact, this has happened to you, personally. You have done this yourself. You scanned your brain at a younger age and then after the lifestyle change? Is that correct?
Dr. Daniel Amen: It is. I think all of it is about how can I have a better brain? And then how can I teach you to have a better brain? And oh, by the way, if I teach you to have a better brain, we both have better brains. You are now part of my support group.
Lainie Rowell: Could you give us some very specific daily practices that the readers slash listeners could incorporate into their life? I know we're talking about things like exercise. It all relates to mental health, but what are some specific practices that you really encourage people to implement in their daily lives?
Dr. Daniel Amen: Start every day with today is going to be a great day. You know, most Americans have undisciplined minds where they turn on their phone, they start to scroll, they watch negative news, they just allow negative inputs into their mind and they don't know how to direct their mind. So I start every day with today is going to be a great day.
I start my huddles in the morning with my team and I'm always walking or on a stationary bike. Exercise absolutely essential because boost blood flow to the brain. Whenever I go to eat something, I ask myself, is this good for my brain or bad for it? And I only eat foods I love that love me back.
It's like, you're in a relationship with food and too many people are in abusive relationships with food. Meditate. I love diaphragmatic breathing. I have a very specific pattern I like. Four seconds in, hold it for a second or two. Eight seconds out. Hold it out for a second or two. It's a 15 second breath.
If you do that, increases heart rate variability and calms your whole nervous system down. And it's super simple. But my favorite of all my daily habits is when I go to bed. I say a prayer, and then I go on a treasure hunt. I start at the beginning of the day, looking for what went well, or what made me happy.
And it's my favorite part of the day because so many cool things happen and many people when they go to bed the negative stuff attacks them and, and, you know, negative stuff will attack me, but I like imagine a big broom and sweep it away because it's like, that's not the time. The time, you know, I'll deal with that tomorrow.
And during the day I'm much better at, you know, doing karate with my thoughts than right before bed. And so what went well? is, you know, such a great technique.
Lainie Rowell: And I find that when I do that, and calling it Practicing Gratitude, going on the treasure hunt for the goodness, I find when I do that, I know that sleep is considered a reset, but I find that when I do that before bed, it carries over to the next day, and how I wake up.
The mood. The emotions that I'm feeling the next day are carrying over from that night before, just as if the night before I'm stressing and worrying about it, I tend to wake up stressed and worried.
Dr. Daniel Amen: Yeah, it impacts your dreams, and how you're processing information, so, it's just learning to discipline our minds, our brains, and direct them to what's right rather than what's wrong, and then whenever I feel sad, or mad, or nervous, or out of control, and it's not very often, But I write down what I'm thinking.
And then I just have a process I teach my patients to kill the ants, the automatic negative thoughts that steal their happiness. And I just go, is that really true? And it's so helpful to not believe every stupid thing I think. And I have this rule of 12. Which is I came up with this when I took my wife to Paris for her birthday four or five years ago. And I said, you know, 12 things are going to go wrong. I just honor the principle that shit happens. And let's work really hard and not be upset until the 13th thing. And four things went wrong and nobody was upset the whole trip and we sort of felt like we had a bonus of eight.
And I think learning how to roll with life. Not roll over it, but roll with it, and one of my favorite quotes from my friend Byron Caden is, "Argue with reality, welcome to hell." And so, if I'm upset because the plane, my flight got cancelled, I'm like, well the flight got cancelled, you know, probably because the engine wasn't right, and thank God you're not going to die.
If I roll with it, well then I'm not stressed.
Lainie Rowell: Yeah, I think there's this intentional, you could say disciplined, approach where, you know, some anxiety, I've heard you say this before, some anxiety is healthy, right? Like, You don't get to just live so carefree that you don't care about how much you exercise, or the things that you might be putting into your body that are unhealthy.
Some anxiety keeps us from making some bad choices, right? But that negativity bias, where we do overwhelmingly notice the things that are bad, it really does have to be kept in check. And I really appreciate you saying don't spend too much time scrolling, be careful about how much you're intaking the news.
There are people who consume so much news. I honestly don't even know how they function because that is is so much negativity and it's not to ignore it, as you said, but we do have to be focused on, okay, how much am I taking in? and also having the discussion about, well, what is reality?
That's what I hear you saying, is that we have to be so intentional with what we put into ourselves, including the news and the social media. That's part of our brain health.
Dr. Daniel Amen: Absolutely. And I always think of my patients in four big circles. What's their biology? That's why I look at their brain, but I also look at the health of their body.
What's their psychology? How they think, their development. What's the social circle? How are we getting along? And what's the spiritual circle? Why do you care? What is your deepest sense of meaning and purpose? And understanding illness, it occurs in all four of those circles, right, so it's not just your brain, and getting well, being optimal, is all four of those circles, and I, I think it's just the most balanced, rational way to practice medicine, but also to live your life, to be purposeful and focused on what you want.
I have an exercise I do with my patients called the One Page Miracle. On one piece of paper, write down what you want. Relationships, work, money, physical, emotional, spiritual health. What do you want? And post it. And then you ask yourself, is my behavior getting me what I want, rather than you shouldn't have sugar, or drinking is not good for you, or marijuana is not innocuous Go, what do you want?
And if you want energy and memory and passion and connection, well those things damage your brain, so you don't really want them. But when you go, Oh, you shouldn't have this or shouldn't have that well, then people want them. And so you have to preface it with love your brain. And what do you really want?
And, you know, I know what I want. I want energy, and memory, and clarity, and connection, and passion.
Lainie Rowell: I feel like I have a sensitivity to sugar. I can tell a difference if I consume something that has an amount of sugar that's gonna spike my blood sugar level. I can tell.
It's, it's so clear to me. There's a difference and it's a, it's a bad feeling. It's just something I really, I don't want to be there. I don't want to be there. So that's me having to remember if I do this, I will end up there and that's not what I want, right? And so it's really helpful.
Dr. Daniel Amen: And I was at in an area where there's a little cafe, and I was with my two nieces who were raised in a horrible environment.
I ended up adopting them. , And I, I just pointed out to them the donut case. I said, look at these. There were donuts and cupcakes and cakes. And I said, all of these things, are basically made with sugar, flour, butter, and all of them. They just, like, change the texture a little bit. I said, all of them are going to kill you early, and they make you feel better for about 20 minutes, and then you feel worse.
And yet, people don't see that as weapons of mass destruction. They're like, Oh, I want them. And little kids beg for that. And I'm just like, you know, when you see the world through my eyes, you just, see that you're in a war for the health of your brain and your body.
Lainie Rowell: I know you have a lot of success stories in your practice and in your work, could you share a specific success story or an example of someone really improving their mental and emotional well being, their overall well being, implementing.
the things that you recommend.
Dr. Daniel Amen: I have so many stories.
You know, one of my favorite stories is Jared, who was diagnosed with ADHD when he was three. Hyperactive, restless, impulsive. couldn't concentrate, no friends. The doctor put him on a stimulant, made him worse, put him on another stimulant, made him worse, put him on another stimulant, made him worse.
I'm like, okay, who's got the learning problem? I was going to put him on an antipsychotic medicine to calm him down. And his mother brought him to the clinic. And, no question, he did have ADHD, just not the kind that responds to stimulants. He had a pattern we call the Ring of Fire, and on a group of supplements, parent training, he just did dramatically better.
And for 10 years, straight A's in school, and I was at a benefit with him and he told me he wanted to be a firefighter, his dad was a firefighter, and I said, how come? He said, on someone's worst day, I want to make it better. And I love that, because he was clearly headed for a bad life. And now he's in service, with a good brain, and a good mind, and a great relationship, and a job he loves.
I love that story.
Lainie Rowell: So I want to give you an opportunity any last words of wisdom.
Dr. Daniel Amen: Well, the big lesson is you're not stuck with the brain you have. You can make it better. And I did the big NFL study when the NFL was lying. It had a problem with traumatic brain injury and, I've always loved football until I started looking at the brain and then I realized football doesn't love your brain. And Anthony Davis, the Hall of Fame running back from USC came to see me and his brain was terrible. But five months later, it was better. And he's like, Doc, we have to tell people about this.
And so, I gave a lecture to the Los Angeles chapter of the NFL Players Association, and it was clear to me that some of the players had dementia, they had a lot of family problems, and I'm like, somebody should do a study, and if you grew up Roman Catholic like I did, As soon as you go, somebody should, you then point the finger back at yourself.
And I go, I should do that. And so I partnered with the NFL Players Association. We did the first and largest study on active and retired NFL players. High levels of damage. Stop lying about it. Football's a brain damaging sport, but on a rehabilitation program, 80 percent of our players got better. That's stunning news.
You're not stuck, even if you've been bad to your brain, we can make it better, and I can prove it. But it starts by looking, right? If you don't look, you don't know. And people go, oh, I don't want to know. And I'm like, well, if you knew a train was going to hit you, wouldn't you at least want to try to get out of the way?
Of course you want to know. And the scans are only good news because you have what you have. If I can show it to you and make it better, well, how cool is that? And that's, you know, my mindset is not to tell you you're messed up. It's like, you're awesome. How can I help you have maybe 10 percent more access to your own good brain so you can be more awesome?
Lainie Rowell: There's so much hope in the work that you're doing. I appreciate it and I know that our listeners and our readers do too. So, I want to be able to get people connected to you if they're not already connected to you. What is the best way for people to keep up with your work?
You've got tons of books, you're on the socials. What is your favorite way for people to connect with you?
Dr. Daniel Amen: I have a new book out called Change Your Brain Every Day. It's one of my favorite books too. It's 366 short essays on the most important things I've ever said. So it's sort of like a daily devotional to the brain.
They can learn about the clinics I have a lot around the country at AmenClinics.Com. Amen like the last word in a prayer. Clinics. com or follow me on Instagram or TikTok @DocAmen.
Lainie Rowell: Okay, and I do and I will. And thank you for everything you've shared here today and for all the amazing work that you put out there.
We truly appreciate you. And thank you all for listening.