Pod Insights On Purpose with Jay Shetty Dr. Daniel Amen: ON The Most Powerful Habits For A Healthy & Productive Brain About this episode You can order my new book 8 RULES OF LOVE at 8rulesoflove.com or at a retail store near you. You can also get the chance to see me live on my first ever world tour. This is a 90 minute interactive show where I will take you on a journey of finding, keeping and even letting go of love. Head to jayshettytour.com and find out if I'll be in a city near you. Thank you so much for all your support - I hope to see you soon.
Jay Shetty sits down with the most popular psychiatrist in America, Dr. Daniel Amen, who’s also Justin Bieber’s doctor. Dr. Amen has spent his career studying correlations between brain health and mental illness. He is forever discovering new ways in which the brain is shaped by environment, trauma, and health.
Dr. Amen will tackle some common misconceptions about mental health and the brain and learn the 11 things you should avoid for a healthy brain. Text Jay Shetty 310-997-4177
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Transcript 13,804 words · 6 speakers
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2:16 Jay Shetty? And when everything around you is changing, it helps to have a few things you can rely on. AG1 Next Gen is one of those easy habits to keep. It's the clinically backed, comprehensive daily health drink that supports your gut health, energy production, and foundational nutrition all in one scoop. AG1's ingredients are sourced from quality partners for absorption, potency, and nutrient density to deliver the foundational nutrition your body needs. And alongside a proper diet, AG1 Next Gen meets 94% of nutrient requirements and is clinically shown to enrich the gut microbiome. For a limited time, save 20% on your first subscription order of AG1 Next Gen or AG1
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3:09 Daniel Amen? Thoughts are automatic, they just happen, they're based on complex chemical reactions and things from the past, and maybe not even your past, it could be your parents' past or grandparents' past. And they lie. They lie a lot. Just because you have a thought has nothing to do with whether or not it's true.
3:34 Jay Shetty? Hey everyone, welcome back to On Purpose, the number one health podcast in the world. Thanks to each and every one of you who come back every week to listen, to learn, and to grow. Now, I am so excited to be talking to you today. I can't believe it, my new book, Eight Rules of Love, is out and I cannot wait to share it with you. I am so, so excited for you to read this book, for you to listen to this book. I read the audiobook. If you haven't got it already, make sure you go to eightrulesoflove.com. It's dedicated to anyone who's trying to find, keep, or let go of love. So if you've got friends that are dating, broken up, or struggling with love, make sure you grab this book.
4:17 Jay Shetty? And I'd love to invite you to come and see me for my global tour, Love Rules. Go to jayshettytour.com to learn more information about tickets, VIP experiences, and more. I can't wait to see you this year. In our 12 months that we've been live, that we started 14th of February in 2019, there's only been one guest who's been on the podcast twice, and obviously that's my wife. But out of all the other guests, there is only one other guest that we've had on in the same year, and he is our guest today. Now, he was one of the most popular and one of your favorite episodes from last year. So I'm so excited for this conversation. This was truly one
4:58 Jay Shetty? of those podcasts that I remember recording. And anytime I'm asked in an interview or a conversation, who was your favorite podcast? This is the one I talk about. So I literally feel that today's guest, as you all know, Dr. Daniel Amen is one of the best guests we've had, hand down. And I'm so excited for today's conversation. Now, for those of you who missed it, The Washington Post called Dr. Daniel Amen "the most popular psychiatrist in America." He's a double board certified psychiatrist and 12 time New York Times bestselling author. Dr. Daniel Amen is on the forefront of a new movement within medicine and related disciplines that aims at ending mental illness. Dr. Amen draws on the latest
5:42 Jay Shetty? findings of neuroscience to challenge an outdated psychiatric paradigm and help people take control and improve the health of their own brain, minimizing or reversing conditions that may be preventing them from living a life that's emotionally healthy. Dr. Amen's research team has published more than 70 scientific articles. He's the lead researcher on the world's largest brain imaging study on professional football players. His credentials can fill a book. So I'll stop there. And I'm so happy to have him on today's show and talk about his new book, The End of Mental Illness. So we're going to be putting the link to this book into the comments and the captions. And of course, I highly, highly recommend you go and grab a copy of the book. Dr. Daniel Amen, thank you for being here.
6:27 Daniel Amen? Jay, what a pleasure.
6:28 Jay Shetty? This is honestly the best. I mean it. Every time I'm asked, what's your favorite episode? I talk about this episode.
6:33 Daniel Amen? Thank you so much.
6:35 Jay Shetty? And it's not an overstatement. It's everything you share, the way you share it, the way you talk about it, your ability to go between spirituality and science and faith and facts. Like for me, that's kind of where I get so excited. And you're just that person that embodies all of it. So thank you for being there. And thank you for doing the work that you do.
6:55 Daniel Amen? Well, you're welcome. I have to do it because if you don't look at the brain, how the heck would you ever know? And these aren't mental illnesses, they're brain illnesses. And I opened the book with actually a story of when I was coming to your podcast. You know, I was so excited about it. And in the corner of Hollywood and Vine, there's this homeless person who's disheveled and has blood on his face. He's talking to himself and most of my colleagues would have went, oh, he has schizophrenia or he has unstable bipolar disorder. Why won't he take his medication? And in my mind, I'm like, well, when did he have his last head injury?
7:37 Daniel Amen? Does he have Lyme disease? Is his gut a complete mess? I mean, why is he not able to make sense of his life? And it's not what most people think. It's not that he has a psychiatric illness or a bad attitude. It's something's physically wrong with the health of his brain. And what I've learned is get your brain right and then your mind follows.
8:04 Jay Shetty? Yeah, and I love that approach. It makes so much logical sense to me. And as someone who's fascinated by neuroscience, I couldn't agree more when you start looking at the stats and the data. But I want to start a bit personally this time with you before we dive into all of that. You were named after your grandfather.
8:18 Daniel Amen? I was.
8:19 Jay Shetty? And you had a very close connection and, you know, really close friendship growing up. What was key to that connection that you had?
8:26 Daniel Amen? Well, I was named after him.
8:28 Jay Shetty? Yeah.
8:28 Daniel Amen? And he was my best friend. I'm one of seven and I'm completely not special. So in a Lebanese family, the oldest boy is the golden child.
8:40 Jay Shetty? Right.
8:41 Daniel Amen? Well, I have an older brother and an older sister. And so I was completely not special, but I was totally special to him. And he was a candy maker. That was his profession. So my earliest memories are standing at the stove, making fudge, making pralines. And I actually have a company called Brain MD that makes healthy chocolate because he was overweight, he had heart disease and his funeral was the saddest day of my life. It would still make me cry because I was so connected to him. And that matters. I mean, he lives in me every day because he was just such a kind person.
9:22 Jay Shetty? Absolutely. Thank you for sharing that. It's always nice to hear about that because it sounds like it's inspired a lot of your work today and the way you approach it, especially when someone's your best friend. And in 1979, you told your father you wanted to be a psychiatrist. How do you decide that? I feel like psychiatry today is such a rapidly growing industry. It's becoming even more important with the challenges that we're seeing today's generations have. But how did you in 1979 think of this career path and know that it was something you wanted to dedicate your life to?
9:55 Daniel Amen? So a little bit earlier, when I turned 18, the government still had a draft and I had a very low draft number, which meant see you later. And I became an infantry medic, where my love of medicine was born. But about a year into that, I realized I didn't like being shot at. It was just not my thing. Some people like that. I didn't. And I got myself retrained as an X-ray technician and developed a passion for imaging because our professors used to say, how do you know unless you look? And then I got out of the army, went to medical school. And in 1979, someone I loved tried to kill herself. And I took her to see a wonderful psychiatrist. And I came to realize if he helped her, which
10:38 Daniel Amen? he did, it wouldn't just help her. It would help her children and even her grandchildren as they would be shaped by someone who was happier and more stable. So I fell in love with psychiatry because I realized it has the potential to change generations of people. But I fell in love with the only medical specialty that never looks at the organ it treats. And I knew it then it was wrong. And so now I tell my dad, I want to be a psychiatrist. And unlike my relationship with my grandfather, I had a really lousy relationship with my dad, who was never home. He worked all the time. His favorite word growing up, I don't know, can I say this? It was bullshit. His
11:20 Daniel Amen? second favorite word was no. I mean bullshit, no. And I tell him I want to be a psychiatrist, and he asks me why I don't want to be a real doctor, why I want to be a nut doctor and hang out with nuts all day long. Now, great story. He is now my best friend, but it took a long time. And 40 years later, I really get why he said that, because we don't act like real doctors. I mean, what other medical doctor doesn't look at the organ they're treating? Cardiologists look, neurologists look, your orthopedic doctor looks, your GI doctor looks, every other physician evaluates the organ they're treating. Psychiatrists
12:03 Daniel Amen? guess. And I knew it was wrong. And so part of my path was how do we look at the organ we're treating? It's the brain, right? It's, people go, oh, it's your mind. Well, where does your mind come from? Your brain. Damage your brain, you damage your mind.
12:27 Jay Shetty? Yeah, and it's incredible that you kind of clocked on to that so early on. Like, that sounds crazy to believe that even now, since you've been involved in this world and writing so many incredible books, that we haven't caught on with that conversation. Like, I feel the conversation is still mental illness. You know, that's still, and that's obviously what you're trying to solve. Like, tell me what we're missing in the conversation? Why are we missing that in the conversation? Why are we not talking more about the brain? And why are people not as focused on improving their brain as they should be? This episode is brought to you by Wayfair. Home should be a place that feels like a sanctuary, a space that truly reflects who you are.
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15:14 Daniel Amen? So you remember when Sandy Hook happened?
15:16 Jay Shetty? Yes.
15:17 Daniel Amen? And President Obama came on television that night and said, "We need more money for mental health." And I'm like, "Oh, great."
15:27 Daniel Amen? Almost all of these young school shooters had seen psychiatrists. Almost all of them had taken medication before they committed their heinous acts. More money for what we currently do is going to get us more of what we currently have. Did you know 23% of women between the ages of 20 and 60 are taking antidepressant medication? That's insane. You were not born with a Prozac deficiency. It's because our brains aren't right. Our habits aren't right. We have no love, honor, respect for the brain.
16:08 Daniel Amen? I mean, here we are in this incredibly beautiful place in LA where homelessness is skyrocketing. And people don't know 50% of people who are homeless had a significant brain injury before they were homeless. So you can do whatever you want from a societal standpoint to help the homeless. But if you don't help their brains, you're not going to help the situation.
16:30 Jay Shetty? Absolutely. That's a great answer. And what are the causes of brain injury? Like, let's say someone's listening or watching right now and they're saying, "Yeah, Dr. Daniel Amen, I agree, but you know, I've never had any serious brain injury. I've never had an accident. I've never, you know, been an American football player or I've never done boxing." Like, tell us some of the things that actually cause brain injury and some of the ones that might surprise us.
16:51 Daniel Amen? So in the book, actually the bulk of the book, I talk about if you want to keep your brain healthy or rescue it if it's headed for the dark place, you have to prevent or treat the 11 major risk factors that steal your mind. And there's a mnemonic I have called bright minds. Well, the H in bright minds is head trauma. And if you said, "Hey, Daniel, single most important thing you've learned from 160,000 scans, mild traumatic brain injury ruins people's lives and nobody knows it." So yes, it could be concussions from playing football. Even if you never had a concussion, it's the subconcussive blows just from playing. I just saw a professional soccer player this week and he told-
17:36 Daniel Amen? Or intake person never had a concussion. And I asked him, because his brain was damaged. I'm like, so how many times have you hit a soccer ball with your head? And he's like, thousands, tens of thousands of times. Your brain is soft, your skull is hard, your skull has sharp, bony ridges. Don't let your children play tackle football. Don't let them hit soccer balls with their head. But it also comes from skateboarding accidents, from falling out of a tree, from falling down a flight of stairs, from being in a car accident. Go, oh, I had a whiplash injury, but I didn't have a head injury. Well, if you had a whiplash injury, that meant you had a head injury. Because what's on top of your neck is your brain.
18:16 Jay Shetty? And what about emotional trauma or emotional challenges with parenting, growing up? Or any of that? How does that kind of?
18:23 Daniel Amen? So emotional trauma, I published two studies, actually, on 21,000 people, showing I could separate PTSD, emotional trauma, from traumatic brain injury with high levels of accuracy. So with brain injuries, what you see is decreased blood flow in the brain. But with emotional trauma, their limbic brain, their emotional brain fires up. And so I dedicated this book to my two nieces.
18:53 Jay Shetty? Yeah.
18:53 Daniel Amen? And they grew up in traumatic families and they were taken by the police
19:01 Daniel Amen? at the direction of Child Protective Services and put into foster care. It's very traumatic for them. And they have bad genetics. They have family history of schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, major depression, multiple suicides, criminal behavior addiction, I mean, anything you can think of that. So, but genes only load the gun. It's what happens to us that pulls the trigger. Well, unfortunately, they had both. And we actually didn't know them until we got the call from Child Protective Services, at which point I knew, my wife knew, we needed to intervene. And so the end of mental illness is how do I end it in them? And their babies and grandbabies.
19:42 Daniel Amen? And you can see the emotional trauma in their brain. Which, the cool thing about that is you know it, and then you can calm it down through some of the processes I talk about in the book.
19:58 Jay Shetty? What are some of the things that we're doing wrong for our brain on a daily basis? Because I want everyone listening and watching now to gain some self-awareness, uh, that they can start recognizing some of the practices or some of the habits that they're actually causing more damage to their brain.
20:14 Daniel Amen? Well, the first thing we're doing wrong is we don't care. Um, when I saw my brain, so it was 1991 when I started doing spec, what we do now. And I scanned my mom. She had a beautiful brain, and then I scanned myself, and I was 37 at the time. And it looked terrible. I'm like, why does my brain look terrible? I don't drink, I've never smoked, I've never done drugs, but I played football in high school. And, and we were taught then to use your head as a weapon, right? Tackle people with your head. Um, I had meningitis twice when I was a young soldier. And, and I had bad habits. I thought I was special, that I only needed four hours of sleep at night. I could get away with that.
20:59 Daniel Amen? And now I realize I wasn't special, I was stupid. Um, I was overweight. I ate fast food like it was like my best friend. And so, not caring. And when I saw my brain, and I saw it was worse than my 60-year-old mother's brain, I developed something I call brain envy. Freud was wrong. He was about two and a half feet too low in the body. Not once in my 40-year psychiatric career have I seen penis envy, not once. It's brain envy. You want, I wanted her brain. So what do you have to do? Care, that's brain envy. And then avoid things that hurt it, and do things that help it. But the first thing we're doing wrong, I live in Newport Beach,
21:42 Daniel Amen? and I always say we care more about our faces, our boobs, our bellies, and our butts, than we do our brain. How insane is that? When it's your brain that makes every single decision you make. And when it works right, you work right. So that's the first thing.
22:04 Daniel Amen? The second thing, well, we can just go through the bright minds risk factors because all of them have simple things that people could do. So bright minds, B is for blood flow. Low blood flow is the number one, number one brain imaging predictor of Alzheimer's disease, but it's also associated with depression, with schizophrenia and ADHD. And my older niece, Alize, when she first came to see me, really low blood flow. I didn't know why. She had mold in a house. She had some sort of environmental toxin. So I put her in a hyperbaric chamber and hyperbaric chambers increase blood flow. I also got her exercising more because exercise increases blood flow. So if you've been wanting to exercise, but
22:49 Daniel Amen? you haven't found the time, it'll save your brain, right? So that'll help you with motivation. And brand new study out this week. So excited about this. Love new studies. Forever, I've been telling people table tennis is the world's best brain game. What? Why? You gotta get your eyes, hands and feet all to work together while you think about the spin on the ball. It's aerobic chess. Brand new study was presented at the American Academy of Neurology. This week, the table tennis improves Parkinson's disease. No way. And I love it. So what kind of exercise should you do? People who play racket sports
23:32 Daniel Amen? live longer than anybody else. So ping pong, table tennis, squash. You want to do a coordination exercise and dance is also incredibly good for your brain. As long as you're not drinking while you're dancing. That sort of ruins the benefit. So for blood flow, it's exercise. Simple things, supplements like Ginkgo increase blood flow. Foods like beets or oregano, cayenne pepper, the spicier, the better, as long as it's not artificial spices. The R is retirement and aging. When you stop learning, that's why I envy your job because you're
24:14 Daniel Amen? always learning. When you stop learning, your brain starts dying.
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26:52 Daniel Amen? And so new learning has to be part of everything you do. And then if your ferritin level is high, that's a measure of iron storage. If your ferritin level is high, prematurely ages your brain. So I know there's all this controversy on red meat. Should you have it? Shouldn't you have it? Well, it depends on your iron level. If you have low levels of iron, red meat can actually be really helpful. Just make it healthy red meat. But if your iron levels like mine, they tend to run too high. I donate blood on a regular basis. Good for me, good for someone else. It's like the perfect exercise. The I is just devastating in this country now. It's inflammation. And inflammation comes from low levels of omega-3 fatty acids.
27:37 Daniel Amen? 97% of people have low, suboptimal levels of omega-3s when we test them. Horrifying. Processed food. And of all things, gum disease. Gum disease increases inflammation in your body, which increases heart disease and brain disease. So flossing and then getting your gut healthy. Probiotics can help. The G is genetics, but we think of genetics wrong. I think. People go, oh, well, I'm diabetic because my parents are. I'm fat because my parents are. You know, I, my grandfather had heart disease and he was overweight, but I don't have heart disease and I'm not overweight. Why?
28:18 Daniel Amen? Because I see genes not as a death sentence, but as a wake-up call. What do I need to do to prevent those? And one of my favorite stories in the book is Lisa Gibbons. Lisa is a friend of mine. She's a well-known media personality whose mother and grandmother died with Alzheimer's disease. And I was on her television show a lot and I'm always sort of nudge, come on, you need to come see me. And she's like, oh, I don't want to know. And I'm like, no, you want to know. If you knew a train was going to hit you, wouldn't you at least want to get out of the way? And so she went through a hard time and I saw her win. She was 51 and her brain looked terrible. I'm like, no, you're vulnerable. And she's so smart.
29:03 Daniel Amen? She just did everything I asked her to do. And I just scanned her again 10 years later. Her brain's dramatically better. Wow. Which is the theme of my life. You are not stuck with the brain you have. You can make it better. And you're not too old. It's not too late. And I can prove it. It's, yeah. It's only too late when you're dead. Right? Cause even people with dementia, if you feed them crappy food, they are going to lose their mind at a more rapid pace. Yeah. If you feed them healthy food, they will retain or maybe even improve their cognitive function. The H we talked about, which is head trauma, so avoid it. T is toxins. There's so much to talk about here.
29:46 Daniel Amen? And when I first started scanning people, I was the director of a substance abuse treatment program. And it's, there's no question in my mind, alcohol, marijuana, methamphetamines, cocaine, heroin. Any psychedelic. Ecstasy, bad for your brain. Now, at some point, if we want to get, we can talk about ketamine and things like that and how it can, for some people, be helpful. But no question, drugs and alcohol are not good for your brain. And I'm a little horrified by the marijuana discussion now. And, and I never try to take political sides. I love everybody. But when one of the Democratic candidates says, yes, I'm gonna legalize marijuana on
30:29 Daniel Amen? day one, and then I'm gonna teach the black, brown, and American Indian minority communities to sell it. I'm like, that's insane. You're gonna keep people down by doing that. That's, you're just not thinking. I published a study on a thousand marijuana smokers. Every area of their brain is lower. Now, I absolutely think it should be legal, really. Let's not put people in jail. That's a bad use of everybody's resources. Um, but let's not say it's good for us. Yeah. And here in LA, I mean, just coming to the podcast, I must've seen six dispensaries. It's like, I'm not a fan. But what I learned through the imaging is there's a whole bunch of other things that are toxic. Yeah. For us, like mold.
31:13 Daniel Amen? Or environmental toxins. So I love firefighters and first responders. I've scanned hundreds of them. They almost all have toxic looking brains because of the carbon monoxide that they breathe in, or the cyanide that comes from burning furniture.
31:28 Jay Shetty? So what do you recommend to them? Because that's their career and their job and what chance can they make?
31:33 Daniel Amen? Well, it's sort of like football. You know, my professional football players are going to still play. One of them signed an $80 million contract. If you're going to do something that's potentially bad for your brain, you have to do everything else right. So rather than wait until firefighters retire, they have double the risk of suicide. I mean, how, that's shameful for us that we're not taking care of our first responders, because football players really aren't heroes, they're entertainers. Firefighters are heroes. You need them. We should be rehabilitating them all the way along. We should just own it.
32:11 Daniel Amen? Being a firefighter is a brain damaging profession. It just is. And if it is, let's protect them from it. And, you know, one simple thing the listeners can do is don't put toxic things on your body. When I wrote my book, Memory Rescue, I learned about how toxic products are for us. You know, if you put on shaving cream, for example, barbasol, it was what I've used since I was 14. It was like 50 years, the stuff on my face that on a scale of one to 10 of how quickly it's killing you is a nine. And now I put something on
32:51 Daniel Amen? my face called Kiss My Face, and it's a two. Why? Because I love myself. And they go, oh, it's expensive. It's like, no, being sick is expensive. This stuff isn't expensive. And oh, by the way, it lasts like 20 times longer than barbasol. So it's cheaper. So products, the M is mindstorms, it's abnormal electrical activity that often increases with sugar. And so if you're having problems with anxiety, with your moods, with your temper, kill the sugar, right? Your diet can just make such a difference. The second I is immunity and infections. Know your vitamin D level. I'm in a new docu-series with Justin Bieber.
33:32 Jay Shetty? Yeah, it's fantastic. I've been watching.
33:33 Daniel Amen? Yeah, he came out with his mental health challenge and I've been his doctor and he has Lyme disease, which is an infection that attacks your brain. And he has antibodies that actually attack the dopamine receptors in his brain. And dopamine gives you joy and it gives you motivation, it gives you pleasure. And, you know, my prayer for my young stars is, dear God, please don't let me be famous before my brain's finished developing because it's damaging. And I'm just so proud of him that he's been talking about his journey to
34:12 Daniel Amen? getting well. And he's just so much better. But the infectious thing is so important and nobody knows about it, right? You go to, he went to a psychiatrist in LA. He said, oh, you have bipolar disorder here, take lithium. And at which point Haley said, no, we're gonna go see Dr. Amen. And I scanned him, he didn't have bipolar disorder. He had something was attacking his brain. And how would we ever know if we didn't look? And is neurohormone deficiencies? And so many young men have low testosterone. And you're like, oh, why is that? You have a head injury, can lower, because it hurts the organ in your brain,
34:56 Daniel Amen? your pituitary gland that tells your body to produce hormones. Or it's all these toxins on our body that are called hormone disruptors. You don't ever want to put a hormone disruptor on your body because your hormones are like miracle grow for your brain. Anybody who has thyroid problems listening to this, no, you're either anxious, depressed, low energy and so on. The D is diabetes. We could just go on and on about this one, but I have published several studies now that say as your weight goes up, the physical size and function of your brain goes down. And if you're overweight, you automatically now have
35:36 Daniel Amen? five risk factors because being overweight decreases blood flow to the brain. It increases inflammation. It stores toxins and it decreases your hormones. So belly fat takes healthy testosterone and flips it into unhealthy cancer promoting forms of estrogen. This is a bad thing, right? And you go to the mall, almost any city in America now, and you're like, why are all these pregnant men here? Right? I mean, you're just like, you have to deliver that baby. It's not good for you. And then the S is sleep. 60 million Americans have sleep related problems.
36:16 Daniel Amen? And in 1900, and I know I wasn't around 1900, but on average, we got nine hours of sleep. And now, now on average, we get six and a half. That changed in such a short evolutionary period. But with all the lights now, it's disrupting the production of melatonin in our brain, which is why you should turn off your gadgets at dark.
36:45 Jay Shetty? Yeah, absolutely. No, those, by the way, first of all, thank you for walking us through that. It's very generous of you because that mnemonic in the book is so powerful. And anyone who's listening or watching right now, I highly recommend that when you get the book, that's a great place to start and really look at those because you can go through that list and look at which are the ones that are affecting you the most, which are the ones that you're noticing, the ones you're not aware of, like that's, that's a great map to start with, I find, because it really helps you figure out what are you struggling with and what you're not. Now, when, when you look at those, one of the things I love that you do is It's so practical to just start with one of them. Because oftentimes they're interconnected. Like you talk a lot about how when we eat later on the day, then that's worse for our sleep.
37:30 Jay Shetty? And when we eat close to when we sleep, that's bad for our sleep. And then that's bad for our brain. And it's almost like this vicious cycle that one bad habit leads to another, leads to another, that leads to another. And it just keeps imprinting negative impact on our brain, right? It's all interconnected. It's not-
37:45 Daniel Amen? And I love what you said. It's like, just do one thing.
37:48 Jay Shetty? Yeah.
37:48 Daniel Amen? And the thing to start with is this little tiny habit. In the book, there are all these tiny habits.
37:53 Jay Shetty? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
37:54 Daniel Amen? The smallest thing I can do today.
37:56 Jay Shetty? Yeah.
37:56 Daniel Amen? That'll make the biggest difference. And it's just ask yourself this question. Three seconds. Whenever you're going to do something, so whenever I'm gonna drink this water, is it good for my brain or bad for it?
38:09 Jay Shetty? I love that.
38:09 Daniel Amen? And if I can answer that with information and love, I love myself, I love my wife, I love my children, I love my nieces, I love my mission, I love where I work. If you can answer it with information and love, you start doing the right things.
38:30 Jay Shetty? Yeah, and I've said this a lot to my audience, actually, in my, in my private coaching group. I've not said it so much here on the podcast. But what you're saying is so true that when you ask yourself that question, you know, is this good for my brain or bad for my brain? You know, am I acting in a way that I love myself? Or am I showing myself that I don't love myself? You can only answer that question authentically if you know the research. Otherwise, it's really hard to convince yourself that you're doing the right thing or the wrong thing. So when I'm having this conversation with you, now I know the next time I try and do any of these things that are bad for me, I've got your voice in my head, asking me this question. I've got your voice walking me through which are the steps that I'm making mistakes on. And that's why anyone who's listening to this podcast right now, if you listen to Dr. Daniel Amen's podcast,
39:15 Jay Shetty? you're now in a better place to make better decisions all the time than if you listen to a podcast once a year or read a page of this book, but don't really dive into it. You're missing out on your mind actually being able to help you. So one of the things I love that you talk about is ANTs, right? Automatic Negative Thoughts. And you talk about how sometimes our thoughts can lie to us. Walk us through that.
39:37 Daniel Amen? So I never knew this until my psychiatric training. It just blows me away that every time you have a thought, your brain releases chemicals. Every single time you have a thought. Whenever you have an angry thought, a hopeless thought, a helpless thought, a mean thought, your brain releases chemicals that actually change your body. And it happens immediately. Your hands get colder, they get wetter. Your breathing changes, your heart rate changes. Your blood flow to your brain drops. I actually did a study on negative thinking patterns in the brain. But the opposite is also true. Whenever you have a happy thought, a hopeful thought, a loving thought, a purposeful thought,
40:21 Daniel Amen? your brain releases a completely different set of chemicals that help relax your body. Thoughts are automatic, they just happen. They're based on complex chemical reactions and things from the past. And maybe not even your past. It could be your parents' past or your grandparents' past. And they lie. They lie a lot. Just because you have a thought has nothing to do with whether or not it's true. And one day after a really hard day at work, I saw four suicidal patients, two couples who hated each other and two teenagers who'd run away from home. And I went home and I was tired. And I came home to an ant infestation in my kitchen. They were everywhere.
41:05 Daniel Amen? And as I'm wiping them up, I'm thinking to myself, ants, automatic negative thoughts. My patients are infested. And so I came the next day to work with a can of Raid, of ant spray. And then I'm like, okay, that's not good. So later I replaced that with an anteater puppet and an ant puppet. And that concept is just so helpful. You don't have to believe every stupid thing you think. And so here's the tiny habit. Whenever you feel sad or mad or nervous or out of control, write down what you're thinking. And just ask yourself if it's true. My friend Byron Katie, I don't know if you've had her on the podcast.
41:48 Jay Shetty? I haven't, but I know who she is. Yeah, she's wonderful. Her books are incredible.
41:51 Daniel Amen? I love her.
41:51 Jay Shetty? Yeah.
41:52 Daniel Amen? She just teaches you to ask these five simple questions. You know, you had a bad thought, write it down. My wife never listens to me. And then just these five questions, is it true? Yes, you know, if you're mad. Is it absolutely true? Second question, no, she listens to me all the time. She's listened to all 14 of my public television scripts, like multiple times. The third question is really interesting. How do you feel when you believe the thought? I feel sad. I feel disconnected. I'm sort of angry. I'll give myself permission to be rude to her. That's not a good idea. The fourth question is, how would you feel without the thought? Like a good husband. And then you take the original thought and turn it to the opposite.
42:37 Daniel Amen? My wife does listen to me. And just see if you can find one or two examples. But those five questions dramatically change the people I serve. If they can, I can just, and I tell people, they say it in the book. You need to do 100 bad thoughts. And just do those five questions with the 100 bad thoughts. And then the ants will begin to go away from your life.
43:00 Jay Shetty? Yeah, I think, thank you for sharing that. I think that's such a practical and great system. Please, when you're listening to this podcast, when you get a moment today, when you're finishing your commute, or you've stopped walking your dog, or you've stopped cooking, take a moment to actually do this activity. I highly, highly recommend it because when you see yourself start getting through one thought and two, and then five, you'll start to see how you're rewiring your brain just by doing this very simple activity. So please do not take that activity lightly. It sounds like, oh, just do it in my head. No, don't do it in your head. Write it down, do it step by step, break it down. Like, take, take the advice really, really seriously. One of the things I love about the book, you talk about different types of brain and getting to learn about our different types of brains that we have. Tell us about the process of how we can become more aware.
43:44 Jay Shetty? Can we do it without imaging and without scans? Or do we really need, obviously, we need to do that to get the deepest. I can't wait to get my brain scanned with you. It's something I am 100% going to do. But how can we get to know our brains better?
43:57 Daniel Amen? So a long time ago, I realized not everybody has the same brain. I mean, some people are lucky and they have pretty balanced brains. But there's a whole group of people who have what I call spontaneous brains. They have sleepy frontal lobes, more with the ADD group. There are other people, and these two people tend to marry each other. The spontaneous and the persistent, the persistent.
44:20 Jay Shetty? Tell us more about that. So tell us more about spontaneous. I want to figure out what me and my wife are.
44:24 Daniel Amen? So the spontaneous, they have sleepy frontal lobes. So they're creative, they're out of the box thinkers. They can interrupt, they get distracted easily. They might not be great at organization.
44:39 Jay Shetty? Okay.
44:40 Daniel Amen? So that's the spontaneous type. The persistent type, they get stuff done. When they say it, they're early, but it has to be their way.
44:50 Jay Shetty? Yeah.
44:50 Daniel Amen? Or they get upset. They can worry, hold grudges. If things don't go their way, they get upset. Now, you want your neurosurgeon to be a little bit like that. We're going to do it, we're going to do it this way, we're going to do it perfectly. We're going to do it all the time. And then there's the sensitive brain where their emotional system is increased. And they make really good therapists, but they tend to see the glass as half empty rather than as half full. So they can go to sadness quickly. And then there's the cautious people. And you need some anxiety. Let's just be clear. The people with the lowest level of anxiety, the spontaneous group, they also die early
45:35 Daniel Amen? because from accidents and preventable illnesses. These are the people that run with the bulls in Spain. It's like, why? But the cautious people, they tend to be more anxious, more nervous. And you want the sort of persistent and cautious to be... I hire them all the time because it's like, no, I want to do the best job possible. And then... There's actually 16 types, but six through 16 are combinations of those types. So for example, if you grew up in an alcoholic home or you have a lot of alcoholism in your family, you tend to be type six, which is both spontaneous and persistent, or what I might call impulsive and compulsive at the same.
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47:19 Daniel Amen? From time.
47:19 Jay Shetty? And what are the good partnerships? Which are the ones that do work well together?
47:23 Daniel Amen? Well, the ones I see in my office the most are the spontaneous guys married to the persistent women.
47:31 Jay Shetty? Okay.
47:31 Daniel Amen? She, she was so attracted to him because he was the life of the party. He didn't have the same inhibitions that she had, but his lack of follow through just makes her crazy. I have great stories. One of my first imaging stories, I saw these, because I'm also a child psychiatrist, and this, this couple, Judy and Gary brought their kids to me and the little boy had, they both had ADD. The little girl responded to the simple treatments I gave her. The little boy didn't. And so I'm like, I need to see him. So I saw him in weekly counseling and then I realized, oh, the reason he's not getting better is mom and dad hate each other.
48:11 Daniel Amen? I'm like, oh, so I said, you know, I think I should see you guys to work on your relationship. And they go, Dr. Raymond, we really like you a lot, but we saw four other marital therapists and they always make it worse. And I'm like, in my head, and never have this thought, because in my head, I'm like, well, maybe they didn't see anybody really good. So I had that thought, boy, I regret that thought. Because so they saw me and I had two leather couches in my office and I sat on the opposite end of each couch and
48:42 Jay Shetty? That's how they naturally sat when they walked in?
48:44 Daniel Amen? It was terrible.
48:44 Jay Shetty? Okay.
48:46 Daniel Amen? And he was always late. He would always say things that would hurt her feelings. She would hold on to it. She, I would say she has a PhD in grudge holding. She's holding on to stuff from 15 years ago that his mother did. And after about four months, I actually knew I wasn't going to be helpful. But, you know, I'm persistent and at nine months, whenever I'd see him on my schedule, my stomach would hurt. And this one morning, I realized they're on my schedule and my stomach started to hurt. And I'm in the shower and I said, today I'm going to tell them to get divorced because it is not good for children to be raised in chronic stress. But I grew up Catholic, like my mother was not kidding about the whole thing.
49:29 Daniel Amen? And, you know, divorce was like a really bad thing. And so the Catholic voice visited me in the shower and said, what? Because you're not a good enough therapist, they're going to get divorced and you're going to damn their souls to hell. And I just stared at the water faucet, like, how much therapy does this take to get over? And then I got out of the, I got out of the shower and called my mentor who taught me imaging. And I'm like, would you give me two scans for the price of one? He's like, why? I said, Jack, I have this couple and I don't know what to do with them. He said, couple? Scans. What about brainmatch.com? It's just like so interesting. So anyways, we scanned him. He had low frontal lobes, just like my spontaneous group. And I was mad at myself because I missed that.
50:12 Daniel Amen? He had adult ADD and it's one of my specialties. And she had a brain that was just worked way too hard. And so she had like an OCD. She wasn't OCD, but she had an OCD like brain. And so I put her on Prozac, him on Ritalin, just to balance their brain. And told him I didn't want to see him for a month because I was having trouble dealing with the stress. And when they came back a month later, they sat on the same couch.
50:40 Jay Shetty? Wow.
50:41 Daniel Amen? She had her hand on his leg. That's a good sign in marital therapy. And now we're 30 years later, they're still married.
50:50 Jay Shetty? No way.
50:51 Daniel Amen? The children are like in their 40s. And they came to an event I did. And it just, without knowing that, they could have done therapy forever. But if you don't have the map, how do you know what to do? I'm just not like a fan of guessing.
51:10 Jay Shetty? It makes so much sense. I feel like what you're doing is so it's almost like we've always talked about this. That with the body, it's very easy to see a before and after. You know, you look at the body and you're like, are my muscles getting bigger? Am I losing weight? Am I gaining weight? Whatever it is. And what you're literally letting people do is do the same with the brain.
51:27 Daniel Amen? Right.
51:28 Jay Shetty? So you can literally see it get better. I've seen and I share a lot of your posts on the brain because you're able to show us what a healthy brain looks like. You're able to show us what a brain on marijuana looks like. You're able to show us what a brain with specific diseases looks like. And it's like, when you see it physically look different, you know whether you're making progress. And I think that's half the issue with the mind and the brain is that people think you can't see it. But based on the imaging, you can. And talking about couple matching and brain matching, you just shared something with me before we started the podcast, which I love, by the way. It just shows how much you believe in what you're saying. It's, this is the proof. Forget all the studies that Dr. Daniel Amen's done. Forget all the people he's guided. This is the real proof that he practices what he preaches. So Dr. Daniel Amen, before we started the interview,
52:13 Jay Shetty? he told me that anyone who wants to date his kids, they have to get their brains scanned, right?
52:20 Daniel Amen? Absolutely.
52:20 Jay Shetty? That is amazing. Like that to me is more-
52:23 Daniel Amen? So I have four children.
52:24 Jay Shetty? Yeah, tell us about it. Yeah. How old are they now?
52:27 Daniel Amen? The oldest is forty two and then thirty five and then thirty three and the youngest is sixteen.
52:33 Jay Shetty? Okay.
52:33 Daniel Amen? And she starts dating Michael and I love Michael. Michael's a good boy. But in my mind, they're really not dating until I see his brain. And when Michael was twelve, his mother killed herself and he found her. And I'm like, no, I need to know. And he's such a good kid, scanned his brain. It was busy and he had struggled with anxiety. And on the things that I recommended for him, he's just done so much better. And now he like refers people to us. And one of my kids, I scanned the brain of his partner and I'm like, please don't marry her. Cause it was not good. It was not healthy.
53:18 Daniel Amen? And it turned out she had an addiction issue that he didn't know about. But he didn't listen to me and that was trouble. And then, you know, I, I was married for twenty years and it was not a good marriage. And so I told myself, I got divorced in two thousand. If I ever got married again, the first naked part of this person I wanted to see was their brain. And I met Tana, my wife, and she's a neurosurgical ICU nurse. So we sort of bonded over the brain. I'm so excited for you to meet her. And two and a half weeks later, I'm like, sweetheart, you haven't seen the clinic. Don't you wanna see the clinic? We scanned her and it was good. So I felt okay marrying her.
54:02 Jay Shetty? That's amazing. That, that to me is the real proof above, above everything. That's the real deal. And we were talking about how like your partner is so important to your brain health, right? Your partner is just so important. We were speaking about how incredible Haley is earlier and you know, love Haley. She's, she's amazing. And it's just like that. Your partner is so important to your brain health. And, and I think we underestimate.
54:28 Jay Shetty? We underestimate that when you fall in lust or love or, you know, infatuation.
54:32 Daniel Amen? Which is a cocaine thing, right? I mean, new love is, works on the same area of your brain where cocaine works and on the nucleus accumbens that responds to dopamine. And that's why don't marry somebody until the love switches from cocaine to then it has an opiate response. Then you just feel happy when you're around them, but you don't get the fluttering.
54:58 Jay Shetty? Yeah, cocaine's chemistry, like it's the same, same feeling.
55:01 Daniel Amen? And you want alchemy where you're creating something beautiful, not just going, oh, that person didn't do it for me because they didn't make my heart go fast.
55:09 Jay Shetty? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
55:10 Daniel Amen? Probably the guys that made your heart go fast broke your heart.
55:14 Jay Shetty? What is it, what does a brain on love look like, actually?
55:16 Daniel Amen? So I wrote a book once called Brain in Love.
55:18 Jay Shetty? Oh, I didn't know that. Okay, so I know that.
55:19 Daniel Amen? Yeah, it's a great book.
55:20 Jay Shetty? Okay.
55:21 Daniel Amen? One of my favorite chapters is how to use your head before you give your heart away.
55:25 Jay Shetty? Oh, amazing. Can we dive into this for a bit?
55:27 Daniel Amen? How to do an interview based on neuroscience to see is this person going to be a good partner for me or not a good partner for me. But there's actually studies done on people who had just fallen in love and their basal ganglia, this is a part of the brain that responds to dopamine, become much more active, just a little bit like OCD where all you can do is think about them, all you see is the good parts of them. And it disrupts brain function for a while, which is why be patient and meet their friends and meet their family
56:06 Daniel Amen? and see what they're like when you go out. There's, there's so many, then there's questions. Like I think you want to know about their family, you want to know about their mom or dad, you want to know about their friends and you want to meet them and just see, does this fit the goals I have? But if you don't have goals, how do you know if it fits? So it's what, you know, I get frustrated with AA, you know, the first step in the addiction programs is know when you're out of control. And I'm like, that's step two. Step one is know what you want.
56:45 Jay Shetty? Yeah.
56:46 Daniel Amen? What do you want? And in the book, I talk about an exercise called the one page miracle. On one piece of paper, write down what you want and then you ask yourself, is my behavior?
56:56 Daniel Amen? Getting me what I want. And if it's not, then we talk about what do we need to change? And often it's your brain.
57:03 Jay Shetty? Yeah. And I love that you mentioned that because I think what happened in society at one point is obviously parents and family were very important in matching couples and bringing people together. I think, you know, like, I don't know, I think I saw a study once, which was like, maybe, maybe it was a bit more than 25 years ago, but around that time, it was very common for most people to be introduced through family. Or you married someone who lived in like a one mile to five mile radius of where you grew up. And that started to change. And I remember growing up and just thinking like, oh, it doesn't matter. It's between me and the person, etc. And when I met my wife, my wife has an amazing relationship with her father. She has an amazing relationship with her mother and amazing relationship with her family. And I know that that is so integral to who she is today.
57:44 Jay Shetty? But it took me to that because in the beginning, I was just like, oh no, it's just about me and her. As long as me and her get along, that's all that matters.
57:49 Daniel Amen? You totally marry their family.
57:51 Jay Shetty? Yeah, you do.
57:53 Daniel Amen? You totally marry their family.
57:54 Jay Shetty? Either indirectly or directly, we marry.
57:57 Daniel Amen? Although I'll give you a secret. So when I met Tana, and Tana's actually working on a book that I love called The Reluctant Courage of a Scared Child. So she grew up with a lot of trauma and I really liked her. She's beautiful. She's smart. She's sweet. And how do you get someone to fall in love with you? This is a neuroscience strategy.
58:23 Jay Shetty? Okay.
58:24 Daniel Amen? You do something nice, important for someone they love. And we are dating for like three months and her father had, who she was estranged from, had just been diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. And her sisters, her half sisters had no idea what to do. And now Tana's a nurse, I'm a doctor, and I'm like, well, I know what to do. Let's bring him down, which made her anxious because she had, was estranged. And let me scan him. And it turned out he didn't have Alzheimer's disease. He had something called pseudo dementia,
59:04 Daniel Amen? which is severe depression that masquerades as Alzheimer's disease. Plus, he's on a toxic cocktail of medication. And so I changed his medication, got him on supplements, put him on really the plan and the end of mental illness. And six months later, he's doing all day seminars. I mean, he went from being a recluse that basically was just seeing, how am I going to die? To someone who lived and through the whole process, they were able to mend their relationship. And she fell in love with me.
59:41 Jay Shetty? I love it. That's amazing. It's so awesome. I love it. What I love about you, Dr. Daniel Amen, is that you're so good at shifting between the micro and the macro. Like, I feel like today, we've talked about, we started talking about mental illness and how we need to change the language around it. We've talked about the actual changes we can make to our relationships and our particular habits and practices. Let's go back to the macro for a second. How would you like us in media, on podcasts, in this area, like us to change our vocabulary around how we talk about mental illness, brain health, et cetera, which is going to help people actually get to the source of what's really going wrong?
1:00:20 Daniel Amen? So the end-
1:00:21 Jay Shetty? And the government, everything. How do we have to change that vocabulary? Because I think that's a big part of it.
1:00:26 Daniel Amen? So I was actually at the White House about 18 months ago. I'm part of a group called Mental Health Leaders of Faith. And they're like, okay, big ideas. What are the big ideas? The end of mental illness will begin with a revolution in brain health. That we need to call these things what they really are. We just bring up mental illness. No one wants one. Parents will go, oh, we won't say anything about that. And it's shaming. It's stigmatizing. And it's wrong because they're not mental, their brain. So we need to change the terminology from a mental illness to a brain health issue. Because when Justin came to see me,
1:01:11 Daniel Amen? and the switch happened. When he came into my office and he looked at me and he said, my heart, my brain can have problems just like my heart can have problems. If I had heart disease, I would do everything you told me. I have a brain health issue. I'm going to do what you tell me. Until then, we were sort of fussing, will he do it, won't he do it?
1:01:32 Jay Shetty? Yeah, right.
1:01:33 Daniel Amen? All of that. But when you realize the brain is a physical organ that can have trouble. If somebody said you had cancer, you go do the right things to get it treated. If they said you had a liver problem, you'd go do the thing the doctor said. But because psychiatrists don't look at the brain, their patients actually don't believe them. It's like, really? You made a diagnosis of bipolar disorder just based on my symptoms?
1:01:59 Jay Shetty? Yeah.
1:01:59 Daniel Amen? Without ever looking?
1:02:00 Jay Shetty? Yeah, which is...
1:02:01 Daniel Amen? And it's why, one of the reasons I fell in love with Imogen. Because compliance went up and stigma went down. Those are like big deals. So my hope is we talk about these as brain health issues. Because you know how insane this is? Is you can have an addiction, go to an addiction treatment center, and they give you pancakes and waffles and candy.
1:02:23 Jay Shetty? I hear about that.
1:02:24 Daniel Amen? And it's like, are you people insane? He's got a brain problem. Why aren't you going to feed the brain? And there's a chapter in the book called Food Made Insanely Simple. And it's like, why aren't you going to feed it in a healthy way to get a healthy?
1:02:40 Jay Shetty? I see that all the time.
1:02:41 Daniel Amen? Response.
1:02:42 Jay Shetty? I see so many of my friends struggling with so many, mainly cancer, etc. And their diet sheet says no changes required as well.
1:02:49 Daniel Amen? Right.
1:02:49 Jay Shetty? And I know that that is...
1:02:50 Daniel Amen? Because we want you to take more medication.
1:02:52 Jay Shetty? Totally. Yeah, it's crazy.
1:02:53 Daniel Amen? And we're trying to do population control.
1:02:55 Jay Shetty? Yeah. It's insane. It's crazy that we haven't changed that yet. It's...
1:02:59 Daniel Amen? Fifty percent. So I did this one study from Australia. I talk about it in the book.
1:03:04 Daniel Amen? They looked at two outer islands. One of them had fast food restaurants, the other one didn't. And they measured their omega-3 index and the level of depression. The island with fast food restaurants, significantly low levels of omega-3 fatty acids in their blood, and five times the level of depression.
1:03:23 Jay Shetty? Wow.
1:03:24 Daniel Amen? It's the food. There's a linear correlation between the number of fruits and vegetables you eat a day and your level of happiness. Up to eight servings of fruits and vegetables a day.
1:03:36 Jay Shetty? I'm so glad I married my wife. She sorted that out for me. If I didn't have her, I'd probably be in the worst food. She's been the one who's been so health-focused, exercised. She just brought all of that into my life. I was so focused on the mind. And she helped me see all the similarities between the body and the mind.
1:03:51 Daniel Amen? Well, because if you're, if you don't nourish your brain, it's hard to have a healthy mind. And that's that thing we need to understand. Plus, guys who are married live longer, but women who are married do not live longer because they have, they have to deal with us.
1:04:09 Jay Shetty? That's crazy. I love it. Dr. Daniel Amen, you are amazing. We're gonna go into the last couple of segments of the podcast. This is called Fill in the Blank. So I read out these sentences and you have to fill in the blanks. Are you ready?
1:04:20 Daniel Amen? Yes.
1:04:20 Jay Shetty? Okay, great. So the first one is loving your brain means?
1:04:26 Daniel Amen? Thinking about it every day.
1:04:28 Jay Shetty? Nice. Yeah, exactly. If you love someone, you think about them, right? That's great. I love that. That's a great answer. If you want to fry your brain?
1:04:36 Daniel Amen? Think of alcohol as a health food and marijuana as going green.
1:04:42 Jay Shetty? Good answer. Good answer. I like that one. Okay. My best habit for my health is?
1:04:49 Daniel Amen? Every morning, I start the day with today is going to be a great day.
1:04:54 Jay Shetty? Yeah.
1:04:54 Daniel Amen? And every night, when I go to bed, I go, what went well today?
1:05:00 Jay Shetty? People love that from last time when you talked about it. That was, that was huge for people. Okay. Meditation helps?
1:05:07 Daniel Amen? Increase blood flow.
1:05:09 Jay Shetty? We should all.
1:05:10 Daniel Amen? To the brain.
1:05:10 Jay Shetty? Yeah.
1:05:11 Daniel Amen? And decreases the hyperactivity in your emotional brain. Meditation helps balance the brain.
1:05:19 Jay Shetty? We should all limit?
1:05:21 Daniel Amen? Sugar.
1:05:24 Jay Shetty? So when, when I was a monk, I didn't eat sugar and I gave up sugar this January again, and I've been having it. I've been cheating. I've been having once a week. I've been having my favorite dessert. But it's changed my life. Like, I remember it changed my life then, but I thought, oh, maybe I was a monk.
1:05:37 Daniel Amen? So let's talk about this once a week, just for a second. I'll be your doctor just for a second.
1:05:42 Jay Shetty? Do it.
1:05:42 Daniel Amen? I'm like.
1:05:44 Jay Shetty? I'm scared now.
1:05:45 Daniel Amen? Have you ever been in a bad relationship?
1:05:47 Jay Shetty? Yeah, for sure.
1:05:48 Daniel Amen? Yeah, me too.
1:05:49 Jay Shetty? Multiple times.
1:05:50 Daniel Amen? Me too. And I'm not doing that anymore. I am only gonna love someone that loves me back. And I'm damn sure not gonna do it with food. So Drew Carey said it right. Eating crappy food isn't a reward. It's a punishment. And so whenever I go to eat something, I'm just asking myself, do I love it? Because I want to eat what I love. And does it love me back?
1:06:19 Jay Shetty? Oh, that is so good. That is so good. I'm, oh, wow. I feel terrible for last night now. I totally get it. That's so powerful. That's, I've had, that's like.
1:06:29 Daniel Amen? But it's the four year old in you. Wants what he wants when he wants it. It's gonna be good, except here. And it's like, when is it rational for an alcoholic to have cheat days? Or a sex addict to have cheat days? And you know, this food is artificially.
1:06:44 Jay Shetty? I've just had an epiphany. Yeah, that's huge. I never thought about it like that. I love what you just said. It's not a reward, it's a punishment. That's huge. Wow, okay. Can you be my doctor for real?
1:06:53 Daniel Amen? Absolutely.
1:06:54 Jay Shetty? That was great. I love that. Okay, that was really good. The best foods for the brain are?
1:07:01 Daniel Amen? Colorful fruits and vegetables. Colorful, low glycemic fruits and vegetables. Healthy fat. Because 60% of the solid weight of your brain is fat. Lots of fiber. And high quality protein. And water your brain, because 80% of it is water.
1:07:28 Jay Shetty? What's the difference between an evil ruler and a good ruler? Some examples of it.
1:07:32 Daniel Amen? It's one of my favorite parts of this book.
1:07:34 Jay Shetty? I didn't want to end before asking it, so.
1:07:38 Daniel Amen? I just thought if I was an evil ruler, just looking at American society, and I wanted to increase the incidence of mental illness, what would I do? I'd.
1:07:50 Daniel Amen? Put the worst foods on the bottom two shelves in the stores where children see them and beg for them. If I was an evil ruler, I would create addictive gadgets that steal people's attention span. If I was an addictive, if I was an evil ruler, I'd give the NFL a day of the week. I'd let them own a day of the week, which is basically head trauma glorification. If I was an evil ruler, I would tell older people to get up on ladders to clean out their gutters because falls are just so damaging. If I was a good ruler, I would limit gadgets for kids for sure and get them out in the
1:08:35 Daniel Amen? sun. Unfortunately, the dermatologist won. They made us afraid of the sun. And nearly 80% of us have low levels of vitamin D, which is a universal risk factor, not only for Alzheimer's disease and depression, but also for cancer. And if I was an evil ruler, I'd continue to prescribe psychiatric medicines with no biological information, which is great for the pharmaceutical industry. It's just a frickin nightmare for our country.
1:09:09 Jay Shetty? That's great. Thank you for sharing that. I love, I love that too. It was just brilliant. And I just thought, if you get into that mindset for yourself, for society, for community, what would a good and evil ruler do? It becomes so clear what parts are tricking us. Thank you. That's beautiful. Okay, so these are your final five. You did remember them from last time. We have the rapid fire, fast fire, fast five questions. So one word to one sentence answers maximum, no more than that. And I will probably go off tangent because you're so amazing, but we will try and stick to this. So I've got such a great choice here. Let's go with, let's start with something funny. Your favorite Justin Bieber song?
1:09:48 Daniel Amen? "Purpose." He sang it to me before it actually was released.
1:09:52 Jay Shetty? Oh, wonderful. Great. Okay, I like that. I didn't expect that. That's a good answer. Yeah. What do you think most people misunderstand about the brain?
1:10:04 Daniel Amen? That it's the most important part of you.
1:10:09 Jay Shetty? Yeah, I think I told you last time about one of my spiritual mentors has been incredible spiritual mentor to tens of thousands of people in London. He's got stage four brain cancer. I can't remember if I did mention it to you or not, but yeah, he's just been struggling. It's amazing because he was such a light and such a guide for so many of us. And even now, in his weakest stage, he's just exuding gratitude. And it's amazing that after his brain's like, so he's lost his, pretty much his short-term memories disappeared. His long-term memory is it's there, but it's, you can tell that there's parts that are now failing to mesh together. Now he's become extremely quiet, but the last I saw him last year,
1:10:51 Jay Shetty? he was just grateful to everyone for what they were doing to serve God and what they were doing to make a difference in the world. And that's all that was coming out. And it was just, yeah, it's one of those things that you don't notice how powerful the brain is until you see it, until you see someone lose it. And I almost.
1:11:05 Daniel Amen? It's horrifying.
1:11:06 Jay Shetty? Yeah, and we don't see that as much or we don't hear about it as much because I guess people struggle to talk about it. All right. Question number three is, what question do you wish people would ask you more often?
1:11:20 Daniel Amen? What's the best way to help my children?
1:11:24 Jay Shetty? Ah, nice.
1:11:25 Daniel Amen? Cause it's, this is a generational.
1:11:28 Jay Shetty? Yeah.
1:11:30 Daniel Amen? Mission for me. It started with, it's going to help her children and even her grandchildren.
1:11:36 Jay Shetty? Yeah.
1:11:37 Daniel Amen? What you do. When a little girl's born, they're born with all of the eggs and their ovaries they'll ever have. This is so important.
1:11:45 Jay Shetty? Yeah. Question number four, what's something you were once sure of and now have changed your mind on? Or found a new answer to?
1:11:53 Daniel Amen? That your brain doesn't have to get old.
1:11:58 Daniel Amen? I've seen so many older brains, but not everyone's bad.
1:12:03 Jay Shetty? Wow, that's really powerful. All right, fast five, final question. What's the biggest lesson you've learned in the last 12 months? Could be personal, professional, or anything.
1:12:15 Daniel Amen? I'm actually working on a new project called Your Brain Is Always.
1:12:18 Jay Shetty? You're always working on a new project. How do you do it?
1:12:19 Daniel Amen? It's called Your Brain Is Always Listening. And I talk about the dragons from the past that breathe fire on your emotional brain. And my favorite dragon is the ancestral dragon. Is that sometimes your anxiety, your anger, your sadness may actually not be yours. That it may be somebody from the past. And so I was talking to my dad about the ancestral dragon. I said, tell me more about my grandfather. He was 19 when he came to the country. And his brother was not a good driver, borrowed his sister's car and was killed in a train accident.
1:12:59 Jay Shetty? No way.
1:13:00 Daniel Amen? And my grandfather never drove because of the bitterness and the anxiety that he held. And that happened before he made my dad. And I know that changed my grandfather's genes in part to make my dad who he was. And then I got some of that as well, I'm certain. And so the thing in the last 12 months is sometimes our issues are in fact not our issues. They're from another generation.
1:13:32 Jay Shetty? Yeah, we need to break those generational curses and make the choice on breaking that pattern. But you need to know what pattern it is before you can break it. Great, great answers. I want everyone to go and follow Dr. Daniel Lehman on Instagram. Genuinely, I look forward to his posts. And Dr. Daniel Lehman, where can, if people are listening and watching and they're going, I need to get my brain scanned, like they're serious about it. How can they come and do that? Because I think that would be an amazing.
1:13:56 Daniel Amen? We have eight clinics around the United States.
1:14:00 Daniel Amen? And then go to amenclinics.com. So amen, like the last word in a prayer, clinics.com. And we would love to serve them.
1:14:09 Jay Shetty? Yeah, I would love that. Anyone who's listening and watching and you really realize from today's conversation, the impact and the importance of your brain health, please go and take that opportunity. I know I'm going to be doing it as well. And for everyone, including those and everyone else, please, please, please go and grab a copy of this book. It is going to blow your mind or your brain. And it's going to help you deeply understand what's going on in your brain, your friends' brains, and how you can start helping yourself and others. And remember, this is what self-love really looks like, right? It's not just bubble baths and walks on the beach. It's like this self-love for your brain is really what self-love is about. But I feel like you were gonna say something and I stopped you off.
1:14:52 Daniel Amen? No, I'm just grateful. I'm grateful for-
1:14:54 Jay Shetty? No, I mean, I feel like this is the self-love that we all, you know, we're talking a lot about self-love these days, but I feel like a lot of the other self-love is like, kind of nice to have, and it might work, but this is kind of like the root of all of it. So I'm a big proponent of everything that Dr. Daniel Amen does, and I highly recommend that you go check it out. Thank you, Dr. Daniel Amen, for coming on the show again.
1:15:14 Daniel Amen? Thank you.
1:15:14 Jay Shetty? And please share your best insights from Dr. Daniel Amen on Instagram, tag myself and tag him as well, so that we can see what you learned from this episode. Thanks for listening, everyone. We'll be back with another On Purpose episode next week.
1:15:31 Jay Shetty? Hey, guys. So this is bonus footage, just on my reflection from the interview that we just completed with Dr. Daniel Amen. Of course, he's been an incredible podcast guest. Before, this was the second time we've had him on. And I was actually just sharing with him, and that's why we wanted to switch the cameras back on, because I said this after the cameras were off.
1:15:50 Jay Shetty? When he came on last year, and blew my mind, and blew your mind, and that podcast went super viral, I fell in love with him as an individual, and I really identified with what he was trying to do in the world, and his expertise, and his studies blew my mind, and his understanding of the brain. So I was really impressed by him as an individual. And this time I'm sitting down with him after a year, I'm actually realizing that I missed the point. And I missed the point because I didn't yet realize that I need to go and get my brain scans. So importantly, it needs to be the top of my agenda because until I do that, then I'm not even taking it seriously. And so maybe some of you listened last year and it was really powerful.
1:16:33 Jay Shetty? You're like, I learned so much and whatever it is, but you're like, but wait a minute, I haven't actually changed what I'm doing for my brain. I actually don't understand my brain. So go and get your scans, get the new book, The End of Mental Illness as well. Read more about it because if you're not doing that, then we're basically saying, oh, that's nice. That's another nice thought. It's another nice podcast. It's another nice interviewer, cool ideas. But it's like, this isn't that, like this isn't that. This is, this is life-changing stuff. And so I just wanted to let you all know that you should highly, I highly recommend. Yeah, of course. Please.
1:17:03 Daniel Amen? The end of mental illness begins with a revolution in brain health. And we would love your ideas on, well, how do we create this revolution? Because if we don't, the incidence of suicide is going to continue to go up. And what I love about you and your group, it's like, these are passionate people. So we'd love your ideas about, so how do we create this revolution in brain health? To change the conversation from mental illness to brain health.
1:17:37 Jay Shetty? Yeah, love that. Thank you. Yeah, please, please, please send them through to us on Instagram. Tag both of us, comment section, anywhere that you know it's going to reach us. We're going to be looking out for your answers.
1:17:58 Speaker 03 Mr. President, my company tore me of the explosion on our rig on October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. So y'all keep the blame on me. Tom Cruise is.
1:18:08 Speaker 04 Digger got us into this mess and Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and The Ravenette.
1:18:14 Speaker 05 What would happen if I stopped doing it? You're stalled, you're freezing there. That's what.
1:18:18 Speaker 04 With great power comes great deniability.
1:18:22 Speaker 05 I'm not the first daddy.
1:18:23 Speaker 04 Digger. See the trailer online. Only appears October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17. Not a middle without parent.
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