Pod Insights On Purpose with Jay Shetty Dr. Daniel Amen: ON Training Your Brain for Optimal Performance 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.
I learned so much in this week's episode with psychiatrist, brain expert and ten-time New York Times bestselling author Dr. Daniel Amen. He walks us through the difference between the mind and the brain, teaches us how to get rid of ANTs (automatic negative thoughts) and teaches us how to train our brain to reach its maximum potential. He debunks quick fixes that provide temporary relief and goes over specific habits we can all implement in our daily lives in order to improve our mood and actually make it last.
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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
2:59 Jay Shetty? Pro at drinkag1.com/onpurpose. That's drinkag1.com/onpurpose.
3:09 Daniel Amen? The only organ where size matters is your brain. It's the three pounds of fat between your ears. So the first thing you have to do if you want a better life is you have to start wanting a better brain.
3:32 Jay Shetty? You know how passionate I am about sitting down with deep, deep experts, people who can broaden and open my mind and yours, people that can teach me things that I've never thought about and that I can share with you as well. And 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
4:16 Jay Shetty? sure you grab this book. 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. And today's guest will definitely not disappoint. He's a clinical neuroscientist, a professor, a psychotherapist, and he's a ten times New York Times bestselling author. His name is Dr. Daniel G. Amen. And today we're talking about his new book, Feel Better Fast and Make It Last: Unlocking Your Brain's Healing Potential to Overcome Negativity, Anxiety, Anger, Stress, and Trauma.
4:59 Jay Shetty? So if you like the sound of what we're discussing today, make sure you go out onto Amazon, go out to Barnes and Noble, and grab the book. Daniel, thank you so much for being here.
5:08 Daniel Amen? Jay, it's just such a pleasure.
5:10 Jay Shetty? The pleasure's all mine. I was saying to you just briefly when we were speaking before that this is what I crave in life, is to sit down with someone who has dedicated their life and work and their purpose to such a deep and noble cause. And to be able to sit with you is a complete honor for me. So thank you for being here.
5:28 Daniel Amen? Thank you.
5:29 Jay Shetty? Thank you so much. And yeah, this book, when I was diving into it in the conversation we've just had, I instantly had so many questions. Because for me, the brain's the most important thing for us to talk about right now, especially right now. And that's the question I wanted to start with you with is, why did you choose the brain throughout all your work as being such a big area of focus?
5:53 Daniel Amen? Well, it runs everything. But when I went to medical school, I wanted to be a pediatrician because I adore children. And when I was a second-year medical student, I'd just gotten married, and my wife tried to kill herself. And I was horrified. And I was traumatized. I took her to see a wonderful psychiatrist, and I came to realize if he helped her, which he did, it wouldn't just help her, that it would help me. It would help our children. It would help our grandchildren. And so nearly 40 years ago, I decided to be a psychiatrist, and I have loved it every single day.
6:34 Daniel Amen? But I joined the only medical profession that never looks at the organ it treats. And before I went to medical school, I was in the army, I was an infantry medic, and I got myself retrained as an X-ray technician and developed a passion for imaging. And our professors used to always say, "How do you know unless you look? How do you know unless you look?" And now, I'm a psychiatrist, and we're not looking. And I'm an agitator. My father, growing up, he called me a maverick. And to him, that was not a good thing. But I got it from him. His favorite words, growing up, when I was growing up, the first favorite word was bullshit. And the second, his favorite word was no.
7:18 Daniel Amen? Everything was bullshit or no. So obviously, I got it from him. And I loved being a psychiatrist, but I'm like, "Well, why don't we look at the brain?" Because obviously, the brain is our organ. The brain, you know, is involved in how you think, how you feel, how you act, how you get along with other people. It's the organ of intelligence, creativity, and every single decision you make. And with my X-ray background, I'm like, "We should look." And so, in the late 1980s, I started looking at the brain with this study called Quantitative EEG.
7:57 Daniel Amen? And it was fascinating that I could see underlying patterns for things like depression and ADHD and autism. But in 1991, I went to a lecture on brain spectroimaging. Spectre is a nuclear medicine study that looks at blood flow and activity, and it rocked my world. Let me take a little detour. Please. So how did addiction start? Let's say gambling addiction. Addictions start with a big win, right? Either cocaine, you're like, whoa, I've never felt like that before. I want to feel like that again. Or with gambling, you win the whole jackpot and dopamine floods the pleasure centers of
8:40 Daniel Amen? your brain and you're like, oh, whoa, I want that again. Well, I'd been a psychiatrist for nearly 10 years when I ordered my first spec scan. My first 10 cases were big wins because I went into this profession to get people well, because I knew the pain of when you're not well, from a suicide attempt from my first wife, and then the level of emotional and personal pain that brought to me. Of course. And so as patients got better, because I had more information, I'm like, I have to do this again. Well, today, we have 150,000 scans that we've done on patients from 120 countries.
9:25 Daniel Amen? So I'm completely addicted. Because, you know, if you don't look, you don't know. And we need to stop lying about that. But wholesale across the US, really across the world, you go to your doctor, you say, I'm depressed, I'm anxious, I can't sleep, I have temper problems, I'm obsessiveness. And within a 20-minute office visit, you leave with prescriptions for anxiety, depression, sleep, and that's insane. When no one has looked at your brain, so you don't know, does it work too hard or not hard enough? Is it toxic from drug abuse or from mold in your home?
10:07 Daniel Amen? Or is it traumatic because you played a contact sport and it damaged your frontal lobes? And so I have been on this crusade, really, to change psychiatry because we should act like our other medical colleagues and look at what we do before we do it. But along the way, I've learned big lessons like first do no harm, that some of our medications are actually not that great. For you, that there are natural ways to heal the brain. And oh, by the way, you got to get your heart right. You got to get your gut right. You got to get your kidneys right. You got to get your liver right in order for your brain to be right. Because when your brain works right, you work right.
10:50 Jay Shetty? Hmm, absolutely. No, I couldn't agree with you more. And it was actually fascinating just earlier this week. I was speaking to Naveen Jain on the podcast as well. And I don't know if you've come across Naveen. It's a try, I should definitely connect you both. He feels very closely with the way you do around having a crusade around modern medicine and what's supplied and how it's just prescribed to anyone and everyone without actually knowing anyone's gut, brain, or any other health. So I should definitely connect you. You've just sparked an idea, but I want, I want to ask you before we dive into it. And I know everyone listening and watching, you're probably thinking like I am. Oh, my God, we cannot wait for this because you can give us so many practical tips. But before we do that, I want to ask you more of a, I guess, a conscious question around what is the difference between the brain and the mind?
11:34 Jay Shetty? And, and what are the mistakes we make when talking about the mind versus understanding the brain?
11:40 Daniel Amen? The mind comes from the brain. If your brain is damaged, it damages your mind. And without a brain, you don't have a mind. Now, you can train the brain so that you have a healthier mind. But let me just tell you a story. Since I know that's what you love is stories.
12:06 Jay Shetty? Absolutely.
12:06 Daniel Amen? Storytelling. There was this couple that were in marital therapy. And they went for three years, spent about $20,000. And at the end, the therapist flung them, told them to get divorced. And they were very unhappy that they had failed. And so they got mad at the therapist and the therapist said, well, I know a doctor in Costa Mesa, California, that takes care of really difficult people. You should go see him. And, you know, as part of our process, we scan people. We do SPECT. And the wife had a pretty healthy brain. The husband had a moth-eaten brain. Was really low in activity.
12:51 Daniel Amen? It's a pattern we usually see with alcoholism or drug abuse. But in his history, he said he never used drugs and he didn't drink. Now, the first thing you learn about drug addicts is they lie. So in front of his wife, I'm like, well, is that true? You don't drink and you've never done drugs? And he said, "Dr. Amen, that's not my problem. I've never drank and I've never done drugs." And then I looked to his wife and I said, "Is he telling me the truth?" And she said, "Oh, yes, Dr. Amen, he doesn't drink. As far as I know, he's never done drugs. He's just an asshole." And I started laughing. Can you imagine that? But in my head, I'm like, "Why does his brain look so bad?" And so I thought about, well, what are the different options?
13:36 Daniel Amen? Drugs, alcohol? Well, probably not if your wife who doesn't like you says no.
13:43 Daniel Amen? An environmental toxin, anoxia, lack of oxygen, an infection, severe anemia or hormone disruptions. And so my next question to him is, "Where do you work?" He said, "I work in a furniture factory." I said, "What do you do?" He said, "I finish furniture all day long." He was doing drugs. He was doing the worst drug abuse, which is inhaling organic solvents. And I'm like, "Do you wear a mask?" He said, "No, they tell me I should." And I'm thinking to myself, I don't say it because I have good frontal lobe function. I'm thinking, "That is not the sign of intelligent life." I'm like, "Is there ventilation?" He said, "Often not, it's hot, I'm sweaty."
14:26 Daniel Amen? And I looked to his wife and I said, "So when did he become an asshole?" And she said, "What do you mean?" I said, "Did you marry him that way? Do you have father issues you're trying to work out?" And she said, "No, when we dated and for the first three years, he was great." It was about five years ago. And then the light went on in her head. About the time he got this job, his behavior started to change. Do you think it could be related? Of course, it could be related. And I love this shift, that's what the scans do. They shift from "he's an asshole."
15:11 Daniel Amen? And actually, his therapist gave him that same diagnosis. Now, you can't write asshole in the chart. Absolutely. So what you write is mixed personality disorder with narcissistic and antisocial features. What's that? You're an asshole, right? It's not a billing code, right? And that shift was so important, because play this out with me. He's angry, he's depressed. So he's mad and he's sad. If they did what the therapist recommended, which was get divorced. Now, it's gonna be like his skin is being ripped off of him. Because this is the love of his life. He just can't act in a consistent way. What is the organ of acting? It's your brain, right?
15:56 Daniel Amen? And his brain is damaged. And so if they would have gotten divorced, he very well could have killed himself. And as many people do, he also could have killed his wife and his children, right? So this is the consequence of not looking. But once we looked, she shifted and she's like, "Do you mean in his attempt to be a good husband, going to work, supporting the family, that he's being poisoned and that he's sick and he's not bad?" Exactly. And so we took him out of work, worked on rehabilitating his brain,
16:36 Daniel Amen? which is one of my favorite things to do, is taking bad brains and making them better. And years later, they're still married, they love each other, he's much better. And she's not as stressed, because when you live with someone whose brain is damaged, you become... damaged as well.
16:58 Jay Shetty? Absolutely. Wow, that's incredible. So how, I guess my, my, my follow up question that is, how many of us are living with someone who has a damaged brain? How many of us, me sitting right here? Like, how many of us have a brain that is somewhat damaged? And what are the mistakes we make? When we're trying to heal that in our everyday life?
17:16 Daniel Amen? And, and the first mistake we make is we don't care about it, that we don't love it. So when I started doing spec in 1991, I scanned everybody I knew. I scanned my sisters. I have five of them. Pray for me.
17:29 Jay Shetty? I want you to scan, scan me one day.
17:31 Daniel Amen? I, I want.
17:32 Jay Shetty? Yeah, I'd love that.
17:33 Daniel Amen? I scan, and then I scanned my mom, and she had at 60, a perfect brain. In fact, she was our resident model of a perfect brain.
17:43 Jay Shetty? Well, she must have loved that.
17:45 Daniel Amen? It fit the story of her life. Even at 87, she has 48 grandchildren, great grandchildren. She knows everybody's birthday. She's everybody's best friend. She's just a phenomenal human being. And then I scanned my brain, and I didn't like it because I played football in high school. And I had meningitis when I was a young soldier. And that just really pissed me off that my 60 year old mother had a better looking brain than I did. And so I developed a concept then called brain envy. I wanted a better brain. I wanted a brain that looked like hers. And you know, as a psychiatrist, or as a trained psychiatrist, you have to of course read Freud. And he had this concept of penis envy.
18:30 Daniel Amen? And in 40 years, I've like not seen one case. The only time I've seen a case of it is when I was on Broadway a few weeks ago. And at intermission, I saw the long line at the women's bathroom and no line at the men's. And I go penis envy, there it is right there. But you know, it's really, the only organ where size matters is your brain. It's the three pounds of fat between your ears. So the first thing you have to do if you want a better life is you have to start wanting a better brain. And that is critical because that leads, I know you, you want,
19:15 Daniel Amen? for your listeners and viewers, tips, we call them tiny habits. We work with the Stanford persuasive tech lab.
19:25 Daniel Amen? On how people change. And they make small incremental changes that can make huge differences over time. So the first tiny habit we'll talk about, and I actually think this is the most important one. It's whatever you do, whatever you say, whatever you eat, whatever you do, it takes three seconds. You just ask yourself, is this good for my brain or bad for it? And if you can answer that question with intelligence and love, because you do the right thing, not because you should, but because you love yourself. Ultimately, doing the right thing is the ultimate act of love. It just works. Is this good for my brain or bad for it? And if it's bad for it, I don't do it if I care about myself.
20:09 Jay Shetty? You've ruined chocolate for me forever now.
20:12 Daniel Amen? No, chocolate's great for your brain.
20:13 Jay Shetty? It is, yeah.
20:14 Daniel Amen? And we actually make
20:15 Jay Shetty? Okay.
20:16 Daniel Amen? Sugar-free, dairy-free chocolate.
20:19 Jay Shetty? Some vegans, that's it.
20:20 Daniel Amen? Chocolate coconut bar. And they're phenomenal. And what they really are, or because that's not our primary business, it's a metaphor for there is no suffering in getting well. Plus, I am named after my grandfather, who was a candy maker. I mean, that was his job. And but he died early because he was also fat and had heart disease. And I'm not fat and I don't have heart disease because I know it's a risk for me. And I don't give in to the behavior making it likely to be so. But you don't have to give up chocolate. In fact, I don't know if you're like me, but I'm very much a creature of habit.
21:00 Jay Shetty? Me too.
21:01 Daniel Amen? And so, you know, I have maybe thirty foods I eat.
21:06 Jay Shetty? Yep.
21:06 Daniel Amen? And I only want them to love me back. So I only want to be in love with someone or something that loves me back.
21:19 Jay Shetty? Isn't that all of us?
21:19 Daniel Amen? So I have, I don't know if you've ever been in a bad relationship.
21:23 Jay Shetty? I have, yes.
21:24 Daniel Amen? To meet your beautiful wife. And and one day I hope you meet mine and I adore her. But I've been in bad relationships.
21:30 Jay Shetty? Me too.
21:32 Daniel Amen? I'm not doing it anymore. There's just, I'm not. And I'm damn sure not doing it with food.
21:37 Jay Shetty? Yeah.
21:38 Daniel Amen? That's too, often people say, I love bread, or I love pasta, I love brownies, I love. You know, in fact, I had one woman, we should talk about the Daniel Plan at some point. This massive program I did at Saddleback Church, now thousands of churches around the world do it. And one of the pastor's wives, after she heard me talk, she said, you know, after I heard you, I told my husband, I'd rather get Alzheimer's disease than give up sugar.
22:03 Jay Shetty? Wow.
22:03 Daniel Amen? And I'm like, did you date the bad boys in high school? Cause that's like a seriously bad relationship.
22:10 Jay Shetty? Yeah, absolutely.
22:11 Daniel Amen? Right?
22:11 Jay Shetty? That's terrible, yeah. So let's start talking about that kind of rehabilitation process. And in the book, you obviously have your incredible acronym, and I picked out some of the letters that I wanted to focus in on, and one of my big ones is when you talk about the rational mind. Now, I know that we are prone to making irrational decisions and choices all the time. We do it every single day, as far as I know, and as far as my reading has gone. And I wonder why we do that, why we constantly choose to make irrational decisions, and how we start to overcome that.
22:43 Daniel Amen? So, in the book, there's this cool mnemonic, brain XL.
22:47 Jay Shetty? Mm-hmm.
22:48 Daniel Amen? And it starts by getting your brain right.
22:52 Jay Shetty? Mm-hmm.
22:52 Daniel Amen? Because your rational mind is better when you do that.
22:56 Jay Shetty? Mm-hmm.
22:56 Daniel Amen? And the rational mind is really about training your brain and training your mind to help you rather than hurt you. So often, people are just brutalized by the thoughts that go through their heads. And many years ago, at a really hard day at work, I had seen four suicidal patients, and that's hard. Because you feel responsible for them, but you actually don't have full responsibility. Um, I saw two couples who hated each other, I saw two teenagers who had run away from home. And at the end of the day, I'm feeling pretty stressed.
23:37 Daniel Amen? And I walked into my house, and my wife and kids were gone, but there was an ant infestation in my house, in my kitchen, and I'm furious. And as I'm wiping up what felt like thousands of ants.
23:55 Daniel Amen? When you go to medical school, you have to learn fifty thousand new terms your first year. And so you come, you get good at coming up with acronyms and mnemonics. And so I'm always playing with words. Yeah. And as I'm wiping up the ants, I'm thinking, oh, automatic negative thoughts. My patients are infested with ants. Hmm. And I need to teach them to eradicate the ants. And so the next day at work, I brought a can of ant spray and I put it on the coffee table and I'm like, we're gonna get, I'm gonna show you how to get rid of the ants. And over time, that morphed into an anteater and an ant puppet, because I also see children. And I taught them how to do it.
24:37 Daniel Amen? And it's one of the most important things that I teach anybody how to do. You don't have to believe every stupid thing you think. And if you can learn to tell yourself the truth, because this is not positive thinking. I am not a fan of positive thinking. Neither am I. Positive thinking means, you know, I can go a couple of blocks to Jack in the Box and get four of their big desserts and it won't have a negative impact on my life. And it will. Or positive thinking is I can, you know, fool around on my phone until two o'clock in the morning and it's not gonna have a negative impact on me the next day.
25:20 Daniel Amen? People who have low levels of anxiety go to jail and they die early. There's actually a cool longevity study out of Stanford where they looked at fifteen hundred and forty-eight ten-year-old children in nineteen twenty-one. And then researchers followed them for ninety years, looking at what goes with health, success and longevity. And the don't worry, be happy people died the earliest from accidents and preventable illnesses. The people who live the longest, they're conscientious. They told themselves the truth. Hmm. I have taxes to pay. I better pay them or I'm going to be in trouble. Or I said I'm gonna show up at two o'clock. I show up at two o'clock.
26:03 Daniel Amen? So it's conscientiousness, which is really a prefrontal cortex function, right? So you have to have your brain right. But here's the tiny habit. Whenever you feel sad, or mad, or nervous, or out of control, write down what you're thinking. And then, ask yourself, is it true? So those are these three little words I love. And I have a process that I talk about in the book. So, a bad thought, like, today is gonna be hard. Is that true? Well, I don't know. And then the second question, is it absolutely true? No.
26:46 Daniel Amen? How do I feel when I believe the thought, awful? Who would I be without the thought, free? Take the original thought, turn it to its opposite. And what you find, the opposite of what's torturing you, is usually true. So it just blows your mind. But if you can learn to be disciplined about questioning your own thoughts. And I got this technique from my friend Byron Katie. She wrote a brilliant book called Loving What Is. Brilliant. It's sort of a combination of cognitive therapy and Buddhism. And it's, I just, I love it. Whenever I'm off, or I'm sad, or I'm stressed, I'll read portions of Loving What Is,
27:29 Daniel Amen? or listen into it, because she read it, and she has a beautiful voice. And it's training your mind to help you, rather than hurt you. Another rational mind technique Yeah, please. is start every day with, today is going to be a great day. Why? Because your unconscious mind will find why it's going to be a great day. We are programmed, through our evolutionary biology, to wake up in fear. Because our ancestors woke up, and the fear was real. Something was going to eat them. Something wanted to hurt them. And so you wake up anxious.
28:12 Daniel Amen? But now that's not true, for most of us. And if you start with, today is going to be a great day, your unconscious mind then begins to find, well, why is it gonna be a great day? And for families, it's a great ritual.
28:32 Daniel Amen? Hey honey, today's going to be a great day. And then you begin in your mind to find why it's going to be a great day. It's so easy to find why it's going to be a bad day. At the end of the day, I actually do this as a ritual, both at dinner and then when I put myself to sleep, is what went well today? And we focus on what went well. Now, we also want to focus on, well, what can I learn from today? What could I have done better? Because we're always striving to grow. But when I put myself to sleep at night, I'll say a prayer, and then I'll just go back through my day, what went well? Because it actually sets my dreams up to be more positive than negative.
29:15 Daniel Amen? Because dreams, there's a purpose for them. It's really we're consolidating memories from what happened that day. And sometimes, because you didn't consolidate them from the past, they get infected by negativity. So, super simple, tiny habits that can make a big difference.
29:36 Jay Shetty? Yeah, that's a great tiny habit. I think building that, and this is what we find so often, even in the work that I do, that people don't have a conversation with themselves that is conscious. They have an unconscious or subconscious conversation with themselves, which is naturally taking down that negative rabbit hole, or living out the pattern that they've built up for so many years or decades, or whatever it may be. But I don't know how many people are having a conscious, intentional conversation with themselves to dive deeper into a thought, a belief, a pattern.
30:09 Daniel Amen? And they've never been taught.
30:12 Jay Shetty? Absolutely, absolutely.
30:13 Daniel Amen? I have a children's book, it's relatively new, I love, called Captain Snap and the Superpower Questions. It basically teaches kids to think about what they think about, and to not believe every stupid thing they think. And four-year-olds can do this. So, one quick story.
30:33 Jay Shetty? Yeah, please. Love your stories.
30:36 Daniel Amen? My last one, I have four children and Chloe's 15. And she's got red hair like her mother. And when she's four, she announces to her mother that she's going to get her ears pierced that day. And you don't announce things to Tana. And Tana said, no, that they didn't have time and she had to wait until she was five. And Chloe said, I can't wait till I'm five, burst into tears, drama, runs into my office, climbs on my lap, she's just crawling, crawling her eyes out, lip, little lips going. And I'm like, what's the matter? And she said, mommy said I can't get my ears pierced till I'm five. I'm like, okay, what's the matter? I can't wait until I'm five.
31:21 Daniel Amen? Like, is that true? Yes. Is it absolutely true? What do you mean? Are you gonna die if you don't? And no lie, she rolled her eyes at me. I didn't think that was gonna happen till 12. Of course not. How do you feel when you believe the thought you can't wait? I'm mad and I'm sad and my ears aren't cute. Okay? Who would you be if you didn't have that thought? Four years old, free. Wow. So what's the opposite of I can't wait? What do you mean? I said, you know, opposites. We just read a book on opposites, tall and small and fat and skinny. I can't wait until I'm five.
32:04 Daniel Amen? And then she got off my lap and went and played with the dog. We could have had drama all day long over the years, or we could just teach ourselves we don't have to believe every stupid thing we think.
32:16 Jay Shetty? Wow, I love that. And that's incredible. The children's book, if you have kids, there you go. What was the name of the children's book again?
32:22 Daniel Amen? Captain Snout.
32:24 Jay Shetty? Captain Snout.
32:24 Daniel Amen? And the superpower question.
32:26 Jay Shetty? That's brilliant. I love that. That's incredible. And it's teaching kids how to think about what they think about. That's brilliant. That's amazing. That's something we could all use too. We should start there before this. It would be such a useful technique. That's amazing.
32:38 Daniel Amen? Well, I get the parents to read it to the children so the parents will get the idea.
32:42 Jay Shetty? Absolutely, absolutely. No, I think it's, you're spot on that we've never been taught these things. We can't expect, if anyone's listening and watching right now, we can't expect to know these things. And so we have to look at alternative forms of educating ourselves. It's the only way. It's absolutely the only way.
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33:42 Jay Shetty? That's indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need to hire? This is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. This episode is brought to you by Whole Foods Market. If you're talking about quality food, you can't forget Whole Foods Market, who've been holding themselves to the highest standards since they opened in 1980. That means you'll see thousands of organic products across their stores, from the produce department to the aisles. It also means you'll never see certain ingredients. They've banned artificial sweeteners and colors, high fructose corn syrup and more, so you can shop with peace of mind. Shop Whole Foods Market in-store or online. This episode is brought to you by State Farm.
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34:59 Jay Shetty? Now, the next in your mnemonic is about attachment. And this one fascinates me a lot because when I lived as a monk, we focused so much on detachment. And detachment was such a...
35:09 Daniel Amen? Yeah, I've never got that quite down. Because I'm totally attached to my wife, to my work, how the book does. You know, I want to not be attached to how the book does, but I totally am.
35:23 Jay Shetty? Thank you for being honest with us and yourself.
35:25 Daniel Amen? I've written 13 public television specials. They've aired 100,000 times across North America. And I'm sort of attached how they turn out. But attachment causes suffering. And so the idea, what I've seen as a psychiatrist, is when relationships break, that causes intense emotional pain. So if we know that's true, that we are a pair bonded species, that we are a relational species, we're wired that way. Well, you need to know how to take care of them.
36:04 Daniel Amen? And so, based on 40 years of helping couples, and helping families, and helping businesses, it's, well, what are the ingredients? And there's a cool mnemonic for attachments. It's called relating. The R is, you're responsible for it. So you're 100% responsible for that relationship. What is it you can do today to make it better? Is empathy, seeing things from the other person's point of view, which is a brain function. And autistic kids actually have damage in the mirror neuron system of the brain, which is the part that allows me to see things from your point of view. L is listening, something parents are generally not very good at.
36:48 Daniel Amen? And so I teach them this technique called active listening, so powerful. A is assertiveness. T is time, actual physical time. I is inquire into the negative thoughts you have. So it's about inquiry. And is notice what you like more than what you don't. How do they train penguins at SeaWorld? They're not beating them. They're not noticing the negative. They notice what they like. That's how you shape. Behavior in G is grace and forgiveness. And there's a technique on forgiveness that's just so powerful. Because you know, when you hold on to hurts, the person you're poisoning the most is yourself.
37:31 Jay Shetty? And how do we do that now? I know a lot of the people that watch and consume my work really love hearing my perspectives on relationships and dating because online dating has completely changed my generation's approach to love and relationships and modern romance. And on top of all of that, we see this challenge with attachment and avoidance consistently. We have people who are scared of getting attached because they're scared of having their heart broken. So they avoid and play that avoidant role in a relationship. And there are those that go in full throttle and get attached and then get their heart broken. What would be your advice in terms of the best brain approach to building a healthy relationship?
38:13 Daniel Amen? Well, it's one, get your brain right. I wrote another book called The Brain in Love. And chapter six is how to have a first date from a neuroscience perspective.
38:25 Jay Shetty? Oh, I love this.
38:25 Daniel Amen? How you can screen the other person.
38:28 Jay Shetty? I'm gonna have to make a video about this.
38:29 Daniel Amen? If you're going to be, if this person's going to be a good partner or not a good.
38:34 Jay Shetty? Can you walk us through it? Bits of it that you can remember?
38:37 Daniel Amen? So it's pay attention, be a good listener, learn their family story. Because they'll tell you about the history of drug and alcohol abuse or physical abuse, violence. Look for attachments. And, and then watch their habits and know going into it, new love is a drug. New love works on the nucleus succumbens or the pleasure centers of your brain. And it works just like cocaine. So you have to be suspicious of new love.
39:18 Daniel Amen? Because you're not going to see things clearly for probably three or four months. And so just know that and, and be ready for it.
39:32 Jay Shetty? And when people are telling you about their family history, which I think is such a great example, I couldn't agree more with you. When people are telling you about their family history, how is that corresponding or what parallels are drawn between that and then their current habits? What are the kind of things that you're sensing? So let's say someone had a childhood where their parents were always arguing or not getting along. How would that, how is that seen trends, pattern wise, to affect people today?
39:58 Daniel Amen? Well, people do what their parents did, not what they told, how they told them how to be.
40:07 Jay Shetty? Yes.
40:08 Daniel Amen? And so you just are gonna, if they don't work on it, then that's going to be a source of potential pain. And, you know, if you're gonna have babies together, you really want to understand the history because, you know, things do tend to run in families. Now, if you date one of my children for more than four months, I scan you. I'm not kidding about this. It's sort of like meet the parents, but worse.
40:41 Jay Shetty? Bakula, this is crazy. I love this. And do you have a scanner at home? Like, is this like, is there a special room?
40:48 Daniel Amen? You haven't seen the clinic. Don't you want to see the clinic? And, you know, my oldest daughter married someone whose mother had paranoid schizophrenia and whose father killed himself. Now, did that mean I didn't want her to marry him? No. But if he had vulnerabilities, I wanted to make sure he was open to taking care of them. And, and he was. And he and I, actually, he's a professor at Corbin College now. And we wrote an online high school course called Brain Thrive by 25, where we teach kids to fall in love with their brain and how to take care of their brain.
41:31 Daniel Amen? So that early scan set up sort of a lifelong partnership.
41:37 Daniel Amen? For us. In fact, you know, I told you about my first wife.
41:40 Jay Shetty? Yeah.
41:40 Daniel Amen? She tried to kill herself. I got divorced about eighteen years ago. And I told myself, if I ever got married again, I'm scanning her.
41:48 Jay Shetty? Wow.
41:49 Daniel Amen? Before we go to the next level. And when I met Tana, I just loved her right away. And I knew that was cocaine.
41:55 Jay Shetty? Yeah.
41:56 Daniel Amen? And I'm like, two weeks after I met her, I'm like, you know, you haven't seen the clinic. You want to see the clinic? And she was game because she's a nurse, surgical ICU nurse, and she had a great brain. But by putting brain health toward the center of our relationship,
42:10 Jay Shetty? Hmm.
42:11 Daniel Amen? it really helps us.
42:12 Jay Shetty? Hundred percent.
42:12 Daniel Amen? Right? When you're... And she grew up in some serious craziness, right? So I'm not advocating looking for the perfect person because there are very few of them. But I knew with her history that she could really deal with a little bit of EMDR. It's a psychotherapy for past trauma. And it was so helpful to her. And we like never fight with each other.
42:37 Jay Shetty? Wow.
42:38 Daniel Amen? And it's, it's awesome. But, you know, if, if you go out on a first date with somebody and they have three drinks to manage their anxiety, that's a bad sign.
42:48 Jay Shetty? Hmm.
42:49 Daniel Amen? You know, I know that was sort of in this, in the new movie, A Star is Born. That was, you know, part of it. But that just means you're going to suffer. Um, I'm not a fan of alcohol and marijuana, just because of what I've seen them do to the brain.
43:04 Jay Shetty? Yeah, I'd love to dive into that, actually. And before we do, I was, I was gonna say, the reason why I'm finding this so fascinating is so many of these were subconsciously my ways of observing my relationship to be with my wife right now. But I never even knew about it from this perspective. So one of the first things I asked my wife about was her family and her relationships with the family. And my wife comes from an incredible family. Her parents are extremely respectful to each other, have a wonderful relationship. My wife has an incredible relationship with her father. And I knew that that was going to play into our relationship. And these were almost truths that I was looking for unknowingly, without knowing that there was science to back it up. So for me, it's...
43:44 Daniel Amen? Right, it's chronic fighting.
43:46 Jay Shetty? Yeah.
43:46 Daniel Amen? Is a sign that something's not right in their brains. Yeah. Right, because ultimately you you marry someone who becomes your best friend or your worst enemy. And if you're not acting respectfully, sometimes it's because the brain doesn't work hard enough. And people become conflict driven as a way to turn it back on. They don't know it. It's not conscious. It's Pavlovian. Other times their brain has an OCD pattern, obsessive compulsive pattern. And if things don't go their way, they can't stand it. And so in order for you to get them to do what you want, you actually have to tell them the opposite of it. And it's just, it's a lot of work. Yeah.
44:28 Daniel Amen? But you can balance the brain and and I did a study once called the Couples From Hell Study. We studied 500 couples who failed marital therapy and wanted to be together. And eighty five percent of them, one or both of them were struggling. Right? I mean, if if people just buy this really super simple idea, your brain is involved in everything you do. How you think, how you feel, how you act, how you interact. Then why wouldn't a marital therapist, the first thing he or she should do is scan their brain and go. Is it healthy? Does it work too hard? How can I balance that? But no marital therapy program teaches anything about the brain.
45:13 Daniel Amen? They're all teaching these outdated outdated. Methods of better communication and problem solving. But if you don't have a computer that'll run the software program, it's not going to work.
45:28 Daniel Amen? So we're actually not dealing with the root of the issue at all. We're not dealing with it at all. And the issue is always in those four circles, right? There's a biology, a psychology. And so the brain Excel format, B is biology. The rational mind is psychology. Attachments is the social circle. And I or inspiration is the spiritual circle. It's why are you here? Why do you care? And we are wearing out our pleasure centers in the brain by constantly hitting. Getting these little dopamine hits from our cell phones, from social media, from. People screaming at each other on television. And we're wearing out our pleasure centers, which is why depression is so high in our country now.
46:12 Jay Shetty? Let's dive into that a bit more. I've boxed the marijuana and alcohol conversation, which I really want to get on to. I've shelved it for now, we'll bring it back out in a bit. But this is so, so important because I think too many people are talking about this and they may not have the actual expertise and the insight that you do. What do you mean by our pleasure centers being worn out? What does that actually mean? And how is that leading to depression? How is that leading to the challenges we see in society?
46:37 Daniel Amen? So you have these two areas deep in your brain. They're part of a big group of cells called the basal ganglia. And within them are called the nucleus accumbens. And when you push on them and you push on them with the neurotransmitter dopamine, you feel good. You know, sort of like the jackpot that I said when I first started doing scans. It's like, I love this. I love it when people get, well, I have meaning, I have purpose. My education is working to benefit these people. Well, cocaine does that too. Oh, I love that. Pornography can do it. A scary movie can do it. Jumping out of an airplane can do it.
47:17 Daniel Amen? And the more you do it, the more it begins to wear out your pleasure centers. So it takes more and more in order to get the same response. And so in Feel Better Fast and Make It Last, I talk about the dopamine dump versus the dopamine drip. Right? So you want to drip dopamine onto your nucleus accumbens. So that way it keeps them stimulated and happy as opposed to the dump, the scary movie, pornography, cocaine. Because if you hit them too often, and interestingly, people who are obese, then it doesn't react like other people. It's sluggish.
47:58 Daniel Amen? It's slow to react than if you're at a healthy weight. Because those really high calorie, high sugar, high fat foods.
48:10 Daniel Amen? When it hits it over and over with dopamine, it just begins to wear them out.
48:16 Jay Shetty? Wow.
48:16 Daniel Amen? So you need more and more
48:18 Jay Shetty? Got it.
48:19 Daniel Amen? to feel anything at all. And, you know, having treated many drug addicts through the years, as the drug addicts tell you, initially, the drugs made them feel awesome. And then they use the drugs to prevent the depression. So just so they would attempt
48:33 Jay Shetty? Yeah.
48:34 Daniel Amen? to feel normal. But then, you know, the addiction cycle kicked in and they were hooked. So you want to always protect your pleasure centers. And with social media, I did a show with Dr. Oz on Tinder. And, you know, swipe left, swipe right. And for the person who is getting lots of positive responses, his brain actually looked happier. But many of the other ones, their brain started to look depressed when they weren't getting the response they had hoped for.
49:05 Jay Shetty? Yeah, I love that you brought that up. I saw that. I highly recommend it. You can go and check it out with Dr. Oz and Dr. Amen. I highly recommend it. It was brilliant. And it's so fun to see it because what's the difference then between the dopamine dump, the dopamine drip, and then purpose? Because with you having said what you said, that when you were able to heal people or you saw that breakthrough, we all get it. When I live my purpose and I create some content or I see a breakthrough for someone through the work that I'm doing, what's then the difference between that?
49:38 Daniel Amen? You're getting this constant drip that keeps your pleasure centers healthy.
49:45 Jay Shetty? Right.
49:45 Daniel Amen? Plus, you're not doing anything that's damaging
49:47 Jay Shetty? Right.
49:48 Daniel Amen? them. I mean, you can keep it going on and on. But say, for example, you're a rock star and you get the high from being on stage over and over again. You don't feel right because too much dopamine has hit your nucleus accumbens. And I have a prayer for the young stars I see. It's, dear God, please don't allow me to be famous before my frontal lobes have developed. And your frontal lobes really don't develop in girls until they're about twenty five, and in boys until they're about twenty eight. So you see why all these young stars get into so much trouble because they don't have
50:31 Daniel Amen? the forethought, the judgment, the impulse control, it's all prefrontal cortex stuff, to manage their nucleus accumbens. And so there's this,
50:40 Jay Shetty? Oh wow.
50:41 Daniel Amen? Think of it as the elephant and the rider. So your pleasure center is really the elephant. I mean, it drives you toward whatever behavior. The prefrontal cortex is the rider, and it directs you. So when the rider is inefficient, or ineffective, or it's not there, it just ruins your life. So you need a strong prefrontal cortex to break your pleasure centers, or you end up doing all sorts of completely stupid things.
51:13 Jay Shetty? Wow, that's amazing. And for women, it's twenty five on average, men, it's twenty eight. That sums up so much.
51:20 Daniel Amen? So I never recommend, would never let my children go too far from home to go to college, because they're right in the middle of massive brain development. The most important brain development occurs between about fifteen and twenty five. And people think, oh, it's all from zero to three.
51:41 Jay Shetty? Yeah, wow.
51:42 Daniel Amen? And it's like your prefrontal cortex is getting myelinated, which means it's really developing from fifteen to twenty five.
51:50 Jay Shetty? Yeah, the reason why this is so current for me right now is I've been speaking a lot with the social media platforms of YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook, because even a lot of creators who are extremely young, most of them younger than me too, as a creator myself, a lot of creators are going through burnout, and are going through feelings of depression and anxiety because of having had, A, rocketed accelerated fame early on in life, and B, having to keep up with the pace of social media as a creator to continue to create that level.
52:23 Daniel Amen? So their pleasure centers are worn out when they don't have frontal lobes to modulate it. But what you did, I mean, you spent time Meditating and really developing your brain. We haven't talked about that, but I've actually published three studies on a Kundalini Yoga
52:39 Jay Shetty? Oh, wow.
52:39 Daniel Amen? meditation called Kirtan Kriya.
52:41 Jay Shetty? Yeah.
52:42 Daniel Amen? And it activated the prefrontal cortex and it calmed down the limbic or the emotional brain. So it had that very nice balancing effect. And it's like a 12-minute meditation, right? This isn't hard. Or my favorite meditation, a loving kindness meditation, developing practices to balance your brain. It should just be part of school. But unfortunately, you know, school really hasn't been redesigned in 110 years. And I often think of Paul Simon's song Kodachrome, which starts off with, "When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school, it's a wonder I can think at all."
53:24 Daniel Amen? And that's why we developed our high school course, because come on, it's like, teach them practical things like how to manage the organ that's going to run everything in their life.
53:34 Jay Shetty? Absolutely. And then, okay, now you've got me, now you've got me thinking of a million things. The next thing was around that. So the research that you've done on meditation and the brain, what are the specifics? So you say Kirtan Kriya, they have Kundalini Yoga. What were the direct, a bit more detail around the direct impacts of that meditation on the brain? What was actually happening?
53:56 Daniel Amen? So we did three studies on it. And the first study, what we found, activation of the prefrontal cortex. And we're not the only one. They've done a lot of studies at the University of Wisconsin. And calming of the emotional brain. It also dropped activity in the parietal lobes. That's the top back part of your brain. That's sort of where you sense space and time. So during that time, the 12 minutes, seems like it actually went by in about three. So things become timeless. And then we did another study at the University of Pennsylvania and found that people who did it for eight weeks.
54:37 Daniel Amen? Two months, had stronger resting frontal lobe function. And that's like the holy grail
54:44 Jay Shetty? Yeah.
54:44 Daniel Amen? of brain science is if you want anything, you want big fat frontal lobes. Because that's what makes us human. Thirty percent of the human brain is the prefrontal cortex. Eleven percent of the chimpanzee brain, seven percent of your dog's brain, three percent of the cat's brain. Right, this is the part of us that makes us human. And it's called the executive part of the brain because it's about focus and forethought and judgment and impulse control and organization, planning, empathy, learning from the mistakes you make. So it's where you play chess. It's where you're not just thinking about the moment, oh, I can take your rook.
55:25 Daniel Amen? It's where you're thinking five steps ahead, which is how we have survived. As a species, we just don't, we don't have to be instinct like the squirrel. We can plan not just for this winter, but for ten forward. And when your prefrontal cortex is damaged.
55:47 Jay Shetty? You can't.
55:48 Daniel Amen? You're just in the moment. And people go, oh, but I want to be, you know, and, and a lot of people love the book, The Power of Now. And I actually love the book, but I hate the title.
55:56 Jay Shetty? Right.
55:57 Daniel Amen? Because if you're always in the power of now, you're screwed. Because you need to be now and later, which is why the title of the book, Feel Better Fast and Make It Last.
56:08 Jay Shetty? Yeah.
56:08 Daniel Amen? Is so important. People are too into feel better now, but not later.
56:13 Jay Shetty? Yeah, and let's dive into that too. This is, if you're listening and watching this right now, if you're just listening, you can't see my face. I'm blown away. Uh, I'm, I'm in awe because I feel like there's so many, cliches are not the right word, but there's so many things that are thrown about in this world right now, about these themes and topics. And we take them as reality, but then getting to sit with you, and I almost feel like now I need to go and buy all your books and read all of them.
56:37 Daniel Amen? Thank you.
56:37 Jay Shetty? Uh, not just this one. That's genuinely how I feel right now. Like I'm about to walk out of here and ask my team to order every single one of your books. And I feel like I have to sit with them for, for weeks. Because I I feel like you're giving me such a refreshing perspective on so many things that I feel I know subconsciously, things that I've known without the backing of science, but to hear that from your perspective is is fascinating. One of the big ones for me is purpose is such a big part of my life. I became a monk because of purpose. I left being a monk because of purpose. I married my wife because of purpose. I do what I'm doing right now with you because of meaning and purpose. Is purpose critical to happiness in life? Or can someone be happy without purpose?
57:20 Daniel Amen? You know, they probably can. It's just a heck of a lot easier to be happy with purpose. Because we are a relational species. And purpose can take a number of forms. It can be helping other people. It can be developing personal skills, like I have a ping pong coach. Because I love playing. It keeps my brain young. It makes me happy. Or it can be doing something massively important at work. My favorite book, or at least it's in the top five, is Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl.
57:58 Jay Shetty? Yeah, absolutely.
57:59 Daniel Amen? And he was younger than Freud, but they were competitors in the sense that Freudian psychoanalysis was very powerful in psychiatry. But he developed a kind of therapy around logos therapy or meaning therapy. And I'd so much rather talk to my patients about meaning than their love relationship with their mother. Right? That just it just never went anywhere with me and that whole thing. But getting people into why you want to be well, why are you on the planet? What is your deepest sense of purpose? And too often in the younger generation, nobody's asked them that question.
58:43 Daniel Amen? And so now they go, well, I want to be Jeff Bezos and I want to be the richest person in the world. And as soon as you do that, you will set yourself up to fall. Right? And that is one of the origin thoughts of depression. And this is what the bad part of social media. It's you start comparing yourself to people that are actually not completely real. And because you can't live up, you feel less than. And then that drives depression, along with, oh, by the way, you're eating crap. You have low vitamin D level. Your hormones aren't good because of the toxins, your mother, toxic lotion your mother's
59:26 Daniel Amen? put on your body. Right? I mean, it's more complicated than that. But whenever you compare yourself, you know, I could go, well, I haven't won a Nobel Prize, so my life is meaningless. Well, that's just nuts. Right? The person who won the Nobel Prize in psychiatry did it for prefrontal lobotomies. Right? Putting an ice pick up above your eyes and wiping out your frontal lobe. So it's, it's not, I'm not pining for the Nobel Prize. Right? The thing that gives me joy and meaning and purpose is not being better than other people. It's being the best I can be and having the most meaningful existence. I learned that.
1:00:09 Daniel Amen? So when I was in college, I was generally the top student in my class, but I helped everybody else. I was never about, I need to be better than you. I wanted us both to be our best. And oh, by the way, if I helped you study, it's reinforcing the information for me. So Hans Selye was a very famous stress researcher. And he, it's a term he called egoistic altruism. It's mean, when I help you, I'm also helping me.
1:00:39 Jay Shetty? Yeah, absolutely. And, and is there such a thing in the brain as completely selfless altruism? Like, does the opposite of that exist? And what does that feeling look like?
1:00:49 Daniel Amen? You know, I don't know. I always, there's a phrase I say often is we're all out for ourselves. It's just the more sophisticated you are, the harder it is to tell. I recently adopted, um, my two nieces got taken by Child Protective Services in Oregon into foster care, which sent me, I know you talked about vulnerability. It sent me into a panic and I'm like, no, I'm not okay with this. But my wife grew up in a home where there was a lot of addiction. So I'm rescuing the kids and she's like, no, I don't want to be part of that world.
1:01:34 Daniel Amen? And so it was one of our very few fights. And so what we agreed to do was wrap services around their mother, my wife's half sister. And then within five months, the kids were out of foster care and now we care for them. And people go, oh, well, that's so kind of you. And it is kind. But it's awesome for me.
1:01:57 Jay Shetty? Yeah.
1:01:57 Daniel Amen? Right? When I see their report cards and they're getting straight A's. When I see them fall in love with their brains, that turns on the dopamine dripping to my nucleus accumbens and you know, I see them do a ward. Yes, okay. So that's a dopamine dump, but you don't want too many of them, right? And it's, it's meaningful, it's purposeful, but it's a huge blessing.
1:02:23 Jay Shetty? Hmm, hmm, absolutely. Yeah. So, yeah, that one's I've always fascinated by is, is, you know, what is selflessness and what is the definition of selflessness? Because I actually don't think it's, I don't think it's bad as, and I think you agree from what you just said. I don't think it's bad to want to do good for others and, and feel good about it. But almost we sometimes look at that in a negative way and say, oh, well, you're only doing it to help yourself.
1:02:47 Daniel Amen? Well, you know, they're always negative people. And you know, I think CNN and Fox have done. More to promote mental illness. With the constant negativity, fighting, looking for something to be wrong. And then they train the minds of the millions of people who watch to look for what is wrong, which is a bad mental discipline, rather than looking for what is right.
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1:05:12 Jay Shetty? Absolutely, absolutely. I want to go back and pick up off the shelf the exciting topic you brought up because I thought, oh yeah, let's talk about that because I have some very similar views to you, but I want to hear your perspective around marijuana and alcohol, specifically marijuana. We're in L.A. right now and obviously it's legalized.
1:05:30 Daniel Amen? Pot dispensaries.
1:05:32 Jay Shetty? Absolutely.
1:05:33 Daniel Amen? Lots of corners here in L.A.
1:05:35 Jay Shetty? You can go, yeah, you can go. Get an Uber as quick as you can go to dispensary.
1:05:39 Daniel Amen? So I have no dog in this fight. In fact, I make more money if you smoke pot than if you don't smoke pot. You are way more likely to come see me. And people just don't understand the research. They go, oh, well, there's not enough research. No, marijuana increases the risk of psychosis 450% if teenagers start smoking pot. That is not a good thing. And the reason I sort of turned negative on it was I've done 150,000 spec scans. It looks at blood flow and activity. It makes the brain look toxic. It does. I published
1:06:19 Daniel Amen? a study in the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease on 1,000 pot smokers. Every area of their brain was lower. And then just a few months ago, I published the world's largest imaging study on 62,454 scans on how the brain ages. So we looked at the brain from nine months to 105, and it's got fascinating aging patterns like it's not really done until about 25 in girls and 28 in boys. And then we looked, well, what are the factors that accelerate aging? On the top of the list was schizophrenia. If you have schizophrenia, your brain looks worse than everybody else. The second worst thing was marijuana. It was worse than smoking. It was worse than alcohol. I'm not a fan.
1:07:03 Daniel Amen? And I see so many people go, but I feel better, I concentrate better, I'm more creative. And I'm like, there's so many other ways to do it that don't have a potentially toxic impact on your brain. Now, having said that, I'm a huge fan and I think it should be legal. You're really gonna put potheads in jail? You're gonna sleep deprive them, chronically stress them, let them hang out with people who do bad things? That's insane. They're really separate issues.
1:07:35 Jay Shetty? Yeah.
1:07:35 Daniel Amen? Right?
1:07:36 Jay Shetty? It's not glamorize.
1:07:37 Daniel Amen? It's not glamorize and everybody thinks, and CBD now is like, they're giving it to their dog, for goodness sake. And I worry, you know, cocaine used to be in Coca-Cola.
1:07:49 Jay Shetty? Yeah.
1:07:49 Daniel Amen? And opiates used to be the antidepressant. And when Xanax came out onto the market, it was called mommy's little helper. And all of those things have caused disasters in our country and we're, we're setting ourselves up again. It's sort of like 20 years ago, alcohol was a health food.
1:08:10 Jay Shetty? Yeah.
1:08:10 Daniel Amen? Right? I gotta have my two glasses of wine a day because it's good for my heart. But we clearly know now, it's related to seven different kinds of cancer. Even if you're only a mild to moderate drinking, any drinking shows an increased risk for cancer. So, I don't smoke pot and I don't drink. Now my wife drinks, like two or three glasses of wine a month, where when I first met her, she drank considerably more than that. Never a problem, but I don't want it to have a negative impact on her health.
1:08:44 Jay Shetty? Yeah, you've all heard it. There we go. Don't have to just hear my perspective.
1:08:48 Daniel Amen? We're gonna get haters.
1:08:49 Jay Shetty? No, but I'm so glad, no, but I'm glad we went. I mean, who better to speak to than someone who's looking at the direct effect? And it comes back to that same point that you brought up earlier around, if I go take that one back off the shelf of now versus now and later. And it comes back to that because I experimented with drugs throughout my teens, absolutely everything under the sun, never got addicted, never did something consistent. Enough, but always wanted to take one or two tries of everything. And then gave it all up at eighteen and never met. I haven't drank alcohol or smoked anything or or taken anything.
1:09:22 Daniel Amen? And you feel like you're missing something.
1:09:24 Jay Shetty? Not at all, not at all, not at all. I feel amazing and I get to be creative and my whole life is creative and I get to travel the world and.
1:09:31 Daniel Amen? And people go, well, if I go to a party, I'm anxious.
1:09:34 Jay Shetty? Yeah.
1:09:34 Daniel Amen? Well, learn how to deal with the anxiety. Rather than have to medicate the anxiety because that's now, but not later.
1:09:43 Jay Shetty? Right. Yeah.
1:09:44 Daniel Amen? And, you know, and when you're around and you go to a party where there are a lot of people drinking, you know, for me, I generally just leave because they're sort of stupid. And they're like saying things that it's like, did you really say that? That's like so rude. Why would you say that? Because it drops frontal lobe function and it drops cerebellar function and your cerebellum is the major processing organ in your brain and you don't want to be slow.
1:10:09 Jay Shetty? Hmm. Absolutely. Absolutely. And this is what we're saying. I'm not, I'm not judging anyone who does either of these things and I'm not criticizing anyone. It's just making yourself aware. It's just becoming more aware and that's, that's all I, that's why I asked the question, not to judge anyone, not to criticize anyone, not because I think I'm better than anyone for not having done it. Just to be aware. And when I was young, the thing that made me become aware was my friend and I went to see his aunt who happened to be a heroin addict. And she had a fit in front of us. And that was the day I was like, okay, I, I cannot do this any longer because actually seeing someone who is addicted to heroin
1:10:51 Jay Shetty? have a fit in front of me was far more telling to me than any study or any research or whatever it was, just seeing that and experiencing that was just like, okay, I need to stop messing around in this space.
1:11:03 Daniel Amen? So I was at the White House last year about this time. And all of my liberal friends go, you'd really go to the White House? And I'm like, it's the executive branch of government. And we were, they asked me to help them think about the issue of the opiate epidemic and prison reform. And so I was really honored.
1:11:25 Jay Shetty? Of course.
1:11:26 Daniel Amen? And my input was, we need to develop a national brain health program to teach people to fall in love with their brains. And that's why you don't drink, or that's why you don't do drugs, because you love your brain and you want it to be healthy.
1:11:50 Jay Shetty? Hmm, absolutely. I couldn't agree more. And congratulations, by the way. That's incredible. And I'm happy that people like yourself are being involved in those discussions and decisions. Because like you said again, if you don't see it, I mean, how can you tell anyone what to do? Amazing. I wanted to start touching on a specific area that I had here was around the I in the new Monica's inspiration. And I wanted to talk about why is it that inspiration is often so short-lived instead of long-lasting? Like, we feel like even on social media now, people watch a video and they feel inspired, or people hear a speech and they feel inspired. And people even hear this podcast today and they'll feel inspired. But then the change doesn't happen.
1:12:34 Jay Shetty? There's no application, there's no practice. Why is that inspiration short-lived? And how do you make inspiration last into action and application?
1:12:42 Daniel Amen? Yeah, so you have to turn them into habits.
1:12:44 Jay Shetty? Mm-hmm.
1:12:45 Daniel Amen? And, because we're habitual creatures.
1:12:47 Jay Shetty? Mm-hmm.
1:12:48 Daniel Amen? And if you can turn the good things. And so, you know, it's the smallest thing I can do today that will make the biggest difference. Start every day with, today is going to be a great day.
1:13:01 Jay Shetty? Right, right.
1:13:01 Daniel Amen? Um, what one purposeful thing will I do? Today, and you know, people spend more time planning their vacations than planning their lives. This is a little odd. And so I'd love everyone to do the one-page miracle that's in the book. It's, so what do I want in my relationship? So for example, with my wife, I want a kind, caring, loving, supportive, passionate relationship. I always want that. I don't always feel like that.
1:13:36 Jay Shetty? Yeah.
1:13:36 Daniel Amen? Right? But if I get my eyes on that, when I get that rude thought that comes into my head, I just filter it with, will this get you what you want? And no, it won't get me what I want. So I inhibit it. Now, how can I inhibit thoughts? Well, if I'm drinking, I'm less likely to inhibit it. If I'm smoking pot, I'm less likely to inhibit it. If I haven't slept, I'm less likely to inhibit it. And so it's the brain health habits. It's then the clear direction, I want this. And so, well, then how do I get that?
1:14:19 Daniel Amen? And that's where I begin to break free of the bad habits. Plus, I published two studies that showed as your weight goes up, the physical size and function of your brain goes down. So you need to be a little bit horrified by, you know, I always think with motivation is know what you want, but also be clear with what you don't want. Um, because pain is actually a bigger motivator for people than pleasure often.
1:14:49 Jay Shetty? Hundred percent. And that's what I love about this book. I love how strategic the book is and how practical it is. And that's when I was speaking to you earlier, I love the fact that there are activities, exercises, questions that people can use to reflect on themselves in the book. And, and that's unique because often we find that when, when books are written from a medical perspective, it can be quite hard to digest, whereas when I was reading through this, it didn't feel that way at all. So. Anyone who's watching and listening right now, if you're looking for tools, tips, practical habits to actually break through, then please, please, please go and get the book because it's going to help you do that. So just, just thanking you for actually having gone through that, gone to that stage. So now we finish every interview, I will ask you if there's anything I missed,
1:15:32 Jay Shetty? but we do finish every interview with what I call the final five, which is my final five questions, usually rapid fire, quick fire in the final five minutes. So I have yours here. If they're not rapid fire, I'm not upset because I, I think your insights are beyond one to three words and I'm okay with that. The first question I have, which is, which is from the book, but I loved it was, what is the quickest way to break a panic attack?
1:15:55 Daniel Amen? So four simple things. The first thing is breathe. You gotta take a big breath and take at least twice as long to blow it out. That'll trigger a parasympathetic response in your body to calm you down. The next thing is what are you thinking? Write it down. Because often fortune telling, negative thoughts drive panic attack. You're predicting the worst possible thing and then your brain is just masterful at making it worse. So killing the ant. The third thing is don't leave. If you're starting to have a panic attack at work, don't leave. Because if you leave, the panic will now start to control you.
1:16:38 Daniel Amen? And it could actually turn into something called agoraphobia where you can't even leave your home because you're worried you're going to have a panic attack. And then the fourth thing, if all those things aren't working, there's some simple supplements that can be really helpful. Thiamine, GABA, ashwagandha, huge fan of things like that to just help calm you down. And I talk about them in the book.
1:17:01 Jay Shetty? Absolutely. Amazing. Great piece of advice. Love that. Second question is, what are the simplest food we can add to our diets to nourish our brain?
1:17:08 Daniel Amen? Colorful fruits and vegetables. So not Skittles when I say colorful or M and M's.
1:17:15 Jay Shetty? M and M's.
1:17:16 Daniel Amen? No, no, no. But try when you're in the produce department to pick as many colors as you can because they're loaded with antioxidants. Also, scratch the low fat diet because 60% of the solid weight of your brain is fat. Avocados are God's butter. I'm a huge fan of wild fish. The societies that eat the most fish actually have the lowest incidence of depression.
1:17:46 Jay Shetty? Amazing. Great advice. So succinct as well. I'm impressed. This is brilliant. Third question is, what's, where does ego sit in all of this? And how much have you studied ego at all, if at all?
1:17:57 Daniel Amen? Well, I actually like Freud's concept of id, ego and superego. And I really think of them about prefrontal cortex. So when your prefrontal cortex is low, or you are young, it's just not developed. That's the child in you that takes over. And in our society, the four-year-old rules, you know, whether it's the White House, or Congress, or the media, or, you know, just everyday society, it's, we're way too impulsive. And there are way too many temper tantrums going on. The ego is really healthy frontal lobe function.
1:18:38 Daniel Amen? So you're 28 or 40, and you're good to your brain, and it helps you make good decisions and be thoughtful. This superego, Freud's concept, is really when your frontal lobes work too hard. And you get, you're rigid, you're inflexible, and you're harsh to yourself and to others. So balance your brain, balance the ego in a good way.
1:19:05 Jay Shetty? Brilliant. Question number four, you brought it up slightly earlier. What's your best advice for anyone who has party anxiety? Or social anxiety in those kind of circles?
1:19:16 Daniel Amen? So it's so common, and it's actually one of the most common anxieties on the planet. And it's why people drink. It's why people do drugs, because they feel uncomfortable around other people. And, and I think you'll like this, learning how to manage your anxiety through things like hypnosis, guided imagery, meditation. It just should be part of everything we do. Along with learning how to not believe every stupid thought you have. In the book, I have one of my favorite rules. It's called the 1840-60 rule, which says, when you're 18, you worry about what everybody's thinking of you.
1:19:59 Daniel Amen? And when you're forty, you don't give a damn what anybody thinks about you. And when you're sixty, you realize, nobody has been thinking about you at all. People spend their days worrying and thinking about themselves, not you. So it's really hard for my paranoid schizophrenics to get this concept, because they think the whole world revolves around them. It just doesn't. And if you can get it, that a negative look from someone else may mean nothing more than they are constipated. You don't know. And other people are anxious too. And so often, if you're at a party and you're feeling anxious, go, you know,
1:20:44 Daniel Amen? I just feel anxious sometimes, you know? And the other person's likely to go, oh, you know, I'm that way too. And then all of a sudden, everybody's anxiety goes down. When you believe you have to present yourself as that perfect person, nobody can relate to you, because nobody's perfect.
1:21:02 Jay Shetty? Yeah, so true. That's a great piece of advice. As long, as soon as you open up and say, hey, I'm struggling with this, someone else has the permission to say that too. Absolutely. I love that. And fifth and final question was actually all around what we spoke about before, which was about what I'm fascinated by you and when we spoke earlier as well, is your ability to bring together science and spirituality, your ability to understand both dimensions and both approaches to understanding our human selves and condition. And you spoke about earlier, we were talking about death. And I'd love for you to reiterate that story that we were speaking about earlier and just elaborate more on what you have found in terms of all your studies, et cetera, through spirituality coming out.
1:21:45 Daniel Amen? We are all spiritual beings. And as a psychiatrist, if I don't understand your deepest sense of meaning and purpose, why you believe you're on the planet, and what happens to your soul after you die. Um, then I don't really understand all of you, which is my goal.
1:22:06 Jay Shetty? Hmm.
1:22:06 Daniel Amen? And so I told you before, last week I had a friend that died. And he told his partner that she had to let him go because he's been invited. Uh, and where he's going, he's seen and it's beautiful. And um, it was nineteen seventy seven, I read a book called Life After Life by Ray Moody. And it was about people who had near death experiences. And it gave me a really deep sense of peace that I don't believe I'm here by random chance. Now, I know a lot of my science friends, you know, they're a hundred percent on evolution and we're all here by random chance. They just forget the second law of physics.
1:22:50 Daniel Amen? The second law of physics is entropy. Things go from order to disorder in the universe. They don't go from disorder to order. And I'm sorry, I have a brand new granddaughter and I don't think Haven's here by random chance. It just, it makes, I think it actually takes more faith to believe we're here without any creative design or intelligent design um than to believe that our interaction today happened out of randomness.
1:23:23 Jay Shetty? Hmm, I love that perspective. It definitely, in my sense is to think things are undesigned is actually generally pushing our faith much further. I couldn't agree more. That's really well said, really beautifully said. Daniel, it's been absolutely incredible. I've learned so much today. I genuinely mean this and I'm not lying. As soon as I walk out of this room, I'm gonna ask my team to order every single one of your books. I feel like I'm gonna dive deep into all of them and I feel like I want to continue the conversation offline and back on the podcast anytime you like, because I can only think that anyone who's watched and listened to this today has been benefited in some way. And I know that when they go and buy the book, they'll be benefited in an even bigger way. So I highly, highly recommend it. Is there anything that I haven't touched on that you really feel like I should have asked you, could have asked you,
1:24:08 Jay Shetty? would have asked you and, and you'd like to touch on?
1:24:11 Daniel Amen? You know, the only, well, two things.
1:24:14 Jay Shetty? Yeah, let's do it.
1:24:16 Daniel Amen? I finished the book with a chapter on love.
1:24:20 Jay Shetty? Hmm.
1:24:20 Daniel Amen? That you don't do the right thing because you should.
1:24:23 Jay Shetty? Mm hmm.
1:24:24 Daniel Amen? You do the right thing because you love yourself. And I've just thought more and more. One of my other books is called The Brain Warrior's Way. Because my wife and I wrote it together. And we just believe we're in a war for the health of our brain. Alzheimer's is expected to triple. Thirty-six percent of teenage girls suffer from depression. That if you love yourself and you love your planet and you love your country and you love your world, that ultimately doing the right thing is not because you should do it, but because of love.
1:25:07 Daniel Amen? And if you do it out of love, it's just so much easier to do. The other thing, just to touch on for a second is-
1:25:16 Jay Shetty? Can I, before we get it, is there another thing separate? Is that different? Can we go into the one you just mentioned? Because I'm fascinated by it too. In the Vedas that I studied as a monk, it talks about the three types of motivation. And the lowest motivation is ignorance or fear. The middle motivation is duty or obligation or responsibility, because you have to. And the highest motivation is love, as you rightly said. So I couldn't agree more. Do you think, though, that that begs the question that the biggest challenge we all have is that we don't love ourselves? Like, we don't love our brain? Like, we just, we're so inundated. We're trying to be that which we're not or letting the opinions of others affect how we are and our self-belief.
1:25:59 Jay Shetty? And that's actually what's affecting our brain health the most is we're not looking at it through the lens you're recommending and suggesting.
1:26:06 Daniel Amen? I think that's exactly right.
1:26:08 Jay Shetty? Yeah.
1:26:08 Daniel Amen? And, you know, when I turned 50, my doctor wanted me to have a colonoscopy. I asked him why he didn't want to look at my brain. Wasn't the other end just as important? But we don't screen it, we don't look at it, and ultimately, we don't love it. You can't let a child hit a soccer ball with their head and say you love that child or that child's brain. It's just not possible when you understand the physics of it.
1:26:36 Jay Shetty? I've hit a lot of soccer balls with my head. All of them splashed before my eyes. I love soccer, I'm a huge, huge football fan, so.
1:26:44 Daniel Amen? Yeah, okay. So if, and I tell, because I have done 225 NFL players, I mean, Hall of Fame players, like Terry Bradshaw, and if you're gonna do it, because we're always gonna have dangerous jobs, that's a dangerous job.
1:27:02 Daniel Amen? If you're gonna do it, you should be putting your brain in a healing environment all the way along, not just when you retire. See, that's like, doesn't make any sense. Because if you're gonna play, and one of my players signed a $42 million contract, so he's going to play, you have to be rehabilitating it all along, because you'll actually be a better player. Yes, absolutely. And the second thing, you were going to go off, and then I stopped you. The second one is, we had just began to talk about a book I'm just starting to write called The End of Mental Illness. Yes. I'm so tired of the stigma attached to mental health problems. And these, in fact, aren't mental health problems. They're brain health problems.
1:27:47 Daniel Amen? Get your brain right, and your mind will follow. And I just think we have to completely break the paradigm and create a new. So you're saying stress, depression, anxiety, all of these are brain health, they're not mental. Problems. And when you get your brain right, then you realize, um, I have to learn how to manage stress, because stress actually shrinks the major memory center in my brain, which is gonna make me more stressed if I can't remember what I'm supposed to do. That depression clearly is a brain health problem, and there's not one form of depression, and that's the problem.
1:28:31 Daniel Amen? You go to your doctor, and 85% of psychiatric drugs are prescribed by non-psychiatric physicians, or nurse practitioners, or your physician assistant. I'm depressed, so they give you Lexapro.
1:28:44 Jay Shetty? And one size fits all?
1:28:45 Daniel Amen? And one size fits all. When you look at the scans of depressed people, there are at least seven different kinds. And one, yes, can help this pattern, but will actually make that pattern worse. And so, all of these medications have black box warnings because they hurt people. And we can just do so much better. And coming here, I saw someone on Hollywood and Vine who was clearly psychotic. They were talking to themselves, they were having this whole conversation. And I'm thinking to myself, I wonder if he had a brain injury? I wonder if he has an infection in his brain? Lyme disease is rampant in this country for causing psychosis.
1:29:28 Daniel Amen? I wonder if his body's inflamed? And so, easy to call him crazy. Easy to give him an antipsychotic that he won't take because it'll make him feel bad. The harder question, but the better question, is why is he that way? And if I balance his brain, will it help balance his life? In my experience, the answer is yes.
1:29:52 Jay Shetty? Absolutely amazing. Thank you so much, Daniel. Thank you to everyone who's watched and listened. Remember, you can get the book, Feel Better Fast and Make It Last. Go get it right now if you're fascinated by this conversation. We literally just scratched the surface of what this book really takes into account. Make sure you go and get it if you like this conversation. Thank you so much, Daniel, for taking out the time to be here. And I feel like we need to do another 10 because I'd love to dive into all of the different types of clients you've worked with and hear the stories about how you specifically worked with them, with their specific challenges to overcome them. So I think this is the first of many, hopefully. And I'm sure all of you watching and listening will agree. But Daniel, thank you so much for taking out the time.
1:30:33 Daniel Amen? Well, I'm thrilled to be in with you again.
1:30:34 Jay Shetty? Yeah, I really appreciate it. Thank you so much.
1:30:36 Daniel Amen? You're welcome.
1:30:37 Jay Shetty? Amazing.
1:30:43 Jay Shetty? Thank you so much for listening through to the end of that episode. I hope you're gonna share this all across social media. Let people know that you're subscribed to On Purpose. Let me know, post it. Tell me what a difference it's making in your life. I would love to see your thoughts. I can't wait for this incredibly conscious community we're creating of purposeful people. You're now a part of the tribe, a part of the squad. Thank you for being here. I can't wait to share the next episode with you.
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