Transcript: The 11 Risk Factors That Are Destroying Your Brain – Dr Daniel Amen

And if your brain is healthy, you’re much more likely to be happy. If you have low activity in the front part of your brain, you’re less happy.

Brand new study, just got accepted two weeks ago on negativity bias. The same thing we found. If you have low activity in the front part of the brain, not only are you not happy, you’re much more likely to be negative. And negativity is bad for the brain.

Now you need some anxiety. I always tell my patients to go, “I don’t want to be anxious anymore.” I’m like, let me. Is it okay if I take you from 800 to 100, from 80 to 15, because I want you to have some anxiety. So you don’t drink, you don’t drive at 125 miles an hour down the freeway both ways. You don’t get the idea you’re going to go rob a store. And then you do it because the anxiety will say, you don’t like institutional food or you don’t look that good in orange stripes.

The 70/30 Rule: Brain Health vs. Mind Management

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: How many of the issues you think that we’re seeing from a mental health perspective are top down versus bottom up?

DR. DANIEL AMEN: I think it’s probably 70, 30. 70% brain and 30% undisciplined minds. And my mission in life, why I think I’m on the planet, is actually to end the concept of mental illness by creating a revolution in brain health.

And if I can create that revolution in brain health, we’re actually working on a national brain health initiative. I think 70% of the mental health problems will go down.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Why do you think that this is the unhappiest generation at the moment? What’s contributing to that?

DR. DANIEL AMEN: Because they have brain problems. They think of alcohol as a health food. They think of marijuana as innocuous. They think of psilocybin as the cool new thing that I should do because it treats PTSD and depression. And I think I should do it at the party I’m at Friday night.

I think there are a series of lies that are driving the problems we have. And then if you take on top of that social media where you think everyone else life is better than yours, the negative news that is actually designed to hook you to keep watching even though it makes you angry, so that they can sell you more copper underwear and then take 70% of the calories, the Young people consume are ultra processed.

So we’re poisoning their food, we’re putting toxic products on their bodies, we’re feeding them negative news, negative comparisons on social media. It’s a shit show.

And the way out, I believe is brain health. Because when you ask yourself this one question, and this is really the one question to unpack, whatever I do today, is this good for my brain or bad for it? And if I can answer that question with information and love, love of myself, love of my family, love of the reason God put me on earth, I just get better.

The Impact of Substances on Brain Health

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Dig into the effect of alcohol, marijuana, mushrooms on the brain. I think we’re seeing a huge downturn in alcohol use and a huge uptick in THC use at the moment. In fact, Gen Z are more likely to smoke weed than they are to drink alcohol. And that’s, you know, in the space of 50 years, a big pivot.

So I’m interested to know what even short term and then slightly more protracted, you know, social, normal, normal use, whatever, normal recreational use of alcohol, weed and mushrooms.

# Marijuana’s Effect on the Brain

DR. DANIEL AMEN: You see the disaster we have with our mental health. Teenagers who use marijuana in their 20s have an increased risk of anxiety, depression, suicide and psychosis. I’m not a fan of at all.

I published a study on a thousand marijuana users until recently, the largest imaging study ever. Every area of the brain is lower in blood flow and activity makes your brain look older than you are now. I’ve known that for a long time.

I’m also a child psychiatrist and parents would bring me their 16 year old child and they go, “I think he has ADD. I heard about your work with ADD or ADHD. I think he has it.” I’m like, well did he have it when he was 10? Did he have it when he was 8? Did he have it when he Was 12? No, no, no. I’m like, we’re going to do a drug screen.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: And he came, he had it when it started hanging around with little Johnny from two doors down.

DR. DANIEL AMEN: That’s exactly it.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: What’s happening functionally with THC that’s causing that effect in the brain.

DR. DANIEL AMEN: It’s decreasing activity and blood flow in the brain. And then just recently another group has nothing to do with me. Published a study on a thousand marijuana users, young marijuana users. Significant areas of their brain involved with learning and memory were underactive.

And it’s like, that’s not loving your brain. And it’s like, “But I can’t deal with the anxiety.” It’s like, well have you tried diaphragmatic breathing or learning? Not to believe every stupid thought you have or theanine. I’m a huge fan of theanine from green tea, of all things. Decreases anxiety and helps you focus.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: It’s interesting that the salve that some people are using acutely to try and treat a symptom is predisposing them to more of that symptom once they come out the other side of it. There’s a poetic irony going on there.

DR. DANIEL AMEN: Yeah. I wrote a book called “Feel Better Fast and Make It Last.” And it’s like, I want you to do things that help you feel good now and later, as opposed to now but not later.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah. You don’t to be borrowing health and well being from tomorrow to pay it today.

DR. DANIEL AMEN: No.

# Alcohol’s Impact on Brain Health

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: What about alcohol?

DR. DANIEL AMEN: It makes your brain look older than you are. And when I first started scanning people, I was the director of a substance abuse treatment program. And their brains look so bad I actually put them on a poster.

And the poster hangs in a hundred thousand schools around the world called “Which Brain Do You Want?” Alcohol, marijuana, cocaine, methamphetamine, nicotine. Not good.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: None of them were pretty brains.

DR. DANIEL AMEN: No. And it was like so impressed. I was so impressed with the visuals that actually for now, I make my patients posters. It’s like, here’s a healthy brain, here’s yours. Here’s yours if you get it healthy, and here’s yours if you don’t. Five years from now. And the title is “Which Brain Do You Want?” Very motivating.

Jonathan Cain did my show. He’s the guitarist, keyboardist for Journey, the band Journey. And he wrote many of their iconic songs. He saw his brain and he was drinking like two bottles of wine a night and stopped. And that was nine months ago and hasn’t drank since. I was so proud of it.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: It’s a real motivator for people.

DR. DANIEL AMEN: If you’re smart and you realize your brain, the physical functioning of your brain is involved in everything you do. How you think, how you feel, how you act, how you get along with other people. It’s the organ of every decision you make. If you’re damaging it, you are damaging your present and your future.

Brain Structure and Conscious Experience

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I think so much of it comes back to that tension I spoke about earlier on, that our day to day conscious experience of our own minds is the most salient thing. And yet the structure that’s underpinning them is so opaque because we don’t get to know why am I feeling a little bit worse this month versus last month?

Yeah, maybe, you know, I had to send it a bit too hard at a few parties and yeah, maybe I didn’t get that much sleep and yeah, maybe I’ve been eating a lot of sugar. But like, who’s to say sometimes I eat sugar and I feel fine the next day. So there’s always the. It’s very slippery, you know, not in the same way.

I think that if you eat a calorie surplus for a couple of months and then you look in the mirror and you go, “I’m a bit fluffy.” You know, I kind of, I can see what’s going on now. If there was an external representation of structurally what was happening to our brains beyond our conscious experience, which is so slippery and you can’t draw those lines. The trend between what I did and the impact that it had, and I’m going to guess that a lot of this stuff’s lagged as well.

It’s not going to be immediately I smoke weed one day, my brain immediately starts functioning more differently. It’s going to be cumulative. It’s going to build up over time. It’s going to be to do with acute changes but turning into chronic like state changes turning into trait changes over time. So everybody can just ah, well, you know, like I’ll just. It’s another well.

The Power of Seeing Your Brain

DR. DANIEL AMEN: And nobody cares about their brain because you can’t see it. Right? Just like you’re saying you can see the wrinkles in your skin or the fat around your belly and you do something when you’re unhappy with it.

And in 1991, when I looked at my brain for the first time, I’m a double board certified psychiatrist. By then I was the top neuroscience student in medical school. I didn’t care about my own brain, but when I saw it and then I saw my mom’s brain. So I saw my mom’s brain the week before and her brain was stunningly beautiful, which reflected her life.

And still 93. She’s got 55 grandchildren, great grandchildren. She knows everybody’s name, everybody’s birthday, what’s going on in everybody’s life. I was unbelievable how it reflected her brain. And then I looked at mine and it wasn’t healthy because I played football in high school, I had meningitis when I was a young soldier. I had bad habits. But when I saw it, I’m like, “No, I’m not going to have my 60 year old mother having a better…”

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Looking brain than me wiping the flow with me neurologically. Yeah.

DR. DANIEL AMEN: Came up with this term called brain envy. I always say Freud was wrong. Penis envy is not the cause of anybody’s problem. I’ve not seen it once in 45 years. Brain envy. You want to learn to look, you want to want a better brain. And as I develop brain envy, I’m like, “Okay, what do I do to have a better brain?”

ADHD and Brain Scans

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: We all have a sense of this physically. I love the, you know that, the shape of that person’s body. And if I go to the gym and I train a lot, then maybe I can start to make myself look like that. But again, because everything is so opaque internally. You mentioned ADHD earlier on. What’s different in the scans of people who have an ADHD brain?

DR. DANIEL AMEN: So one of the big lessons early on is I learned that all psychiatric illnesses are not single or simple disorders. They all have multiple types. Now I’ve published a number of studies on ADHD. Consistently, they have lower prefrontal cortex function. Front third of their brain is lower in activity, especially when they try to concentrate. So it’s low at rest, drops further when they try to concentrate.

But also their cerebellum is lower and an area of the brain called the basal ganglia where dopamine is lower in activity. That’s the classic type. But there are other types, one I’m famous for called the ring of fire, where they don’t have low activity in their brain, they have high activity in the brain. And eight times out of 10, if you give this person a stimulant, you make them worse. Which is why Ritalin has a bad reputation for the right person. It’s miraculous for the wrong person to nightmare.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: That’s interesting. Do you think we’ve got an over…

DR. DANIEL AMEN: Diagnosis of ADHD at the moment and an under diagnosis? So I think girls are often under diagnosed because they don’t bring the negativity to themselves with troubled, they don’t act…

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Up in the same sort of a way, especially in school.

Diet and ADHD

DR. DANIEL AMEN: And I think that I’m so excited the government just banned red dye number 40 because I think artificial dyes and sweeteners and ultra processed food increase the expression of ADHD in our society. There’s a study from Holland where they gave 300 kids put them on an elimination diet. So they basically eliminated gluten, dairy, FODMAP type thing, artificial dyes and sweeteners. And 70% didn’t have ADHD anymore.

So shouldn’t if you have a child you’re worried about or if you’re worried about yourself rather than going on a stimulant, well, let’s just for a month try to change your diet to be a healthy diet. And I first got interested in diet early in my career when I had a mother of an autistic child said, “I stopped gluten and dairy. And the next week he had 50 more words.” And I’m like, “Why is that?”

And so as we study the brain and nutrition, both gluten and dairy, so gluten in your stomach mixed with stomach acid turns into something called gluteomorphins, which work on the opiate centers in your brain. So they turn things down. And milk or dairy products have casein. One of the proteins turns into casio morphins.

And so if you get rid of those, get rid of gluten and dairy, you just think clearer. Is it not everybody the same for everybody? There are some people that are more vulnerable. I know for me, when I have dairy, my stomach is much more unhappy, and if I stay away from it, I’m just fine.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: It’s interesting how the foods that make us feel good and that are so popular are also the ones that cause us to function worse.

DR. DANIEL AMEN: But now you know why they make you feel good. Because you’re actually working on the opiate centers of your brain. So if you think of pizza, gluten, and dairy, it’s like, “Oh, I love that,” but it doesn’t love me back. And that’s ultimately the question with alcohol or brownies or pizza. Do I love it and does it love me, too? Because I don’t know if you’ve ever been in a bad relationship. I was in a bad relationship, and I’m not doing that anymore. I’m married to my best friend, and I’m damn sure not doing it with food.

Understanding Brain Fog

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I want to talk about brain fog. I think this is something that everybody sort of has a sense. It’s going, I’m just not functioning quite as sharply as I would like. I feel like my thoughts should be more agile, more nimble, and I’m struggling to recall words. Maybe I’m not getting to the point as quickly as I would like. What is brain fog? Where does it come from?

DR. DANIEL AMEN: Well, there’s many different causes of brain fog. I have an acronym maybe we should talk about. If you want to keep your brain healthy or rescue it, you have to prevent or treat the 11 major risk factors that steal your mind. And the acronym is Bright minds. And this is actually my Alzheimer’s prevention program. I wrote a book about it called Memory Rescue. And then I’m like, “Oh, this is my end of mental illness acronym as well.” Right. If we assume your brain creates your mind, if your brain’s not healthy, your mind’s not healthy. So I wrote another book, how can…

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: You have a healthy mind without healthy brain?

DR. DANIEL AMEN: Called the End of Mental Illness. And I really dive into each of these 11 risk factors.

The BRIGHT MINDS Protocol

So brain fog, B stands for blood flow. Low blood flow is the number one brain imaging predictor of Alzheimer’s disease. It goes with brain fog. So what gives you low blood flow in your brain? Caffeine constricts blood flow to the brain. Nicotine, marijuana, alcohol, not sleeping, being overweight. I published three studies on 33,000 people. As your weight goes up, the size and function of your brain goes down, which should scare the fat off anyone being sedentary.

You know, little kids, when I was a little kid, were out all the time, out playing, play, play. And now kids are in front of screens with using their thumbs, playing video games. And so they’re not getting the level of exercise they did before, which, oh, by the way, will increase the expression of ADD or ADHD.

So blood flow R is retirement and aging. Does your brain look older than you are? And of all things, high iron levels accelerate aging. And so I look at ferritin levels, iron storage, in all of my patients, and I naturally have the gene that causes me to accumulate iron.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Me too.

DR. DANIEL AMEN: And so I’m always donating blood because I don’t want my brain to age faster than it should.

I is inflammation. And it’s like, what causes inflammation? Having a leaky gut or having an unhealthy mouth. So periodontal disease is a major cause of inflammation. So I became a flossing fool. Low levels of omega 3 fatty acids. I did a study on 50 consecutive patients who came to amen clinics who are not taking Omega 3s. 49 of them had suboptimal levels. Isn’t that crazy? And then another study was 93% of the population have suboptimal omega 3 fatty acids.

And so to improve that, get rid of the processed foods, take fish oil, or we actually make a vegan omega 3 from algae floss. Get your gut healthy.

G is genetics, but I think we think of genetics. “Oh, my dad’s an alcoholic. That’s why I drink.” You could have the opposite thought. Many people do. “My dad’s an alcoholic. That’s why I don’t drink.” But genes aren’t a death sentence. What they should be is a wake up call. I don’t know what you have in your family, but I have obesity and heart disease. But I’m not overweight and I don’t have heart disease because I’m on an obesity heart disease prevention program every day of my life. Because my grandfather, his first heart attack when he was a year younger than I am now.

H is head trauma major cause of psychiatric problems? And nobody knows about it because people don’t look at the brain. When you start looking at the brain, it’s like, so when did you have a head injury? And they go, “Well, I didn’t.” And I’m like, “Are you sure? Have you ever fallen out of a tree, off a fence, dove into a shallow pool?” And you cannot believe the number of people go, “No, no, no. Oh, when I was 7, I fell out of a second story window. Or when I was 13, I fell out of a moving car. Or I played football.”

And even if you never had a concussion, you had hundreds or even thousands of sub concussive blows. So brain is soft, skull is hard, skull has sharp bony ridges. Don’t hit soc with your head. Did you play sports growing up?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I did. I played cricket, much smaller ball, but I also did a lot of boxing, a lot of Thai boxing, stuff like that. So, yeah, I mean, you, you, you, the ins in the head, we might…

DR. DANIEL AMEN: See some of that.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I’m sure that you will. Yeah. Okay, We’ve gone B, R, I, G, H, head trauma.

Toxins and Brain Health

DR. DANIEL AMEN: T is toxins. And so we talked about marijuana and we talked about alcohol. Clearly toxic to brain function. There’s not one question in my head that they age your brain. They’re not good for you. Some surprising toxins. General anesthesia. The kids who have general anesthesia have a higher incidence of ADD and learning disabilities.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Single dose.

DR. DANIEL AMEN: Single dose. Adults who have general anesthesia have a higher incidence of dementia.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: From a single dose.

Anesthesia and Brain Health

DR. DANIEL AMEN: From a single dose. And the worst is a coronary artery bypass surgery. Now, if you’re going to do something bad for your brain because you might not have a choice, right?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah. The choice between having a brain that’s suboptimal and a heart that’s not working. It’s like, okay, we’ll get the heart working, and then we’ll deal with the brain thing.

DR. DANIEL AMEN: And then we have to rehabilitate the brain. But very few people ever think about that. They just think general anesthesia is innocuous, when in fact it’s not. And it surprised me. I mean, how I learned about it was I had a patient, she was an alcoholic. I got her sober, got her brain better. Brain was healthy. She had a knee replacement, and now she’s crying on the phone to me, “I have Alzheimer’s disease.” I scanned her. Her brain’s completely toxic.

And so I go to the library at a time when there were libraries for these things, and there’s a whole literature on general anesthesia and cognitive impairment.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Stepping into your world for a moment, what is the contrast that’s used in certain types of CT scans for the brain?

DR. DANIEL AMEN: So we don’t do CT. No.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: But what is it for the ones that do get done? Is it MRI? Is it bromelain? Bromelain.

DR. DANIEL AMEN: Gadolinium.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Gadolinium. Thank you.

DR. DANIEL AMEN: For MRIs, which is a metal which sort of sticks around.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yes.

DR. DANIEL AMEN: So if you can do it without contrast. Ours, we don’t use a dye. We use a radiopharmaceutical HMPAO or Ceretec, and it’s gone in 24 hours. And if you drank 32 ounces of water, dramatically gets rid of it faster.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Gadolinium was something that Dr. Gabrielle Lyon, who’s my doctor, brought up. I was going to go and get a scan with contrast. And as I’m on my way in, I get a call like, “Do not get the contrast, please. Let’s just do it without. You’ll be fine.” Et cetera, et cetera.

And yet it’s wild. The additives that are used to try and facilitate something that’s supposed to make you better, not even the treatment itself is the issue. It’s some weird ancillary part of the process. It’s the general anesthetic. It’s the gadolinium, in order to be able to get the contrast. It takes ages for you to work that out, right?

Environmental Toxins and Personal Care Products

DR. DANIEL AMEN: Other toxins, the products you put on your body, the parabens, the phthalates, what are they? They’re hormone disruptors. And is there a connection between autism and the products we put on our bodies? I mean, I think it’s an important question to ask.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Have you seen any evidence around that?

DR. DANIEL AMEN: I have, and it’s frightening because many people read food labels and it’s like, “Oh, I don’t know what that is. I won’t eat it.” But they never read product labels. And so look at. There’s an app I like called Think Dirty which allows. It’s not what you think.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I was going to say that doesn’t sound like something that.

DR. DANIEL AMEN: It allows you to scan your personal products and it’ll tell you on a scale of 1 to 10 how quickly they’re killing you. So, for example, I used to shave with Barbasol and one is live a long time, 10 is die early. It’s a nine. And now I shave with something called Kiss My Face and it’s a two. And it’s actually not more expensive because it lasts forever.

What you put on your skin goes in your body and affects your body, and people just never even think about that.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: What about environmental toxins, air quality? Mold?

DR. DANIEL AMEN: Mold is bad for the brain. I’m in a documentary with Dave Asprey called Moldy because when I saw his brain for the first time, it was moth eaten. It was terrible. Turned out he had mold. And when he got rid of the mold, his brain got better. So mold.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: He spent a long time detoxing.

DR. DANIEL AMEN: Last year he did mercury, heavy metals like lead. I often, if I see a toxic brain and they’re not drinking or using marijuana, I’m like, why is it toxic? Is it anesthesia? Is it mold? Is it mercury? Is it lead? And it could be their detoxification pathways just aren’t very healthy.

And people who take saunas have a lower incidence of Alzheimer’s disease, in large part because it’s helping the body detoxify itself.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: So that’s the T. Toxins.

Mental Health and Adverse Childhood Experiences

DR. DANIEL AMEN: Toxins. So the M. Mental health issues, especially negativity bias, low hope, high population and adverse childhood experiences. We published a huge new study on 7,500 patients on how many bad things happened to you growing up and did that have a lasting impact on your brain? And it turns out it does. So have you heard of the ACE questionnaire before?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yes.

DR. DANIEL AMEN: So adverse childhood experiences, 0 to 10, physical, emotional, sexual abuse, neglect, witnessing domestic violence, having a parent with a mental health issue, incarceration or addiction. And people score four or more have an increased risk of seven of the top 10 leading causes of death. People who score seven or more die 20 years early.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: So here we have the inverse of the directional dynamic that we’ve been talking about. This is something which is going top down. It’s something experiential story that you tell yourself, a narrative that is now functionally changing the way that the brain works. Is that the direction that we’re into here?

DR. DANIEL AMEN: Correct. So the chronic stress causes your emotional brain to become hyperactive, where now you’re always watching for something bad to happen. So that’s the negativity bias. So the more a score you have, the higher your ACE score, the more likely you are to notice the negative.

And I actually had a positive training program to teach people to notice what’s right. And my wife, who has an ACE score of 8, she’s like, “This is the dumbest game I’ve ever seen.” Because she believed noticing the scary people protected her. Where I’m like, the chronic stress is going to take you out early. But she’s holding on.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: It feels like safety. Yeah, interesting.

DR. DANIEL AMEN: In fact, we just did a whole podcast together on negativity bias. And I’m like, you have to teach people to be more positive in order to feel it yourself.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: What about you’ve mentioned ACE there. What about adverse adult experiences? Is that something as well?

DR. DANIEL AMEN: Yes.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Is the required dose as a child less than it is as an adult? For chronic stress.

DR. DANIEL AMEN: The dose would be less for a child because they have an undeveloped nervous system. But I often say it’s the brain you bring into trauma, physical or emotional, that determines the brain that comes out of trauma.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: How fertile is the ground that we’re working with here? Yeah, interesting.

DR. DANIEL AMEN: Yeah. My first published paper, a long time ago, 43 years ago, was on post Vietnam stress disorder. And I called it a metaphor for current and past life events. So if you brought a vulnerable brain into a traumatic situation in Vietnam is going to affect you more than if you brought in a healthy brain.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: This has been shown, I think in PTSD across a lot of different studies that I’ve seen, where people who had a predisposition to anxiety disorder going in are the ones that are the most likely to then suffer with the PTSD on the other side. So I guess that would be the brain that you bring in is what you get out on the other end as well.

DR. DANIEL AMEN: And it’s also the genes you bring in because we have seen that genes can affect generations. So if you have PTSD, if your grandparents had PTSD, you are more likely to develop it yourself because that stress changed their genes, the ones they gave to you.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Well, I mean there’s a, you know, if you are a woman, at one point your grandmother was pregnant with your mother and inside of your mother while your grandmother was pregnant with her was the egg that was going to make you. Because every baby is born female baby is born with all of the eggs that she’s ever going to have. So you have this odd three generation window where, you know, month eight, month nine, everybody’s together kind of in a way.

The Hidden Dangers of Artificial Sweeteners

DR. DANIEL AMEN: No, that’s exactly right. And teenage girls need to know they are carrying their babies. And so the drugs they’re using is turning on or off certain genes to make illness more or less likely. Not in them, but in their babies and their grandbabies.

And another new study that just exploded my mind, they looked at aspartame. So the sweetener that’s in diet sodas, it made the mice anxious, but it also made their babies anxious and their grandbabies anxious. And aspartame is now in 5,000 products. And so you wonder in part, if the mental health epidemic is because of an artificial sweetener that people thought was free.

I used to drink it, like it was my best friend, because I’m like, “Oh, it’s free.” And when I was 35, I had arthritis. I couldn’t get off the floor when I was playing with my kids. My hands and my knees hurt. And then one of my patients one day, this is how I learned most of what I know my patients teach me. She said, “I stopped aspartame and my arthritis went away.” And I think maybe I had a diet soda in my office while she was saying this.

So I stopped and my arthritis went away. And I’m not that smart. And so a month later, I’m like, “Nah, probably not.” So I had another one. I just had this huge flare, and I’m like, breaking up with diet soda.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I is next.

Immunity and Infections

DR. DANIEL AMEN: What’s I Immunity and infections. And I think there’s going to be a whole sub branch of psychiatry in the future. If you overlay a map of schizophrenia. So one of the most severe psychiatric disorders were people who lose touch with what’s real and what’s not real. Highest incidence in the United States is the Northeast, the north, Midwest, and the west Coast.

If you overlay that map with the highest incidence of Lyme disease, they’re identical. So is it possible that an infectious disease is causing some mental illness? And the answer is absolutely yes.

And we have so many great stories of people like Adrianna, 16 years old, beautiful, normal, goes to Yosemite on vacation. When they get to their cabin, they’re surrounded by six deer, and they think it’s a magical moment. And 10 days later, she starts hallucinating. She becomes aggressive paranoid, goes to a psychiatric hospital. She’s diagnosed with schizophrenia, put on medication.

The doctor trained at Stanford said to the mother, “She’s to have to be on this for the rest of her life.” And six months later, she’s a shell of herself. She comes to see us. Her brain’s on fire. Why is her brain on fire? She had Lyme disease, and on an antibiotic, she’s no longer in psychosis.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: You’re all do that to a person.

DR. DANIEL AMEN: Yeah, and we saw that with COVID. COVID causes this inflammatory bomb that goes off in the brain. And we’ve known that, syphilis, for example, can pretty much make you crazy. HIV can change the way you think. And when I saw many HIV brains, they’re so negatively affected now, thank God there’s treatment for it. But I think infectious disease is a major cause of psychiatric problems.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: What are some of the other common infectious diseases you mentioned? Lyme. That’s pretty common, COVID. Everybody at some point was probably exposed to that. What are the other ones?

Infections and Brain Health

DR. DANIEL AMEN: Herpes, cytomegalovirus and something called PANDAS. Have you heard of PANDAS? Pediatric autoimmune neuropsychiatric disorders associated with strep infections. So you know if you get strep throat, you have to treat it, because if you don’t, you can develop some very serious heart problems.

Well, about 30 years ago, researchers at the NIH found that the same antibodies to strep that attack your heart attack your brain. And they can create new onset OCD, obsessive compulsive disorder in the brain from an infection. Which is why it’s important if you have a psychiatric disorder to get the infections assessed.

I had this one boy as a consultant on the movie “Concussion” with Will Smith about chronic traumatic encephalopathy, football dementia. And one of the people who was involved in the movie had a nine year old son who was on three psychiatric medications. And they said, “Would you see him?” And when I saw his brain, I’m like, “He’s got an infection.” And it turned out he had Lyme and PANDAS, and when they were treated, he got so much better.

Neurohormone Abnormalities

Neurohormone abnormalities – if your estrogen’s not right and you’re a woman, your brain’s not right. If your progesterone’s not right, your brain’s not right. Obviously, if your thyroid’s not right, your brain’s not right. If your testosterone’s too low, your brain’s not right. And if it’s too high, you lose half your net worth and visit your children on the weekends because your libido goes up and your empathy goes down. It’s a very bad thing.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah.

DR. DANIEL AMEN: And did you know that if you get a sugar burst, it drops testosterone levels by 25%? So if you share the cheesecake with your partner at the restaurant, no one’s getting dessert when you get home.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Okay.

Diabesity: The Super Bad Risk Factor

DR. DANIEL AMEN: Diabesity, probably – well, they’re all bad, but this is super bad. So diabesity is your blood sugar is high and or you’re overweight, and both of them are just a disaster for brain function. In fact, if you’re overweight or have high blood sugar, you have virtually all of the risk factors because you have low blood flow, it ages your brain, it creates inflammation, it alters your genes.

So maybe not a head injury, but fat stores toxins, they give you mental health problems, it ruins your immunity, it takes healthy testosterone and turns it into unhealthy forms of estrogen and you don’t sleep well.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: How does anyone have a functioning brain in the modern world?

Loving Your Brain

DR. DANIEL AMEN: Loving your brain. I just talked to one of my patients who I was a miserable failure with for eight years and a wild success the last six. And she just loves her brain and loves her life because every day she just asks that one simple question: “Is what I’m doing today good for my brain or bad for it?” And if I just stay with what’s good…

People go – we have a high school course called “Brain Thrive by 25” and it decreases drug, alcohol and tobacco use. Decreases depression, improves self esteem. Independent research showed that. And in week four, when it’s 12 weeks, in week four we go, “Okay, these are the things to avoid.” Invariably, a 14 year old boy, never a girl – boy, raises his hand and goes, “How can you have any fun?”

And we play a game with the kids called “Who has more fun? The kid with the good brain or the kid with the bad brain. Who gets the girl and gets to keep her because he doesn’t act like an ass? The kid with the good brain or the kid with the bad brain. Who gets into the college they want to get into? Who has the most meaningful long term relationships?” It’s the person with a good brain. Right. We have to get rid of the notion “I need to do something that harms me in order to have fun.”

University Drinking Culture

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah, it’s an odd trade, I think, being British. The sort of heavy drinking culture that was very popular when I was at university and I went to university 2006 and I was there until 2011 and that was like a rite of passage. My master’s dissertation was “The effectiveness of anti alcohol advertising on students at Newcastle University.” Shock horror.

It’s kind of hard to tell if you’re 21 or 22 years old and you’re at university at one of the biggest drinking unis in the UK that kind of has pride, I guess, in how hard it goes that it’s very difficult to have that sort of an intervention. Really, really tough that people saw it as a badge of honor.

You know, there’s not many things that you bond over how painful they are, but nights out are one of them. So if you were to ring someone and say, “Hey Alex, how was the night last night?” And you go, “Dude, it was amazing. Josh nearly lost an eye.” You go, “That’s not typically the sort of review that I get,” but it’s this odd rite of passage, badge of honor that people go, “Oh my God, that’s how heavy it was. It was crazy.” You know, like you ended up without a toe. That’s the situation that people get into.

And I suppose especially guys like Jonathan Haidt, Jean Twenge, they’ve got these concerns about slow life strategy, about young people being too coddled, this extended adolescence, as they call it. But I do think that there’s some advantages to this, which is that people aren’t sending it in the way that me and the guys that I went to uni did from the age of 18 to 25. Whether that’s because they’re too nervous to leave the house or because their brains are addled by Netflix and TikTok. Okay, right. There’s a trade off that’s going on here. I’m not saying that it’s necessarily net better, but we’ve got rid of one of the toxins.

DR. DANIEL AMEN: I’m actually not a huge fan of sending kids away to school to live with other underdeveloped brains. Your brain’s not finished developing until you’re 25. And when I was 18, I went in the military because Vietnam was still going on. And thankfully for me, I didn’t go to Vietnam, I went to Europe. But it, for me, it was great because it was structure.

But the brain’s just not done until you’re 25. Why would you send it away where basically half of the people are functional alcoholics and where that’s just normal and it can have a negative impact on their brain for the rest of their lives?

Early Childhood Experiences and Brain Development

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I’m interested. You mentioned early childhood experiences earlier on. How do early childhood experiences shape the brain and what’s going on?

DR. DANIEL AMEN: It changes it. It actually takes their emotional brain and heightens it so that they’re always watching for something bad to happen. We look specifically at how good you are recognizing faces, and they’re very good at it. And then there’s something called non conscious negativity bias.

Ask “Do you recognize happy faces faster or do you recognize negative faces faster?” And they’re masterful with the negative faces, so they’re always out looking at what could hurt them, what’s wrong. And that chronic cortisol exposure to stress hormones is just bad for them. They’re more likely to get cancer. They’re more likely to get sick.

DR. DANIEL AMEN: I think in school we should teach kids to love and care for their brains, and we should teach them how to manage their minds. So, for example, I was 28 years old in my psychiatric residency at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C. – that’s where I did my psychiatric training. One of our professors said, “You have to teach your patients not to believe every stupid thing they think.”

And I’m like, “But I believe every stupid thing I think.” No one had ever taught me, even though I had 25 years of education, no one had ever taught me to question my own thoughts. When I get a thought, “My wife never listens to me,” to at least go, “Is that true?” And I’ve written and produced now 19 National Public Television specials about the brain. And she’s listened to every script.

But just if I don’t question my thoughts, I believe them, even though they’re a lie. And then I act as if they’re true, which gets me no end of grief. So now I get that thought and I’m like, “Well, that’s not true.” And it just helps me so much to live in truth and live in the moment.

Reversing Early Childhood Trauma

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: How much can that impact from early childhood be reversed in your experience?

DR. DANIEL AMEN: So much of it. I dedicated my book “The End of Mental Illness” to my two nieces, Alize and Anomaly. It’s about eight years ago now. Wow, almost nine years ago. They were taken into foster care, so I had never met them. And my wife’s half sister and her husband were drug addicts. And so they were raised in a very stressful environment. So on a scale of 0 to 10, how many ACEs they had? Nine.

And I dedicated the book to them because it’s like, “You don’t have to live – that is not going to be your destiny.” And by teaching them to not believe every stupid thing they think, to get them the right help. I love a therapy called EMDR – stands for eye movement desensitization and reprocessing. You get triggered. Think about it. Go there, right? Don’t drink it away. Go there. Get your eyes going back and forth. Tell me what comes up.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Tell me what’s happening with the EMDR.

DR. DANIEL AMEN: It’s calming down that diamond pattern or the trauma pattern in your brain. I published a study on it, and police officers who were involved in shootings, they all had that heightened emotional brain. And after an average of eight sessions, all calmed down.

Now, if you grow up in trauma like these girls did, so they had years of it – it takes more than eight sessions. But that plus learning to kill the ANTs, the automatic negative thoughts, plus not believing that hot Cheetos is a health food. They’re just doing amazing.

How EMDR Works

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Why is lateral eye movement nice for the brain?

DR. DANIEL AMEN: It unlocks the left, and it gets the left and right hemispheres to work together to unlock the chronic hyperactivity in those circuits, and it calms it down. It’s very interesting.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: It’s so funny that moving your eyes is this sort of direct access to the brain.

DR. DANIEL AMEN: But it’s moving your eyes with – well, your eyes are the only part of your brain that’s uncovered, right. I mean, your eyes are really your brain.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Extruded out through the front of the face. Yeah, right. Yeah.

DR. DANIEL AMEN: And getting them to go back and forth stimulates the left side and the right side. So while you bring up that memory, it just tends not to bother you anymore. I had one patient recently, he was on a flight, and when he was landing, he started to panic. And I’m like, “Great, let’s go into it.” And it went back to a very important memory in childhood that he had completely forgotten about. And as we processed it, that flying didn’t bother him anymore.

And so I always love – I want my patients to keep track of their triggers. So rather than drink, I want you to be curious about it, not furious. And if you write it down, we’ll go hunt it down.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I’d heard something similar to EMDR about walks, that locomotion with the scenery sort of coming past the eyes. And typically as you’re walking, sort of looking left, there’s a squirrel over there looking, oh, there’s a car coming this way. So have you seen with walks, has this been shown in the data that you’ve had a look at?

DR. DANIEL AMEN: You know, I think that’s how Francine Shapiro, who developed EMDR, noticed on a walk, when she would look one way and then the other way, one way, then the other way, whatever was bothering her, didn’t bother her anymore. And then developed this very cool form of psychotherapy.

I also use it for peak performance that I’ll use the eye movement. I have an NBA player – “All right, let’s go through the last game where he played really well.”

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: And.

DR. DANIEL AMEN: Just to sort of lock in that feeling. But if he had a bad game, it’s like, “Well, let’s go to all the other bad games that you had to just sort of clean them out of your head” and then use it to focus on “So how do you want to show up?”

Neuroplasticity and Brain Transformation

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I’d heard that once patterns and habits are laid down that there’s no pruning or getting rid of those pathways. All that there is is laying more preferred pathways over the top of them. How true is that from a structural perspective?

DR. DANIEL AMEN: Yeah, I don’t think it’s true. I think I’ve seen people undergo wildly positive transformations and wildly negative ones. If we think of neuroplasticity as a good thing, but it’s not, it’s a thing. Whatever you continually pay attention to, if it’s positivity, your brain will learn to be more positive. If it’s negativity or an addiction, it’s going to be more negativity.

And so where you bring your attention repeatedly always determines how you feel. As long as you don’t have an infection and your hormones are right. And we didn’t talk about S, which is sleep, which is so important because when you sleep seven and a half hours, it turns on 700 health promoting genes. And if you sleep less than six hours, it turns off 700 health promoting genes.

So making sleep like I don’t, I go to bed to wash my brain. I go to bed because I want my memory to be better tomorrow. That’s why I don’t drink, because I have more REM, I have more dreams.

The Perfect Recipe for Brain Destruction

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Imagine for a second that you were to design a protocol for someone to follow that would put their brain in the worst possible state. We want to take a well functioning brain and we want to make them moody and slow and unable to regulate themselves emotionally. What would be your prescription? To turn a healthy functioning brain into a totally useless one.

DR. DANIEL AMEN: So if I was an evil ruler and I wanted to create mental illness. What would I do? Well, if we just use the Bright Minds acronym, I wouldn’t let them move. I give them video games and just go, “Stay here. Don’t go anywhere, Stay here.”

And I’d give them a little bit of alcohol that they could have whenever they wanted and marijuana and caffeine. I wouldn’t have them learn anything new. I’m like, “No, you just do Netflix” and not even let them have the documentaries. I would not encourage them to take care of their teeth and floss. I’d give them a processed food diet which increases inflammation.

I would tell them, “Oh, your family’s fat, so you’re going to be fat.” I’d go, “If you drive, make sure you’re texting while you’re driving” to make sure they get a head injury. I would teach them that alcohol is a health food and marijuana is innocuous.

And yeah, to just go under all the plastic surgery they could to get the degenerate anesthesia that they didn’t need. To believe every stupid thing they thought. I’d have them start the day by turning on the news. And because people who watch the news are 27% less happy in the afternoon if they start the day with the news.

And I’d have them never check their vitamin D level, never eat onions, garlic or mushrooms because they boost your immunity, never check their hormones, eat all the bad food they wanted and keep them up late at night. Like get really interested in murder shows right before bed so they couldn’t sleep.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: And that would take somebody that’s relatively well functioning and turn them into somebody.

DR. DANIEL AMEN: Who needed to see me.

Managing Anxiety: The Do’s and Don’ts

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: That could actually be a good front end of the funnel for the marketing, though, if you promote that. And then you can give them on the other side, something else that we sort of touched on earlier on. Let’s say that someone’s suffering from anxiety. What are the biggest do’s and don’ts for them?

DR. DANIEL AMEN: So if you suffer from anxiety and you start to panic, don’t leave the situation you’re in, because if you leave, the anxiety is going to begin to control you. So that’s the first step.

The second thing is when you get anxious, learn how to breathe with your belly. Diaphragmatic breathing is as effective as Xanax and there has no side effects. And do what I call it the 15 second breath. And you know what I mean when I say diaphragmatic? When you breathe in, stick your belly out as far as you can, because when you do, there’s a muscle between your chest and your abdomen called the diaphragm and it flattens and it doubles your lung capacity.

So most vain people like they hold their belly in when they’re having a picture because they don’t want to be seen as fat. And, but do that when you’re taking a picture. But in everyday life, you breathe in, stick your belly out as far as it’ll go, four seconds in, hold it for a second and a half, eight seconds out. So take twice as long to breathe out as you breathe in. Hold it out for a little bit. So that’s a 15 second breath. It’ll break a panic attack. And under four or five breaths it’s so cool. And you’re controlling your own physiology.

And then write down what you’re thinking and odds are it’s scary thoughts. “They don’t like me, they’re judging me. I’m going to fail some way.” And I teach all of my patients the 18-40-60 rule that says when you’re 18, you worry about what everybody thinking of you. When you’re 40, you don’t give a damn what anybody thinks about you. And when you’re 60, you realize nobody’s been thinking about you at all. People spend their days worrying and thinking about themselves, not you.

And then if you need something else to calm down. I’m a huge fan of hypnosis, just masterful at calming anxiety. I like supplements like theanine, GABA, magnesium, Ashwagandha, curcumin, help actually decrease inflammation. There’s so many things, but often people go to the doctor and become really anxious and they write them a prescription for benzo, which I think should be malpractice because once they start the benzo, Xanax, Ativan, Valium, whatever, they never stop them. And benzos are associated with addiction and dementia. So anything that’s associated with addiction and dementia, you should only take that really thoughtfully.

The Modern Anxiety Epidemic

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I’m interested in why we’ve got this massive onset of anxiety disorders. It seems to be the emotion du jour of the 21st century.

DR. DANIEL AMEN: So maybe it’s aspartame. I mean, it was really clear in the study on animals that they got aspartame and they were anxious. And Valium, one of the benzos, calmed it down. And not only did it make the animals anxious, it made their babies anxious, it made their grandbabies anxious. And that’s not the only thing.

But if you mix that with all the other ultra processed foods with social media, with the negative news. Our polarized culture now, which is quite frankly, is great for psychiatric business, but it’s a disaster for our society. I’ve had people suicidal after the last presidential election.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Did you see that study that was done on the Boston Marathon bombing where they had two cohorts? One were either runners or spectators at the actual event, and the other were people who had watched at least two hours of news. And the people that watched two hours of news showed more signs of post traumatic stress disorder than the people who were actually there and observed it firsthand, who tried crazy.

DR. DANIEL AMEN: And it’s being done purposefully. You watch, whether it’s Fox or CNN, it’s “breaking news, breaking news, breaking news.” It’s the same thing they’ve been talking about for days.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Everything can be breaking news, but apparently it is.

Fighting Corporate Manipulation

DR. DANIEL AMEN: But it’s to keep your attention so they can sell you more things and that should make you mad. And I’m very interested in your research when you were studying alcohol prevention, because I’m working with the White House on issues with mental health and I wrote a drug and alcohol prevention program for them.

But it’s mostly about getting young people pissed off at Anheuser Busch because, you know, they spent $7.2 billion last year on sales and marketing. I’m like, they’re not only taking your money, they are taking your life. And they’re doing it with a lie. And so getting them angry about being manipulated, because I think that’s what motivates teenagers.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Emotion.

DR. DANIEL AMEN: It’s emotion.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah.

DR. DANIEL AMEN: And not wanting to be controlled. And often they’re like, “Well, my parents said, don’t drink, drink. So now I have to drink.”

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Revolutionary.

DR. DANIEL AMEN: “Don’t control me. I am going after my own independence and my own identity. Don’t tell me what to do.”

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: They don’t realize it’s Anheuser Busch. You’re telling them what to do.

DR. DANIEL AMEN: Just Anheuser Busch and Jack in the Box and McDonald’s and the food. They’re telling them what to do, and they just don’t see it. They don’t see the manipulation. Put someone, a model like Scarlett McKinney in a bikini, and have her eat Carl’s Jr. And you know, she’s not eating that food because she’d never look like she did. She does if she ate that food. And so I think it’s motivating them with emotion at the same time teaching them to love their brain.

The Power of Externalities in Behavior Change

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: The emotion thing’s interesting. That was the one area at my master’s dissertation, although very well received by my tutors, was largely a massive failure in that each intervention that I tried didn’t seem to work in reducing. The one that did, interestingly, was looking at the externalities of how your behavior affects the people around you.

So it was imagining a marketing campaign showing you and your friends having a great night out and someone throws up because they’ve had too much to drink. But the next morning, it showed the shopkeeper that had to go and spray his front step from the vomit that one of your friends had left. It was the grandma that was woken up in her house, and she’s already got quite frightened, but because you were being raucous in her front garden at 4 in the morning, that it’s disrupted her and it made her feel scared and it made her feel anxious.

So it was kind of the same as the, you know, the classic James Bond torture scene where he’s being tortured and he can just take it and “I don’t care.” But then they bring in somebody that he cares about as somebody that he loves, and that’s when, you know, that’s when they break. It was this externality that I can kind of handle the costs that I need to pay myself, but being the reason for a cost that somebody else has to pay. Kind of a special type of pain. And it seemed like people were.

But again with that, it was emotion. The emotion this time I think was guilt, it was shame, it was regret, it was pro social, which was interesting cause I think alcohol a lot of the time is quite antisocial. But yeah, it’s interesting that you aligned at something not too dissimilar for young people. You mentioned some supplements there. What I mean, there is an endless list of things that are supposed to improve brain function. What are the ones that are the biggest winners from a supplement perspective?

Top Brain-Boosting Supplements

DR. DANIEL AMEN: Omega 3 fatty acids help mood, memory and pain. I love that. My favorite of all of them is saffron. So the spice, the most expensive spice in the world has been shown in 26 randomized controlled trials to be equally effective as antidepressants with fewer to virtually no side effects.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: What’s the mechanism it’s working on?

DR. DANIEL AMEN: It seems to increase multiple neurotransmitters and decrease inflammatory markers. And why I got interested in Saffron is around 25 years ago there was a study showing it helped mood and improve sexual function. And most of the antidepressants I prescribe decrease sexual function. And that was always something that used to really irritate me. “I’m going to help your mood and ruin your relationship.” And I’m like, “No, I don’t like that.” And so I started paying attention to it.

And then all this research, brand new study out just last week where they looked at 192 studies on 17,000 patients looking at what supplements worked for depression and they compared them against antidepressants and saffron came out the best alone.

Interestingly, when you added zinc to antidepressants, dramatically improved their effectiveness. That’s so interesting. When you added curcumins from turmeric to antidepressants, dramatically increased its effectiveness. And so one of my favorites, saffron, zinc and curcumin for mood. They also found SAMe very effective for pain and mood.

Gender Differences in Brain Health

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I’ve only heard that used to help you get over MDMA comedowns again. You can tell I was a club promoter for a long time.

DR. DANIEL AMEN: 5-HTP not as effective in the studies as saffron. I’d like it if I’m trying to specifically boost serotonin. And did you know women have 52% less serotonin than men?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I did not.

DR. DANIEL AMEN: Which is why if you make them mad, they’re never going to forget it because it stimulates the part of their brain that keeps them stuck and why women are at twice the risk of depression as men.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: The predisposition to rumination, to being stuck on thought patterns. Yeah, okay.

DR. DANIEL AMEN: So they also have better frontal lobes though. So I published a study on 46,000 brains and looking at differences between male and female brains. And women have much better frontal lobe function, which is why they go to jail 14 times less than men do.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I would imagine the testosterone plays a role there as well.

DR. DANIEL AMEN: It does, but also the lack of forethought, risk taking behavior.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: If I do this, I’m more likely to be in a cage than if I don’t do that.

Essential Supplements for Brain Health

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Okay. Omega-3s, saffron, SAMe, theanine.

DR. DANIEL AMEN: Love theanine, especially for anxiety. But it also can help with focus. I like that. I like a good multiple vitamin especially that has vitamin D because low levels of vitamin D are associated with virtually every bad thing. B6, B12 and folate.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Methylated or have you not got a preference?

DR. DANIEL AMEN: Methylated, yeah. And it’s about a third of the population has a folate genetic issue. Me too. And so I take extra methylfolate every day to decrease my homocysteine and decrease my risk of heart disease.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Let me give you an interesting one. For my most recent set of blood tests, my MCV was unusually high. And then I had a test done. My entire genetic profile got done toward the back end of last year. I’ve got four different polymorphisms that wreck my ability to do B12. So one in the gut, one in the blood, one in the brain and one in the methylation pathway, something like that. So I’ve switched to B12 injection to try and bypass all of that. And that made a really big impact.

DR. DANIEL AMEN: In what way?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I noticed improved energy was the main thing, that I was having these dips in energy throughout the day, especially sort of post lunch and then earlier on in an evening. So I’m still working through a bunch of stuff on an evening time. But this made an impact despite the fact that every type of different methylated B12, B6 vitamin under the sun. But when you’ve got this series of different sort of hurdles that you need to jump over and when you think it’s got to the stage where the size of your red blood cells is actually being manipulated by this, I should probably pay attention to that.

DR. DANIEL AMEN: Any alcohol?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: No, never.

DR. DANIEL AMEN: Because sometimes that’ll give you big red blood cells. It’s one of the first things that I see, but that’s not it.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: What else have we not gone through from that? Omega-3s, saffron, SAMe, Ashwagandha.

DR. DANIEL AMEN: I like Ashwagandha. It actually helps boost testosterone levels and can sort of calm you down. Magnesium, I think.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Have you got a preferred type?

DR. DANIEL AMEN: Depends on what we’re using it for. If you’re constipated, oxide. If you can’t sleep, glycine. If you have muscle twitches, taurate. But many people are magnesium deficient. And it’s like, let’s do the simple things before you go to the psychiatric medications. It doesn’t mean you won’t use the psychiatric medications, but it shouldn’t be the first thing. But most doctors, they get no training in supplements and so it’s the medication that keeps you coming back.

Brain Differences Between Men and Women

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: You mentioned there about scans, comparison scans between men and women. When you look at men and women in your scans, what are the differences that you see in the brains?

DR. DANIEL AMEN: Women overall have healthier brains. They have healthier frontal lobes, but their emotional brains are busy, which there’s not one society on the face of the earth where men are primary caretakers for children. So bonding is really important. But that heightened limbic system makes them ruminate more, makes them have a higher tendency to depression.

And so exercise boosts serotonin. Bright light therapy. We haven’t talked about that. I love bright light therapy, like sitting in front of a light box for 20 or 30 minutes.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Have you got a preferred brand of lightbox?

DR. DANIEL AMEN: Well, we make one. So it has both blue light and white light. So I like ours. But there are many of them. It’s been shown to help with pain, with mood, with energy, with memory and sleep. And so too often, we’re not in the sun enough and we’ve been made afraid of the sun.

So I think everybody should know their important numbers. And one of them is their vitamin D level. Normal is between 30 and 100. People who are over 40 have half the risk of cancer of those who are under 20. And when I first tested mine, when I learned about this fifteen years ago, I was 17. And I live in Southern California where the sun is out mostly, but I’m working during the day.

And I noticed when I got my level high, normal 80, my appetite went away. Like I’d been trying to lose that extra 20 pounds forever. But I was just – it was the food chatter, always the food chatter just went away because my vitamin D level was normal. It’s just crazy, like things you wouldn’t even think about.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Well, it’s a system that is not compartmentalized. And everything is affecting everything else. And I suppose there’s so many different contributing factors that you don’t know exactly how it’s going to impact you. A low level of vitamin D for somebody else could cause them to tend toward depression, could cause them to have lower energy, whatever it might be. But for you, it was appetite. All right, so that’s women. What about men? Under the scans.

DR. DANIEL AMEN: Lower prefrontal cortex function, which is why men are diagnosed with ADD five times more than women. Plus, they play things like football and soccer, drink more. But they had more activity in the back part of their cerebellum, which is involved with coordination and tracking.

Men tend to be really good with narrow focus. Women with vision, better peripheral vision, which means – I hate this part – if a guy sees a really cute girl, he has to turn his head so he gets caught. If a girl sees a really cute person, they don’t have to turn their head so they don’t get caught. It’s sort of unfair.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Very interesting. You know, my favorite study around local spatialization versus – what’s it called when you throw something through the air and it intersects with something else? The visual spatial coordination. Thank you.

So this would never be done again, I don’t think, but it was in the 70s or the 80s. One of the problems that you have when trying to do these sorts of studies is that male shoulder articulation works differently. You’ve got different lengths in the forearm. So if you’re going to say, well, look at throwing velocity, look at throwing accuracy. You’ve just been trained to throw stuff. You put a group of boys near a field that’s got some rocks in it, and those rocks are inevitably going to end up in the air pretty quickly. That’s not quite the same for girls. So anyway, they decided to control for that.

DR. DANIEL AMEN: Their parietal lobe – back part of their brain is stronger. We did see that in males.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yes. The study that they did to try and reverse this, or at least to try and control for the ability to throw, the training, the articulation length, the forearm, all this sort of stuff. They took one of those tennis ball serving machines, and they fired it at students. And it was the job of the students to just get out of the way as opposed to try and hit something. They just needed to avoid it.

And they didn’t hit any one of the male participants once. Whereas I think the girls got peppered a little bit more. Again, not convinced that this would pass an Ethics board now, but just really interesting. I’m going to guess that the local memorization stuff, if you put a 10 by 10 card grid that women will just wipe the floor with men typically with stuff like that. But if you want to try and have a darts player on your team, it’s like, you know, lean toward the guy perhaps than the girl.

DR. DANIEL AMEN: Yeah.

Love, Relationships, and Brain Health

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: You’ve done, talking of men and women, you’ve done a lot of scans of couples in conflict. What have you learned about love and the brain and how we regulate?

DR. DANIEL AMEN: That it’s easier to love someone whose brain is reasonably healthy because they’re reliable, predictable, and you can trust them when the brain is not healthy. And then it’s like, well, in which ways could it not be healthy? If their frontal lobes are low? Less predictability, less consistency, more impulsive.

And the hippocampus in women is larger than in men. The hippocampus is the major memory structure in the brain. It gets short term memory into long term memory. So you’re just more likely to say things you shouldn’t say and hurt her feelings and then she won’t forget it.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: She’s going to hold on to it.

DR. DANIEL AMEN: She’s going to hold on to it. My first couple, they’re so interesting. They brought their two kids to me because they thought they had ADD and the little girl had inattentive ADD and she got way better when I treated her. The little boy didn’t get better. And so I started seeing him in therapy. I’m like, why is he not getting better? And I realized he’s not getting better because his parents hate each other.

And I was young and bolder then. And so I go to the parents and I’m like, “He’s struggling because of your stress. Why don’t you let me see you in therapy and see if I can help you?” And they said, “Doctor Amen, we really like you. We’ve seen four other marital therapists and it always makes us worse.” And in my head I thought, well, maybe they just hadn’t seen anybody really good. And whenever you have that thought, shut it down.

And so they saw me. And the first week I had two couches in my office. I sat on the opposite end of each couch. That’s a bad sign in marital therapy. And after about three months, I know I’m not going to help them. The woman has a PhD in grudge holding. She is beating things from 15 years ago. She just loops, can’t let go. And he’s the sniper. I remember thinking, you’re the sniper. He’s late, he’s disorganized. But whenever she gets into a vulnerable teaching place, he’ll say something so mean to her just to get her going again.

And at six months, I start having physical stress symptoms when I know they’re on my schedule because I hate being ineffective. At nine months, I’m in the shower getting ready to come to work, and I’m like, these people are on my schedule, and my stomach starts to hurt, and I’m like, “Today I’m going to tell them to get divorced.” Because it’s not good for children to be in homes with chronic conditions.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: That’s happening to you and you just need to see them once or twice a week. Imagine what it’s like as a child that lives with them.

The Power of Brain Imaging in Relationships

DR. DANIEL AMEN: Oh, it’s terrible for them. But I grew up Catholic, and my mother was not kidding about the whole thing until. So Catholic, divorce, bad hell, things like that. And so I’m in the shower and the Catholic voice visits me, because, “you’re not a good enough therapist. You’re going to tell them to get divorced and damn their eternal souls to hell.”

And I started chuckling, and I’m looking at the water faucet going, “how much therapy do I need to get over this?” And I got out of the shower, and we just started scanning people, like that year. And I called my friend who owned the imaging center, and I’m like, “Jack, will you give me two scans for the price of one?” Because I was always, like, negotiating for my patients.

And he’s like, “why?” I was like, “Jack, I have this couple and I’m feeling miserable.” He’s like, “couple?” He’s like, “I’ve been married twice. I can’t figure it out. Do you think this will help? Maybe we could do a business together and call it brain match.com mom.” Which I thought was hysterical.

So I told. I’m like, “obviously, I am not being helpful to you. I want you guys to get scanned because that’ll give me more information to help you.” She had an area of the brain called the anterior cingulate gyrus from hell. It’s the gear shifter in the brain. And when it works too hard, people get stuck. They go into loops. Things don’t go their way, they get obsessed. Set goes with an OCD like brain.

And he had really low frontal lobes, which, as a child psychiatrist, I should have figured out. The ADD and the kids came from him. And so I put him on Ritalin, her on Prozac. And just by random chance, if you believe in random chance, the night before, I read an article in the American Journal of Psychiatry. The Prozac calms down the cingulate gyrus.

And so I put her on Prozac, him on Ritalin. I said, “let’s try this. I don’t want to see you for a month. Let’s just see how they met.” A month later, they come back, they sit on the same couch. She has her hand on his leg. Now, that’s a good sign in marital therapy. And they learned everything they needed to learn. And they didn’t need me anymore.

35 years later. No, it was 33 years later. I was given a lecture in San Francisco. They showed up and they’re still married, and they don’t see therapists, and they’re not fighting with each other.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Are they still on Ritalin and Prozac?

DR. DANIEL AMEN: No, they’re on different things, supplements. But their brains are balanced and they love their brain and they love me.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Well, you kept them together.

DR. DANIEL AMEN: And so if you think of domestic violence, think of somebody’s had a head injury or there’s a substance involved, there’s bad brains are involved in domestic violence. And it could be both. It could be one spouse can’t let things go and just hammers the other spouse and then the other spouse, because their frontal lobes are low, they can’t take it anymore.

But when you look at it through the lens of brain science, judgment begins to go down and effectiveness goes up. Because it’s easy to call people bad. It’s a harder question.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: It’s such a moral claim about whether or not you are doing this thing or not doing this thing. But you wouldn’t say the same thing to a dog that was poorly trained and had been abused for its entire life.

DR. DANIEL AMEN: Compassion goes way up.

Rewiring the Brain for Better Relationships

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Can we rewire ourselves to be better partners?

DR. DANIEL AMEN: Absolutely. I always start with an exercise called the One Page Miracle. One piece of paper, write down what you want. Relationships, work, money, physical, emotional, spiritual health. What do I want in my relationship? Kind, caring, loving, supportive, passionate relationship. Almost everybody I know wants that.

And so if your brain is healthy and you get a rude thought, well, you don’t say it. Like Jerry Seinfeld once said, “the brain is a sneaky organ. We all have weird, crazy, stupid, sexual, violent thoughts that nobody should ever hear. But when you drink, they get out.” And I have crazy thoughts, but I don’t say them. And I question them often.

The Brain and Sexual Behavior

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: What does sex do to the brain? What does sex, the act of sex, do to the brain?

DR. DANIEL AMEN: I wrote a book once called “The Brain in Love” and I talked about weird sex fiends and fetishes and how the arousal template, wherever you were, however old you were when you first got aroused, that’s going to plant something in your brain that’s going to be very powerful for you. And it could be shoes or it could be cows or it could be all sorts of unusual things.

Generally, sex produces a lot of oxytocin, the sort of cuddle connection, but also possessive. “You’re mine, you’re part of my tribe. Don’t let anybody take you from me.” I think oxytocin is actually involved in racism and dopamine. Oxytocin, dopamine and stimulation and then relaxation. It helps heart rate variability go up, but it depends, right?

There’s so much wrapped up into sex about performance, about mutual respect. And I think for people who are thoughtful, it’s like, “let’s have really good communication around this and not get our feelings hurt if I didn’t do what you wanted me to do.”

And I often say guys have a short attention span. You have to teach them. Sort of like shooting free throws. How do we learn to shoot free throws? We do a lot of them. And what’s a good coach notices what you do right, teaches you and you can do better. If we had that sort of mindset with our partners, it would be better.

And it’s harder today because of pornography, that pornography changes the brain for you have different expectations than perhaps before Pornhub was everywhere.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Why do you think it is that people struggle to communicate more clearly around sex? Is it shame? Is it embarrassment?

DR. DANIEL AMEN: Yes, and I think it’s a lack of really great education on communication.

Brain Chemistry and Partner Selection

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: What role does brain chemistry have in how we choose our partners?

DR. DANIEL AMEN: Well, I think brain function and our past has a lot to do with how we choose our partners. Are we choosing them because they’re really a great partner for us or we’re filling a deficit in us.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Can you give an example of how that shows up?

DR. DANIEL AMEN: Well, a deficit would be my brother was a drug addict and tried to kill himself. And I loved him so much that I tend to be attracted to people who are troubled. And there’s a part of me that wants to fix my brother. So I try to. So I tolerate and want to fix my partner.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: The “I can fix them” meme.

DR. DANIEL AMEN: Yeah. Which often comes from past trauma.

Brain Patterns in Relationship Challenges

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Have you noticed any particular brain patterns in people who struggle with commitment or jealousy or envy in relationships?

DR. DANIEL AMEN: Well, jealousy. They tend to be hyper frontal, though. Their frontal lobes work too hard. It’s like they got a thought in their head and it then starts to spin. I see that a lot. They can’t let go. And they. Some of them become stalkers.

I had one patient who was a stalker, and she had no OCD pattern in her brain. She just couldn’t let go. Her brother saw me because he had road rage. Couldn’t let it go that someone cut him off.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: He’s going to tailgate them. She’s going to stalk the person. He’s going to stalk the car.

DR. DANIEL AMEN: Yeah. Actually got arrested for following somebody eight miles down the freeway. And then when he cornered him on an off ramp. He was an orthopedic surgeon. Took out a long metal rod, bashed his windshield in. Called me from jail because I was seeing his sister. He had a very obsessive brain, and she did too.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Just pointed in a slightly different direction.

DR. DANIEL AMEN: Yeah.

Understanding Limerence and Obsessive Love

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I learned about limerence a couple of weeks ago. Have you heard of this term limerence?

DR. DANIEL AMEN: No.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: So it’s currently being proposed to be added to the DSM. Imagine a crush, but on steroids. And it never goes away. So that infatuation phase, a lot of rumination. But limerence in particular is often one. It’s unidirectional. So the limerent, the object of this person’s desire often doesn’t even know that they exist.

Sometimes it can be for fictional characters, cartoon characters, can be for movie stars. It can be for people that have never met you. And it’s fascinating. And I think that the obsessive, the OCD element of this, finding something, grabbing onto it, getting your hooks in, and not being able to let it go. It would be fascinating for you to look at the brains of people that were limerent, as it’s known, or suffering with limerence.

DR. DANIEL AMEN: That would be interesting. And I would expect there to be hyper frontal. So what if, from our previous conversation, they had a strep infection that activated the obsessive part of the brain, and if you treated that effectively, they stopped the obsession? Like, how interesting is that?

One of my friends, Jason Waller, he was on a show called “The Hills.” He and I worked together on our foundation. He went to 14 alcohol and drug programs. Like, he was not learning, but as a child, he had terrible OCD to the point where he’d wear gloves at night with Neosporin in it because he’d washed his hands so often that if he had PANDAS syndrome, so we assume he did.

He had PANDAS syndrome that had caused the OCD, which then caused the drugs and alcohol to calm down his brain and it all goes back to an infection. See, I think this is so interesting, but you brought up the DSM. I’m not a fan of it at all.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I don’t know anybody that is right.

DR. DANIEL AMEN: Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. I’m like, they’re not mental disorders, they’re brain disorders. Get your brain healthy and your mind will follow. Stop making diagnoses based on symptom clusters with no biological data. That’s the dark ages. Yeah, we need to bring it into the light.

The Reality of Celebrity Life and Brain Health

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: You’ve worked with, you mentioned celebrity there. You’ve worked with a lot of celebrities. What do you wish more people knew about the reality of the lives of high status people?

DR. DANIEL AMEN: Well, they’re like regular people, except their dopamine has been worn out. That fame is potentially lethal for the brain. When people adore you, want to be with you, want something from you that they don’t have the skill. It takes often to manage it and you can’t.

Like I’ve seen some of the world’s most famous people and they all have this thought, “I’m not enough.” And I look at them like, “if you’re not enough, who would ever be enough?” Right? But they, but when you give them the tools and they like use them dramatically better. Some of the just the most wonderful people.

I just did Khloe Kardashian’s follow up scan. I scanned her for their show two and a half, three years ago. It was not good because she was in a bad car accident, but she just did what I asked her to do. And her brain’s so much better.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Has she changed? How has that manifested in her daily experience? What’s different for her?

DR. DANIEL AMEN: Just happier and more consistent and making better choices.

High ROI Daily Habits for Brain Health

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: We’ve talked a lot about supplements and some of the ways that you can get stuff wrong. What are the daily habits that offer the highest ROI when it comes to improving brain health?

DR. DANIEL AMEN: Well, so if you go back to BRIGHT MINDS blood flow, it’s exercise. Walk like you’re late. Coordination exercises are the best. Played table tennis with my grandkids yesterday. That’s the best brain exercise.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Table tennis is table tennis.

DR. DANIEL AMEN: Got to get your eyes, hands and feet all working together while you think about this spin.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Okay to pivot that to pickleball. Is that okay?

Pickleball vs. Ping Pong and Brain Health

DR. DANIEL AMEN: So pickleball. But pickleball is not as fast. Ping pong is much faster. If you play at a high level, retirement and aging is just new learning. Always push your brain to do and learn something new.

Inflammation – floss and take omega-3 fatty acids. Genetics – know what’s in your family and beyond that prevention program every day of your life. If you have addiction, be on an addiction prevention program. If you have Alzheimer’s, be on an Alzheimer’s prevention program.

Head trauma – don’t text while you drive. Don’t let your kids play tackle football or hit soccer balls with their head. Toxins – avoid exposure as much as you can and detoxify. What are the detoxification? Drink more water because you’ll pee out the toxins. Eat more fiber, you’ll excrete the toxins. Sauna sweating with exercise. Stop the alcohol because it ruins your detoxification organ.

Mental Health and Daily Practices

Mental health – stop believing every stupid thing you think. Start every day with “today is going to be a great day.” End every day – my favorite exercise – what went well today? Just go hour by hour looking for what you love.

One of my patients this morning told me a dream that I’ll just never forget because it just shows our work has gotten into his unconscious dream life which made me so happy. Our interview the show up tonight on what went well today.

I know your vitamin D level and I take something called smart mushrooms every day because mushrooms are good for immunity. Neurohormones – kill the sugar because you want your testosterone to be healthy. Diabesity – I know how many calories I eat a day because I have obesity in my family and if I eat too much weight just loves me, wants to stay and I don’t want it to stay.

And I go to bed early every night. My kids make fun of me like say 8:30, “I’m going to go get ready for bed.” And it’s like. But I’m like I want to feel good tomorrow, right? So it’s thinking not just about the moment but thinking about all the moments including death.

It’s like, okay, so we’re all going to die. What’s going to happen between now and then? So I’m not going to encourage it but I’m also not going to be weird about it because I don’t believe we’re on the planet by random chance. I think there’s creative design to think we’re having this conversation and it was an explosion a long time ago and there was no design in it. I think that actually takes more faith personally. So I’m like, yeah, it’s all going to be okay.

Overcoming Negative Thinking Patterns

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: We’ve talked about the ants. How do you advise somebody to bring more positive thinking into their life, let’s say they’ve got a very overactive, critical inner voice. They’re noticing negative stuff all the time. They’ve got this default to pessimism, to rumination. Where do you get them to so that they’re more optimistic.

DR. DANIEL AMEN: Give your mind a name. I love that so much. On our podcast, interviewed Stephen Hayes, who developed a form of therapy called ACT Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. And he talked about give your mind a name.

Like, what would I name? My mind came to me immediately when I was 16. I had a pet raccoon, and I loved her, and her name was Hermeyer. And Harmony was just like my mind. She’s a troublemaker. She TPed my mom’s bathroom one day. Very bad, very bad day. She ate all the fish out of my sister’s aquarium. She’d leave raccoon poo in my shoe. That’s my mind. It just creates trouble.

And so when my mind is sort of getting out of control, “you’re going in the cage” or now I put her on her back and play with her metaphorically in my mind. Right? Don’t believe every stupid thing you think. Separate, gain psychological distance from the noise and then train it. “Today is going to be a great day.” “What went well today?”

And then throughout the day, look for the little miracles. What are the micro moments? And for me, it’s a hummingbird. As, for whatever reason, I love hummingbirds or butterfly or call from my granddaughter or waking up next to my wife and just grabbing her hand, like, notice it. Right? You have to train it. If you just wake up with the news and you tend to be negative, you’re just noticing what’s wrong and you’re going to be miserable.

Active vs. Passive Therapeutic Approaches

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I love Rick Hansen’s work around that in Hardwiring Happiness and. And, yeah, it’s effortful. I think this is the difference when. If you pivot from trying traditional talk therapy to doing something like CBT or something like act, you go from something that during the moment sort of feels very active to a modality that during the moment is instructive.

When you get off the cushion with talk therapy, sometimes there’s not that much to do. But when you get off the cushion with CBT or with act, that’s sort of when the real homework begins. And throughout the day, you’ve got, you know, a million reminders on your phone popping up, telling you, like, “what’s going well right now?” “What would you tomorrow want you today to do?” “What went well today?” It’s an interesting pivot from investigating yourself to trying to change yourself. I think with that.

DR. DANIEL AMEN: It’s a skill and it’s easier to do if your brain works right.

Where to Find Dr. Amen’s Work

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Dr. Daniel Amen, ladies and gentlemen. I love your work. I think it’s so fantastic to try and take the onus off of “you are broken. You don’t have sufficient willpower, you don’t want yourself to be better. There’s some sort of moral judgment on you as a person because you are not where you want to be” to actually. Well, let’s see what’s underneath the hood. Let’s see sort of what’s contributing to this. So where should people go? They’re going to want to keep up to date with all of the things that you’ve got going on.

DR. DANIEL AMEN: You know, I often say don’t take broken people and put them back together. I take awesome people and help them be more awesome. And with a better brain, it’s easier to do that. They can learn more about our work at AmenClinics.com, amen. Like the last word in a prayer. Clinics.com they can follow me on Instagram or TikTok doc. Amen. Or learn about our supplements at brainmd.com

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Daniel, I appreciate you.

DR. DANIEL AMEN: Thank you, thank you.

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