Pod Insights The School of Greatness 104 Protect Your Brain, Reverse Injury, and Overcome Disorders with Dr. Daniel Amen About this episode "Our goal is to create brain warriors." - Dr. Daniel Amen If you enjoyed this episode, head to www.lewishowes.com/104 for show notes, extras, and more great content. Get more from Lewis! Get my New York Times Bestselling book, Make Money Easy! Get The Greatness Mindset audiobook on SpotifyText Lewis AIYouTubeInstagramWebsiteTiktokFacebookX
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Lewis Howes? This is episode number 104 with Dr. Daniel Amen.
0:07 Lewis Howes? Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur. And each week we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin.
0:33 Lewis Howes? And this episode is with the one and only Dr. Daniel Amen. I'm very excited about interviewing Dr. Amen. And it's all about how to change your brain and how that will change your life. The Breakthrough Program for Conquering Anxiety, Depression, Obsessiveness, Anger, and Impulsiveness. He's a New York Times bestselling author of that book itself. And he is a clinical neuroscientist. And also, he is nationally recognized expert on relationship between the brain and behavior, and on Attention Deficit Disorder, or ADD. He's the author of several books, and again, a New York Times bestselling author, one of the leading guys on the brain in the world.
1:18 Lewis Howes? And fascinating information. I heard him speak at a talk with Dave Asprey recently and said, I gotta get this guy on the podcast. So I'm very excited to dive into this, all about how to improve your brain, and about how to get your brain healthier, and how it impacts a lot of your emotions, a lot of your physical body, and the results that you get in your life. So this is crucial for people that want to have a better life, that want to be more successful, want to be more fit, have better relationships. It's all comes down to how you, your health with your brain. So you want to make sure that you dive into this, take notes, grab this book at the end. We're going to have everything linked up with the show notes. But this is a fascinating topic, and I had a lot of fun connecting with Dr. Amen.
2:03 Lewis Howes? So without further ado, let's go ahead and dive in with the one and only Dr. Daniel Amen.
2:15 Lewis Howes? Welcome back everyone to the School of Greatness Podcast. We've got Dr. Daniel Amen on. Very excited about this and thanks so much for coming on, Doctor.
2:25 Daniel Amen? Well, thanks Louis for having me.
2:27 Lewis Howes? Yeah, I am, you know, I first, I'd heard about you a few times through Michael Fishman, a mutual friend. I think you'd spoken at one of his conferences before and he told me about you, but I never really learned about how inspiring you actually were until I heard you speak at Dave Asprey's event, the Bulletproof Conference that happened here in Pasadena recently. And I was blown away at your information about the brain and how it really affects every part of your life. And I have a, you know, a personal relationship with the brain because my father had a pretty severe car accident and was in a coma for three months from this
3:11 Lewis Howes? car accident. And he's basically never been the same person. He's still alive today, but it's basically a completely different human being. Has a lot of challenges in remembering things. He forgets a lot of memories from the past and specifically forgets a lot of his kids' memories, things like that. And so it's been a challenge for myself and my family to experience this over the last 10 years. It's definitely, I've grown accustomed to it now and have adjusted to it, but for the first three years, it was really hard to understand why the brain affected my father so much when it had that extreme trauma. And so I'm curious to, you know, kind of dive in and ask you questions about this. Not
3:54 Lewis Howes? only that, but really just everything in terms of everyone's behaviors and mental disorder in general, because I guess it's actually more common than we think. And it doesn't have to be an injury per se, but that people have some type of mental disorder frequently. Isn't that correct?
4:12 Daniel Amen? Well, I think the story of your dad is just so instructive. Because your brain is literally involved in everything you do. Everything you do. How you think, how you feel, how you act, how you get along with other people. And when it works right, you work right. And when it's troubled, for whatever reason, toxic exposure, head trauma, drug abuse, a lack of oxygen, that people are sadder, sicker, poorer, less successful. And if you never look at the brain, that's what we do at Amen Clinics, you in fact
4:57 Daniel Amen? never know. And it's really easy to judge someone as bad when in fact they may have a brain issue that can be rehabilitated. I mean, that's sort of the big exciting news in my world is that you're not stuck with the brain you have. You can make it better if you do the right things.
5:23 Lewis Howes? So even if it has some type of illness or it's, you know, going down the wrong track, there are, one, medical things you can do, medicine that you can do, but also holistic things that you talk about in your book, right? On ways to improve it so that it can actually be cured 100% or just get better?
5:41 Daniel Amen? Well, it depends on what you're starting with. I mean, so for example, you know, if we take your dad, if the injury killed certain areas of his brain, well, we really don't have the Lazarus treatment to bring the dead back to life. But we can certainly make struggling tissue better. And I get so excited about the opportunity that we have at Amen Clinics to take troubled brains, put them on brain smart programs that could include lifestyle interventions, diet, nutritional supplements, or medication, or even more sort of wild sophisticated treatments
6:22 Daniel Amen? like hyperbaric oxygen, or transcranial magnetic stimulation, using powerful magnets to stimulate blood flow, and work to improve it to whatever degree is possible.
6:36 Lewis Howes? Right. It may not be 100%, but it could get to 80%.
6:39 Daniel Amen? And you know, often when people have had brain injuries, or they've had strokes, or they have Alzheimer's disease, that now their judgment centers aren't good. And so they make all the wrong dietary decisions.
6:52 Lewis Howes? Yes.
6:53 Daniel Amen? Which only accelerates the damage and the illness.
6:57 Lewis Howes? Now, how important is, I think I know your answer, but I want to hear from you. How important is diet when it comes to a brain disorder or illness? Because I'm guessing it's really important because my father gained probably about 150 pounds since his accident, used to be really healthy and in shape, but now it's like he can't taste certain foods, so he has a lot of like fatty foods, so he can like taste it. And he just, I don't think he like has the hun, like, I don't think he gets full. He just eats and eats and eats now. And it's really disturbing to me to see that happen because I feel like if he got healthier, he would in fact be able to remember a lot more, he'd be able to move a lot better. And I'm assuming it affects the brain a lot.
7:41 Daniel Amen? Oh, no question. There are 200 studies now that say as your weight goes up, the size and function of your brain goes down.
7:48 Lewis Howes? Really?
7:48 Daniel Amen? And where, before he had impulse control.
7:52 Lewis Howes? Right.
7:54 Daniel Amen? If you hurt, especially the front part of your brain, well, now you don't have impulse control. And in our day and age, when there's so many delicious bad choices.
8:07 Lewis Howes? It's hard for me to not eat good things, right?
8:10 Daniel Amen? It's hard for all of us.
8:11 Lewis Howes? Right.
8:11 Daniel Amen? That we're surrounded by bad choices that keep us fat depressed and feeble minded. Your brain uses 20 to 30% of the calories you consume, and food is medicine or food is poison. So if you eat a high glycemic, low fiber diet, so think bread, rice, potatoes, pasta, sugar, if you're eating a lot of that stuff, along with a lot of sweets, then it's gonna literally shrink your brain and not provide you.
8:50 Daniel Amen? With the nutrients you need to have the most mental horsepower to make good decisions.
8:58 Lewis Howes? That's pretty much how I lived the first 28 years of my life. All those foods you just mentioned, that's pretty much my, was my diet. It's crazy to think about and how much I struggled with memory, with staying focused with all these different challenges I had growing up. It was hard for me to comprehend in school. I couldn't read. I was really challenged for me to write and I couldn't take tests. I was horrible at tests and all I had was sugar all day.
9:24 Daniel Amen? Right. And, and you know, it's easy to just go give you Adderall or Ritalin. Um, as a way to help you focus, uh, it's a lot smarter before we do those things to go change your diet.
9:39 Lewis Howes? Hmm. Right. What, what got you into this? Before we move forward, what got you into this work in the first place? What got you so fascinated about the brain and the health of the brain?
9:48 Daniel Amen? Um, so the short story is, uh, when I turned 18, I got, I was going to be drafted. So I joined the army, became an infantry medic, learned that I love medicine, but also learned I hated the idea of being shot at. Sleeping in the mud. So I got myself retrained as an X-ray technician. And that's where, um, our professors used to always say, how do you know unless you look? And then when I was a second year medical student, I got married and a couple of months later, my wife became suicidal. Took her off to the department of psychiatry and that's really when I fell in love with, um, helping people's emotional lives.
10:31 Daniel Amen? And then a number of years later, I got the chance to do imaging. And so it really came full circle. My two professional loves, imaging psychiatry came together and I started looking at people's brains in 1991.
10:45 Daniel Amen? And I mean, it really caused a revolution for me. In the next 23 years, my colleagues and I have literally built the world's largest database of brain scans related to behavior. So we've done nearly 100,000 scans on people from 111 countries. So we have the most active imaging centers in the world. And, and when you look at people's brains, I mean, the first thing you develop is brain envy. Um, start caring about it.
11:13 Speaker 02 Right.
11:14 Daniel Amen? Um, you know, as a psychiatrist, I learned all about penis envy and Freud. And, and years later, I realized Freud was wrong. It's not about your penis, it's about your brain. That, you know, I want to do, uh, we have a nonprofit foundation called Change Your Brain, Change Your Life Foundation. And I want to do these T-shirts that say, "Brain Envy," and underneath Freud was wrong. Just to sort of start the conversation that, you know, as I saw my own brain um, in 1991, when I was 37, um, I just didn't like how it looked at all. It looked toxic and older than I was. And I'm like really unhappy about that.
11:55 Daniel Amen? So, brain envy caused me to do things differently, eat right, exercise, take some simple supplements, care and think and fall in love with my brain. And so 20 years later, my brain actually looks younger, fatter, happier because I think about it and I care about it. So, as a psychiatrist, you know, I was making diagnoses based on symptom clusters. I mean, if you really think of it, it's truly terrifying. That literally in 1991, because it was what I was taught to do. If you had six of these nine criteria, I would give you a diagnosis of depression or bipolar disorder, ADD, or whatever.
12:38 Daniel Amen? And some people on medication got better, but other people got dramatically worse. And so now I'm beginning to go, I think I need more information. And so what the imaging did is it gave me more information and it taught me a lot of really important lessons such as all psychiatric illnesses are not single or simple disorders. They all have multiple types. So ADD is not one thing. It's seven different things. Anxiety and depression is not one thing. It's multiple different things. Addictions are not one thing. Even being an overeater is not one thing. We have impulsive overeaters,
13:17 Daniel Amen? compulsive overeaters, sad or anxious overeaters. And it also taught me that mild traumatic brain injuries ruin people's lives and no one knows about it. So I know that you've played football and I played football in high school and loved it, was passionate about it. And then I started scanning football players, high school players, college players, and then NFL players, and uniformly they have brain damage. And I'm like, well, that's a bad idea. You know, your brain is soft, your skull is hard. Maybe we shouldn't be bashing it around.
13:55 Lewis Howes? Yeah. And I got to the point where I was only leaning with my head, like as hard as I could when I'd hit people or block. I wouldn't use my hands or shoulders. I would just smash people with my head. And can I imagine what that did for my brain?
14:07 Daniel Amen? Well, it's not good. And if you own it, that you were involved in a brain damaging sport and you ate lousy. So those are the two things I know about you now. Well, then it's not really helping your brain express its full capacity. And if it was hurt, well, one, you should look because how do you know unless you actually look at your brain, how it's doing? You should look at it, test it, and then always be on a rehabilitation program. And all of us should be on a rehabilitation program because life is hard, life is stressful.
14:49 Daniel Amen? We, you know, have a lot of lousy quality food available to us and we age. And the biggest risk factor for Alzheimer's disease is if you want to live a long time. Fifty percent of people eighty-five and older will get a diagnosis of dementia of one form or another, and Alzheimer's is the most common. And so I'm like, if I have a fifty percent chance of getting something and I love myself, care about myself, I'm going to become, and I am, a brain warrior.
15:23 Lewis Howes? Hmm. Now, this is fascinating stuff, and I'm really excited to dive more into this. Now, should all of us get scanned to see our brain? Because I heard you say, like, you know, you really don't know until you see what's inside. So should we all do it, even though I think it's pretty expensive to get scanned, though, right?
15:41 Daniel Amen? Um, having a brain that doesn't work right is expensive.
15:45 Lewis Howes? Right.
15:46 Daniel Amen? Um, getting a scan, so at Amen Clinics, we have two programs. One is our full evaluation if someone's suffering from anxiety, depression, ADD, memory problems. I mean, we really want to dig into their life, and that's about thirty-seven hundred and fifty dollars.
16:01 Lewis Howes? Uh huh.
16:02 Daniel Amen? Um, so if you think of what I spent on my kid's education, you know, it's like less than half of elementary school tuition.
16:12 Lewis Howes? Right.
16:12 Daniel Amen? For people who are just curious and they want to just sort of get a checkup, um, we have a executive brain optimization program, which is about seventeen hundred dollars.
16:23 Lewis Howes? Okay.
16:24 Daniel Amen? So it's not much compared to having a brain that doesn't work right. And, you know, I live in Newport Beach, which is in Southern California, and, you know, we've been part of the OC, the reality show, and, you know, people know about Newport Beach. People here care more about their faces, their boobs, their bellies, and their butts than they do their brain. And, you know, so to get any kind of plastic surgery is a heck of a lot more money.
16:53 Lewis Howes? Hmm.
16:53 Daniel Amen? And it's working on what you look like on the outside rather than...
17:00 Daniel Amen? How you operate on the inside. And so, so I I've always thought of the cost as an investment in.
17:13 Lewis Howes? Your rest of your life. Yeah, that's.
17:16 Daniel Amen? Right. Because, I mean, if you think of it, because people go, oh, the cost. And they go, OK, so what does it cost to have an ineffectively working brain? What's the cost of divorce? Job failure.
17:27 Lewis Howes? Stress.
17:28 Daniel Amen? Incarceration.
17:30 Lewis Howes? Yeah.
17:30 Daniel Amen? Chronic stress. And and our goal, quite frankly, is to create brain warriors. Who take this message of brain envy, brain health to the worlds that they live in.
17:46 Lewis Howes? Now, is it is it only your place that does scans in Southern California? Or do people do this all over the world? Or how can people get a scan and really learn more about their brain?
17:56 Daniel Amen? So we have six clinics around the US, three on the East Coast, three on the West Coast. And people can learn about it at amenclinics.com. So amen like the last word in a prayer dot com. Imagine growing up with that last name. There are other people that do it. There's a clinic in Dallas that does it. There's a clinic in Melbourne, Florida that does it. There's another one in Chicago.
18:23 Daniel Amen? So there are other people that do it. We do more of it than anybody in the world. But, you know, I I've always never thought it was mine. I always thought I should teach other people how to do it. There's just a brand new article out of Toronto that said if you get a spec scan, your outcomes are better a year later. And that's, I mean, it's why we do it. Because.
18:46 Lewis Howes? Because you're aware of it and then you're you're willing to take the action to change it, right?
18:50 Daniel Amen? Right. So if you came and you got scanned, you would. Develop brain envy, you would go, oh, I don't really like that. How can I make it better? And then, you know, maybe four months later, we scan you again and you can see the improvement. And now you're hooked to live a brain healthy life.
19:12 Lewis Howes? That makes sense. And do you, you know, you've had so many years of experience of this. Can you pretty much pinpoint pretty accurately people if you were able to ask them questions for thirty minutes? Let's say, and then dive into, you know, what their challenges are. Would you be able to say, okay, this is really what the brain looks like? Could you kind of guess what it would look like with your?
19:31 Daniel Amen? Well, I, I do that. We create questionnaires to help people, you know, for people who can't get scanned, either because of cost or they're not near clinic or they don't want to. We've developed questionnaires to help predict what the scans would look like. Um, in my book, Healing ADD or Change Your Brain, Change Your Life, we have, uh, those questionnaires, but they're clearly not as good as getting it.
19:53 Lewis Howes? Sure, of course.
19:54 Daniel Amen? Because, um, you know, without looking. So there's a scan pattern that's typical for people who have ADD or people have obsessive compulsive disorder, but not everybody has the typical pattern.
20:10 Lewis Howes? Hmm. Have you ever had someone come in and just have a beautiful looking brain? Or does everyone have something that they can improve on?
20:17 Daniel Amen? Oh, no, I've had a lot of people come in and they just have great looking brains. Um, it's not common. Um, my favorite scan is, uh, Dr. Doris Rapp. So typically as we age, our brain just really begins to look awful. Um, it begins to look atrophied, smaller, more toxic. And that sucks. I mean, I don't know. How else do you say that?
20:42 Lewis Howes? Right.
20:43 Daniel Amen? Um, but Doris was eighty-two and she'd really taken care of her brain. She was not overweight. She ate right. She exercised. She was eternally passionate about her mission and her message. And at eighty-two, her brain looked stunning. In fact, if I wouldn't have been married, I'd asked her out. Because ultimately, you want your part, you want to be in love, not with somebody's body, but with their brain.
21:10 Lewis Howes? Hmm.
21:11 Daniel Amen? It's nice if they have a nice body, too.
21:12 Lewis Howes? Right.
21:13 Daniel Amen? But I joke when, and maybe I did that at Dave's event.
21:17 Lewis Howes? Yeah, you did.
21:19 Daniel Amen? That I talked, you know, when I met my wife, Tana, I mean, I just really liked her. And I went, hey, would you mind coming over to the clinic so that I could scan you and see that if I really like you long term or you're gonna make me psychotic?
21:32 Lewis Howes? It's interesting you say that because, you know, I've dated a lot of gorgeous women, you know, amazing, amazing women, but it was some of the most stressful relationships I've ever experienced because of the emotional imbalance. And I wouldn't say it was all them, you know, I'm sure I had some emotional imbalance as well, and we fed off of each other's negativity or whatever. But it's such a difference, the relationship I'm in now, it's like the calmness of her emotions, there's still lots of passion, but it's like, I just feel like she has a healthy brain based on the way she acts and her habits and her hard work and commitment and her mindset. And I'm just like, you can kind of see the difference, the physical results based on
22:17 Lewis Howes? someone's health of their brain, I guess. And it's, it's kind of crazy.
22:21 Daniel Amen? Well.
22:21 Lewis Howes? Go ahead.
22:22 Daniel Amen? If you put brain health in the center of your relationship, so you eat right, you exercise, you're really avoiding things that hurt your brain, doing things that help your brain, the relationship is just so much better. And, I mean, isn't that what we really want? And, you know, brain envy is not hard. And keeping your brain healthy isn't hard, you just have to be committed to it. But then, relationships are better, work is better, your money's better, your sense of meaning and purpose is better. And that's what we get so excited about.
22:59 Lewis Howes? I think you quoted somewhere that there was a study, um, I think back in the nineties, it was like 50% of Americans suffered from some type of psychiatric psychiatric illness at some point in their lives. I don't know if that's the correct stat or when it was done, I know it was a while ago. What do you think the percentage is today? If that was in fact, the right percentage?
23:21 Daniel Amen? So it's a study from the US government that they've done a couple of times. Kessler was the author and when they do population studies, 51% of the population at some point in their life will have a diagnosable psychiatric illness.
23:40 Lewis Howes? And what are these, what are these illnesses? Like, what are the common ones that we're talking about so people know?
23:46 Daniel Amen? So like ADD, anxiety, depression, addictions, bipolar disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder.
23:55 Lewis Howes? So more than 50% of people will have some type of illness like that in their life?
24:01 Daniel Amen? Right. So what I say, it's almost more normal to have a problem than not to have a problem. And so really the concept of normal is a myth.
24:15 Lewis Howes? Wow.
24:15 Daniel Amen? That I tell people, normal is the setting on a dryer or it's a city in Illinois.
24:23 Daniel Amen? That it's, um, you know, just make a list of friends. And half of them are taking medicine or they should be taking medicine.
24:34 Lewis Howes? Hmm. Interesting. So what is the cause for so many disorders?
24:40 Daniel Amen? That's a really good question. And in children, for example, they have doubled in the last 20 years. So the incidence of learning, behavior, emotional problems in kids.
24:53 Daniel Amen? Has doubled. And I think it's a number of things.
24:59 Daniel Amen? When we went to a low-fat, high-sugar diet that triggered inflammation in people's bodies and a higher incidence of ADD, depression and dementia. We don't exercise as much because we're exercising our thumbs with video games. And the other consequence of not exercising is we're not in the sun. And oh, by the way, dermatologists have scared us of the sun. So everybody's wearing sunscreen. So that means two thirds of Americans are low in vitamin D. Well, vitamin D is essential for brain health.
25:36 Lewis Howes? Jeez.
25:37 Daniel Amen? So lousy diets, less exercise, low levels of vitamin D. And no one really helps us learn how to manage our thoughts or our own internal emotions, which blows me away because, for example, there's a treatment called cognitive therapy, which is teaching people not to believe every stupid thought they think. And I mean, it's just basically internal logic. It's probably as effective as antidepressant medication. And yet we don't teach it routinely in school.
26:13 Lewis Howes? This, you know, I've been having this conversation with a number of, you know, mindfulness practitioners recently. It's that I don't understand that the things that are the most important to our health and our success in life, really, which is our emotions and our mind, our mindset. We don't learn about how to be successful in them, growing up at any place in in school or in education. Only if our, I guess our parents taught us that or our friends teach us that somehow, or if we pick it up on our own. But why is it that the things that are the most important towards our success, we don't learn about until, you know, we discover it when we have an illness? And we try to figure it out then.
26:56 Daniel Amen? Well, most schools have not been redesigned in 110 years. And so I actually did a, I created a high school course that is now run in 42 states and seven countries. We just launched it in Huntsville, Alabama.
27:14 Lewis Howes? No way.
27:15 Daniel Amen? And I created it after my daughter, who was in ninth grade.
27:21 Daniel Amen? Asked me to help her do first quadratic equations and I knew this kid was never going to do another one in her life. And I'm factoring and I'm thinking to myself, um, you know, and I just remember Paul Simon's song Code of Chrome. It starts with, when I think back and all the crap I learned in high school, it's a wonder I can think at all. And so shortly after the interaction with Caitlin in 2005, I was asked to speak by the Orange County Department of Education. And I talked to them about brain health and how important it was to teach kids, uh, some basic brain skills.
28:03 Daniel Amen? And, uh, there was a principal there who was in charge of high school redesign and she said, oh, I would love for you to do a pilot with me and teach kids about brain health. And we did that and the kids loved the class.
28:18 Lewis Howes? Wow.
28:19 Daniel Amen? I mean, that was really the exciting thing is nobody cut our class. In fact, they got their friends to crash it. Cause we taught them and we would feed them brain healthy food. We'd play brain healthy music. We would teach them about how it's your brain that gets you a date. It's your brain that gets you into college. It's your brain, um, that gets you a cool car and takes cool vacations. And if you hurt it before it's finished developing, it may ruin the rest of your life. And they just got excited and passionate. And so we developed this course that is now taught, uh, all over North America. And I think it's in Germany and Austria.
29:04 Lewis Howes? Wow. That's crazy. Is this elementary schools or high schools or?
29:07 Daniel Amen? We have a high school course and what we're trying to do is, uh,
29:14 Daniel Amen? Create an elementary school and a preschool version too.
29:17 Lewis Howes? Wow, this is awesome. You know, fun fact about Huntsville, Alabama. I lived there for six months playing professional football, arena football down there. So I know that city very well. Uh, that's cool. It's down there. Now, what I wanted to know is how about alcohol and smoking and drugs? How much do those affect the brain? And if you are using them for a long amount of time, can you still heal the brain to get it almost back to, you know, looking fuller and bigger and better?
29:49 Daniel Amen? You know, it's interesting question. I get that question all the time. And it depends on how much you used, how long you used, what you used, was laced with and so on. Uh, I've been eternally impressed by the brain's ability to recover and heal. And so, so here's the brain health purpose. It's three things. Brain envy, gotta care. Avoid anything that hurts it. Do things that help it. Now you then have to fill out the list of care, stop, do. So care and then, so what are the things that hurt the brain?
30:30 Daniel Amen? Drugs, you know, I'm not all that happy about the perception of marijuana. Is like, well, it's no big deal, except it is because it drops brain function.
30:42 Lewis Howes? Hmm. And you've got lots of proof of scans that shows this.
30:46 Daniel Amen? Thousands of scans. And when we compare the pot scans with the healthy scans, there's just no question it diminishes brain function, uh, and, and brain activity. So, you know, people can talk about it all they want, but I've published, uh, studies on it. It's what we see clinically. It's, it's like, you can't really argue with the scans.
31:12 Lewis Howes? Yeah.
31:12 Daniel Amen? Um, but alcohol is not a health food. Um, medications like Xanax, anti-anxiety medications, Xanax, Klonopin, Ativan, uh, Valium. If you take those, you just increase your risk for Alzheimer's.
31:27 Lewis Howes? Really?
31:29 Daniel Amen? Yeah, it's frightening. Having a high blood sugar is bad for your brain because high blood sugar erodes blood vessels and your brain uses 20% of the blood flow in your body. So, anything that damages blood vessels, so hypertension, diabetes, heart disease is damaging your brain. And I like to say whatever's good for your heart is good for your brain and whatever's bad for your heart is bad for your brain. But I wrote a book once called The Brain in Love and I realized I had to have genitals in there because genitals are all about blood flow. And so whatever's bad for your heart is bad for your brain, is bad for your genitals. And did you know 40% of 40-year-olds have
32:14 Daniel Amen? erectile dysfunction? Jeez. Which is actually more common in NFL players, which is sort of an interesting, why would that be? Because the chronic traumatic brain injuries hurt this little gland in your brain called the pituitary gland that helps produce testosterone. Really? So isn't that interesting? You think, oh, these big football players are all testosterone-driven. It's like, well, no, a lot of them aren't because they've damaged the signaling mechanism to produce testosterone. Wow. So, you want to protect your blood flow, you want to protect your hormones. So I
32:53 Daniel Amen? just started talking about that. Low testosterone, low progesterone, estrogen in women, low thyroid are all associated with low brain function. And so getting your important numbers checked is really important. Low vitamin D, as I alluded to, is associated with trouble, the greater, the standard American diet, associated with ADD, depression, and dementia. Not exercising is harmful to the brain, yet exercising too much is also harmful. Really? For the brain. So. What's too much?
33:34 Daniel Amen? Extreme athletes, our marathoners, our triathletes, it's just too much stress. It's chronic excessive stress that is bad for the health of the brain.
33:48 Daniel Amen? And, you know, believing every stupid thought you have is bad for the brain. Having untreated depression doubles the risk of Alzheimer's disease in women, quadruples that risk in men. Untreated ADD triples the risk of Alzheimer's disease, because it's associated with all sorts of other bad things, like more medical problems, more head injuries, more obesity. And then, as we talked about earlier in the conversation, is as your weight goes up, the size and function of your brain goes down. I actually coined a term called the dinosaur syndrome. Big body, little brain, you're going to become extinct. And I know some people think, well, that's just so rude of me to say that.
34:30 Daniel Amen? But in the New Testament, it talks about know the truth and the truth will set you free. There are 200 studies that say that. You want to take your physical health seriously. Wow. Also, not sleeping. If you don't sleep seven hours a night, you have lower blood flow to your brain, more bad decisions. So protecting your sleep becomes a critical piece of being well. If you're a teenager and on average you get an hour less sleep at night than your peers, you have a significantly increased risk of killing yourself. So, sleep is really important. And so, okay, so those are some of the things to avoid.
35:11 Daniel Amen? The things to do, the right diet, reasonable exercise, new learning. Because whenever you learn something new, your brain makes a new connection. The coordination exercises I particularly like for the brain are coordination. So like dance and table tennis, juggling are some of my favorites. Simple supplements, omega-3 fatty acids. I love Genko, the prettiest brains I've ever seen, take Genko. Another one called venpo cetin. And so, when you get excited about the brain, when you learn about it, you can change it. I mean, if you go, you know,
35:55 Daniel Amen? Daniel, what's the single most important thing you're excited about?
36:00 Daniel Amen? Is this concept that you are not stuck with the brain you have. You can make it better and I can prove it.
36:07 Lewis Howes? I love that. And you just threw a lot of at us right now and I'm excited to dive more into that. But I want to talk briefly about, since this is close to my heart, is extreme athletes or some of the greatest athletes in the world, let's say. Let's say the top 1% of athletes in the world, their specific sport. They spend a lot of time, energy, practice, and I guess stress on their body to be in that elite shape in their sport, you know, basketball, tennis, baseball, all these things. Now, do they have damaged brains when they're that great at a sport that has a lot of physical exertion, I should say? Or are they okay?
36:49 Daniel Amen? Well, I think it depends. I think if they play in the NFL, they have damaged brains. In my study of 140 players, 138 of them had damaged brains. So if they're playing hockey, odds are they have a damaged brain. If they are a rodeo athlete, they have a damaged brain.
37:07 Lewis Howes? What's like non-contact, let's say, but still exercising to extreme levels every single day to be in that top, you know, shape constantly?
37:19 Daniel Amen? I think what we would have to, I mean, it's really an individual.
37:24 Lewis Howes? Gotcha.
37:25 Daniel Amen? Thing.
37:26 Lewis Howes? Gotcha.
37:27 Daniel Amen? That some extreme athletes have awesome brains because they really think about it. I think if.
37:33 Lewis Howes? They probably get enough sleep, too.
37:35 Daniel Amen? If we talk about Novak Djokovic, you know, his number one tennis player in the world, he talks about his meditation practices, he talks about his dietary practices, but you know, he's probably not running 26 miles.
37:49 Lewis Howes? Right.
37:49 Daniel Amen? You know how the marathon thing started, right? The Greeks won a war against the Persians. There was a messenger from Marathon, Greece, who ran 26.2 miles to Athens and, you know, raised his hands and said, "We won the war."
38:10 Daniel Amen? And then he died.
38:11 Lewis Howes? Died, right? It's crazy.
38:13 Daniel Amen? So I'm like, you know, in what universe does this really make sense to push your body to that level? I just, and, and you know, maybe it's because I'm lazy and I want to believe that, that, you know, you don't have to beat yourself up. But my experience, the best exercise for the brain, weightlifting, because the stronger you are as you age, the less likely you are to get Alzheimer's disease. Burst training, because bursting increases your blood flow and metabolism. And then coordination exercises.
38:57 Daniel Amen? And so I love to play table tennis. It's my favorite way to exercise. And I played actually in the US Nationals a number of years ago, and there were 600 of us in Las Vegas. And there was not one brain injury, the whole tournament.
39:13 Lewis Howes? Wow. So I love table tennis. We'll have to play some time and see if I can keep up with you.
39:19 Daniel Amen? Love that.
39:20 Lewis Howes? This is interesting. So what's your, what's your like daily habits and rituals? Because you're one of the leading experts in the brain, if not the leading expert in the brain in the world. So what is, what do you do? Besides what you've said with the, you know, the coordination and the exercise and the table tennis and the juggling and things, but what's like your daily rituals like to live a healthy lifestyle and have the healthy brain that you have?
39:43 Daniel Amen? So I sleep seven hours. I'm pretty religious about that. And I have, I mean, just naturally I have a lot of energy. But I really, since I read the research, focused on, you know, if I don't go to bed until 11:30, I'm going to stay in bed until 6:30 or 7:00. So I sleep, I pretty much have, I'm pretty routine with my food in that I'll start the morning with kale, spinach, protein.
40:17 Daniel Amen? Blueberry shake, so I'll do that. I usually have a snack of an apple and some almonds or walnuts. I have different lunches, but my favorite one is called Pain in the Ass. It's a sushi where they core cucumber and stuff it with crab and salmon, avocado, and then they slice it up. It's why it's called Pain in the Ass, because it's hard to make, but it's not wrapped in rice. We actually make something that I'm addicted to called
40:54 Daniel Amen? Brain on Joy. It's a sugar-free, dairy-free, gluten-free, chocolate coconut bar. It's just got nothing bad in it, but coconut's awesome for brain health because of the medium-chain triglycerides that your cells use the most efficiently. And then chocolate's got all sorts of benefits. It's usually the crap they put in chocolate that makes it bad for you. So, you know, I have one of those that's calorie smart. And then I'm always learning new things, eternally passionate and excited about the mission of Amen Clinics, and I hang out with healthy people. I think it's probably the most important thing, that not
41:37 Daniel Amen? only am I a warrior for my health, my wife is a warrior too. And I remember the first time with my first wife, I went on the Atkins diet, because I wanted to get rid of all the, you know, simple carbs in my diet. And she brought home two double fudge chocolate cakes. And I just like, this is not working for me. You have to have a partner that does it with you. And I don't know if we talked about, but I did this big program at Saddleback Church, where we got this huge congregation healthy.
42:17 Lewis Howes? Yes, you did mention this, but go ahead.
42:19 Daniel Amen? What we found was that we just needed to hook one, you know, the wife or the husband, because if they got hooked and started doing the program, their spouse wanted what they had, you know, whether it was weight loss or energy or focus. And, you know, so one person then began to change their couple, which then began to change their family. And then we had a lot of warriors who then brought it to their businesses or their schools or their communities. And that's the ultimate goal in my life is creating brain health warriors, people who they get better, then they give it away because it is in the act of giving.
43:01 Daniel Amen? And I never really understood this. I grew up very Catholic, like my mother was not kidding Catholic. And my favorite prayer growing up was the prayer of St. Francis, which starts, "Lord, make me an instrument of your peace. Where there is hatred, let me so love." Toward the end of the prayer, he writes, "For it is in the giving that we receive." And I never really got it. But when we did the Daniel Plan, that's the big project we did at Saddleback Church, it just crystallized for me that when someone gives health away to their spouse, to their kids, to their friends, to their business,
43:45 Daniel Amen? what they're really doing is creating their own support group, making it more likely they'll stay on the program forever. And so, get it, give it away.
44:00 Daniel Amen? Keep it forever. That is how we're going to change the world.
44:05 Lewis Howes? I love that. I've got a couple of questions left for you, and I want to be respectful of your time. So a couple of questions left. We didn't talk about this, I don't think, yet. How important is breathing and meditation for the brain in your life or in people's lives in general?
44:22 Daniel Amen? So meditation actually fooled us. A lot of us thought, who do imaging, thought that when we met, when it hit it, it would calm the brain down. It actually doesn't do that. It fires it up, especially in the most human thoughtful part of the brain called the prefrontal cortex. And so meditation is a wonderful tool to put in your life. We actually teach it in our high school course to optimize brain function. And you don't have to do it for a long time. I studied and published work on a Kundalini yoga form of meditation called Kirtan Kriya. It's a chanting meditation, which means you have to use breath to do it.
45:06 Daniel Amen? And it was only 12 minutes long, and we found significant benefit from it.
45:10 Lewis Howes? Wow. So do you use this in your daily practice, breathing or meditation?
45:15 Daniel Amen? You know what I do is I do diaphragmatic breathing, and it's a technique I call five times two. So you take five seconds to breathe in. I mean, like you take a big breath, and then you hold it for two seconds, just because you're intentional about the breathing. And then you blow it out really slowly. So you take five seconds to breathe it out, and then you hold it out for two seconds. And I can just guarantee people, if they're feeling anxious, tense, nervous, out of control, five times two times 10 breaths will calm you down.
45:48 Lewis Howes? Wow, I like that.
45:50 Daniel Amen? So simple, powerful.
45:52 Lewis Howes? Do you do that every day, or is it more once, if you feel stressed, then you start doing that practice?
45:57 Daniel Amen? You know, I do it pretty much when I feel stressed. If I was maybe a little more disciplined, I'd do it every day.
46:02 Lewis Howes? Right.
46:03 Daniel Amen? But, you know, it's just such a cool tool to use.
46:08 Lewis Howes? I love it. Well, I want to ask you one last question, and before I do, I want to tell everyone to make sure to go get this book, Change Your Brain, Change Your Life, The Breakthrough Program for Conquering Anxiety, Depression, Obsessiveness, Anger, and Impulsiveness. It's a New York Times bestselling author. The cool thing about this is there's like prescriptions at the end of each chapter that can support you if you're having any of these, any of this anxiety on how to prescribe yourself to then start taking necessary steps to improve your brain. So, again, there's a lot of great information in this book. If you can't go get a scan right now, definitely get the book and check out, I believe it's aimanclinics.com, is it correct?
46:47 Daniel Amen? Correct.
46:48 Lewis Howes? Awesome. And we'll make sure to have it all linked up in the show notes here. Before I ask you the final question, I just want to acknowledge you, Dr. Amen, for the incredible service that you provide in the world for informing us on how to live really a better life and how to have better brains, which is going to give us better health, better relationships, better emotions, better feelings, and ultimately more success and fulfillment. So I want to acknowledge you. It's a true blessing to have you around. So thank you for all that.
47:19 Daniel Amen? Thank you so much.
47:21 Lewis Howes? And the final question, as I ask all my guests this at the end, it's what is your definition of greatness?
47:27 Daniel Amen? You know, I don't know that I have one on greatness, but I do have one on happiness.
47:31 Lewis Howes? Perfect.
47:32 Daniel Amen? I've been thinking about this a lot. And I had breakfast with Sanjay Gupta the other morning, and he's doing a whole show on happiness. And so, and he asked me about it and talked about the happiest people on earth were in Denmark. And the reason they were happy is they had no expectations. And I'm totally not there in my life, that I think happiness is not the absence of pain.
48:06 Daniel Amen? Or the absence of expectations that in reality, in my experience and for my life, it is the presence of purpose. And I think when people live purpose driven lives, that they live longer, they're healthier, and they can withstand the stresses that come their way. My favorite book is Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. And it's And the Purpose Driven Life by my friend Rick Warren. I just know that when my brain is as healthy as it can be, I am more loving and I am more purpose driven, and I'll live
48:51 Daniel Amen? longer because I'll be more effective.
48:54 Lewis Howes? I love that. Well, thank you for that definition. Thank you for coming on this interview and make sure to check out amiclinics.com and the book Change Your Brain, Change Your Life. Thank you so much, Dr. Amen for coming on.
49:06 Daniel Amen? Thank you so much. What a pleasure, Lewis.
49:09 Lewis Howes? And there you have it, guys. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Again, fascinating topic for me, all about how to improve the health of your brain and how really your brain affects so much of your life. So make sure to go check out this book. Go head over to the show notes at lewishouse.com/104. That's lewishouse.com/104. We'll have the book linked up, some other videos, and all the other resources that we talked about in here, we'll have it linked up as well in the show notes. Very excited about this. I'm going to dive in deeper. I'm probably going to get my brain scanned here soon. So
49:52 Lewis Howes? I'm going to be heading down to do that because I just am curious to see what it looks like. And I hope it's all, I hope my brain is all there, really. But yeah, guys, thank you guys so much for your support. From the last episode, episode 103, so many of you are talking about it like crazy online. You're posting pictures on Instagram, you're uploading it to the site at lewishouse.com/103. It's all about how they get clarity. In your business and your life and the steps to achieving those goals. So go ahead and check out the previous episode 103. Share this one as well with your friends slash 104. And I'm so pumped to bring you more inspiring guests, influencers and thought leaders to the podcast.
50:35 Lewis Howes? Thank you guys again so much for being here, for subscribing, for sharing this. And I can't wait to see you guys next time. You know what time it is. It's time to go out there and do something great.
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